Letters

Sir:

“The question,” writes Geert Lernout in JJQ 54.3–4 (Spring–Summer 2017), 434–36, “is not whether we can read Joyce as a Catholic or as someone of religious faith. Of course, we can; this book is a good example. The real point is a moral one: we ought not to do so.” By “this book” Lernout refers, unfortunately, to my own Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)—a study which, for all its lesser sins, is plainly innocent of the grave error Lernout imputes to it. His remarks nonetheless have the virtue of reanimating certain well-worn academic questions, including the extent to which an author’s biography “ought” to determine or (at the other extreme) to foreclose avenues of scholarly inquiry and literary criticism.

Joyce was an atheist, of course. But this biographical datum hardly tells the full story of his pervasive and unceasing negotiation of religious materials throughout his oeuvre. Nor is it a point worth belaboring, given that Lernout has already rehearsed it so exhaustively in Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (New York: Continuum, 2010). For my own project, I was more interested in exploring Joyce’s status as the blasphemous modernist par excellence, a writer whose aesthetic practice of “sacreligion” provides an exemplary template for the literary irreverence of other modernist authors: a diverse group of poets and novelists whose uses of religion, profane and otherwise, have to date received far less attention than Joyce’s have (FW 365.03–04). So concerned is Lernout to protect Joyce’s atheism from all real or imagined threats that he neglects entirely to address this core function of Joyce’s work within my overarching argument or even to mention any of these other authors—including Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and a number of Harlem Renaissance writers—who collectively occupy the bulk of Blasphemous Modernism.

One person Lernout does mention, repeatedly, is Slavoj Žižek, whom I cite exactly once in the book. I certainly do not claim that Joyce, Loy, Barnes, et al. subscribed to a “Žižekian non-denominational ‘religious faith’ (without God, scripture, or church),” as Lernout puts it. He is the first reviewer to understand Blasphemous Modernism’s argument in this way; that he does can perhaps be attributed to a statement in my introduction which he quotes and, I daresay, misreads. In the offending sentence, I venture that meaningfully blasphemous art requires “a respect and even reverence, not for God, or scripture, or the church, but for religious faith itself and its enduring cultural sway.” “Surely,” Lernout marvels, “a religious faith without God, scripture, or church . . . is a particularly late-post-modernist notion that modernist writers would not recognize?” Perhaps, but I do not ascribe such a faith to any of the writers discussed at length in Blasphemous Modernism—almost none of whom was personally religious. (One exception: Mina Loy, Christian Scientist.) My point, rather, was that any blasphemy worth the name requires a tacit acknowledgment of religion’s abiding power, “of the sanctity that still adheres to its institutions, sacraments, and scriptures.” I was talking about religious faith(s) in God, complete with church, scripture, and all the rest—not “without” them. These are precisely what the seriously irreverent writer profanes, reimagines, and makes new.

The other inaccuracies Lernout finds in my book are enumerated as follows: “Photius I of Constantinople, Arius, and Sabellius were not Catholic heretics; there is no single Protestantism; and Queen Victoria is not ‘facetiously’ celebrated as a ‘defender of the faith’—that was and is the official title of the reigning monarch.” Yet Lernout’s own Help My Unbelief notes that “Photius was a heretic, from the point of view of the catholic church”; that Sabellius was “a heretic according to orthodox thinkers”; and that “the case of Arius as heretical is the clearest: in a way he became the church’s arch-heretic.” (Surely “the point of view of the Catholic Church,” and that of “orthodox thinkers,” must count for something in the identification of “Catholic heretics”?) As for his other objections, I do not recall advocating for...