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1. Confession and Order in Chamber Music and Dubliners
- University of Michigan Press
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1 CONFESSION and ORDER IN CHAMBER MUSIC and DUBLINERS Chamber Music’s Profaned Confession Written between 1901 and 1904,1 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 signi‹cantly, in the third chapter of A Portrait.2 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.3 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.4 Such a speci‹c, 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 13 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.5 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 af‹nity 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 re›ected in the ambiguity of the head. The poem deepens this understanding of the expansion of desire as in›uenced 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 ‹rst 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 ‹rst: “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 de‹ned itself even more prominently into the foreground. Thus—as historically established by Foucault—the poetic structure represents the expansion of sexual discourse from the con‹ned 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—de‹nition, 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...