5—
The High Priest of Their Imagination—
Joyce and His Catholic Critics

Actually, I have never known anyone with a mind so fundamentally Catholic in structure as Joyce's own, or one on whom the Church, its ceremonies, symbols, and theological declarations had made such an impress.... The Scholastic was the only philosophy he had ever considered seriously.
MARY COLUM , 1947

Even in his "overturning" ... Joyce has remained a pious Catholic. His "counter-world" has the medieval, quite provincial, and quintessentially Catholic atmosphere of an Erin that tries desperately to enjoy its political independence. The author worked at Ulysses in many foreign lands and from all of them he looked back in faith and kinship upon Mother Church and Ireland.
CARL JUNG , 1949

There can be no doubt that in Finnegans Wake Joyce is on the side of the devils. His use of the materials of orthodoxy should not be misconstrued. He uses them in the same way that Marx uses Hegel and the devil quotes Scripture.
J. MITCHELL MORSE , 1959

I confess I have no better explanation to offer of his triumphant struggle to preserve his rectitude as an artist in the midst of illness and disappointment, in abject poverty and disillusionment, than this, that he who has loved God intensely in his youth will never love anything less. The definition may change, the service abides.
STANISLAUS JOYCE , 1958

Joyce's attitude toward the Christian religion was twofold: when he remembered his own youthful conflict with it in its Irish-Roman form he could be bitterly hostile, but in general, viewing it as a whole as an objective reality and as epitomized human experience, and from a position well out of reach of any church's authority and sanctions it was for him a rich mine of material for the construction of his own myth.
FRANK BUDGEN , 1956

For Catholic readers in particular, and for many devout Christians as well, Joyce's work has posed a host of obvious problems. Joyce's portrayal of the Church and the priesthood was often sardonic, especially in his early work, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . While Joyce demonstrated a fascination for the power and the mystery of Church ritual and doctrine, Catholicism was represented in his early books largely as a corrupt and oppressive force in Irish life, as the center of the center of paralysis. Joyce's rebellion against the Church was epitomized in the struggles of Stephen Dedalus, who rejected the priesthood and dedicated himself high-mindedly to an artistic career, to a "mode of life or of art whereby [my] spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom" (Portrait 246). His blasphemies against the Church in Portrait and in Ulysses were provocation enough for some Catholics, who considered Stephen to be a spokesman for Joyce and dismissed Portrait as an anti-Catholic tract.

There were other elements in Joyce's work that deeply troubled Catholic literary critics. Joyce's absorption in the quotidian details of Dublin life created a fictional world in which God seemed to be an irrelevance. Joyce's Dublin was a mass of detail, event, and characters in motion, a

frenzied atmosphere unregulated by any higher spiritual authority and seemingly unjudged by any literary one. Joyce was regarded as a materialist and a sensualist, even a pornographer, a chronicler as well as a victim of the decay of modern life. Aside from Stephen's outright challenges to religious authority, perhaps what was most distressing to earnest believers was Joyce's comic sensibility. As Edwin Muir explained in 1926, it may have been Joyce's comic disposition that provoked not only religious readers but political ideologues as well.

Mr. Joyce tries to set in the plane of low comedy ... professional seriousness of all kinds, and secondly the objects about which people are serious in this way: religion, to which the comic reaction is blasphemy; patriotism, to which it is little less; literature, to which it is parody; the claims of science, to which it is an application of anti-climax; sex, to which it is obscenity.... To see religion with the eyes of comedy is not, of course, to laugh it out of existence, any more than to see sex comically is to destroy it. All that comedy can destroy is strictly the second-rate. (30–31)

Muir does not suggest, as more superficial readers of Joyce have, that a comic treatment of religious issues destroys religious values or makes Joyce antireligious. A comic spirit may actually disguise serious religious belief and may in fact be the basis for a profound religious sensibility. Some Catholic readers have argued that Joyce's manifest protests against the Church obscured latent affinities with Catholic values and beliefs. Such, at least, is the claim made of the mature Joyce by L. A. G. Strong, Kristian Smidt, Robert Boyle, and others examined in this chapter.

Gauging the religious import of Joyce's work is as dif-

ficult as assessing Joyce's politics. The ambivalence, the contradiction, and the ambiguity that characterize so much of Joyce's thought make it impossible to reduce to easy theory or formula. Superficial, sentimental, or polemical analyses do little to elucidate the complexity of his attitudes. Although there is ostensible evidence to support a condemnatory reading such as Paul Elmer More's, Catholic readers of Joyce have labored mightily to establish the view that he was not a blasphemer or an atheist or a pornographer. In fact, Catholic readers of Joyce have endeavored to prove that Joyce never eluded the grasp of the Church, that he incorporated into his work Church ritual and dogma, and that he evolved a vision of the means and ends of human life that was profoundly affected by his religious training and vestigial religious values. During the last thirty years, Catholic critics have amplified T. S. Eliot's claim that Joyce's work was "penetrated with Christian feeling" (Strange Gods 48). L. A. G. Strong, Fr. William T. Noon, Fr. Robert Boyle and others have argued that Joyce, in his later years, returned to the faith he had tried to abandon, that his well-documented sundering was followed by a less apparent reconciliation, and that we ought to read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as the expressions of a preeminently Catholic mind and sensibility.

Underlying much of the commentary on Joyce by Catholic critics was a veiled, and sometimes not so veiled, polemic. In the shadow of many of their textual explications were appropriative designs: they were eager to read in Joyce some confirmation or repudiation of their own religious views. The question was not whether Joyce's fiction could be admitted into the canon of great literature, but whether his work proved that he was

among the saved or the damned. The portraits of the artist that emerge from such inquiries are as illuminating for what they reveal of the aims of some of his critics as for what they tell us of the range and complexity of the artist.

But the influence on Joyce criticism consists of more than a mission of Catholic scholars uncovering the latent Catholicism in Joyce's work. The conjoining of a religious orthodoxy to reactionary political views has had an even greater impact on the portraits of Joyce drawn by two of his most important readers, T. S. Eliot and Hugh Kenner. Like Tare, Ransom, and Brooks, who were Eliot's literary comrades-in-arms and Kenner's teachers, Eliot and Kenner embraced modernist aesthetics without sacrificing their deeply held religious beliefs or their political conservatism.^[1] What allied Eliot and the New Critics was an aversion to the industrialization and democraticization of modern life. Their religious convictions formed the basis for a social critique: they found modern American life to be crassly materialistic, dehumanizing, spiritually arid, and culturally stultifying. Religion was a necessary link to the past in a rapidly changing world as well as a necessary "check" on the pretentiousness and moral levity of a liberal capitalist society. Moreover, wrote Eliot, religion was an essential condition for the development of culture: "The only hopeful course for a society which would thrive and continue its creative activity in the arts of civilization, is to become Christian. That project involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience, and discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory" (Christian Society 19).

For Eliot and the New Critics, and later for Kenner, religious convictions were indispensable in shaping a

reactionary social perspective, from which the spectacle of modern civilization appeared as a living hell. Such a weltanschauung drove Eliot and the New Critics toward the safe confines of aesthetic form and colored their critical judgments as well. In the case of New Critical commentary on Joyce, we remarked how Ransom, most notably, sought corroboration of his own social biases in his reading of Finnegans Wake . Eliot and Kenner discovered between the lines of Joyce's work the disposition of a moralizing Christian. Kenner in particular saw in Joyce the calculating eye of a vigilant and severe judge of his fellowman. Both implied that beneath the manifest anti-Catholicism in Joyce's fiction lay a residue of Catholic belief and sensibility; both saw in Joyce a figure bearing a marked resemblance to themselves.

In his widely read tribute to Ulysses , "Ulysses , Order, and Myth," Eliot praised Joyce's use of the "mythical method" as a means of representing contemporary life. "I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found," Eliot declared; "it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape" (198). Joyce's incorporation of the Homeric epic allowed him to bridge the gap between the classical and the modern worlds and to give an ordered frame to the chaotic experience of modern life. Eliot disputed the notion that Ulysses presented a distorted picture of everyday life or that the novel was libelous to humanity. Joyce's stroke of genius had the significance of a scientific breakthrough. Ulysses , quite simply, "[made] the modern world possible for art."

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.... Instead of the narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aidington so earnestly desires. (201–2)

Eliot's enthusiasm for Joyce's "mythical method" was founded on Eliot's fear of and thorough contempt for the conditions of modern life. It was a contempt which he too readily assumed Joyce shared. Eliot argued that the Homeric parallels in Ulysses gave a shape and structure to the disorder of contemporary life. Other readers, including Ezra Pound, argued that the Odyssean correspondences played a less important role in the novel. Pound maintained that they provided Joyce with a necessary scaffolding to construct the edifice of the novel but they were clearly subordinate to the novel's action.^[2] In fact, references to the Odyssey are more muted and less frequent in the later episodes of Ulysses , in "Circe," "Ithaca," and "Penelope." Edmund Wilson believed that the mythic parallels, along with other allusions and interpolations, were flaws in the novel that slowed the narrative movement and were symptomatic of the author's obsessive, "supernormally energetic" mind (Axel's Castle 215). The Italian Marxist Franco Moretti maintains that Eliot's enthusiasm for Joyce's "mythical method" explains much more about Eliot than it does about Joyce. Eliot, Moretti argues, valued myth as a way to mold history, to create

an ordered and predictable future. Joyce, on the other hand, did not privilege myth as Eliot did. "Joyce uses myth only to desecrate it, and through it, to desecrate contemporary history: to parody Bloom with Ulysses, and Ulysses with Bloom; to create an order which gives greater relief to the absence of order, a nucleus gone haywire with irony and distortions" (192). For Moretti's Joyce, myth could not be equated with aesthetic form, as it could for Eliot; it "therefore cannot be the starting point for a new cultural hegemony" (192).

Eliot's gaze held fixedly to the myth rather than to the matter of Ulysses ; it was by reference to the myth that the matter was to be judged. But Eliot's novel was not Joyce's. Modern life and the consciousness of modern man were not mercilessly satirized in Ulysses , or not satirized only. Both were explored and celebrated with painstaking care and detail. Moreover, Joyce's major achievement in the novel, one unremarked by Eliot, was the largely sympathetic treatment given to its protagonist, a middle-class Jew named Bloom. Bloom is the object of our affection and laughter, our pity and respect. He does not simply suffer from comparisons with his mythological counterpart but emerges as something of a hero himself. He is the epitome of modern man and the product of the modern age. Eliot might have agreed with Ezra Pound's description: "Bloom very much is the mess" (Deming 2:215).

Eliot could only accept the social world of Ulysses by assuming that Joyce was making a judgment against it; his own social vision differed so fundamentally from Joyce's egalitarian sentiments or from Bloom's schemes for social reform. Eliot's politics were unabashedly elitist: "The governing elite ... would consist of those whose

responsibility was inherited with their affluence and position, and whose forces were constantly increased, and often led, by rising individuals of exceptional talents" (Notes 159). Privilege, stability, discipline, reverence for God and tradition, homogeneity of race and religion were the hallmarks of Eliot's social vision. A "spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated," he warned in After Strange Gods (1933); "and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable" (20). In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Eliot inveighed against the evils of democratic liberalism and warned of its consequences:

By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos. (12)

It is indeed a remarkable feat that one with so thoroughly reactionary a perspective as Eliot could find anything praiseworthy in Ulysses .

Ulysses was not the only work of Joyce's that Eliot held in high regard. In "A Message to the Fish" (1941) he referred to "The Dead" as "one of the finest short stories in the language" (468), citing it to rebut claims that Joyce devalued nature and the human spirit. In After Strange Gods (1933) he showed himself so moved by the story that he declared Joyce to be "the most ethically orthodox

of the more eminent writers of my time" (38). Eliot's assessment was based not on the author's professed beliefs but on his "orthodoxy of sensibility" and his "sense of tradition." Although Eliot admired the elaborate and allusive structure of "The Dead," he was most absorbed with Gabriel Conroy's struggle with his own conscience. Gabriel is humbled following his wife's admission of passion for young Michael Furey. Gabriel's pretentiousness, his self-centeredness, and his superficiality are exposed, and he becomes a penitent sinner at the story's close. Undoubtedly, it was Gabriel's epiphanic moment of self-revelation and repentance and his subsequent unification with "all the living and the dead" that moved Eliot to declare at the end of his essay: "I consider Mr. Joyce's work to be penetrated with Christian feeling" (48). Modern man, Eliot insisted, needs to "restore the sense of Original Sin" (42) and reengage himself, as Gabriel Conroy had, with the struggle for his own soul. He must divest himself of romantic, post-Enlightenment illusions and cast a cold eye on the godless idealism of a liberal and progressive age.

Eliot's admiration for Joyce was based on what Eliot regarded as Joyce's deep-seated religious sensibility and Joyce's use of classical literature in his depiction of contemporary life. Eliot's Joyce possessed the "historical sense," which, he explained in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), "compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (Essays 4). Moreover, Joyce appeared to embody the ideal of the impersonal artist so central to

Eliot's aesthetic theory. Eliot inveighed against the cult of individualism and personality in art, a condition he regarded as symptomatic of a culture bereft of a religious and literary tradition. "The poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways" (Essays 9). Eliot's Joyce was this perfect medium, seemingly detached, antididactic, blending past and present. The meaning of Ulysses was not in any transparent authorial message but in the juxtaposition of myth and modernity, the order of the past a counterpoint to the chaos of the present. Eliot fashioned a Joyce in conformity with his own standards and sensibility. In the process, he deftly executed his critical mission, which on one occasion he defined in this way: "There are standards of criticism, not ordinarily in use, which we may apply to whatever is offered to us as works of philosophy or of art, which might help to render them safer and more profitable for us" (Strange Gods 63).

Eliot's reading of Joyce resonates in Hugh Kenner's first major contribution to Joyce scholarship, Dublin's Joyce (1956), though of course Kenner's book offers a much more extensive treatment of Joyce's fiction than Eliot's essays. Kenner assiduously traces the sourcebooks of Joyce's works, painstakingly examines the language of Ulysses , and attempts to locate Joyce's oeuvre within a modern context of moral, philosophical, and political change. Like Eliot, Kenner reads Joyce's work as an indictment of the various "isms" that constitute contem-

porary culture: liberalism, individualism, materialism, and aestheticism. Also, as in the case of Eliot, Kenner's early remarks on Joyce reveal a great deal about Kenner's own temperament, religious beliefs, and social prejudices. Whereas Eliot saw Joyce as both a classicist and an aesthetic innovator, with kindred fascist sympathies, Kenner's Joyce emerges as a thoroughgoing ironist and irrepressible moralist. Saturating the pages of Dublin's Joyce is a tone of persistent scolding, Kenner reminding US always of the stasis and awful corruption that reigns over Joyce's Irish wasteland. Kenner implies, and occasionally states outright, that Joyce, too, sits in judgment over his city of dead souls. Brilliant as Kenner's insights are, influential as they have been, his signature is indelibly etched in his skewed portrait of Joyce in Dublin's Joyce .

Despite the persistent moralism in Dublin's Joyce , Kenner demonstrates an acute sensitivity to Joyce's use of language, though this is even more in evidence in Joyce's Voices (1978), a deft analysis of Joyce's stylistic techniques in Ulysses . In Dublin's Joyce , Kenner argues that Joyce's true subject in Ulysses is Dublin's language, in which is preserved the only vitality of a dead city and its dead citizenry.^[3] Cued by Joyce's portrait of Dublin, Kenner sees a vista of sordidness and corruption, which he evokes in images of death, catatonia, and inebriation:

[In Ulysses ] Joyce embalms in cadences what Dublin embalms in music, and entraps in the amber of learned multiple puns the futile vigour which the Dubliner, gazing into his peat-colored Guinness, must generate in language because its counterpart has slipped out of life. (12)

[In Finnegans Wake ] Joyce projects in language the generic Dubliner's image: a cataleptic dreaming of the waking world, all his

reality a dream and a dream made out of words, the stones of Dublin, its smells, its sunlight, everything but its language taken away. (18)

This is the world of Eliot's Hollow Men, a somnambulatory universe in which nothing changes, in which man is stripped of dignity and potency, in which life lacks meaning or value. "Everything has become all that it can ever be, the past is exhausted ... nothing can be willed away, nothing can change, nothing is of the slightest intrinsic interest, and that is hell" (238). Finnegans Wake only appears to offer a reprieve from the catalogues of dead objects and deadened spirits heaped in Ulysses ; but, claims Kenner, "the relation between Bloom's day and Earwicker's night is analogous with the relation between infernal and purgatorial states" (239).

Kenner's perspective on Joyce does in some dimensions dovetail with Eliot's, but it may owe even more to the views of Wyndham Lewis, whose essay on Joyce Kenner admired, with some qualifications.^[4] Although his response to Ulysses was more sympathetic than Lewis's, Kenner shared Lewis's revulsion for modern life. Both abhorred the Philistinism, the vulgarity, and the amorality chronicled in the pages of Ulysses . In Kenner's mind, the path toward progressivism and materialism was, again, the route to hell:

To cast the doctor as priest is to strike at the outset the note of materialistic transposition that runs throughout the book. The body usurps the room of the soul, theology gives way to associationist psychology, visions become hallucinations, the metaphors of Scripture receive bitterly literal realization in matter, in an inferno whose apotheosis is the debris-crammed brain of hapless Leopold Bloom. (Dublin's Joyce 230)

Lewis recoiled at the "dense mass of dead stuff" collected in the pages of Ulysses (107), but Kenner, like Eliot, found a way to hold his nose and smile knowingly, approvingly. Lewis, Kenner argued, was too engaged in a polemical tug-of-war to notice that Joyce, the chap at the end of the line who appeared to be paring his fingernails, was actually tugging gently and discreetly on Lewis's side of the knot.

Kenner congratulates Lewis for three essential insights into Ulysses that potentially could have served as "master keys" for a "definitive exegesis" of the novel: (1) the novel's characters are clichés; (2) Stephen is a "hopeless farce" (364); and (3) the book shows an unprecedented concern with the "flux of matter" (363), or, in Lewis's veiled excremental metaphor, a "physical enthusiasm that expresses itself in [a] tremendous outpouring of matter, or stuff" (Lewis 109). The latter, according to both Kenner and Lewis, results in a plodding and mechanical movement in the novel that mirrors the mechanization and spiritual deadness of modern Dublin. The authorial intelligence behind the "huge and intricate machine" of Ulysses is itself mechanical: "craftsmanlike and unreflective, gifted at transcription, with minimal distortion ... a thinking machine, in short, the incarnation of quasiindustrial 'know-how,'" according to Kenner (Dublin's Joyce 167), "not so much an inventive intelligence as an executant," according to Lewis (quoted in Dublin's Joyce 167). But Lewis errs, says Kenner, in identifying this persona with Joyce. This is the author's fabrication, behind which Joyce stands, indifferently paring his fingernails.

It is essential to the total effect of Ulysses that it should seem to be the artifact of a mind essentially like Bloom's, only less easily deflected; a mind that loses nothing, penetrates nothing,

and has a category for everything; the mind that at length epiphanizes itself in the catechism of "Ithaca." ... It is by the insane mechanical meticulousness of that mode of consciousness, the mode of consciousness proper to industrial man, that in Ulysses industrial man is judged. That is, in a way, the "meaning" of the book, the form in which it remains as a whole in the memory. One of Joyce's greatest creations is the character of this sardonic impersonal recorder, that constantly glints its photoelectric eyes from behind the chronicle of Bloomsday. (Dublin's Joyce 168)

For Kenner, this "sardonic impersonal recorder" is the embodiment of industrial man and becomes the means by which we judge that man and his era. It is also, according to Kenner, the source of laughter in the novel. We laugh at it, as a "monstrous parody" of the workings of the "super-brain" (168); and we also laugh, if occasionally through our tears, with it, at the desiccated landscape it surveys. This is another manifestation of "double-writing," or the multiple layering of meaning and perspective that Kenner is ceaselessly explicating in Joyce's writing.

Kenner insists, more emphatically than Lewis, that the Stephen Dedalus of Portrait and Ulysses not be confused with his creator, James Joyce. Stephen is culpable of a host of sins and, even more than Bloom, is subject to severe moral scrutiny from Joyce. Joyce's ironic distance saves him from Kenner's censure: it is Stephen, not Joyce, who is a blasphemer and a deluded romantic. "Joyce was never the Stephen Dedalus of his 1914 Portrait , mirror of nineteenth-century romantic idealism" (Dublin's Joyce 114). The romantic tradition, of which Stephen is the culmination, creates isolates, exiles, and megalomaniacs. It does not lead toward either personal or artistic fulfillment. Stephen, like his mythological name-

sake, is bound to fall, precisely because he repudiates his "fallen" condition. "Stephen does not, as the careless reader may suppose, become an artist by rejecting church and country. Stephen does not become an artist at all. Country, church, and mission are an inextricable unity, and in rejecting the two that seem to hamper him, he rejects also the one on which he has set his heart" (Dublin's Joyce 160). Kenner argues that it is pure romantic foolishness to assume one can mature personally and artistically outside an institutional framework, free of bonds to nation or religion. As he does throughout Dublin's Joyce , Kenner reminds us that social and familial institutions—the city, the Church, the family—are not obstacles to meaning and fulfillment but the very means to achieve them.

Stephen is an ironic representation of the Ibsen hero, the social outcast who prides himself on his practice of "high unconsortability" as a mode of living (Dublin's Joyce 160). Kenner argues that Joyce exorcised the demon of Ibsen by exposing the unfeasibility, the sheer ridiculousness of such a posture in the stories of Stephen Dedalus, Gabriel Conroy, and Richard Rowan.^[5] Each of these characters wears the cloak of "ethical absolutism." They are brittle, humorless souls, ponderous social outcasts whom we would laugh at if, as Kenner says about Stephen, we didn't have the intuition that he was "a victim being prepared for a sacrifice" (132). Indeed, these eccentrics are sacrificed, by the sword of Joyce's irony, for the entrance of their worthier successor: communal man, first in the form of Bloom, then Earwicker and Anna Livia. "In Finnegans Wake ," writes Kenner, "Joyce reversed for the western world that current that has flowed from Milton's exile myth into the romantic nightworld" (90). Joyce had served his apprenticeship to Ibsen,

had "pierced the purple fog of Yeatsian aestheticism" (160) and was now under the tutelage of other masters: Homer, Vico, Lewis Carroll, and Sophocles.

[Ibsen] had never known, and could not know amid the frontier vacuum of the fiords, the traditions of the European community of richly-nourished life; and the lonely starvation of his ideal of free personal affinity in no context save that of intermingling wills inspired Joyce with a fascination that generated Exiles and a repulsion that found its objective correlative when Leopold Bloom, reversing Gabriel Conroy's lust for snow, shuddered beneath "the apathy of the stars." (94)

Bloom is the antipode to Stephen, and his virtue lies in his acceptance of the obligations imposed by a fractured family and community. He is Dr. Watson to Stephen's Sherlock Holmes, the social man to Stephen's outlaw, the man of compassion to the disembodied intellect. But Bloom, the "timid cuckold" (356), is hardly heroic, in Kenner's estimation. He is the epitome of the deracinated, undereducated, soulless, and impotent modern man. He is mocked by the Odyssean parallel: "Dublin an immense graveyard of buried hopes, heroic promises dead, promised Homeric heroisms shrunken to the fulfillment of a Bloom" (210). At times, Kenner can hardly contain his disgust for Bloom. He warns us that we ought not to sentimentalize Bloom or regard him as anything more than another member of the living dead: "Bloom is not entitled to sentimental regard as the champion of the plain man. He is the most inadequate Messiah imaginable" (256).

Molly comes in for even harsher reprobation. Kenner had found nothing salutary in Stephen and Bloom's unconscious revelations in the "Circe" episode and saw no

affirmation—or at least none worth praising—emerging from Molly's monologue which closes the novel. Kenner objects to sentimental readings of either episode and employs the term "animality" frequently in his discussion of the characters and events in both. "Circe" he regards as "an apocalypse climaxing in the Black Mass and the burning of Dublin" (259). Stephen's attempt to smash the chandelier is no apotheosis: "All he does is epiphanize his own Luciferian sin against the light" (260). Molly's "yesses" threaded through "Penelope" demonstrate her lack of self-restraint and her moral turpitude; they are her passwords to hell—the destination to which all of these unfortunate souls in the novel seem bound. "[Molly's] 'Yes' of consent ... kills the soul [and] has darkened the intellect and moral sense of all Dublin.... Her 'Yes' is confident and exultant; it is the 'Yes' of authority: authority over this animal kingdom of the dead" (262).

Kenner takes special pride in distinguishing himself from those he considers sentimental readers of Joyce. In Dublin's Joyce he poses as a relentless moralist, a toughminded interpreter of a shrewd and elusive author. Kenner's Joyce is not Stephen/Joyce, not a blasphemer, not a pornographer, not supremely indifferent to the decay of Western civilization. Kenner objects to the cultic idolization of Joyce for virtues he was never truly guilty of: "[Joyce] was praised for being Stephen Dedalus, smasher of chandeliers, disgusted with everyone and everything; which disgust insured his having no particular axes to grind, like a white-coated Frankenstein, above politics, devoted to pure science, standing behind the wreckage of Hiroshima, inscrutable, paring his fingernails" (359). This is not the portrait of the artist Kenner celebrates. Kenner is much more sympathetic to Wyndham Lewis's perspec-

tire, which, Kenner maintains, is closer to the truth, in spite of its polemical excesses.

In Kenner's compact 1978 study, Joyce's Voices , language is still the subject and hero of Ulysses , but here Kenner displays little of the moralism so pervasive in his earlier book. Still concerned primarily with Joyce's manipulation of style, syntax, and diction in Ulysses , Kenner further demonstrates how Joyce moves from a style of "Objectivity" to a purposeful distortion of language in the later episodes, blocking our vision and obscuring our understanding. In moving away from narrative toward a preoccupation with style, Joyce progressively frustrates our desire to interpret, to render meaning. Kenner, who in his eclectic reach has appropriated deconstructionist theory, concludes Joyce's Voices by exposing the epistemological uncertainties that abound in the text of Ulysses and by insisting on the arbitrariness of its interpretation. The language of Ulysses conceals rather than reveals; truths are multiple; "the whole truth about even a circumscribed situation is probably uncommunicable" (Joyce's Voices 89). What a different book, what a different writer Joyce has become in the two decades since Dublin's Joyce ! Moral judgments have been replaced by moral quandries; the ironist has become the artful dodger; the teller of painful truths has become the jokester who mocks the very notion of "truth." Kenner has ceased his moralizing, preferring instead to explicate the quirks and subtleties of style in Ulysses . The Catholic and reactionary sensibility that gave shape to Dublin's Joyce has receded before the linguist and aesthetic philosopher for whom the ascription of meaning is a perilous enterprise.

What links Eliot's essays and Kenner's first book on Joyce to Catholic exegeses is the assumption that beneath the impressive technical apparatus of Joyce's fiction lies a deep-seated and profoundly religious sensibility. Moreover, in spite of the manifest anti-Catholicism in Joyce's work (usually issuing from the mouth or mind of Stephen Dedalus) Joyce remained emotionally and psychologically attached to the Church. Kevin Sullivan writes that "Joyce never completely succeeded, nor does it appear that he ever wished to succeed, in severing those emotional and imaginative ties that bound him to his spiritual mother, the Church invisible" (54). Joyce's religious sensibility expressed itself in a variety of ways in his work, some more apparent than others. Incorporation of Catholic liturgy and scripture presents obvious examples, but Joyce also drew on Church ritual and dogma in a broader sense, using as the thematic substructure of his work, for example, the confessional, the celebration of communion between man and man and man and God, and the quest for redemption and salvation. Most Catholic readers argue that Joyce moved away from the naturalism and persistent irony in the early works toward myth and mysticism and a greater sense of compassion in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . They point particularly to Finnegans Wake as evidence that Joyce had recovered or finally expressed latent religious sentiments and beliefs.

One of the central issues for religious readers of Joyce is the relationship between the artist and his alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus. Most Catholic commentators on Joyce have agreed with Hugh Kenner that Stephen is not Joyce, though some contend that Kenner exaggerates the distance between the two.^[6] However, J. Mitchell Morse and Kristian Smidt, both writing in the late 1950s, argue that Stephen's aesthetic and religious opinions were essentially

Joyce's own. Morse argues that throughout his life Joyce remained an ambivalent Catholic at best, and that his work is noteworthy not for its reconciliation with the faith but for its unremitting struggle with the authority of the Church. Stephen's presumptuousness is Joyce's own.

Joyce, having found himself unable to subordinate intellect to faith, as Eliot did, or to seek virtue in degradation, as Baudelaire did, could free himself of the sense of sin as society understood it only by denying the concept of sin as society understood it, and establishing for himself, as godlike artist, a completely different scale of values. All his work is the record of a struggle to do this, to overcome the persistent influences of his upbringing. (Morse 22)

Joyce flouted the Jesuitical practice of self-renunciation, instead raising the artist to the level of the divine, knowing in his own tormented soul that he was risking damnation for it: "[Joyce's] terrible indictment ... amounts to a denial of God in the name of the human individual, who cannot live with Him; it is, in fact, the obverse of the Jesuit denial of the individual self in the name of God" (Morse 80).

But as much as he struggled to do so, Joyce could never free himself of the grip of the Church. Morse makes the familiar argument about Joyce, that his compulsive rebelliousness represented a form of continuing intellectual dependence on Catholicism. In any case, Joyce was too self-conscious an artist and possessed too complex a mind to be able to renounce categorically his Jesuit upbringing or to deny the power and profundity of the Jesuits' view of life. Joyce could neither fully embrace nor completely reject his religious background; he remained suspended between sympathy and alienation. "Joyce's

conscience is neither that of a conformist nor altogether that of a rebel, but the permanent uneasy conscience of an artist" (Morse 88).

A very different view of Joyce is taken by Kristian Smidt. While agreeing with Morse that Joyce's opinions corresponded with Stephen's, Smidt goes on to argue not only that Joyce's temperament was a profoundly religious one, but that Joyce was performing priestlike functions through his art. Joyce, like Stephen, was drawn early and powerfully to the Church, chiefly to the aura of mystery that surrounded it. Smidt agrees with Kevin Sullivan that, had family circumstances been different, Joyce could very well have become a priest. Instead, Joyce broke his ties with Church, family, and state and declared his allegiance to art, but as an artist he was haunted by what he had abandoned. In his imagination, he returned to Dublin, reconstituted a family, and "turned his art into a cult to replace Christianity and himself into its deity, its priest and its devotees in one person" (Smidt 27).

Joyce's "cult of art" was an individual rather than a communal rite that affirmed a transcendent realm of existence. Joyce worshipped two gods: himself, and the goddess of Beauty, epitomized by Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle. Joyce himself and his alter-ego Stephen resembled Christ in the self-sacrifice and search for redemption in their creative work. Here and elsewhere, Smidt overlooks evidence contrary to his thesis and strains to make Joyce's temperament appear as religious as he claims.

Smidt's Joyce is not Kenner's ironist but a Blakean visionary and mystic. Joyce wished to create a counterreligion in his work in which nothing would be too base or too sublime for godlike artistic apprehension. In Finnegans Wake ("Ailspace in a Notshall") and in such episodes

as "Circe" in Ulysses , Joyce attempted to free himself from the constraints of time and space. While Kennet mocked such artistic pretension, and while Wyndham Lewis disparaged Joyce's immersion in the "time-flux," Smidt announces that Joyce not only sought but gained transcendence from the mundane and quotidian. Words were indeed Joyce's weapon, but for the purpose of spiritual rather than political enlightenment. Smidt maintains that words assumed an almost sacred meaning to Joyce and in their obscurity resembled a form of "ecstatic babbling" tantamount to speaking in tongues. This was an expression of Joyce's "mystical groping towards the divine."

The liturgy of the Catholic Church is an international language, and Joyce's language is international, though in a different way. The sense of mystery is aroused by his polyglot style because one feels that the underlying idea is that of an indivisible Logos .... It has the power to unite humanity by means of communication and raise it to a superhuman status. (70)

Joyce's ambitions were grandiose: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were written to redeem a cursed and paralyzed Irish race. However, stepping back from his own grandiose appraisal of Joyce's artistic project, Smidt concedes, "[Joyce's] success in bringing about a spiritual regeneration of his country is doubtful, I suppose" (103).

Smidt's analysis of Joyce's work suffers most from overstatement and religious sentimentalization, and the portrait of the artist that emerges is less funny, less obscene, and much more solemn than that to which we are accustomed. Inevitably, Smidt either ignores or gives scant attention to the evidence contrary to his hypotheses, and he chastises Joyce for his intrusive parodies and

"tricks of style" (102). He regards Joyce's humor as a counterimpulse to his cultic ambitions and as a way of masking the seriousness of his religious longing. "Joyce to a certain extent protected his solemnity against ridicule in his own mind and at the hands of his readers by presenting it as grotesque" (102). Smidt, like a shrewd psychoanalytic critic, transforms what appears to be contradictory evidence into support for his own thesis.

Kevin Sullivan's Joyce Among the Jesuits (1958) is more a biographical than a critical study, in which Sullivan concludes, from extensive research, that the Jesuits who were Joyce's teachers left an indelible stamp on the mind of the artist. Sullivan, like Robert Boyle and William T. Noon, is a Catholic scholar engaged in a literary reclamation project. He argues that, despite much evidence to the contrary, Joyce never left the faith that so early nurtured him. Sullivan, Boyle, and Noon make it very clear that Joyce was decidedly not Stephen Dedalus. Joyce was neither the heretic that Stephen was, nor was he "the philosophic idealist or solipsistic aesthete that Stephen Dedalus became" (82). In a judgment that reveals the critic more than it does Joyce, Sullivan claims, even more emphatically than Smidt, that had Joyce's social and familial environment been less "corrosive and contemptible ... there would have been no deterioration in his relations with the Jesuits, no rejection of Catholicism, no abandonment of home and country, and possibly no Portrait —or at least a very different kind of portrait" (11). Nor, we are tempted to add, would there have been a James Joyce.

Sullivan explains Joyce's actual break with the Church

as a symbolic reenactment of the artist's oedipal conflict. Joyce's quarrel was really not with Catholicism but with his parents. His rejection of Catholicism was a rejection of his authoritarian father who, like the clergy, mediated between the son and the sacred object: on the one hand, the mother, on the other, God.

This separation was an intellectual act ... by which Joyce cut himself off from the visible Church as manifest in the words and works of the priest or spiritual father; but Joyce never completely succeeded, nor does it appear that he ever wished to succeed, in severing those emotional and imaginative ties that bound him to his spiritual mother, the Church invisible. To this extent, at least, the Jesuits never lost their hold on Joyce, paradoxical as their hold on him may now appear. (54)

We are reminded here of Kristian Smidt's solemn efforts to rationalize Joyce's humor. Both Smidt and Sullivan maneuver ingeniously to support the thesis that Joyce remained deeply religious, but their efforts underscore the fact that Joyce's religious attitudes remained ambiguous and contradictory and cannot be understood by resort to stereotypes.

Sullivan, like Smidt, maintains that Joyce the artist was haunted by Joyce the priest, but Sullivan's artist is less ecumenical, more particularly Catholic. Joyce's work resembles an aestheticized form of the confessional, his characters, unrepentant sinners. The rituals and beliefs of the Church are the foundation stones of his fictions:

Joyce may have begun to live for literature, but he continued to live in doubt. It was because of this habitual doubt, plus the intensity of his adolescent temptation to the priesthood, that the shadow of the priest falls constantly across the work of the

artist. So it is that in Ulysses , and even in Finnegans Wake , the shadow-structure is the Catholic Mass in which the priest, performing the specific sacrifice for which he was ordained, celebrates the communion of God and man. But the artist secularizes this function of the priest, and his sacrament is a celebration of the communion of humanity. (146)

Sullivan's claim of the enduring influence of the Jesuits on Joyce echoes in two critical studies of Joyce's work by Catholic scholars, Fr. William T. Noon's Joyce and Aquinas (1957) and Fr. Robert Boyle's James Joyce's Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (1978). Both studies have the effect of softening Joyce's attitude toward Catholicism by demonstrating how Joyce used elements of the Thomistic or Pauline vision in developing his art. Both argue—Boyle more emphatically than Noon—that Joyce's art became a secular means of religious expression, and that the influence of Aquinas and Paul was instrumental in modifying Joyce's aesthetic theories to allow a fuller expression of his religious sensibility in Ulysses and especially in Finnegans Wake .

Noon believes that Aquinas drew Joyce away from Stephen's preoccupation with aesthetics in Portrait . Ulysses , unlike Portrait , acknowledges the limitations of man and art and redirects the concern of the artist away from abstract theorizing and toward the "'supra-social general commitment' of literature to existence" (58). Joyce resembles Gabriel Conroy in this respect more than he does Stephen Dedalus, for Gabriel moves beyond aestheticism and toward communion with his fellowman. The orientation of Ulysses is primarily social; it affirms conservative and traditional values in regard to family, sex, and politics. Although it is undeniably a critique of modern life, one finds throughout a comic and concilia-

tory tone: "Joyce succeeds in presenting a searching and exhaustive critique of contemporary society ... [but] the tone of the novel is nowhere near that of saeva indignatio . Religious mores are satirized ... sentimental patriotism is parodied, modern science is mocked ... but at the same time there is an absence of anger" (101). Noon presents a balanced view of Ulysses : its author is neither a nihilist, a moralist, nor a romantic sentimentalist.

Noon argues that Aquinas's influence was critical in the evolution of Joyce's theory of epiphany. As he matured, the source of the epiphany shifted from actual experience to language. Words assumed multifarious symbolic meanings, particularly in the "metaphorical, metaphysical experimentation with language" in the Wake (158). Words became a way of capturing and contemplating the deepest mysteries of life. Finnegans Wake is more than a linguistic riddle: it is an implicit "avowal of personal faith ... [which] revolves around a core of theological acceptance" (143). Aquinas the philosopher-theologian taught Joyce the artist that the poetic construct resembled the work of the God of creation and that words were both mysterious and sacred.

Robert Boyle presents a portrait of the artist as a Catholic mystic, similar in many respects to Kristian Smidt's view of Joyce. Boyle argues that Joyce used literature as Scripture by presenting a timeless vision beyond the ken of rational explanation. Artistic and religious fulfillment were analogous: both revealed the universality of experience and the deepest potential of the human soul. Such revelations occur in the final episodes of Ulysses and throughout Finnegans Wake . Joyce came to understand that the appeal of Catholicism lay in its transcendental aspirations and in its respect for the longing of the human spirit. "[Joyce] did not see Catholicism

as simply an evil force frustrating and repressing the self. He did, of course, see that aspect, but he saw it against the background of Catholic aspiration to fulfill and complete the self beyond the limits of nature, even infinitely beyond" (47).

Boyle waxes sentimental in his effort to plumb the depths of Joyce's conflict-ridden Catholicism and frequently gets carried away by his own religious enthusiasms. His presentation is an inspired one, if sometimes overly subjective, overstated, and undersupported. At the heart of his analysis, too, we find a desire to separate the author from Stephen Dedalus and to preserve the former's religious integrity. The crucial lesson that Joyce had learned by Finnegans Wake Stephen would never learn: it is, simply, love, or in the words of May Dedalus, "what the heart is, and how it feels." Joyce understood the most profound expression of that sentiment to be a religious one, and, following the example of another Jesuit, Gerald Manley Hopkins, "allow[ed] himself to acknowledge some aspects of Hopkins's positive and profound expression of Jesuit love" (79).

Boyle's efforts to redeem Joyce's reputation, to sanctify the artist who had been damned by others, gain support from other Catholic readers who admired Joyce. Our survey would not be complete without a brief consideration of L. A. G. Strong's contribution to this exculpatory effort, The Sacred River (1958). Strong notes the irony that Joyce was branded as atheistic and licentious when, in fact, his life was marked by discipline and austerity and his work showed his dedication to religious principles. Strong terms Ulysses "a great Catholic novel" (79); "Finnegans Wake could only have been written by a man whose whole attitude to life and to his art was religious" (11). "[Joyce] led a dedicated life: and those who would

condemn him need to be very sure that their own faith is as clear, and their integrity as strong" (161).

Strong portrays Joyce as a heroic teller-of-truths, a profoundly religious individual who would not be satisfied with the dogmatism and prudery of the Church. Joyce's work probed the depths of the human mind relentlessly and without inhibition. Joyce was the modern-day Dante, descending into the inferno of contemporary civilization to integrate the fractured modern psyche and redeem a fallen humanity. Strong applauds Joyce's courage and faith:

[Joyce] would attempt for himself what the Church had not done for him: more than that, something which in his judgment the Church had failed to do. He would redeem the Dragon. He would go down into hell, in the steps of Odysseus, Dante, and Swift. From its depths, accepting life's deepest pain, he would raise a triumphant cry, as Shakespeare did in Lear and Hamlet and Macbeth .... He would make a ladder joining hell to heaven, after Blake, and with Blake link religion with the feminine principle in life. Inspired by the Romantics, he would open wide the gate between conscious and unconscious, shadow and light. Side by side with the prophets of his own time, he would make friends with the shadow, look on the great archetypes, face his own darkness, and redeem it. (161)

Strong's Joyce is a romantic hero and cult leader, somewhat akin to Kristian Smidt's Blakean mystic. He heralds the return of the repressed and declares nothing in the range of human thought and behavior to be outside the bounds of holiness. He is anything but Kenner's detached ironist. It is not surprising to discover that unlike Kenner, Strong celebrates the affirmation in Molly's final "Yes": "That 'yes,' that fundamental and final acceptance of the human situation, is Joyce's cry of faith. It is made

in terms of his feminine side, his inferior function, his feeling" (154).

Hugh Kenner may have unwittingly provided the proper subtitle for this survey of Catholic commentary on Joyce with the title of his 1978 study, Joyce's Voices . As some Catholic critics have suggested, Joyce was haunted by voices from his past—from religious authorities, from his own priestly superego—that he could not expunge from his fiction. But "Joyce's Voices" is apropos here for other reasons, too. Joyce spoke in many voices in his fiction. He owned multiple and sometimes contradictory points of view, and not only on the subject of Catholicism. The difficulty any critic faces in assessing Joyce's perspective is in determining which of Joyce's voices he will listen to. One may hear a clear, evenly pitched tenor, a screech, a titter, or a howl; orchestral harmony or a cacophony of discrete and meaningless noises. As we have seen, the critic who bends his ear to Joyce's fiction frequently hears the sound that pleases him or that corroborates his own moral or aesthetic views. This is often the music that the critic himself might have performed had he been in possession of Joyce's instruments.

Although there exists the danger of oversimplification when approaching Joyce's work from a theological, theoretical, or ideological position, a more circumspect criticism ought to militate against this very tendency. The value of these approaches lies in the discovery of unnoticed elements or veiled tendencies that enlarge the scope of a writer's achievement. For example, the assertion made by all of the critics examined in this chapter—that Joyce possessed deep religious convictions—is itself

a challenge to the point of view of those such as Paul Elmer More, who regarded Joyce's work as blasphemy. In more general terms, commentary such as that of Morse, Smidt, Noon, and Strong reminds us that Joyce's sensibility was a complicated and ambivalent one, affected in more ways than we are aware by a Catholic upbringing and worldview. Although we may dispute the particulars of their portraits and object to their sometimes too-enthusiastic embrace of Joyce as a fellow-believer, their contribution lies in their elaboration of the portrait of our artist. Joyce becomes not a proud, self-indulgent aesthete but a humble seeker of communion; not a naturalist absorbed in the "time-flux" but a mystic seeking transcendence; not a pornographer or a nihilist but a modern St. Francis who confers his blessing on all things human; not an atheist but a believer; not a mocker, but a redeemer of his fellows. The portrayal of Joyce as a Catholic, rendered to a large degree by Catholics, affirms at the very least that a moral sensibility and moral vision underlie Joyce's work.

Much of the commentary by Catholic critics that followed the publication of Kenner's Dublin's Joyce may be viewed as a response to that book. Wittingly or unwittingly, Morse, Noon, Boyle, Smidt, and Strong all qualify and temper Kenner's portrait of Joyce, redrawing it with softer contours. Their Joyce is not so dour or so severely judgmental as Kenner's. He is both critical and conciliatory, rather than angry and stern; compassionate and sentimental, rather than detached and ironic; affirmative and visionary, rather than skeptical or even cynical. The religious temperament they attributed to Joyce lacked the mean and reactionary character of Kenner's and, to some degree, Eliot's imagining. In addition, this Joyce lacked "orthodoxy" or conventionality in his reli-

gious beliefs, and was applauded, by Smidt and Strong in particular, for his efforts to fashion a counterreligion in his art. Theirs is a portrait of the artist as a religious romantic, one fallen victim to the disease that Eliot and Kenner might describe as Stephen-itis.

Although it may not be inevitable, theology may lead to gross distortion or simplification of Joyce's art. As much as the portraits we have examined may differ or resemble one another, we often sense gaps, omissions, and misrepresentations in all these responses. Joyce's humor, Joyce's obscenity, and Joyce's irrepressible irony are too frequently ignored or softpedalled by Catholic readers. Perhaps the most obvious omission is this: all of the Catholic critics we have examined, with the possible exception of J. Mitchell Morse, simply do not take Joyce's anti-Catholic pronouncements seriously. When they appear to do so, they insist that while Stephen may have been guilty of blasphemy, Joyce was not. Joyce's antipathy for the Church was at least as deep-seated as his awe of it, and his protest against its repressiveness, its dogmatism, and its authoritarianism was, in his mind, a reasoned and legitimate one. The darker side of Catholicism that Joyce was so familiar with is often effaced from revisionist readings by Catholic intellectuals.

Joyce became to Catholic readers what he had become to political ideologues from both the left and the right: a symbol of things modern. Their repudiation, or even their manipulative embrace of him, was a gesture against the secularism and moral relativism of the modern world, against what Wyndham Lewis called the "surging ecstatic featureless chaos" that described the world as much as it did James Joyce's style. Catholic reclamation projects around Joyce's reputation represent a rejection of much that we associate with the term "modern."

The effort to portray Joyce as a Catholic artist fails finally to show a sufficient understanding of Joyce's temperament and intellectual style. Aside from what he considered to be many other good reasons to leave the Church, Joyce could not accept its doctrinal thinking, and he protected his intellectual independence and creative freedom from it and other "isms" that threatened to usurp them. Though Catholicism may have been in his head, and though socialism may have been in his heart, he was too stubbornly independent, too skeptical, too ambivalent, too estranged, too shamelessly modern—and perhaps, simply too full of the Luciferian pride of soul his detractors accused him of—to associate himself formally with either or to subscribe to their respective sets of beliefs. He would, like Stephen, "fly by those nets," and every critical effort to recapture him, to contain and identify him, falters if it does not acknowledge Joyce's willed and irrevocable exile.