The Stolen Thing: Stephen’s Paradoxical Imaginingsof the Nation in Ulysses
Kyeong-Kyu Im
This paper aims at reexamining James Joyce’s troubled relationship with Ireland, one that is characteristically marked by ambivalence or paradox. Many scholars have tended to see it in terms of the creative tension between Joyce as a modernist aspiring to artistic universality, and Joyce as a native subject preoccupied with parochial identity. Such a tendency has mythically constructed Joyce as a metropolitan modernist. In countering this canonical formulation, this essay recontexualizes the question in terms of the psychological dynamics of national identification, by using Slavoj iek’s conceptualization of the nation as the “Nation-Thing.” To illustrate these dynamics, this paper uses the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses. Even though Joyce cannot be directly identified with Stephen, the latter’s ambivalent relationship with Ireland may well, in a number of ways, mirror that of Joyce. Through a close reading of first three chapters of Ulysses, this paper argues, after iek, that Stephen’s relationship with Ireland, or his national identification, is sustained by a relationship toward “the Nation qua Thing.” Here, the Nation-Thingas a non-discursive entity like Lacan’s “the Real”exists outside language or the symbolic order, yet our access to it is only through a certain set of discursive practices, that is, a community’s “way of life” such as traditions, rituals and myths. This paradoxical nature of the Nation-Thingoscillating between absence and presencewould enable us to explore the dynamics of national identification without reducing the nation into a purely discursive artifact, and thereby to give a historical and psychological justification to Joyce/Stephen’s ambivalent relationship with Ireland.
The Stolen Thing: Stephen’s Paradoxical Imaginingsof the Nation in Ulysses
Kyeong-Kyu Im
This paper aims at reexamining James Joyce’s troubled relationship with Ireland, one that is characteristically marked by ambivalence or paradox. Many scholars have tended to see it in terms of the creative tension between Joyce as a modernist aspiring to artistic universality, and Joyce as a native subject preoccupied with parochial identity. Such a tendency has mythically constructed Joyce as a metropolitan modernist. In countering this canonical formulation, this essay recontexualizes the question in terms of the psychological dynamics of national identification, by using Slavoj iek’s conceptualization of the nation as the “Nation-Thing.” To illustrate these dynamics, this paper uses the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses. Even though Joyce cannot be directly identified with Stephen, the latter’s ambivalent relationship with Ireland may well, in a number of ways, mirror that of Joyce. Through a close reading of first three chapters of Ulysses, this paper argues, after iek, that Stephen’s relationship with Ireland, or his national identification, is sustained by a relationship toward “the Nation qua Thing.” Here, the Nation-Thingas a non-discursive entity like Lacan’s “the Real”exists outside language or the symbolic order, yet our access to it is only through a certain set of discursive practices, that is, a community’s “way of life” such as traditions, rituals and myths. This paradoxical nature of the Nation-Thingoscillating between absence and presencewould enable us to explore the dynamics of national identification without reducing the nation into a purely discursive artifact, and thereby to give a historical and psychological justification to Joyce/Stephen’s ambivalent relationship with Ireland.