Joyce's Misbelief

Foreword

Foreword Joyce was not a good Catholic: this we knew. But now we have the data to back it up. What Roy Gottfried has done quite marvelously is demonstrate the precise nature of Joyce’s rebellion against religious authority. Non serviam now has a fuller context: by reading Joyce against the Catholic doctrine of his time and through the versions of biblical texts that he chose both to use and to ignore, we now understand in particular terms the ways that Joyce distanced himself from the church. In a brilliant move, Gottfried measures Joyce’s schismatic resistance against the Catholic Encyclopedia—prepared and serially published between 1905 and 1914 and spanning the period of Joyce’s own catechism and education—to gauge his rhetoric against the doctrines he would have actually heard. Joyce’s Misbelief takes its lead from Gottfried’s earlier prize-winning work on Joyce’s language. In Joyce’s Iritis and the Irritated Text, language is looked at from a slanted angle; here it is religion, and religious doctrine. Gottfried’s approach is always to begin at the base level of text, and there are wonderful discourses here on the meanings of “gnomon,” which is connected to narrare (to narrate), epicleti (given its Eucharistic sense of a summons or an initiation), and other cruxes in Joycean scholarship. The analysis of Joycean wordplay in this book is tremendous throughout. Above all, Gottfried is an illuminator of text. His explanations of the distinctions between the Douay (Catholic) Bible and the King James (Anglican) Version are fascinating, and his dagger definitions of transubstantiation and consubstantiation are extraordinarily useful to anyone who, like me, still hasn’t quite figured out the difference. Gottfried is good on all the heresies in the catalog; by situating Joyce within the heretical margins, he shows Joyce’s abiding contempt for all forms of authority. Joyce is drawn to schism not just as a condition of questioning the church; the attractions of the Protestant Mass and the Authorized Version of the Bible are, as Gottfried shows, aesthetic. In the Protestant Mass the elements are metaphorical: the “is” of “This is my body” is not real, but figurative. (It is strangely comforting to know that, four centuries before the impeachment trial of President Clinton, there were public debates on the definition of the word “is.”) Joyce’s challenges to Catholic doctrine allow him, says Gottfried, to find “the form and figure of his art”; further, in Protestantism Joyce found an opportunity “to express more freely and openly transgressive and liberating ideas about sexuality, economics, and culture.” Gottfried’s close readings of “The Sisters,” Stephen’s sections of Ulysses, and the fable of “The Mookse and the Gripes” are revelatory: Finnegans Wake becomes the heretical act, the final assault on the authority of language, that Joyce was born to write. Heresy comes from the Greek word for choice (αίρεσιϚ). Joyce’s choices, after reading Joyce’s Misbelief, are never so clear. Sebastian D. G. Knowles Series editor  / Foreword ...