The Nora Letters as a Source of Joyce’s Performativity

Abstract

n A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen points out that his recourse to the aesthetics of St. Thomas of Aquinas has a restriction: When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience (P 209). The notorious letters Joyce wrote to Nora in December 1909 record that new, intersubjective experience, linking the act of writing to the drive, while marking a significant in Joyce's aesthetic development.' If we understand an event as a moment indicating an irreversible change, we may see these letters as the beginning of the incremental movement in Joyce's fiction away from mimesis to an ever more performative and rhythmic style in which the act of writing overrides the desire to create a transparent copy of real life. Samuel Beckett notes, [Joyce's] writing is not about something; it is that something itself.2 The movement towards enactment instead of representation, which Beckett sees as characteristic of Joyce's writing in Finnegans Wake, had its beginnings in Joyce's correspondence with Nora. That the Nora letters are highly performative is obvious. Written to sustain the onanistic complicity between husband and wife (SL xxiv), they feature the characteristics of performative speech. They use the present tense, and they comment on the activity of reading and writing, as well as on the relationship between reading and masturbating: Darling, I came off just now in my trousers so that I am utterly played out. I cannot go to the G.P.O. though I have three letters to post (SL 190); [Y]our letter was lying in front of me and my eyes were fixed, as they are even now, on a certain word in it. There is something obscene and lecherous in the very look of the letters. The sound of it too is like the act itself, brief, brutal, irresistible and devilish (SL 180). Representing a process of increasing fetishization, the letters stand in for the absent body of the beloved. The tangibility of the paper,