The well-disposed mind: Joyce, Loyola, and the psychoanalysis of ambivalence

This thesis examines the relationship between the fiction of James Joyce and the theological practices outlined by Ignatius of Loyola. By deliberately foregoing claims of direct or simple influence, the thesis illustrates the way in which Loyolaâs concepts of belief, irony, discernment, and indifference illuminate the operations of the Joycean text. These operations in both Loyola and Joyce are themselves best explicated through the use of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory. Klein and her followers analyze dynamics of belief, representation, and meaning as products of frustration. Loyola and Joyce both force the reader into symmetrical situations of frustration, and Kleinian analysis helps us see how Joyce uses his texts as a kind of exercise for the readerâan exercise of productive frustration, disappointment, and loss. I trace the way this loss can turn reading into a reparative act, one that moves through the Kleinian âparanoid-schizoidâ position into a more productive, contingent, depressive position. I thus address Eve Kosovsky Sedgwickâs proposal for reparative reading. By examining both Loyola's and Joyce's engagement with (and invitations into) frustrating, paranoid reading, I show how this engagement might become reparative. The thesis begins with an analysis of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, finding there a specific structure of 'earnest irony.' It continues with a close reading of 'The Dead,' discerning how this structure operates in the Joycean text at the levels of both content and narration. It then takes up Kleinian theory directly to see precisely what paranoid readingâof the kind both Joyce and Loyola demandâaccomplishes, and what its failure achieves. Its final two chapters consider A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where it finds the narrative apparatus forcing the reader into a particular form of productive frustration, and Ulysses, which requires the greatest form of âearnest ironyâ from the reader.