Pathologies of Desire: The Vicissitudes of the Self in James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," (review)

Aptly enough, the Joyce industry has spawned a paradox in which all Joyceans are trapped: in effect, scholars seeking to write anything about Joyce's texts, by definition, cannot read all the other commentaries on his writing needed to ensure that their own work is entirely original. This paradox makes hypocrites of us all, since the one assertion that literary scholarship on a given text inherently makes is that more investigation is needed. Failure fully to ascertain what work already exists evinces a scholar's uncertainty on precisely this question. Given the ethical and intellectual weight of this paradox, it was with genuine sympathy, as well as enlightened self-interest, that we plunged into Gerald Doherty's deliciously titled Pathologies of Desire. Doherty's study of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stakes its claim to originality in its approach to A Portrait through five autonomous critical "view-finders" or lenses: "autoeroticism," "paranoia," "shame-guilt," "identification," and "metaphor" (xi). This is a maneuver by which Doherty attempts to make a new claim concerning A Portrait and to bear it out through close readings without the need to consult prior readings of the text, let alone the larger ocean of Joyce scholarship. This approach, which Doherty terms "perspectival criticism," serves to "highlight . . . one crucial aspect of Joyce's modernism: his refusal to identify the self with a settled substratum or essence that would unite all its perspectives into one larger, more comprehensive whole" (xii).

Unfortunately, the same argument could have been made by citing the already-existing range of compelling, yet contradictory, readings of A Portrait that, indeed, seem to be the accepted understanding of Joyce's modernism. Doherty's relative neglect of work by other Joyceans therefore fails (alas) to justify itself. Furthermore, although Doherty asserts that each of his lenses "discloses a distinctive self-aggregation," they seem most often simply to reinforce each other rather than to reveal new information in turn (xii). This would be fine if Doherty were making a bold new argument about A Portrait that needed plenty of supporting evidence, but that does not seem to be the case; his lofty diagnoses of Stephen as, say, grappling with sexual anxiety or feeling the pressure of constant surveillance from church, family, and society are, again, commonly accepted notions. These are points to build upon and not compelling ends unto themselves. Reading Pathologies, we were struck by the feeling that, although he purports to be using his (heavily Freudian) critical lenses to tell us something new about A Portrait, Doherty actually seems more interested in using the book to test the validity of his idea of perspectival criticism, with the result that we come away more convinced of his personal mastery of critical concepts than of the validity of some of his arguments. That said, the historical research that underpins all of Doherty's view-finders is impressive, and his specific readings of A Portrait are provocative, if not always convincing. We will use Doherty's initial view-finder, autoeroticism, to describe in more detail some of the study's specific strengths and failings.

The first of Doherty's autonomous lenses, autoeroticism (essentially the area of masturbation), is especially intriguing. Doherty produces a binary opposition between heterosexuality and masturbation, which he puzzlingly treats as a matrix for the whole of human sexual expression. In considering a scholarly milieu full of similar binary matrices founded on distinctions either between male and female sexuality or, even more commonly, hetero- and homosexuality, one wonders how Doherty could have come up with such a strangely unworkable model. His reading of scenes here is meticulous, and his analysis of Stephen's trajectory as paralleling that of the "masturbating boy" of nineteenth-century literature is striking and, at times...