"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" Through the Lens of Marx and Jameson by way of Lacan and Žižek

Abstract

There are numerous ways to approach the analysis of James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and many of the 20th and 21st centuries’ intellectual greats have used this novel as a means to build upon their own cultural theories. Indeed, Joyce’s body of work could be described as uncategorizable, able to be at one and the same time Modernist, Structuralist, Postmodernist, Poststructuralist, and a whole plethora of other designations that scholars have classified it as. What this Master’s thesis will set out to do is not to prove something new or create a unique way of looking at Joyce’s novel, but instead will strive to point out how connections can be made between the novel itself and the 3-horizon framework of how history and theory operate in a dialectic as proposed by Frederic Jameson in his seminal work The Political Unconscious. While setting out to accomplish this task, this thesis will also draw heavily from Lacan’s concept of the Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Sinthome. Furthermore, in order to further develop these links, added commentary will be provided through the works of Slavoj Žizek. My starting point for this thesis will be in the introduction and an analysis of Jameson’s argument against the Althusserian conception of historicism in literature and his arguments for how both history and theory operate in a dialectic and can be utilized in literary and cultural analysis through a Marxist lens. Once this has been established, this thesis will then proceed to apply Jameson’s three-horizon framework, namely by first establishing the historic conditions under which James Joyce first conceptualized and eventually completed his novel as a bildungsroman and therefore fulfilling the first horizon, “of political history, in the narrow sense of punctual event[s] and a chronicle like sequence of happenings in time,” followed in the second section and fulfilling the second horizon by examining the novel’s place within society, “… in the now already less diachronic and timebound sense of a constitutive tension and struggle between social classes,” and finally, in the final section, by fulfilling the third horizon and determining the work of art’s place within the framework of the totality of human history, “… in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations” (Jameson, 2002: 60). Furthermore, In each of the three sections, careful consideration will be taken of how the language of A Portrait develops as the novel progresses and is closely related to the four-part Borromean knot of the unconscious as proposed through Lacan’s conception of the Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Sinthome. The way the work of art encompasses both Jameson’s dialectic of history and theory as well as the way in which Lacan presents the subconscious will need further clarification and evidence, and for this I will utilize the works of Slavoj Žižek as a means to justify how both Psychoanalytic and Marxist theory can cooperate concurrently. The final fifth section will map out and summarize the conclusions and findings of this thesis, followed by an extensive works cited and consulted.