Desire

There is a passage in Joyce's The Dead that tells us much about desire. As the annual dinner dance breaks up, Gretta, Gabriel's wife, is profiled at the top of the stairs; she is singing an Irish song. For a moment her husband Gabriel fails to recognise her:

Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife

But the revealing line is that she appears to Gabriel ‘like a symbol of something’. The fact of being ‘symbolic’ is enough, prior to any symbolised content. He apprehends ‘that’ she signifies but not ‘what’, and it this which excites Gabriel’s sexual desire, when his wife becomes vaguely hieroglyphic.

What is also curious here is the link between the aesthetic and desire, proverbially kept apart in the Kantian regime. For when Gabriel sees Gretta as symbol (or rather resembling a symbol) he places her in an imaginary art-work, a picture that thinks might be called ‘distant music’. So it is that this ‘aestheticising’ move - when Gretta has been replaced by an image of herself, turned into a signifier of some opaque X - is simultaneously the onset of desire. It is this, the state of 'having significance' which is a property of the aesthetic - that gets under the skin.



But this brief parable of desire is re-writable at once on a political level. For the ‘distant music’ to which Gretta is attuned is an Irish song, in the old ‘Irish tonality’. It transports her to the West of Ireland, to her youth and into Irish tradition (both things already invested with significance earlier in the tale). Gabriel, the Anglicised ‘West Briton’, the Dubliner, who was earlier in the story berated for not knowing what should be his own (i.e. his own country), who is ‘cultivated’ in English and continental culture, is nonetheless aroused precisely when Gretta is suddenly attuned to Irish tradition and to the West.

It is thus also the fact of cultural difference, and of cultural alienation, which curiously excites Gabriel. Arguably, however, the ultimate ‘content’ of his wife’s strangeness, turns out to be desire itself – Michael Furey’s fatal love. It is this which at the end of the tale is revealed to be the true X ‘symbolised’ by Gretta’s ‘distance’, and which removes him from his wife just at that point when he had thought himself closest. What arouses Gabriel leads him ultimately toward a traumatic encounter with her own passionat attachment, an encounter which leaves him unrecognisable to himself.

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