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Introduction: Joyce and Confession
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
INTRODUCTION: JOYCE & CONFESSION After Ulysses was published, James Joyce dissociated himself from psychoanalysis in no uncertain terms: “In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious—but as for psychoanalysis it is neither more nor less than blackmail.”1 The psychoanalytic method would interpret this brusque dismissal as having been provoked by a deep desire on Joyce’s part. Hence, Jacques Lacan typi‹ed the complete works of Joyce as having been formatively in›uenced by psychoanalysis.2 What is more interesting, however, than Joyce’s personal disengagement from a method that has in the meantime become a paradigmatic institution, are the implications of his metaphor. At a time when the substance of Sigmund Freud’s constructs, such as the universality of the eros or the Oedipus complex, was still creating a public sensation, Joyce completely ignored the contents of psychoanalysis and focused exclusively on its form. If blackmail formally describes a transaction under duress, equating it with psychoanalysis projects this aspect of coercion onto the therapeutic method. As the metaphor suggests, when the analyst incites the patient to verbally express his own desire, implying the promise that this verbalization will ensure “liberation” from the symptom, a blackmailing force unfolds in the act of speaking. A statement made by Joyce in 1919 while writing Ulysses places his critical attitude toward psychoanalysis in the expanded context that leads up to the theme of this book. As recorded by Ettore Schmitz, Joyce, upon being asked to comment on psychoanalysis, responded: “Well, if we need it, let us keep to confession” ( JJ 472). Jointly, these two inconspicuous sideswipes shed a telling light upon a basic structure and theme of Joyce’s texts. Just as in the later blackmail metaphor, even the unexpected confrontation here between psychoanalysis and confession is concentrated not on substance, but on form. According to Joyce, these two conversational techniques, the modern as well as the signi‹cantly older, are not only formally comparable; they also become indistinguishable at the point whose coordinates determine the otherwise unde‹ned “it”: the sheer compulsion to speak. Without placing blame on the analyst or confessor, Joyce points out an area of commonality underlying the institutions of psychoanalysis and confession : the one promises to relieve the patient of his symptoms, while the other promises to redeem the Catholic believer from the tortures of hell, thus relying on two fundamentally disparate strategies in order to solicit from their “clients” the same commodity: sexual confession. Just as this book employs Joyce’s personal opinion of a particular type of psychological method solely as the point of entry into another discussion, Joyce himself , in the conversation mentioned above, also switches course from the secondary psychological track to the track he considers to be of primary importance: if we are interested in techniques for eliciting speech about sex and desire, Joyce implies, we should concentrate on confession. In conducting a literary analysis of Joyce’s works with a view to his own recommendation, we are initially confronted with an overwhelming abundance of sexual confessions and portrayals in which the author succumbs to the compulsion to speak of desire. Beginning with the early poems in Chamber Music and the ‹rst story of the Dubliners, the author inscribes into his subsequent texts—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its earlier form Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles—both sexual discourse and references to the underlying compulsion as basic structuring principles. He then goes on to develop and unfold this system of meaning thoroughly in Ulysses and to innovatively reintroduce it in Finnegans Wake. The ‹rst volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality supplies the historical framework for Joyce’s sexual confessions, together with the systematic grid to understand its scope. Foucault takes the sacrament of penance as the starting point, and indeed archetypal form, of a whole network of forces and powers enmeshing the modern Western subject and resulting in an ever expanding movement of sexual representation, primarily in language. But Joyce goes further than solely representing sexual discourse. In a remark on Dubliners he depicts his writing as measures within a larger critical movement: “I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the ‹rst step towards the spiritual liberation of my country” (SL 88). This explains why, throughout his oeuvre, Joyce self-critically questions...