Portraits in Development: James Joyce, The Artist, and the Human Condition of Creativity

Abstract

Portraits in Development:James Joyce, The Artist, and the Human Condition of Creativity Noel Arthur Davies Glover (bio) Prologue: The matter of a few holes A form which he knew for his mother's appeared far down in the room, standing in the doorway. In the gloom her excited face was crimson. A voice which he remembered as his mother's, a voice of a terrified human being, called his name. The form at the piano answered: —Yes? —Do you know anything about the body?... He heard his mother's voice addressing him excitedly like the voice of a messenger in a play: —What ought I do? There's some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel's … stomach … Did you ever hear of that happening? —I don't know, he answered trying to make sense of her words, trying to say them again to himself. —Ought I send for the doctor … Did you ever hear of that?... What ought I do? [End Page 131] —I don't know … What hole? —The hole … the hole we all have … here (Joyce, Stephen Hero 147). "The hole we all have … here," says the artist's mother in James Joyce's novel Stephen Hero, the first iteration of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. What hole, then? Mother and son reckon together in the quotation above with the question of the body's matter and with the matter of the body's meaning. How to make sense of the words that make sense of the matter that comes away from the body? Isn't that already what words are: matter coming away from a hole in the body? For Joyce's artist the body's limits seem to have a constitutive relationship to limits in understanding. The artist and his mother emerge as forms in relation to the sense of their words regarding a hole we all have. They seek an account of the body, of what it is and that which it is not, its matter and the matter of its hole. In a seminar on Joyce, Jacques Lacan is also drawn to the question of the relationship to the body: "In no [hu]man is the relationship with the body a straight-forward relationship—aside from the fact that the body has a few holes" (128). "According to Freud," Lacan continues, "this is even what must surely have put [the hu]man on the path of those abstract holes that have to do with the enunciating of anything whatsoever" (128). Straightforward about the body as a relation, says Lacan, is the fact of its holes. Obscure in this relation, however, is the question of enunciating the meaning of this fact. Can we describe literature, then, as an exceptional form of the enunciation of the fact of the body's holes, a style of enunciation that is also a relationship and a filling-in, a composition of matter coming away from a lack? Is literature, in other words, and precisely, the very matter of the few holes in the body? Jacques Derrida argues: No doubt literature, too, seems to aim toward the filling of a lack (a hole) in a whole that should not itself in its essence be missing (to) itself. But literature is also the exception to everything: at once the exception in the whole, the want-ofwholeness in the whole, and the exception to everything, that which exists by itself, alone, with nothing else, in exception to all. (42) Treated together, Joyce, the artist, and his figure of the artist, Stephen, comprise a body and a body of work, a certain wholeness, and the filling-in of a hole, and yet also the exception to its own wholeness, intending toward [End Page 132] a reader, and so containing even in the enunciation of the relation to the body's holes a few additional holes. If literature is what comes away from the holes in the subject, we are left with an additional question, as Garry Leonard asks in a Lacanian re-reading of Joyce's Dubliners: "Where do the holes in the subject's story of [themselves] come from?" (31). Accordingly, I am interested...