Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company (review)

Was Joyce a Catholic? Did he believe in God or in any meta-physical system compatible with orthodox Catholicism? It is surprisingly difficult to give firm answers to these questions. Indeed, dispute about such basic issues seems to have stymied rather than stimulated critical investigation of religion in Joyce. Although now a more frequently addressed topic, one might have expected some livelier new treatments of it than we have had to date. After all, modern secularism has yet to deliver a world free from religion or religious conflict. Religion is still bound up with key cultural and political issues, including inter-communal violence and the resistance to imperialism.

In such a context, Mary Lowe-Evans’s engaging and original study of what she refers to as Joyce’s “Catholic nostalgia” is a welcome indication that new kinds of critical engagement with the question of Joyce and religion are on their way. Similarly, her earlier book, Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control, represented a remark-able anticipation of some of the concerns of postcolonial criticism of Joyce.¹ Crimes Against Fecundity investigated the impact of the Great Famine on Joyce’s culture and his writing. Given the lack of any explicit or extended treatment by Joyce of the Famine in his works, this was a bold, counterintuitive, and highly productive move. Here, Lowe-Evans looks for evidence of Joyce’s imaginative involvement not (as we might usually assume) with the more liberal or “modernist” strands of Catholicism but with the dogmas and rituals promoted by the “anti-modernist” Vatican in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century (“modernist” being the church’s own label for its perceived enemies). She examines Joyce’s influence as the seminal figure for a century of Catholic writing in the United States, rather than, for example, the model for generations of dissident Irish artists protesting in the routine way against a repressive institution. She analyzes the significance of Joyce for such Irish-American Catholic writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Flannery O’Connor and suggests that Joyce contributed to the conversion of the best-selling American Catholic writer, Thomas Merton—and that reading Joyce also played a role in bringing Hugh Kenner into the Catholic fold (6). So the book deals not only with what Catholicism did for Joyce, in providing him with an education in Catholic theology and philosophy that he later appropriated for his own brand of heretic aestheticism, but also explores what he did for Catholicism, through his ambiguous but powerful representations of Catholic practices and sensibilities.

This argument will not convince everyone. Geert Lernout has recently commented that “despite all the attempts over the years to salvage Joyce for the True Church, for Christianity or for any other creed, it is difficult to find unmistakable movements towards reconciliation with any form of religion, either in his work or in his life.”² Lernout insists that Joyce never withdrew the declaration of open war on the church he had announced in an early letter to Nora Barnacle (332, LettersII 48). He also objects to liberal Catholic appropriators of Joyce, such as J. Mitchell Morse, who suggest that the author stood in an occluded tradition of individualistic Catholic thinkers and who, like Robert Boyle, claim that Joyce grew increasingly tolerant of Catholic attitudes as he matured (333).³ Boyle argues that Joyce ultimately embraces an “epiphanic vision” that was not fundamentally at odds with Catholicism (xi). Lowe-Evans also disagrees with these critics. But, in contrast to Lernout, she judges that they are misguided in their commitment to a liberal Catholic Joyce. Any such view of Joyce is undermined by his great interest in Thomas Aquinas, the key intellectual figure for conservative Catholicism in this period; and while, in Lowe-Evans’s opinion, Boyle finds Joyce’s “epiphanic vision” to be “liberating and salutary,” she argues that it would be equally accurate to describe it as “enthralling and addictive” (9). Despite her familiarity with Joyce...