Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions (review)

Since the 1995 publication of Kathleen Ferris' James Joyce and the Burden of Disease, the subject of Joyce's unresolved conflict with Catholicism and its promotion of absolute confession has been put back on the agenda of Joyce criticism. In his Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions, Wolfgang Streit now offers a novel interpretation of Joyce's conflicted obsession with the confessional. Given the Catholic upbringing of the Irish writer it is indeed surprising that no book-length study on the subject of sexual confession has been written before. Yet as its title suggests, and despite occasional references to the troubling impact of Catholic authority in Ireland, Streit's study does not rely on biography but on a Foucauldian framework in the analysis of Joyce's texts, listing among the conventional readings of Joyce's four major prose books, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and also the less-studied texts Chamber Music and Exiles. The latter are particularly welcome, not only because their inclusion gives credit to Joyce's "lesser texts," but it also confirms Streit's argument that Joyce's struggle with sexual confessions was truly an ongoing one.

Essentially, the argument of Joyce/Foucault is that throughout his oeuvre Joyce developed a sustained and complex resistance to both the confession as an institution and its obligatory production of sexual discourse. In consistently applying Foucault's theoretical reference system as developed in The History of Sexuality, Streit successfully avoids both an author-based argument and a pathologization of Joycean characters. What follows instead is a scholarly and meticulous literary analysis of Joyce's works that pays significant tribute to their critical reception. Streit's book thus offers more than a Foucauldian reading of Joyce's texts, for it presents a first-rate synopsis of Joyce criticism to date, situating its argument firmly in the ongoing discussions of critical topics such as theology, Catholicism, narrative theory, and connections between sexuality and medicine.

A distinctive strength of Streit's book is also the excellent close-reading of Joyce's works, especially the reading of Exiles and the skillfully executed analysis of Stephen's guilt-ridden response to the Church's demands for sexual purity in A Portrait. The chapter on Exiles is probably the strongest one of the book. It analyzes not only the content of the play, but also the theater's integral emphasis on speech and discourse and its relevance for the topic of sexual confession as replacement for unfulfilled sexual desire. Naturally, Streit not only understands confession in its religious context, instead persuasively widening the scope of the book's argument to consider a number of "profane confessional scenes" appearing in Joyce's texts (40). Consequently, Streit reads Bloom's masochism in accordance with Foucault's analysis of a developing late-nineteenth-century scientia sexualis. Having thus far successfully charted Joyce's conflicting response to compulsory confession, the book then concludes with a competent analysis of the Wake that reads its "deferral of signification" as the most prominent attempt to evade the confessional (151).

Yet in spite of the undoubted relevance of Foucauldian theory to Joyce's oeuvre, Streit's argument often over-amplifies its significance. Joyce texts often appear only as the playground on which the intellectual designs of the French theorist are probed. It remains doubtful if the speaker of the poem "What Counsel Has the Hooded Moon" in Chamber Music seriously prefers confession and sex discourse to physical love, or if HCE's stutter in the Wake can be read exclusively as a metaphorical "resistance to the power over life" (145). Foucauldian theory seems over-applied at this point and the reader of Streit's book is consequentially faced with the suspicion that it is not always productive to abandon traditional or conventional readings of Joyce in the attempt to make the text fit a theoretical framework. Inevitably, Foucauldian catchphrases such as "power over life" and "will to knowledge" that are scattered through the book remain...