Mr Joyce and Dr Hydes: Irish selves and doubles in ‘The Dead’

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Quoted in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 138. Cf. L. Thurston, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 126–30. There is however an uncertainty as to when – or even whether – Joyce actually read Stevenson's text. Only a single book by Stevenson, the Scottish Romance Catriona of 1893, was found in Joyce's Trieste library. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 88. See Michael Levenson's discussion of Joyce's critique of the Gaelic League's Irish-language revivalism: in James Joyce, The Dead: Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. D. Schwarz (Boston, MA: St Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 168–70. ‘If he be Mr Hyde … I shall be Mr Seek’; R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), (London: Penguin 2002) (hereafter JH), p.14. J. Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, Écrits: A Selection, trans B. Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 4. For an intriguing discussion of the relation between Stevenson's photography, his ‘semi-anthropology’ and his writing, see Ann Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), esp. pp. 99–131. Robert Mighall, notes to Stevenson, op. cit., p. 165. Quoted in Ibid, p. 151. Or perhaps of the non-Anglophone Celt in general. It is crucial to remember, alongside the complexity of Stevenson's own political views and his ambiguous colonial position, the particular status in his work of Scottish identity. As Ann Colley writes, ‘Stevenson recognized a similarity between the “savage” South Sea islanders and the “barbaric” highlanders exploited and harmed by fellow Scots (lowlanders)’ (Colley, op. cit., p. 5). It is clear that particular national differences are suppressed by the racist portrayal in English culture of the Gaelic-speaking Celt. V. Cheng, ‘Catching the Conscience of a Race: Joyce and Celticism’, in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, ed. M. Beja and D. Norris (Ohio State University Press, 1996), p. 23. Florence L. Walzl, ‘Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of “The Dead”’, James Joyce Quarterly, 4 (1966), pp. 17–31. A. Burgess, ‘A Paralysed City’ (1965), James Joyce, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man: A Casebook, ed. M. Beja (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 235. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 173–4. R. Spoo, ‘Uncanny Returns in “The Dead”’, in Joyce, Dubliners: A New Casebook (London: Palgrave, 2006), p. 144. D. Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce's Dubliners (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 231. See Jeri Johnson's note, Dubliners, p. 274. The Critical Writings of James Joyce, eds. E. Mason and R. Ellmann (Itheca: Cornell University Press, 1989). p. 156. Torchiana, op. cit., p. 231. J.I.M. Stewart, James Joyce (London: Longman, Green & Co, 1957), p. 14.