Mr Joyce and Dr Hydes: Irish selves and doubles in 'The Dead'

My aim in the following essay is a double one: both to revisit an old haunt of Joycean criticism – a political interpretation of „The Dead‟, that dangerous textual supplement Joyce added to Dubliners in the autumn of 1907 – and to explore a new set of questions there concerning the Joycean „self ‟; concerning, that is, not so much the writer himself as the developing sense of selfhood, as both concept and lived experience, in his early work. I want to start from the familiar notion of „The Dead‟ as a text fully embroiled in the antagonistic politics of Irish identity in the early twentieth century; but then to link it to another question of identity, one usually reserved for discussions of Joyce‟s late work: namely his preoccupation with so-called multiple personality. However, it is not until Finnegans Wake (FW ) that the intertextual imbrication of these two questions of the self – one obviously political, the other seemingly psychological – is explicitly spelt out by Joyce. For it is there that we read of „. . .hides and hints and misses in prints‟ (FW 20.11), where a duplicitous textuality, clearly itself the site of multiple identities, also contains a riddling hint at the debate over true Irish identity. The key term is „hides‟, which in itself hides (from the reading voice) the name Hydes: in other words, there is more-than-one Hyde hiding in the Joycean text. And since the „misses in prints‟ – at once designating and themselves constituting typographical slips – can also be read, as I have argued elsewhere, as the „misses in Prince‟, those young women treated by Morton Prince, prophet (or inventor) of Multiple Personality Disorder, we start to recognize in Hyde the name of Stevenson‟s famous double.[2] Indeed, later in the Wake, we come across „the Mr Skekels and Dr Hydes problem‟ (FW 150.17), where the slippage of names and titles points directly to what may be thought the master-text of multipleidentity: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.