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2. Dogsbody “Marys” His Mother
- University Press of Florida
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2 Dogsbody “Marys” His Mother Dear Mother I am sick. I want to go home. Please come and take me home. I am in the infirmary. Your fond son, Stephen Stephen Dedalus in Clongowes, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Mircea Eliade calls “Nostalgia for Paradise,” a “something in the human condition [prompting] in man the desire to find himself always, and without effort, at the centre of the world” (quoted in Sister Sylvia Mary, 9). In her 1966 study of world mythologies, which takes its title, Nostalgia for Paradise, from Eliade’s coinage, Sister Sylvia Mary C.S.M.V. demonstrates “how in Christ all these deeper yearnings have found fulfillment” (10). In effect, Sister Sylvia Mary locates the key to all mythologies in Catholic dogma. For her, both the hope and possibility of recovering a stable center or home becomes inextricably enmeshed in the church’s teachings in spite of ubiquitous evidence indicating the radical instability and diversity of existence. A similar urge and entanglement in Catholicism are characteristic of all the writers I discuss in this study. Furthermore, the stable center they seek is best realized in the doctrine of the immortal soul. As John J. McGraw puts it in Brain and Belief: An Exploration of the Human Soul, “with the entrenchment of Christianity into the Western tradition, the notion of the immortal soul became more than theory, more than philosophy, it became dogma . . . terra firma” (85). Similarly, in Imagining the Soul, Rosalie Osmond observes that “the reunion of the soul with the body is . . . an idea that is unique to Christianity and closely related religions” (189). Osmond explains: “This changeless soul provides us with a sense of permanent identity [which religions like Christianity] extend . . . beyond the present life. The soul is the 56 Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company part of us that not only remains the same here and now, but survives death and guarantees us immortality” (vi). In the Christian tradition, moreover, the soul is frequently associated with the Augustinian variety of nostalgia that holds that the soul longs to return to the contemplation of the eternal Being (see Chapelle, 101). In Portrait, Father Arnall (paraphrasing Aquinas) expresses the concept as follows: “At the very instant of death the bonds of the flesh are broken asunder and the soul at once flies towards God. The soul tends towards God as towards the centre of her existence. Remember, my dear little boys, our souls long to be with God” (P, 128). Arnall’s use of the feminine pronoun is instructive since, in Catholic lore, and consequently in Joyce’s oeuvre, the soul is associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary and her womb, about which I will have much more to say in the following pages. In linking the mother’s womb to the nostalgic experience of the individual soul or psyche, however, the church was not alone. For example, in “The Uncanny,” an essay devoted largely to justifying the theory of the castration complex, Freud concludes with this extraordinary observation: It often happens that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the female genitals. But what they find uncanny [unhomely ] is actually the entrance to man’s old “home,” the place where everyone once lived. A jocular saying has it that “love is a longing for home,” and if someone dreams of a certain place [thinking] to himself, “I know this place, I’ve been here before,” this place can be interpreted as representing the mother’s genitals or her womb. Here too, then, the uncanny [the “unhomely”] is what was once familiar [“homely,” “homey”]. The negative prefix un- is the indicator of repression. (151) Freud implies the womb is the quintessential object of nostalgic desire, the irretrievably lost paradise not only for neurotic men, but for everyone. Not unlike the Catholic Church, however, Freud seems to incorporate the mother in his predominantly masculinist theory only as an afterthought or supplement , albeit as an addendum involving a significant paradigm shift from the male’s fear of castration to his desire for the comforts of the mother’s womb. In developing my argument about Joyce’s Catholic nostalgia, I will consider more extensively how this pattern of apparently valorizing while actually usurping the womb might be perceived in Joyce’s works and those of writers similarly inspired. Recent studies of nostalgia reach various conclusions about its causes and effects. In one, it is “an important vehicle for developing, maintaining...