Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue

2. “An Encounter”

❦ 48 2 “An Encounter” James Joyce’s Humiliation Nation MARGOT GAYLE BACKUS AND JOSEPH VALENTE Our collaboration, which we honed over several talks and essays, proceeds by way of a combined oral and written dialogue. Beginning with a textual part-object, composed by one of us and then examined by both, we identified our main line of argument over a series of telephone conversations. At that point, we undertook gradually to expand and revise our brief on an alternating basis, sending drafts back and forth for one another to elaborate, until the need for renewed telephone conversations asserted itself. We repeated this process a few times, allocating different chores and sections to one another as the essay grew toward completion . It would be fair to say that we never, or rarely, write together, although in another sense we are doing so throughout. An Encounter” narrates an encounter with shame: the boy narrator tries to escape the strict routine of school, replacing it with an escapist adventure, and instead he becomes witness to the shameful exhibition of an older man who claims to be his “fellow,” a “bookworm” like himself (D, 28). His chance meeting with this “queer old josser” precipitates a startling encounter with his own shame, affording a disquieting glimpse of an unexpected association between the ethnic shame of Irish Catholicism, which he and Mahony are perpetually colluding to project elsewhere, and the shame of the quasi-homoerotic emotional bonds through which such projection is accomplished. “An Encounter” ❦ 49 Shame attaches itself to the interior, socially defined identity of the sufferer . Both because it is hidden and because it results from the necessity of being part of society, shame cannot be verbally expiated or mitigated under the prevailing symbolic order. Speech, too, is a social construct, and hence speech can neither absolve nor amend the humiliation of a subject who is—necessarily—only partly assimilated into society. Shame adheres to the residue of social definition, that which exceeds or defies social norms of legibility and acceptability. Because speech cannot reconcile the shameful with social norms or their enforcing institutions, people habitually endeavor to rid themselves of shame by projecting it onto “Others.” The inexpressibility of shame, therefore, is not only a significant psychoanalytic and phenomenological problem, but a pathogenic social and political condition as well. James Joyce made a sustained effort throughout his career to render shame visible and revalue it as a collective good rather than an individual ill, which is therefore a politically salient aspect of his life’s work. We will begin by briefly reviewing how Joyce was positioned—both materially and culturally—in relation to the intellectual establishment of his day. Such an overview will help to show why his strategies for representing shame in an affectively and politically destabilizing manner became central to the stylistic innovation for which he is so celebrated. Joyce occupied an inherently shameful position within existing Irish and British cultural hierarchies . He was an intellectually and formally ambitious Irish Catholic writer educated within the second-tier university system that, as Terry Eagleton argues, served both to disguise and to institutionalize growing cleavages among the Oxbridge elite, a philistine middle class, and an alienated petit bourgeoisie shot through with ethnic and regional grievances. On the one hand, attempts on Joyce’s part to emulate the tastefully erudite allusions of his highbrow modernist betters would have left him open to accusations of imperfect mimicry, or, symbolically, of the “plagiarism” of which Bloom, in “Circe,” stands accused by his class superior, Philip Beaufoy (U, 15.822). On the other hand, the deliberate, overt violations of prevailing decorum for which Joyce increasingly opted inevitably exposed him to charges of ill-bred intellectual ostentation and tastelessness. Owing to his lack of tony university credentials (like Bloom, Joyce could be said to have learned much of his art from the “university of life”), Joyce was vulnerable to accusations that he 50 ❦ M A RG O T G A Y L E B AC K US A N D JO S E PH VA L E N T E had simply smeared shit on his pages, a charge he transfers to both Leopold Bloom and Shem the Penman. In the “Circe” episode, Bloom is hauled into court for disfiguring Beaufoy ’s prizewinning story, “Matcham’s Masterstroke,” with “the mark of the beast,” while A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY ethnicizes and literalizes the offense complained of...