Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. - Review - book review

Christine van Boheemen-Saaf. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 227 pp. $59.95 cloth.

As Joyce's intention to keep scholars baffled for centuries becomes ever more apparent in the polyphony of readings his works inspire, most academics have abandoned their (masculinist) hopes of mastering Joyce's texts in favor of creative and varied engagements with them. No exception to this rule, Christine van Boheemen-Saaf's fine study of Joyce as a postmodern and (post)colonial writer and subject calls on readers to witness the trauma of history visited upon the Irish by Great Britain's impulse to colonize others. Such an impulse complicates the formation of an individual as well as a collective Irish identity, especially since that identity or set of identities is constituted in a language quite different from Gaelic. Irish citizens, then, have to account for the loss of a "natural" language at the same time that they forge identities within an oppressive language, political system, and historical reality. Ideal readers of Joyce, Van Boheemen-Saaf suggests, do well to empathetically "witness" the inexpr essible traumas of colonialism that are discursively encrypted in his texts. At one point in her study, Van Boheemen-Saaf defines a diary as "words written by the self to the self in order not to forget the self' (67). The criticism that hopes to tame Joyce's texts often reads like so many diaries that monumentalize certain readings, insights, or ego-bolstering "solutions" to the textual riddles Joyce purportedly poses. Van Boheemen-Saaf, on the other hand, offers readers a refreshing approach to Joyce at the same time that she avoids writing a self-serving diary.

Outlining one of the central claims of her work, Van Boheemen-Saaf writes, "I want to reclaim the importance of literature as a socially necessary source of knowledge, especially in its affective demand to witness literature's occasion" (10). Throughout her five-chapter study, and in detailed discussions of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the "Cyclops" and "Penelope" episodes of Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, Van Boheemen-Saaf convincingly casts the reader in the position of witness. Joyce's text, she claims, "was designed as a location where the anxiety of postcolonial existence could find embodied existence, and as an anamorphic mirror which returns to the reader the experience of traumatic insufficiency characteristic of colonial experience" (191). The "trauma of Irishness" (3) involves a crisis of identity in language and a crisis of understanding as obtained within language. Joyce himself mocked epistemology, referring to it in Finnegans Wake as "Epistlemadethemology for deep dorfy doubtlings" (3 74.17-18). As "deep dorfy doubtlings," we cannot help but to see our modes of knowing as constructed and as insufficient when confronted with Joycean texts that simultaneously mock our "dorfiness" and encourage our epistemological and ontological doubt.

This study is at its strongest when Van Boheemen-Saaf reads Joyce alongside Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, illuminating the subaltern subjectivity that challenges both binarity and the void at the "origin" of colonial identity. As an example, the chapter titled "Representation in a Postcolonial Symbolic" takes as its subject Stephen Dedalus's relationship to language. Because Stephen is a subaltern subject, "the English language does not provide him with a stable point of authority, a unified mirror image, an unshakeable concept of origin which can ground identity in his language" (49). Although the English language fails in many ways to anchor Stephen's identity, I wonder if any language can in fact "anchor" any subject's identity. Lacan's system argues for the radical contingency of identity in all symbolic systems. In his Ecrits Lacan argues that "the unconscious is structured in the most radical way like a language" (234). The intensely private unconscious starts to look as though its origin is in th e Other, the symbolic order. Thus the subject's intimate sense of individuality and identity as well as the subject's connection to the outside world becomes extimate rather than intimate, and extimacy underscores the linguistic quality of subjectivity. Because of this quality, and because the symbolic serves the culture and predates each individual, the vicissitudes of language complicate the stability of any identity.

Van Boheemen-Saaf, however, eloquently defends her claim regarding Stephen's identity when she questions the validity of universals such as the symbolic. Similarly, Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition announces that "the grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation" (37). Hegel's speculative Absolute Spirit and dialectic as well as Marx's dialectical materialism serve as examples of the theoretical penchant for universals in the form of "grand narratives." That Joyce depicts Stephen as the artist in A Portrait hints at universality, but the historical specificity of Stephen's condition, and the care with which Joyce constructs A Portrait as a text that repetitively enacts the young artist's trauma of Irishness--his identity originates in a colonial structure of oppression that defies representation-"contrasts the universality implied by Derrida and Lacan" (Van Boheemen -Saaf 72).

Reading Joyce's texts as effects of an original trauma of colonialism helps readers to engage the unspeakable and unrepresentable trauma of colonial subjectivity. Such an engagement, Van Boheemen-Saaf contends, will call upon affect and specificity, two elements often absent from universalized theories. Relying on a binarized narrative/theory distinction, Van Boheemen-Saaf privileges the ability of narrative to "witness the pain and suffering which official history cannot convey" (175). Always ahead of his time, Joyce anticipated New Historical theory when he fashioned texts, from Dubliners through Finnegans Wake, which narrate the lived everyday experience of "ordinary" Irish citizens, the very narratives often omitted from historical documents detailing great movements and national leaders. While theory advances ideas about universal castration, for example, Joyce's narrative "visits castration upon his reader to make the reader share the emotional situation of the Irish subject born around the turn of the century" (167). I agree that psychoanalytic and deconstructive theories often erase historical specificity in attempts to systematize all symbol systems, but I hesitate to endorse any binarism as stable. That is, the narrative/theory binary provides Van Boheemen-Saaf a useful tool in reading Joyce alongside figures like Lacan and Derrida, but Joyce's textual enactment of trauma blurs the line between the two just as Lacan's self-conscious play with signification blurs the line between telling and enacting. Additionally, Van Boheemen-Saaf regards "the reader" as an unproblematic, if not universal, designation throughout her study. And at one point she maintains that "Joyce's colonial experience concerns us all" (208). Devoting time to a discussion of "the reader" and "us" might help strengthen Van Boheemen-Saaf's critique of universal categories. A further strengthening of this critique would come from a longer and more focused discussion of the ways the absence at the "origin" of colonial experience connects to logical categories of nothingness posited by Freud (the Thing), Kant (das Ding an sich), Lacan (the real and the object a), and Rene Girard (the void). I am specifically interested in the ways the extimacy of language complicates the intimacy of individual experiences of colonial subjection, subjectivization, and subjectivity.

But I hasten to note that the issues I discuss above detract little from this sophisticated and theoretically informed study of Joyce. Although Van Boheemen-Saaf concentrates on only a few Joycean texts in her work, and on only two episodes from Ulysses, she does a fine job weaving references to all of Joyce's work throughout the fabric of her study. For example, while discussing Derrida's separation of Joyce's content from form in the chapter titled "Materiality in Derrida, Lacan, and Joyce's Embodied Text," Van Boheemen-Saaf provides one of the best and most comprehensive readings of the Wake that I have seen in a long time. Characteristic of the rest of the book, in detailing her argument, Van Boheemen-Saaf locates her position in the rich critical tradition of Joyceans. Finnegans Wake is discussed in light of Kimberly Devlin, John Bishop, Derek Attridge, and the like. The link between Derrida's separation of the affective power of Joyce's work (its content) from its modernist style calls to mind the same question that closes W. B. Yeats's "Among School Children": "How can we tell the dancer from the dance?" In his contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett provides an answer to the familiar Yeatsian question when he writes that in Work in Progress "form is content, content is form" (14). Derrida's critical move of separating form from content, then, looks suspect when read alongside various critics of Joyce.

I believe Van Boheemen-Saaf's ability to advance her contentions regarding readerly witnessing, language, trauma, and colonialism in an impressive theoretical network stands out as the strongest feature of this work. Joyce's project takes on new dimensions when it is located alongside the work of Lacan, Freud, Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Homi Bhabha, Theodor Adorno, Helene Cixous, Michel Foucault, and Lyotard. Teresa Brennan's History After Lacan is notable in its absence from Van Boheeman-Saaf's formulation of historical trauma, as is Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth from her considerations of postcoloniality. Overall, though, Van Boheemen-Saaf clearly contextualizes her claims and imaginatively recasts very familiar theoretical arguments in light of Joyce's performative textuality. Moreover, Joyce's influence on both Lacan and Derrida receives detailed treatment in this work. More important, though, Joyce's unique and radical narrativity often moves to the foreground of this study. Wri ting for the Joycean and non-Joycean alike, Van Boheemen-Saaf stakes out Joyce's territory as a place of praxis. Readers of her work and of his texts actively participate in dynamizing theory as practice. Van Boheemen-Saaf proposes that in the push to make theory and narratives relevant to the lived everyday experiences of colonial and postcolonial subjects, readers and theorists, writers and critics, should subvert the Enlightenment rationalist and New Critical ideal of sanitized literature. In the process of subverting this ideal, readers of Joyce just might learn to witness the pain of his colonial condition and thus learn an empathetic style of reading that can undo a tortured history of mastery.

Sean P. Murphy (com611@clc.cc.il.us), assistant professor of English and Coordinator of Graduate Student Interns at the College of Lake County, has recently published work on Joyce in Studies in Short Fiction, The CEA Critic, and Readerly/Writerly Texts. "James Joyce and the Logic of Victimage," a book-length manuscript, is currently under review.

Other Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. "Dante... Bruno. Vico... Joyce." Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. 1929. Ed. Beckett, et al. Rpt. New York: New Directions, 1962. 3-22.

Brennan, Teresa. History After Lacan. London: Routledge, 1993.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. 1966. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

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