A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist
A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist:
Stephen Dedalus and the Search for a Master Signifier
Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
In the works of James Joyce, we encounter the character Stephen Dedalus. While Dedalus was based at least in part in autobiography, Joyce used the character to explore a part of himself. The extent to which the unconscious efforts of the author shaped his works, however, greatly expand what we might learn about Joyce through Stephen. By studying Stephen's attempts to define his own subjectivity, we learn not only about Stephen, nor only about Joyce himself, but also of the process of interpellation into a discourse. Stephen's search for a "master signifier" around which to build his identity becomes for the Lacanian reader of Joyce a vehicle for revelation that goes beyond even Joyce's perception of the self-revelations inherent in literary art.
Joyce via Lacan
In Ulysses, James Joyce created an enduring set of literary enigmata; Ulysses is at once a maturing, a complexification of the aesthetic vision he set out in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a foreshadowing of the linguistic labyrinth of Finnegans Wake."I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant," Joyce said of Ulysses, "and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
If, however, Ulysses is to be more than a curious set of word-puzzles, if we may attribute any lasting significance to it as a work of art, we must find some method of unravelling the enigmata, of coming near whatever significance may underly them. To assume, on Joyce's word, that every "puzzle," every difficult passage or troublesome phrase in Ulysses was woven into the novel by conscious choice, in light of some subtle yet transcendent meaning would be a gross misunderstanding, an exercise in naiveté.But we likewise must not make the mistake of ignoring or discrediting the enigmas. For in fact, as Stuart Gilbert points out in his commentary on Ulysses, "it is often precisely in the offending passages that the text is at its most significant (Gilbert 50)."A study of Ulysses, then, must consider not only what the "offending passages" consist of, but also why they appear in the work.A Lacanian analysis, with its unique approach to the text, may shed light on this "puzzle."
The study "of necessity focuses on the words, images, and symbols used...because it is through words, and words alone, that we can learn or intuit Joyce's attitudes (Harkness 13-4)," but the Lacanian analysis looks beyond the "words, images, and symbols" consciously employed by the author to focus on the particularities of the text itself, the emergent properties that are the product of the interplay of signifiers within the text. Furthermore, the Lacanian analyst view the work of the artist—the work of Joyce—as an attempt at self-analysis: Joyce writes "in order to speak to the opaque Other" that is his own unconscious; he writes "in an effort to decipher the mystery of his symptoms (Ragland 48)."
The autobiographical elements of Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus—the main character of A Portrait and a prominent figure in Ulysses as well—are well known to readers and critics of Joyce; another commonly-held point about A Portrait is "that the structure of the novel centers on Stephens' adopting and rejecting of various ways of ordering, or attributing sense to, his world (Harkness 20)."The same structure is apparent in Stephen's further characterisation in Ulysses.
In the sense, then, of Stephen as autobiography, the Portrait of Stephen is a portrait of Joyce, and A Portrait and Ulysses can be read in part as a study of Joyce's relationship to the authourities president over his own life.This view of Joyce's work seems to fit well with Joyce's own aesthetic theory, propounded by Stephen in Ulysses: "In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be.So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be (U 9.381 ff)."In the sense that revelations from the text of Joyce's work are revelations about Joyce, this analysis reconciles with the Lacanian viewpoint. As known to Joyceans, however, as the autobiographical features present in Stephen Dedalus, is the notion that Stephen and Joyce are not one in the same. Gilbert says "a personal note is discernible...but Stephen Dedalus represents only one side of the authour of Ulysses, the juvenile, self-assertive side, unmodified by maturer wisdom (202-3)." If we think of Joyce's work in Stephen as a study of the authour's "juvenile, self-assertive side" as it was involved in the quest to recognise and to embrace the calling of aestheticism, the life of an artist, we must realise that while Joyce may have valued his own youthful "self-assertiveness," he used the figure of Stephen Dedalus to explore the limits of his own aesthetic vocation (Harkness 15).
If Joyce wrote in order to "decipher the mystery of his symptoms (Ragland 48)" through Stephen, he wrote in order to understand the failures of Stephen, the lack of maturity that hindered Stephen as an artist. But from the point-of-view afforded by the Lacanian analysis, I suggest that if indeed Joyce was aware of the limitations involved in his aesthetic vocation, he was not so much consciously aware of them as much as the limitations actually revealed themselves in his literary artwork, through the character of Stephen Dedalus.
Stephen's aesthetic vision can be thought of in Lacanian terms as the desire to be interpellated into a discourse—the discourse of the Artist—a discourse that hinges upon certain master signifiers of the Symbolic register, which can be in turn suppourted by identifications at the level of the Imaginary.Thus a study of Stephen Dedalus as a character can be revelatory of the process of interpellation into a discourse by means of identification. And by using an analysis of Ulysses as a starting-point for an examination of Joyce's own relationship to his art, we gain insight not only into the process of interpellation but, insofar as Stephen is representative of the failures of Joyce, we gain insight into the failures of this interpellation as well. Stephen's search for a master signifier on which to hinge his identification as an Artist—and Stephen's identifications with the Imaginary and Real factors that underly his Symbolic interpellation—is a study of incompleteness, of failure.
In order to begin to investigate Stephen Dedalus's search for a master signifier, we must first come to understand Stephen's relationship with the authourity-figures of his life, the discourses he finds himself inscribed in, and the signifiers by which they operate.Turning to Joyce's texts—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses—we can examine these relationships.
Stephen's "Three Masters"
The study of Stephen's relationship to the discourses of authourity is the study of Stephen's desire.The form of desire we are here most interested in is that of identification."Identification, along with the other forms of desire, operates in each of the three registers of subjectivity: Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real; these three registers manifest themselves, respectively, in signifiers, images, and fantasies (Bracher 22-3)." The discourses of authourity in Stephen's social world are the discourses of the Other, and to examine Stephen's relationship to this social Other is to focus on his Symbolic Relations (Fink 89); "it is the signifier that holds the key to desire (Bracher 23)." The chief signifiers of a chain of discourse, signifiers that "function as bearers of our identity" within the discourse, Lacan calls "master signifiers (Bracher 23)." The urge to identify with a master signifier is the urge to "m'être à moi-même," as Lacan says, "to master myself by 'being myself' to myself;" viz. To claim an identity in a cultural discourse, to "recognize [oneself] and...be recognized by others (Bracher 23-4)."
But the master signifiers that make up the cultural discourse in which Stephen is immersed do not invoke in him the desire to identify; Stephen is very much at odds with the Symbolic Order of his place and time. "I am a servant of two masters," Stephen says in the opening episode ("Telemachus") of Ulysses, "and a third there is who wants me for odd jobs (U 1.638-9, 41)." His "masters" are "the Imperial British state," the Roman Catholic Church, and his homeland Ireland, specifically the Irish Nationalist or "Home Rule" movement.Stephen's choice of words here illustrate his relationship with his two most significant masters, the two manifestations of the Symbolic Order, his Church and his Nation. Both are "masters," both "want" him for something.This type of association with the Other is a relationship of demand.
The demands of the Other, dialectised into the master signifiers of Church and Nation, threaten Stephen's very subjectivity, for the Other's demands subjugate Stephen's ability to adopt a relationship toward an object of desire. With regard to the Symbolic register, "the subject consists in a stance adopted with respect to [the] Other," and the subject "stuck at the level of demand, dependent upon the Other's demand," is "unable to truly desire (Fink 87, 90)."The demands of the Other (which operate by way of the master signifiers of the Other's discourse) rob the subject of his desire, and thus take away the "jouissance that defines the subject's very being (Fink 92)." Here we can explore how the master signifiers in Stephen's world rob him of his jouissance, and then how he goes about seeking what he has lost.
STEPHEN AND THE CHURCH
Stephen's relationship to the Church is closely tied, both in A Portrait and in Ulysses, with his relationship to his mother. Stephen's mother literally wishes him to submit in faith to the Church's authourity, and she becomes for Stephen a symbol of the wishes—the demands—of the Church-Other.In one of the final episodes of A Portrait, Stephen says "[My mother] wishes me to make my Easter duty (259)." The Law of the Church makes this demand on Stephen, that he must receive the sacrament of Holy Communion during Eastertide (P 325, note 224). Stephen interprets the act as an act of submission—i.e., submission to the Church-Other's demand—and he replies "I will not serve (P 260)." Furthermore, we see how Stephen's refusal to submit to the Church-Other's demand accompanies his complete lack of identification with the signifiers of the Church discourse. When asked if he disbelieves in the Eucharist, Stephen replies "I neither believe in or it nor disbelieve in it (P 260);" the signifiers of the Catholic discourse hold no meaning for Stephen. The discourse of the Church demands subservience as the price of identification—"A crazy queen," Stephen thinks, "old and jealous. Kneel down before me (U 1.640)"—and Stephen "will not serve."
The demands of the Church are more explicit, more violent in Stephen's mind in Ulysses.The image of Stephen's mother, May Dedalus, on her deathbed haunts Stephen throughout the day:
Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face.Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat. (U 1.273-6)
Yet still Stephen refuses to serve: "No, mother!Let me be and let me live (1.279)."It is important here to realise that Stephen's refusal is not simply a denial of his love for his mother; Stephen associates his mother's wish for him to submit to the Church with the demands of the Church-Other (Leland 1996), and Stephen cannot allow this demand to subjugate his desire, to erase his subjectivity.
STEPHEN AND éIRE
Ireland, another of Stephen's "masters," one who "wants [him] for odd jobs," makes similar demands on Stephen, demands that are closely related to his life as an artist. "Although the Irish Nationalists opposed the British, they did not oppose the Church, and made strong claims about the need for art to serve their political cause (Leland 1996)." For Stephen, this "need" of the Other becomes a demand on him, and a stranglehold on his artistic freedom.
As Stephen's mother becomes a powerful symbol for his relationship to the Church, so is the Irish Nationalist movement mirrored in Stephen's relationship to his father, Simon Dedalus. In broad Lacanian terms, the father—symbolised in the paternal metaphor, le nom du pére—stands in for the authourity of the overall Symbolic Order of society; this concept is useful in our analysis of Ulysses, especially insofar as Simon Dedalus is associated with the Other of Irish Nationalism.
As a symbol of authourity, Simon Dedalus is a weak figure, an "impotent" father.Stephen's questioning of paternal authourity is reflected throughout Ulysses, in references to Church heresies regarding the relationship of the Father and the Son of the Godhead, and in parallels Joyce suggests between Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, or between Stephen and Hamlet (Leland 1996).But Stephen's antagonism for, and resistance against his father's control—which is, symbolically, Stephen's resistance to any authourity of the Other—is revealed even in early episodes of A Portrait; in one such instance, Stephen sits in the kitchen of the Dedalus home—his father's home—while Simon waits at the head of the stairs, asking "Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?" One of Stephen's sisters urges him to leave, but he replies only by mocking his father's words—and thereby his father's paternal authourity in the home: "He has a curious idea of gender if he thinks a bitch is masculine," Stephen says. Stephen resists his father's authourity here in a literal way, and leaves "smiling and kissing his fingers in adieu (P 189)."
Later in the novel, Stephen further illustrates his father's paternal impotency."What was [your father]?" asks Stephen's friend, Cranly. "A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past (P 189)."While Stephen's assessment of his father is not entirely discrediting, nor is it filled with hatred, Stephen makes it clear that Simon Dedalus, a man unable to set his household in order, unable to manage his own life and career, is a meaningless authourity to Stephen; he is no authourity at all.
And Stephen's relationship to the Irish Home Rule movement is similar; his reaction to it is very much the same. In the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses comes Stephen's most explicit attack on the movement, and he characterises the discourse of the Irish Nationalist rhetoricians in much the same way as he does his father Simon, as an impotent authourity, a "praiser of [its] own past."In "Aeolus," Stephen spins out an allegory, "The Parable of the Plums," that symbolically illustrates the impotence of Home Rule rhetoric. In the Parable (see U 7.921 ff), we see that if Stephen is to identify with the discourse of Irish Nationalism, he must surrender the aesthetic fertility of his talent to the infertile demands of an impotent paternal Other.
In the company of Irish Nationalists (who happen to be friends of his father Simon) Stephen tells the tale of "two Dublin vestals," 50 and 53 years old (and thus themselves representative of failed creativity, a conspicuous lack of fertility), who "want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson's Pillar," (a 121-foot-tall column "surmounted by a thirteen-foot statue of Admiral Lord Nelson:" Gifford 6.293n) a very visible reminder of British authourity in Dublin.The "vestals," intended by Stephen to represent all of Ireland (Leland 1996), are ignorant ("They had no idea it was that high," 7.947), and "afraid of the dark" in the pillar's stairway; they "argue about where the different churches are (7.1011), and, reaching the top of the pillar, "they are too tired to look up or down or to speak (7.1024-5)."
Finally, Stephen adds a dramatic 'punch-line' to his parable: the old virgins, the embodiment of infertility, of frustrated creation, sit and eat the plums they brought with them, "wiping off...the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting the plumstones slowly out" onto the city of Dublin below (7.1025-7). Stephen gives "a sudden loud young laugh as a close (7.1028)," his mockery of the Irish and their cause complete. The image he paints is that of a grand phallus—Nelson's Pillar—ejaculating infertile seed—the plumstones—onto the ground. Thus the rhetoric of the Irish Nationalists—those true sons of the Home Rule-Other, who remain submissive to its demands—who had spent the earlier part of the "Aeolus" episode reminiscing over great Irish victories and promulgating "high-flown rhetoric of liberation," is likened to an infertile, impotent exercise, a "mental masturbation" that is fruitless: "it is the product of infertile, impotent people (Leland 1996)."
Stephen views the Nationalist-Other, like his own father, as an impotent Other whose demands on his talent ("wants me for odd jobs," 1.641) will result only in futile rhetoric, a subjugation of Stephen's aesthetic fertility, his desire to create.
The master signifiers of Stephen's "masters:" the Eucharist of the Church, and the "Home Rule" promised-land of the Nationalist movement are signifiers that demand Stephen's submission—and signifiers that threaten to subjugate Stephen's creative desire, to render it impotent. Stephen, therefore, cannot identify with these signifiers, refuses to be interpellated into the discourse of the Church or Homeland, refuses to become his enslaved mother or his impotent father. Thus Stephen sets out to forge his own identity; he seeks to identify with a master signifier of his own creation.
The Search for a Master Signifier: the "Hawklike Man"
Rather than suffer the subjugation of his desire to the demands of the Other, Stephen Dedalus seeks to adopt a new position with respect to the Other, a position that marks him as a desiring subject.The root of Stephen's desire can be traced to an encounter with the Real; this encounter reveals to us the object of Stephen's desire, and the position that he adopts with respect to it.Then we can examine the way in which Stephen's desire is dialectised into a master signifier—a signifier that, unlike those of the Church and Homeland, allows Stephen the privilege of desire.
AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE REAL
Walking along "the strand"—the beach of Dublin Bay—Stephen has a vision, an "epiphany," as Joyce would refer to it, in which his vocation as an artist was revealed to him.Stephen has an encounter with desirousness, and he focuses his desire on an 'object:' his calling, his "destiny" as an artist. "[B]y identifying with an object a [—an "excess in jouissance," the "cause of desire"—] one is in a moment of temporal pulsation a subject of jouissance (Ragland 48);" and the jouissance Stephen experiences is evident in the language of the text:
His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight...His throat ached with a desire to...cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds...He started up nervously...for he could no longer guard the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. (P 183-4)
The nameless, formless emotional energy, the uncontainable joy that Stephen experiences on the strand is an experience of jouissance.And Stephen immediately associates the jouissance of his object of desire—his aesthetic destiny—with a signifier. The signifier that suddenly becomes meaningful and significant to Stephen is his own name: Dedalus."Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy (P 183)." The name of Dedalus here becomes for Stephen "a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop...a new soaring impalpable imperishable being (P 183)," and the signifier is doubly meaningful for him.The signifier Dedalus represents at once the "hawklike man flying sunward above the sea," a symbol of freedom, and "the fabulous artificer," a potent and capable creator. Note how these facets of Stephen's master signifier, the foundations of his discourse as an Artist, stand in direct opposition to the signifiers of the Church and the Home Rule rhetoricians; Stephen's discourse counters the discourse of the Other—and the consequences of the Other's demands.Stephen's encounter with the Real—and his dialectisation of the encounter—"was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice (P 184)" of the Other's demands, but the call of desire, the call of the jouissance of artistic creation.
One must immediately see the irony of Stephen's choice of a signifier with which to identify: Dedalus, the name of his father, Stephen's very literal nom du pére. But Stephen's internal discourse soon dismisses the irony: by identifying with his own discourse, his own master signifier, Stephen allies himself against the dominance of the old master signifiers. Just as the "hawklike man" Dedalus, a symbol of "deliverance," of the "ecstasy of flight," will not submit to the Church-Other's demand for subservience ("Kneel down before me," 1.640), Dedalus the "fabulous artificer" will not succumb to the infertile, onanistic rhetoric of the impotent paternal Other, but instead will come to embody aesthetic fertility and the power of the creator.
Stephen is not, as some suggest, a man "in search of a father (U 1.561)," nor "The Son striving to be atoned with the Father (U 1.578);" Stephen seeks to become his father, i.e., to become his own authourity (Leland 1996). In Ulysses, Stephen further demonstrates his rejection of le nom du pére: in the "Circe" episode, Stephen plays the rôle of the Prodigal Son."Filling my belly with the husks of swine," Stephen thinks. "Too much of this.I will arise and go to my (15.2495-6). "Even in his thoughts, Stephen "does not pronounce the word 'father' (Gilbert 62); Stephen has already rejected his father's authourity, and he creates a new signifier from le nom du pére by changing what it signifies for him. Later in the episode, the name Dedalus as nom du pére is completely erased. When Stephen's mother appears to him in the unconscious surreality of the dream-episode of "Circe," she "was once the beautiful May Goulding (U 15.4173-4);" the name Dedalus is no longer associated with Stephen's father Simon—nor with the Symbolic Order of the Other—the name, the master signifier, is exclusively Stephen's.
Stephen Dedalus, "hawklike man," no longer must submit to the Other's demands. And Stephen Dedalus, "fabulous artificer," has the power "to express [him]self in...art as freely...and as wholly" as he can (P 268-9), to "press in his arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world (P 273)," the "loveliness" he has yet to create.
IMAGINARY RELATIONS
The richness of Stephen's interpellation is evident not only in his Symbolic identifications but also in his identifications with images that surround his master signifier. "Images derive their power from what Lacan calls the Imaginary," and images, along with signifiers, "operate in discourse as a part of its total interpellative power (Bracher 31)." A subject who has come to embody a signifier "will identify with other subjects" who have done the same (Bracher 27), and likewise a subject who has rejected a discourse and the signifiers that make it up will identify himself against the subjects of that discourse. We see evidence of this behaviour in Stephen in Ulysses, and he accomplishes it by means of the Imaginary register of identification.
In the "Telemachus" episode, we see some of Stephen's imaginary identifications (or counter-identifications, if you will). Leaving the tower where he lives, Stephen walks between his room-mate Buck Mulligan, and Haines, a British visitor to Ireland. As they walk, "In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap dusty mourning between their bay attires (U 1.570-1, emphasis added)."Stephen, who wears mourning for his recently-departed mother, is distinguished from his fellow-Dubliners—and this distinction remains present in Stephen's mind throughout the day.Another parcel of Stephen's attire sets him apart in a more specific way: his "Latin Quarter hat," a "soft or slouch hat associated with the art and student worlds of the Latin Quarter in Paris, as against the...bowlers or derbies then fashionable in Dublin (Gifford 1.519n., emphasis added)," is another means by which Stephen rejects the demands of the Other and identifies with a new master signifier. Stephen's imaginary identifications against those around him suppourt his interpellation of the discourse of the Artist.
The Failures of The Master Signifier: Dedalus or Icarus?
But, as we set out at the start of our analysis, Stephen's interpellation is not complete, his identification is imperfect.Throughout the text of Ulysses, doubts arise—if only for a moment—then sink back beneath the surface of the text. But these intimations of doubt—like Gilbert's "offending passages"—cannot be ignored; they are as significant to our analysis as are Stephen's successes."The mockery of it!" says Buck Mulligan, as early as the "Telemachus" episode. "Your absurd name, and ancient Greek! (U 1.34)" Dedalus: the name on which hangs Stephen's entire aesthetic discourse, his confidence in his artistic calling, "absurd."
And Stephen himself has his doubts, "self-assertive" Stephen, in "Scylla & Charybdis:" "Fabulous artificer," he thinks; "The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?...Paris and back...Icarus. Pater, ait [trans: 'Father, he cries.']. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering (U 9.952-4)." "What we seek is the repeated dominance of those signifiers that represent us (Bracher 26)," but even Stephen himself is ambivalent, at best, about the lasting dominance of his master signifier: is Stephen a Dedalus or an Icarus, destined to fly to freedom and to create as an artist, or doomed to fail, "seabedabbled, fallen, weltering?" If "master signifiers are simply accepted as having a value or validity that goes without saying (Bracher 25)," then Stephen's "master signifier"—"hawklike man," "fabulous artificer"—can hardly be said to be a master signifier at all. Stephen Dedalus, to some extent, is indeed "absurd."
Conclusion: Joyce via Stephen
But, once again, if Joyce wrote in order to "decipher the mystery of his symptoms (Ragland 48)" through Stephen, then the revelation is not only a revelation about the character, Stephen Dedalus, but a revelation of the creator, James Joyce, as well. What is significant, then, about this revelation? Ellie Ragland writes "I shall argue that the enigmata in Joyce's art unveil, even from his earliest creations [note—she is writing about Joyce's play, Exiles, in the article from which this quote is taken], the object a produced by his unanalyzable symptom (49)." This "object a" is "the impossible kernel" of Joyce's psyche, an element of his own unconscious, "that cannot be spoken (Ragland 48)." And, "indeed, Lacan saw the raison d'être of art as trying to say, hear, or see this something more...that hides our own secrets from us, while showing us where to look for them (Ragland 54)." So as Joyce wrote, "inscrib[ing] himself in the Symbolic (Ragland 49)," he revealed his deepest symptoms, his own failures, his doubts that remained hidden, perhaps, even from himself. "So in the future, the sister of the past," it is we, the analyst of Joyce's works of art, who have the privileged position Joyce spoke of (through Stephen) in "Scylla & Charybdis;" we see the artist reflected in his own work, and gain insight into the life of the artist himself.Furthermore, just as the "fabulous artificer," Stephen, found himself "in a moment of temporal pulsation a subject of jouissance (Ragland 48)," so might we, the reader, identify with the character—and the character's creator ("Old father, old artificer...")—and achieve the same sort of enjoyment.
Works Cited
Texts:
Joyce, James.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Books, Inc. 1993.
(cited throughout as P, followed by page number)
Joyce, James.Ulysses. New York: Random House, Inc. 1986.
(cited throughout as U, followed by Episode and line number(s) )
Sources:
Bracher, Mark.Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1993.
Fink, Bruce.The Lacanian Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1995.
Gifford, Don with Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1988.
Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Random House, Inc. 1952.
Harkness, Marguerite.The Aesthetics of Dedalus and Bloom. London: Associated University Press. 1984.
Leland, Blake.Lectures given at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Unpublished. 1996.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. "Psychosis Adumbrated: Lacan and Sublimation of the Sexual Divide in Joyce's Exiles." James Joyce Quarterly. 1991: 29, 47-62.
12 February, 1998