Joyce subjected race to comic treatment without lessening its seriousness. He does this by broadening his perspective and deferring judgment about differences (“prejudice” literally means prejudgment). Human racial competition takes the form of a car race (in “After the Race”) and a horse race (in Ulysses). This play on different meanings of “race” allows Joyce to make fun of racism while simultaneously belittling it. People “pre-judge” the results of racial competition by betting. Racial hatred is no longer comic in Finnegans Wake, where Shem the Penman is excoriated as black, Jewish, and oriental. Joyce exposes the superficiality of race prejudice by suggesting that darkness is internal to everyone, and it can be transformed into a form of communication that is communal instead of being driven by self-interest and greed.

Flynn’s chapter argues for the crucial role of nineteenth-century French naturalism in the conception and evolution of Joyce’s Dubliners. Specifically, it argues that Joyce’s ambition to correct the development of his country through representing the debilitation of its capital city is modelled on Émile Zola’s aim in his naturalist, twenty-novel series Le Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893) to present and diagnose the pathologies of the Third Republic through representing several generations of a diseased family. However, in their indirection, Joyce’s stories expand upon an ambiguity intrinsic to naturalism – the subjectivity inherent in any would-be objective perception of reality – an ambiguity developed to comic effect by the second-generation naturalist, Guy de Maupassant in the story “Auprès d’un Mort” (Beside Schopenhauer’s Corpse). The chapter argues that the first story of Dubliners, “The Sisters,” is inspired by this minutely observed, disenchanted, and enigmatic story. The chapter closes by looking at the final scene of “The Dead” to argue that Joyce turns the dead end of naturalism into a test for an Irish readership.

The chapter finds in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ a radical problematization of idiolect, one that creates a specific form of unstable narrative practice. It finds within these problematics a demand for what will be called the Loyolan Position: a mental stance towards the crises both Loyola and Joyce mobilize. The chapter is marked by a fresh, sustained close reading of one of the most well-read and well-analysed stories in English.

The chapter works, step by step, through the problem of reading as Joyce constructs it, using Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to explicate the structure of the problem and where its solutions lead. In the literature, Kleinian and Lacanian theory are almost never brought into contact; this chapter offers a new comparison of the theories, both for readers of each theory and for readers of Joyce. In addition, the chapter furthers, and intensifies, the analysis of ‘The Dead’ as an invitation to paranoid reading, and it traces the ways Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’ invites the reader into a position of paranoid complicity.