Joyce's Misbelief

5. Schism as Politics

5 Schism as Politics Along with the artistic possibilities of schism for Joyce, there could be dividends in the sphere of political action. Through schism, Joyce could resist certain powers in a way that provided freedom of choice in contexts other than the production of art. Eschewing loyalty to the church of his youth and resisting the claims of a nationalism allied with it, he also had no wish to enlist wholeheartedly in the ranks of Britain’s global empire. True to his rebellious nature, he would turn against supporting such secular, political powers as Britain. While his alignment with English culture through the Authorized Version and the Anglican prayer book had its uses, it also had its limits. He wanted to be Irish, but Irish free from Britain and Rome and all petty sectarianism. In order to continue resisting the hegemony of the church and its claims to universal power, he sought out schismatic gestures and events that could be regarded as local and native expressions. This kind of resistance would be achieved by Joyce’s seeing rents and tears in church history as opportunities for making choices that involved action and national identity. He would use his misbelief to assert a brand of national identity that would be a model for the Ireland he sought to express through his apostasy. In “Scylla” Stephen names three very unlikely associated figures who have mocked a strongly held point of orthodoxy—the notion of divine relation or “the son consubstantial with the Father”: “Photius, pseudo Malachi, Johann Most” (9.492). Stephen emphasizes the figures here, rather than the ideas they represent. They form an enigmatic Trinity containing in its persons a religious figure, a nonce figure apparently religious (and referring to the character Mulligan ), and a secular, political figure. Photius we will consider more closely below. As far as Mulligan is concerned, Joyce knew that mockery could be heresy, as demonstrated by Mulligan’s parodic Mass in “Telemachus” and the imagined Black Mass in “Circe.” Yet not all heresy is made by mockery. There was for Joyce considerably more at stake in heresy than easy humor: there was freedom, artistic choice, and serious political ends. In his discussion of Johann Most, the one figure in the triad who is political rather than literary or religious, Manganiello describes an anarchist “who attacked the Church and the notion of God” in a written parody of the Apostle’s Creed. Joyce echoed Schism as Politics / 103 this parody in “Cyclops”: “they believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell on earth, and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun” (12.1354).1 This parody, itself a “ripping good joke,” takes a statement of belief and aligns it ironically with the powers of the state, especially the naval power of the British Empire, in a combination that prefigures the possibilities of schism. More seriously, Johann Most wrote The Science of Revolutionary Warfare (and was a model for the anarchist Hoffendahl in Henry James’ political novel, The Princess Cassamassima ). Manganiello contends that Stephen’s insertion of Most into this discussion constitutes an attack on a society in which evangelists are more important than politicians, where religion leads people away from an engagement with politics.2 For Manganiello, religion somehow inadequately supersedes politics, and he can only read Stephen’s rebellious non serviam as a form of anarchy, arguing that the religious rebellion is a metaphor for political reformism. Yet Most’s eclectic combination of an attack against the Godhead, a parody of the Trinity, and a manual for revolution may not be so odd or disparate for Joyce: they may be connected in his mind as an example of the usefulness of schism. Questions regarding the figures of the Trinity to which Stephen alludes appear throughout Joyce’s works: the procession of the Holy Ghost in Eastern Orthodoxy in the Wake; Stephen’s reflections on the Son and the Father—on what is called divine filiation—in Ulysses. These Trinitarian issues are all, at one level, pure and simple, questions of relationships of power and equality.3 Trinitarian challenges appear throughout church history because their questions all concern essential identities and consequently issues of power, equality, and subordination. When Stephen is obsessively concerned with questions of the Son “consubstantial” with the Father, starting in “Proteus” (3.50), he is thinking of his own strained relations with his family and more; he refers to the Nicene Creed which establishes the dogma of the Trinity. It...