Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions

by Wolfgang Streit

Overview

Sheds new light on James Joyce's use of sexual motifs as cultural raw material for Ulysses and other works

Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions examines instances of sexual confession in works of James Joyce, with a special emphasis on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Using Michel Foucault's historical analysis of Western sexuality as its theoretical underpinning, the book foregrounds the role of the Jesuit order in the spread of a confessional force, and finds this influence inscribed into Joyce's major texts. Wolfgang Streit goes on to argue that the tension between the texts' erotic passages and Joyce's criticism of even his own sexual writing energizes Joyce's narratives-and enables Joyce to develop the radical skepticism of power revealed in his work.

Wolfgang Streit is Lecturer, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472110001
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	12/08/2004
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Wolfgang Streit is Lecturer, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich.

Read an Excerpt

JOYCE / FOUCAULT
Sexual Confessions

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By Wolfgang Streit
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2004
University of Michigan
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-472-11000-1

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Chapter One CONFESSION and ORDER IN CHAMBER MUSIC and DUBLINERS

Chamber Music's Profaned Confession

Written between 1901 and 1904, Joyce's early poems, later collected in Chamber Music, provide an initial perspective on the discursive arena that forms the backdrop against which the author's subsequent works unfold. According to Robert Spoo, poems XII ("What counsel has the hooded moon") and XXVI ("Thou leanest to the shell of night") depict the lyrical voice competing with a Capuchin monk for the erotic speech of the object of his desire; this confessor resurfaces as Stephen's confessor in Stephen Hero and, even more significantly, in the third chapter of A Portrait. Upon closer examination of Chamber Music in this context, we can plainly see that most of the poems do not deal solely with erotic attraction and rejection. Some of them oscillate between speaking of sex and desire and attempting to avoid this speech. This is demonstrated most clearly in the poems that anticipate the attempt of A Portrait to amalgamate artist and priest. In poem XII, according to the sequence of Stanislaus Joyce, the lyrical voice explicitly applies for the position of the confessor hitherto occupied by the "hooded" full moon, which is likened to a Capuchin monk: "Believe me rather that am wise / In disregard of the divine."

In the confession that the lyrical voice wishes to hear, there is no mention of the Capuchin confessor posing questions about sexuality; he does, however, use the institution of confession as an opportunity to talk about sex by offering a piece of advice. According to Spoo's interpretation of "Love in ancient plenilune," the monk advocates an ascetic model of love. Such a specific, restricted economy of sexuality cannot help but to disassociate itself, as a celebration of chastity, from its condemnable antithesis, wild lust. Paradoxically, this allusion to asceticism actually proliferates desires and, as does censorship, broadens the scope of sexual discourse. The divergent contents of seduction and prohibition thus become indistinguishable in the form of an expanding discourse.

"What counsel has the hooded moon," however, not only supports but also criticizes the discursive expansion of sexuality. The "other," eroticizing side of the monk's advice is suggested both by the exogenous viewpoint of discourse theory and by the details of the monk's characterization in the poem itself. Described as "kith and kin / With the comedian Capuchin," the monk's affinity to a carnivalesque counterpart endows him with a Janus face. While the image implies that the full moon's serious face outshines the back of its head, the dark side of this moon actually mocks the front. Thus, taking the monk's advice at face value, we see that the implicit interdependence of prohibition and expansion in the poem is reflected in the ambiguity of the head.

The poem deepens this understanding of the expansion of desire as influenced by the nominal repression in the sacrament of penitence. It not only reveals the scattering mechanism of sexuality in its symbolism, but also integrates this mechanism into its basic structure. While the first stanza pretends to prohibit an unnamed sexual experience, the negation of this prohibition in the second stanza builds on the discursive tradition of the confessor in the first: "Believe me rather that am wise / In disregard of the divine." By using its own speech to refer back to the restrictive sexual advice, the lyrical voice brings the desires through which the prohibition has defined itself even more prominently into the foreground. Thus-as historically established by Foucault-the poetic structure represents the expansion of sexual discourse from the confined space of the confessional to the limitless space of a profane inquisition. This is underscored by the poem's introductory lines, which reveal this expansive development in nuce by raising the question about the monk's advice. In this fourfold representation of the movement toward the profane-definition, symbolism, parallelism, and exposition-the poem demonstrates its awareness of the effect of the will to knowledge. Of critical importance is the fact that some Chamber Music poems conceive of the lyrical voice as a singer or a poet or, in the third person, as a spectator or a listener (IV, XXVI, and XXVII). The entire collection applies this hearing of confession and its transformation into writing to the other speakers or admirers within the collection, thereby identifying the poems as products of the identical discursive process and revealing their own dependence on the Catholic confessional obligation. Poem XII can be seen as paradigmatic for Joyce's subsequent writings since it both exemplifies the expanding development of sexual discourse and identifies the origins of this movement.

Just as one cannot allow oneself to be deceived by any asymmetry of authority in the confessional, one must see that the poem's lyrical voice does not demand confession on its own authority. Even if, according to Foucault, confession lies at the origin of Western sexual discourse, and priests manipulate the actions of the penitents for the sake of spiritual welfare, the two occupants of the confessional are equally subjugated to the power over life. Without promoting any hermeneutic interest, the imperative of this power generously overlooks the moral intention of the speech as long as only questions, suggestions, and confessions obediently oil the confessional's mechanism for evoking speech. Just as priests and penitents yield to the will to knowledge, a poem that speaks of sex cannot be autonomous, but is instead a medium forced into action by the power over life, albeit a medium that can indicate its status through its choice of protagonists.

The parallels in poem XII between the two competitors for the confession, which place their speaking on an equal footing, are reinforced by additional similarities. The statements of the two confessors formally coincide not only by virtue of the fact that both are pieces of advice ("counsel"; "Believe me rather"), but also because they operate with the rhetoric of negation. At first glance, the lyrical voice may seem to be making a plea for genuine physical lust, but in reality it is demanding belief in the truth of its advice ("Believe me rather") with a view to replacing and triumphing over the sacramental confession in favor of the profane confessional conversation. These formal parallels between the two confessors are accentuated by the wisdom that they have in common ("sage"; "that am wise"), and even more tellingly by the fact that the lyrical voice makes use of the methods of the monk in his interrogation. By promising the addressee a reward for submitting herself to the profane care of the speaker, he aims to seize the metaphysical authority that she is supposed to disdain in his religious counterpart. In place of, but analogous to, the promise of divine grace inherent in confession, an a-religious experience ("A glory kindles in those eyes / Trembles to starlight") should serve as the tool for surpassing and ultimately replacing the monk. Since the monk has contemptuously trampled on spirituality ("Glory and stars beneath his feet"), the role of an artist-priest outside of the apostolic tradition should be allowed to lay legitimate claim to the addressee and her erotic speech ("Mine, O Mine"). Thus it is not only the poem's structure but also its choice of rhetoric that exposes the sacrilegious disassociation from the spiritual or godly as feigned.

There is more to poem XII, however, than the imitative reversal of the monk's advice. An alternative interpretation could maintain that the lyrical voice is appealing for "another" type of negation that points to a route bypassing power: while the lyrical voice does demand that the addressee speak of desire, he withholds his alternative advice, thus establishing in the poem an oscillation between obediently producing discourse about desire, on the one hand, and refusing to do so by concealing the discourse, on the other. This view of a missing representation takes into account the theoretical impossibility of a discursive "exit" from the escape-proof confessional. Such an "exit" in Foucault's sense must remain outside the poem and can therefore appear only in the inflamed eyes of the addressee. These eyes gaze out of the poem into an unattained distance, beyond the realm of discourse, in which the power over life has been stripped of its force. The poem thus oscillates between two positions. In unison with its lyrical voice, it expressly admits to profaning and reproducing the confession; however, it also reflects upon this process with a certain amount of self-criticism, searching with a hopeful look, indicative of the future of its own writing, for "exits" out of the productive submission to writing.

Within Joyce's works, poem XII establishes the Foucauldian idea that demand and prohibition function identically within discourse. More importantly, by questioning its own position within the discourse of sexuality, it lays the foundations for the subsequent reflection on and criticism of power. Analyses of poems XXVII, XXXI, XXXII-and due to the woman's desire as a desire for signs that symbolize the woman's lust, also XI-could clearly demonstrate that they also deal with confessional conversations. In addition, one could formulate a detailed explanation of how poems V, XVIII, XIX, and XXVI search for "exits" from power relationships, as does poem XII, by hinting at, among other means, the substitution of discourse with corporeality.

At this point, however, it seems prudent instead to focus our attention on "The Sisters" as a characteristic example of the Dubliners stories in order to effect a transition to the later narrative texts and to the play Exiles.

Tales of Sexuality, Power, and Order: Dubliners

The criticism of the will to knowledge, expressed by the Chamber Music poems' consideration of the profaning of confession, continues with Dubliners. "The Boarding House" aligns Bob Doran's liturgical confession with Polly's profane one; Father Purdon in "Grace" reinforces the liturgical confession with profane material arguments; and "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" profanes the clerical world through Father Keon's function as an actor. However, of pivotal importance in these short stories is the representation of a continuity between various ordering forces that direct the action and the portrayal of confession. Joyce himself alluded to the main theme of the collection when he stated his intention to describe Dublin as a "centre of paralysis" in order to write "a chapter of the moral history" of his country, a topic gratefully seized upon by scholarship. "The Sisters," which formed the germ of the Dubliners project and was initially published in an agricultural newspaper in 1904, deals most openly with this theme. Despite its early origin, however, "The Sisters" was also one of the last stories Joyce wrote for the Dubliners; he revised it first in 1905 in order to adapt it for inclusion in the planned collection of twelve stories and again in 1906 for the final version, this time so fundamentally as to make clear its tailoring to the thematic orientation.

As commonly recognized, the sequence of the terms paralysis, gnomon, and simony, introduced in the final version of "The Sisters," represents the main connecting themes of the collection: paralysis, an impediment to moral action, is found in stories with characters who are prepared to exchange spiritual values-corresponding to the term simony-for material ones because their deficient moral character corresponds to the geometric figure of the gnomon, the part of a parallelogram remaining after a similar, smaller parallelogram has been subtracted from one of its corners.

No character in the Dubliners stories expresses this paralysis as graphically as Father Flynn in "The Sisters." However, the superficial explanation of his paralysis as the result of three strokes falls short, as shown by Burton A. Waisbren and Florence L. Walzl, who demonstrate that in his final revisions the author purposefully reduced those aspects of the priest's behavior that propelled his character toward insanity. Instead, the priest is afflicted with a series of symptoms that the medical community of that day would have interpreted as resulting from paresis, syphilis of the central nervous system. Thus the priest's paralysis becomes the symptom of the sexually transmitted disease that terrifies Bloom, the profane priest in Ulysses. Just as the word gnomon can also denote the pointer that projects a shadow onto the face of the sundial, and as the geometrical gnomon, the remnant of an intact figure, points to the absence within itself, the text uses the signifier of paralysis to indicate an unspecified signified, that of the priest's taboo sex, constituted by its symptoms but withheld by the narrative.

The central themes of paralysis and the obligation to confess one's sex can be applied from "The Sisters" to all of the Dubliners stories that fall under the main theme of paralysis, and raise the question to what extent the power over life governs the characters' actions. This question becomes even more pertinent considering Joyce's statement that he had written the Dubliners "in a style of scrupulous meanness" (SL 83), using a word whose Latin root scrupulus means "a small sharp stone that the more scrupulous monks would place in their shoes as a penance to cause mental and physical discomfort." Adding to this etymological information, Donoghue and Shapiro explain that in clerical circles, the term scrupes refers to those penitents who, from intense feelings of guilt, are subject to a constant compulsion to confess. Due to its prominent position within Dubliners, "The Sisters" can aid in reconstructing the genealogy of power in Joyce's works between the early poems and A Portrait over a time period of approximately two years. In "The Sisters," just as in the other short stories, the power over life is not the sole influence on the characters; various ordering forces also share in directing the characters' actions. Thus the boy in "The Sisters" is subjected not only to an informal, social pressure that asserts itself through acquaintanceships and friendships, most clearly through Old Cotter's look, but also to the pressure of the religious, ritualistic ecclesiastical order, personified after the priest's death by his sister, Eliza. As the boy's friend and religion teacher, the priest holds the position at which these two ordering forces intersect, with the additional obligation to confess exerting the most powerful influence of all.

"The Sisters": Rhythm of Order and Attempts at Denial

During an evening conversation, Old Cotter, a friend of the family, is the first character to mention the priest. The uncle then tells his nephew about the death of Father Flynn, who, according to the uncle, had been a friend of the boy's (DC 129, [2] 32-35). From this point on, the boy, to whom this news is no news, is subjected to scrutiny (127, [2] 29-30), initially impersonal in nature but immediately thereafter associated with Old Cotter (129, [3] 5-8). The text fails to specify Cotter's expectation, but since the boy refuses to look up from his plate in order not to give him any satisfaction (129, [3] 8-10), the narrator implies that Old Cotter is expecting not an expression of grief, but rather the look of the boy himself as a sign of abstract submission. The boy refuses to give in to the pressure of this informal, social order, which takes shape solely in the expectation of the look. Significantly, it is only the final version of "The Sisters" that confers upon Old Cotter the key controlling authority that foreshadows the other influences in the text. The 1904 and 1905 versions merely describe how the boy competes with Old Cotter to arrive at the valid interpretation of the priest's death; here the boy reacts to Old Cotter not with anger, as in the final version ("Tiresome, old, red-nosed imbecile!" 131, [4] 12-13), but with indifference.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from JOYCE / FOUCAULT by Wolfgang Streit
Copyright © 2004 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents Abbreviations....................ix
Introduction: Joyce and Confession....................1
1 Confession and Order in Chamber Music and Dubliners....................13
2 The Struggle for Confession in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man....................29
3 The Stage as Confessional: Exiles....................70
4 Ulysses' Sexual Confession and Its Self-Critique....................85
5 Sexual Uncertainty in Finnegans Wake....................144
Notes....................159
References....................203
Index....................215

Editorial Reviews

"Absolutely original and excellently researched, this combination of a Foucauldian analysis with genetic perspectives reveals an aspect of Joyce's oeuvre that has not yet received sufficient critical attention."
—Geert Lernout, University of Antwerp

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