Molly in Furs: Deleuzean/Masochian Masochism in the Writing of James Joyce

Abstract

Masochism is not only a subject that obsessed, as well as a weakness that possessed, James Joyce, but it seems to have provided one source of psychosexual energy out of which he drew his writing. This essay will explore how force of masochism, as defined by Gilles Deleuze in Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, shaped narration (not story told, but storytelling) principally of Ulysses-an issue that narratives (plot lines) of Dubliners, A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses provoke. At one point in his psychoanalytic study Joyce in Nighttown, Mark Shechner ponders relation of Joyce's masochism and writing style, and concludes: In Joyce's case, especially, irony and masochism go hand in hand, for both involve a strategic self-abasement. The masochist courts pain in interest of disarming his superego much as ironist cultivates self-criticism for purpose of disarming his critics. 1 My sense of matter is different and more elaborate, as Shechner's might have been had he substituted for Freudian Oedipal model of masochism he relies on a Deleuzean paradigm based directly on writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's conception of masochism is applied appropriately to Joyce not only because it is derived from Masoch, and Joyce knew-lived-Masoch, but also because Deleuze urges students of masochism to take a literary approach, since original definitions of sadism and masochism stem from literature: the clinical specificities of sadism and masochism are not separable from literary values peculiar to Sade and Masoch. 2 Deleuze argues for a genuinely formal, almost deductive psychoanalysis which would attend first of all to formal patterns underlying [sadism and masochism], viewed as formal elements of fictional (M 65). My application of Deleuze to Joyce will extend Deleuze's ideas even further into territory of formal artistic principles. From art masochism arose, and to art it will herein