Faubourg Saint Patrice - ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

Catholic Church and Irish nationalism. Foucault describes such a process of discovering
power relations in his essay, "The Subject and Power":
I would like to suggest another way to go further towards a new
economy of power relations. . . It consists of taking the forms of
resistance against the different forms of power as a starting point. To use
another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical
catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find
out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than
analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it
consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of
strategies. (210-1)
Writing Ulysses sixty years previous, Joyce applied this method in reflecting the
dominant influences of his homeland: Stephen is Joyce's "chemical catalyst," the
religious deviant who, through his apostasy and subsequent guilt, "brings to light" and
reveals the "application [of] and methods used" by the Catholic Church to control its
practitioners.
When Stephen Dedalus is reintroduced in Ulysses, he appears to have undergone
significant changes in both attitude and personality from those he displayed at the
conclusion of A Portrait. As he relates in "Scylla and Charybdis": "As we, or mother
Dana, weave and unweave our bodies . . . from day to day, their molecules shuttled to
and from, so does the artist weave and unweave his image" (9.376-8). Likewise,
Stephen is no longer the egotistical, self-ordained poet-priest who embarks on his self-
made quest to forge the "uncreated conscience of [his] race," rejecting family, friends,
and faith. In Ulysses, Stephen appears deeply troubled over his mother's death, his
alienation from friends and family, his position as an aspiring but frustrated artist within
Dublin culture, and his dissatisfying work as a teacher in Dalkey. Underlying these
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