Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Joycean Gaze: Lucia in the I of the Father

1985; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3684954

1527-2095

Philip Kuberski, Carol,

Modernist Literature and Criticism

When Joyce began writing Finnegans Wake his daughter Lucia was seventeen. She was a pretty girl, more like her father than her mother, with delicate features that were marred by crossed eyes. Sixteen years later, the text was finished and Lucia had been in and out of several maisons de santS. Joyce seemed finally resigned to his daughter's illness. Compounding his sorrow, Finnegans Wake failed to excite the enthusiasm that Ulysses had. Less than two years later Joyce was dead, his daughter was institutionalized, and the Wake languished, unread and uncelebrated, in the midst of the world war that Joyce claimed he had prophesied in his unreadable book. The affinities between the text and the daughter are alluring, urging me to attempt a reading of text and woman in terms of a common language of schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze offers this description: