Stuck in the Other: Reading Joyce's "Dubliners" through Lacan's Mirror Stage

The impact of otherness on the self has always been a central concern for Modernist literature, and Dubliners is no exception to the relentless search of meaning to which alterity offers a brief glimpse of hope. The Joycean collection not only deals with a sense of belonging to the claustrophobic (and yet tough-to-part-with) reality of Dublin but also provides a fitting framework for applying Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Mirror Stage, presented for the first time in 1936. This theory analyses the impact of the child’s identification with his reflection in the mirror, a moment that marks a turning point, dooming the future adult individual with an everlasting mediation through an image that comes from outside, an idealised and totalising other that seems to have the power to organise and orient the self. By analysing six stories from Joyce’s most-influential Dubliners through the analytic eye of Lacan’s Mirror Stage, I suggest a new perspective on the value of the encounter and the role of the other in the collection, whose ultimate upshot is to guide the protagonist towards self-discovery – an understanding of the reasons that seem to constantly lead to a state of paralysis and inadequacy to which Irish culture, history and the urban landscape contribute significantly. The same urban landscape is one with which Joyce maintains a double-edged relationship: a state of constant escape and an apparent refusal to write about anything else, in this way giving a brand-new meaning to the concept of “Irishness”.