Jealousy as jouissance in Joyce’s Exiles: A psychoanalytic reading — by Dr. Pablo Tsoi, Division of Arts and Languages
Prologue
In Act I of Exiles, Bertha asks Richard if he is jealous of her upon knowing her affair with Robert, and Richard replies ‘No […] I am not. Jealous of what?’ (E, p.170). God knows Richard is not lying when denying his ‘jealousy’ here, although – seemingly being a kind of dramatic irony where the audience know about the plot more than some of the characters do (and in this case Richard) – we are convinced that he is jealous, and therefore Bertha is right. Self-denial is probably a typical reaction that the archetypal Joycean figures, such as Leopold Bloom, Gabriel Conroy, and certainly Richard Rowan, hold against the jealousies they are individually suffering from. Indeed, jealousy is certainly one of the recognizable themes which Joycean oeuvre quite often tends to address. The exploration of different modes of jealousy may be considered for Joyce to both reflect his own personal experiences and respond to the study of jealousy in literary classics such as Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and Madame Bovary. While Joyce’s constant suspiciousness of the loyalty of his (common-law) wife Nora Barnacle – hence his fear of becoming a cuckold himself – makes him struggle almost throughout his life1, his investigation into the ‘symptoms’ of jealousy through his literary work is seen to go beyond both conventional literary depictions as well as philosophical (e.g. ethical) explanations.
This paper first provides a comparative account on some prominent cases of jealousy in Joycean oeuvre – mainly focusing on Ulysses and Exiles, which is going to be supplemented by incorporating some of the moral philosophy on the issue of jealousy, such as Spinoza’s treatise. In discussing jealousy as a quintessential human ‘disavowal’ (or what Freud calls verleugnung) for being always regarded as morally inferior, the paper draws on psychoanalytic ideas proposed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and, arguably, his inheritor and successor, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981).
I. Portrayal of Jealousy in Archetypal Joycean Characters
Doubtlessly, jealousy (or Irish people would commonly prefer the word ‘begrudgery’ in describing this seemingly inherent national psyche) is one of the profound motives prompting Joyce to reflect, most of the time autobiographically bitterly, in his literary oeuvre. Joyce always immersed himself into both literary classics and philosophy trying to seek out, so to speak, ‘benchmarks’ in order to justify his own strong jealousy (not just pertaining to sexuality but also friendship and national identify). In his own Notes to Exiles he once assessed such early treatments of jealousy in Shakespeare in relation to Spinoza’s ethical approaches:
As a contribution to the study of jealousy Shakespeare’s Othello is incomplete. It and Spinoza’s analysis are made from the sensationalist standpoint – Spinoza speaks of pudendis et excrementis alterius jungere imaginem rei amatae2 (E, p.343)
The treatment of jealousy in Othello indeed seems to merely follow a social or moral convention in terms of the husband’s assured rightful punishments of both the beloved wife and the demonized suitor, that is, Desdemona and Cassio. In Spinoza’s words, a jealous person ‘will be affected with hatred towards the thing loved’ (Spinoza, 1985, p.190). However, the kind of evil plot that Iago hatches to inflame Othello’s deadly jealousy leading to the tragic ending does not seem to appear in Joyce’s texts, as Joyce stated in his writing plan for the play (as attached to the Penguin edition of the play) that he would refrain from repeating such conventional clichés:
Robert wishes Richard to use against him the weapons which social conventions and morals put in the hands of the husband. Richard refuses. Bertha wishes Richard to use these weapons also in her defence. Richard refuses also and for the same reason. His defence of her soul and body is an invisible and imponderable sword. (E, p.343)
The development of the plot in the play does follow Joyce’s plan, where the supposed rancour against both the wife and the seducer does not necessarily lead to any ‘sensationalist’ or commonplacely dramatized events, nor is the husband ‘compelled to link the image of the thing that he loves with the genitals and excrement of another’ – this is the English translation of the part of Spinoza’s definition of jealousy3 quoted by Joyce above (Spinoza, 1985, p.191). In other words, as Anthony Uhlmann rightly points out, ‘[i]t is as if Joyce here is completing the study of jealousy that was taken to a certain point by Shakespeare through the method of affective causation he finds in Spinoza’ (Uhlmann, 2009, p.138). Joyce, in this regard, tends to de-dramatize and neutralize the supposed grudge and rancour in jealousy, and he can be seen to achieve this de-dramatization by deploying his characters’ reactions to their own jealousy in various neutralizing ways.
1. Leopold Bloom: sublimation – from self-deception to altruism
In the ‘Ithaca’ episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, upon having eventually entered the bed and been immediately aware of ‘additional odours…the imprint of a human form, male, not his,’ would have been ironically content ‘[t]o reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be the first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in the repeated to infinity.’ (U, 17.2123, 2124, 2127-31). Bloom’s comically unconventional or aShakespearean reaction to his supposed cuckoldry even leads to his listing in his streams of consciousness all the men, from those plausibly imaginary to the evidently believable, who have become Molly’s suitors.
Of course, at this moment he is not entirely indifferent about his obvious rancour, especially and particularly against Molly’s current suitor Blazes Boylan, who is supposed to be the ‘last member of this series and the late occupant of the bed,’ with four ‘antagonistic sentiments’ affecting ‘his subsequent reflections’, namely, ‘[e]nvy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity’ (U, 17.2143, 2154, 2155). But both his own explanations for his envy and jealousy seem to be too unreasonably impartial and comically rational – far from being like that of a cuckold husband, as they tend to rather justify why this particular suitor well deserves to be both envious and jealous of. The subsequent impersonal catechetical questions and answers about jealousy, for example, reveal this self-effacement of cuckoldry:
Jealousy?
Because a nature full and volatile in its free state, was alternately the agent and reagent of attraction. Because attraction between agent(s) and reagent(s) at all instants varied, with inverse proportion of increase and decrease, with incessant circular extension and radial reentrance. Because the controlled contemplation of the fluctuation of attraction produced, if desired, a fluctuation of pleasure. (U, 17.2162-8).
Here Bloom’s deliberate use of a quasi-scientific language to evaluate an emotional breakdown, i.e., jealousy, suggests an attempt to ignore an affective hatred out of his cuckoldom. To ironically double-guarantee this justification for the rights of the suitor to make him a cuckold – so as to convince himself of his magnanimity, Bloom further adopts three levels of alleviative methods, that is, abnegation, equanimity, and (attempted) retribution, which are again comically far-fetched in nature. The first method is supported by an assumed social and cultural altruism and practicality that he is found to be always advocating. The second tends to reduce the sinfulness of the adulterers by comparing it to a series of unrelated crimes and sins, which apparently deliberately commits a logical fallacy known as ‘false analogy’. He is then to conclude that there should be ‘more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity’, because ‘the matrimonial violation of the matrimonially violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the adulterously violated’ (U, 17.2195, 2197-9). Finally, excuses are given to repress the thought of having conventional ways of retribution, e.g. ‘assassination,’ ‘duel,’ and ‘divorce,’ against the adulterers (U, 17.2201, 2202). Instead, some rather benign measures, such as ‘connivance, introduction of emulation…, depreciation, alienation, humiliation, separation’, are to be taken to ‘protect[] the one separated from the other, protecting the separator from both’ (U, 17.2206-8, 2208-9).
In Bloom, as one can see, both the attitude held and actions to be taken towards cuckoldry and jealousy are far from fulfilling the definition and symptomatic behaviours prescribed by Spinoza – about whom Bloom is actually owning a book, among other books on his two bookshelves as listed earlier in the episode (U, 17.1372).
2. Richard Rowan: from self-righteousness to traumatic dismay
If the self-effacement of a strong jealousy in Bloom has to be relentlessly achieved by himself due to his inferiority in the power relation between him and his wife Molly, Richard Rowan who apparently dominates the marriage denies a jealousy altogether, even though such a jealousy is so conventionally evident and Bertha therefore recognizes it very univocally too, as she says, after hearing his denying being jealous of her: ‘You are, Dick.’ (E, p.170). But consciously Richard can indeed never be jealous of her because of his moral self-righteousness over both Bertha and Robert, and because what he is trying to unveil and keen to condemn is the betrayal of his wife and that of his lifelong friend Robert. That is why, after knowing that Bertha is supposed to meet with Robert at the latter’s place that night, Richard reveals his plan very clearly, that is, to expose the betrayer [i.e. Robert] as ‘a liar, a thief, and a fool’ (E, p.173). But Bertha looks into Richard’s motive more deeply, as she points out what he is doing is ‘the work of a devil’ (E, p.173) out of his strong possessiveness, that is, jealousy, and is in line with his constant evil deeds towards her by trying to ‘turn everyone against [her]’ (E, p.174): first and foremost, their son. But Bertha’s outspoken exposure of Richard’s taking advantage of her simplicity to exploit her only makes the latter feel even more morally superior, as he says, ‘violently’: ‘And you have the courage to say that to me?’ (E, p.175). He then re-assures Bertha that she has ‘complete liberty [to go and meet with Robert]’, and he would not be jealous but solely wants to disclose a naked betrayal as he says: ‘But he [i.e. Robert] must know that I know [about his adultery with you and betrayal of me]’ (E, p.175).
Another example showing how Richard tends, rather unconsciously, to get his jealousy alleviated through his strong self-righteousness is at the moment when he teaches his son Archie about the meaning of ‘to give’, right before his dialogue with Bertha over the issue of jealousy towards the end of Act I. Archie is asking his father to ask for his mother’s permission to go out in the morning with the milkman as he’s so interested in the milkman’s horses at the moment. After receiving his father’s promise, Archie incidentally changes the subject to the cows that the milkman owns, explaining the difference between bulls and cows: ‘[Cows are] not bulls. Because bulls give no milk…[but cows] give a lot of milk’ (E, p.163). Then he suddenly seems to change the subject by asking another question: ‘What makes a cow give milk?’ (E, p.163). This question arouses his father’s reflection on the meaning of ‘to give’: to give means that ‘you have a thing it can be taken from you’; and, ‘It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give’ (E, p.164). This seems to reflect on his own jealousy of Bertha: if to be jealous of her means to fear her being robbed by the robber (i.e. Robert), then he must give her away to the robber in order to eliminate the feeling of jealousy (i.e. the feeling of being robbed), so as to possess her forever. To further interpret Richard’s mind, we may see that what he is most being troubled with is not the possession of Bertha, not even Robert’s and Bertha’s betrayals of him, but his own endurance of the feeling of jealousy. Archie’s final question ends their conversation in a very interesting and punning way: ‘How could a robber rob a cow? Everyone would see him. In the night, perhaps’. And Richard answers, possibly to himself only: ‘In the night, yes’ (E, p.164).
If to give reveals Richard’s self-conscious magnanimity which reassures his own moral high ground, his other deeds having been exercised in his marriage life in order to safeguard his moral superiority (or in fact in order to ease his strong jealousy) are detected unmistakably by his wife and deemed by her as morbidly disgraceful. In Act III towards the ending of the play, the couple start to confess to each other about what ‘happened’ last night when Bertha unexpectedly meets her husband during her ‘dating’ with Robert in the latter’s home. When being asked why he left her alone, Richard says: ‘In your hour of need’. Bertha rebukes by pointing out Richard’s inner motive: ‘You urged me to it. Not because you love me [but because you want] to make me humble before you, as you always did. To be free yourself…[w]ith her [i.e. Beatrice]! And that is your love’ (E, pp.250-1). Of course, Bertha’s charge is convincing from her perspective. But the smart audience may realize that the real story may not be what she thought: it may well be that it is Richard’s jealousy of her that makes him humble her – in order to free himself from his unbearable jealousy, that is, to de-idealize the object of jealousy, i.e. Bertha, by psychologically making her (morally) inferior. Upon realizing his husband’s explicit jealousy of her – as he says: ‘You would like to be free now…[s]o that you could meet your lover’, Bertha begins to confess to him ‘with intense passion’: ‘To meet my lover! […] My lover! Yes! My lover! […] You do not understand anything in me – not one thing in my heart or soul’ (E, p.252). By ‘my lover’, Bertha certainly does not mean Robert but Richard, because if her lover is Robert then she would not say ‘you do not understand anything in me.’
II. Jealousy Experienced as Trauma
1. From what does traumatization result?
Unlike Bloom’s jealousy which is being alleviated by resorting to various kinds of excuse, or what Freud calls protective barriers (this term will be further discussed later), Richard denies his traumatic jealousy by having it transformed into moral self-righteousness and eventually leading to de-sublimating it into despair. The origin or cause of Richard’s trauma seems to be the fear of being a cuckold, and this threat is not unreasonably conceived due to the blatant rivalry from his lifelong friend Robert. When they meet again after the Richards return from the 10-year exile, the two men have quite a naked conversation over the somehow triangular relationship:
ROBERT: (also leans forward, quietly) Richard, have you been quite fair to her? It was her own free choice, you will say. But was she really free to choose? She was a mere girl. She accepted all that you proposed.
RICHARD: (smiles) That is your way of saying that she proposed what I would not accept.
ROBERT: (nods) I remember. And she went away with you. But was it of her own free choice? Answer me frankly.
RICHARD: (turns to him, calmly) I played for her against all that you say or can say; and I won.
ROBERT: (nodding again) Yes, you won.
RICHARD: (rises) Excuse me for forgetting. Will you have some whisky?
ROBERT: All things come to those who wait.
(E, pp.153-4)
Therefore, his supposed jealousy should be based on the fact that he is betrayed by Bertha. But, when looking at the plot of the play more carefully, we can see that, like the jealous Leontes in The Winter’s Tale who suspects, having no the slightest proof in truth, that there is an affair going on between his virtuous queen Hermione and his dear old friend Polixenes, it is Richard who actually fantasizes a cuckoldry by inventing and propelling an adultery so as to ease his profound fear of being a cuckold; the exact way in which he is traumatized is in fact his having always been anticipating a potential cuckoldry immediately after his relationship with Bertha begins.
What makes Richard disregard his very discernible jealousy, psychoanalytically speaking, can be interpreted as his suffering from a traumatic neurosis out of his constant awareness of the threat of his beloved potentially being seduced or, in the ‘to give’ metaphor he explains to Archie, being ‘robbed’ by the robber, e.g. Robert. Unlike the honest Polixenes, its counterpart Robert in Joyce’s play does seem to be suspicious enough to Richard. There is a moment in Act I when the two old friends are turning their chatting topic to women, Robert shows his general attitude towards the role of women for men.
To illustrate his idea about the meaning of women for men, Robert picks up a stone on the table, which Bertha brought from the strand and is used as a paperweight…
ROBERT: For me it is quite natural to kiss a woman whom I like. Why not? She is beautiful for me.
RICHARD: (Toying with the lounge cushion.) Do you kiss everything that is beautiful for you?
ROBERT: Everything – if it can be kissed. (He takes up a flat stone which lies on the table.) This stone, for instance. It is so cool, so polished, so delicate, like a woman’s temple. It is silent, it suffers our passion; and it is beautiful. (He places it against his lips.) And so I kiss it because it is beautiful. And what is a woman? A work of nature, too, like a stone or a flower or a bird. A kiss is an act of homage.
RICHARD: It is an act of union between man and woman. Even if we are often led to desire through the sense of beauty can you say that the beautiful is what we desire?
(E, pp.155-6)
Apparently, the stone here becomes a symbol exemplifying Robert’s theory of why a woman should be objectified into merely a sexual product. Robert’s mindset is naturally quite dangerous for Richard who will not have the slightest doubt that his friend would have already deduced his wife. Therefore, Richard can be regarded as having already been traumatized even before experiencing the actual trauma.
Freud in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1922) shows us symptoms of how people suffer from traumatic neurosis – though his cases are mostly about accidents and war neuroses:
I believe we can reasonably venture to regard ordinary traumatic neurosis as resulting from an extensive breach of the protective barrier…see[ing] the key aetiological factor not in the direct impact of the mechanical violence itself, but in the element of fright and in the threat to life… For us…fright remains an important factor. Fright can occur only in the absence of a state of apprehensiveness, a state that would bring with it a hypercathexis of the systems that initially receive the extra stimulation. (Freud, 2006, pp.158-9)
The traumatic neurosis in Richard is characterized by the unconscious fear of being a cuckold. This fear, however, is not caused by any real evidence, e.g. the wife’s behaviours of infidelity de facto, but by the ‘fright’, that is, ‘the absence of a state of apprehensiveness’ – or literally ‘fear-preparedness’ – by which the hypercathexis is brought is always ready to the chronically expected betrayal from Bertha. In other words, a trauma does not result from the very moment of being a cuckold – which in fact quite evidently barely exists based on the plot of the play, but from a constant threat of becoming a cuckold. This retroactive traumatic repetition is what Cathy Caruth calls, interpreting Freud’s ideas on trauma, ‘survival’; she says:
[T]he survival of trauma is not the fortunate passage beyond a violent event, a passage that is accidentally interrupted by reminders of it, but rather the endless inherent necessity of repetition, which ultimately may lead to destruction. (Caruth, 2016, pp.64-5)
Hence in the case of Richard, it is the survival of a highly plausible yet absent cuckoldry that becomes the cause of his constant and repetitive torment, as he always exposes it to Beatrice, first, in the beginning of the play:
RICHARD: O, if you knew how I am suffering at this moment! For your case, too. But suffering most of all for my own. (with bitter force) And how I pray that I may be granted again my mother’s hardness of heart! For some help within me or without, I must find. And find it I will.
(E, pp.125-6)
Indeed, although Richard’s suffering can well be interpreted as resulting from an intense jealousy, he never admits and addresses it precisely because the conscious realization and recognition of jealousy goes against the unconscious aspiration for survival of the trauma. Hence this survival being the daily life nightmare always repeats, and it is such a nightmare which intensifies his torment as a traumatic neurosis. According to Freud,
[T]he dreams of patients with accident-induced neurosis when they thrust them back…seek to assert control over the stimuli retrospectively by generating fear – the absence of which was the cause of the traumatic neurosis in the first place. (Freud, 2006, p.159).
The recurrent of the traumatic neurosis in Richard shows an unconscious attempt to grasp and hence to be in control of traumatizing stimuli, i.e. actual events leading to his cuckoldry. Not having truly encountered the traumatic events of being a cuckold de facto, Richard as the survivor of such events is doomed to repeatedly conjure them up. For him to survive the expected cuckoldry is to confront directly with the threat of cuckoldry. Paradoxically, in that regard, not being able to confront the possibility of cuckoldry directly turns out to be the cause for his profound suffering. In other words, Richard’s traumatic neurosis resulting from a temporary survival of cuckoldry could only make him repeatedly obsessed with the possibility of the cuckoldry, and such chronic repetition ultimately leads to wounding results. Interestingly, as in the genre of drama, Richard’s unconscious obsessions with encountering a betrayal has to be disclosed to the audience, as a peculiar type of dramatic monologue, through his confessions to Beatrice about his sufferings, as discussed above. Indeed, Richard’s confessions reveal him as a traumatized husband who can only survive the trauma of cuckoldry by repeatedly confronting his traumatic neurosis, that is, by gradually pushing his wife Bertha to commit the betrayal and adultery.
2. Protective barriers: repression or sublimation?
The Freudian protective barriers against traumatic neurosis can be seen as categorized into either repression or sublimation. While the case of Bloom is surely suggesting the latter, Richard falls neither into the two protective mechanisms. Indeed, Richard’s repeated unconscious masochism reflects a sadistic desire to satisfy his drive. Freud in ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915) posits four fundamental ‘vicissitudes’ of the drive (Trieb), viz, ‘Reversal into its opposite’, ‘Turning round upon the subject’s own self’, ‘Repression’, and ‘Sublimation’ (Freud, 2001b, p.126). However, since the drive (Trieb) is translated as ‘instinct’ in the Standard Edition, according to Lacan, it is misleading in the sense that it mixes up the biological and ideological aspects of the drive. Instead, Lacan insists that the drive is non-biological but entirely cultural and can only be recognized in the Symbolic: ‘The satisfaction of the drive is reaching one’s Ziel, one’s aim’4 (Lacan, 1998, p.165). Here Lacan tries to differentiate between aim and goal. Whereas goal suggests a biological need such as the need to survive for a ‘wild animal[] [who] has found what he has to eat, he is satisfied, he digests it’, aim pertains to a Symbolic construct, such as repression and sublimation which are opposed to each other in which ‘[s]ublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drive, without repression’ (ibid.); or, to use Dylan Evans who interprets Freud, ‘complete sublimation would mean the end of all perversion and all neurosis’ (Evans, 1996, p.198).
Leopold Bloom, in this regard, by resorting to a self-contained belief of altruism and magnanimity, seems to be exercising a more complete sublimation resulting in his self-contentedness; such contentment, on the other hand, may also indicate that Bloom somehow fails to go beyond the pleasure principle but constantly attains and justifies it through a series of quasi-symbolic prohibitions, as mentioned earlier, in the nature of self-deception. Richard’s traumatic neurosis, however, cannot be eased through sublimation, because his attempted sublimation of jealousy into being a sympathetic victim of both his wife’s and bosom friend’s betrayals can only intensify his self-righteousness against the ‘adulterers’ but cannot bring him the sense of enjoyment out of his moral superiority over them. As Joyce says about him in his own Notes to the play, ‘Richard has fallen from a higher world and is indignant when he discovers baseness in men and women’ (E, p.345). Richard’s symbolic determination to safeguard his attainment of the pleasure principle, viz., to ‘enjoy’ as little as possible, cannot be fulfilled. This may be an example of what Lacan says, ‘complete sublimation is not possible for the individual… There is something that cannot be sublimated; libidinal demand exists, the demand for a certain dose, of a certain level of direct satisfaction, without which harm results, serious disturbances occur’ (Lacan, 1992, pp.91-2). That is why, in order to satisfy such a libidinal demand, Leopold Bloom would have to create an apparently pseudo affair with the typist, and in the case of Exiles, Richard makes himself up an affair in terms of toying with Beatrice.
III. Jealousy as Jouissance
1. ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’
But why did both Leontes and Richard urge to fantasize and materialize a trauma which they can never imagine to be able to bear? Trauma in Lacanian psychoanalytic treaties is further developed into a linguistic conduct as opposed, therefore, to the non-symbolic jouissance (whose denotation will be addressed soon). It is precisely the repetitively wordy narratives behind jealousy (e.g. the commonplace discourse like ‘tell me what happened’) that make the subject of jealousy ‘imaginative’ enough to prolong the traumatic suffering of being jealous. The relationship between trauma as one’s unconscious repetition and its coinciding (virtual) conscious reality is well illustrated by Lacan’s reassessment of a Freudian dream of a certain father of a recently dead child who falls into sleep when taking the vigil being suddenly wakened from his dream… Here is the account of the case in Freud’s own words:
A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them. (Freud, 2001a, p.509)
While for Freud ‘the words spoken by the child must have been made up of words which he had actually spoken in his lifetime and which were connected with important events in the father’s mind’ (ibid., p.510), Lacan sees that that something actually awaking him ‘is not only the reality, the shock, the knocking, [but] a noise made to recall him to the real’ (Lacan, 1998, p.57). Jeremy Tambling develops this point intelligibly in Literature and Psychoanalysis (2012):
So, ‘Father, don’t you see…’ draws attention to what the father has not seen: the real, the gaze, which, not reducible to a person, but inherent in vision looks, as the objet petit a. (Tambling, 2012, p.113)
In Lacan, the gaze seemingly resembles the real, but in a more specifically or clinically symptomatic manner: ‘I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides’ (Lacan, 1998, p.72). Hence, the words ‘Father, don’t you see I am burning?’ can never be from the child in his lifetime, but from the father’s perpetual guilt, being therefore the representation of his guilty negligence buried in his unconscious mind. The unconscious, as Lacan suggests, ‘is structured like a language’ (Lacan, 1993, p.119), thus these words and certain particular scenes being associated with them are doomed to repeat in the father’s unconscious to represent his guilt as gaze. Therefore, if the ‘burning son’ as a perpetual sign is always gazing at the father, its signified can only be a determinate discourse, viz., the father’s guilt.
Now, let’s return to the case of Richard, who is just like the father who seems to be awakened by the noise of the falling candle while virtually by the dead child’s traumatic words ‘Father, don’t you see I am burning?’. Interestingly, Richard also metaphorically hears such voices surrounding him. But he does not (consciously) feel guilty but the very opposite. Towards the ending and before the final reconciliations among all confronting characters, Richard is still deeply immersed in his perpetual self-righteous hard feeling towards everyone. Talking to Beatrice who read Robert’s leader article about Richard that early morning and immediately came to visit the couple, Richard parodies the Caliban speech from Shakespeare’s Tempest: ‘I assure you [Beatrice]. The isle is full of voices. Yours [Beatrice’s] also… And her [Bertha’s] voice. And his [Robert’s] voice. But, I assure you they are all demons. I made the sign of the cross upside down and that silenced them’ (E, p.244). Richard seems to feel being gazed at, somehow consciously, by ‘all demons’, and he is extremely self-righteous always overlooking them from his moral high ground – even paradoxically resorting to religiosity (i.e. St. Peter’s inverted cross). He is trying very hard to uphold the pleasure principle such as the symbolic rules governing friendship, romantic relationship, and above all, monogamy.
What Richard condemns can be deemed to be those who tend to transgress the pleasure principle. But is he satisfied and content with such a moralist determination? The answer is ‘no’. As he admits, he is wounded, and he believes that ‘[he has] wounded [his] soul for [Bertha] – a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed’ (E, p.265). It is not until the end of the play that he tells Bertha (and indeed the audience/reader of the play) about his true feelings. Of course, he is still not aware of his being unable not to transgress the pleasure principle associated with his strong jealousy and begrudgery; while Bloom succeeds in transforming his supposed repression out of jealousy into sublimation, Richard seems to be reaching what Lacan calls the jouissance.
2. Jealousy is turned jouissance
The concept of jouissance addresses the subject’s attempt to transgress the pleasure principle which ‘functions as a limit to enjoyment’ (Evans, 1996, p.91). Such attempts to attain ‘enjoyment’ beyond morality are doomed to be painful or, in Lacan’s own words, ‘jouissance is evil…is suffering’ (Lacan, 1992, p.184). Unlike Bloom who is only an advertising salesman, and unlike Robert who admits ‘I have no remorse of conscience. Maybe you [Richard] have’ (E, p.155), Richard is an academic who is being invited to take up a university position as Chair of Romance Literature. What is more? The characterization portrays Richard as very much of an intellectual who is intelligent, arrogant, and cynical about politics and morality. That’s why Richard is always struggling as to whether uphold the pleasure principle which makes him suffer, or transgress it for ‘pleasure’ or ‘enjoyment’ beyond the symbolic and, so to speak, existing only in the real.
Throughout his life, Richard can be seen as constantly defying the prohibitions imposed on his career and life fulfilments. The plural form of the word ‘exile’ as the title of the play might well suggest his unfulfilling life against the current political ambience (e.g. Ireland’s having been a British colony for 700 years), cultural atmosphere (e.g. the local stagnation and bias towards accepting foreign cultures and religious reformation), and personal sexuality (e.g. sex bound by marriage – since Bertha is only his common-law wife). In other words, instead of conforming to what is expected to comply with, Richard is evidently and literally going against the pleasure principle by resorting to the Lacanian jouissance through, so to speak, ‘exiles’. However, like what Dylan Evans proposes, ‘the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this “painful pleasure” is what Lacan calls jouissance’(Evans, 1996, p.92). We can indeed see in Richard how different cases of ‘painful pleasure’ appear in those social and personal domains mentioned above, and the word ‘exile’ is rightly conceived to address such painful cases.
Regarding this primordial human state of mind known as jealousy, our usual way to deal with it is to deny it (or what Freud calls verneinung) through either repression or sublimation – as discussed in the earlier parts of the paper. Jealousy should be denied and repressed, and that is what normally happens in our society, and that becomes a primordial pleasure principle. But Richard, and indeed Joyce himself, is too critical to comply with such a principle (while being too cynical to be able to get it sublimated). To live with it no matter how unbearably painful, and that is the answer to jealousy for Richard. The ending of the play reveals such a Joycean jouissance:
RICHARD: (still gazing at her [Bertha] and speaking as if to an absent person) I have wounded my soul for you – a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed. I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or to believe. I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness – for this I longed. (E, pp.265-6)
By saying ‘It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt’, Richard clearly means that I desire you regardless of all the dark (i.e. disgraceful facts) that I believe. Rather, it is exactly my living (i.e. constant) wounding doubts about you (i.e. my restless jealousy) makes me desire you. If these two lines above can be seen as merely an obscure self-realization of his strong desire for (and jealousy of) his wife, the line that follows shows his outspoken passionate declaration of love: ‘To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness – for this I longed’, which apparently means that what I desire for is to hold you (even without any ‘bonds of love’, i.e. the official marriage), to be united with you physically and mentally in an utterly undisguised and unprotected way.
To be outspokenly jealous ‘in utter nakedness’ or in an utterly undisguised and unprotected way is excruciatingly ecstatic, and that is jouissance.
Epilogue
Ezra Pound wrote to Joyce in 1915, saying that the play ‘won’t do for the stage…I don’t believe an audience could follow it’. Exiles has never been a successive play simply due to a lot of psychological understatements going on on the stage, which are unfair to the theater goers.
Although most of the Joycean oeuvre can be considered autobiographical, it is only in Exiles that we can find such an identical figure so resembling Joyce himself – his particular kind of jealousy.
