Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 The stolen birthright: the mimesis of original loss
- Chapter 2 Representation in a postcolonial symbolic
- Chapter 3 The language of the outlaw
- Chapter 4 The primitive scene of representation: writing gender
- Chapter 5 Materiality in Derrida, Lacan, and Joyce's embodied text
- Conclusion: Joyce's anamorphic mirror
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Representation in a postcolonial symbolic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 The stolen birthright: the mimesis of original loss
- Chapter 2 Representation in a postcolonial symbolic
- Chapter 3 The language of the outlaw
- Chapter 4 The primitive scene of representation: writing gender
- Chapter 5 Materiality in Derrida, Lacan, and Joyce's embodied text
- Conclusion: Joyce's anamorphic mirror
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is a symbol of Irish art.
The cracked lookingglass of a servant
UlyssesA “purloined letter” is not defined by its contents, but by its material presence and its effect on those who receive or hold it. Thus the letter is not valued for its message. It is seen as a “performative.” In this chapter, I will focus on the unsettling effect of A Portrait of the Artist to argue that Joyce's traumatic and resistant textuality produces a trembling and redoubling. The text is both presentational and representational. It syncretically inscribes two different ways of relating to the world at once, so that the performativity of différance is woven into the constativity of a stable “portrait.” This produces vacillating contours, and positions the author as anxiously engaged in an ongoing process of negotiation of the boundary between self and persona, inside and outside, language and matter, psyche and history. The reader, who cannot read in two contradictory manners at once, is caught wanting in perceptiveness and comes to share the anxiety of the text.
Stephen Dedalus's qualification of Irish art as “the cracked looking-glass of a servant,” is richly suggestive. A cracked mirror is a flawed object to be discarded or handed down to a servant: Irish art makes do with the outmoded models of representation of the master culture. Moreover, when we look into a cracked mirror, we see a redoubling and splitting reflection. We never see ourselves whole.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of HistoryReading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism, pp. 31 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999