Joyce's Dubliners

BOOK REVIEWS tation. Here, his marriage of Lacanian theory with feminism provides a rich matrix for his Wake explorations. Susan Shaw Sailer __________________ West Virginia University Joyce's Dubliners Earl G. Ingersoll. Engendered Tropes in Joyce's "Dubliners". Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. xv + 193 pp. $29.95 IN A FIELD like Joyce Studies, dominated by the analysis of monumental texts like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it is always refreshing to find a book devoted to Dubliners. Ingersoll's study, Engendered Tropes in Joyce's Dubliners, takes its place in that precinct of Joyce scholarship in which Joyce's texts are treated from a psychoanalytic perspective informed by Jacques Lacan's "return" to Freud. One thinks of Sheldon Brivic and Garry Leonard, the two most prominent Joyceans to deploy a Lacanian analytic of desire and demand. Leonard's Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective, one of the most important books on Dubliners published in recent years, is particularly relevant here. Ingersoll's book invites comparison with Leonard's; in the preface, the "confrontation" between the two is couched in gunslinging terms of an American Western: "We agreed that there was room enough for both of us in town and neither would have to leave before noon the next day." What we learn from this anecdote and the engagements with Leonard throughout the book is that there is little significant difference between the two approaches. Leonard is invoked more often than not to support Ingersoll's reading, and on the one occasion when Leonard is taken to task (for an "eccentric" Lacanian reading of "Eveline") the effect is less critique than quibble. What we might learn from a comparison between the two is not the point of this review, however; suffice it to say that Leonard's book is more committed to the Lacanian analytic than Ingersoll 's, and to this extent the latter's book will suffer by comparison. Still, Ingersoll puts forward a useful and at times engaging argument from which the non-specialist (in Joyce or psychoanalytic theory) can learn much. First, let me say that the Lacanian analytic in this book is muted, particularly once the reader has passed the theoretical first chapter, which raises more questions than the subsequent chapters are prepared to answer. Ingersoll's thesis depends on an essentially formalist process of "engendering" Dublin experience derived from Roman Jakobson's theory of tropes—a process that hinges on the distinction between 361 ELT 40:3 1997 travelling (the axis of metaphor and male privilege) and staying home (the axis of metonymy and female subordination). "It is possible," writes Ingersoll, "to see the associations of these tropes with the binary opposition between the constrained, restrained, and repressed position of those in the bourgeois 'room' and the impulse to travel, to organize desire as a quest for a variously defined possession or goal." As far as it goes, this thesis is sound and the readings developed from its premises are also sound. But however often Ingersoll reminds us that the distinction is not hard and fast, however often he gestures toward a certain fluidity or oscillation (never quite as far as jouissance), the argument remains polarized, with the usual suspects arrayed at either end of the field. In speaking of "The Sisters," for example, he notes that "the categorizing impulse might encourage us to see [the polarities of trope and gender] as separate and fixed; however, this story and its counterparts to come demonstrate the interrelatedness of metonymy and metaphor, 'femininity' and 'masculinity,' and 'confinement' and 'liberation.'" This interrelatedness, in the end, is always subordinate to the gravitational pull of the two poles. It is worth noting that when Ingersoll deals with stories like "Little Cloud" and "Counterparts," which focus on the pub (ambivalent site of both travelling and staying home), the ecumenical drift of his argument holds things together. But otherwise, his reading has the curious effect of defaulting to the "strong" framework laid out along Jakobsonian lines and is relatively undisturbed by the subversions attributed variously to Lacan. It would be unfair to say that Lacan is unnecessary to Ingersoll's argument, but it is true nonetheless that Lacan's work is often...