The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature

Writing the Unspeakable

Joseph Valente, Margot Gayle Backus

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253053213
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children remain in peril.

In The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature, Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and 21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage has served to enable such abuse.

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature refines the debates on why so many Irish children were lost by offering insight into the lived experience of both the children and those who failed them.

1

“AN IRIDESCENCE DIFFICULT TO ACCOUNT FOR”

Sexual Initiation in Joyce’s Fiction of Development

AS THEODORE SPENCER OBSERVES IN his introduction to the extant pages of Joyce’s early, abandoned Stephen Hero, “much of the talk sounds as if it had been taken down immediately after it had been spoken” (1963, 9). This impression, that Joyce’s early fiction represented photo-realist accounts (or Akashic records) of the Dublin circles in which he moved, is consistent with Joyce’s known approach of accurately reproducing dialogue and sensory impressions in his “epiphanies,” some of which he incorporated into the Stephen Hero manuscript. Certainly, the preponderance of the dialogue in Stephen Hero was either transcribed verbatim, like the epiphanies, or crafted in painstaking obedience to the social conventions of the world Joyce depicts—a social world punctuated by emotionally intense, semantically cryptic exchanges organized in relation to unspecified, enigmatic scandal referents.¹

In many of these dialogues, it is possible to observe the relationship between the disconnect of the sentimental representation of children in public discourse from the actual treatment of children, and the circulation and socio-symbolic import of such cryptic scandal signifiers. The connections between child-love in theory and child-harm in practice, on one hand, and enigmatic scandal referents, on the other, is especially evident in two contiguous passages in Stephen Hero dealing with the harrowing death of Stephen’s younger sister, Isabel. Isabel has returned from her convent school so steeped in Catholic doctrine that Stephen finds he must either patronize her, by speaking in the thoroughly reified, formulaic language of Catholic piety, or threaten to corrupt her by speaking to her in any other way.² In Isabel’s death scene, Joyce painfully juxtaposes children’s idealized spiritual purity—the Catholic valorization of which prompts their mother to bid Isabel rejoice in her own imminent demise—with Stephen’s reflections on all that Isabel’s restrictive upbringing has stolen from even the short life she has had:

Isabel seemed to Stephen to have grown very old: her face had become a woman’s face. Her eyes turned constantly between the two figures nearest to her as if to say she had been wronged in being given life and, at Stephen’s word, she gulped down whatever was offered her. When she could swallow no more her mother said to her, “You are going home, dear, now. You are going to heaven where we will all meet again. Don’t you know? . . . Yes, dear . . . Heaven, with God” and the child fixed her great eyes on her mother’s face while her bosom began to heave loudly beneath the bedclothes.

Stephen felt very acutely the futility of his sister’s life. He would have done many things for her and, though she was almost a stranger to him, he was sorry to see her lying dead. Life seemed to him a gift; the statement “I am alive” seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him uncertain. His sister had enjoyed little more than the fact of life, few or none of its privileges. The supposition of an allwise God calling a soul home whenever it seemed good to Him could not redeem in his eyes the futility of her life. The wasted body that lay before him had existed by sufferance; the spirit that dwelt therein had literally never dared to live and had not learned anything by an abstention which it had not willed for itself. (1963, 165)

In this agonizing passage, Stephen gazes into the prematurely aged face of his barely pubescent, dying sibling who has lived “by sufferance,” debarred from the gratification of her every vital drive: to explore and experience, to question and learn, to communicate with others in a language that makes possible both intimacy and insight. Isabel has ultimately been denied the opportunity even to experience herself as alive. In the passage that follows, an exchange at Isabel’s wake serves explicitly to indict the anti-sex, antibody piety that Dublin’s Archbishop Walsh already epitomized owing to his leadership role in Charles Stewart Parnell’s destruction.³ Stephen lays the responsibility for his dying sister’s grim fate—the systematic eradication of every satisfaction from her short time on Earth—on Walsh’s life-hating mode of Catholicism and the growing numbers of educated Irish nationalists who had, since the fall of Parnell, been embracing it in the name of social and career advancement.

Upon his arrival at Isabel’s wake, Stephen and Isabel’s uncle John is introduced in a single, breathless sentence as “a very shock-headed asthmatic man who had in his youth been rather indiscreet with his landlady’s daughter and the family had been scarcely appeased by a tardy marriage” (166). Once Uncle John’s three most distinctive characteristics are established, a friend of Simon Daedalus, “a clerk in the police courts,” ventures what seems a practiced conversational gambit. He tells nearby mourners about a friend of his in Dublin Castle whose impressive and somewhat titillating charge it is to “examin[e] prohibited books.” Getting wound up in response to his own icebreaker, possibly owing to the gravity of the occasion, the clerk bursts out, concerning materials that he himself cannot have seen, “such filth. . . .You’d wonder how any man would have the face to print it” (166). Uncle John, whose personal sex scandal, as the narrator’s establishing shot makes clear, is both known to and studiously concealed by his community, follows the clerk’s highly emotional bid—“such filth”—with his own enigmatic horror story about a youthful encounter with some kind of similarly reprehensible print material. He recalls that “when [he] was a boy,” he had gone to “a bookshop near Patrick’s Close . . . to buy a copy of Colleen Bawn” (166). On that occasion, he recalls, in a tone and with body language that clearly convey a sense of horror, “The man asked me in and he showed me a book” (166).

This utterly cryptic account of a scandalous outrage, in which a bookseller shows a book to a regular patron who had gone to the bookshop to buy a book, subsides in ellipses, and the clerk, alert to the inward shudder signaled by Uncle John’s pregnant silence, relieves him of the insupportable burden of going on by murmuring, “I know, I know.” Thus validated in the sense of horror this memory has inspired, Uncle John bursts out, “Such a book to put into the hands of a young lad! Such ideas to put in his head! Scandalous!” (166). Stephen’s brother, Maurice, gives his uncle’s declaration a moment to land before asking curiously, “Did you buy the book, Uncle John?” (perhaps mischievously treating the exchange as an actual, ordinary conversation). Uncle John’s auditors seem ready to laugh, but Uncle John himself grows angrier still, barking, “They should be prosecuted for putting such books on sale. Children should be kept in their places” (166).

These strangely unmoored and oblique allusions to unspecified books can have triggered the two men’s outrage only insofar as the books in question had also titillated their interest. In other words, the police clerk, by expressing his revulsion, makes clear that his friend has shared scandalous particulars with him—or, at minimum, that he has a fantasy about what those books might be like. For his part, Uncle John, a known fornicator, erupts with outrage and calls for a crackdown on publishing and on children in response to a question that threatens to reconnect his own suppressed and denied desires to the vague scandal signifiers that the two men have taken shared, self-congratulatory pleasure in condemning. In a final effusion of defensive sadism, Uncle John commits what might be described as the Freudian slip of all time, climatically calling to further restrict Ireland’s children at a gathering that centers on the body of a child who is already “in [her] place” forever, lying among them, dead in a box.

The men’s encoded interchange exemplifies a paranoid hyperawareness on the part of Irish nationalists of every stripe concerning the dangers of sex scandals that gained new purchase in Irish society in the wake of Parnell’s scandalous fall and subsequent death. A psychic and social mandate to misrecognize was broadly constitutive of adult civic subjectivity in post-Parnellite nationalist circles. Saturated with guilt, shame, and bitter disappointment and menaced by both social and psychic dangers associated with sexual exposure, Irish nationalists found in the pervasive encoding function of the scandal signifier both the means and the mandate to express and thereby exploit painful shared realities—personal, social, and historical—in encrypted form. The scandal-saturated air that James Joyce grew up breathing—what Joyce termed “the odour of corruption” that he sought to capture in Dubliners (1965, 89–90)—stimulated him to develop various techniques to amplify and play on the devious deniability that characterized turn-of-the-century Dublin’s scandal-coded vernacular. As is well known, Joyce’s obsession with the artfully encoded sex scandal reached its fullest expression (or got entirely out of hand, depending on whom you ask) in Finnegans Wake. As Margot Norris puts it, this sprawling word puzzle, seventeen years in the making, “greatly augments the normal tendency of discourse to consciously or unconsciously conceal, then inadvertently reveal those matters that are most important to the speaker” (1998, 5–6).⁴

The practical necessity of this pervasive scandal management is dramatized in the Christmas dinner-table scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce 1992b), when Dante, an aging female and poor relation, single-handedly demolishes paterfamilias Simon Dedalus and his friend, Mr. Casey, whose aura of heroic nationalism is enhanced by his time in a British prison. Oblivious to the newly emerging capacity of the scandal signifier to redefine and enforce collective moral priorities, Dedalus and Casey ill-advisedly enter into a verbal fight they cannot win. Still reeling from Parnell’s death, they denounce the Irish Catholic hierarchy for its part in his fall, which, as they believe, has destroyed the prospects for Irish independence. Importantly, their dinner-table jousting first careens out of control around the point when Dedalus specifically heaps scorn on Dublin archbishop William Walsh, or “Billy with the lip” (35). Dante, through her undeviating, fulminating emphasis on Parnell’s sex scandal, hammers away at her opponents as traitors to the nation—renegade Catholics, black Protestants, and blasphemers—because their focus on Ireland’s lost opportunity for independence evinces their sinful, failure to fixate on sex.

As they struggle to set aside the question of Parnell’s legally and clerically unsanctioned union with Katharine O’Shea in favor of what they understandably view as the weightier question of Irish independence, Dante repeatedly casts Casey and Dedalus as unforgivably indifferent to the enormity of Parnell’s sin and thus as secret enemies of the Catholic Church and Ireland itself. In his attempts to respond to Dante’s badgering accusations, Casey is at last provoked into open blasphemy, renouncing the Catholic Church altogether. This speech act precipitates both men’s collapse into inchoate shame, visibly and tangibly ousted from a national community over which Catholicism, in any and all matters touching on sex (which, through the enigmatic signifier, all matters can be made to do), now reigns supreme.

In this microcosmic reenactment of the Parnell scandal’s reconfiguration of the Irish national imaginary, Joyce reveals how censorious references to the Chief’s private life could readily be wielded, with destructive force, against anyone foolish enough to defend or downplay his adultery. Thus in modern Ireland did the enigmatic signifier give rise to an acute sense of threatened exposure that had to be constantly indemnified by means of impinging silences, evasions, and opacities, and in irrational or self-contradictory assertions.

JAMES JOYCE, SEXUAL INITIATION, AND THE ENIGMATIC SIGNIFIER

James Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s first, illicit sexual experience is famously commemorated in the date on which Ulysses is set. That romantic gesture has combined with Molly Bloom’s rapturous last words recalling her first sexual encounter—“yes I said yes I will Yes” (Joyce 1986, 18.1608–9)—to give rise to the “Joyce of sex” phenomenon, the popular, and sometimes scholarly, assumption that Joyce affirms the potential of human sexuality to be fully liberatory and gratifying (Beja and Jones 1982, 255–66). Concomitantly, the early puritanical efforts of Anthony Comstock and the Decency societies to have Ulysses banned in the United States as obscene pornography have served to discourage the examination of the darker, more skeptical side of Joyce’s erotic vision. Yet the sexual panegyrics in Ulysses, which align the novel with contemporary sexological discourses espoused by Havelock Ellis or Charles Albert,⁵ are in fact counterbalanced by constitutively traumatic specimens of sexual initiation, most notably Stephen Dedalus’s account of the seduction of William Shakespeare by Anne Hathaway, which corresponds to Stephen’s own first sexual encounter with an older prostitute in A Portrait of the Artist. If we expand our idea of sexual initiation from the classic first-intercourse variety to the many forms of introductory sexual knowing that pervade Joyce’s narratives, beginning with the earliest stages of infantile awareness, we discover that the alternative scenarios we have cited and the conflicting values they attach to sexual experience (shameful/validating, transgressive/compliant, exalting/scarring) are the outcroppings of a deep-structural aporia in the Symbolic Order itself: the mutual determination and disturbance of sexual affect and the signifying function. A kind of literary phenomenology of this aporia, Joyce’s writing registers the radical psychic ambivalence that it produces, an ambivalence imbricating the meaning of sexuality and the sexualization of language.

In pursuing this project, Joyce never forgot (or perhaps his deeply Catholic, quasi-Jansenist culture did not let him forget) the cauterizing as well as the exalting aspect of sexual enjoyment, and this unremitting double vision has given him an honored place in the annals of post-Freudian psychoanalysis—psychoanalysis après la lettre, if you will—which is likewise magnetized by the inherent ambivalence of the erotic.⁶ Joyce’s work has not, however, been brought to bear on certain of the long-standing debates in psychoanalysis concerning sexual identity formation, particularly its underexplicated relationship to collective identity formation. To begin this discussion, we propose to examine the status of sexual initiation in Joyce’s narratives of development—specifically, “The Sisters” and A Portrait of the Artist—focusing on aesthetic and representational strategies that achieve their effects by tapping a residue of sexualized trauma embedded at the level of the word.

Understanding the ways in which Joyce employs ambiguously sexual formulations that position both his characters and readers as imperfectly initiated allows for a fuller appreciation of the workings of his literary style. It also affords greater insight into how the social world leaves its most salient imprint on the individual subject through contingent personal experience and how, conversely, such highly individuated experience lends intense affect to larger social movements and ideologies. In Joyce’s case, the most consistently impinging of such ideologies is Irish Catholic nationalism. This simultaneously ethnic and sectarian ideology stands as his test case for the shaping power that collective priorities and concerns exert on a child’s ambiguously sexual stirrings, causing them to set and calcify within an always emergent Symbolic Order. Read in this light, Joyce’s work continues to elucidate and expand the vocabulary of psychoanalytic theory.

JOYCEANCE

Late in his career, Jacques Lacan devoted his annual seminar to Joyce, for the purpose of introducing a last course correction in his long “return to Freud” (Lacan 1997a).⁷ According to Lacan’s model of subject formation at that point, the infant, on entering into language, forfeits or finds refuge from a traumatically intense mode of enjoyment—or jouissance—seated in the bodily connection to the mother. The child does so in acceding to the Symbolic Order, the register of cultural discourse, which is anchored by the nom du père (name/no of the father; Lacan 1997b). The reconciliation of the oedipal/castration complex, in other words, involves repression in its primary form. The paternal name or phallic signifier that forbids direct access to the maternal body likewise mediates and in a sense mummifies the child’s experience of his or her own body, insulating somatic tissue within the tissue of representation. The effect is to replace an overwhelming sexual pulsion, steeped in the Real, with an ineradicable lack or desire, enchained to the figural displacements of language, a process Lacan described as “the sliding of the signified under the signifier” (Lacan 1999, 153). On this account, sexual initiation coincides with the genesis of subjectivity and unfolds according to the same logic. The substance of being, jouissance, is alienated in the domain of meaning, the signifying grid, which functions as a sort of generative prophylactic giving rise to a life form by stanching its primordial vitality.

In Joyce’s work, however, Lacan discerned a reversal of this logic. From the “supple periodic prose” of A Portrait of the Artist to the portmanteau words of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s method of writing works to access and exude jouissance instead of inhibiting it. His progressive exploitation of the paronomastic and acoustic properties of language and the flamboyant undecidability of meaning effected thereby struck Lacan as a materialization of enjoyment at the level of the signifier itself (Lacan 1998). Joyce’s exuberant wordplay even inspired Lacan to articulate his revisionary insights on this question in similarly homophonic terms. The traumatic enjoyment of jouissance finds its literary correlative in joyceance, which reveals that “punning . . . constitutes the law of the signifier” (Lacan 1990, 10). This discovery allows in turn for the possibility of jouis-sens, enjoy-m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Enigmatic History of Imperiled Innocence
• 1. “An Iridescence Difficult to Account For”: Sexual Initiation in Joyce’s Fiction of Development
• 2. Between (Open) Secret and Enigma: Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices, and the Stylistic Invention of Lesbian (In)visibility
• 3. Country Girl: Groomed, Seduced, and Abandoned
• 4. “From the Pits and Ditches Where People Have Fallen”: Sex Scandal and the Reinvention of the Irish Public Sphere in Keith Ridgway’s The Long Falling
• 5. Retrofitting Ireland’s Architecture of Containment in Tana French’s In the Woods
• 6. “Roaring Inside Me”: The Enigma of Sexual Violence in The Gathering
• Epilogue: What about Brendan?
• Notes on the Illustrations
• References
• Index
• About the Authors