Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue

9. “Counterparts”

❦ 188 9 “Counterparts” JAMES HANSEN AND JEAN-MICHEL R ABATÉ Jean-Michel: Our collaboration went like this: thinking I was very late for the deadline, I wrote my piece first, fast, furiously. I sent it to Jim, who then wrote his as a response, and sent it to me. We both liked the way the two parts seemed to complement each other. Did I say compliment? Parts, by Jean-Michel Rabaté A Man Is Being Beaten: “Counterparts” and the Phenomenology of Anger Every act of becoming conscious (it says here in this book) is an unnatural act —Adrienne Rich, “The Phenomenology of Anger” (1972) Now the virtues and vices are not emotions because we are not pronounced good or bad according to our emotions, but we are according to our virtues and vices; nor are we either praised or blamed for our emotions—a man is not praised for being frightened or angry, nor is he blamed for being angry merely, but for being angry in a certain way . . . we are not angry or afraid from choice, but the virtues are certain modes of choice, or at all events involve choice. . . . it is not easy to define in what manner and with what people and on what sort of grounds and how long one ought to be angry; “Counterparts” ❦ 189 and in fact we sometimes praise men who err on the side of defect in that matter and call them gentle, sometimes those who are quick to anger and style them manly. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1934) In Bk. II: iv. 6, is correct view, // v. 3 on not getting angry enough, is good. —Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1970) For a long time, whenever I had to teach “Counterparts,” I would resort to an old ploy, an inviting comparison—following a hint provided by Morris Beja whom I had heard give a wonderful talk on “Farrington the Scrivener” at the Copenhagen Symposium in 1986. This groundbreaking reading of “Bartleby the Scrivener” next to “Counterparts” listed all the possible parallels between the two stories; the construction of Farrington’s character was illuminated by such a comparison, since it allows us to become more sympathetic to this “fierce and ill-natured man with a wasted life” (1989, 121). Considering that we, as readers, can become Farrington’s “counterparts,” Beja concluded with a Melvillean pastiche: “Ah, Farrington! Ah, humanity!” Interestingly, Beja also pointed out that Joyce’s text was less ambiguous and undecidable than Melville’s opaque allegory: “There are ambiguities enough in Joyce’s story, but for once another writer seems even more indeterminate than he. Yet however uncertain we remain about the true sources of Bartleby ’s behavior and his plight, we must—given the comparisons I have pointed out—feel that at least some may well be shared with Farrington: and among those their frustration and alienation and social plight are surely central” (ibid.). However, I will try to show that there is an irreducible ambiguity in Joyce’s text, and it has to do with the direction of anger. More than once, I have followed the tip, and verified that the contrast betweenFarringtonandBartlebywouldtriggerheateddiscussionsamongstudents . The productive parallel provided an opportunity to refer to Deleuze’s wonderful essay on “Bartleby.” There, Deleuze presents Bartleby as a comic figure and not as pure allegory. He sees him as a Kafkaesque “bachelor” who is moreover the incomparable author of a radical “formula” (“I would prefer 190 ❦ JA M E S H A N S E N A N D J E A N-M IC H E L R A B AT É not to”) with which this paradoxical “medicine-man” would attempt to cure a sick America (1993, 89–114). In a distant echo, the increasingly frustrated and humiliated Farrington is the author of a witty retort (“I don’t think, sir, that that’s a fair question to put to me,” as an answer to: “Do you think me an utter fool?”), a perfect sentence that condenses an instant of verbal glory while being the cause of his impending downfall. More recently, Margot Norris has “revisited” the comparison and extended it in the direction of Russian models of scriveners found in Gogol’s stories (2003, 122–39). Norris also makes good use of David Lloyd’s productive analysis of the legal language (“counterparts” refer to a copy that authenticates the original) and of the economics of Irish pub dynamics (Lloyd...