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4 ULYSSES’ SEXUAL CONFESSION and ITS SELF-CRITIQUE Stephen’s exile has failed by the time of the Telemachiad. Within Joyce’s text in progress, the extroverted energy that fueled his attempt to ›ee from ordering forces and the power over life by entering physical exile has been reoriented in Exiles and Giacomo Joyce. This critical energy reappears in Ulysses as an introverted search for an exit from the text’s own sexual expansion and from the practice of sacramental and profane confession. Confession on Bloomsday If, in Ulysses, Dublin ‹gures as the equivalent to a character,1 one of its key functions is that of a center of Catholicism, in›uencing the behavior of its citizens by imposing religious practices such as the sacrament of penance and its profane extension. Within this con‹guration Bloom is a special case. He considers himself Jewish, yet he has been baptized once as a Protestant and twice as a Catholic (U 17.540–44). According to Jewish law, as the son of a Catholic mother he is not a Jew, but, as Marilyn Reizbaum argues, he is situated in the cultural domain of Judaism.2 Thus Bloom exposes the extent to which not only the Catholic confessional obligation and its profaned form mark the sexual discourse of Dublin, but also the nineteenth-century sexual stereotypes against Jews. This accounts for the fact that he expresses the productive compulsions of the power over life as does virtually no other character in the novel, or in Joyce’s entire oeuvre, Catholic or not. “confession. everyone wants to” In “Lotus Eaters” Bloom enters St. Andrew’s Church, named All Hallows, in order to pass the time until Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Here he ‹nds proximity to young women (U 5.340–41) and follows the ritual of the 85 mass in comically distanced ignorance.3 Even if the text is devoid of indications that Bloom himself might ever have made Catholic confession, his re›ections on the liturgy, Catholicism’s structure of meaning and the rigid organization of the church also allude to confession: “Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look down on her ring to ‹nd an excuse” (5.425–29). Bloom places the of‹ce of the priesthood above the con‹dential of‹ces of doctor and lawyer, which he also mentions. Most importantly, however, Bloom’s interior monologue reconstructs the genealogy of the power over life. Priests employ the sacramental encoding of the will to knowledge as a productive weapon. But this weapon must be recast in the form of the penitent ’s wish so that it can transport the discursive struggle from the confessional to the outside world. Just as “Confession. . . . Then I will tell you all” demonstrates the continuum between sacramental and private confession, “Penance. Punish me, please” establishes this continuum for the private domain. These two associations amalgamate the sacrament of penance in All Hallows with Bloom’s own masochistic ideas and his correspondence with Martha Clifford : “Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you” (U 5.251–52) and “Then I will tell you all” (5.254). Without encountering any resistance, both expansion and profaning operate under the guise of free will (“Everyone wants to”). Eventually the will to knowledge becomes so unquestionable that even the threat of punishment —profane penance—serves not as a deterrent to speech but as yet another incentive to speak. Although Martha Clifford’s letter is present in the text, where we ‹rst encounter it in Joyce’s fair copy, the double representation of profaning was added later in stages. Integrated into a more substantial section of text about Bloom’s view of ecclesiastical rituals, this addition establishes Bloom’s role as the vehicle for expanding the text’s sexual discourse. Other penitents in Ulysses besides Bloom are occupied with directing their sexual energy to the linguistic level. In “Nausicaa” the confessor Father Conroy becomes a vanishing point of sexual fantasy for Gerty MacDowell : “He looked almost a saint and his confessionbox was so quiet and clean and dark and his hands were just like white wax and if ever she became a Dominican nun in their white habit perhaps he might come to the convent for the novena of...

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