James Joyce's "Fraudstuff" (review)

Abstract

Devlin, Kimberly J. 2002. James Joyce's Fraudstuff. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $55.00 hc. xv+ 201pp.Throughout the twentieth century, the issue of fraudulence has held central place in discussions of aesthetics. The problem at hand is the nature of reality itself. What is really real and what is merely representation? This would become the foundation of James Joyce's development as literary artist: from his early idealism of the transcendent and self-contained artist-hero fighting against the oppression of church and state, to his later critical, ironic, and self-mocking portrayals of the artist as sham. In James Joyce's Fraudstuff, Kimberly J. Devlin follows are through Joyce's career, mapping his changing ideas about the role of the artist in the twentieth century. As she writes in the book's preface, this book will argue [that] Joyce moves steadily away from the early concern with epiphanic self-revelation to obsessive celebration of selfhood as imposture and sham-and as ultimately unknowable entity (xi).The portmanteau word, in Devlin's title comes from Joyce's last book, Finnegans Wake. There are at least three echoing allusions in the word that make it appropriate touchstone for Devlin: 1) fraudstuff, as in the objects of fraudulence or forgery; 2) foodstuff, as in the cultural consumption of the aforementioned fraudulent objects; and 3) freudstuff, as in the psychological motivations behind fraudulence and forgery that forms the primary method of Devlin's psychoanalytic approach to Joyce. These areas of inquiry form the basis of Devlin's deconstruction of Joycean identity.She begins with interesting comparison of Joyce's young alter-egos: the Stephen Daedalus of Joyce's partially destroyed first attempt at semiautobiographical kunstlerroman, Stephen Hero, and the Stephen Dedalus of Joyce's finished and published version, A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. Illustrating how Joyce's attitudes were changing, Devlin argues that the earlier Stephen emerges as self-centered, autonomous, egotistical, and transcendent artist, in stark contrast to the later, revised manifestation of Stephen as cultural sponge completely immersed in, and dependent upon, his time and place. She charts Joyce's ontological revisions of Stephen's characterization from autonomous to an understanding that leads to his representation of subjectivity as inevitably 'fraudstuff' (2002, 12). Arguing that change in characterization is centered on a surrendering of attempted gaze, turning away from authoritarian position, and clear alignment of Stephen's point of view with the eye-with all its attendant perceptual uncertainties, delimitations, and lacks (24), Devlin argues that Joyce's construction of Stephen in A Portrait is supersaturated subject (25). This reflects the movement of Joyce's changing attitudes from aesthetic detachment to engagement with his surrounding cultural environment.In her next two chapters, Castration and Its Discontents: Gender Acts in Ulysses and Female Masquerade and Mimicry: Performances of Womanliness, Devlin turns her attention to the social construction of gender and gender performance as act of subversion. She begins by analyzing the as viewing position privileged in its ability to detect fraudulence. According to Devlin, the castrating gaze gains its power from its ability to peer through the artifice and masks that we surround ourselves with and expose the lack within. In other words, if Joyce has come to the conclusion that identity is social construct, that we are merely supersaturated subjects, or copies of copies, then he is playing on one of our biggest fears: namely, being discovered as phony, as actor playing part. If identity is performance of veils and masks, what is left when all of the artifice is peeled away? …