Abstract

Jacques Lacan's theory of the four discourses in his seventeenth volume of seminars includes an arrangement whereby the discourse of the master, which imposes the proper order of society, is opposed to the discourse of the hysteric, which focuses on what is shameful or obscene so as to express the feeling of the oppressed, and this is the source of the master's knowledge. Joyce's work is continually involved in challenging censorship to express the discourse of the hysteric, often by concealed means. The part of woman that Joyce is most interested in, which is emphasized at the ends of his works, is the hysterical overflow of her feelings that expresses her resistance to oppression. The focus of his art on the resentment of women is represented by the fact that Shem the Penman, the ultimate Joycean artist, is constituted as an artist by nursing on his mother's bitterness, which is embodied by her urine. This idea is manifested by a series of hysterical passages in Ulysses and the Wake that present the artist as drinking a woman's urine. On one level, this is an article about alcoholism.

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