Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company

Introduction

Introduction All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine. James Joyce, in a letter to Lady Augusta Gregory, November 22, 1902 For A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul, and in the metaphor Joyce found his new principle of order. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce In this brief-case I placed the written symbols of the languid lights which occasionally flashed across my soul. The total weight is estimated to be Kg. 4.78. Having urgent need of these notes in order to complete my literary work entitled Ulysses or your bitch of a mother I address myself courteously to you, honoured colleague. James Joyce in a letter to Italo Svevo [Ettore Schmitz], January 5, 1921 “The Sisters,” Joyce’s first significant work of published fiction, features a motherless young boy preoccupied by the death of an old Irish priest. The remembered words of this minister of God’s one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church usurp the boy’s psychic space, arousing sensations of fear and loathing as well as release and longing. The boy overhears old Cotter, a family friend, insist that “there was something uncanny about” Father Flynn, who, according to the boy’s uncle, had taught the boy “a great deal” (D, 10), presumably about the Catholic faith. This observation prompts old Cotter’s remark, “I wouldn’t like children of mine . . . to have too much to say to a man like that” (D, 10). The story incorporates elements of the Catholic nostalgia—the obsessive urge to return to a, paradoxically, dead but mysteriously vital and intellectually challenging body of Catholic dogma and ritual—pervading Joyce’s works. That nostalgia, I contend, derives from the “faith in the soul” Joyce owns early in his career in the letter to Lady Gregory quoted above and accounts for his decision to make “the gestation of a soul” the principle of order for Portrait. 2 Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company The “languid lights which occasionally flashed across [his] soul,” during the 1920s, ultimately encroaching on his “literary work entitled Ulysses or your bitch of a mother” also owe their glamour to Joyce’s memories of his Catholic indoctrination. The “light(s)” Joyce associates with the soul in the first and third quotations suggest that property of nostalgia thought to clarify one’s sense of self. Furthermore, his association of Ulysses, and “your bitch of a mother” with lights flashing across his soul incorporates all the elements of the Catholic nostalgia considered in the following pages. Joyce’s fiction, his mother, his perception of himself as an intellectual, and his Catholic soul are of a piece because they were thoroughly enmeshed in the Catholic crisis in modernism that lasted from the early nineteenth century until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The soul, as evidenced in the quotation from Joyce’s letter to Lady Gregory, might be considered the desired, privileged, stable sign (though its referent is decidedly unstable) in Joyce’s otherwise decentered universe. At the age of eighteen Joyce completed his first literary work, a play titled A Brilliant Career . Though the work is no longer extant, we are told by William Archer, the dedication read: “To My own Soul / I dedicate the first / true work of my / life.” Ellmann observes “it was the only work that he was ever to dedicate to anyone” (JJ II, 78). Yet, Joyce dedicated the work (whose title seems predictive of his own future) not to just “anyone.” Rather, even over the objections of his brother Stanislaus, who found the dedication “too flamboyant” (BK, 118), Joyce purposefully dedicated it to his own soul, an entity in which he consistently believed. Stephen Dedalus explains to his friend Davin in Portrait, “when the soul of a man is born [in Ireland] there are nets flung out at it to hold it back from flight.” In Ulysses, apparently deriving his definition from Saint Thomas Aquinas, Stephen finds the soul to be “in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms” (U, 2.75– 76). Later (adhering more closely to Giordano Bruno’s notion of a universal soul), during the Dionysian “All Sorts Jour” celebration in...