JOYCE FOUCAULT by Wolfgang Streit

Author:Wolfgang Streit
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780472024650
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE FAMILY

When Foucault discusses the superimposition of the power over life on the right, or power of death, or the way in which the restrictive deployment of alliance began to be supplanted by the expansive deployment of sexuality, within this process he does not postulate an internal teleology (HS I 107). The most significant area of overlap between the two deployments is undeniably incest, which in Western culture was present in the nobility’s intermarriage. In the nineteenth century, when the threshold of human civilization was established to coincide with the prohibition of incest (HS I 109), sexual speech expanded by means of the bourgeois family, which was in turn accorded the main task of transporting the desires to the alliance (HS I 108, 129), supplying sexuality with a static juridical element. Because psychoanalysis and its precursor Charcot accused the patient of incestuous behavior but simultaneously excluded it (HS I 112–13), the family turned into the center of the sexualization of society—precisely due to its insistence on the rules of the alliance.

Joyce’s pre -Ulysses texts that deal most openly with incest are “Eveline” and “Clay,” in which the main female characters are threatened with the integration into an incestuous family order. Eveline has already partially assumed her dead mother’s role in the family, and her father jealously denounces his rival for her attention, Frank. In “Clay,” on the other hand, Maria is confronted with her brother Joe’s wish to have her act as a substitute mother to his children and as a second wife next to the symbolically weakened “Mrs. Donnelly,” whose hostile attitude toward Maria can thus be traced to her fear to be replaced by Maria. While incest does not play a prominent role in A Portrait or Exiles, Ulysses introduces the topic as part of its sexual tableau.

Very little information is provided about the Blooms’ family life. Their son, Rudy, died just a few days after his birth. Details about their daughter, Milly, are limited to occasional memories of Bloom and Molly, the most prominent of which have to do with a boat excursion they took together; her gift of a mustache cup for her father; and the tam she received on her birthday. It was at Bloom’s urging that she began an apprenticeship as a photographer in Westmeath at the tender age of fourteen (U 18.1004–9). Milly’s preference for her father, manifested in the letter she sends him as opposed to the postcard she sends her mother, does not stem from an erotic relationship between Bloom and his daughter but from the two boxes on the ear that Molly gave her in a fit of rage (18.1066–73). Other theses on incest in the Bloom house tend to marginalize the text in favor of a secondary psychologization.94

However, the text does contain a symbolic incestuous family tie in Bloom’s attempt to be a father to Stephen as a substitute for Rudy. The narrator supports these attempts in various places in “Eumaeus,” such as when he describes Bloom as “several years the other’s senior or like his father” (U 16.

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