Reception Study: John Rodker's Psychoanalysis, Masochistic Production, and James Joyce

Abstract

In 1927, at the same time that he was reading and writing about James Joyce's Work-in-Progress, modernist poet, critic, and publisher John Rodker uttered his own "invented portmanteau word" in his psychoanalysis with Barbara Low. Both Rodker's invented word and the Work-in-Progress puns he wrote about in Parisian magazines circled around themes of passivity, petrification, and punishment. This essay situates Rodker's desire, expressed in analysis with Low, to become a statue in relation to his own experimental writing from the 1910s and 1920s as well as his astute criticism on Joyce's masochistic themes in these same years. Rodker's reception of Joyce must include his mimicry of Joyce's pun language in analysis. This inadvertent copying returns us, on the one hand, to a moment when Rodker's anxieties about his writing were distended by modernism's masculinization of literary production and, on the other, to the realization of Rodker's own vision that Joyce's language of the unconscious would spread outward into the minds and mouths of men and women everywhere.