‘The nervous laughter of writing’: Stephen Hero, onions, laughter and other lawless affirmations

Abstract

Acts of writing can be dissonant, whether they are kept in a locked room at the top of the house (as in the case of the nameless writer’s text in The Yellow Wallpaper), or whether they occur in colleges and universities. This chapter is concerned not with a nameless author but with an invisible, unread text; it is also concerned with reading acts and the determination of impropriety of certain acts of reading and writing within institutional contexts. The perception of dissonance or affirmative resistance on the part of certain readers in certain quarters may constitute a more powerful effect than the very text itself. Thus this chapter suggests a reading of Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s prototype Portrait, as a text which, though obviously ‘unfinished’ and seemingly less ‘experimental’ than either A Portrait or, obviously, Ulysses, nonetheless offers a model of dissonant identity at work in the service of affirmative resistance. This earlier, other novel can be read as demonstrating the beginnings of what Vicki Mahaffey calls Joyce’s use of a ‘vast repertory of stylistic techniques in order to attack the traditional, univocal model of authority reflected in the organizations of the Church and State’ (Mahaffey 1995, 1).

A work laden with obvious and canonical ‘metaphysical’ theses can, in the operation of its writing, have more powerful ‘deconstructive’ effects than a text proclaiming itself radically revolutionary without in any way affecting the norms or modes of traditional writing.

Jacques Derrida

One has to read against so many grains, against at times, the finite here and now of institutional ideologies and political presumptions about scholarship.

Avital Ronell

… resisting readers are certainly among the best

James R. Kincaid

The quotation which serves as the title for this chapter comes from Hélène Cixous’ essay, ‘Joyce: the (r)use of writing’ (1984, 22), in which she talks of the unity of order is broken up through farcial and transgressive acts of writing in Ulysses (21–22).