The Poetics of Confession: The Promise and Disavowal of Self-Presence

Alicia Christoff March 31, 2004 Advisor: Professor Ross Posnock

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The Poetics of Confession: The Promise and Disavowal of Self-Presence

I am interested in examining confession and its relation to the compulsion to write

about oneself. Confession shares with autobiography the drive towards self-revelation, but it

is the urgency contained within confession that I find compelling. There is something

pressing about confessional writing: a secret demands to surface, a sin urges disclosure, a life

must be revealed. The perceived need to shape this act of revelation into a narrative allows

us to approach the initial gesture of writing; we come close to the drive for expression and

the first moments of inscription. The confessional narrative supports a mythology of this

urgency; it upholds the primacy of the recourse to language and the efficacy of self-

expression through writing.

I want to think through the promises the confessional narrative makes. From where

does the relief, the exoneration, the satisfaction, that confession ostensibly grants arise? Why

should the act of telling perform this type of transformation of the subject confessing; why

should confessing alter his sensibility or further his understanding of the past? Confession

poses as writing par excellence in its pretension of transparent representation. The standards

it proposes for language, which allow the confessional text to be a perfect reflection of the

confessing subject, propose a direct and uncomplicated relationship between the word and

that which it signifies. The form asserts a perfect reference between writing and the extra-

textual experience to which it refers; this system of reflection ensures the total presence of

the subject confessing. Confession, always a retrospective form, promises the recovery and

mastery of the past, sublimated into a narrative of teleological cause and effect.

The compulsion to confess is founded on these promises, and the urgency with which

one performs this self-revelatory act hinges on the belief that confession makes good on these

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promises. Here, I would like to read writers that are driven by this call to confess: I am

interested in both the overwhelming expectancy that turns them to the discourse of

confession and in the extent to which it is able to grant them what they seek. In many

instances, their texts reveal that the promises made by confession are always already broken:

the very pronouncement of the efficacy of the confessional narrative contains its own

undoing. The contradictory functions that confession encompasses—commemoration and

forgetting, self-presence and specular distance, appropriation and disappropriation—will

provide our entrance to this reading.

The choice of the texts I examine here is inevitably somewhat arbitrary. So vast is

the selection of confessional writing that a succinct canon does not delimit itself readily. I

would like to be open in my examination of confession to the multiplicity of forms it takes

on. While we can examine confession as a profusion of outgrowths from the traditional

religious context of the discursive ritual entailing the revelation of sins, we must note that

there are many manifestations of the confessional discourse. One direction confession

proceeds in is that of the spiritual narrative, stemming from St. Augustine’s Confessions, in

which the religious context remains central. The admission of sin, repentance, and a desire

for an affinity to holiness forms the core of this tradition. But the chronological,

retrospective mode of narration that St. Augustine introduces also gives rise to confession in

its more generalized form of autobiographical writing. Here, the role of the exposure of guilt

and the desire for forgiveness is lessened, although it is always latent. Yet the “thematic

insistence” on “memory, on birth, eros, and death” (de Man “Autobiography as De-

facement” 922) recalls the structure of St. Augustine’s confessional narrative.

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I’d like to work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions because, while this text is

customarily read as the crescendo to the canon of confession centered on the specifically-

Catholic ritual, it both upholds the tradition St. Augustine’s text gives rise to and introduces

important modifications to the form. Rousseau attempts to secularize the tradition, turning

away from questions of faith and centering his discussion on the trajectory of his life and the

notion of individualism. And yet a reading of Rousseau’s text makes it clear that guilt and

the desire to reveal one’s wrongdoings remain central concerns of the confessional narrative.

Moreover, it is important to consider this text because it is widely considered the foremost

exemplar of confessional literature. Rousseau’s Confessions, completed in 1770, set in place

many of the conventions that mark later writings as confessional: among others, the

conceptualization of confession as an act of self-portraiture that Rousseau inaugurates is as

pervasive as it is problematic. In our discussion, Rousseau’s text will serve as an

introduction to the problems raised by the confessional narrative. Commonly viewed as the

archetype of the genre, we will see that the issues raised in our examination of this text will

serve as something of a reading guide in addressing our other selections.

The sense of urgency in Rousseau’s Confessions is great. Rousseau acutely feels the

need to impress upon the reader the ‘truth’ of his existence, and he constantly seeks to rectify

the paranoid encroachment of misperception that he feels marks the world’s take on him.

Recourse to writing becomes necessary to Rousseau: not only is he unable to understand

situations as they occur, but only through distanced reflection, but it is the only means by

which he will be able to master the opinions others have of him. To Rousseau, self-

perception is the only accurate mode, and self-representation, which Rousseau conceptualizes

as portraiture, is a perfectly viable means of transmitting this perception. As writing renders

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a perfect likeness to Rousseau, the text can come to stand in his place, securing his accurate

self-presentation as the public perception. The dual motion of presentation and removal that

occurs in all confessional texts is typified here. While Rousseau claims to be present in the

text, writing is also posited as the distancing required for a more complete understanding.

Likewise, as the confessing subject claims writing as the space of plentitude of self-presence,

i.e. the fullness of the portrait, the act of self-examination entails a specular structure in

which the self is necessarily deprived of unity. Read alongside Derrida’s notion of the

supplement, the text comes to explicate the dual movement of writing in constituting and

deconstituting self-presence.

This dual movement makes itself felt even more acutely in Oscar Wilde’s

confessional text, De Profundis, wherein we will find the very act of its composition recalls

Derrida’s act of supplementation. Moreover, the stakes implied by De Profundis, which

Wilde considered to be a penitential composition, again illustrate the overwhelming of

urgency of disclosure. The closeness to the origin of the gesture of writing also makes itself

felt here: the text is a letter Wilde composes to his ex-lover Lord Alfred Douglas, or Bosie,

from prison, wherein the labor of composition Wilde must undergo is in fact a huge obstacle

to surmount. Given only one page at a time on which to write, and denied access to the

anterior pages and the whole, the letter bears a resemblance an early drive towards

inscription. Yet Wilde’s confidence in his project could not be greater. The lengthy letter,

completed in 1897, sets out to remedy the past through narrative and to alter experience

through writing. Wilde’s confession is unique because it is designated for one recipient,

Bosie; it is Wilde’s expectation that this reader’s life will be changed by his text. The

transparency of its meaning is something Wilde proclaims again and again, and so its

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provocation of a matching confession from Bosie, a return letter, is something Wilde does

not question.

The act of readership, and its relation to writing, is always central here. Confessing

entails self-reading and self-writing, and it is not always clear how the two relate. In all of

the texts, we are forced to deal with questions of readability, the transparency or opacity of

writing, the ability of language to render or represent, and interpretability. Central to

confession is the premise of perfect reference. The confessional narrative presupposes a

direct correspondence between the confession and the experience it relates; a matching

correlation between language and extra-textual reality. Writing is assumed to be the perfect

rendering of the referent. But if we take into account the play of multiple meanings, this

action can be read as both the promise of confession and its undoing. Rendering both grants

presence and denies it: to render is both to reproduce and to modify, in terms of translation or

the milder alterity of representation; the rendition both restores and relinquishes presence.

These questions of representablity place our examination of confession in an area of utmost

interest: our exploration of confession opens a discussion of the signifying functions of

language itself. Close to the impulse to write, confession provides a context for the call to

and the failure of writing.

We see this movement system of reference most overtly elucidated in Wilde’s text,

but it is insinuated in every confessional narrative. The third text I would like to address,

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is compelling because it directly

questions this system of reference. A novel that addresses confession as both its subject

matter and a possible mode of designating its form, Portrait as an act of self-revelation that

blurs the lines of fact of fiction takes to task the notion of perfect reference. A production of

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Modernism published in 1916, the text seeks to alter the field of confession as one of the

utmost transparency. Altering the ease of readability in its affront to autobiography and

through Stephen’s writing as an act of “silence, exile, and cunning,” the impulse to write and

to reveal the self are nevertheless maintained.

These texts all work to inform a common discussion on the status of the confessional

narrative. They share the puzzling out of the contradictory logic of confessional narrative.

In each, the operation of confession as both a mode to commemorate and fix the past and to

enact a forgetting of painful memories is insisted upon. In our discussion, we will read this

contradiction side by side with the analogous models in Freudian psychoanalysis. The

coincidence of the discourse of therapy with the dialogue of confession suggests itself for

exploration. Furthermore, the promise of confession to vouchsafe presence through its

system of reference is one that both institutes and deconstitutes itself within these

confessional narratives. In his essay “The Rhetoric of Blindness,” de Man elucidates this

action: “Representation is an ambivalent process that implies the absence of what is being

made present again, and this absence cannot be assumed to be merely contingent” (123). The

subject is not merely split, but disseminated indeterminably in the very gesture of the

unification of self-representation. Most notably, I see what unites these texts is the primacy

of the gesture of writing. As an already-established writer at the moment of the text’s

composition, Rousseau’s Confessions treat writing as the only means by which Rousseau can

communicate, both with himself and with others. Wilde stakes his identity and his hope for

redemption in his status and efficacy as a writer. Through Stephen Dedalus, whose

development as an artist is charted through Portrait, the call to the writerly vocation and the

sense of its overwhelming importance is depicted in Joyce’s text. The movement towards

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writing itself comes to typify confession, and is worked through in both the content and form

of these texts. The play of micro-scenes of confession with the larger confessional narrative

prove highly felicitous to our exploration of confessional logic.

In texts overdetermined by the act of writing, the role of the reader is implicated as

being of the utmost importance. Taking the critic as the exemplary reader, the shortcomings

in the critical work on these texts demonstrates yet again that the system of perfect reference

that proposes an ideal readability is destined to defeat. These texts share the common

designation of “always being systematically misread” (de Man 111). The critic-as-reader of

each these texts tends to demonstrate a blindness toward the text that stems from the

confessional discourse: the bulk of the bodies of criticism on these works is locked into the

logic of confession as truth discourse. As such, the blinded critic (so termed by Paul de

Man), caught up in the tradition of confessional narrative, becomes interpellated into the

discourse and begins to act as the confessional interlocutor. The reader in this position

ascribes to himself transcendental authority over the confessing subject, and seeks out the

veracity of his truth claims, the authenticity of representation, and the accuracy of depiction1.

As such, former readings of these have been centered on the questions of the writer’s

honesty, sincerity, and good-faith. In my exploration of confession, I seek to overturn this

rhetoric of intentionality in order to examine the assumptions central to the confessional

narrative of the efficacy of rerefential systems of language and the ability to present oneself

in the text. I want to examine the process of representation by keeping the ambivalence of its

process in mind. Rather than repress the knowledge of absence that allows the critic to treat

the writer as a presence in the text, I would like to see what an acknowledgment of this

1 For further explication of this phenomenon, see Leigh Gilmore’s essay “Policing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical Truth”.

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absence brings to the reading of the confessional narrative. Centering my reading on

precisely the play of presence and absence, I will examine the promise of confessional logic

and the seed for its own confutation that is enclosed within it.

The texts I have chosen to examine represent three centuries of confessional writing;

they also typify confession in its wide variety of manifestations, from the religious rite to

autobiography to psychoanalysis, and in its varying degrees of declaration as truth claim,

Portrait typifying the fictional mode of confession. The mode of criticism I bring to these

texts is an attempt to remedy the degree of readerly interpellation into the discourse of

confession that has typified the former criticism of these works. Instead, I address these texts

through the critical lens of deconstruction that directly attempts a self-conscious examination

of the confessional narrative, or writing, and the critical position. Specifically, I call upon

such writers as Derrida, de Man, and Cixous, whose critical work paves a new direction in

the study of confession.

Staying close to the compulsion to confess and the insistence on writing found in

these texts, our discussion of the central confessional promises will open a reading of the call

of language itself, and the play of presence and absence it elucidates.

I: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions

Jean-Jacques Rousseau posits as the impetus for writing The Confessions of his life a

multiplicity of motives. At one moment he attempts to find relief in forgetting: his goal is to

expel his sins from his memory by relating them (88). At others, he seeks to commemorate

his life with as much accuracy as possible, making claims to a perfect accuracy of memory

(17). In yet other moments in his text, his promise to direct representation is mitigated by his

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own admissions that material has been both elided and supplemented—allowances made for

the sake of the narrative, functioning to preserve an ‘authorized’ memory of Rousseau in the

mind of the reader (479). What I would like to explore is the way in which all of these

contradictory functions Rousseau cites for his Confessions are not anomalistic, but are

instead encompassed and necessarily included in the logic of confessional narrative. This

self-revelatory discourse holds as its promise both remembrance and forgetting; it offers the

possibility of both repetition and closure. Most importantly, it both inaugurates the sense of

self-presence and revokes it.

At the core of this logic is the promise, always already broken, of Rousseau’s ability

to present himself in his text, both in terms of presence and direct representation. The

opening lines of The Confessions relate, “My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in

every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself. Simply myself” (17).

Rousseau’s claim enacts both a splitting and a repression of this action: he acknowledges the

act of representation, but only as exact repetition. Rousseau notes that his writing is

portraiture, but a portrait so ‘true to nature’ that the original will be indistinguishable from

the copy. But this claim, which we read as the assertion of self-presence (“I know my own

heart” (17)), is broken down by this admission of doubling of the self. Rousseau will

ostensibly be present in both person and portrait, as in the mirror’s play of object and image.

Jacques Derrida explains this movement: “In this play of representation, the point of origin

becomes ungraspable…For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to

itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles…What can

look at itself is not one” (Of Grammatology 36). The act of confession—the act of writing

oneself—absents the self in its very attempt to present it. In the terminology of Derrida, it is

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“the speculary dispossession that institutes and deconstitutes” the subject through the “law of

language” (141). In writing, Rousseau will necessarily have to separate himself into subject

and writer. What, then, is the call that leads Rousseau to the means of language—of

writing—to represent himself and his experience in The Confessions? We must begin to

examine the disparate claims he makes in the text.

To begin, we look at Rousseau’s writing as a form of repetition, or as a way to

maintain possession of the past. Rousseau states, “The sweet memories of my best years,

passed in equal innocence and calm, have left me a thousand charming impressions that I

love ceaselessly to recall” (261). In this manner, the discursive repetition of experiences

yields a direct pleasure in the re-experiencing of pleasurable moments. Referring to his early

days residing with ‘Mamma’ (Mme de Warens), he writes:

This period is one of those in which I enjoyed the greatest calm, and which I

have remembered since with the utmost pleasure. Of the various situations in

which I have found myself some have been marked by such a feeling of well-

being that when I remember them I am as much moved as if I were in them

still…the sharp recollection…carries me back there again. (121)

But what of the unpleasant memories? For Rousseau, their recollection has the opposite

effect. “To recall them is to relieve their bitterness. Far from increasing their painfulness of

my situation by such sad retrospects, I dismiss them in so far as I can; and I often succeed”

(261). While the recollection of pleasant memories initiates a ‘ceaseless’ repetition, that of

painful memories enables an expulsion that indicates a total closure. Rousseau states that he

dismisses bad memories so well he “cannot recapture them…This ease with which I forget

misfortunes is a consolation” (261). In this way, what repetition conjures up for Rousseau is

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a mode of self-consolation marked by the mastery of the past: what is pleasant will be

retained, what is unpleasant will be eliminated. In this view, it is possible to address the

working of Rousseau’s confessions in terms of Freud’s conception of repetition compulsion.

As Freud describes the workings of a child’s play, one might describe the act of telling one’s

history: “These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting

independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not” (Beyond the Pleasure

Principle 15). In Rousseau’s case, the mastery arises not only from his proclaimed ability to

“rid himself” of unpleasant memories through their recital (Confessions 88)—a claim which

we will examine more closely momentarily—but from the narrative form itself.

In his Confessions, Rousseau is no longer an actor in his experiences, but their very

author. The formation of a narrative history grants Rousseau a degree of power over his past,

just as the child in Freud’s formulation of fort/da: “At the outset he was in a passive

situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though

it was, as a game [or a narrative for Rousseau], he took on an active part” (Beyond the

Pleasure Principle 15). Rousseau describes the joy of shaping his observations of nature into

a narrative form: he does it “so that I can combine them, select them, and make them mine as

I will, without fear or restraint. I dispose of all Nature as its master” (158).

It is interesting to note that yet again, as in the splitting of the subject that watches

over itself, the concept of dispossession encroaches upon Rousseau’s text: the language of

mastery is inevitably tied to distance and self-removal in his confessions. Rousseau speaks

of his impossibility to understand experience in the present, stating: “During this stir of

emotion I can see nothing clearly, and cannot write a word; I have to wait” (113). The

avowal of this deferral is insistent, and tied to the conception of mastery. For a second

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redundant statement reads: “I do not know how to see what is before my eyes; I can only see

clearly in retrospect, it is only in my memories that my mind can work. I have neither feeling

nor understanding for anything that is said or done or that happens before my eyes.” He then

directs the reader—“Seeing that I am so little master of myself…” (114)—in a reading of his

self-dispossession. Yet Rousseau finds the remedy to this belatedness of understanding in

his writing. It is only through distance and time that his understanding unfolds and he is able

to express his now-clear observation (114). This explains why, as Starobinski states, “Jean-

Jacques chooses to be absent and to write” (Derrida 142). This is, in Derrida’s words, “the

greatest sacrifice aiming at the greatest symbolic reappropriation of presence” (143). If

Rousseau accepts the distancing and self-dispossession he feels in the moment of experience,

it is only because writing grants him the promise of immediacy and self-restoration gained in

retrospect2. Not only will Rousseau come to own the moment, he believes, with a full-

measure of understanding, but he will arrive at a mastery through reflection that has only

been made possible through the sacrifice of the present and the proximal. Writing is

repetition of the past, but with a difference: time and distance allow Rousseau to master

experience.

And yet, the palliative nature of writing does not grant Rousseau the full relief he

asserts. As we have seen, he avers to the fact that he relates the shameful or sorrowful events

in his life in order to expel them from his memory (261). But many instances in The

Confessions run counter to these claims. Rousseau inaugurates Book Eight of his

2 De Man notes that in this assertion, even Derrida becomes caught up in the rhetoric of intentionality and good faith. Commenting on other policing critics, de Man notes, “At first sight, Derrida’s attitude seems hardly different…The writer ‘renounces’ life, but this renunciation is hardly in good faith: it is a ruse by means of which the actual sacrifice…is replaced by a ‘symbolic’ death that leave intact the possibility of enjoying life” (“Rhetoric of Blindness” 113). Yet de Man qualifies this assertion by allowing for the fact that Derrida does not psychologize Rousseau, but rather points to a problematic assumption of all Western thought (ibid. 114).

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confessions by revealing that this section “starts the long chain of my misfortunes, in its very

beginnings” (326). Almost immediately, he tells the reader that he “disposed of” all five of

his children by sending them to the Foundling Hospital for state care (333). Although

Rousseau would seem to posit this experience among those ‘misfortunes’ he can so easily

forget by recalling, here, the action of repetition seems just as ‘ceaseless’ as the way in which

he recalls fond memories (261). Rousseau “told everyone” in his circle of this act “freely

and frankly” (333), just as he frequently re-iterates the reasoning behind these actions to the

reader throughout the text (335, 515, et al). He states: “The attitude I had taken with regard

to my children…had not always left me easy in my mind…So strong did my remorse finally

grow that it almost drew from me a public confession of my fault at beginning of Émile”

(549). The problem with confession that Rousseau continually denies yet cannot fail to make

known through his text is that the reiteration of sins is indeed ceaseless.

The telling does not signify closure, but incessant repetition. This is precisely what

Freud describes to us in his conception of repetition compulsion. While in formulations such

as the game of fort/da this compulsion is governed by the pleasure principle’s dictate of

mastery, there is indeed another “task, which must be accomplished before the dominance of

the pleasure principle can even begin” (Beyond 36). This is the endeavoring “to master the

[traumatic/painful] stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was

the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (ibid. 36-37). If it is the pleasure principle’s demand for

mastery that creates homeostasis, or lack of excitation—notice Rousseau uses the word

‘calm’ to designate the affect of happy memories (see 261, 121 above)—it is something in

fact beyond the pleasure principle that creates anxiety. This anxiety is precisely what we see

behind Rousseau’s claims of having dismissed unhappy remembrances: “Since my memory

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calls up only pleasant objects, it acts as the happy counterpoise to my fearful imagination,

which makes me foresee nothing in the future but cruel disasters” (261). This preparation for

trauma is the protective measure of Freud’s ‘compulsion to repeat.’ Anxiety is summoned in

advance and to protect from trauma (Beyond 36) or, for Rousseau, unhappy experience.

Rousseau reiterates: “My cruel imagination…ceaselessly torments itself by foreseeing evils

before they arise…In a way I exhaust my misfortunes in advance” (540).

While this anxiety functions to spare Rousseau from the full shock of experience, this

is also where the painful double bind of confession resides. While Rousseau would seek to

find ‘calm’ after telling his experiences, he is confounded not only by anxiety, but the

continued compulsion to repeat. As anxiety is a preparatory defense, readying for re-

repetition of the painful event, confession begets confession. This is the case when Rousseau

relates the ‘cruel memory’ centering on his theft of a ribbon. “I have never been able to

bring myself to relieve my heart by revealing this…I can affirm that the desire to some extent

to rid myself of it has greatly contributed to my resolution of writing these Confessions” (88).

After relating the crime in full, Rousseau writes, “This is all I have to say on the subject.

May I never have to speak of it again” (89). Yet, as Paul de Man tells us in his essay on

Rousseau, “some ten years later, in the Fourth Rêverie, he [Rousseau] tells the entire story all

over again…Clearly, the apology has not succeeded in becalming his own guilt to the point

where he would be allowed to forget it” (“Excuses” 282). But this is exactly what repetition

compulsion tells us is at issue: Rousseau’s confession has not enabled forgetting, but anxiety

in preparation for further repetition.

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De Man, an important figure in Rousseau criticism3, addresses the way in which

Rousseau’s confessions specifically seek to becalm Rousseau’s sense of guilt. In his essay

“Excuses,” De Man centers his reading of Rousseau’s Confessions on the episode of the

ribbon, which Rousseau singles out, here and later in the Fourth Rêverie, as “a paradigmatic

event, the core of his autobiographical narrative” (de Man 278-279). Rousseau steals a “little

pink and silver ribbon, which was quite old” (86) from the house in which he is employed (at

the age of 16). Rousseau reports that he stole the ribbon to give it to his companion Marion,

“a good girl, sensible and absolutely trustworthy” (87). But when the young Rousseau, who

fails even to conceal the ribbon well, is discovered and accused of the crime before he can

give it to the girl as a gift, he lies outright about his crime. Instead, he boldly accuses Marion

herself of stealing the ribbon (86-87). It is not the theft, but the bold-faced lie that he tells

against Marion, and that he posits as her possible ruination, that Rousseau holds as his

shameful and almost-unspeakable crime. What interests de Man is the way in which

Rousseau attempts to excuse himself from his crime. In this way, Rousseau undoes the work

of revealing guilt that confession is to accomplish: “The only thing one has to fear from the

excuse is that it will indeed exculpate the confessor, thus making the confession (and the

confessional text) redundant as it originates” (280). Rousseau’s excuse testifies to his

guiltlessness, contrary to the readerly expectation that the work of confession was to be a

revelation of guilt. In this way, Rousseau pretends to the utmost innocence even in the

moment of the utmost “heinousness” of his offence. He writes:

3 De man speaks of the systematic misreading of certain writers and the misrepresentations handed down in the body of literary criticism. He writes, “The history of Rousseau interpretation is particularly rich in this respect, both in the diversity of the tactics employed to make him say something different from what he said, and in the convergence of these misreadings toward a definite configuration of meanings” (“The Rhetoric of Blindness” 112). Obviously, de Man places himself outside of this tradition of misreading, and seeks to rectify misperceptions.

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When I accused that poor girl, it is strange but true that my friendship for her

was the cause. She was present in my thoughts, and I threw blame on the first

person who occurred to me. I accused her of having done what I wanted to do

myself. I said that she had given the ribbon to me because I meant to give it

to her. (88)

In de Man’s reading, Rousseau makes an attempt to underwrite his guilt by pointing to the

powerlessness of his own speech. Again, we come to the “speculary dispossession” that

Derrida posits as “the law of language” (141). De Man’s reading of the machinelike quality

of the lie (294) is even more troublesome in the face of the mastery we have seen Rousseau

attempt to build in the name of this same language. But with this excuse, Rousseau attempts

to depict himself as a mere automaton, to whom the signifier is a product of a brand of

random generation—‘Marion’ simply came to his mind and he repeated it, not attempting to

signify anything more than a word. “By saying that the excuse is not only a fiction but also a

machine one adds to the connotation of referential detachment, of gratuitous improvisation”

(294), de Man writes. The statement of non-guilt in this micro-scene of confession

necessarily forces us to question Rousseau’s larger work of Confessions: how are we to

distinguish Rousseau’s citation of empty speech from the rest of his claims?

And yet the excuse-generating machine is not fully devoid of referential signification:

‘Marion’ is mentioned not only because she is the first person that comes into Rousseau’s

mind, but because his theft of the ribbon was ultimately intended for her. In this way,

Rousseau’s excuse comes to unmake itself, just as his confession unmakes itself by the

infringement of the excuse—Marion’s name is used for a reason. According to de Man, “this

failure was already partly inscribed within the excuse itself and it governs its further

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expansion and repetition” (283). That is to say, with the undoing of the first claim of the

excuse, Rousseau presents us with another: he accuses Marion because she was his friend,

and was thinking of giving her the gift. If we are to follow the logic of this (second) excuse,

we should excuse Rousseau’s thefts on the grounds of his desire for Marion. And what of the

slander that follows the theft? Rousseau has a prepared answer: “the presence of all those

people prevailed over my repentance…I was only afraid of disgrace…my invincible sense of

shame prevailed over my repentance” (88).

In de Man’s reading, both of these excuses are tied together under the figure of the

ribbon. “Once it is removed from it legitimate owner, the ribbon, being in itself devoid of

meaning and function, can circulate symbolically as a pure signifier” (283) that becomes the

“articulating hinge” of a free circulating desire. That is to say, a desire that not only indicates

Rousseau’s desire for Marion, but also, as in Rousseau’s lie, Marion’s desire for Rousseau.

Moreover, de Man states, it is also the desire at the center of Rousseau’s supposed shame and

the theft of the ribbon itself: it is not only the desire for possession of the ribbon and or

Marion, but the split desire to remain hidden and the desire to be exposed (286). De Man

forces us to examine the levels of complication inherent in this excuse. But even if the reader

is to address Rousseau’s excuse with this complicated picture of desire in mind, this

conception still locks us into the logic of the passage; the reader is caught determining the

variations of Rousseau’s desire, and what particular degree of exoneration Rousseau’s excuse

of desire grants him. In this way, the performative nature of the excuse is ultimately

reinforced: “Guilt is forgiven because it allows for the pleasure of revealing its repression. It

follows that repression is in fact an excuse, one speech act among many” (286). Moreover,

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de Man’s logic of excuses insistently centers the reader on the policing of Rousseau, using

his excuses to determine the guilt he experiences or manages to exculpate himself from.

We need to think carefully of how these excuses play into the logic of confessional

narrative that we have been examining. Rousseau claims that the pleasure of revealing his

greatest transgressions was to rid himself of their memory, but we have shown that this

consolation is not really evident in the text. We have seen how Rousseau’s confessions do

not yield relief, but produce anxiety and perpetuate further enunciation and repetition. In a

way, this is not very different from de Man’s claim: “The structure is self-perpetuating, en

abîme, as is implied in its description as exposure of the desire to expose, for each new stage

in the unveiling suggests a deeper shame, a greater impossibility to reveal, and a greater

satisfaction in outwitting this impossibility” (286). Yet de Man posits a claim to pleasure in

the revealing that would seem to counter our conception of the anxiety-producing function of

the confession. But is it not possible to suppose that both effects of repetition compulsion—

the pleasure of mastery and the production of anxiety—cohabit the confessional space? Can

this not be said to be the movement, the mise en abîme, that de Man describes? Anxiety not

only increases the pleasure of a mastery that surmounts it, but enables, through its retroactive

protection, this very mastery.

To backtrack, it is worth examining de Man’s conception of the ribbon as a “pure

signifier.” As he describes it, “we have at least two levels of substitution (or displacement)

taking place: the ribbon substituting for a desire which is itself a desire for substitution”

(284). The ribbon is a pure signifier not only due to its free circulation, but because it

signifies desire as such. The function of this type of signifier can be conceptualized in the

terms of the phallus for Lacan: “For the phallus is a signifier…the signifier that is destined to

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designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence

as signifier” (“The Signification of the Phallus” 275). The ribbon signifies, as de Man

indicates, the meaning effects of desire that is metonymic. The ribbon therefore marks a

desire that, at the level of the signifier, is endless in its deferral of meaning—just as in de

Man’s description the ribbon is Rousseau’s desire for Marion and her reciprocal desire for

him, it is both the desire for withholding and revealing the confession, for guilt and its

repression, et al. Reading this alongside Lacan’s “Signification of the Phallus,” what we see

is a claim to plentitude that masks a constitutive lack. While there is an ostensible fullness in

metonymic desire that is constituted by a chain of substitutions, the mere fact of this

ceaseless substitution signals a lack, both of a ‘full’ origin and of finitude (“just as the text

can never stop apologizing for the suppression of guilt that it performs” (de Man 300)). De

Man identifies the ribbon as the signal for desire as such in the specific moment of The

Confessions that he reads. But what he fails to do is to work through the metonymic motions

of desire in the rest of the text.

Extending our view to the text at large, it is through Lacan’s term that we can read the

ribbon in its full status as the ‘transcendental signifier’ of the phallus. For the symbol of the

ribbon is marked by the displacements of “the obliterated origin of absence and presence”

(Derrida 143) that marks off the phallus’s signification of imaginary fullness and constitutive

lack. To begin, the moment of desire that de Man freezes is underwritten as an originary

moment by a precedent in Rousseau’s text not only of desire, but of the symbol of the ribbon

as well. We come to find out that the giving of ribbons and their theft has been a key figure

in Rousseau’s personal history of desire. Years before the episode with Marion, on a trip

through the mountains with the wicked Sabrans, Rousseau relates this experience: “Mme

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Sabran found means to strip me of everything down to [and including] a little piece of silver

ribbon which Mme de Warens had given me for my small sword. This I regretted more than

all the rest” (65). This complicates our conception of desire—the workings of transference in

the picture of metonymic desire reveal further textual associations necessarily coupled with

the ribbon’s reappearance. Rousseau’s theft becomes an act of recovery or reparation; his

desire for exposure becomes tied to the injustice of the Sabrans. But most importantly, it is

no longer appropriate to center the reading of desire on Marion. De Man posits a specularity

that attributes the same status of a free signifier to Marion as he did to the ribbon. But the

prefiguring of the ribbon in an earlier episode of The Confessions adds another dimension to

the symmetrical exchange of de Man’s reading (“if Rousseau has to be willing to steal the

ribbon, the Marion has to be willing to substitute for Rousseau in performing this act” (284)).

Namely, Marion is decentered: a reading of Rousseau’s text cites her as a substitute for Mme

de Warens (referred to by Rousseau as ‘Mamma’). If Rousseau’s excuse initiates a reversal

in which Marion stole the ribbon due to her desire for him, it is because Rousseau is in fact

staging not Marion’s, but Mamma’s desire for him.

But even Mamma cannot be cited as a ‘full’ origin of desire, because even her

presence masks an underwriting and overarching lack: Mamma is already a replacement for

Rousseau’s real mother, from whom his “heart had been fully transferred” (Confessions 147)

to Mamma. What we see is an underwriting of originary moments in which a claim to a full

presence is continuously undercut by the positing of a prior, fuller moment. The privileged

status as total desire and point of origin is continuously revoked and revealed as a place of

overdetermination. As Derrida describes, this is the chain of supplementation: Marion, and

later Thérèse, is in a certain way “already a supplement. As Mamma was already the

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supplement of an unknown mother, and as the ‘true mother’ herself…was also in a certain

way a supplement, from the first trace, and even if she had not ‘truly’ died in giving birth”

(Derrida 156). Like the phallus, the Derrida’s ‘supplement’ delineates both an imaginary

plentitude and constitutive lack: “Reason is incapable of thinking this double infringement on

Nature [on the phallus, on the mother, etc.]: that there is a lack in Nature and that because of

the very fact something is added to it” (149). To back up, let us address the action of the

supplement more closely, and explore the way in which this notion controls the workings of

Rousseau’s desire.

Derrida’s supplement “adds itself, it is a surplus, a plentitude enriching another

plentitude, the fullest measure of presence…But the supplement supplements. It adds only to

replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void.

If it represents and makes an image, it is by anterior default of presence” (144-145). If there

is a fullness in the metonymic nature of desire by nature of its superfluous substitution, it is

only because it is situated in a space of void, wherein the substitution is necessitated by a

marked lack. As Derrida explicates in Of Grammatology, the chain of Rousseau’s

substitutions in terms of love objects exemplifies this action of supplementation (see above).

Rousseau writes of Mamma: “I became entirely her concern, entirely her child, and more so

than if she had been my real mother” (213). Mamma is the supplement that is so full that is

even ‘more than mother’, and yet this addition cannot be opened without the lack of the

mother Derrida elucidates.

But more importantly for our purposes, this process of supplementation is also that

which represents writing itself. Rousseau’s writing of his life is the ‘representing’ or

‘making an image’ that does not merely instantiate or add fullness, but adds in order to

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replace, as testament of ‘anterior default.’ Recall the opening lines of The Confessions: “My

purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall

portray will be myself” (17). Following Derrida’s suggestion, we must question the ‘default

of presence’ that leads Rousseau to this act of supplementation. Rousseau has already

insinuated anterior default of presence in his lack of understanding in the moment as that

which necessitates supplementation. If one writes in order to supplement experience, it is

precisely because the experience was lacking. But we must not privilege one moment over

another: the ‘strange unity’ (Derrida 141) of the supplement must be thought. Just as the

“speculary dispossession” of Rousseau’s self-reflection “institutes and deconstitutes” him

(ibid.142), his writing is both the cause and the cure for Rousseau’s sense of loss of self-

presence. There is a way in which Rousseau, choosing to be absent and to write, enacts his

own removal.

Rousseau locates this sense of loss in his inability find satisfaction of his desires—in

a sense, he places the need outside of himself, attributing loss to the absence of an ideal

object of satisfaction. “So it was in the sincere and mutual attachment into which I put all the

affection of my heart, the void in that heart was nevertheless never really filled” (Confessions

387). Rousseau attempts to fill what he cites as an interior lack by the means of an “exterior

addition”: this is precisely what Derrida names the supplement (145). Rousseau goes on:

“Being unable to taste to the full the intimate companionship of which I felt the need, I

looked for something in addition, which would not fill the void but which would make me

less conscious of it” (Confessions 387). We see that not only is the absence contained in

Rousseau himself, but Rousseau is aware of the supplement’s functioning, which carries its

own destiny of the failure to fill. What is notable is that this is the moment in which

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Rousseau turns to writing: “I found myself unexpectedly thrown back into literature” (387).

Writing will become the means of supplementation Rousseau employs in order to fill the

lack. But we cannot fail to note that through writing, supplementation is only further

proliferated. For it is the ‘law of language’ to constantly defer meaning in the chain of

significations that, in the same way as the metonymic substitutions of desire, is always

already the rule of supplementarity. Derrida writes that “it happens that this theme describes

the chain itself, the being-chain of a textual chain, the structure of substitution, the

articulation of desire and of language, the language of all conceptual oppositions taken over

by Rousseau” (163).

What makes itself seen in the text is that Rousseau’s preference is in fact for this very

brand of deferral. Choosing the role of “writing and remaining hidden” (116), Rousseau

shows his preference for, or the privileging of, the sign itself (Derrida 156) above all else.

The same could be said in terms of way desire functions for Rousseau. He describes

virtually all of his love objects in the same manner: he loves them too much to consummate

his love for them (80, 109, et al). As he describes one, “to have soiled that divine image

would have been to destroy it…I loved her too well to wish to possess her” (413). Rousseau

prefers the sign: that is to say, the fantasy over consummation, desire over its necessary

annihilation in its fulfillment. He explains, “I only like unadulterated joys” (143).

The same movement is evidenced in Rousseau’s preference for writing his life instead

of directly experiencing it. The Confessions he writes is the very action and evidence of this

move: it is within the economy of the text that Rousseau hopes to suspend language, desire,

and being in the realm of the sign. Moreover, this is the role of confession itself: “Does it not

renounce the present and the proper in order to master them better in their meaning, in the

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ideal form of truth, of the presence and of the present and of the proximity or property of the

proper?” (Derrida 143). Rousseau’s need for mastery extends to all aspects, both formal and

referential, of is project. The logic of confession proves to be one in which all of the

contradictory functions we have been describing cull out a space of coexistence. Writing on

the self both ‘institutes and deconstitutes’ the subject, just as the writing of one’s history is at

once “mnemotechnique and the power of forgetting” (Derrida 24). All of this is attested to

by Rousseau himself. Moreover, the supplementation of experience by writing is both a

testament to the plentitude of experience and the insinuation of its lack. There is no need to

synthesize these functions of the discursive act of confession. They are all present, just as the

various motivations Rousseau states throughout the text are probably equally present. What

is important to note here is that we are no longer faced with the question of Rousseau’s ‘good

faith’ that has dominated the field of criticism on his confessions. In fact, we can no longer

even question the intentions of the author. For what we have seen in this preliminary

deconstruction of the form of confession is that it is the very speaker/inscriber of the

confession, the self, that is broken down. The writing subject is both instituted and

deconstituted by his writing, but he is never present outside the determinations of the text.

The narrative of confession emphasizes the threat of “radical estrangement” (de Man 289)

that is the nature of all writing. Reading the confession becomes not an act of determining

culpability or securing exoneration, but of examining precisely these issues of presence and

non-presence.

I’d like to read Rousseau’s Confessions alongside those of Oscar Wilde, which appear

in his epistolary composition from prison, De Profundis. The act of confession that appears

in Wilde’s text provides a ground wherein we can continue to puzzle out the ostensibly

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contradictory logic of the confessional narrative, and wherein we can examine more carefully

the functions of presence and absence carved out in this space. For just as Rousseau’s

Confessions touch upon the tension of writing as supplementation to experience, Wilde’s text

assesses this problem as its theme; and just as Rousseau’s confessional act is tempered by his

use of excuses, Wilde’s act of confession is mitigated by his indictment of another.

II: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis

Written from prison, Oscar Wilde’s confessional text De Profundis attempts not only

the revelation of sins, but also the enormous project of self-consolation. Writing a letter to

his former confidante and lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie,’ Wilde composes an account

of their past together. An act of confession that serves not only to avow the past, but to

disavow its effects, this text becomes a compensatory structure that reacts against the loss of

Bosie. Mere commemoration is not enough: Wilde strives not only to remember Bosie, but

to re-create his presence; Wilde is not content to merely recall sins, he must rectify them.

But inscribed within this specific scene of direct address, the contradictory moments that

Wilde establishes of both self-recrimination and accusation, of both self-indictment and self-

exoneration, reveal the act of confession as one of infinite ambivalence for Wilde. As Wilde

writes, it is both an act of humility and pride: “A man’s very highest moment is, I have no

doubt, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells us all the sins of his life”

(197). The double motion of debasement and elevation is mirrored in Wilde’s complex

narrative strategy. His text is both a recuperative labor bent on the “process of recalling, to

reanimate, what is posited as a previously unified—or more authentic—self” (Jay 1051) and

a strategy of effacement wherein his past identity becomes “disappropriated” by the very text

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which was to mirror it (Jay 1051). Wilde’s project of self-consolation calls for a brand of

confession that does not merely inscribe the past, but attempts to re-script it. Through his

writing, Wilde claims for himself a mastery of the past centered on the conflation of art and

life and on the sublimation of experience into narrative—a narrative replete with the justice

and order lacking from his past.

The ambivalence of Wilde’s act of exposing his sins is further instated by the text’s

insistent mixing of self-reproach with self-justification, of assumptions of culpability (Wilde

repeats the phrase “I blame myself” habitually) with displacement of blame unto Bosie.

Wilde’s discourse is both self-revelatory and a vicarious substitute for Bosie’s act of self-

revelation. Confession, which Wilde attempts to make function for both himself and his

love object, becomes dual: Wilde states that he writes “as much for your sake as for mine”

(97). The epistolary nature of the text proposes a clean divide between writer and receiver,

between the subject confessing and the interlocutor, but this is a divide that is continuously

collapsed in Wilde’s deliberate inversions of authorship and spectatorship.

How does Wilde’s writing serve the multiple purposes of representation and

alteration? In order to understand the complexity of the notion of the confessional narrative

that appears here, we will need to further elaborate the connection between Derrida’s

supplement and the action of writing that we have touched upon. Here also, the system of

reference presupposed by autobiographical works will necessarily be implicated. Further, the

splitting of signifier and signified that arises in this discussion of representation will also

affect Wilde’s notion of selfhood, and we will see a splitting of the subject that is even more

dramatic than that which we explored through Rousseau. What unites these discussions of

the text is their insistent puzzling out of relationships of presence and non-presence that

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dominate the confessional field. In our discussion of De Profundis, we will see the promise

made by confessional discourse—to vouchsafe presence through writing—is always already

broken.

Wilde’s letter is a field wherein the play of appropriation and disapporpriation

dominates not only Wilde’s treatment of blame and guilt, but also his conception of

experience and authorship. The duality of Wilde’s narrative strategy that seeks to both

reanimate the past and to efface it—to the extent that Wilde’s writing will stand in its place—

further calls upon this play. The functions of appropriation and disappropriation within the

text turn us back to Derrida’s notion of the supplement. The excess of Wilde’s long and

repetitive confessional text point us to an attempt to accumulate presence—itself founded on

Bosie’s absence and the lack of possession of the past—that is to Derrida the mark of

representational writing itself. Wilde’s text comes to literalize the movement of the

supplement in its very composition. To recall Derrida’s description, we note:

The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plentitude enriching another

plentitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates

presence…But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It

intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a

void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by anterior default of

presence…[it adds] by way of compensation for what ought to lack nothing at

all (144-145).

Wilde’s very method of writing harbors the dual signification of the supplement. As Vyvyan

Holland remarks in her introduction to the text, Wilde’s letter was “composed of eighty

close-written pages, on twenty folio sheets of blue prison paper…Wilde was allowed one

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sheet of this paper at a time; when it was filled it was removed and replaced by another” (91).

Nothing could more closely approximate Derrida’s conception of the supplement then this

movement: each page was filled to the “fullest measure” with a surplus of words, each page

extended by the addition of the “plentitude” of the next, in a sequential illustration of the

supplement itself. And yet as each page is written, the last is taken away; the page “adds

only to replace” the previous page, it takes the place of. Underlying Wilde’s need to fill page

after page of this sprawling letter is an awareness of the absence of the “anterior,” and

consequently of the whole. Wilde keenly feels this absence—“I cannot reconstruct my letter

or rewrite it” (197), he states within the text—just as the reader feels the surplus. For De

Profundis is marked as much by the reader’s sense of excess as Wilde’s denial of it. Despite

Wilde’s insistent telling and re-telling of events in all their detail, of the repetition and re-

repetition of Wilde’s favorite phrases and metaphors, and the great length of the piece, Wilde

asserts the perfection of his letter. At the close of his letter, he states that his words are an

“absolute expression” of his thoughts, and “err neither through surplusage nor through being

inadequate” (197-198). Textual repetition and the sense of surfeit that arises from Wilde’s

desperate avowals and disavowals, he states, mark merely an exactitude of expression. What

we come to understand is that the compensatory measures Wilde enlists to mask the

constitutive lack of a unified text are exactly what the reader perceives as excess. Wilde

writes and writes, supplementing his text again and again; yet his efforts merely insinuate

what is a pervasive default of presence in the text.

Evidence of Derrida’s supplement does not reside solely in the method of the text’s

composition. It is also felt in the play of presence and absence that Wilde’s writing evokes.

To begin, Wilde’s text is one in which the dialogic nature of confession begs to be read. The

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act of confession from which autobiographical writing grows4 is founded within a context of

discourse between speaking subject and interlocutor. The nature of this confessional

discourse is re-emphasized by Wilde’s epistolary confession: his letter marks off an

equivalent structure of writer and addressed. Frank Mc Guinness writes that De Profundis is

a “soliloquy masked as a dialogue, for it is written in a letter, and letters anticipate an

acknowledgement” (53). Just as the supplement attempts to “cumulate and accumulate

presence” (Derrida 144), Wilde attempts to evoke the absent love object through the false

dialectic of his text—Wilde attempts to write in Bosie’s presence, both in the return letter

that the text literally and formally begs, and within the letter itself. The conversational tone

and the 2nd person voice of the letter insinuate Bosie into the text; Wilde’s rhetorical

questions suggest insertions of Bosie’s responses between the lines and in the spaces of the

letter. At times, Wilde even anticipates Bosie’s imagined response and replies to it: “There

is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is that you loved me” (125). In

his longing for Bosie’s presence, Wilde believes his own hallucinatory wish that Bosie made

this declaration of love, and responds to it in the following sentence just as if replying to

Bosie: “Yes, I know you did” (125). Wilde picks up on this phrase—“you loved me”—and

repeats it in the text of the letter three times within the same paragraph: like an incantation, it

is as if by setting it down repeatedly, Wilde cannot only disown the authorship of the phrase

and attribute it to Bosie, but even convince himself that this is Bosie’s true sentiment. For

Wilde’s wish is not only for Bosie’s presence, but the presence of an ideal Bosie who

responds in just the manner Wilde would wish. This is an exact parallel to what Derrida’s

4 In Paul John Eakin’s introduction to Philippe Lejeune’s seminal work, On Autobiography, which works toward defining the genre, he writes, “Lejeune places confession at the heart of the autobiographical domain” (xxiv). While the direct relation of sins can be more or less emphasized, the drive to tell is what motivates one to write.

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notion: “the supplement has not only the power of procuring an absent presence through its

image; procuring it for us through the proxy (procuration) of the sign, it holds it at a distance

and masters it” (155).

The movement Derrida describes is shown in the text’s opening lines, wherein

Wilde’s pronouncement of this procuration is heartbreaking in its desperation. “Dear Bosie,”

Wilde writes, “After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as

much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two

long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line you” (97). Ostensibly

exhorting Bosie to write a return letter, what Wilde simultaneously establishes is that his own

letter substitutes for Bosie’s letters; the letter he pens becomes the reply from Bosie that he

lacks.5 What we see is that Wilde comes to collapse the distinction between articulating

subject and interlocutor in the very moments that he seeks to establish this distinction. The

immediate switching of roles that Wilde enacts with his pronouncement underlines an

ambiguity of roles that will permeate the text. Wilde’s confession becomes not only the

revelation of his own sins, but Bosie’s as well: “You see that I have to write your life to you

and you have to realize it” (130). But in the following instant, the roles are reversed yet

again. Wilde indicts Bosie, “You had the sympathy and sentimentality of the spectator of a

rather pathetic play. That you were the true author of the tragedy did not occur to you”

(130). In this melding and in Wilde’s subsequent fantasy of this confession being Bosie’s

(“you would be happier if you [told it] yourself”, Wilde writes (197)), Wilde’s letter

5 Mc Guinness makes a clever comparison of this instance to a similar one in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest: Cecily can produce a box of letters where she has kept all her letters from her future husband Algernon. “He protests he has never written any letters to her. Cecily replies, ‘I remember it only too well. I grew tired of asking the postman every morning if he had a…letter for me…So I wrote your letters for you’” (52). But while this comic example illustrates the scene well, it does not match the undisguised seriousness and desperation of Wilde’s tone here wherein his assertion false authorship, authorship-by-proxy, is without mockery.

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performs the work he wishes from Bosie. Wilde remedies the lack of Bosie’s presence by

writing him into the text rhetorically, forms his role even further by granting him the agency

of imagined authorship, and moreover masters absence by formulating the confession from

Bosie that Wilde so longs to hear.

But in the end, the rhetoric that writes in presence is not enough to mask the absence

that pushes Wilde into writing in the first place. Wilde ends his letter with a two-page-long

instructive detailing the contents of Bosie’s letter. Wilde is still trying to write in Bosie’s

presence with a demand that assumes Bosie’s reply: “As regards your letter to me in response

to this…” (209), and goes on to set down specifications for length, frankness, and content.

That Wilde’s lengthy letter has not served as an adequate compensation for Bosie’s letter,

and that his excessive, detailed confession has not accomplished the work of consolation it

set out to do, is both obvious and heartbreaking.

Following our reading of Derrida’s supplement through the text, we see that this

sense of plentitude that both masks and enacts a constitutive lack makes itself felt in this text

through Wilde’s inscription of the past. Writing acts not only as an addition to, but a

replacement or taking-the-place of, experience. It is here that we fully grasp the power

Wilde attributes to confession. The phrase “I confess” has been a constant decree within

Wilde’s text (107, 108, 117, et al), but it is not until Wilde reaches the middle of his letter

that the full import of this statement is iterated. Wilde writes, “Of course the sinner must

repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realize what he had

done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that: is the means

by which one alters one’s past” (179, emphasis mine). Confessing, which for Wilde is the

act of writing, not only puts the past in place, but also modifies it. The notion of the

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supplement inserts itself as the notion of writing the past that comes to stand in for the

experience. Writing is not simply added or superimposed upon experience, but comes to

replace experience, substituting, in phrases Wilde uses over and over again, the real for the

ideal relation (205 et al). Wilde’s transcription of events becomes a means of altering the

past; writing is really re-writing, with all the implied correlates of modification, emendation,

and difference that the word entails. The key change that Wilde asserts in the re-telling or re-

narration of experience is the imposition of order and meaning on past events. Wilde writes,

“While there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings would be endless, I

could not bear them to be without meaning” (152). Mastering experience through distance,

Wilde believe that through writing, he “can see life as a whole” (126), and therefore

formulate a narrative that is a “beneficent and liberating intervention in its…continuity” (Jay

1054)—the fact that this continuity is merely illusory is something Wilde does not take into

consideration.

Many critics have recognized and commented upon this inflated view Wilde carries

of the capabilities of narrative. Keith Rinehart notes that Wilde sees his life as a complete

artistic whole (183), unbroken and delineated into a neat sequence of suffering that has been

sublimated into the highest moment of self-realization. This rhetoric of confession elucidates

the structure of sacrifice aimed at the greatest possible gain; or in the language of Derrida, a

renunciation of “the present and the proper in order to master them better in their meaning,

in the ideal form of truth, of the presence and of the present and of the proximity or property

of the proper” (Derrida 143). Wilde’s sorrow is treated as the prelude to a greater joy. He

writes, “my life, whatever it had seemed to myself and others, had all the while been a

symphony of sorrow, passing through its rhythmically linked movements to its certain

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resolution, with the inevitableness that in Art characterizes the treatment of every great

theme” (113). In his writing, Wilde’s life charts a perfect teleology, a brand of development

in which everything is in its right place. Since confession does not merely alter his

perception of the past, but alters the past itself, as he states (179), narrative is not the addition

of order to experience, but the replacement of experience with an ordered narrative. The

naivety of this wishful thought is not lost on many of Wilde’s readers. Edward Said’s “Notes

on the Characterization of a Literary Text” comments on the Wilde’s use of the text not only

to give meaning to the “monstrous triviality” (Peckham 610) (accompanied by dire

consequences) of his affair with Bosie, but to Wilde’s career as a whole. De Profundis sets

out to reaffirm Wilde’s status as an artist. Said writes:

in what Wilde considered a penitent work, De Profundis, we find him making

of his career a shaped whole…Wilde cannot help turning the brutal

experiences of his life into a balanced career reflected in the juncture of his

writing and public lives: the plays, epigrams, stories and fables of his demonic

career are redeemed, balanced, naturalized by his horrible punishment, and his

subsequent conversion. What we watch in De Profundis is Wilde’s

substitution of a fully shaped career made up of nice balances (sin,

punishment, redemption: wit, jail, Christianity: writer-dandy, fall from favor,

penitence)…he understands the pattern of his life, which really means that like

one of his plots, his career has triumphed, at least in his writing about himself.

(779-780)

Addressing the past retrospectively, Wilde is able to impose upon it a teleological reading

that grants significance to all events and validates them, making them irreplaceable and

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indispensable to the perfect order of experience. Said reflects that the stakes of Wilde’s

confession do not only entail their proper reception from Bosie, but the very shaping and

reassertion of Wilde’s status as a writer—Said hits upon an important point in Wilde’s text

with his phrase ‘juncture of writing and public lives.’ Moreover, this statement can be taken

a step further: the unspoken assumption that has facilitated Wilde’s use of writing as the

supplement that replaces experience is the confluence of not only Wilde’s private and public

lives, but of art and life themselves.

Wilde’s text is founded on a conception of an exact reference between object and

representation, signifier and signified, and consequently, in this self-revelatory and

autobiographical text, art and life. Wilde’s claim is great: “I am not speaking in phrases of

rhetorical exaggeration but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact” (99). In Bosie’s reading

of De Profundis, there will be no need for interpretation nor exegesis (137), for Wilde has the

ability to render in language a precise, irrefutable counterpart to occurrence or emotion.

Wilde goes on, "my letter has its definite meaning behind every phrase. There is in it nothing

of rhetoric. Whenever there is erasion or substitution, however slight, however elaborate, it

is because I am seeking to render my real impression, to find for my mood its exact

equivalent” (198). Wilde writes over and over again that he is “writing the truth,” and that

Bosie must “realize it” (130). Wilde’s language is posited as an exact representation of what

he wishes to present, and this formulation of direct referentiality is extended to the

relationship between art and life. “Truth in art is not any correspondence between the

essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of

the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself…Truth in art is the unity of a thing with

itself” (161). The grandiosity of this claim, I believe, cannot be overstated. Wilde takes

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Rousseau’s claim of perfect portraiture to a new degree of exaggeration: Wilde is not

painting a portrait of himself or Bosie (recall that the two are conflated in this confession), he

is not even reflecting their image as in a mirror. He claims to an even more direct mode of

presentation here, one that somehow precludes representation altogether. Wilde’s claims, of

course, cannot stand up; it calls for a brand of reference that surpasses both mimesis and even

exact repetition and that is instead unity itself.

But what is made clear is the ludicrousness of any textual claim, be it here or in

Rousseau’s more tempered version, to assert self-presence through writing. The failure of

this project is marked by the text itself: Wilde need not venture the representation that is

writing if the experience had been sufficient and complete of itself, and did not demand the

repetition of inscription. Wilde has fallen into the lure of the supplement’s promise of

plentitude, and has therefore become ignorant of its constitutive lack. “Writing is dangerous

from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing

itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning of the sign, that the

substitute make one forget the vicariousness of its own function,” Derrida writes (144).

Wilde has mistaken the sign for the thing itself, and an overarching absence has only been

masked temporarily: despite his greatest efforts, Wilde’s letter will not conjure up the

presence of Bosie, nor even incite him to return Wilde’s letter and therefore produce the

confession Wilde begs of him. De Profundis becomes a citation of the divorce of language

from that which it refers.

What is most devastating about the mode of representation Wilde suggests is that it is

bound to fail; likewise, what is devastating about his notion of writing—as more than

reinstancitation, but instead as alteration, replacement, and reparation—is that the procedures

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Wilde performs constitute the very loss they attempt to conceal. Derrida’s supplement both

constitutes and deconstitutes the sense of plentitude. Derrida writes, “Somewhere, something

can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself it to be filled through

sign and proxy” (145). For Rousseau, we saw that the painful double-bind of confession led

him to constant repetition of his sins. For Wilde, the double-bind of confession resides in the

fact that recourse to literature simultaneously institutes and deconstitutes the ‘fullness’ of

experience. Without the addition of writing, Wilde would not be able to “realize”

experience. Yet this act of supplementation is precisely that which enacts the bereavement of

experience, leaving it incomplete without this exterior addition of retrospective

representation. De Man describes this Derridian motion: “imitation, which expresses an

avowed desire for presence, surreptitiously functions, in Rousseau’s text, as the undoing of a

desire that it reduces to absurdity by its very existence: there never would be a need for

imitation if the presence had not been a priori pre-emptied” (“Rhetoric of Blindness” 126).

For Wilde, the need for continual repetition of experience becomes acutely felt. Just

as Rousseau’s attempts to purge painful memories merely lapsed into cycles of ongoing

reiteration, Wilde’s extensive scenes of self-recrimination and obsessive agonizing over the

wrongs Bosie has done him illustrate the inefficaciousness of the function of confession that

claims to eliminate negative affect. Yet Wilde nonetheless attempts to make confession

operate in this way: “I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart,” he writes to

Bosie, “but to pluck it out of mine” (150). Critic Joseph Pearce follows the naïve view that

preaches the efficacy of confession as extraction when he writes, “Self-reproach wrestles

with self-justification as Wilde both blames himself for many mistakes and [Bosie] Douglas

for many more. It [De Profundis] is a confession of wrongs, both inflicted and suffered,

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which was intended in its candour to purge the pain and guilt from his anguished soul” (257).

Pearce neglects what betrays itself in Wilde’s text as a knowledge that this brand of

purgation is ultimately ineffective. For immediately following Wilde’s claim of ‘plucking

out’ his sorrow, he admits to the necessity of not only retaining, but also of absorbing,

painful affect. “The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do,

if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and incomplete is to absorb

into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without

complaint, fear, or reluctance” (155).

Wilde offers us an alternative to Rousseau’s brand of confession that seeks only the

banishment of painful remembrances. While Rousseau’s expulsion proved unsuccessful and

dictated the further repetition of confessing pain, Wilde’s alternate model proposes an

absorption and conversion of “what was intended to desecrate or destroy” into a protective

force (156). Returning in our reading to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we see that these

two models have an analogue in the development of Freud’s theory: his early model of

catharsis and abreaction is modified to an absorptive model that is first elucidated in Beyond

the Pleasure Principle. The former is first given in Freud’s early work with Joseph Breuer

entitled Studies in Hysteria. Here, the fading of memory or elimination of affect depends on

a countering reaction that eliminates tension. The text reads, “The injured person’s reaction

to the trauma…exercises a completely ‘cathartic’ effect if it is an adequate reaction—as, for

instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be

‘abreacted’ almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when,

for instance, it is…giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. confession” (8). But as our

examination of Rousseau’s text has shown, and what Freud came to realize in his later work,

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is that mere abreaction—the giving utterance to confession—does not effectively purge the

incident or negative affect. One is left with the painful memory, as we saw in Rousseau’s

painful system of repetition. What Freud inaugurates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, then,

is a drive that does not merely serve to eliminate excitation, as does abreaction, but which

learns to tolerate and absorb pain in order to protect against future encounters with it (28-39).

Here, what Freud elaborates, and what comes to mark the advent of psychoanalysis proper, is

a system that can tolerate painful memories, which inevitably leave a traced. In this way,

one’s hope for Wilde is that his acceptance of painful memories will allow him to retain them

in his memory rather than dooming him, like Rousseau, to re-experience them in the mode of

repetition (see Beyond the Pleasure Principle 19). And yet, Wilde’s knowledge of the need

for toleration is underwritten by his attempt to sublimate painful memories into something

meaningful and transformative. He does not allow the past to stand, but attempts to alter it

through incorporation into a larger structure of narrative.

Further, we realize that this positioning of Wilde within the psychoanalytic discourse

places him cleanly in the role of the subject who is acted upon by outside forces. He is the

victim; it is he who is perpetrated against and must accept the trauma. If this is the case,

what do me make of his confession? If instead of confessing his own sins, he is confessing

the sins of Bosie against him, or even indicting Bosie as guilty, how do we reconcile this

reversal to our reading of De Profundis as Wilde’s confessional discourse6? It is interesting

to note that, confessing from prison, Wilde’s text is not an explication of the offences that

6 An easy but not uncontestable answer is provided by Willoughby, who writes of De Profundis, “This unique aesthetic apologia—so reminiscent of other Victorian confessions of faith or doubt, yet so different in tone and substance—depends for its effect on a central rhetorical strategy: the speaker’s identification with Jesus Christ…” (103). Wilde’s comparisons of himself to Jesus Christ are interesting for our purposes because Jesus becomes the figure in which the perfect correspondence between life and art that Wilde aspires to are wholly manifest.

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landed him in prison, nor a defense or renunciation of his homosexuality; it is instead an

account of a love affair. Wilde vicariously composes Bosie’s confession through and

alongside his own, alternating self-recrimination and accusation, and in this way we see that

the text retains its status as a confessional discourse. Moreover, Wilde’s text is felicitous in

that it forcibly demonstrates the constitutive splitting of the confessing subject that is present

in every confessional discourse.

One could spend a great deal of time elucidating the splitting of the confessing

subject that makes itself felt in De Profundis. The self is constitutively split not only through

the “speculary dispossession” of self-examination, but through the demand Wilde finds to

represent not only himself but Bosie as well. The confession is constructed as if it arises

from a dual source and therefore seeks a doubly effective response of exoneration, one that

will not only serve both men but will function as that which grants them a perfect unity—for

what happens to one happens to another, Wilde states repeatedly. Wilde is not only

demanding Bosie’s forgiveness but also demanding that Bosie request his own forgiveness,

and the motions become confused. Wilde informs Bosie, “if you have read this letter clearly

as you should have done you have met yourself face to face” (197). Keeping Wilde’s notion

of reference in mind and the transference of confession Wilde posits for his letter, this is a

loaded declaration. The self-reflexive moments raises the question of reflection and

exchangeability of images, and the substitutability of reader and writer. Assignments of

authorship and causality are obscured in the play of the procuration of presence and the

elision of absence. The splitting of the confessing subject is announced and repressed within

the text. Following the dialectic between the two men that Wilde creates in the text, we

could work on a reading of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” that the text insinuates.

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Robbed of Bosie’s presence, Wilde enters into a state of mourning in which detachment from

Bosie is only enacted by incorporating Bosie into his own ego. Pronouncements of self-

blame that are heard repeatedly throughout the text can be read as plaints raised against the

absent but internalized Bosie. In Wilde’s identification with the absent love object, a

melding ensues between subject and object just as internal splitting of the subject is enacted.

The ego that watches over itself takes on an ambivalence, demonstrated in Wilde’s

alternating bouts of self-praise and self-remonstration, that are in reality tied to the object, but

are turned around upon the self. Both alterity and unity in Wilde’s confession become

endlessly complicated. Alternatively, one could press the issue of the disjunction between

Wilde’s private and public identities. Noting that Wilde’s letter to Bosie is not only copied

and sent to Wilde’s close friend and editor Robert Ross, but is eventually published, how do

we read Wilde’s duplicity in writing a public declaration in the guise of personal

correspondence? A slight increase in exegetic pressure to any of these questions, and many

more, would yield interesting discussions on the inherently divided subject who utters the

confession.

Yet what all of these discussions would reserve as their endpoint is the revelation that

the splitting of the subject is the mark of an impossibility to assign to the subject confessing

or writing the status of a unified presence. As we move on to examine Joyce’s A Portrait of

the Artist as a Young Man, we will see the way in which this absence of self-presence

becomes a confounding factor for the critics of confessional texts who attempt to assert,

using the terminology of sincerity, intentionality, and good faith, the authorial presence as the

final signified in assigning the text meaning.

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Wilde’s De Profundis is a confession that acts as a substitute for a missing letter, a

consolation for an unspoken admission of guilt and request for forgiveness, and moreover, a

compensatory structure that serves to mask not only the absence of a lost love object, but the

absence of a unified self, a self we have shown to be split again and again. Wilde’s use of

the supplement of writing indicates a desperation to recuperate the past that can only be

founded upon and even enact the notion that the past is inherently lacking. As such, we see

again that confession is comprised of a play of presence and absence. More precisely, it’s

becoming increasingly clear that the discourse of confession, as we have illustrated here and

in Rousseau’s text, both promises and denies a sense of self-presence or unity for the

confessing subject. The stakes that Wilde sets for language as the marker of perfect

representation and a totally stable system of reference mark the inevitable failure of Wilde’s

project of self-consolation. On a larger scale, we see that these stakes are not only present in

this text, but hold true for the entire field of confession. The discussion opened up becomes

centered on the failure of language to represent the subject or the past with the degree of

accuracy demanded by the confessing subject. If this subject is already constitutively split,

as Wilde’s text demonstrates, if experience is already challenged as full, originary moment,

as in the metonymic motions of Rousseau’s confessions, the ability of confession to fulfill its

promises is derided even further.

III: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

We open a reading of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because

it allows us to examine more closely confession in the parallel registers of reference and

form. Not only does the main character Stephen Dedalus encounter the redemptive promise

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of confession in its ritualized religious context, but in the guise of the novel’s narrative form

itself. In this way, we find that the novel is shaped by the self-revelatory act not only in

terms of content, internally, but also by the very nature of its pseudo-

biographical/autobiographical form, or its external composition. The collapse of the

distinction between the inside and outside of the text marks the importance of the

confessional space as that which inscribes the text. But it is also this collapse that imposes a

myriad of difficulties in reading the text. The French critic Hélène Cixous describes the

complication that is present in the title alone:

The story of A Portrait of the Artist is both that of a portrait being made and

that of a finished portrait. The title indicates this kind of permanent duplicity.

The reader is told that it is the portrait of an artist, not a young man, which

raises the question of the self-portrait of the artist, of the coming and going of

the look, of the self, of the mirror and the self in the mirror. (“Writing and the

Law” 4)

The opening of Rousseau’s Confessions insinuates itself here, portraiture and confession

become bound, and Joyce’s novel becomes implicated in the same debates as Rousseau’s

work. The self becomes duplicitous through the specularity of representation (as Derrida

states, “what can look at itself is not one” (36)), and, as Cixous has suggested, through the

temporal splits the title suggests. Stephen Dedalus himself declares a further divide, that

arising from his intention to use “silence, exile, and cunning” to express himself freely

(Portrait7 269). Again, as with Rousseau, the choice to be absent and write announces itself

in the discussion. But these moments of collapse between the text’s content and form circle

around the act of confession—which we read here as self-revelation or the disclosure of 7 From here on, we will designate this text in parenthetical citations simply as “P”.

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personal information—and as such, we find that a close reading of confession in the text

provides an opening to Joyce’s Portrait that manages both to take these difficulties into

account and to avoid over-simplifying the issues they raise.

The text is filled with micro-scenes of confession that regularly punctuate Stephen’s

development. An opening memory relates his mother’s demand that Stephen reveal his fault:

“—O, Stephen will apologise” followed by the threat of punishment in the form of a nursery

rhyme: “—O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes” (P 4). A formative memory

from the second section of the text comes from a friend’s demand in his school days: “—

Admit! repeated Heron, striking him again with his cane across the calf of his leg” (P 82).

The entirety of Part III of the novel, which we will discuss in more detail shortly, is based on

Stephen’s accumulation of guilt that is released in a literal act of the rite of confession. The

later sections are governed by an act of confession that becomes increasingly entwined and

identified with the act of writing. As one can see, the text is literally infused with confession.

Moreover, contemplation on the act forms the premise for the text’s own existence.

Let us fully articulate Stephen’s ambition, as he comes to realize it towards the close of the

text: it is “to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I

can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning”

(P 269). As the artist at the center of the Künstlerroman embarks on his artistic project, it is

self-expression that is discussed in the mission statement that can be read in multiple ways;

without question, the exchangeability of “art” and “life” grammatically and rhetorically is

notable, and the assumption is raised, as in Wilde’s writing, that text and life mirror each

other perfectly. The possibility of the self as subject of narrative is set in place, and the

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question of authorship of the text is irrevocably suggested. As one can see from Stephen’s

statement, confession becomes situated at the center of both his and Joyce’s artistic projects.

In A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, it is confession that becomes the hinge

around which questions of stealth and exposure, repression and revelation, guilt and

exoneration, revolve. As Stephen states, the strange pairing of expression and silence are

somehow sublimated into one artistic project. This is a movement that is difficult to

understand, but one which is contained within the logic of the discursive form of confession

according to Michel Foucault. In his work in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, he

describes the history of the rite of confession as one situated precisely between repression

and the voluntary act of self-disclosure. In defining the rite of confession, Foucault states:

“The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of

the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not

confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the

interlocutor, but the authority who requires the confession” (61). This is a crucial point for

Foucault: while it is indeed an authority that demands the confession, the act is

conceptualized in such a way as to make the telling seem self-motivated on the part of the

subject. “The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so

deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains

us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only

to surface” (ibid. 60).

Thus, confession is the dual space, the hinge, between repression and unrestraint.

And yet to the confessing subject, only the action of unrestraint, of unburdening oneself of

one’s sins, is intelligible. The repression is rendered imperceptible by the belief in the

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overwhelming powers of the discourse: Foucault recounts that the ritual of confession is

perceived as one in which “the expression alone, independently of its external consequences,

produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and

purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation”

(ibid. 62). Let’s follow this conception of confession through the text.

The entire third section of Portrait is devoted to Stephen’s anxiety concerning his

sins—primarily his sexual activity—and his attempt to eliminate it specifically through the

sacrament of confession. The scene opens with Stephen’s “cold lucid indifference” to his

sins: “he had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in

danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his

guilt and his punishment”, and yet he remains unmoved and unwilling to seek atonement (P

110). It is not until the Church retreat, a series of sermons “concerning the four last

things…death, judgment, hell and heaven” (P 117), that Stephen is moved. He becomes

fully locked in the horrifying pictures of damnation and torture that the preacher depicts.

“The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew

death into his soul” (P 120). As Cixous notes in her essay “The Style of the Troubled

Conscience,” the power with which the sermon, with its “images of stereotyped terror,”

breaks into Stephen’s consciousness is made evident by “the almost complete bodily

transposition of the retreat sermon” into the text (73). She continues, “By using a piece of

completely foreign prose, Joyce suppresses the central awareness of Stephen’s consciousness

for the length of the sermon” (ibid. 73). After the sermon’s close, Stephen envisions his own

death and suffering, caught up in the hallucinatory language of the sermon.

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The Church, then, with its “system of threats and rewards” (Cixous “The Style” 76)

that so fully captures the fearful imagination of Stephen, becomes the authority that

prescribes confession. As the sermon threatens, if sins are not confessed in life with the

appropriate measure of repentance to back them, there will be no option of concealment in

death: “Every sin would then come forth from its lurkingplace, the most rebellious against

the divine will and the most degrading to our poor corrupt nature, the tiniest imperfection and

the most heinous atrocity” (P 121). Stephen is the ideal recipient of the threat; he responds,

“Every word of it was for him…The preacher’s knife had probed deeply into his diseased

conscience and he felt now that his soul was festering in sin. Yes, the preacher was right” (P

123). The imposition of the last sentence, with an elision-marking “Yes,” as if responding to

another speaker, marks the implied presence of the interlocutor, the imagined confessor. The

dictate has been issued: “No escape. He had to confess, to speak out in words what he had

done and thought, sin after sin. How? How?” (P 136). Stephen is not only poised to tell, but

is already telling; the repetition of questions demand the presence of one to hear Stephen’s

words; he is already locked into the discursive mode of confession. His self-remonstrations,

sounding suspiciously like external demands, become stronger and stronger—“Confess!

Confess!” (P 150)—until Stephen finally performs the confessional rite. In this moment of

release and exaltation, the Joycean moment of epiphany that ends the section, all is forgotten

but the feelings of redemption and exoneration. “He had confessed and God had pardoned

him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy…How simple and

beautiful was life after all! And life lay all before him” (P 157-158). As Foucault has

described, in the rapture of the perceived effects of confession, the external pressures forcing

one to speak have been repressed. The confession is not perceived as a demand, but as the

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willful and redeeming act of the confessing subject. The act of telling modifies and frees

him.

Confessing is an act of emptying out, expelling sin. Joyce describes Stephen’s speech

in the act of confession as such: “His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in

shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The

last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell” (P 156). Just as Rousseau

hopes to completely expel painful reminiscences from his memory via the act of recital or

revelation, Stephen’s conception of confession is built on the same logic of, to borrow the

psychoanalytic8 terms, catharsis and abreaction. To tell, as Foucault states, is to “extract

from the depths of oneself” (59), to rid oneself of sin or painful memory.

Stephen’s moment of release, however, is short-lived. The epiphany that closes this

section of novel is paired with the denouement of Stephen’s disillusionment in the following

section. As Stephen becomes increasingly tied to the Church’s rigorous schedule of

sacrament and ritual, he comes to doubt the power of confession. We come to see that there

is a way in which abreaction always falls short of its promise of erasure. No matter how

much or how often Stephen reveals his sins, their memory can never be eradicated;

regardless of the sensation of initial relief of pronouncement, guilt is ultimately boundless.

Foucault’s pronouncement of expulsion becomes modified: extracting “from the

depths of oneself” becomes an “infinite task” (59). Which is to say, one can never extract the

full measure; the work of the infinite task is never complete; the self is never fully rid of sin.

Just as Rousseau becomes caught up in the compulsion to repeat, to continually recite and

8 It is exceedingly appropriate to make mention of psychoanalysis within the context of Foucault’s notion of confession: it is his belief that therapy, from Freudian psychoanalysis to any of its modern-day manifestations, sprang from confession in its ritualized form of Christian penance. Psychoanalysis, a hybrid form, enables confession to stand up to modern investigation by combining it with the protocols of scientific ideology (The History of Sexuality (57-63, 129-131).

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rewrite his painful memories of abandoning his children, Stephen’s work of extraction is

endless. Following the demands of the Church to re-confess a past sin, Stephen “named it

with humility and shame and repented of it once more. It humiliated and shamed him to

think that he would never be freed from it wholly…A restless feeling of guilt would always

be present with him: he would confess and repent and be absolved, confess and repent again

and be absolved again, fruitlessly” (P 166). One is always guilty in the discourse of

confession, and no amount of initial catharsis can purge this sensation. This is the realization

that sets Stephen to dismiss not only the act of confession, but also the vocation of the

priesthood and the Church itself; “His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders”

(P 175).

It is worth interrupting our progress through Joyce’s text to stay with this idea

momentarily. The problem of the inefficacy of cathartic action through self-revelation

proves to be, both here and for Rousseau and Wilde, both a central promise of confession and

the point of its undoing. Relying on the claim that expression itself is that which modifies,

Stephen, Wilde and Rousseau alike turn to self-revelatory discourse to rid themselves of sin

and painful memories. But for all it promises, confession fails: it never fully extracts or

empties, there is a residue remaining. Be it residual guilt or anxiety that prods one into

repetition, a trace of that which was to be emptied out is always left behind. Our reading of

Wilde pointed to the analogous structure of Freudian psychoanalysis, wherein it is the

indelible memory-trace that remains to confound the possibility of a full abreaction. In this

trace lies the failure of confession; the trace that is left behind is evidence of the failure of

confession to perform the emptying out it promises.

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To return to Portrait, following this disappointment, Stephen is ostensibly through

with confession. And in the strict referentiality of the plot, he does indeed turn away from

the Church and the sacrament of confession. But Joyce insinuates that the ideology of the

confessional discourse is something from which Stephen is unable to fully extricate himself.

The compulsion to reveal himself, through discourse, has simply been transferred from its

literal setting of a religious rite to a less formal context. Specifically, the confessional

discourse has been transferred to his friendship with Cranly in the final sections of the text.9

Stephen’s intimacy with Cranly, the exchange of confidences that comes along with

friendship, becomes conceptualized in the terms of the rite of confession in Stephen’s mind.

Seeking him out in a crowd, Stephen sees Cranly’s head, and speculates on the similarity of

the priest’s position in the confession booth:

poised squarely above its bending fellows like the head of priest appealing

without humility to the tabernacle for the humble worshippers about him.

Why was it that when he thought of Cranly he could never raise before his

mind the entire image of his body but only the image of the head of the

face?…It was a priestlike face…and Stephen, remembering how swiftly he

had told Cranly of all the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after

day and night after night, only to be answered by his friend’s listening silence,

would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who heard

confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve… (P 192-193)

9 This dissemination of the procedures of confession is one which Foucault finds both unsurprising and without limit. He writes, “The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites…Western man has become a confessing animal” (59).

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Underwriting his claim to have distanced himself from the confessional act, Stephen

indicates here a re-enrollment in its procedures. But it is a moment of both trust and mistrust

in the convention. While Stephen thinks of Cranly, “inclining his ear like that of a

confessor” (P 246), as he to whom he must confide, he also doubts the efficacy of this

confidence. Cranly is “the guilty priest” without the “power to absolve.” Stephen can gain

only as much relief confessing his sins to Cranly as he could to the Church’s priest. Is the

telling alone, without any response or granting of exoneration, enough? The question is left

unanswered as Stephen’s dissatisfaction with his confessor grows: what can explain “his

friend’s [Cranly’s] listless silence, his harsh comments, the sudden intrusions of rude speech

with which he had shattered so often Stephen’s ardent wayward confessions?” (P 252).

Echoing his villanelle, Stephen grows weary with ardent ways and decides to end his

friendship with Cranly (P 267).

This climactic scene of breaking off from Cranly coincides with Stephen’s

embarkation upon the life of a writer. Stephen’s decision to leave Cranly behind is also his

decision to go away, to leave the place of his upbringing (P 267). But we are approaching a

space of inscrutability, wherein acts of expression and withholding become confused.

Stephen’s break with Cranly is the decision to discontinue the discourse and to be silent, but

it is also the moment where Stephen declares his intention to express himself, to write.

Stephen’s ambition is difficult to read:

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and

what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do.

This reads as a confessional moment. But Stephen continues:

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I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my

home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some

mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my

defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

The declaration of silence that is to be the break from Cranly refutes confession at the same

moment as it enforces the ritual—for Stephen continues talking:

—And you made me confess to you, Stephen said, thrilled by his

[Cranly’s] touch, as I have confessed to you so many other things, have I not?

—Yes, my child, Cranly said, still gaily.

—You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will also tell you what

I do not fear…I do no fear to be alone… (P 268-269)

The end of this conversation marks a break in the text. Following this break, a new form is

introduced: Stephen’s diary entries comprise the novel’s ending. What do we make of this

split, this shift in genre that is also a move from 3rd person to 1st person?

In one way, it reasserts the belief in the transformative powers of confession. In the

cyclical manner that forms the text, Stephen’s faith has been placed in confession, withdrawn

from it, and replaced there again a number of times over. From the Church to Cranly to the

blank page, Stephen’s confessor has shifted, and yet the fundamental need to reveal himself

through discourse has not been modified in his move to writing. The diary form carries

precisely the same confession of sins, fears, and desires that has transpired throughout the

text. In this way, one can read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a reinforcement of

the ideology of confession: it would seem that the creation, the “expression alone” (Foucault

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62), of a self-revelatory discourse is something Steven finds vital. But what becomes of

Stephen’s pledge to “silence, exile, and cunning?”

Our reading of the diary entries grows complicated. The end of the novel is set to be

the culmination of Stephen’s search for vocation and the climax of the Künstlerroman:

according to formal dictates, Stephen has apparently become an artist—more specifically, a

writer. But what does Stephen’s artistic production entail? What does he write? Are his

works excluded from the novel and outside of the reader’s grasp? Or can we read Stephen’s

writing in the text itself? A multiplicity of readings are made possible. The diary entries that

conclude the novel follow two significant marks: Stephen’s declaration of self-expression

and a break in the text. Can this break be read as an ellipsis, as an indication that Stephen’s

diary entries themselves are the product of his artistic mission, not only the writer’s text, but

the very artistic work? But one could also reposition the question of artistic production to a

later point in the novel, its close. Does the confessional discourse of the diary send us back

to the beginning of the novel, to read the text in its entirety as Stephen’s breakthrough

accomplishment, the novel as his own writing, as one reads Proust’s In Search of Lost

Time10? Both views continue to align Stephen’s conception of confession with the one

Foucault states has been inscribed upon us: as both readings insist on a brand of

autobiographical writing, Stephen continues to be locked in the self-revelatory discourse. To

read the diary and/or the novel itself as Stephen’s own writing is to see Stephen continue a

new transference of his insistent telling of the self.

10 Work in autobiography, such as that of Paul L Jay, frequently looks to both Portrait and In Search of Lost Time as either thinly veiled autobiographical pieces or as self-conscious perversions of the form. Jay writes, “…the tendency of the autobiographer in the modern period, seen most clearly in Proust’s A la recherché, and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist, [is] to acknowledge the inherent disjunction between the writing self and the subject of its text by fictionalizing the life” (“Being in the Text” MLN 1051). But this is a dangerous assumption. Here, we are reading Stephen’s potential act of self-portraiture. Joyce himself does not yet enter into the equation of autobiography.

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In this way, it is not important to privilege one reading instead of another. To return

to Cixous, we recall that her teaching is to leave the text open. While the title “raises the

question of the self-portrait of the artist, of the coming and going of the look, of the self, of

the mirror and the self in the mirror” (“Writing and the Law” 4), it does not resolve the issue.

Instead, the state of “permanent duplicity” (ibid.) is something that must be thought.

This is the duplicity of Stephen’s intention to “express himself…in life or art” (he

makes no clear distinction between the two), armed with “silence, exile, and cunning.” This

statement re-iterates the difficulty in marking Stephen’s artistic production. Not only are art

and life interchangeable, but, through “silence, exile, and cunning,” expression and

remaining hidden are coupled in such a way that one becomes inseparable from the other.

Stephen’s statement turns us back to our reading of Rousseau, where we found the desire “to

be absent and to write” (Derrida 142). Hiding and exile necessarily coincide with writing in

Stephen’s statement of intent, just as distance is the necessary correlate of Rousseau’s

project: estrangement functions in both of these texts as the law of writing. Following

Stephen’s declaration, he is, as Cixous elucidates, “ready for the painful but necessary exile

which must be his. Soon he will assume the ancient insignia of the scribe-god Thoth. The

long stay he makes after his revelation constitutes a detailed preparation of his soul for its

destiny of exile and writing” (448 The Exile of James Joyce).

Stephen’s growing realization through the text is the need for precisely this brand of

separation and distance in order to become a writer. Even the novel’s first mention of

Stephen-as-writer, in the second section of the novel, implies this demand: re-narrating his

own embarrassment at being mistaken for a girl, Stephen “chronicled with patience what he

saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret” (P 70). Inherent

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in this distance is the attempt at mastery through re-telling that Rousseau champions in his

Confessions: mortification is undone as Stephen experiences it “in secret”, distancing his

witnesses and therefore eliminating the cause of embarrassment.

But there is a difference between the aims of Rousseau and the aims of Stephen.

While Rousseau’s absence aims at reappropriation of presence (cf. p.15), there is something

more oblique and complicated in Stephen’s act of exile. It too is an attempt at recovery, but

one in which more appears to be at stake, wherein there is great danger locked into the bind

between exposure and remaining hidden. In Part IV of the text, as Stephen splits from the

possibility of a vocation in the Church, he realizes that “his destiny was to be elusive of

social or religious orders” (P 175). It is precisely these orders that pose a threat to his

selfhood and to his artistry. Stephen goes on, “He was destined to learn his own wisdom

apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the

world” (P 175). These are the snares that lead him to exile and cunning, and force him to

enact a tenuous and complex negotiation between expression and silence. Although in our

reading we came to realize an inherent duplicity in the aims of Rousseau, they are

unacknowledged as such in the text of the Confessions. Only in Joyce’s text does the self-

conscious deployment of cunning become central to the mission of self-expression.

Cixous says of Joyce’s writing that its message “centers on the necessity to the Artist

of duplicity” (Exile 566). As such, Portrait reveals in Stephen precisely this duplicity,

centered on the textual tools of irony and dissimulation. To begin this discussion, we return

to our reading of Stephen’s diary entries. As stated, one reading would posit these writings

as part of Stephen’s ongoing confessional discourse, another manifestation of his compulsion

to reveal himself. To view them as such, we note that the entries do take parts of Stephen’s

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mission statement into account—specifically, the need for exile. As Cixous comments, the

diary entries are the first indication of this hiding, and signify Stephen’s “exiled condition” of

“withdrawing into the depths of himself, into his own conscience with its turmoil of doubts,

of dreams whose meanings he is trying to find, of visions of reality whose hidden

significance he is studying” (473 Exile). But we need to stop to consider another reading,

one that would take into account the use of duplicity, irony, and dissimulation. This is also a

reading that would take another part of Stephen’s mission statement into account: Stephen’s

proposed use of cunning.

The reading opened up cannot accept Stephen’s diary entries at face value. Michael

Levenson comments, “It scarcely needs saying that this cunning technique violates one of the

most familiar assumptions about the diary form: that it aspires to a perfect transparency, that

it is indeed the sincere literary form par excellence” (194). How does the foreknowledge of

Stephen’s duplicity affect our reading of his diary? The reader is now forced to balance the

conventional reading, dictated by the diary form, of transparency or strict referentiality, with

a more cautious reading, informed by Stephen’s declaration—the reader must take into

consideration the complications created by cunning, deception, and artifice11. Levenson goes

on to state, “it is plain that his [Stephen’s] diary is a mocking and duplicitous thing” (194).

Following these suggestions, our grounding in the reading of the diary entries as a

continuation of Stephen’s compulsion to confess becomes unstable. Stephen’s supposed

sincerity is that which compelled us to read his diary entries as a continuation of the

confessional moments that pervade the text. But if these diary entries are a product of

11 For the modern critic, this sentence serves as an instruction for the reading of all autobiographical texts: Leigh Gilmore writes, “Because the subject of autobiography is a self-representation and not the autobiographer her/himself, most contemporary critics describe this ‘self’ as a fiction. When we locate the pressure to tell the truth in the context of the fictive self accountable for producing truth, the problematical alliance between fact and fiction in autobiography begins to emerge” (68).

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Stephen’s writerly artifice, the situation changes. Noting Stephen’s duplicity, we come to

question the status of the diary entries as confession. The thrust of the discussion returns us

to questions of ‘good-faith’ and ‘honesty’ that we have banished from the discussion, but

continue to insinuate themselves. To frame these issues within our present discussion, the

question becomes this: returning to Foucault’s definition of confession, what becomes of the

efficacy of confession if its status as truth discourse is challenged?

What we come to see through Stephen’s writing is a deception that does not fully

repudiate confession, but a writing that attempts, specifically through its self-proclaimed

inscrutability, to temper confession’s control over Stephen. While he will continue to make

himself the subject of his own discourse, he will script this discourse using a “defence” (P

269) of opacity and unreadability. The reader is not to know what to attribute to Stephen’s

sincerity and what to attribute to Stephen’s artifice. This is the way in which Stephen has

effectively balanced silence and expression. His negotiation of withholding and revelation—

expression using silence, exile, and cunning—serves as a response to the power-dynamics

present in Foucault’s notion of confession. More importantly, it directs us back to the realm

of confession wherein questions of sincerity and good-faith are not only unanswerable, but

rendered simply an inherent disjunction in the supposedly transparent form of confession.

Stephen is more self-conscious of cunning in his confessions than Rousseau and Wilde, but

cunning marks their texts all the same.

Let’s explore Stephen’s negotiation more fully. As we have stated, confession stages

a reversal in perceptions of repression and unrestraint. Foucault posits an “internal ruse”

within confession that states, “confession frees, but power reduces one to silence,” whereas it

is actually the production of the discourse that is “thoroughly imbued with relations of

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power” (59). The early confessional moments which, as we have shown, punctuate the text

are lodged at Stephen from outside sources. Here, his moments of telling—centered around

the imperatives apologize, admit, confess (Tindall 57)—are the forced responses to a demand

to reveal. Even in his relationship with Cranly, Stephen imagines his confessions as forced:

“You made me confess,” he says to Cranly (P 269). If the text can be read, as Farrell has

suggested, as a series of purgations (186), it is rather that something has been wrenched out

of Stephen than surrendered freely. But, as we reach the end of the text, Stephen seems able

to detect the use of confession as repressive, and attempts to confound his interlocutor

through the use of his three-fold deployment of defense. Nonetheless, Stephen has not been

able to fully evade the seductive promises of confession, and is still compelled to find a safe

mode of self-expression. It is thus when we reach Stephen’s last mode of confession—his

writing—that we find he is able to reposition himself within the discourse. Following his

artistic mission statement, this new brand of confession will allow him both to expose

himself and to remain hidden through the doubling of intention that is apparent in his

statement, which conflates both art and life and silence and expression. Writing becomes the

space in which Stephen attempts to juggle both perceptions of the power placement in

confession: he is able to reap the exonerating and modifying effects of the confessional

discourse without experiencing what he perceives as the danger of becoming enlisted in its

power structure.

Non serviam: I will not serve becomes Stephen’s proclamation of separating himself

from “home, fatherland, and church” (P 260, 268), or the authorities that he believes bind

him and attempt to make him subservient. But just as he is locked into the rhetoric of power

and in turn reconstitutes this structure by positing it as that which he must escape, Stephen is

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similarly locked into the mode of confession12. Although his use of silence, exile, and

cunning alter the readability of his confession, the compulsion to “express” himself “freely”

remains. Stephen has elaborated a rapport with the confessional demand, but the demand

remains; Stephen’s diary entries stand as yet another manifestation of confession in the text.

As Rousseau’s claims to the impossibility to continue confessing merely reinforced the glory

of the act (de Man writes that the structure is “exposure of the desire to expose, for each new

stage in the unveiling suggests a deeper shame, a greater impossibility to reveal, and a greater

satisfaction in outwitting this impossibility” (Excuses 286)), each of Stephen’s successive

bouts with disillusionment with confession eventually lead him back to confession, be it in a

more oblique form.

From the position of the reader, confession is becoming more and more complex and

difficult to interpret. In the text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, confession is

seen to arise from a duplicitous artist—which is to say, from the place of a subject that is not

unified. To reiterate, we define confession here as self-revelation or the disclosure of

personal information. If this arises from an unstable self, what is the value of the confession,

and how are we to read it? In the largest sense of confession that is available to us in this

context, we turn to a discussion of confession as a literary genre: as the chronologically-

ordered telling of a life despite the difficulties in revealing intimate information. This is the

notion of confession that defined Rousseau’s project. As such, there remains one more level

on which to discuss confession in Joyce’s Portrait, one more pulling back of our view of the 12 Cixous writes of the way in which these structures inscribe Joyce’s texts: “Joyce, as a Catholic, is never done with the law. His unconscious is completely taken into the Christian space of the fault.” To Joyce, there is no outside the space of law, nor therefore an outside to his conception of the power structure. “Instead of giving up the law, Joyce puts in place an enormous system of transgression. And there can be no transgression without law” (Writing and the Law 7). While Joyce puts in place transgressions to confession—silence, exile and cunning—and therefore attempts to evade and hide from power relations, these movements only serve to reinforce these systems. This is a reiteration of Foucault’s conception of power—the French pouvoir also translates to ‘enablement’—as not a transcendental, logocentric authority, but merely a differential system.

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confessional scene to confront: how do we reply to the numerous critics who declare the

novel itself a confession?

The simplest reading of this sort identifies the novel as Stephen’s confession. This

would entail the type of reading we earlier supposed, in which we take Stephen for a full-

fledged artist at the novel’s close, but turn back to the novel’s beginning to see a

demonstration of his artistry: here, Stephen is posited as the author of the test as a totality.

As the text itself therefore becomes self-revelatory or (fictionally) autobiographical, it is

Stephen’s confession. This is a type of reading proposed in the early writings of Cixous, who

describes Stephen in her work The Exile of James Joyce as self-observant and self-writing:

“Everything is seen by this subject [Stephen], but such is his feeling of alienation…that he

sees himself as ‘he’ rather than as ‘I’. It is not the subject who occupies the center of the

stage here, yet it is he who speaks…This foreignness of the ‘I’ with regard to himself is

marked…by the use of the third person” (438).

As Stephen becomes a writer, the take on confession becomes more complicated:

Stephen the author becomes conflated with Joyce the author, and the novel is read as Joyce’s

autobiography. This is the reading that has formed the core of the novel’s critical reception.

Joyce scholars such as Patrick Parrinder begin by marking Joyce’s dating of the text—

“Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914” (P 276)—and reading it as Joyce’s signature on the text.

Following the definition of autobiography penned by Philip Lejeune13, Parrinder uses this

entrance to conflate Stephen and Joyce, and to define Portrait as an “impersonal

autobiography,” written in the ten-year span “during which Joyce kept rigorously to Stephen

13 See Lejeune’s notion of the autobiographical pact in his On Autobiography: the idea is that the proper name on the titlepage, or the signature of the author at the text’s close, enacts a contract between the author and the reader that defines the manner in which the text as read—that is, autobiographically (3-30). Lejeune is a key figure in the drive to establish the poetics of autobiography as a stable genre.

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Dedalus’s program of silence exile and cunning” (71). Other critics go even further,

addressing Portrait as an autobiography that is neither impersonal nor ironic. Harry Levin,

one of the most famous early Joyceans, writes in his 1941 work James Joyce, “Except for the

thin incognito of its characters, the Portrait of the Artist is based on a literal transcript of the

first twenty years of Joyce’s life. If anything, it is more candid than other autobiographies”

(45). Here, confession and autobiography are used interchangeably. Parrinder backs off his

claim of impersonality in Joyce’s “autobiography”, and testifies, like Levin, to Joyce’s

scrupulosity in “sticking to the…facts of his own life” (Parrinder 72), and to the generic

conformity of Portrait to autobiography. Parrinder states,

His [Joyce’s] rewriting of the main events of his life is as nothing compared to

with the melodramatic inventions to be found in even the most ‘confessional’

of earlier novels. This is the main difference between Portrait and the

Bildungsromane and Künstlerromane (‘novels of education’ and ‘artist-hero’

novels) of the nineteenth century. The Portrait is less close to books like

Wilhelm Meister, David Copperfield, or Gissing’s New Grub Street than it is

to the genre of literary autobiography and memoirs. The pattern of destiny

which Stephen discovers in his own life suggests that one crucial source is the

tradition of spiritual apology or confession, from St. Augustine to Newman.

(72)

Another important Joycean, Hugh Kenner, points to St. Augustine’s Confessions as an

“important archetype” for Portrait (170), and in so doing, emphasizes the equation that takes

place in this criticism between autobiography and confession (This conflation serves to re-

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emphasize our definition of confession as self-revelatory discourse; in this sense, all

autobiography is confession.)

What is problematic about according to the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man the designation of being Joyce’s confession or autobiography is the way in which this

view transforms readings of the text. Evidenced in the novel’s critical reception, readings

seek out the veracity of Joyce’s accounts and attempt to verify his sincerity against known

facts of his life. What comes to the fore is a critical blindness wherein the text fails to be

seen as a novel, and instead becomes viewed as a truth claim. The language of critical

writing points to the degree to which critics have been interpellated into the confessional

discourse: it is as if they had been appointed to the position of confessional interlocutor, and

they set out to either exonerate or condemn. Critic Matthew Hodgart, for example, employs

the language of confession: pointing to a passage in Portrait that differs from facts in Joyce’s

life, writes, “At this point in his autobiography Joyce is lying” (60, emphasis mine). On

Stephen’s sexual adventures, Hodgart writes as if these events in the plot are a direct

disclosure of personal information on the part of James Joyce himself. Hodgart writes,

“Joyce did not mind confessing to his going with prostitutes at a tender age” (60, emphasis

mine). The problem is clear: in viewing the novel as Joyce’s confession, the reading gets

siphoned down into a mere determination of accuracy or dishonesty. This is a reading that

depends on strict referentially, on direct correspondence between the thing and its

representation—it depends on the notion that such a thing as flawless portraiture exists.

Moreover, it posits an author that seeks out transparency as his mode of writing. If there are

any discrepancies between the text and verifiable facts, we are directed to the writer’s

withholding, bad faith, dishonesty, or insincerity, as the source of his failures in attaining this

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transparency. Thus, we see that reading Portrait as Joyce’s confession is filled, to a surfeit,

with problematic assumptions.14 Here, we do not have sufficient space to explore all of the

issues that arise. Instead, we limit ourselves to a discussion of two central problems that link

writing and a confounding of the confessional nature of the novel: these are the issues of

sincerity and self-presence.

As stated, the reading of Portrait as Stephen’s confession/autobiography is defeated

by the fact that he specifically repudiates an aim of sincerity or straightforward referentiality

through his mission of cunning. Similarly, in addressing the novel as Joyce’s confession, we

cannot overlook the fact that Portrait is, in fact, a novel, employing tools of irony and

dissemblance that are inherent to a fictional narrative. It is my contention that the questions

that have arisen concerning the difficulty in separating out Joyce from Stephen, mirrored in

the text in the difficulty in construing the relationship between narrator and protagonist

(Wollaeger 15), point specifically to an impossibility of not only reading Portrait as a

confessional narrative, but to Joyce’s insistence that such a narrative is endlessly

complicated. The constant refutation of confession in the text—through Stephen’s boyhood

and schooldays, to his acts of penance in the Church, to his friendship with Cranly and even

to his opaque diary entries—is echoed again in the form of the text. Portrait is a novel that

thematizes the problems of confession through its plot and form, but it is not in turn a

confession in its own rite.

14These ‘problematic assumptions’ are taken to task by the many critics who, in aligning themselves with post-modern thought, spell out difficulties in the very basis of autobiography. Complications in signification and a refutation of a simple relationships of reference are key. Paul John Eakin, for example, writes of the problematic “fate of autobiography in the age of postructuralism, when deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis have exploded both the concepts of representation and of the self” (Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography 3).

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What the novel takes up is a debunking of confession’s essential claims of sincerity,

which we have addressed above, and self-presence. Immediately, we see a removal from the

strength of Rousseau’s claims to self-presence in his Confessions; the doctrine of exile that

Stephen elucidates seems to be matched by a move towards impersonality in the text.

Rousseau concedes to the preference of writing and remaining hidden (116), but this is a

renunciation only aimed at a more perfect mastery and reappropriation of presence (Derrida

143). More accurately, it is only a deferral: Rousseau is distant when he writes, but claims

for his writing, which he cites as a representation perfectly “true to nature” (17), a complete

self-proximity. In Portrait, on the other hand, we see Stephen Dedalus declare a distancing

of the author from his work, and the author’s removal from the text: “The artist, like the God

of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined

out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (P 233). There are two things to make

evident here: First, that the removal posited by Stephen is a testament to the author’s lack of

self-presence in the text. Second, that we need not attribute this statement to Joyce’s own

belief in order to see that it sets up lack of self-presence in the novel as a whole. Precisely

due to the fact that there is confusion surrounding who exactly speaks this phrase—although

most critics, falling into the trap of reading the novel as confession, do not hesitate to

interpret this statement as Joyce’s artistic aim—we see that there is an impossibility of

marking a presence of the author. As impersonality pervades the text, how can one possibly

read it as an act of confession?

Our reading of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows that confession is

confounded at every move within the text. While Joyce repeatedly sets up moments in which

Stephen places his faith in the confessional discourse, each moment is met with a failure of

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confession to perform what Stephen expects it to. These micro-scenes of the deriding of

confession within the text serve as a reading guide for the text as a totality: as such, they

comprise a cautionary instructive that advises against the critical urge to read the novel itself

as a confession. As Stephen manages a negotiation of the demand for revelation that

represses with the demand for expression that, in the wording of Foucault, liberates him, the

logic of Joyce’s text elaborates an obstruction to the policing gaze of the critic. By impeding

the readability of the novel by Joyce’s own absence from the text, the interlocutor of this

discursive text is robbed of his authority.

We need to examine this important contention systematically. As we have stated, the

critic that is interpellated into the discourse of confession sees Joyce’s signature on the text,

and in turn sees this as the mark of autobiographical truth discourse. This reader “becomes

the judge, the policing power in charge of verifying the authenticity of the signature and the

consistency of the signer’s behavior, the extent to which he respects or fails to honor the

contractual agreement he has signed….the reader’s attitude…is again one of transcendental

authority that allows him to pass judgment” (de Man “Autobiography as De-facement” 923).

But just as Stephen frustrates his confessor by the use of “silence, exile and cunning,” Joyce

upsets the ability of the reader to stabilize the text within the confines of the truth discourse

by absenting himself from the text. In Portrait, writing becomes the space in which the

author is fully effaced. Joyce insinuates himself into his novel, but denies the reader the

satisfaction of any guise of appearance. The absence of his proper name in the text and his

consequent use of the 3rd person stand alongside the seemingly autobiographical aspects of

his text: the effect is to create a space in which the reader is urged to seek recourse in the

extra-textual, but finds there only a false sense of security. This move is a deliberate one in

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the text: the confusing play between Stephen and Joyce as author and character, between

narrator and protagonist in the text, marks an impossibility in determining origin and source.

What Joyce points out is that there is no ultimate meaning to be ascribed to the text, but more

importantly, the text is a field inscribed by overdetermination and rhetorical uncertainty.

Writing is the space in which the author becomes fully effaced. One can see how

serious the implications are to the reader seeking out an affirmation of the confessional

discourse in the text. Roland Barthes writes in his famous essay “The Death of the Author:”

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile. To

give a text an author is to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.

Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the

important task of discovering the Author…beneath the work: when the Author

has been found, the text is ‘explained’ – victory to the critic. (147)

Barthes’s conception of the privileging of the critic in the “Author-God” mode of reading

mirrors the privileging of the reader as interlocutor and transcendental authority in de Man’s

conception of the traditional reading of autobiography. In both, the strict system of reference

ascribed to the text allows the reader to assume an ability to decipher the text totally: one has

only to compare the textual discourse to the extra-textual facts to which the account refers.

In confession, what this amounts to is a determination of the subject’s sincerity; in Barthes’s

notion, the critic unearths the Author’s message or intention. What we see in Joyce’s novel

is a direct refutation of this logic that matches up with Barthes’s ‘revolutionary’ movement in

reading: “In precisely this way literature…by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate

meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-

theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary” (147). Writing diffuses and

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exempts meaning; it becomes impossible to read Portrait as an act of confession not only due

to the artifice of writing, but also due to the tendency of writing to inaugurate the ‘death of

the author’. Joyce refuses to assert his own presence in the text, and in so doing, eludes the

critic who would simplify the reading of his text to a confessional discourse. What Portrait

thematizes, then, is precisely the infinite complications of confession and its multiplicity; and

what it accomplishes is a negotiation—the text motions to the act of confession only in order

to continually turn the reader away from it, and to make him more savvy to its deceptions.

Conclusion

Through our reading of these three diverse confessional texts, we have come to

realize that the logic of confessional narrative is comprised of a series of promises that

consistently fail to be fulfilled. The confessional narrative neither provides for the writer

sense of self-presence nor grants the reader the ability to gain access to the proverbial

authorial presence through the language of the text. The failure of confessional promises is

contained within a the linguistic predicament that is comprised of a constant deferral of

meaning, composed of a system of signs that only pronounce the absence of the referent they

attempt to stand in for. Representation does not confirm the “plentitude of the represented

entity,” but is rather an “an ambivalent process that implies the absence of what is being

made present again” (de Man “Rhetoric of Blindness” 123). This absence is not merely

contingent, but enacted by the very move to language that attempts to restore presence.

And yet the fact that confession has allowed us access to this law of language, which

would otherwise remain hidden and difficult to grasp, speak volumes for our examination of

confession. The questions that have been opened in our reading of confessional narratives

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unmask the most central assumptions of the workings of language as mimesis, imitation, and

representation. Confession contains the same motion of the calling for and the pulling away

of presence that language, the system of signification par excellence, necessarily enacts.

Derrida writes that the act of self-revelation, a central manifestation of the compulsion to

confess, calls for this play of presence and absence: “every autobiography is the

departure/return of a fort/da” (“To speculate—on ‘Freud’” 550). One both recalls to himself

a memory and pushes it away in the motion of distancing that will grant him mastery; one

calls for total presence within a confessional text that will serve to deprive him of the very

unity which he demands.

Our recourse to critics such as Derrida, de Man, Cixous, Foucault, and Barthes has

allowed us to assess the confessional narrative without falling into the familiar critical

blindness of becoming interpellated into the discourse of confession. By avoiding questions

of sincerity, authenticity, and good faith, we have gained access to the central problem of

confessional narrative of the absence of the author from his text.

As a suggestion for a further direction in which to pursue the study of the

confessional narrative, I would like to offer up some examples of contemporary narratives

written with the discussions we have arrived at in mind. I am thinking specifically of Lydia

Davis’s novel The End of the Story (1995) and Roland Barthes’s deconstructive

autobiography entitled Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975). Both are acts of

confession wrought with the utmost self-consciousness, if we can still use the term; the mode

of writing is as central a theme as the relation of the past. These two writers take as their

central assumption in their gesture of writing confession’s inability to vouchsafe presence.

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Lydia Davis’s novel centers on the inability of self-revelation to both provide closure

and to reanimate a lost sense of self-possession. The action of writing in this text is an

acknowledgement that autobiographical writing dos not reveal reliable self-knowledge, but

rather “demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is

the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological

substitutions” (de Man “Autobiography as De-facement” 922). The unnamed narrator in

Davis’s text, describing the dissolution of a love affair and its after-effects, seeks to find a

sense of closure to this affair as she simultaneously attempts to close her text. The act of

writing is self-consciously described in tandem with the writing that is produced. Davis

seeks to debunk the notion that chronological, retrospective narrative is, as “the supremely

temporal form,” ideally “suited on the grounds of verisimilitude to the task of representing

our lives in time” (Eaking How Our Lives Become Stories 100). Davis’s text not only

disrupts chronology, but challenges the teleology narrative imposes upon experience as

something artificial. Writing a narrative of a life does not represent it, but modifies it. The

narrator comments, “I see that I’m shifting the truth around a little, at certain points

accidentally, but at others deliberately. I am rearranging what actually happened so that it is

not only less confusing and more believable, but also more acceptable or palatable” (106).

Davis’s novel also deals, in her beautiful prose, with questions of memory, nostalgia,

and forgetting that challenge the ability to represent that past with perfect accuracy (a claim

made in the last three texts we examined). The narrator states, “What I remember may be

wrong. I have been trying to tell the story as accurately as I can, but I may be mistaken about

some of it, and I know I have left things out and added things, both deliberately and

accidentally. In fact…many parts of the story are wrong, not only the facts, but also my

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interpretations” (228). If the subject confessing cannot accurately read the past, how can she

in turn convey the past accurately in her writing to a second reader? The narrator’s

exploration of the past and her attempt to reanimate it through writing (if only in an attempt

to end it) describes the action of confession as one of “nostalgia for the past, nostalgia for the

past ‘self,’ and nostalgia for a more authentic narrative mode with which to present both”

(Jay 1057). The narrator attempts to make sense of a love affair that has ended, attempts to

make it present in order to master it and understand it more clearly (23). But a dispossession

of the past necessarily encroaches: the absence of the narrator’s love object cannot be

restored through retrospective reflection, the unity that the narrator felt in his presence is

unrecoverable. Jay writes of this inability of the confessing subject to remedy this nostalgia

in writing of a more unified past self: “narrative about his the past is a necessary kind of

construction. But the belatedness he experiences as he constructs it always puts just out of

reach its ability to help him achieve the kind of recovery he seeks” (1059).

This belatedness is the mark of retrospective to representation; and it is precisely this

mode of “tropological substitution” which de Man cites as the mark of “impossibility of

closure and of totalization” (de Man “Autobiography as De-facement” 922) within a text

founded on these substitutions. To end her story, Davis’s narrator just write of the

impossibility to close her text. “…since all along there had been too many ends to the story,

and since they did not end anything, but only continued something, something not formed

into any story, I needed an act of ceremony to end the story” (231).

While Davis’s novel acknowledges a splitting of the self contained within the notion

of nostalgia, Rolands Barthes’s text Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes15 banishes even this

notion of splitting as something too simple. He writes, “when we speak today of the divided 15 We will designate this text as RB from this point onward.

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subject, it is never to acknowledge his simple contradictions, his double postulations, etc.; it

is a diffraction which is intended, a dispersion of energy in which there remains neither a

central core nor a structure of meaning: I am not contradictory, I am dispersed” (RB 143).

Barthes uses formal markers in his text to suggest the impossibility of defining a unified

subject (“Do I not know,” he questions, “that, in the field of the subject, there is no referent?”

(RB 56)). Barthes, like Davis, marks the splitting of the subject and disavows chronology by

writing in short, disjunctive fragments, but he goes even further by disavowing a narrative

altogether. Arranged in alphabetical order by title in order to endow them with an order that

is just as arbitrary as the imposition of a chronological teleology, the fragments give the

feeling of random placement within the text. Barthes directly challenges notions of “ ‘truth,’

‘reality,’ ‘sincerity’” (RB 67) in writing. Moreover, he mobilizes an attack against

confession that attests to the revolutionary reading our discussion ultimately allowed, but

these questions become his starting point. Barthes writes:

This book is not a book of ‘confessions’; not that it is insincere, but because

we have a different knowledge today than we had yesterday; such knowledge

can be summarized as follows: the more ‘sincere’ I am, the more interpretable

I am, under the eye of other examples than those of the old authors, who

believed they were required to submit themselves but to one law:

authenticity…What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my

present some advantage over my past? What ‘grace’ might have enlightened

me? (RB 120-121)

Barthes is unwilling to accept many of the notions that the confessional discourse holds dear;

the very notions that give it the promise of efficacy. But I think it is important to note that

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Barthes nevertheless turns to self-revelatory writing. While he, along with Davis, writes

from a position in which the broken promises of the confessional discourse are only too clear,

nonetheless is called to write a confessional narrative.

We arrive again at the question of urgency inherent in confession. Despite their

repeated plaints that the confessional narrative fails to perform the promises it assert, these

two writers nonetheless are driven by the compulsion to compose confessional writing. In

the larger view, although the poetics of confession entail the disavowal of self-presence and

the inefficacy of language to attain perfect reference, the impulse to confess seems to hold

sway. Despite the chain of broken promises that the confessional narrative leaves in its

wake, the urgency of confession and the gesture of inscription reinforce the attraction that

draws us toward confessional mythology. The illusory promise confession holds in front of

us proves to be greater compelling force than even the knowledge that the promises of

confessional narrative will prove to be withdrawn at the moment of our approach, at the

moment of our approach to grasp them.

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