Joyce's Misbelief

Notes

Notes Chapter 1. Joyce’s Misbelief 1. On this necessary paradox that Joyce employed, Steven John Morrison remarks “the relationship between heresy and orthodoxy as a primary means of avoiding alignment with either side of the polarity of assent and dissent and of profiting from this evasion” (thesis abstract). To deny the one thing, however, is to become the other, defining oneself precisely by this counterstance. By contrast, the argument about misbelief in this study claims that Joyce chooses sides and that he comes down per contra. The dialectic space Morrison claims Joyce finds lies not in his embrace of both but rather in the embrace of schism, because there Joyce can find an opening which allows freedom. Morrison’s dissertation, as yet unpublished, is noteworthy for its close analysis of currents of dissent in the Catholic Church of Joyce’s youth and for its treatment of actual heresiarchs Joyce mentions; while Morrison notes the spaces opened to choice by Joyce’s evasions, he does not pursue the effect for Joyce of these opened schismatic spaces on the works themselves, focusing rather on the heresies proper. 2. See the entry on “Orthodoxy,” 9:330. (The Catholic Encyclopedia is hereafter cited as CE, with volume and page number given. As this work is also available online, the subject heading will also be indicated.) This work brings together several issues that allow for the measure of Joyce’s schismatic resistance. Foremost, bearing the imprimatur of the Roman Church hierarchy, the Encyclopedia is certified to be dogma. Begun in 1905 and published serially between 1907 and 1914, its years of compilation and publication span Joyce’s period of catechism and education and provide the doctrines he would have heard and resisted. The Encyclopedia’s prefatory claim to present the work “of the foremost Catholic scholars in every part of the world,” v, speaks to the church’s claim to universality that Joyce found so stifling; its claim to provide “proper answers to the questions” not available hitherto in English speaks to Joyce’s own stubborn use of English as his contrarian stance. Most particularly, the boast that “in all things the object of the Encyclopedia is to give the whole truth without prejudice, national, political or factional,” vi, is precisely the pride of asserting ultimate power and knowledge that Joyce would neither believe nor accept and which he would challenge at each point with his studied misbelief. 3. Deharbe Catechism, 144. As a measure of the doctrine taught to Joyce and all Catholics in the late nineteenth century, several catechisms in addition to the Deharbe (1912) will be cited in this study: the Maynooth Catechism of the Council of Trent (1829; see Donovan) and the Butler (1887). 4. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that “it is clear that the Vatican Council introduced no new doctrine when it defined the infallibility of the pope, but merely re- asserted what had been implicitly admitted and acted upon from the beginning and had even been explicitly proclaimed and in equivalent terms by more than one of the early ecumenical councils.” See “Infallibility,” 7:798. 5. See The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 1:4. 6. Pelikan notes that “the most important heresies of the early church were those that have been grouped under the name [Gnosticism],” 1:81. 7. My Brother’s Keeper, 108. 8. Ellmann, James Joyce 435. 9. Ibid., 565. 10. Ibid., 596. Chapter 2.“A Ripping Good Joke”: The Attractions of Schism 1. Fargnoli notes in Catholic Moments that for the play to be “performed in the chapel . . . the Blessed Sacrament had to be removed from the tabernacle” and that such a removal “becomes emblematic of the role of art in Joyce’s aesthetics,” 5. 2. Butler’s Catechism notes that the faithful are “Obliged in conscience and justice to the support of . . . pastors,” 42, and not to so oblige entails pain and sin, adducing as support the quotation from Matthew 18. 3. Compare Burrus, 357, on orthodoxy and heresy as “simultaneously revealed and reveiled through . . . textuality.” 4. On the figure of Newman in Joyce, see Schwarze, 52–56. Schwarze’s insightful reading of Stephen’s (and Joyce’s) resistance to church hegemony finds its dynamic first in Romantic freedom and then in realistic accuracy. My argument is that Joyce’s resistance, while it certainly includes the elements Schwarze notes, is located within the very structures of orthodoxy by a rupture from it. 5. My Brother’s Keeper, 68; see also Kevin Sullivan, Joyce...