James Joyce and Catholicism 9781472585943, 9781474258821, 9781472585967

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Conventions
Introduction: The Apostate’s Wake
I
II
The Church in Rome
The Church in Ireland
III
Catholic Joyces
Belief, in theory
Historical turns
A game of unbelief
1 Shem the Penman
Joycean heresies
The priest, the woman and the confessional
A ‘bludgeony Unity Sunday’ (176.19–20): The politics of violence
The voice of the artist: Shem-Mercius speaks
2 Dogmatism and Deviance in the Watches of Shaun
Greedo! (411.21): Shaun’s hungry prayer
‘sinning society sirens’ (50.21–4): The origins of Shaun’s sermonizing discourse
Carnival Cullen’s ‘Lentil Lore’ (440.9): Cullenite Catholicism in chapter III.2, and beyond
‘Bring the devil era’ (473.08): Glimpses of the new Ireland
3 The Wake’s Womanly Devotions
‘My latest lad’s loveliletter’ (459.23): Issy’s missive revisited
‘For the price of two maricles’ (425.19–29): Mariology in Finnegans Wake
‘A glorious lie between us’ (527.36): Catholic girlhood through the looking glass
‘Ah weary me!’ (556.21): A glance to the future
4 Ireland at the Break of Day
‘The leader, the leader!’ (593.13): Nationalisms old and new
‘doctor insularis of the universal church’ (606.7–8): St Kevin’s ‘Irish Ireland’
‘But a puny’ (627.22–4): The revelation of ALP
Afterword
Bibliography
Works by Joyce
Joyce Criticism
Historical and Other
Online Resources
Index

Citation preview

James Joyce and Catholicism

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/​American avant-​garde 1900–​45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, and Erik Tonning Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Modernism at the Microphone, Melissa Dinsman Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–​1937, Mark Nixon Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood

James Joyce and Catholicism The Apostate’s Wake Chrissie Van Mierlo

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Chrissie Van Mierlo, 2017 Chrissie Van Mierlo has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4725-​8594-​3    ePDF: 978-​1-​4725-​8596-​7    ePub: 978-​1-​4725-​8595-​0 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Historicizing Modernism Cover design: Eleanor Rose Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Conventions Introduction: The Apostate’s Wake Catholic Joyces 1 Shem the Penman 2 Dogmatism and Deviance in the Watches of Shaun 3 The Wake’s Womanly Devotions 4 Ireland at the Break of Day Afterword Bibliography Index

vi vii 1 33 49 75 97 121 141 144 155

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my family and friends for their support through dark days and light. During a decade spent immersed in Joyce studies, I  have had the pleasure of meeting countless wonderful scholars and human beings, many of whom I am lucky enough to call my friends. Thank you to all, and especially to Scarlett Baron, Morris Beja, Matthew Creasy, Luca Crispi, Ronan Crowley, Katherine Ebury, Anne Fogarty, Finn Fordham, Brian Fox, Andrew Frayn, Philip Keel Geheber, Andrew Gibson, Cheryl Herr, Clare Hutton, Ellen Carol Jones, Terence Killeen, Alison Lacivita, Jim Le Blanc, Geert Lernout, Timothy Martin, Jonathan McCreedy, Bram Mertens, Erika Mihálycsa, Camilla Mount, Christin Mulligan, Anthony and Suzanne Ossa-​Richardson, Vike Plock, Tamara Radak, Sam Slote, Dirk Van Hulle, Michelle Witen and Conor Wyer. Thanks will forever be due to the late Blanche Levinkind. To those whom I have omitted to mention here, both my thanks and apologies. I am grateful to Fritz Senn and all at the Zürich James Joyce Foundation for the opportunity to spend two months with them in 2012. The research completed during my time at the foundation formed the basis of Chapter 1 of this book. I  am also grateful to the librarians in the Manuscripts and Rare Books reading rooms at the British Library for their kind assistance, and for their generosity in allowing access to Joyce’s manuscripts. Extravagant thanks are due to Sarah Davison for her boundless enthusiasm and belief. Finally, this work is dedicated to my husband, Wim, without whom it could not have been written.

Abbreviations and Conventions The following abbreviations of standard texts are included parenthetically: CE

CW

D FW JJ JJA L I L II, III OED P SH SL

U

The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907–​12). Citations in this volume are taken from the digital edition that is available at . + page number. James Joyce, Critical Writings, edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). + page number. James Joyce, Dubliners, edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (London: Penguin, 1976). Ordinarily referred to by page and line number alone. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). + page number. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). + volume and page number. James Joyce, The James Joyce Archive, edited by Michael Groden et al. (New York: Garland, 1977–​9). + page number. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce: Volume I, edited by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957). + page number. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce: Volumes II & III, edited by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966). + entry title. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). + page number. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964). + page number. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, edited by Theodore Spencer et al. (New York: New Directions, 1963). + page number. James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking; London: Faber and Faber, 1975). + chapter and line number. James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Garland, 1984).

viii

VI.B

Abbreviations and Conventions

+ notebook and page number. Refers to the Finnegans Wake notebooks held by the State University of New York at Buffalo.

References to draft manuscripts and typescripts are referred to by both their location in the JJA and their standard accession number. Unless otherwise stated, all accession numbers relate to the cataloguing system at the British Library. All biblical references are to the King James version, unless otherwise stated.

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Nothing would be worth plowing through this, except the Divine Vision –​and I gather it’s not that sort of thing. –​Letter from Ezra Pound regarding the ‘Work in Progress’, 15 November 1926

Introduction: The Apostate’s Wake

I Pound’s remarks reflect the experience of many readers when faced with Finnegans Wake for the first time. The prospect of traversing vast swathes of seemingly impenetrable verbal terrain goes hand in hand with the question of whether or not it is really worth it. Despite Pound’s flippant tone, his view of the ‘Work in Progress’ that was to become the Wake is, in many respects, accurate enough. Joyce’s abiding concern with human rather than spiritual dramas in his last work –​albeit enacted on a grand historical mythical scale –​is a consistent feature of the Wake, a book that retains an incisive grasp upon the minutiae of life in early-​twentieth-​century Catholic Ireland and a bundle of alternate places and spaces as well. Where Pound’s logic falls down is in the assumption that this fact will somehow render the reading experience less enjoyable, or ultimately less rewarding or revelatory. The Wake does not simply marginalize religious or spiritual questions, but rather, these are persistently understood in relation to human activity and interaction, viewed through a long historical lens, and these acts of transformation constitute some of the most important moments in the Joycean oeuvre, and in modernist literature as a whole. This is seen in instances ranging from the bizarre manner in which esoteric theological debates are transformed through the depiction of figures like Shem and HCE in the light of absurd social or sexual encounters, through to the modern burlesques of medieval hagiography composed during the very first phase of writing the ‘Work in Progress’, and eventually incorporated into the Wake. If the book cannot provide the reader with a divine vision, it may yet prove to provide a fresh articulation of what it means to be human. A vision of the mature Joyce as a kind of navel-​gazing mystic, akin to the absurd bathtub-​dwelling hermit Kevin in Book IV, is a view that is hard to marry with what we know of the mature Joyce from the evidence of both the last work

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as well as his life. Nonetheless grandiose readings, which toy with the idea of the divine nature of the work, pepper the reception history (see pages 33–46). Understood in the broadest possible terms, Joyce’s attitude towards the ‘otherworldly’ provokes questions that are impossible to answer with any degree of certainty. Put simply, was he a theist (or pantheist) of any shade or inclination? His famous description of ‘the artist, like the God of the creation [. . .] behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’ (P, 215) hints at a playful and irreverent brand of theism, expressed by the juvenile, and of course fictional, Stephen. More direct access to the mind of the young writer might be gained via some oft-​cited reflections in a letter to Lady Gregory from 1902, where the young artist appears to express his belief in the existence of man’s immortal soul: All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I  seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine. (L I, 53)

Here, the cocksure youth is able to confidently assert his belief in the strength of his ‘soul’, whatever may be meant by this, to one of the pillars of the Irish literary establishment. There is, of course, no clear line of connection between the vaguely spiritual vocabulary adopted here and a conventional religious faith, and whether these remarks add up to the conclusion that the mature Joyce was in fact theistic, or in any way spiritually inclined, is a question that is destined to remain unanswered. Self-​defining statements like the one addressed to Lady Gregory become increasingly rare in the later years and, as is well known to readers who have done battle with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the mature fiction avoids plain statements of intent by its very nature. Ultimately, we may have to accept that this is one aspect of Joyce’s personal philosophy that is destined to forever remain in the realm of the private. There is, then, some ambiguity over the question of Joyce’s possible belief in a God, and of whether he possessed any private, lingering religious sentiments, Christian or otherwise. This lack of certainty surrounding personal and rather abstract questions of belief should not, however, be viewed as a justification for abandoning a consideration of the religious themes in the work. The role of religion in society is a theme that is revisited time and again in the fiction, and no faith preoccupied Joyce so entirely as the religion that he was born into: a Church that held its seat of power in Rome but infiltrated Irish society at every level.



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There is some debate concerning the precise moment at which Joyce definitively abandoned Catholicism (a topic explored on page 36), but abandon it he did, a decision that he explained, retrospectively, to Nora in the summer of 1904: Six years ago I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a beggar but I retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do. (L II, 48)

The language here is plain and unambiguous, and the words of the angry young man have never been substantially contradicted by concrete evidence indicating that he ever seriously considered a return to the Church, or that he went on to practice any other form of Christianity or organized religion in his adult life. This fact of the biography was forcefully reiterated by his brother Stanislaus Joyce in 1958 when he protested that, It has become a fashion [. . .] to represent [Joyce] as a man pining for the ancient Church he had abandoned, and at a loss for moral support without the religion in which he was bred. Nothing could be further from the truth.1

Stanislaus’s claim was canonized by Richard Ellmann in his still influential biography, and has been consolidated by Geert Lernout with reference to a wealth of biographical and textual evidence. Given that Lernout has dealt so thoroughly with the topic of Joyce’s rejection of the Church in his personal life, it is not necessary to reiterate all of the details of this argument here.2 When it comes to the life, Lernout’s assertions are illuminating, and in some respects this study continues his work. James Joyce and Catholicism proceeds on the assumption that Joyce was not a follower of religion in any conventional sense, and that he maintained an antagonistic stance towards the Catholic Church throughout his life. If Joyce was not a Roman Catholic of any shade, it is left to us to determine exactly what he was. Critics such as Lernout and Roy Gottfried have grappled with the question, and generated the terms ‘unbelief ’ and ‘misbelief ’ respectively as descriptors. The value of these two approaches is considered below (see pages 43–46). It is noteworthy that these terms have not been widely adopted and, in matters of faith, the label most frequently attached to Joyce is that of ‘heretic’.3

Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years (New York: Viking, 1958), p. 130. Geert Lernout, Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (London: Continuum, 2010). For example, Valentine Cunningham lists Joyce as one of the great heretics in English literature and goes on to describe him as ‘in effect a modern Protestant’. See his ‘Introduction: The Necessity of

1 2 3

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Joyce might be commonly conceived of as a heretic, but in the Church’s own terms this label is not quite apt. A major resource for Catholics in the Anglophone world in the early twentieth century was the Robert Appleton Company’s Catholic Encyclopedia (CE), a resource that was published between 1907 and 1912, and that –​as the notebooks attest –​Joyce frequently turned to during the seventeen years in which he worked on the Wake. If one is looking for a standard approach to heresy as it was commonly understood in Joyce’s lifetime, then this is the natural place to visit. The CE gives a lengthy and typically convoluted account of ‘heresy’, but the essential points are as follows: heretics are understood as Christians rather than out-​and-​out unbelievers, and while heretics embrace positions that break with orthodoxy, ‘the heretic always retains faith in Christ’. The CE cites St Thomas’s description of heresy as ‘a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas’, and it follows that in some instances those branded heretics by the Catholic Church do not seek to occupy a marginal position, but are committed Christian thinkers, grappling with the intricacies of their faith, who arrive at the ‘wrong’ conclusion based on Scripture, rational reasoning or other kinds of insight (CE, ‘Heresy’). The notion of Joyce as a committed Christian thinker, cast out by the main body of the Church because his theological insights led him to approach Christianity in a manner deemed unacceptable, is plainly contradicted by the facts of his life. This life was marked by a broad aversion to, and scepticism towards, any finite or dogmatic system of thought, and appears to have lacked much sustained, spiritual reflection in the public realm. In contrast to the Church’s ancient heretics who grappled with religious questions in order to produce a theology that was ultimately deemed heretical, the Joyce of the Wake actively seeks out rebellious ideas that have been condemned by the Church throughout the ages, and revels in their disruptive powers. A vision of the heretic as someone who operates from within the ranks of the faithful is also key to the way in which such a role is imagined in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, provoked by the memory of Emma’s insinuation of Stephen’s own heresy: A monk! His own image started forth a profaner of the cloister, a heretic franciscan, willing and willing not to serve, spinning like Gherardino da Borgo San

Heresy’, in Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology in English and American Writing, 1800–​2000, edited by Andrew Dix and Jonathan Taylor (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), pp. 1–​20 (pp. 14–​15). There are in fact countless examples of this label being affixed to Joyce.



Introduction: The Apostate’s Wake

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Donnino, a lithe web of sophistry and whispering in her ear. No, it was not his image. (P, 219–​20)

The ‘profaner of the cloister’ was a radical Franciscan monk and author of the Introductorius in Evangelium Esternum (1254), a work that was subjected to scrutiny under Alexander IV owing to concerns over the dissemination of the millenarian teachings of a more famous, or infamous, ‘post hoc’ heretic: Abbot Joachim of Flora, a figure recalled in ‘Proteus’ when Stephen acknowledges that beauty is not to be found in ‘the stagnant bay of Marsh’s library where [he] read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas’ (U, 3.7–​8).4 Gerardo’s book was eventually destroyed, and the friar condemned to a prison cell for the remainder of his days. The passage from A Portrait is slippery and fragmented, awash with anguish and resentment; the is logic hard to follow as the image of the heretical Franciscan blends with that of the priest who Emma flirted with over an Irish language phrase book. Crucially, it emerges that the robe of the heretic (at least as this is embodied by the figure of Gerardo) is just as ill-​fitting as the role of monk and devoted servant of the Church. The objection is on grounds of hypocrisy and inconstancy:  the ‘web of sophistry’ that it is necessary to weave in order to maintain a rebellious position within an ostensibly monolithic institution. For Stephen the rejection of the cleric’s compromise, ‘willing and willing not to serve’, will mature into his philosophy of Non Serviam. In questioning Joyce’s status as heretic, it must be acknowledged that when critics adopt this designation they do not always have the Church’s own sense of what constitutes heresy in mind, but rather a more general sense in which the word can be applied to any kind of rebellion against orthodoxy, a description that does of course apply. Ultimately, no single word or phrase will adequately encapsulate Joyce’s practice entirely, and quibbling over shades of definition often feels more pedantic than productive. Nonetheless, I believe that a more accurate term than ‘heretic’ can be found, and the one I have adopted for this study is ‘apostate’. This is a descriptor that Bernard Benstock has astutely employed to describe Joyce’s practice in the Wake, but one that is often used more casually in criticism as a synonym for heretic.5 A key difference between heresy and apostasy in the CE’s Joachim’s biography, such as it is known, beautifully illustrates the manner in which such a thinker can be conceived of both within, and outside of, the established Church. Joachim lived out his days as a monk, and was widely regarded for his holiness. His controversial approach to the Trinity was not officially condemned until after his death, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and many of his other teachings were left unaffected. 5 Bernard Benstock, ‘The Final Apostasy: James Joyce and Finnegans Wake’, English Literary History, 28.4 (1961), 417–​37. 4

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terms is that apostasy constitutes an active choice to abandon one’s faith entirely, rather than to believe in it ‘wrongly’, a distinction described as follows:  ‘The apostate a fide abandons wholly the faith of Christ either by embracing Judaism, Islamism, Paganism, or simply by falling into naturalism and complete neglect of religion’ (CE, ‘Heresy’). As we have seen, the claim that Joyce had completely abandoned all faith in Christ is not one that can be definitively proven or disproven either way. The image of one who consciously throws over his faith is, though, especially applicable. For ‘apostate’ the OED gives us: ‘One who abjures or forsakes his religious faith, or abandons his moral allegiance; a pervert’, a description that suits Joyce rather well. A further trait that often characterizes apostatic literature is not only the abandonment of a faith, but the desire to return to the belief system that was previously held in order to critique it –​a return that is of crucial importance in the Wake.

II The brief remarks just made already hint at the many interwoven threads that one is faced with unravelling when speaking about ‘Joyce and Catholicism’. This theme encapsulates vast theological and global-​political questions, as well as a consideration of the particular social institution that Joyce was born into in February 1882. This study focuses on the last of these concerns, arguably the most underexamined aspect of the treatment of religious themes in the Wake, and the most vital for moving towards a proper understanding of the work. It is impossible to define absolute cultural and historical limits when it comes to such a spatially and temporally slippery aesthetic object. It is also the case that the book does not treat all time and place equally, and that the Wake is infused with the world of Catholic Ireland as it existed around the turn of the last century and beyond, a religious culture that reflected a set of conservative Catholic values that had been on the rise since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. This study therefore works with a broad, but not unlimited, contextual framework, considering Joyce’s approach to a culture of Catholicism in Ireland c. 1850–​1939. However, setting a limit of this kind necessarily excludes close investigation of several important religious themes. An extensive discussion of medieval hagiography, however crucial, must be put to one side. The history of Catholic Ireland in the eighteenth century is a further significant, and underexamined, aspect of the Wake that I do not have space to investigate here.



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The chosen period is, nonetheless, most apt as it accounts for the chapter in Irish Catholic history that Joyce knew best, either directly or indirectly, and that he returned to most frequently. Given the massive changes wrought in the Church by Vatican II Council (1962–​5), a great deal of this culture is now largely unrecognizable to the contemporary reader, Catholic or not. Before embarking upon an exploration of Joyce’s radical reinvention of this world in the Wake, it is therefore first necessary to paint a more general picture of the Church at this time, from the perspectives of both its centre in Rome as well as its periphery in Ireland. While the shape of any historical narrative is inevitably structured by competing ideological forces, as Lernout has noted, Catholic Church history is a particularly thorny area.6 Resources have, for a long time, been limited owing to the fact that the Vatican is exceedingly cautious when it comes to an examination of its past. Furthermore, histories are often written from either a devotional perspective, or with an explicitly liberal and secular agenda in mind, and the middle ground is frequently excluded. Despite these difficulties, the history of the Church in this period has been charted from a relatively neutral and scholarly perspective by a handful of scholars. In French, the most thorough account appears in the relevant volumes of Histoire du christianisme (1995), and in English, in Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett’s magisterial Priests, Prelates and People (2003). To these should be added two valuable histories of the papacy, Owen Chadwick’s History of the Popes, 1830–​1914 (1998), and Eamon Duffy’s less strictly academic, but hugely informative, Saints and Sinners (1997). A slightly outdated but nonetheless valuable work is E. E. Y. Hales’s The Catholic Church in the Modern World, first published in 1958. Turning to the history of the Irish Church in the period in question, Emmet Larkin’s groundbreaking series of seven book-​length studies published from the 1970s onwards, each of which covers in great depth a portion of the period from 1750 to 1891, is by far the most substantial and insightful resource available. David W.  Miller’s overview of the Church in Ireland at the turn of the last century, Church, State and Nation in Ireland, 1898–​1921 (1973), is also helpful. Precise accounts of the period in question are readily available in the sources just mentioned, and a large portion of this information has been summarized from a Joycean perspective by Lernout, so it would not be useful to embark upon Lernout, p. 29.

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another lengthy history at this juncture. It is, however, worthwhile to revisit key landmarks, with an eye to flagging aspects of Church history that are especially relevant to a reading of the Wake. Crucial to this is the relationship between the Church and the fledgling Irish State in the decades immediately post-​Partition, a topic that receives relatively little attention in Lernout’s account, or in Joyce scholarship as a whole. This context is explored below and elsewhere in this study.

The Church in Rome The Church, as it existed in Western Europe in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, was undoubtedly an established conservative force, a force that was embodied in the person of Pope Gregory XVI (1765–​1846). A traditionalist and an ultramontane, Gregory was unpopular at home owing to his draconian conservatism and reckless spending. Against a backdrop of political unrest and uncertainty throughout the Papal States, and beyond, he was the enemy of reformers, including those who favoured seemingly innocuous technological developments like gas lighting and the building of railways. The latter, it has often been claimed, was referred to by Gregory, with a pun, as a chemin d’enfer (a road to hell) rather than the chemin de fer.7 Joyce himself would indulge in a somewhat similar linguistic play in the ‘Nightlessons’ chapter of the Wake, when he has the French ‘road of iron’ or railway transform into ‘that chemise de fer’ (290.19). In the light of the rise of Hugues-​Félicité Robert de Lamennais, along with other prominent liberal Catholics, Gregory officially condemned liberalism in the 1832 encyclical Mirari vos, although he did not go so far as to condemn Lammenais by name at that time. Winds of change were, however, to fill the air. Or at least, this was how events were perceived in the popular imagination. In 1846, Giovanni Maria Mastai-​ Ferretti  –​the man who was to be hailed the world over as Pio Nono  –​was elected Pope Pius IX, who, from his election until his death in 1878, steered the Church through a rocky course. At the time of his selection, Mastai-​Ferretti was known for his liberal tendencies, ‘an ardent and emotional man’ with a record of generosity and friendship that even extended towards those who might be assumed to be his bitterest enemies.8 These qualities were lauded by Thomas Worcester, ‘Pius VII:  Moderation in an Age of Revolution and Reaction’, in The Papacy Since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor, edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 107–​24 (p. 124). 8 Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners:  A  History of the Popes, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2002), p. 286. 7



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the Italian population at large in the early days of his pontificate, a mood that is vividly captured by Hales: He was said to be interested in railways and scientific improvements in agriculture. He was a progressive. He was no friend of the Austrians. He would take the lead in liberating Italy! Racing ahead of the facts, the Italian imagination was casting him for the role of Julius II; he would drive the Austrians from Milan and Venice, where they had ruled since 1815, he would redeem and unite Italy and himself be her first President! In vast crowds the Romans congregated, almost nightly in the piazza at the Quirinal, to receive, on their knees, his benediction; in Piedmont and Sicily, in Tuscany and Naples, his name was painted on the plaster walls, carried on banners in procession, invoked as patron of every enterprise. Viva Pio Nono!9

The image of the liberal pope was, perhaps inevitably, destined to evaporate. A  power struggle between the Papal States and the burgeoning Italian nation had gripped the peninsula for many years prior to the election of the new pope, and in November 1848 the pontiff was forced to flee Rome briefly in the wake of terrorist attacks perpetrated by liberal nationalists. When he eventually returned to Rome, the pope did not resume residence in the Quirinale (a building constructed as a summer papal residence by Gregory XIII as far back as 1583), but ensconced himself in another of the Roman palaces, famously styling himself as ‘The Prisoner of the Vatican’. It is these events that altered the entire direction of his pontificate. The decision to retreat into a contained and well-​defended zone was clearly pragmatic; the Church simply did not have the military might necessary in order to go toe to toe with the insurgent forces. The move to the Vatican also, naturally, garnered symbolic importance, for both the ‘prisoner’ himself and his followers. As the Papal States fell all around, the Church turned within and to its own traditions –​a bid, it seems, to claim absolute spiritual authority as temporal power slipped from its grasp. No doubt this new agenda was in part a consequence of the pope’s increasing distrust of the liberal political agenda that had endangered both his own life, and the ancient institution for which he stood. His papacy was, from this point on, characterized by increasingly traditionalist and conservative steps, and nowhere is this traditionalism more apparent than in his approach to devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1854 Pio Nono, an avowedly Marian pope, officially defined the dogma of the Immaculate E. E. Y. Hales, The Catholic Church in the Modern World: A Survey from the French Revolution to the Present (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1958), p. 18.

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Conception in the encyclical Ineffabilis Deus, a dogma that drew upon an ancient and apocryphal piety that had never been formally articulated. The ‘new’ dogma instigated a fresh wave of Mariology across the Catholic world that remained conspicuous up to, including, and beyond Joyce’s lifetime. Mariology is a topic that is returned to throughout the Joycean oeuvre, and a phenomenon that is discussed in further detail in Chapter 3. More aggressively conservative was the pope’s infamous Syllabus Errorum or Syllabus of Errors. This lengthy document was appended to the 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura and, as Atkin and Tallett note, it was produced in great haste (they claim that the document was composed at a comparable speed to Stalin’s construction of the first five-​year plan in the Soviet Union).10 The Syllabus takes the form of a list of ‘false’ propositions that were commonly accepted in the modern world, according to the author of the document. As Atkin and Tallett point out, many of the articles in the eighty-​point list are not particularly controversial. Rather, they present a rhetorically exaggerated counterpoint to the Church’s established position on a number of core issues. For example, the opening section of the Syllabus is, unsurprisingly, concerned with the promotion of the singular truth of the Catholic faith and the condemnation of ‘Pantheism, Naturalism and Absolute Rationalism’,11 and sections of the Syllabus are also dedicated, via the inclusion of numerous false propositions, to the condemnation of ‘Moderate Rationalism’, ‘Indifferentism and Latitudinarianism’, and ‘Socialism, Communism, Secret Societies, Biblical Societies and Clerico-​Liberal Societies’, along with a selection of additional ‘modern’ tendencies that are singled out as particularly harmful.12 Again, as one might expect, a further preoccupation is with asserting the rights of the Church in the face of potential interference from ‘civil governments’, and with asserting the supremacy of the pontiff ahead of national churches (see Article 37). An example of an ‘erroneous’ proposition with regard to the relations between church and state is the following blunt statement, included as Article 55: ‘The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church’. Additionally, the mentality of ‘nationalist’ revolutionaries is caricatured as follows: ‘The violation of any solemn oath, as well as any wicked and flagitious action repugnant to the eternal law, is not only not Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750 (London and New York: Tauris, 2003), p. 135. 11 The consulted English translation of the Syllabus Errorum is at ‘Papal Encyclicals Online’ . Accessed 1 September 2015. 12 The inclusion of ‘Biblical Societies’ within this list of renegade groups and societies, dismissed as ‘pests of this kind’, might strike the modern reader as odd, but this scepticism towards the study of scripture is entirely in keeping with the mood of the Church of the day. 10



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blamable but is altogether lawful and worthy of the highest praise when done through love of country’ (Article 64). So far, the Syllabus does not seem to include many surprises in the light of the prevailing mood in the Church in the middle of the nineteenth century. The final cluster of statements (‘Errors Having Reference to Modern Liberalism’) is, nonetheless, striking in its extreme conservatism and lack of tolerance. In these declarations, Pio Nono effectively denies the religious freedoms of non-​Catholics, condemning the following as nought but a misguided liberalism: In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship [. . .] Hence it has been widely decided by law, in some Catholic countries, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship (Articles 77–​8).

The final article summarized all that the pontiff wished to render as falsehood:  ‘The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization’ (Article 80). The Syllabus naturally provoked scorn and derision outside the Catholic world. The document also caused rifts to deepen within the Catholic hierarchy, which throughout the second half of the century consisted, as it often had, of both conservative as well as more liberal factions. One of the men at the head of the conservative faction was Cardinal Manning of Westminster, an individual who had been in large part responsible for the composition of the Syllabus in the first place. Joyce was certainly aware of Manning, and the cardinal is mockingly addressed in chapter II.2 of the Wake –​along with three other humorously deflated representatives of Church authority –​as ‘his enement curdinal marryng’ (282.21). In this perhaps facile pun, the ‘enemy’ has become conflated with an ‘enema’, and there is an additional sense of something that is ‘curdling’ or going sour. This is hardly a sophisticated critique, but it is evidence of Joyce’s vitriolic approach to the arch-​conservative figure nonetheless. One of many examples of the author’s love of biographical titbits, the pun ‘marryng’ relates to the fact that Manning was a widower before taking Holy Orders. Manning was not only an arch-​conservative but a staunch believer in papal autocracy, and it was this ultramontane agenda that he endeavoured to push through at the First Vatican Council in 1870. The Council represented a defining moment in the history of the modern Church, most famously because of its proclamation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility. This well-​known and controversial belief is, unsurprisingly, mocked on several occasions in the Wake, most

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humorously in chapter II.1. Here the dogma becomes reimagined in aquatic terms, and we learn that ‘the pesciolines in Liffeyetta’s bowl have stopped squiggling about Junoh and the whalk and feriaquintaism and pebble infinibility and the poissission of the hoghly course’ (245.10–​13). The Dublin masses (all who live in the basin of the River Liffey, in linguistic terms an Italianized bunch) have given up arguing over such technicalities as the accuracy of the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, or perhaps the place of the Feria Quinta or Maundy Thursday in the Easter Triduum (another ‘holy’ Thursday being Bloom’s day on 16 June 1904). Debates over the dogma of Papal Infallibility and, perhaps more significantly, the nature of the Procession of the Holy Ghost are also present. The latter is at the root of the great schism between the churches of the East and West that is so often alluded to in the Wake. Instead, possession or ownership of the ‘holy course’, and indeed the ‘holy cross’, has been handed over to the Catholic hierarchy. Within Joyce studies, the First Vatican Council is most often considered in relation to the distorted version of the debate over Papal Infallibility that appears in the short story ‘Grace’, ‘the greatest scene in the whole history of the Church’ as Joyce has the ostensibly devout Cunningham proclaim (D, 168). As I have discussed at some length elsewhere, Joyce’s description of the rebellious, nationalist Archbishop John MacHale at the Council in the short story is deliberately distorted for dramatic effect, with MacHale engaging in something of a ‘showdown’ with the pope.13 In Rome in November 1906, Joyce told Stanislaus that he was looking up the account of the First Vatican Council (Letters II 192–​3), and it is probable that Joyce continued to visit the events of this tumultuous period in Church history as he worked on Ulysses. An example of Joyce’s idiosyncratic reading habits, William Francis Barry’s The Papacy and Modern Times: A Political Sketch, 1303–​1870 (London: Williams and Norgate, n.d.) is among the books he left behind in Trieste in 1920. Barry, better known as the author of Catholic novels such as The New Antigone (1887), was educated at the Gregorian University, and he was in Rome during the Vatican Council. His Political Sketch includes an eyewitness account of the taking of Rome in 1870, an account that would surely have interested Joyce, if he did in fact read or consult this volume. It has long been acknowledged that Joyce’s depiction of the Council is inaccurate and implausible, but what is less commonly noted by critics is the fact that Joyce had not forgotten about MacHale when composing the Wake. A possible 13

Chrissie Van Mierlo, ‘Greedo! Joyce, John MacHale and the First Vatican Council from ‘Grace’ to Finnegans Wake’, Dublin James Joyce Journal, 8 (2016), pp. 1–14.



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allusion to the archbishop occurs in one of Issy’s speeches, when she speculates about a lover by asking, ‘I just want to see will he or are all Michales like that’ (461.20–​1)? If this is indeed a reference to MacHale, then the question of ‘will he or won’t he?’ might relate to the decision to assent to Papal Infallibility. In broader narrative terms, the question is definitely a sexual one. At this moment MacHale is conflated with ‘Fr Michael’, a priestly lover for both Issy and ALP who recurs in the Wake, and is hardly a flattering identification for a senior cleric. A  further allusion to MacHale occurs when Joyce explicitly echoes the account of Vatican I  that appears in ‘Grace’. In this restaging  –​penned many years after the initial short story –​the Archbishop of Tuam’s cry of ‘Credo’ is parodied as follows: ‘Happy Maria and Glorious Patrick, etc., etc. In fact, always, have I  believe. Greedo!’ (411.19–​21). This formulation reduces the belief in the powers of Irish national saints the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Patrick to a throwaway, gluttonous exclamation. It combines a sense of forgetfulness and opportunism when it comes to the ownership of a particular set of beliefs with a more general jibe at clerical greed. At the time of its convocation the longevity of the pronouncements of the Council can hardly have been imagined. Yet, remarkably, the Council’s decisions were destined to remain current for almost a century. On 19 July 1870 the Franco-​Prussian War erupted and the Council was suspended. As it happened the Council was never reconvened, and the first order of business at the Second Vatican Council, almost a century later, was to declare Vatican I closed.14 Pio Nono died, having been in large part responsible for establishing the Catholic Church as a supremely conservative force on the world stage. According to Chadwick, it would not have been conceivable for the cardinals left behind to elect a successor who was not a conservative, and this is exactly as it came to pass when Leo XIII took the reins in 1878, probably the Wake’s ‘Lio the Faultyfindth’ (153.34) or fault-​finder.15 This figure, pontiff from 1878 to 1903, warrants special notice in this study as he was the pope directly responsible for the Church into which Joyce was born, although in many respects he only sought to continue the work of his predecessor. Like Pius IX, Leo was an exceptionally Marian pope who promoted a range of devotions to the Blessed Virgin. A more unique aspect of his pontificate was his love of Aquinas, a papal preference that led to a Thomist revival in the Catholic world in the last part of the nineteenth century. This move was officially instigated by the well-​known encyclical of 1879, Aeterni 14

Duffy, p. 301. Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–​1914 (Oxford: Clarenden, 1998), p. 278.

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Patris, in which the pontiff instructs ‘carefully selected teachers [. . .] to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others’.16 The young Joyce, ‘steeled’ as he was ‘in the school of old Aquinas’ (CW, 152) according to his juvenile broadside poem ‘The Holy Office’, surely bathed in this new wave, regardless of his distaste for the Roman hierarchy. Leo XIII’s approach was overwhelmingly conservative and traditionalist, and, like his predecessor, he despised both Freemasonry and socialism and condemned these burgeoning movements. In one aspect of his papacy he might be said to have taken a more liberal approach, and that is in the area of Bible scholarship. The 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus appears to allow Catholics more freedom to study Scripture than had been enjoyed at any time since the Reformation. The document celebrates the achievements of the Bible scholars of antiquity and suggests that the study of the Vulgate is a suitable occupation for a well-​educated Catholic. The rub is that such study can only be undertaken in the light of the already established teachings of Mother Church. The encyclical explicitly condemns scientific or rationalist approaches to Scripture, and hits out against the ‘enemies of religion’ and their ‘vaunted “higher criticism”’, which, in the pontiff ’s eyes, ‘will not throw on the Scripture the light which is sought, or prove of any advantage to doctrine; it will only give rise to disagreement and dissension, those sure notes of error, which the critics in question so plentifully exhibit in their own persons’.17 The logic of this statement is itself remarkable: the ability of Bible scholarship to generate debate and conflict is in itself enough to prove its erroneous nature. The pope does not name his targets, but it is likely that the object of his ire were the liberal Protestant scholars who had pioneered new approaches to the Bible since the rise of the Tübingen School in the 1840s. The rise of a rationalist or ‘modernist’ approach to the Bible was, moreover, destined to become a problem from within, as well as from without, the Catholic Church. This conflict came to be known as the modernist crisis, and was probably the most damaging thing to hit the Church since the Papal States began to fall in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris:  Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Restoration of Christian Philosophy . Paragraph 31. Accessed 1 September 2015. 17 Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus:  Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Study of Holy Scripture . Paragraph 17. Accessed 1 September 2015. 16



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It is difficult to provide an objective definition of what ‘Catholic modernism’ was, or is, simply because the term was not one used by the modernists themselves, but rather a derogatory label that Pius X (who succeeded Leo XIII in 1903) coined in relation to certain trends of thought in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis –​a communication that was designed to stamp out modernism in all its forms. In this way, Catholic modernism often comes to be understood not in its own terms, but in the terms of those who sought to suppress these movements for change. Some of the key players that came to be associated with Catholic theological modernism (including the French Priest Abbé Alfred Loisy, often called modernism’s ‘founding father’, the expelled Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell, English nun Maude Petre, the Austrian layman Baron (Friedrich) von Hügel, the Italian philosopher Ernesto Buonaiuti and the French historian of the Church and its dogmata, Pierre Batifol) embody a broad range of thought, incorporating diverse national traditions. For our purposes, following Joyce’s lead with regard to his own preoccupations, two key threads of Catholic modernist thought might be teased out all the same. The first of these concerns Bible scholarship, and an emphasis on a rationalist approach to the Bible as a fallible text –​a method of reading Scripture that Pius X describes as the ‘dismembering of the Sacred Books’.18 A further crucial point, to again borrow the words of Pius X, is a mode of historicism that concerns itself with ‘the intrinsic evolution of dogma’,19 that is, the notion that the Church’s teachings are not intrinsic or absolute, but rather that they do, and indeed should, change throughout time. The modernist crisis is an aspect of Church history that Lernout attaches particular importance to with regard to Joyce’s stance, particularly as this is reflected in the fiction up until 1922. Lernout also flags the fact that Joyce continued to show interest in approaches to Scripture, and to Church history, that could be loosely termed modernist, while he was working on the Wake. In the notebook VI.B.2, Joyce took notes from two rationalist critiques of the Bible, John Mackinnon Robertson’s Pagan Christs:  Studies in Comparative Hierology and Grant Allen’s The Evolution of the Idea of God, as well as taking notes from the recently published apocryphal gospel of St James in VI.B.11. In notebook VI.B.28 Joyce also took notes from Joseph Turmel’s banned book on the history of the devil.20 Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis:  Encyclical of Pope Pius X on the Doctrines of the Modernists . Paragraph 34. Accessed 1 September 2015. 19 Pius X, paragraph 13. 20 Lernout, pp. 194–​5. 18

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Lernout is surely correct in asserting that the precepts of Catholic modernism are relevant to Joyce’s practice. Moreover, the move towards a conception of the historical changeability of the Church’s supposedly fixed teachings is reflected in the depiction of Stephen’s intellectual development in the fiction. In A Portrait, Stephen famously eschews Protestantism by declaring that he is not willing to ‘forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent’ (P, 244), suggesting at least some investment in the Church’s own conception of its character. In ‘Telemachus’, he is rather less sure of the historical integrity of Catholic dogma. In response to the clanging of the ‘proud potent titles’ that declare the Church’s unified, sacred, universal and apostolic nature –​‘et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam’ –​he reflects upon ‘the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars’ (U 1.651–​3). Here Stephen’s mental chemistry produces a vision of Church history that is populated with a plethora of ancient heretics (Photius, Arius, Valentine, Sabellius). The history of Church teaching becomes an ever-​ shifting battleground, defended by militant angels with ‘their lances and their shields’ (U 1.664), a sharp contrast to Pius X’s vision of the fixed, unwavering truth of the teachings of Mother Church. A contingent, historically grounded conception of Church history also speaks to the last work. The Wake turns to numerous moments of schism and disruption, and incorporates allusions to literally dozens of rebellions that were subsequently deemed heretical by the Church. Chapter 1 shows that it is relatively unusual for Joyce to explore these heresies in any great depth in the Wake. As an approach to Church history his method does, nonetheless, have distinctly modernist characteristics. Frequent recourse to moments of conflict, and subsequent realignment, over crucial dogmata exposes the history of Catholic teaching. It is shown not to be the unbroken apostolic tradition that the Church claims for Herself, but rather a jagged line that has been shaped by numerous ideological battles and power struggles. The Wake, of course, does not allow for comfortable comprehension or straightforward parallels; we cannot fall back on easy assumptions regarding the exact nature of Joyce’s interests in his last work, despite the hints that survive as tangible traces in the archive. Sympathies with the Catholic modernist cast of mind can certainly be discerned, but it must be acknowledged that the theological modernists themselves remain largely absent. Abbé Loisy is the only figure strongly associated with Catholic modernism to be invoked and this occurs in a description of HCE’s ‘perusal flea and loisy manner’ (516.9),



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a ‘free and easy’ manner that  –​consistent as it is with HCE’s dissent  –​also sounds distinctly ‘lousy’. The only allusion to Grant Allen does not concern his radical theology, but rather his better-​known novel of 1895, The Woman Who Did –​ a work that enjoyed a succès de scandale owing to its approach to the institution of marriage.21 While Lernout calls attention to Joyce’s engagement with radical and heterodox ideas, it should also be remembered that Joyce’s reading materials are often of the most ‘middle of the road’ kind. A  further example of Joyce’s idiosyncratic reading and book buying (or acquiring) habits, Allen’s historical guide to Paris (London: Grant Richards, 1900) is also part of the ‘Trieste Library’. The Roman Catholic Church, as it stood at the turn of the last century, is the very institution that Joyce consciously elected to leave behind. Despite his apostasy, he kept his eyes on the Vatican until the last years of his life. The most recent pope to feature in the Wake is Pius XI, pontiff from 1922 until his death in 1939, whose reign mirrors almost exactly the composition history of the book. Pius XI earned his place in the history books when he finally resolved the relationship between the Church’s dominion and the new nation of Italy by founding Vatican City as an independent sovereign state in 1929. This particular pontiff comes into focus in chapter I.6, when the 1928 papal encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor appears. Here the mischievous Gripes inverts the intent of the holy missive, proclaiming to his popelike counterpart: ‘Think of it! O miserendissimest retempter! A Gripes!’ (154.6). This punning address might cast the arch-​Catholic Shaun-​Mookse in the role of tempter, or indeed re-​tempter.22 In typically Wakean fashion, Joyce chiefly delighted in the pontiff ’s rather unfortunate birth name, Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti. The Mookse’s response to the outburst quoted immediately above is ‘Rats!’ (154.7), and plays on the pope’s name also appear in the phrases ‘[a]‌sk my index, mund my achilles’ (154.18), and in Issy’s playful words, ‘scene it, ratty’ (458.6). Again, these jibes can hardly be thought of as sophisticated, but they do bear witness to a persistent animosity towards the Catholic hierarchy that is indelibly inscribed in the text of the Wake.

An account of the reception of this hugely popular work of fiction can be found in Vanessa Warne and Colette Colligan’s ‘The Man Who Wrote a New Woman Novel:  Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did and the Gendering of New Woman Authorship’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 33.1 (2005), 21–​46. 22 The encyclical itself is largely concerned with affirming Catholic belief in Margaret Mary Alacoque’s vision of Christ exposing his Sacred Heart, a popular devotion that is also treated with due irreverence in the Wake (see also p. 26). 21

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These albeit brief glimpses into the intersections between the activities of the Church of Rome and Joyce’s work are indicative of an important preoccupation in the fiction that persists far beyond Ulysses. The Wake reveals at every turn its saturation in Catholic culture, as subject matter, and as subject for critique, from the day-​to-​day ‘props’ of religious culture that are associated with the central cast of characters at various moments, through to larger theological concerns. That said, Joyce’s lived experiences of Catholicism did not, naturally, come directly from Rome, but via a culture of Irish Catholicism that existed in Victorian and Edwardian Dublin during his juvenile years, and that took on new and pervasive forms during the first four decades of the twentieth century. It is to this important context that I now turn my attention.

The Church in Ireland As Stephen recalls towards the end of ‘Telemachus’, the Nicene Creed enshrines four terms that are central to the Church’s understanding of its own historical character:  unam, sanctam, catholicam, apostolicam (one, holy, catholic, apostolic). This sense of the Church’s ‘oneness’ as a global body does not sit altogether comfortably with the character of the Irish Church in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this era, the Church in Ireland possessed a regional flavour to perhaps a greater extent than was the case with many Catholic nations on the Continent. The growth of a unique, or at least distinctive, religious culture in Ireland has been attributed to numerous social, geographical and legal factors. Among various competing theories, two are especially plausible:  the fact that the Inquisition never reached Ireland’s shores, and the suggestion that the various penal laws inflicted upon the country’s Catholic majority for centuries had forced a less formal, underground religious culture to blossom.23 Geroid Ó Crualaoich describes the popular approach to religion in premodern Ireland as a ‘native or ancestral religious sensibility’,24 a climate in which pagan traditions persisted alongside more orthodox Christian ideas. He cites rituals like pilgrimages, pattern-​festivities and wakes as important examples of ‘a religious sensibility on the part of the rural masses that derives as much from a Celtic or pagan cosmological tradition as from a Christian one’.25 Local Raymond Gillespie, ‘Popular and Unpopular Religion: A View from Early Modern Ireland’, in Irish Popular Culture, 1650–​1850, edited by James S. Donnelly, Jr and Kerby A. Miller (Dublin:  Irish Academic Press, 1998), pp. 30–​49 (p. 32). 24 Geroid Ó Crualaoich, ‘The Merry Wake’, in Irish Popular Culture, 1650–​1850, edited by James S. Donnelly, Jr and Kerby A. Miller (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), pp. 173–​200 (p. 173). 25 Ó Crualaoich, p. 176. 23



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pilgrimages and pattern-​festivities are related concepts. The word ‘pattern’ (a term derived from the Hiberno-​English pronunciation of ‘patron’) denotes a uniquely Irish religious rite that was undertaken by the masses, ostensibly in honour of the patron saint of a local holy place. A large number of these sites had, inevitably, roots that were pre-​Christian. Typical practices at such events included the ritual of performing circuits or rounds centred on a given feature of the landscape, often a holy well. During these rounds, numerical patterns were strictly adhered to, with prayers repeated in a fixed sequence. Part of the pattern would usually be undertaken on one’s knees, frequently causing serious injury. Further common activities at such events included the recitation of rosaries and the selling of prayer cards and other tokens as souvenirs. Water or other items would be taken away as relics, and pilgrims would bathe together naked, regardless of sex. The ‘devotional’ part of proceedings was usually followed by drinking, dancing (patterns were often used as the occasion to arrange marriages between neighbouring villages or hamlets) and bonfires. Loss of life was common at such events, owing to faction fighting.26 Given this unholy alliance between the sacred and the profane, it is hardly surprising that the clergy stopped attending in the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, there is evidence that patterns continued to play a part in Irish Catholic life into the nineteenth century, and that some patterns were revived in the early part of the twentieth as well. While it is highly unlikely that the city born Joyce would have witnessed such a sight, these practices certainly lingered long in the cultural memory of the society in which he was raised –​if only as a remote echo of days now lost.27 How much Joyce knew of such practices is not known, and this is certainly not the dominant religious culture that is represented in the Wake. Furthermore, prominent intertextual allusions suggest that Joyce drew heavily upon the fictional vision of Ireland’s rural past that he encountered in the works of Dion Boucicault, the Dublin-​born playwright whose melodramatic ‘Irish plays’ –​rendered in dialect –​earned the writer-​actor great success in the mid-​nineteenth century, with a career ranging from Ireland to London, Australia and New York. The Wake’s ironic reference to ‘the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault’ (385.2–​3) reinforces the sense that the world of the plays is nought but a sham, and in this respect, Joyce’s views overlap with those expressed by Yeats, who Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, ‘The Pattern’, in Irish Popular Culture, 1650–​1850, edited by James S. Donnelly, Jr and Kerby A. Miller (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), pp. 201–​21, passim. Ó Giolláin describes the pattern at St Gobnait’s Well in Dunquin, County Kerry, a festival that was revived in the early twentieth century and continues to this day (p. 202).

26

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complained in his editorial essay in Samhain in October 1901 that ‘[i]‌f Irish dramatists had studied the romantic plays of Ibsen [. . .] they would not have sent the Irish Literary Theatre imitations of Boucicault, who had no relation to literature’. That same month, Yeats recalled his despair at the attitudes of Irish audiences in a letter to Lady Gregory: I was saying to myself ‘Here are we a lot of intelligent people, who might have been doing some sort of intelligent work that leads to some fun, yet here we are going through all sorts of trouble and annoyance for a [. . .] body of ignoramuses who prefer Boucicault an audience a mob [sic] that prefers Boucicault to us.’28

Yeats might have been keen to leave a clear stretch between Boucicault and the high ideals of the literary theatre, but Joyce –​characteristically more playful  –​was perfectly willing to incorporate numerous elements of Boucicault’s melodrama, although there is no real sense that the popular dramatist is taken particularly seriously in the Wake. It is easy to see why some of Boucicault’s twee, absurd and chaotic themes appealed. For example, raucous celebrations are a feature of Arrah-​na-​Pogue, a play set against the backdrop of the 1798 uprising. Here, Shaun-​the-​Post (a character name purloined by Joyce) buoyantly jumps atop a barrel during a party to celebrate his marriage, an act that is mimicked in chapter III.1 of the Wake when Shaun likewise delivers a speech from atop a floating barrel.29 The climax of the play’s second act –​a rollicking courtroom scene in which Shaun attempts to evade questions with slippery rhetoric, and in which Colonel O’Grady unsuccessfully defends his innocence –​ also finds a parallel in the courtroom-​style inquisition of Shaun-​Yawn that takes place in chapter III.3 of the Wake. It is telling that Boucicault himself took the role of Shaun in early productions, adding further layers of fakery to the Shaunish persona.

W. B. Yeats quoted in Deirdre McFeely, Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 177. 29 The dialogue and stage directions run as follows: ‘Shaun: There’s lashins of mate inside, and good liquor galore, and him that spares what’s there, I look upon as my inimy. (He jumps on a barrel. Music again. Exeunt all into inner room, Arrah first with the Priest as they go in.) Pat Ryan, lave that girl alone till the grace is said; in wid ye, you are welkim as the flowers in May. Nora Kavinagh, don’t be provokin’ that boy before he’s able for ye. Ah! Tim Conolly, is it cologuin wid two girls at a time you are: I’m lookin’ at ye. Walk in, my darlin’s, and cead mille failtha. (He leaps down and follows them.)’ Dion Boucicault, Arrah-​na-​Pogue or, the Wicklow Wedding (1864), full text downloaded from . Accessed 1 October 2015.The play was sufficiently well known to spawn a parody, Charles Adolphus Shelley’s Arrah-​na-​Brogue, as well as a Spanish adaptation, Juan el Corro (published Madrid, 1867). And it had certainly not been forgotten by Joyce’s day. Arrah-​na-​Pogue continued to be performed in Ireland, and beyond, well into the twentieth century, and this was one of three plays by Boucicault to be adapted by American film studio, the Kalem company, in 1911–​12. 28



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Returning to the pattern, another reveller from the imagination of Boucicault, ‘Conn’, the titular Shaughraun of an 1874 work, is described in the play’s dramatis personae as ‘the soul of every fair, the life of every funeral, the first fiddle at all weddings and patterns’.30 The kind of riotous pattern or wake alluded to here contributes to an opaque scenario from chapter III.3, a version of the mysterious happening that the Four persistently try, and fail, to get to the bottom of: ‘this pattern pootsch punnermine’ (519.3–​4). The portmanteau ‘punnermine’ suggests a comic staging in its echo of ‘pantomime’, and the mine of puns might also be the Wake itself. There is, furthermore, more than a hint of violence in this bizarre description of a putsch, with ‘the artillery of the O’Hefferns answering the cavalry of the MacClouds, fortey and more fortey, a thousand and one times’ (519.6–​7). Again, it seems, we are dealing with the realm of the imagination; it is a ‘cock and biddy story’ (519.8) according to the member of Mamalujo who is asking the questions. Moving away from such chaotic scenes, the holier dimension of the pattern comes through in chapter II.1 when Shaun is ironically eulogized by the crowd as ‘Pattern of our unschoold, pageantmaster’ (237.13). Similarly, in a ludicrously hyperbolic tribute to ‘rural Haun’ (471.35) at the close of chapter III.2, the narrator paints him as ‘our pattern sent!’ (472.25). When it comes to Joyce’s engagement with Ireland’s ‘ancestral’ religious past, it is, naturally, the image of the traditional Irish wake itself that is afforded the most prominent position in the last work, featuring as it does in the very title. Moreover, it is again clear that his interest in such rituals is far more ambivalent than just a straightforward act of cultural revivalism or retrieval. As is well known, Joyce’s primary source of inspiration for this motif was the popular Irish, or according to Kenner pseudo-​Irish,31 music-​hall song ‘Finnegan’s Wake’. The song, like most nineteenth-​century ballads, exists in many variants. All do, however, tell essentially the same story of an Irish hod carrier and drunk named Tim Finnegan, who fell from a ladder and ‘broke his scull’.32 Upon taking the body home, Finnegan’s friends and family ‘wake’ him, a social occasion that relies heavily on drink and dance, and eventually turns into a brawl as, absurdly, Dion Boucicault. The Shaughraun: An Original Drama, in Three Acts, Illustrative of Irish Life and Character (London: John Dicks, n.d.), p. 1. This is another work by Boucicault that has a Wakean resonance that it is difficult to ignore, for example in a scene where Conn must keep up the pretence of his death as he witnesses his own wake. This is not such a prominent intertext as Arrah-​na-​Pogue, but there is nonetheless explicit reference to ‘Conn the Shaughraun’ (289.24), another role originated by Boucicault himself. 31 Hugh Kenner suggests an American-​Irish provenance in A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 221. 32 ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ reproduced in Maureen O’Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop (eds), An Irish Literature Reader, 2nd ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006 [1987]), pp. 85–​6. 30

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‘Shillelagh law did all engage’. In the final verse, whiskey is spilled over Finnegan’s body, causing him to rise again. His exclamation, ‘Thanam o’n dhoul, do ye think I’m dead?’, is at once comic and grotesque. A number of the song’s themes emerge in the book, the most central of these being the idea of a fall and resurrection itself, an arc that extends from HCE’s suspect encounter with the Cad in the park, and his downfall at the hands of the city’s gossips, to the transmogrification of Shaun into his father part way through the Third Watch of Shaun, and the reawakening of the sleeping giant in Book IV. Additionally, the ‘jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake’ (221.26) that are a feature of the ballad break out on several occasions. Joyce’s use of the ballad could be thought a light-​hearted, or even celebratory, choice of refrain. Then, despite the song’s rowdy, jovial feel, the ballad hardly constitutes an idyllic rendering of Ireland past. In a manner that might be compared to Boucicault’s melodramas, the song fuses a romantic vision with elements that provoke a darker mood. It could be said that, as a counterpoint to the excesses of the ‘cultic twalette’ (344.12) as the book has it, Joyce deliberately selected as sources of inspiration material that would contribute to the chaos, drunkenness and revelry of his vision of the Wake, a vision that is often as nightmarish as it is funny. The traditional Irish wake functions, then, as a useful metaphor for the work as a whole. Despite several Wakean nods towards this earlier culture of Irish Catholicism, it is, however, clear that the vast majority of the book’s cultural fodder is not drawn from this tradition, but from a late-​nineteenth and early-​ twentieth-​century culture of Irish Catholicism that was more formal and bourgeois, and certainly more Rome-​centric, than what had gone before. Emmet Larkin’s groundbreaking historical work led the way in articulating the nature of the significant shift in Irish religious culture that began in the middle of the nineteenth century: Ireland’s ‘devotional revolution’, to adopt Larkin’s now standard term. This revolution, as Larkin understands it, was spearheaded by one Paul, Cardinal Cullen, the infamous Archbishop of Dublin who was eventually rewarded for his efforts with the scarlet cap. In truth, it would be difficult to overestimate Cullen’s impact, and, while certainly not so beloved a ‘man of the people’ as MacHale, in practical terms no other cleric had such an impact on the Ireland of his day. Born at Prospect, in rural Leinster, in April 1803, just three months before Emmet’s rebellion, Cullen came from conservative farming stock, his father a ‘strong farmer’ who had purchased land in the wake of the relaxation of some of the Penal Laws. He entered St Patrick’s, Carlow College in 1816, then proceeded to Propaganda College in Rome. According to his biographer Desmond



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Bowen, he caught the eye of the Curia as a young man, publicly defending his doctoral thesis in front of Leo XII, and the future Gregory XVI. Vincenzo Pecci (the future Leo XIII) had also attended as a student. Cullen’s talents would take him to the heart of the Roman Curia; in 1832 he was appointed to the rectorship of the Irish College, and during the 1830s he also acted as Roman agent to a number of the Irish bishops –​a role that armed him with intimate knowledge of Irish affairs during his long absence from home. As described earlier, Cullen’s time in Rome coincided with a period of great political turbulence, and it is reasonable to suppose that these early experiences of national unrest came to colour his later view of Irish politics. Cullen returned to Ireland in the mid-​ nineteenth century,  first as Archbishop of Armagh (1850–​2), then as Archbishop of Dublin (1852–​78). The Roman years had shaped Cullen’s world view in ways that would prove crucial to the course of the history of Catholic Ireland. However, his appointment was controversial from the outset –​a consequence, in large part, of his staunch ultramontanist allegiances. The new primate managed to provoke nationalist ire soon after his translation by placing the country under the special patronage of Our Lady, rather than her traditional patron, St Patrick.33 Nationalist suspicion of the archbishop certainly did not end there. The Repeal movement floundered during Cullen’s long reign, and the archbishop’s dogged pursuit of the agenda of the Church of Rome at all costs made him unpalatable to nationalists of various shades. This attitude is reflected in Simon Dedalus’ ‘guffaw of course scorn’ in A Portrait: ‘I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God’s eye!’ (P, 38). Cullen’s time in Ireland was, nonetheless, a roaring success from the perspective of the Church of Rome. As Larkin demonstrates via statistical analysis: [I]‌n the twenty years following Cullen’s arrival in Ireland the number of priests was increased by some seven hundred, or nearly twenty-​five per cent, to a total of about 3,200, while the Catholic population declined from five to four million. The nun population increased even more rapidly over the same period. In 1850, for example, there were only some 1,500 nuns in Ireland, while in 1870 there were more than 3,700.34

A consequence of death and mass emigration that came in its wake, the Great Famine led to a massive decline in the Irish population, and the rising clerical Bowen, p. 130. Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–​75’, The American Historical Review, 77.3 (1972), 625–​52 (p. 644).

33

34

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numbers therefore spelled out a huge improvement in the ratio between clergy and laity. The repercussions of the famine aided Cullen’s agenda in other ways as well. As Maria Luddy notes, there was a startling increase in permanent celibacy in Ireland in the post-​famine era, a state of affairs for which numerous explanations have been tabled. These include the suggestion that changes in inheritance law encouraged men to keep their economic assets within their own family line, and the notion that the increased difficulty of securing a dowry in uncertain economic times led to more girls being left with the convent as the only alternative to permanent spinsterhood.35 Whatever the reason for this sudden upturn in the number of celibates (a demographic shift that is captured by the gaggle of priests and nuns who populate the urban landscape of Joyce’s fiction), this trend certainly suited the agenda of the Catholic Church in the short term, an institution that could, of course, only recruit its clergy from those willing to commit to remaining unmarried for life. Luddy and others have noted how this shift led to a disastrous set of social circumstances for many unmarried girls and women, whose prospects became increasingly limited. This is, moreover, a state of affairs that Joyce explicitly engages with through his fictional portraits of characters such as Eveline (unable to break free from a life of loneliness in her father’s house), Gerty McDowell (left ‘on the shelf ’ as a consequence of her inability to compete in an increasingly competitive marriage market), and indeed Issy (through Issy’s many and fluid guises, the Wake brings together a plethora of tales of girlhood or young womanhood, and the politics of sex and marriage are frequently brought to the fore) an idea that is visited in Chapter 3. Yet, from Cullen’s ultramontane standpoint, the large-​scale decrease in the Irish population, along with an increased number of individuals opting for the religious life, served his aim of reinventing the religious geography of Ireland particularly well. The newly invigorated clergy now engaged in building churches, schools, seminaries, convents and presbyteries. Along with these changes in the physical landscape of Catholic Ireland, there was also a new focus on Rome-​sanctioned devotional exercises designed to reshape the internal landscape of the individual’s mind. According to Larkin, this led to the increased popularity of ‘the rosary, forty hours, perpetual adoration, novenas, blessed altars, Via Crucis, benediction, vespers, devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Conception, jubilees, triduums, pilgrimages, shrines, processions and retreats’, as well as to a boom in membership of Maria Luddy, Women in Ireland, 1800–​1918: A Documentary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 5–​6 and passim.

35



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Catholic organizations such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul and St Peter’s Pence, and numerous temperance societies.36 There was also a pronounced shift in the material culture of Irish Catholicism at this time, something that Atkin and Tallett have described as ‘the commodification of Catholicism’.37 While there is evidence of a souvenir culture around pilgrimage sites from the medieval period onwards, it is clear that the commodification of religion was on the ascent in Ireland in this era. As Larkin writes, the new public devotional exercises were ‘reinforced by the use of devotional tools and aids: beads, scapulars, medals, missals, prayer books, catechisms, holy pictures and Agnus Dei’.38 Even a cursory glance at the popular press in late-​ nineteenth-​century Ireland affirms this impression. To give just a few examples, a raffle run by the Freeman’s Journal in 1892 offered the following prizes: ‘a framed Picture of the Virgin and Child, from one of the old masters’, ‘A large and beautiful statue of Our Lady of Lourdes’ and ‘A valuable Picture of the Last Supper, in maple frame’.39 An advertisement placed by M.  H. Gill and Son’s ‘Church furnishing department’ in the same publication (the very existence of such a department illustrates the booming market for devotional objects) illustrates the manner in which devotional aids are touted using the language of the marketplace. Goods for sale include a ‘Sacred Heart Statue (Montmartre model), very beautiful, in two sizes [. . .] decorated in gold and colours, by thoroughly accomplished artists’.40 The fashion for luxury devotional goods is echoed in numerous advertisements for fêtes and bazaars that were promoted in newspapers of the era, something that unsurprisingly persists in the first decades of the twentieth century. Joyce’s (mis)appropriation of the material trappings of the faith is most fully realized in chapter I.8 of the Wake, when ALP emerges as an inverse, or perverse, Santa Claus, bestowing malicious gifts upon the populace –​an act of revenge for the rumours that circulate about her husband’s alleged crimes. As Joyce puts it, ‘[ALP’s] Pandora’s box contains the ills flesh is heir to’ (L I, 213). And via the distribution of ‘maundy meerschaundize, poor souvenir’ (210.2) ALP enacts an unrestrained inversion and debasement of the British monarch’s annual distribution of Maundy Money, ostensibly a philanthropic act.

Larkin, p. 645. Atkin and Tallett, p. 186. 38 Larkin, p. 645. 39 ‘Catholic Notices’, Freeman’s Journal, 21 September 1892, p. 8. 40 ‘Advertisement’, Freeman’s Journal, 8 July 1899, p. 7. 36 37

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Items proffered include a ‘papar flag of the saints and stripes’ (210.13–​ 14) that is gifted to the diminutively named Kevineen O’Dea. A paper flag is hardly a high-​ticket item, and in a post-​famine context, the merging of the papal standard with the Stars and Stripes hints that emigration to the United States is on the cards, with the attendant sense of wholescale tragedy and loss. The apparently puerile gift of ‘a drowned doll, to face downwards for modest Sister Anne Mortimer’ (210.23–​5) requires no explication to reveal its vicious intent, but the meaning behind other gifts is more mysterious. For instance, the offer of a haircut and begging tin for ‘Penceless Peter’ (210.22) contains an implicit critique of the ancient Saxon custom of ‘St. Peter’s Pence’  –​the practice of making an annual donation direct to the Holy See.41 From ALP, the ‘penceless’ beggar is given only a trim and the tools by which to continue a life of dependence. The gruesome ‘prodigal heart and fatted calves for Buck Jones’ (210.17) distorts devotion to the Sacred Heart, a devotion revealed to St Margaret Mary Alacoque that is toyed with elsewhere in the Joycean oeuvre. In this case, popular, stylized images of Christ’s heart, lovingly exposed to his people, give way to something that sounds rather less appealing. Here, the heart is akin to the fatted calf prepared for the Prodigal Son in the well-​known parable, and there is an additional sense that the consumer of these sacred body parts is none other than the gluttonous and irreverent Buck Mulligan. Affection for St Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, is also in the frame. The offering of ‘snakes in clover, picked and scotched, and a vaticanned viper catcher’s visa’ (210.26–​7) alludes to the ‘vaticanned’ hero who, according to legend, demonstrated the nature of the Trinity using the image of a clover, and drove the snakes from Ireland. The offer of picked (or pickled?) snakes is complemented, or further corrupted, by embedded references to the Vatican Council and the 1409 Council of Pisa, part of a larger pattern of allusion to Church Councils that is a feature of this section of the work. Further misery is hinted at with gifts for two children, who function as Shem-​surrogates, both of which relate to the instruments of Christ’s torture and execution. Seumas, who has been ‘thought little’, is now presented with ‘a crown he feels big’ (211.4), a heavy burden, like the crown of thorns, for so small a child. A second version of himself, one ‘Sunny Twimjim’, is also weighed down, this time with ‘a Congoswood cross on the back’ (211.5–​6), an image that conflates the means This practice was current in the Ireland of Joyce’s day, as ‘St Peter’s Pence’ was formally revived by Pio Nono in his Encyclical Letter of 5 August 1871, Saepe Venerabiles Fratres.

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of Christ’s crucifixion with the name of an ancient Irish artefact, the Cross of Cong, and Joyce’s first school, Clongowes Wood. All in all, ALP leaves in her wake the material remnants of a twisted version of a religious society, complete with ‘lubilashings’ (211.7) of the miserable and grotesque, with mercy reserved only for her daughter. The period of perhaps heavy-​handed clerical governance that was ushered in by Cullen’s return to Ireland coincided with the void left by the death of Daniel O’Connell in 1847. The national movement no longer had a popular, charismatic figure at its head, and this gap would not be filled until the rise of Isaac Butt’s Home Rule movement in the early 1870s, a development that was followed by Charles Stewart Parnell’s rise to prominence, and a revised set of relations between church and state. According to Oliver MacDonagh, the Church in the 1880s was ‘embedded in and integral to the Parnellite movement’,42 and by the early 1880s, the tacit Clerical-​Nationalist alliance that existed in O’Connell’s day appeared to be back on track. The new Archbishop of Dublin William Walsh (in office 1885–​1921, and the man Joyce would have known as Archbishop of Dublin during all his years in the city) helped to bring about this state of affairs by supporting the burgeoning Gaelic League, and backing the Plan of Campaign in defiance of the pope. In aligning himself with the cause of the Irish farmers, Walsh at first succeeded in uniting Catholic and nationalist agendas. Crisis was, however, just around the corner. In 1890 Parnell was named in the O’Shea divorce trial, and Irish bishops like Walsh suddenly found their moral agenda to be at odds with political allegiances. As is well known, the Catholic hierarchy formally denounced Parnell, and the resulting rift looms large in Joyce’s fictional depictions of his early life. Divided attitudes towards the bishops’ decision are dramatically depicted in A Portrait, most famously in the furious scene between the anticlerical John Casey and Simon Dedalus and the devout Dante Riordan over Christmas dinner, a passage that includes Simon’s scathing description of Walsh as ‘Billy with the lip’ (P, 33). An irreverent attitude towards Archbishop Walsh does, unsurprisingly given Joyce’s eye for the absurdities of the clergy, continue in the Wake, when we hear a defensive HCE insist that he ‘oldways did me walsh and preechup’ (318.19). This playful plea places Walsh’s preaching on a par with a respectable ‘wash and brush-​up’.

42

Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind:  A  Study of the Anglo-​Irish, 1780–​1980 (London:  Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 91.

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The downfall of Parnell is a favourite topic for Joyceans, many of whom have debated the intricacies of Joyce’s Parnellite sympathies throughout his life. This is a topic I do not have the space to address in depth in this study. With that said, it is noteworthy that, despite the dramatic nature of the crisis sparked by the Parnell–​O’Shea scandal, on the most part reactions against the Church died down fairly quickly. In this sense, Dante’s ardent cries in defence of the clergy can be seen as typical of the views held by much of the Catholic population. Moreover, as the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth, distinctions between Catholic and nationalist agendas became increasingly blurred. Such a connection was naturalized in the columns of nationalist papers like the Leader, a publication that was the source for many reading notes (e.g. the clusters of notes that appear in Buffalo notebook VI.B.1, a document that dates from the mid-​1920s), a number of which were then incorporated into the text of the Wake. Editor D. P. Moran insisted that the Protestant nationalism espoused by the likes of Wolfe Tone, Henry Grattan and Parnell himself, was unsuitable. In Moran’s eyes, a truly Irish Ireland could only be Catholic, a dream that, to a certain extent, came to fruition in the later years of the Free State. This is the point when the historical narrative is often abandoned, a serious problem when it comes to reading the Wake in context. This is also symptomatic of the –​unfortunately still all too common –​practice of considering the fiction only up until Ulysses. For a proper consideration of Joyce’s attitude towards the religious culture that dominated the land of his birth, his abiding concern with Catholic Ireland’s affairs in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century simply cannot be ignored. This is a subject about which he appears to have garnered information from Irish newspapers, when they were available to him, and from accounts relayed by family and friends. In the first decade of the fledgling state, the president of the Executive Council, William T. Cosgrave, sought to consolidate relations between Church and government. He was joined in the political arena by the man who was to become the figurehead of the new Catholic Ireland: Éamon de Valera. This latter figure features in the Wake in important ways, and the resurgence of a conservative, Catholic Ireland that occurred in tandem with the ascent of De Valera’s Fianna Fáil, and the concurrent stripping down of the Free State constitution, is something that is dramatized in a deeply complex and abstract manner in Finnegans Wake. This context is especially pertinent for a reading of Book IV, a theme that is explored in some depth in Chapter 4.



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III As the reader will have intuited by this point, one of the primary approaches underpinning James Joyce and Catholicism is what might be broadly termed the ‘historical method’, a literary critical approach that has been on the ascent since the advent of Stephen Greenblatt’s theoretical work in the 1980s, and an approach that (as discussed on pp. 40–43) has become increasingly prominent in Joyce studies since the 1990s, particularly with regard to the fiction up until 1922. Understanding any kind of literature in relation to the historical conditions that inform the circumstances of its production inevitably generates questions regarding the extent to which a literary work can be said to be determined by the circumstances of its creation, and the manner in which literary works confront, or explicitly subvert, the values of that culture. When it comes to reading a work as temporally slippery and diverse as the Wake, these difficulties are significantly magnified. The subject of the Wake in history has received very little scholarly attention, and with regard to the development of a historically (and historiographically) informed mode of reading, Thomas C. Hofheinz’s 1995 study Joyce and the Invention of Irish History: ‘Finnegans Wake’ in Context is without a doubt the most substantial and useful work to date. Throughout, Hofheinz sets out to challenge the a priori assumptions of a number of recent interpreters of Joyce, arguing that the last work in particular ‘challenges historicist critics by forcing a gap between what they find in its text and what they seek to find’.43 Adopting what he describes as a set of humanist principles, Hofheinz sets Fredric Jameson’s Marxist, cultural materialist approach to Joyce (as articulated in ‘Ulysses in History’) against Paul Ricœur’s ‘subjectivism’, and finds in favour of the latter, who, according to Hofheinz, ‘affirms the transformative power of narrative experience for the individual’.44 Following Ricœur’s principles, Hofheinz takes the subject in the Wake to be an agent that is neither entirely independent of social circumstances, nor merely a conduit for a collective norm. For Hofheinz, the subject of the Wake is HCE himself, the dreamer through whom the entire narrative is mediated. This interpretation unfortunately buys into John Bishop’s still-​influential view of the book as the dream of a single sleeping individual, a model that does not properly account for the complex

Thomas C. Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History:  ‘Finnegans Wake’ in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 39. 44 Hofheinz, p. 8. 43

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layers of autonomy, and lack thereof, that Joyce attributes to his Wakean subjects. Hofheinz’s sense of the book as a work born out of the culture(s) that produced both the Wake and its author, while simultaneously seeking to challenge and redefine the assumptions of that culture, is all the same a sound principal from which to proceed, and a means of maintaining the sense of Joyce’s aesthetic independence and intellectual agency, while not seeking to disconnect the work from the historical narratives in which it is so thoroughly embroiled. With these observations in mind, the approach that I take to Joyce’s treatment of Catholic culture can be broadly understood as both intentionalist and humanist. The very notion of establishing a firm or fixed intention for such a dense and slippery work as Finnegans Wake is naturally a troublesome prospect. Certain aspects of the matter might, all the same, be approached through a variety of means. Put bluntly, one argument of this book is that Joyce’s attitude and approach to Catholic culture, both in Ireland and further afield, can simply be better understood with recourse to the various printed documents that he read, took notes from, and eventually incorporated into the text of his burgeoning work; this is the kind of material that has often come to light as a consequence of the source-​ hunting activities of genetic scholars. Such documents cannot, of course, be understood in isolation, or viewed as a kind of magic key to unlock the whole. Rather, these must be placed alongside a broader consideration of the discourses and debates the Wake actively engages with, alongside a nuanced approach to the detail of the work. This is not only undertaken at the level of the word (a common mode of Wake criticism), but also at the level of plot and characterization, an approach to the book that has been championed by Finn Fordham, and one that has too often been neglected. From a pragmatic point of view, no one system of organizing an exploration of the Wake will ever hold together perfectly. The book is such a fluid beast that any framework chosen will fail to suffice in every instance, and any attempt to focus exclusively on a given element can only be successful to a limited extent; this is perhaps the ultimate antidote to Joyce’s regret that he ‘may have oversystematised Ulysses’.45 When constructing a project of this kind a sense of order must, nonetheless, be imposed, and in this instance I have chosen to build the argument around core religious and politico-​religious themes, referring where appropriate to passages or chapters that are especially resonant.

45

Samuel Beckett qtd in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame:  The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 103.



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James Joyce and Catholicism begins with a chapter that confronts preconceived notions regarding the Wake’s heretical preoccupations. Turning to chapter I.7, otherwise known as ‘Shem the Penman’, it is particularly concerned with the manner in which this sequence takes in allusions to both ancient theological debates, and more contemporary apostatic literature. A crucial theme is the fate of the artist-​hero, understood against a modern Irish backdrop, who undergoes a wholesale character assassination at this point. Chapter 2 turns to the Wake’s treatment of clerical types, a theme that comes to the fore at the opening of Book III. It proposes new ways of understanding the nature and reach of Joyce’s satire via a careful contextualization of Shaun’s ostensibly pious discourse, and also proposes a significant new source of inspiration or model for these words. The third chapter is concerned with the women who are subject to the kind of moralizing, pseudo-​religious discourse that is espoused by the likes of Shaun. Through a consideration of figures such as ALP, Kate and most importantly Issy, this chapter questions the extent to which liberation is truly possible within the world of the book. Chapter 4 tackles the most contemporary historical material, much of which was incorporated by Joyce in the last stages of revision, and which found a home in Book IV. The new HCE who emerges here is understood, on one level at least, as the embodiment of the ascendant Catholic Free State. It will be left to Anna Livia, with whose voice both the Wake and this study concludes, to point the way to the future.

‘Dizzed and dazed by the lumpty thumpty of our interloopings’ (550.36–​7)

Catholic Joyces

The history of the critical appreciation of Finnegans Wake in relation to ‘Catholicism’, ‘Roman Catholicism’ and/​or ‘Irish Catholicism’, whatever these overburdened terms might mean to us in the second decade of the twenty-​first century, is in many respects a disjointed and convoluted tale. As a writer raised in a predominately Catholic country, and within a Catholic family, Joyce was inculcated in the teachings of the Church of Rome. Furthermore, despite his open rejection of the Church that cradled him, the faith of his upbringing is deeply embedded in his writings from first to last. It is, then, no surprise to find that, right from the start, the connection between Joyce and Catholicism has been acknowledged by the critics, although this topic has certainly not always been the fashion. Before Joyce made his mark on the literary world, Catholic readings of his work were undertaken. An early run-​in with the censor of his college newspaper, St Stephen’s, over ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, an essay that opens with a nod to Giordano Bruno, could be viewed as the first of these engagements. In fact, censorship and religious readings go hand in hand in the early reception history. From the notorious intervention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in relation to the serialization of Ulysses in The Little Review, to the eventual banning of the novel in England, the United States, Canada and Australia, the battle with censorship can be implicitly connected to Christian (albeit not exclusively Catholic) morality.1 While Ulysses was never officially banned in Ireland, the novel certainly led an under-​the-​counter existence in the country for many years. Catholic outrage also underpins one of the earliest public reactions to Ulysses from a Roman Catholic reader, Shane Leslie’s essay for the October 1922 issue of the Quarterly Review. In his review, Leslie objects loudly to the ‘dirt’ of Ulysses,

The most comprehensive account of this battle to date appears in Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of ‘Ulysses’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

1

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and to its particular parody of early-​twentieth-​century Dublin life, which he views as having ‘little care for the sacra of Catholic or Protestant Christianity’.2 Leslie, a first cousin to Winston Churchill and a prominent Anglo-​Irish convert to the faith, might be dismissed as simply an affronted religious conservative. Additionally, Leslie’s views can be linked to the initial reception of the Wake’s Catholic elements. It is against exactly this sort of ‘temporary Romanizer’, that is, Anglo-​convert, that Thomas McGreevy directs his comments in the Exagmination of the Work in Progress –​a collection of essays that Joyce famously engineered to accompany his burgeoning work in the late 1920s, and the first ‘official’ interpretation of the book’s Catholic themes. In his brief contribution to the Exagmination, McGreevy dismisses the disgust of Anglo-​Catholic readers at the sordid aspects of Ulysses, arguing that for a work to be considered truly Catholic it must by necessity be all inclusive, ‘to an intelligent Irishman and to Mr. Joyce least of all, Catholicism is never a matter of standing on one leg. It is not a pose, it is fundamental. Consequently it has to face everything’.3 Put simply, McGreevy defends the work on the grounds that it depicts Ireland’s ‘regular’ Catholicism, in contrast to the ‘superficial’ Catholicism practised by England’s converts. It is a book that encapsulates that which is low and dirty as well as that which is high and exalted. Throughout, McGreevy inclines towards an idealization of Joyce’s Irish Catholicism, something that is viewed as superior to any other shade of the faith. Though deeply troubling, this bias remains present in certain strands of criticism today. Despite his provocative agenda, McGreevy’s Exagmination piece is something of a ‘non-​starter’, and is exceptionally uneven in tone. He darts between a brief consideration of the importance of Dante and Vico, to the vindication of Joyce’s profound Irish Catholicism, a dismissal of the English converts, and back again. Any reader who approaches this essay in the hope of finding a thorough analysis of the book’s treatment of Catholicism, or indeed Irish Catholicism, is bound to be disappointed. The somewhat directionless nature of McGreevy’s essay makes for a frustrating read. The essay’s lack of substance might, furthermore, account in part for the ambiguous and often defensive manner in which Joyce’s work was received by Catholic readers in the early days. As noted above, both Stanislaus Shane Leslie, ‘Review of Ulysses’, qtd in Robert Demming (ed.), James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, Volume I (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970), pp. 206–​11 (p. 209). 3 Thomas McGreevy, ‘The Catholic Element in Work in Progress’, in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’, by Samuel Beckett et  al. (London:  Faber and Faber, 1929, rpt. 1960), pp. 117–​27 (p. 121). 2

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35

Joyce and Richard Ellmann promoted an understanding of Joyce’s disdainful attitude to the Church in the 1950s, but in spite of this the fiction received a significant amount of attention from devout Catholic readers in this era. Lernout flags a number of examples of this nature. These include Curt Hohoff ’s essay on Joyce in the Austrian Catholic publication Wort und Wahrheit from 1951, which describes Stephen’s rejection of all authority as ‘a curse’, as well as essays by T. S. Eliot and Hugh Kenner’s literary criticism. To these can be added Thomas Merton’s 1948 autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, in which Merton claims that Joyce was responsible for his own conversion to the faith. Two further essays from this era exploit a paradoxical logic in order to argue that Joyce’s decision to leave the Church affirms his identification as a Catholic writer. For Arland Ussher, the very fact of Joyce’s lapse of faith proves him to be truly Catholic, a contradiction in terms that is never properly accounted for by the critic.4 A similarly long-​winded logic underpins an essay by Sam Hynes, in which he describes Joyce’s writing as ‘Catholicism with the religion squeezed out’. Hynes nevertheless goes on to assert that ‘it is no glib paradox [. . .] to call Joyce a “Catholic” writer in the same sense that Hopkins and Greene are Catholic’.5 Glib paradox is precisely what this is, as it is surely the deep-​seated faith of the likes of Hopkins and Greene that renders their work ‘Catholic’, in the proper sense of the word. Turning now to the Wake, in A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ –​the first major study of the final work –​the book’s religiosity is also spun in a positive light. Campbell and Robinson argue, in relation to Book IV, that the portrait of the ‘innocent’ St Kevin that appears therein is suggestive of ‘Ireland’s lovely Christian dawn of the fifth century’, an interpretation that neglects the heavy irony of the vignette; something that is further discussed on pages 132–136. Campbell and Robinson develop their grandiose, spiritual reading by claiming that the Wake as a whole constitutes ‘a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind’ –​a claim that jars somewhat with the absurdities and ambiguities of the ‘resurrection’ that is ultimately depicted at the book’s close.6 Moving forwards in time, but continuing in pursuit of the Catholic Joyce, the writings of the Jesuit William T. Noon (including his important 1957 study, Joyce and Aquinas) must also be considered. Noon’s careful study of the presence of the Angelic Doctor in Joyce’s writings, produced at an early point in the reception history, is notable because it contains some of the first detailed close readings of the Wake Arland Ussher, Three Great Irishmen: Shaw, Yeats, Joyce (New York: Devin-​Adair, 1953), p. 129. Sam Hynes, ‘The Catholicism of James Joyce’, Commonweal, 55.20 (1952), 487–​9 (488). Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber, 1947), p. 13.

4 5 6

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in the light of Catholic theology. Despite the care and nuance of many of Noon’s interpretations, his understanding of Joyce has the tendency to fall back on the idea of theological acceptance. The attempt to reconcile Joyce’s humanism with a spiritual or theist stance is encapsulated in a later essay by Noon, wherein he claims that ‘[i]‌n order to be perfectly a human being, or perfectly a humanist, Joyce is saying, so anyway to me, that every nation needs some supernatural, otherworldly, transcendent image, an image not of nature but of grace’.7 The matter of religious allegiance goes hand in hand with biographical considerations and accounts, the most influential of which is indisputably Ellmann’s. In spite of the canonical weight behind James Joyce, the narrative of youth contained therein is not without its issues. When it comes to Joyce’s loss of faith, a striking feature of Ellmann’s biography is the extent to which it is influenced by the fiction. In particular, Ellmann describes how, following a minor relapse into religious terror after the ghastly retreat described in A Portrait, the schoolboy Joyce embraced a world view committed ‘to art and to life’ (JJ, 55). This straightforward narrative is countered by Kevin Sullivan in Joyce among the Jesuits (1958) where he points out that the retreat afforded such a monumental place in Stephen’s emotional development was actually a regular event for boys at Belvedere, and would therefore have been far more routine for Joyce than it is made to appear for Stephen.8 Whereas Sullivan’s glosses are themselves widely open to interpretation, elements of the alternative narrative that he presents are at least worthy of fuller and more serious consideration than has generally been the case. Further difficulties arise from Ellmann’s contention that, by the time of his final year interview with the director of studies, Joyce identified the priesthood with ‘imprisonment and darkness of the soul’ (JJ, 55), and it is far from obvious how the biographer can be so clear on the precise workings of the young man’s mind in 1898. Equally dubious is the claim that the bird-​girl incident actually took place ‘around this time’, a fact that is rather speciously supported by a second-​hand account from Marthe Fleischmann many years later (JJ, 55).

William T. Noon, ‘The Religious Position of James Joyce’, in James Joyce: His Place in Word Literature, edited by Wolodymyr T. Zymer (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1969), pp. 7–​22 (pp. 18–​19). 8 Kevin Sullivan, Joyce among the Jesuits (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 133. A greater level of biographical nuance is also a feature of two further articles from this era. In ‘James Joyce’s Shrill Note –​The Piccolo della Sera Articles’, Ellsworth Mason flags the complexities and contradictions of the approach to the Church in the early journalistic writings. Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain are also reluctant to indulge in the myth of the easy conversion from devout schoolboy to liberated artist-​hero. They argue that it is ‘not a question of conversion to anything but rather the greater difficulty of having to surrender one sanctuary through conscience, without being able to replace it immediately with another’. Magalaner and Kain, Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (New York: New York University Press, 1956), p. 40. 7

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37

Despite this initial interest in Joyce’s religious affiliations, the subject was largely off the table in the bulk of early Wake scholarship. In contrast to guides to Ulysses from this period –​ such as Stanley Sultan’s oft-​cited work of 1964, The Argument of ‘Ulysses’ –​which treats Catholicism as a central theme, foundational texts for Wake scholarship often neglect it. Most of the substantial, and now canonical, studies of the book produced in the late 1950s and 1960s focus on developing frameworks for reading, rather than thematic approaches. Works such as Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key, Glasheen’s Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (the first edition of which appeared in 1957 and the last in 1977), and the ‘guides’ by Clive Hart and William York Tindall (published in 1962 and 1969 respectively) understandably neglect the Catholic theme at a time when the business of decoding the formidable knots of the Wake was beginning in earnest. Regarding Joyce’s Catholic preoccupations, the most useful of the classics of Wake criticism is, perhaps surprisingly, James S. Atherton’s The Books at the Wake. Atherton devotes substantial space to the role of sacred books, including a chapter on Joyce’s depiction of the liturgy. To his mind, what Kenner and the authors of the Skeleton Key missed is the mechanism by which the Wake makes ‘a travesty’ of certain aspects of the Mass.9 His careful analysis examines, albeit briefly, some of the particular ways in which the book tears at the very fabric of Catholic worship. Atherton’s method of scholarship was not appreciated by all parties, and in the introduction to his structural analysis of Finnegans Wake from 1962, Clive Hart opined that a new kind of architectural criticism was necessary as, in his view, Wakeans of the era devoted their attention to ‘source-​studies and the detailed elucidation of external references’.10 These comments are ironic in hindsight, given that the business of sourcehunting, which escalated with the rise of genetic investigations of Joyce in the 1990s, and continued to gain momentum in the decade from 2000 to 2009, had barely begun at this date. Reader’s guides form the heart of the early reception history of the Wake, and work by the likes of Glasheen, Hart and Tindall cannot simply be dismissed, although they offer relatively little when it comes to understanding the Wake in relation to broader social, cultural and religious questions. One commentary from this era does include important material about reading the Wake in James S. Atherton, The Books at the ‘Wake’: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974 [1959]), p. 185. Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962), p. 1.

9

10

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context and that is Bernard Benstock’s 1965 book Joyce-​again’s Wake. As noted on page 5, in an earlier essay Benstock called attention to Joyce’s apostatic method in the Wake, and this approach to the book’s treatment of Catholicism, and Catholic history, is substantially expanded in the later study. Benstock acknowledges that the Wake often prioritizes history over contemporary European politics, but crucially notes that when Joyce does explore recent events this is usually done in relation to Irish Catholic concerns, something that is explored far more extensively in the Wake than is the war in Europe. He identifies numerous references in the book to the events of Easter 1916, to the inception of the Irish Free State, and to its most influential leader Éamon de Valera, and ultimately argues that Joyce’s distrust of British Imperialism (something that is illustrated via HCE) goes hand in hand with his critique of the Church of Rome, and indeed all dogmatic institutions.11 Benstock might only skim the surface, but Joyce-​again’s Wake lays a foundation that the present study seeks to build upon. That said, it did not sit comfortably within the mainstream of 1960s literary criticism. It would be another two decades before a ‘historical Joyce’ rose to prominence in the academic arena because new kinds of theoretical readings of the Wake were now on the rise.

Belief, in theory The rise of formalism in the Anglo-​American academy during the 1950s, coupled with the challenges that were faced by those trying to create any sort of ‘key’ to this exceptionally demanding work, may well account for the fact that specific questions regarding Joyce’s engagement with the Catholic Church were often pushed to one side in Wake criticism of the era. The turning of the critical tide in the theoretical 1970s and 1980s, inaugurated by Jacques Lacan’s hugely influential lecture ‘Joyce le symptôme’, delivered at the 1975 Joyce Symposium in Paris,12 further accounts for the waning interest in the topic of Joyce and Catholicism. Lernout’s recent survey of the critical history makes a similar point when he argues that, in the heyday of theory, Joyce’s religious views retreated into the background, and even established Catholic critics like Kenner began to adopt a Benstock, passim. According to Luke Thurston, this lecture was the defining moment for the ‘chiasmic exchange’ that took place in the mid-​seventies between the Lacanian and Joycean worlds. Thurston, ‘Psychoanalysis’, in James Joyce in Context, edited by John McCourt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 88–​98 (p. 93).

11

12

Catholic Joyces

39

more ambiguous attitude.13 As Lernout pointedly illustrates, Catholic systems of thought were not entirely at odds with the ostensibly radical post-​structuralist project. As he puts it, ‘It was paradoxically within the heart of French post-​ structuralist thinking that a new catholic orthodoxy was first spelled out’, a statement which is symptomatic of Lernout’s abiding distaste for post-​structuralist readings of Joyce of all shades and varieties.14 According to Lernout, this line of thinking was instigated by one of the architects of the French post-​structuralist Joyce, Philippe Sollers. Sollers argued that a return to the Catholic mode of Christianity was necessary as a basis for all serious intellectualism. Though largely confined to France, as Lernout again points out, this ‘neo-​Catholic’ approach did have some impact on Anglophone criticism. Julia Kristeva’s work, for example, made a splash when it was translated into English. But it was her student Beryl Schlossman who went on to publish Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language (1985), the only book-​length study in English that I  am aware of that considers Joyce’s Catholicism from an explicitly post-​ structuralist perspective.15 In many respects Schlossman’s book is an anomaly. She wrote about Joyce and Catholicism at a time when this subject was largely out of favour. She also devoted the main part of her study to the Wake, the Catholic elements of which have so often been neglected. Yet, despite the ostensibly unique nature of this study, it is worth noting that in some respects her sacred interpretation, which seeks to understand the Wake as a linguistic enactment of the paschal mystery, in many respects mirrors the logic of the only other significant contribution to the study of the Wake and Catholicism to be produced during this period, Fr Robert Boyle’s James Joyce’s Pauline Vision (1978). Schlossman relies throughout on the language of Derridean deconstruction in order to ‘disrupt’ the reductive binary notion that Joyce is either an apostate or an obedient Catholic. Schlossman does not clarify why firm assertions regarding Joyce’s religious allegiances are particularly reductive, but it is clear that, for her, common-​sense, evidence-​based arguments will not do. The ‘Passion of the Word’ (a phrase that Schlossman appears to use in order to invoke both the infinite power attributed to language within deconstructive thought, and the divine power of Scripture) can be considered ‘fully Catholic only when it is outside

Lernout, p. 16. Lernout, ibid. 15 Lernout, ibid. A much later example of a classically post-​structuralist approach to Joyce’s religiosity is Steven Morrison’s thesis ‘Heresy, Heretics and Heresiarchs in the Works of James Joyce’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1999). Morrison argues for Joyce’s ‘spiritual duality’ claiming that he could function as both a believer and unbeliever simultaneously. 13 14

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the boundaries of the Church’.16 By this, Schlossman seems to mean that Joyce’s forceful rejection of the institution of the Catholic Church in Ireland does not undermine the fundamental spiritual core, or ‘Passion’, of the Wakean Word. By comparison, Boyle’s work lacks the theoretical density that pervades Schlossman’s prose. The conclusions of the two are, all the same, remarkably similar. Boyle takes as his starting point the Wakean phrase, ‘what can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for’ (482.34–​ 6), and reads this passage in relation to the words of St Paul, echoing Isaiah, which relate man’s inability to comprehend the true nature of God’s love: ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’ (I Corinthians 2:9). In my view, the Pauline and Wakean quotations that Boyle compares do not map onto each other especially well, and it is likely that Joyce’s sentence was predominately inspired by two proverbs:  ‘What can’t be proved, can’t be disproved’, and ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart can’t grieve over’. Regardless, Boyle’s insistence on reading this passage in relation to the Pauline text is symptomatic of his broader approach, which he describes as ‘a consideration of Joyce’s deeper use, and his decreasingly acrimonious toleration, of religious and specifically Catholic doctrines and attitudes to express his own literary theory’.17 As is the case with Schlossman, Boyle is determined to find an affirmative, spiritual message within prose that ostensibly rejects the Church and its teachings. Neither critic provides enough textual or contextual evidence to clinch their respective arguments.

Historical turns Post-​structuralist readings of the Joycean Word may have been on the ascent in the late 1970s and 1980s, but a host of both complementary and contradictory paradigms were to come to the forefront of Joyce studies as the twentieth century drew to a close. These included, most prominently, French feminism, New Historicism and postcolonialism. From this admittedly partial list, it is the last two that are most relevant to the study of Joyce and Catholicism, although it should be remembered that questions relating to the precise nature of Joyce’s 16

Beryl Schlossman, Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. ix. Robert Boyle, James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. x.

17

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41

engagement with the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in an Irish setting, have received far less critical attention than Joyce’s engagement with Irish nationalism, and its battle with the Imperial British State, in recent historicist and postcolonial criticism. In the major studies from the 1990s that adopted an explicitly historicist and/​or postcolonial approach  –​namely, James Fairhall’s James Joyce and the Question of History (1993), Emer Nolan’s James Joyce and Nationalism (1995), and Vincent J. Cheng’s Joyce, Race, and Empire (1995) –​Catholicism functions as a minor or subsidiary theme in relation to the major colonial battle. Of these writers, it is Fairhall who provides the most substantial and useful account of the role of the Church, but his comments are largely limited to a consideration of the earlier writings, and of the Parnell crisis.18 Such absences are, on the surface at least, surprising. Still, as Gareth Joseph Downes convincingly argues, it is likely that a motivating force behind the neglect of the subject of Joyce and Catholicism from a historicist and postcolonial perspective is the ways in which, a discussion of the ambivalent relationship [of the Catholic Church] with both the emergent forces of Irish cultural and political nationalism and the dominant forces of the imperial British state, arguably overcomplicates the theoretical paradigms of postcolonialism, and cannot easily be considered in its scrutiny of the binary oppositions at work in the colonial situation.19

Put simply, the Irish Catholic Church as a symbol of both national identity, and of Roman and British imperial authority, cannot be easily assimilated into the postcolonial model. It is therefore best ignored or at least marginalized. The issues isolated by Downes as obstacles to the incorporation of Joyce’s relationship with the Church into a postcolonial model of reading become apparent in Andrew Gibson’s slightly later account of Ulysses in Joyce’s Revenge (2002), and the ideas tabled in this important work have recently been revisited, with further nuance, in relation to the early writings in Gibson’s 2013 study The Strong Spirit. In order to accommodate the role of the Irish Catholic Church within the postcolonial paradigm, Gibson adopts an approach that sometimes relies on elements of the sort of binary logic that Downes takes issue with, placing emphasis on the ways in which Joyce appears to accuse the Church in Ireland of being ‘the James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 123–​46. 19 Gareth Joseph Downes, ‘“A Terrible Heretic”: James Joyce and Catholicism’, in Colonial Ireland: New Essays in Literature and Culture, edited by Aaron Kelly and Alan A. Gillis (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001), pp. 55–​62 (pp. 56–​7). 18

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political accomplice of the [British] State’.20 Gibson is of course correct in asserting that the problem of complicity with Britain constitutes an important element of Joyce’s treatment of the Irish Catholic Church, particularly in the early writings, and this position is, arguably, communicated in a more subtle manner in Ulysses via the portrayal of clerics such as Fr Conmee who, in Gibson’s opinion, can be viewed as an Anglicized social climber. These insights, while valuable, will require further going over for a reading of the chaotic and temporally confused world of the Wake, completed some seventeen years after Ulysses, where Joyce can be seen to revisit and revise certain entrenched positions. A postcolonial reader like Gibson has, then, attempted to assimilate the role of the Catholic Church into the postcolonial model by flagging the ways in which Joyce links the operations of the Irish Catholic hierarchy to the political agenda of the Imperial British State. In contrast, some recent critics have approached the problem from the opposite direction, seeking to emphasize the ways in which Catholicism constitutes an integral part of Irish national experience. Such approaches have sought to recast Joyce’s relationship with his native faith in at least a semi-​positive light in order to understand this faith as an important facet of Joyce’s national identity in the face of colonial oppression. In an essay that takes this tendency to an extreme, Eamonn Hughes has argued that, as an Irishman, ‘the roots of Joyce’s concept of freedom are in Catholicism’. In Hughes’s hands, the fundamentally conservative brand of Catholicism practised in Ireland around the turn of the last century, a mood that has already been discussed in some detail in the Introduction, is transformed into a potentially deconstructive force that is more readily able to embrace notions of ‘both/​and’ rather than ‘either/​or’.21 Hughes’s essay is symptomatic of a broader critical tendency to imagine Catholicism in the Ireland in which Joyce was raised as the most idiosyncratic and unorthodox branch of the Church of Rome. This conceit rightly identifies the local variants that make up the ostensibly ‘universal’ or ‘catholic’ Church. At the same time, such assertions neglect to fully consider the manner in which almost all religious cultures have evolved and adapted to suit local needs over time. Equally idiosyncratic instances of the practice of Roman Catholicism might include the Mexican Church at the turn of the last century, or the Catholicism practised by the Roma of Eastern Europe, to give just two examples. Inevitably bound up with this is the manner in which the ‘unique’ nature Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Culture in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 84. Eamonn Hughes, ‘Joyce and Catholicism’, in Irish Writers and Religion, edited by Robert Welch (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), pp. 116–​137 (p. 131).

20

21

Catholic Joyces

43

of the Irish Church is somehow conflated with a conception of its more positive status in Joyce’s eyes. If, as Lernout has recently queried, Hughes’s essay is not a hoax, then the ways in which it perverts the logic of Joyce’s sustained attack upon dogmatic, Catholic Christianity is barely comprehensible. For Hughes, the ‘net’ of Catholicism that the young Stephen Dedalus must ‘fly by’ in order to liberate himself, becomes the netted wings by which he might propel himself upwards and through the air, a reading that performs an astonishing grammatical distortion of the logic of the passage at hand.22 Hughes’s essay is not an anomaly, and to this attempt at reimagining Joyce’s approach to Catholicism in a more positive light should be added Mary Lowe-​ Evans’s Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company (2008). In her study, Lowe-​Evans draws a series of parallels between certain ‘Joycean practices’ and the notion of Catholic nostalgia. She mentions, for example, Joyce’s interest in digging up and redressing even painful and abhorrent memories, which she compares to the practice of examining one’s conscience. She further goes on to discuss Joyce’s complex ‘Mother Lode’ in relation to the devotion to a mother figure that is central to Catholic Mariology. In addition, Lowe-​Evans views Joyce’s ability to ‘convert’ individuals such as Hugh Kenner and Thomas Merton as an important facet of the nostalgic quality of his works, an interpretation that I would suggest lays too much emphasis on idiosyncratic reader responses. These discussions do, moreover, lead Lowe-​Evans to the broad assertion that, ‘on balance, notwithstanding the heretical stances Joyce often adopted, his forays into his Catholic past, as often as not, enable rather than dismantle the institutional church, inviting an entanglement in rather than liberation from the labyrinthine ways of Catholic theological exposition’.23 The claim that the fiction serves to enable the institution of Catholicism is, as I have maintained throughout, deeply problematic, and this reading is something I return to more substantially on pages 106–107, with regard to Lowe-​Evans’s interpretation of what she conceives as Joyce’s ‘Mariolatry’.

A game of unbelief While questions of belief and unbelief, conformity and rebellion, were central to the debate over Joyce and Catholicism in the earliest biographical and

Lernout, p. 20. Mary Lowe-​Evans, Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2008), p. 8.

22 23

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James Joyce and Catholicism

critical works, they receded into the background when formalism and then post-​structuralism shifted the focus onto the ambivalent and indeterminate operations of Joyce’s language. A turning of the critical tide is perhaps now in progress, and in the two most recent studies to be published on the topic of Joyce and religion, Roy Gottfried’s Joyce’s Misbelief (2008) and Geert Lernout’s Help My Unbelief (2010), a new vocabulary has emerged that calls attention to Joyce’s dismissal of Catholic orthodoxy, and his often polemical opposition to the Church of Rome as institution. Both critics identify in their work a number of potentially useful sources of inspiration for Joyce’s means of rejecting the faith, although Lernout’s research is the more original of the two. In his study, Gottfried reiterates Robert Scholes’s discovery that Joyce made a transcription of the Revelation of St John from the King James Version of the New Testament, and Thomas Connolly’s observation that he possessed two copies of the Book of Common Prayer.24 These facts he uses as evidence of Joyce’s leaning towards what he calls the ‘literary advantages’ of Protestantism.25 As previously noted, Lernout also lists a number of works that possibly inspired Joyce’s dissent, including a book by George Tyrrell, as well as work by the figurehead of Biblical modernism, Alfred Loisy, and other prominent Catholic modernists like Lucien Laberthonière and Maurice Blondel.26 The general usefulness of Lernout’s approach has already been outlined, and therefore this work will not be substantially revisited at this point. As intimated in the Introduction, Gottfried’s account of Joyce’s misbelief will, however, stand some further scrutiny. A particular issue with Gottfried, and this is true of Lernout’s work to a lesser extent, is the manner in which he seeks to align Joyce with an established Protestant tradition of dissent. Moreover, this conceit leads Gottfried to the rather unusual assumption that Joyce was allied with Britain as the dominant imperial culture.27 In order to bolster his hypothesis, Gottfried places no little emphasis on Joyce’s ‘preference’ for the King James Bible (as opposed to the Latin Vulgate or Douay translation) and for the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, but in some instances the claim that Gottfried, passim. As evidence in support of this point, Gottfried also comments on Stephen’s critique of the Anglican marriage service as evinced in an argument that he has with Lynch in Stephen Hero. Joyce’s mockery of the man who would commit himself to another until death is hardly something that affirms his investment in this version of marriage rites, although the reference does demonstrate his familiarity with the Anglican rite (see Gottfried, p. 85). 26 Gottfried, pp. 66–​73, p. 36; and Lernout, passim. 27 See Gottfried, p. 26. 24 25

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Joyce made recourse to ‘schismatic’ English versions of the Bible is tenuous, to say the least. Gottfried’s commentary on the verse that Heron tells Stephen to parody in A Portrait (Matthew 18:17) makes much of a perceived difference between the phrase as it appears in the Douay (‘let him be to thee as a heathen and a publican’), in the King James (‘let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican’), and the novel’s ‘let him be to theea as the heathena and the publicana’ (P, 76). As can be plainly seen, in actuality all three versions are incredibly similar. The schoolboy version is clearly intended as a humorous distortion mimicking speech, rather than an entirely accurate transcription, something that could easily account for the slight variation. In any case, the phrase in question is so well known that it seems unlikely that Joyce would have needed to refer to any printed source in order to pen the Portrait scene. The same might be said of a number of allusions that, as Gottfried would have it, arise from an interest in the Book of Common Prayer. For example, he attaches great importance to Joyce’s various puns on the phrase ‘until death us do part’,28 a vow that is, and was then, so culturally ubiquitous that its inclusion in the Wake is hardly proof one way or the other that Joyce had a particular interest in the Anglican prayer book. In this and other examples (e.g. Gerty’s reflection on the marriage service at U, 15.357–​85) Joyce’s Misbelief paints a Joyce who errs on the side of Anglicanism owing to its more open acknowledgement of the connection between marriage and economics, something that Gottfried detects in Gerty’s garbled remembrance of the words ‘with all my worldly goods I thee and thou’ (U, 15.375).29 The notion of the Anglican Church as the more open or honest system that Gottfried implies is questionable to say the least, and his characterization of Joyce as a man in sympathy with the Anglican establishment does not do justice to the mature writer’s devastating take on the Protestant tradition. His characteristically humorous dismantling of established religion is neatly illustrated, for instance, in the Wake by a number of puns relating to the ‘Thirty-​Nine Articles of Religion’ that define the Church of England, the stuttering HCE’s ‘dudud dirtynine articles’ (534.12). It could, all the same, be said that the rebellious and schismatic history of European Protestantism might have appealed to Joyce’s sensibilities, but this is a far cry from stating that Joyce actually invested in this system of ideology and theology.

Gottfried, pp. 86–​87. Gottfried, p. 88.

28 29

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Despite his earlier attempts to align Joyce with Protestantism, Gottfried admits as much in a somewhat self-​contradictory move in his final chapter, where he qualifies his argument by stating the limits of Protestantism for Joyce. He contends that, for Joyce, no monolithic system could ever be allowed to dominate, as it is the act of schism itself that is central to his practice.30 What these schismatic acts might amount to in terms of an overarching political or artistic agenda is not made clear, but this is absolutely understandable given the consistently anti-​didactic nature of the work. In my view, the point is crucial. These introductory pages have been at pains to stress the polemical and particular nature of Joyce’s attack on Church authority in the Wake. It is also the case that no coherent counter-​system of thought is put forward to replace that which has been dismantled. It is this very reluctance to dictate that may well have led to the unusual amount of ambivalence with which the topic of Joyce and Catholicism is often approached. Then it is a central argument of James Joyce and Catholicism that the Wake’s lack of determinacy and resolution does not, and should not, disqualify precise interpretations of the book’s take on the Catholic establishment, particularly as this relates to the fate of the individual. While acknowledging the dangers of asserting a fixed message or moral for the Wake, this study seeks to elucidate at least some of the ways in which the book engages with Catholic Ireland’s historical nightmare, and the possibilities for disruption, and indeed historical repetition, that it might gesture towards.

Gottfried, p. 118.

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1

Shem the Penman

The study of Joyce and religion has often sought to identify his allegiances with those of one tribe or another, but, as we have seen, a consistent feature of the Wake is the way in which it refuses to assert a coherent counter-​theology or philosophy with which to confront or combat dogma. The breathtakingly intricate, and frequently contradictory, nature of the work means that potential truths are tabled, only to be undermined. From the earliest chapters, it is apparent that accounts of HCE are mediated through the voices of a multitude of narrators, of varying shades of reliability. Likewise, all the voices we hear are subject to a process of mediation and distortion, at both a linguistic as well as a narrative level, a device that the book self-​consciously calls attention to via an endless blurring and exchange of identities: ‘The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas’ (483.3–​4). The Wake does, nonetheless, tease the reader with moments when a coherent authorial vision seems possible, if only for a moment or two. Readers have, naturally, turned to Shem in an attempt to gain access to this vision, a figure who –​as the artist at the Wake –​appears to be most closely aligned with its creator. This alignment is established through the deployment of numerous biographical titbits, as well as the persistent debasement of Shem, and his identification as ‘condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch’ (188.15–​16). The book’s evasion of direct or didactic modes translates into the very structure of the work. Throughout, Joyce refuses us substantial access to the voice of Shem, and this frustrating strategy is further pronounced in chapter I.7, a section of the work that is ostensibly concerned with ‘Shem the Penman’, but that is, as Fordham reminds us, actually dominated by the voice of the bullish Shaun.1 The bigoted assassination of his brother’s character begins with a disgusted portrait of ‘this hybrid’ (169.9) his ‘bodily getup’ (169.11) and Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at ‘Finnegans Wake’: Unravelling Universals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 39–40.

1

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diet. Shaun proceeds to disparage all aspects of this ‘low sham’ (170.25) of a character, pouring scorn upon his political and religious leanings, his dubious paternity, his cowardice in the face of violence and his literary plagiarism. The chapter concludes with Shaun’s transformation into Justius, a figure who makes a lengthy pronouncement against Shem, the latter now appearing as Mercius. The reader is left with little to go on when it comes to an understanding of Shem that goes beyond the Shaunish caricature. And with that said, it is something of a relief to find embedded within ­chapter 1.7 at least one sentence that appears to constitute a maxim for Shem’s art. The statement at hand does, furthermore, go some way towards accounting for the existence of the book in the first place, as the passage in question is concerned with the impetus behind a unique mode of literary creation. The sequence begins with Shaun’s description of his brother scrawling upon his own flesh, using his faeces as a substitute for ink, ‘till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history’ (185.36–​186.2). The story of Shem’s faecal penmanship incorporates the following parenthetical aside, allegedly a report of the penman’s own explanation of his actions: ‘Thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal’ (186.3–​6). The transition into direct reported speech lends this aside an (albeit compromised) sense of authenticity. Given the profound, or at least pseudo-​profound, register, it is unsurprising that this passage has inspired Christian interpretations, the most influential of which is Fr Boyle’s. I observed on pages 39–40 that Boyle’s criticism seeks to retrieve the Christian theology underpinning Joyce’s writings, and his reading of this cloacal scenario is likewise grandiose. Shem’s ‘gift to his people’ –​his literary output, the words that he has inscribed upon his skin –​is linked to Christ’s sacrifice of flesh and blood. In this interpretation, Shem writing on the body becomes an analogy for ‘the artist [who] gives himself in his ink to his hearers and seers’, rendering the intensity of what is ‘common to allflesh, human only’ available to them.2 The elaborate nature of the claims that Shem allegedly makes for his art are therefore reflected in the criticism, and such a reading does not account for the way in which tone clashes with subject matter,

Robert Boyle, ‘The Artist as Balzacian Wild Ass’, in A Conceptual Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’, edited by Michael H. Begnal and Fritz Senn (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), pp. 71–​82 (p. 73).

2



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51

nor for the fact that this passage is as much concerned with a gross display of bodily waste as it is a glorious artistic mission. A similar logic underpins J. L. Baird and Coílín Owens’s commentary on the same passage. This reading, which is more illuminating and precise than Boyle’s, compares the image of Shem writing in faeces upon his own body to a number of premodern Passion narratives in which Christ’s blood is used metaphorically as a substitute for ink. Chaucer’s ‘An ABC’ is one such example, a work that Lucia Joyce illustrated for a bespoke edition, and which contains a description of Christ ‘with his precious blood [writing] the bille/​Upon the crois’.3 Despite the obvious deflation that has occurred in substituting Christ’s blood for Shem’s shit, the message here is exalted, and Baird and Owens conclude their essay with a claim for the ‘essential integrity, clarity, and radiance’ of Shem’s words, terms derived from Stephen’s distorted account of the values that Aquinas attributes to the aesthetic object in A Portrait.4 Mark Patrick Hederman also singles out this passage as justification for the method of the Wake, an aesthetic endeavour that has ‘redefined the limits of humanity and extended temporal existence into another dimension’.5 In Hederman’s hands, the words attributed to Shem the Penman function as a kind of divine revelation for humanity, in which the figure of the creative writer is hailed as a new sort of messiah, capable of transforming the boundaries imposed by time and space.6 Shaun is an extremely unreliable narrator and, in truth, it would be impossible to separate fact from fiction in his account. Moreover, such an endeavour runs counter to the narrative principles of the Wake, where authenticity and inauthenticity always go hand in hand. The question here, then, is not whether Shaun’s account of his brother’s words and actions is truthful, but rather a matter of how this particular attack upon the artist-​penman is constructed. A close reading of Shem’s artistic manifesto reveals a message that is as bleak and ‘unlivable’ (186.3) as it is affirmative or transformative. In A Portrait, Stephen proclaims that, in his projected role as ‘priest of eternal imagination’, he will ‘[transmute] the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life’ (P, 221). When Joyce began work on Shaun’s portrait, or anti-​ portrait, of the artist in 1924 –​some eight years since the publication of his

J. L. Baird and Coílín Owens, ‘Shem as Crucified Word:  FW 185–​6’, James Joyce Quarterly, 14.3 (1977), 251–​4, passim. 4 Baird and Owens, p. 253. 5 Mark Patrick Hederman, The Haunted Inkwell (Dublin: Columba, 2001), p. 151. 6 Hederman, p. 157. 3

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first novel –​the vision of this process of transmutation had shifted considerably.7 In the later scenario, Shem ‘transaccidentates’ a life from his very being that is neither radiant, coherent or whole. Rather he expresses a ‘dividual chaos’ (186.4–​5), a chaos that is both individual and dualist, that divides or disintegrates. Transaccidentation relates to an ancient debate over the elemental nature of the Eucharist during the celebration of Mass, a notion that undercuts the orthodox belief in transubstantiation –​the belief that a holy wafer of unleavened bread can transform into the Body of Christ without its ‘accidents’, that is, material properties, changing also  –​by insisting that Christ’s body must be physically present in the change as well.8 In this instance, however, the vision generated does not relate to the eternal life brought about by the Christian sacrifice. Any sense of permanence is undermined by the deployment of the terms ‘perilous’ (186.5) and ‘mortal’ (186.6). Shem’s art communicates something temporal and flesh-​bound rather than spiritual, ‘human only’ (186.5). The fraught philosophical exercises of the Protean stream of consciousness are now translated into a crude, infantile kind of nominalism: ‘This exists that isits after having been said we know’ (186.8–​9). The question of the book’s heretical voice can be fruitfully revisited with recourse to the ‘Shem the Penman’ sequence, as this portrait of the anti-​hero has important implications for the Wake as a whole. In Shaun’s estimation, the higher concerns of art and belief are enmeshed with more worldly and social concerns, with Shem failing to make the grade on every count. The collision of the religious and political in the chapter is, perhaps, an illustration of the slippery divide between theological and doctrinal questions and social manifestations of belief. This dynamic comes into play throughout ­chapter 1.7, and might be further explored through a treatment of the chapter’s idiosyncratic approach to heretical sources, and an analysis of the manner in which Shaun’s rhetoric mimics certain Catholic nationalist modes. This notion can be further unpacked through a consideration of the ways in which the chapter’s portrait of the degraded, inactive artist might relate to Joyce’s specific concerns for the future of the artist-​intellectual in the fledgling Irish state.

Ingeborg Landuyt records that Joyce wrote to Miss Weaver on 16 January 1924 announcing his intention to add a ‘description of Shem-​Ham-​Cain-​Esau etc and his penmanship’ to the ‘calligraphy expertise’ that he had just completed (Letters I, 208). See Landuyt, ‘Cain –​Ham –​(Shem) –​Esau –​ Jim the Penman: Chapter I.7’, in How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Chapter-​by-​Chapter Genetic Guide, edited by Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), pp. 142–​62 (p. 142). 8 Fordham discusses this ancient debate at pp. 47–​8. 7



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Joycean heresies As discussed on pages 4–6, the designation of Joyce as heretic is troublesome as it characterizes him, in the Church’s own terms, as one who rejects certain points of dogma, but who ultimately retains the faith –​a description that is questionable, at best. This challenge to the straightforward assumption that Joyce himself was a heretic naturally should not discount heresy as an important theme in the work, and it is clear that Joyce created semi-​autobiographical characters who engage sympathetically with the idea of heresy, even if they do not fully embrace the role of the heretic themselves. We might, for example, recall Stephen’s reflection before Haines in ‘Telemachus’, in which he appears to identify with the plight of rebels like Photius, Arius, Valentine and Sabellius,  a horde of heretics that he imagines in religious regalia ‘fleeing with mitres awry’, under the watchful eye of a militant, menacing Church, determined to defend Her claim to authority at all costs (U, 1.650–​64). Heresy is a recurring theme in the Wake also and, as I argue on page 16, allusions to heresies and heretics of the past depict Church history as a jagged line rather than as an unbroken apostolic tradition, a history punctuated by conflict, schism and subsequent realignment, causing the absolute doctrines of the Church to be on occasion revised. A further aspect of the Wake’s heretical subject matter that has not been considered thus far is the importance attached to Giordano Bruno, the heresiarch of Nola. Joyce had an interest in this figure from as early on as his university days, and his 1901 essay ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ is dedicated to ‘the Nolan’. This interest persisted, and Joyce’s best-​known statement on Bruno appears in a letter to Weaver in May 1926. With regard to the ideas of Bruno and Vico, Joyce states, ‘I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories beyond using them for all they are worth’ (SL, 241). Beckett went on to canonize a Brunonian reading of the Wake in his contribution to the Exagmination, ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’, although, when compared to the treatment of the other writers named, Bruno is somewhat neglected.9 The Joyce-​Bruno relationship has been tackled in two fairly recent studies of the Wake, so a thorough revisiting of this topic is not necessary at this juncture.10 The special importance that Joyce attached to this figure and the manner Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico . . . Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’, by Samuel Beckett et  al. (London:  Faber and Faber, 1929, rpt 1960), pp. 1–​22. 10 See Morrison, and Gareth Joseph Downes, ‘James Joyce, Catholicism and Heresy:  With Specific Reference to Giordano Bruno’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of St Andrews, 2003). 9

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in which Bruno is privileged ahead of other unorthodox thinkers cannot, however, be ignored. Given Joyce’s distaste for all shades of dogmatic Christianity, the appeal of the Nolan might lie in the sheer distance between Bruno and mainstream Christian thought. Indeed, when it comes to Bruno’s radical pantheism, it is hard to locate him within the Christian tradition at all. There are few instances of sustained, serious, theological inquiry in the Wake, Brunonian or not, but the ideas of the Nolan are employed beyond the theological realm. Most centrally, Bruno’s concept of coincidentia oppositorium –​an aspect of his philosophy that is derived from Nicholas of Cusa –​functions as a crucial structural and aesthetic device, a means of articulating the human mind’s capacity to overcome that which, according to the operations of reason, is contradictory. On the surface, heresies and heretics take centre stage in ‘Shem the Penman’. The chapter is peppered with such allusions, which bring into focus figures like Cornelius Jansen (‘Jansens Chrest’, 173.12), Caelestius (‘the celestious intemperance’, 178.35), Pelagius (‘his pelagiarist pen’, 182.3), Bruno himself (‘Nayman of Noland’, 187.28), and Marcion (‘that hereticalist Marcon and the two scissymaids’, 192.1–​2), along with heretical schools like Gnosticism (‘he is a gnawstick’, 170.11), Antinomianism (‘not even then could such an antinomian be true to type’, 172.17–​18; ‘His costive Satan’s antimonian manganese limolitmious nature’, 184.36–​185.1),11 and the Albigensian heresy (‘any decent son of an Albiogenselman’, 173.12–​13), and allusions to unorthodox sects like the Quakers (‘when the heavens are quakers’, 170.9) and the Bohemian Brethren (‘when Bohemeand lips’, 170.10). Most, but not all, of these allusions are accurately annotated by McHugh.12 The fact that the fabric of the chapter is shot through with punning references to heresy indicates that this kind of discourse is key to understanding the This allusion may well have been inspired by Joseph Collins’s chapter on Joyce in The Doctor Looks at Literature:  Psychological Studies of Life and Letters (New  York:  George H.  Doran Company, 1923). The essay on Joyce is twenty-​five pages (pp. 35–​60) and is entitled ‘Ireland’s Latest Literary Antimonian: James Joyce’. As is the case with Wyndham Lewis’s remarks, it is part of Joyce’s practice to incorporate criticisms of his work into the Wake. 12 The following discrepancies can be found in McHugh (see the corresponding pages in his Annotations):  he categorizes Quakerism as simply a ‘heresy’ when, by Joyce’s day, George Fox’s ‘Society of Friends’ was a well-​established sect and often categorized as a religion in its own right; he neglects to annotate the allusion to Caelestius contained in the phrase ‘the celestious intemperance’ at 178.35; and he inaccurately describes Marcion as a heretic who ‘believed he was Christ’, an epithet that does not do justice to this theologian’s complex dualist approach to the Old and New Testaments, which postulates that the God of the Old Testament was not the God who was the father of Christ. McHugh detects a reference to the Celestine heresy in Justius’ claim that Shaun and/​or himself has been ‘well-​known to celestine circles’ (191.15), which might also be challenged. Given that this phrase occurs in the course of an adulating description of a Shaunish figure it seems more likely that, looking beyond the obvious pun on the word ‘celestial’, the primary historical allusion is to the papal name Celestine. 11



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passage at hand. Then, the more one seeks to unravel and unpack the nuance of Shaun’s bitter diatribe, the harder it becomes to understand the precise nature of Shem’s alleged heresy. After transforming into Justius, the Shaunish voice claims that he will address the ‘hiresiarch’ (188.16) in a manner that is ‘provocative and out direct’ (187.31–​2), but his accusations are, in substance, vague and diffuse. A reference to ‘fornenst gods’ evokes a kind of pantheism, and the only concrete claim that emerges from the Shaun-​Justius diatribe is the fact of his brother’s doubt itself, a trait that again sounds Brunonian:  Shem’s ‘twosome twiminds’ are forged on the ‘vacuum’ of his ‘most intensely doubtful soul’ (188.14–​17). It could be said that this love of incertitude represents the method, rather than the substance, of heretical discourse, a reflection of Joyce’s persistent privileging of the sceptical and questioning mind ahead of the dogmatic one. A curious contradiction is then apparent. Despite the chapter’s prominent heretical leitmotif, the substance of most of the heresies mentioned is elided. This observation is, moreover, borne out with recourse to the surviving compositional documents. A number of the reading notes for the ‘Work in Progress’ suggest that the exploration of heretical themes is not especially thoroughgoing. Genetic critics have long been aware that happenstance and expedience often play a role in the choices made, and the surviving notes on heresy tend to support Denis Donoghue’s claim that the ‘work shows little of that love of wisdom which constitutes the philosophic habit’ –​a claim that Hederman forcefully repudiates.13 This is because ‘wisdom’ is not, and cannot be, an end in itself in the Wake. Joyce’s radical approach to truth seeking is reflected in his methods; instead of covering a theme comprehensively in order to synthesize the evidence and eventually arrive at a greater truth, the source material is approached in a far more fluid and creative manner. The aim is not to arrive at a truth per se, but rather to scan sources for snatches of useful material to be incorporated into a chaotic fictional universe. These snatches of text are often selected as much for their linguistic qualities as for their content. Evidence of Joyce’s instinctive approach to garnering heretical material appears on page 125 of the early notebook VI.B.6, compiled between the end of December 1923 and mid to late February 1924 according to Vincent Deane.14 Joyce had a very different topic in mind as he filled about a quarter of the page with relatively small, neat notes about the rosary, derived from the CE entry on

Denis Donoghue, cited in Hederman, p. 124. James Joyce, The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.6, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), p. 4.

13 14

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the subject. When reading the encyclopedia’s account of the Feast of the Holy Rosary, which relates certain legends associated with this method of prayer, he would have encountered the following passing reference to the Albigenses, nested within a description of a myth about St Dominic: Apart from the signal defeat of the Albigensian heretics at the battle of Muret in 1213 which legend has attributed to the recitation of the Rosary by St. Dominic, it is believed that heaven has on many occasions rewarded the faith of those who had recourse to this devotion in times of special danger.15

Here the reference to the sect is incidental, but this chance encounter inspired a brief change in focus. He proceeded to make a new heading with the title ‘Albigenses’. Joyce must have been prompted to turn back to the letter ‘A’ in order to find out more, and under the fresh header he inscribed a small block of notes derived from the CE entry on the Albigenses (in fact, described in the CE as ‘[p]‌roperly speaking [. . .] not a Christian heresy but an extra-​Christian religion’). The Albigensian notes run as follows:  ‘consolamentum; God penetrates ear BVM; Dual; catharists; concubinage /​marriage; even animal /​generation abhorred; fish allowed; no war /​ –​capital punishment /​metempsychosis /​ E = hell /​perfecti credentes /​W at home /​responsolated /​deacons & bishops’. Having done with this tangent, he picked up the original thread and returned to taking notes on the rosary. As is typical, the notes are a ragbag collection of appealing ideas and phrases derived from the encyclopedia entry. Most do indeed relate to key ideas associated with the Albigenses according to the author of the CE article, Nicholas Weber, although in the case of reading notes like ‘deacons & bishops’ it is not known why Joyce felt compelled to note down such familiar and commonplace terms. The dualist principle that is reflected in the note ‘Dual’ certainly endures, both in ‘Shem the Penman’ and throughout the Wake, but there is little evidence of Joyce making further use of what he had learned about the sect –​not even the note ‘metempsychosis’, which might naturally be thought to appeal to the creator of Bloom.16 Passing mentions of the Albigenses occur a

The source is identified in the Brepols edition of the notebook, p. 13. The mention of metempsychosis appears under the heading ‘Moral’, when Weber observes in relation to the Albigenses’ abstention from animal foods, that ‘[t]‌heir belief in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, the result of their logical rejection of purgatory, furnishes another explanation for the same abstinence’. The connection between the consumption of meat, and the transmigration of souls, provides a neat thematic resonance with the breakfast scene in ‘Calypso’.

15 16



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handful of times elsewhere in the Wake,17 mentions that are illustrative of the manner in which Joyce deploys and redeploys such watchwords as a means of invoking the large themes of conflict, persecution and schism. But it is unlikely that any of the notes from the CE on this topic were directly translated into the working drafts, as none of the words in the notebook are struck through. Naturally, Joyce’s haphazard approach to ‘research’ does not simply undermine the importance of this material for him. It may have been that he did not need a great deal of written notes for the purposes he had in mind, or that he had recourse to further sources or simply his own memory and residual knowledge. When it comes to chapter I.7 in particular, however, surviving compositional documents indicate a particular pattern of revision and incorporation. The archive bears witness to a process whereby Joyce ‘sprinkles’ the names of heresies and heretics throughout ‘Shem the Penman’, adding a number of related allusions in the chapter at a late stage in the composition history. An example of this occurs on the galley proofs, where we see Joyce tinkering with a phrase from Shaun’s attack that makes ironic reference to ‘any decent son of a shedog who had bin to an university’ – the slip into ‘bad’ grammar undercutting Shaun’s authority as he attempts to discredit another. Joyce revised the phrase in order to produce a neat pun, as follows:  ‘any decent son of an Albiogenselman’ (173.13). With the amended phrase, it is difficult to see what particular bearing the allusion to the Albigenses has on the logic of the passage, other than its status as heresy.18 Rather, it seems plausible that when working on the chapter, Joyce was not so much thinking of the beliefs and history of one particular sect, but rather that he exploited the opportunity that arose from the chance to have ‘Albigensian man’ chime with ‘Albion man’ or ‘Albion gentleman’, an example of the Wake’s extraordinary linguistic alchemy. The implications of the latter add to the sense of social and intellectual pretension that is an important facet of Shaun’s discourse at this moment. A  similar instance appears elsewhere in the same document, where the word ‘God’ is replaced with ‘Jansens Chrest’. The new wordplay makes fleeting reference to the Jansenist school of thought that was inspired by the work of Dutch theologian Cornelius

For example, ‘dooly redecant allbigenesis henesies’ (240.12–​13), ‘raiding revolations over the allbegeneses’ (350.30–​1), and ‘the coughs and the itches and the minnies and the ratties the opulose and bilgenses’ (488.34–​5). 18 Joseph Strayer explains in The Albigensian Crusades (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1991) that the Albigenses, a branch of the Cathar, were a dualist, neo-​Manichaean sect, who rose to prominence in thirteenth-​century France. The sect was eventually wiped out by the Inquisition, but represented the last serious threat to the unity of the Church in the West, prior to the Protestant Reformation (p. ix and passim). 17

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Jansen (1585–​1638), and popularized in the mid-​seventeenth century, before eventually being declared heretical. No less a figure than Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari (the future Gregory XVI) wrote a successful treatise against the Italian Jansenists entitled Trionfo della Santa Sede (‘The Triumph of the Holy See’), and here we have yet another example of Joyce weaving allusions to Church historical conflicts into the fabric of the work. It might again be said that specific theological questions have taken a back seat in favour of an overarching, schismatic aesthetic. A similarly serendipitous chain of events led Joyce to Pelagius, or more accurately, back to Pelagius. The 1907 lecture ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’ makes mention of the ‘great heresiarch’ Pelagius, claiming that this ‘traveller and [. . . ] tireless propagandist, if not an Irishman, as many contend, was certainly either Irish or Scottish’ (CW, 157). Despite his desire to assert the Celtic provenance of this figure, Joyce has little more to say on the subject in the Trieste lecture. Leaping forwards in time some decade and a half, it was in the course of taking extensive notes from a thoroughly orthodox source in the early 1920s –​ the Very Reverend Dean Kinane’s Life of St. Patrick  –​that Joyce again came across the Pelagian heresy in the following passage: The Pope now sent St. Germanus as legate, accompanied by St. Lupus of Troyes, and Patrick, to extinguish [.  . .] the Pelagian heresy; and here our saint tasted the first fruits of his Apostolic mission. That St. Lupus of Troyes, should be chosen as fitting companion for the Apostolic legate, nobody will be surprised; for at this time he was one of the first figures in the Church of France.19

From this chunk of text, Joyce took the simple note ‘Pelagianism’ (VI.B.14.36), and went on to make a couple of further passing references to the heresy as he proceeded to fill the notebook, probably a consequence of his obsessive reading of Patrician literature at this time.20 Not until the notebook was almost complete did he substantially follow up on the lead, taking more than three pages of notes from the CE entry. While these notes are fairly extensive, it should be observed that in relying so heavily upon the encyclopedia, Joyce quite seriously limited his resources to an orthodox, Catholic summary of historical events. The inclusion of a reference to Pelagius in ‘Shem the Penman’ works in a similar way to the two examples just discussed. The neat, punning

19

The source is again identified in the Brepols edition of the notebook. Joyce took notes from seven books about St Patrick in VI.B.14 alone.

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phrase ‘pelagiarist pen’ (182.3) is not present in the last typescript that is preserved in the JJA, where the text read ‘plagiarist pen’ (JJA 49: 460; 47474–​48), but is present in the version of ‘Shem the Penman’ published in This Quarter. This method of including heretical material in chapter I.7 might be compared to the use of river names in the following chapter, a technique Joyce famously claimed to have employed in order to make the chapter flow. Working in this allusive manner, he did not intend to develop Shem’s character traits in anything resembling a conventional novelistic style, but rather to establish an associative pattern, inviting the reader to link Shem to the idea of heresy. Shem becomes, like Bloom before the angry guardians of the faith in the hallucinatory world of ‘Circe’, ‘an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian’ (U, 15.1712). The outraged denunciation of the perceived transgression is more important than the details of the crime itself. At the level of aesthetics, this explanation is plausible, but it is also possible, at the narrative level, to suppose that this has as much to do with Joyce’s attitude towards Shaun, as it does Shem. As the supposed embodiment of Church authority, Shaun cannot engage in coherent, theological debate, but rather resorts to the litany of personal insults that populate the chapter, all the while dropping linguistic clues that hint at Shem’s rebellious, heretical nature. To trace the destination of the notes on Pelagius gives us a final, pertinent insight into the extraordinary manner in which the Wake is able to translate crucial moments of doctrinal disagreement into scenarios that feel very much more immediate, or simply human. Ultimately, Joyce’s reading notes on Pelagius did not bear fruit in ‘Shem the Penman’ (the place where we expect to find a concentration of heretical material) and the material was appropriated in two places: first, in a fishy sounding exchange during the interrogation of Yawn involving a version of the crime that is implicitly homosexual (523.31–​ 525.5), and second, in the pub scene of chapter II.3 (358.36–​359.20). Such instances are discussed by Vincent Deane when he acknowledges ‘direct use of Pelagian elements by Joyce is limited’.21 In the latter example, six heretical theses associated with Pelagius and Caelestius regarding Original Sin, lifted by Joyce from the CE, are translated into a debate over HCE’s responsibility for the events in Phoenix Park. HCE pleads for collective responsibility, but the customers in his pub appropriate the Pelagian theses so as to place blame squarely on his shoulders. 21

Vincent Deane, ‘HCE and the Fall of Pelagius’, in:  ‘Finnegans Wake’:  Fifty Years, European Joyce Studies 2, edited by Geert Lernout (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 109–​23 (p. 111).

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The priest, the woman and the confessional The appropriation of heretical material in the Wake takes turns that are often surprising, and that are certainly hard to pin down or categorize. This ranges from the playful, punning incorporation of single words or phrases so as to suggest a heretical flavour for Shem through to the far larger, and more crucial, theme of the Edenic fall and its implications for human nature which are transmuted through the Wake’s convoluted network of bizarre and unfathomable shades of gossip. The role of distortion and hearsay is also a determining feature in the trials of the early Christian heretics, or so Joyce might say to us. Looking back to the ‘Shem the Penman’ chapter, the incorporation of certain heretical watchwords is, arguably, a fleeting thematic flourish, but one source that embodies the apostatic impulse towards aggressive critique is substantially incorporated into the text: the infamous Fr Charles Paschal Télesphore Chiniquy’s anti-​Catholic diatribe of 1875 (1880), The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional (hereafter referred to as The Priest). Chiniquy (1809–99), a Canadian, was a former Roman Catholic priest and temperance campaigner, who converted to Presbyterianism in 1858, taking most of his previously Catholic congregation with him. He made waves with his anti-​ Catholic lecture tours in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, and penned several exposés of the wrongdoings of his erstwhile co-​religionists, most famously The Priest and Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, published in London in 1875 and 1886 respectively.22 His success can be thought of as a product of the increased public appetite for outlandish anti-​Catholic tracts in North America in the antebellum era, something that Elizabeth Fenton has discussed as a means by which Anglo-​Protestants could express anxieties about democracy and personal liberty by vilifying an autocratic Church.23 Mirroring this impulse, The Priest in large part elides theology in favour of a critique of the practices and procedures of the Church of Rome. Taken as a whole, Chiniquy’s writings chronicle a catalogue of abuses by the Roman Catholic Church, and this is probably the reason why Joyce has Bloom notice Chiniquy’s pamphlet, ‘Why I Left the Church of Rome’, in ‘Lestrygonians’. Appropriately, the pamphlet is stocked by the reverend Thomas Connellan’s bookstore, a shop specializing in proselytizing Protestant literature (U, 8.1070–​1). The Elgin Sylvester Moyer, The Wycliffe Biographical Dictionary of the Church (Chicago:  Moody, 1982), p. 90. Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-​Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-​Century U. S. Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 13.

22

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Priest is the most famous, or infamous, of Chiniquy’s books owing to its shocking claims about the sexual indiscretions of priests with their penitents, an association that is apparent in the Circean nightmare when, after claiming responsibility for disclosing the ‘Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens’, Virag Bloom recommends his audience read Chiniquy’s pamphlet (U, 15.2546–​8).24 Don Gifford has inadequately summarized the contents of The Priest, noting in his Joyce Annotated that Chiniquy’s book argues that ‘for women the experience of confession [. . .] was potentially corrupting’.25 In actuality, The Priest goes much further than this. Chiniquy alleges numerous sexual relationships between penitents and their confessors, the most elaborate being the tale of ‘Geneva’ who purportedly disguised herself as a man for many years so that she could set up house with her priest.26 Claims of sexual activity and the corruption of young girls by representatives of the Church were certainly not new at the time of the Wake. We might think, for example, of the abuses of a convent girl that are central to the Marquis de Sade’s 1791 novel Justine, a symptom of a pervasive trope in erotic literature. This may well be part and parcel of the genre Joyce intends to parody in the Wake, although it is also the case that most of the works of this nature that are explicitly mentioned in the fiction link more firmly with the particular trend for salacious anti-​Catholic narratives described by Fenton. It is unlikely that Joyce would have felt much sympathy with this flagrant exercise in Protestant propaganda, and we know that he found the excesses of Protestantism as distasteful as those of Catholicism. The compilers of the CE reached a similar conclusion (it was obviously in their interests to do so) and filed Chiniquy under the heading ‘Imposters’. The encyclopedia entry asserts that Chiniquy’s agenda switched from doctrinal objections to scurrilous scandalmongering once he had discerned what the Protestant reading public demanded of him, and also stakes the claim that Chiniquy was twice suspended from the Church because of his own amorous indiscretions with young parishioners: ‘There is no room to doubt that these suspensions were motivated by grave moral lapses of which the bishops in question had full and convincing information, though, as often happens in such cases, the girls he had seduced could not be persuaded to face the exposure involved by substantiating the Numerous scholars have tried to chase down the Circean allusion by hunting for a work entitled Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens. Given their lack of success, it is likely that this title is simply a Joycean joke, hyperbolically mimicking the genre discussed here. 25 Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 497. 26 Charles Chiniquy, The Priest, The Woman and The Confessional (Chicago: A. Craig and Co., 1880), pp. 86–​97. 24

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charge publicly upon oath’ (CE, ‘Imposters’). Many of the tales told in The Priest are so far-​fetched that is difficult for any reader, however invested in an anti-​ Catholic stance, to entirely suspend their disbelief. Joyce, along with modern-​ day readers, would likely have swallowed Chiniquy’s tall tales with more than a pinch of salt. That said, a question mark looms over the matter of whether or not Joyce would have entirely dismissed these claims out of hand, or, indeed, if he would have been mistaken to do so. Recent historical revelations bear witness to a grain of truth beneath the propaganda and, despite protestations by the Church that the fact of sexual abuse by clerics was not known of until the second half of the twentieth century, this was clearly a topic that had long been current in the domain of anti-​Catholic literature. The notion that Joyce himself had tuned into this is reinforced by the discovery of further source materials that deal with the sexual indiscretions of celibates, and one such text is present in chapter I.7 in Shaun’s description of the cowardly Shem, ‘moaning feebly, in monkmarian monotheme’ (177.2), as he prays a garbled Hail Mary rather than join the fray. The referent here is Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, the Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836), a work that Bloom ‘idly’ (U, 10.585–​6) flicks through in ‘Wandering Rocks’, part of a fad for ‘escaped nun’s tales’.27 One may also recall Brenda Maddox’s claim that Nora was molested by a priest as a young girl, an incident that, if true, her husband was surely aware of.28 Monk’s tale is elaborate and largely implausible, but one element of her story appears to survive in the Wake. In ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ (chapter I.8) Joyce toys with the suggestion that a baby has been conceived ‘behind the veil’ owing to the washerwomen’s discovery of ‘the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl’ (213.28–​9). Such an accusation is at the heart of the Disclosures, and was propagated further in a widely distributed image alleging to portray Maria and her child that appears in many editions of her book. Throughout the Wake, the idea of sexual liaisons between priestly figures and young women is a recurring motif, an idea that is crystallized in the rumours about the young ALP and the hermit Michael Arklow, and in certain manifestations of the Shaun-​Issy relationship. The Priest is especially relevant to a discussion of such controversies in the Wake, as Joyce returned to this book in 1931 and read it thoroughly, taking more than thirty pages of notes. Lernout comments briefly on Joyce’s extensive Fenton, p.  58 and passim. Another work in this genre Joyce was certainly aware of is Josephine M. Bunkley’s The Escaped Nun (1855), which he referred to in Epiphany 18. Brenda Maddox, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1988, rpt 2000), p. 18.

27

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note-​taking from The Priest at this fairly late stage in the writing process, and observes that this material was incorporated almost immediately into the already established chapters of Book I.29 The deployment of this material does, nonetheless, warrant further commentary in the light of a discussion of (anti)religious themes in ‘Shem the Penman’. In contrast to instances where Joyce cherry-​picked at his reading materials, selecting only a few choice phrases for distribution in the ‘Work in Progress’, in this instance the level of intertextual borrowing is high, and at least thirteen phrases from Chiniquy’s diatribe are directly incorporated into Justius’ speech in the last part of ‘Shem the Penman’. The correspondence between the Justius portion of chapter I.7 and The Priest is a follows: Allusion in Finnegans Wake

Corresponding passage in The Priest

‘I advise you to conceal yourself, my little friend, as I have said a moment ago and put your hands in my hands’ (188.1–​3)

‘I was invited by my young friend Louis Casault to conceal myself with him, in an adjoining room, where we could hear everything without being seen […] I said to my child, “If you love me, put your hand on my heart, and promise never to go again to confess” ’ (pp. 191–​5)

‘Let us pry. We thought, would and did. Cur, quicquid, ubi, quando, quomodo, quoties, quibis auxiliis?’ (188.8–​9)

‘ “Lest the confessor should indolently hesitate in tracing out the circumstances of any sin, let him have the following versicle of circumstances in readiness: “Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando. Who, which, where, with whom, why, how, when” ’ (p. 71) ‘they struggle to nerve themselves’ (p. 27) ‘the horrible necessity of speaking of things’ (p. 24) ‘Dear sister, are you ready to begin your confession?’ (p. 44) ‘to swim with me and all her priests in those waters of Sodom and Gomorrah, under the pretext that their self-​will would be broken down, their fear of sin and humility increased, and that they would be purified by our absolutions’ (p. 31)

‘must I too nerve myself to pray for the loss of selfrespect’ (188.20–​1) ‘to equip me for the horrible necessity of scandalising’ (188.21) ‘(my dear sisters, are you ready?)’ (188.22) ‘while we all swin together in the pool of Sodom?’ (188.23–​4)

Lernout, p. 204.

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Allusion in Finnegans Wake

Corresponding passage in The Priest

‘I shall shiver for my purity while they weepbig for your sins’ (188.24–​5)

‘They will indignantly rebuke you as a slanderer if you say anything to lead them to suppose that you fear for their purity, when they hear the confessions of girls or married women!’ (p. 82) ‘he made a criminal proposition, which I accepted with covered words also’ (p. 35) ‘the unchaste unveiling of the new Bathsheba?’ (p. 28) ‘A young educanda was in the habit of going down, every night, to the convent burying-​place, where, by a corridor which communicated with the vestry, she entered into a colloquy with a young priest attached to the church. Consumed by an amorous passion, she was not deterred by bad weather or the fear of being discovered’ (p. 71) ‘But we challenge the most devoted modern priest of Rome to find a single line in all the letters of St. Jerome in favor of auricular confession. In his admirable letter to the Priest Nepotianus, on the life of priests, vol. II., p. 203, when speaking of the relations, of priests with women, he says: “Solus cum sola, secreto et absque arbitrio, vel teste, non sedeas. Si familiarius est aliquid loquendum, habet nutricem. majorem domus, virginem, viduam, vel mari tatam; non est tam inhumana ut nullum praeter te habeat cui se audeat credere.” “Never sit in secret, alone, in a retired place, with a female who is alone with you” ’ (pp. 228–​9) ‘imo ut non servetur debitum vas, sed copula habeatur in vase praepostero, aliquoque non naturali. Si fiat’ (p. 290) ‘her handsome young spiritual physician’ (p. 87)

‘Away with covered words’ (188.25) ‘new Solemonities for old Badsheetbaths!’ (188.25–6) ‘accomplished women, indeed fully educanded, far from being old and rich behind their dream of arrivisme, if they have only their honour left, and not deterred by bad weather when consumed by amorous passion, struggling to possess themselves of your boosh’ (189.14–​8) ‘solus cum sola sive cuncties cum omnibobs’ (189.19)

‘debituary vases or vessels preposterous’ (189.21) ‘our handsome young spiritual physician’ (191.16)

It is noteworthy that the burst of Chiniquy material coincides with the significant shift in tone that occurs when Shaun morphs into Justius and begs his brother to confess. Here, a distinctly Victorian, didactic mood emerges, an effect that is significantly enhanced by the inclusion of so much material from Chiniquy.



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A further striking feature of the use of Chiniquy’s text is the manner in which the Wake does not simply incorporate images and verbiage lifted from The Priest, but rather the entire notion of a perverse auricular confession. In the mouth of Shaun-​Justius this becomes a ‘wetbed confession’ (188.1), a swipe at Shem’s cowardly or juvenile night-​time urination, masturbatory activity, and/​ or the involuntary ejaculation of a pubescent dreamer. The Shaunish attempt to take the moral high ground –​enticing Shem to confess while lambasting him for his ineptitudes –​soon falters, enabling us to see that the preacher is not the pillar of integrity that he claims to be. Intoning ‘Let us pry’ (188.8), a nosy and voyeuristic, rather than sacred, agenda is apparent. Relish and anticipation mark Shaun’s attitude to his brother’s confession when he ‘nerves’ himself in order to ‘swin’ (both ‘sin’ and ‘swim’) together with him ‘in the pool of Sodom’ (188.23–​4). Likewise, Shaun’s version of St Jerome’s Latin makes his libidinous agenda abundantly clear, and the line ‘solus cum sola sive cuncties cum omnibobs’ (189.19) contains an obvious and facile allusion to female genitalia. The language of Justius betrays that it is truly Shaun, rather than Shem, who is comparable to Chiniquy’s lascivious priests, and this impression is reinforced at the archeological or genetic level. For example, when Shaun hails ‘our handsome young spiritual physician’ (191.16) it appears that he is invoking a glorified version of himself, a figure who is comparable to other idealized and exalted visions of Shaun that are present at the Wake. In keeping with the ironic deployment of material from The Priest throughout the passage, which co-​opts snatches of Chiniquy’s denunciation of the clergy for the ostensibly orthodox discourse of Justius, recourse to the source reveals that the implication of the phrase is by no means holy. The quotation that is the origin of the reference to a handsome physician is in fact a description of the very priest who seduced ‘Geneva’ and allegedly developed an outrageous scheme in order to keep her in his household. It is by no means assured that Joyce kept the nuance of the source text in mind when he deployed this image, but the likening of Shaun to the good-​looking, philandering cleric from The Priest is appropriately mischievous. Attention to the source material opens up further aspects of the double logic that can be discerned in the rhetoric of both Shaun and Chiniquy. All in all, The Priest is a striking example of an ostensibly edifying read that undoes its own intentions throughout. In his moralizing authorial persona, Chiniquy frequently hovers ‘just outside the bedroom door’, returning time and again to his subjects’ ‘unmentionable’ abominations and iniquities in a style that, like Shaun’s, is often more prurient than prudish. It is even possible that the very notion of portraying

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a judgemental, moralizing cleric –​a man who is in fact a lascivious hypocrite –​ was partially inspired by the figure of Chiniquy.

A ‘bludgeony Unity Sunday’ (176.19–​20): The politics of violence Despite Shaun’s repeated insinuations of his brother’s heretical status, we have seen that the precise nature of his heresy is far from clear. As discussed on pages 51–2, in the ‘Haunted Inkbottle’ (182.31) Shem’s rebellion is communicated via a work of art, written in shit upon the flesh, which casts asunder the divine order in favour of a more chaotic and indeterminate world view. What such a production would actually look like, or contain, remains obscure, or at least this is communicated in so elaborate and convoluted a fashion as to render it forever out of reach. When it comes to Shem’s social transgressions against his religious tribe, the content of the chapter is far more explicit. As Lernout has noted, in the earliest drafts of ‘Shem the Penman’, the crimes discussed ‘seem to be much more national than religious’,30 and this theme remains prominent in the published version of the work. Shaun’s assassination of his brother’s character is multifaceted, and his tirade includes criticisms of Shem’s racial ancestry and criminal physiognomy, drawing upon Victorian pseudoscientific theories of degeneracy, along with expressions of disgust at Shem’s diet and personal habits. The notion of Shem’s failure as a ‘nationist’ (190.13), an obscure synonym for ‘nationalist’, is also a favourite theme. This element of the denunciation of Shem is bound up with a raft of material relating to Ireland’s recent political history, material that has received surprisingly scant critical attention. On several occasions, the delineation of Shem’s political failings strongly reflects the events in Joyce’s life. In the guise of ‘national apostate’ (171.33) the penman functions as the inverse of Ireland’s National Apostle, St Patrick, abandoning Ireland in favour of the Continent in order to produce ‘pseudostylic shamiana’ (181.36–​182.1) about those left behind: works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, perhaps. Here, like Joyce, Shem is the author of apostatic literature about his homeland, rather than an apostolic vessel. As discussed above, there is often a danger of biographical overdetermination

Lernout, p. 199.

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when reading Joyce, and this applies to ‘Shem the Penman’ also. Within this ‘moodmoulded cyclewheeling history’ (186.2) –​a history that is, by definition, determined by subjective moods –​there is a great deal of temporal confusion, and, naturally, the histories of the two figures diverge significantly in places. Told through the long historical lens, or kaleidoscope, of the Wake, Shem’s national failings date back as far as the days of the Plan of Campaign, the famous, and theoretically non-violent, stratagem for land reform implemented between 1886 and 1891. Conceived by Tim Healy, and instigated by Irish National League secretary Timothy Harrington, along with prominent nationalist politicians John Dillon and William O’Brien among others, the Plan entailed the coordinated mass withdrawal of rents by tenant farmers. Rather than stand shoulder to shoulder with the farmers in the battle against the abuses of absentee landlords, the inadequate Shem has failed ‘to fall in with Plan, as our nationals should’ (190.12–​13). The ‘Plan’ invoked here has a specific historical shade, although it might also encapsulate any act of collective defiance, as well as the more mundane plans tabled for Shem here. Looking back to the time of Joyce’s youth, these plans involve the undertaking of an office that, playing upon the two meanings of ‘clerical’ (190.15), requires both holy labour and ‘agonising office hours’ (190.15). The chapter’s temporal frame is not exclusively backward-​facing, and the birth of the Free State –​the ‘new Irish stew’ (190.9) that Shaun-​Justius instructs his brother to labour for –​also features. The new political topography of Britain and Ireland is at the centre of the attempt by Justius to articulate Shem-Mercius’ sins against faith, sins he cannot help but paint in a political light. The accusation that the Shemmish persona has ‘reared [his] disunited kingdom on the vacuum of [his] most intensely doubtful soul’ (188.16–​17) attributes enormous political ramifications to the actions of the self-​appointed exile. In this formulation, the fracturing, or disuniting, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, or the partition of Ireland into north and south, is born of Shem’s habitual doubt. Via the absolute entanglement of the religious and the political, ‘Shem the Penman’ flagrantly mimics popular Catholic-​nationalist rhetoric, and the fact that this tendency is associated with the contemptible Shaunish avatars lends credence to the notion that the Wake seeks to satirize, or at least destabilize, some strands of sectarian thinking. Enhancing the chapter’s exceptionally contemporary political theme, one particular event in the recent history of Ireland’s national struggle is pushed to centre stage when the speaker offers an account of Shem’s participation (or lack thereof) on the day of violence known as Bloody Sunday. Violence began on the morning of 21 November 1920 when Republicans set out to assassinate a group of British secret service agents who had established

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themselves in Dublin –​the undercover ‘Cairo Gang’ –​and succeeded in killing twelve gang members, a police officer, and a civilian informant during raids on properties in the south of the city centre and at the Gresham Hotel on present-​ day O’Connell Street. Later that afternoon, as crowds gathered at Croke Park for a Gaelic football game between Dublin and Tipperary, members of the Royal Irish Constabulary opened fire on the crowd killing fourteen civilians. According to R. F. Foster, this was the latest in a long line of attacks and reprisals between members of the IRA and government representatives, including both the regular police and the notorious Black and Tans. Foster remarks that the day of mass killings is usually thought ‘the climax of horrific reprisals’ owing to large numbers of civilian casualties,31 and the massacre came to have near legendary status in Dublin’s oral culture. Brendan Behan’s autobiographical Borstal Boy, published almost forty years later, bears witness to the enduring cultural legacy of the day’s events. At the opening of the book, the first atrocity that comes to the protagonist’s mind is ‘Bloody Sunday, when the Black and Tans attacked a football crowd in our street’,32 the epitomy of British brutality against the common man. That Shaun, ostensibly the Voice of Catholic Ireland, should invoke Bloody Sunday is unsurprising. Shaun’s relation to Catholic-​nationalist ideology is an important feature of his characterization in the Wake, the nuance of which is explored in the next chapter, which tackles the book’s anticlerical themes. The association is crystallized in chapter III.4 when Shaun is hyperbolically imagined as the ‘nicechild Kevin Mary’, a boy who ‘was going to be commandeering chief of the choirboys brigade the moment he grew up under all auspices’ (555.16–​18). The primary reference here is to Kevin Barry, an eighteen-​year-​ old Volunteer who was executed on 1 November 1920 owing to his role in an IRA ambush. The conflation of Kevin Barry with St Kevin, a frequent avatar for Shaun, is perfectly apt. A hagiography of sorts for Barry was on the rise soon after his death, and a popular ballad about the young man quickly circulated.33 Affection for the fallen student who, like Joyce, attended Belvedere College and was enrolled at University College at the time of his death, culminated in the R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–​1972 (London: Pengiun, 1989), p. 498. Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 2. 33 Of the propaganda contained in the ballad, Peter Cottrell writes, ‘Despite what the ballad says, Barry was not hanged for being Irish but for taking part in the cold-​blooded killing of three unarmed soldiers collecting their daily bread ration. The rebel propaganda machine made much of Kevin Barry’s tender age; however, the three dead soldiers –​Pte Marshall (20), Pte Thomas Humphries (19) and Pte Harold Washington (15) –​were not exactly elderly. There was no evidence that Barry actually shot any of them but he was captured at the scene of the killings with a loaded revolver. Cottrell, The Anglo-​Irish War: the Troubles of 1913–​1922 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), p. 54. 31

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installation of a stained glass window bearing his image in a university lecture room at his alma mater.34 The link between Shaun and the bloodshed of the Anglo-​Irish war finds further expression in his version of a ‘surprisingly bludgeony Unity Sunday’ (176.19–​20) in ‘Shem the Penman’, a phrase that presents Bloody Sunday as the apotheosis of a bludgeoning and bloodthirsty unionism. Indeed, the very notion of unity could be viewed as a counter-​Wakean principle, where disunity and discontinuity reign supreme. The storytelling and syntax is, superficially, comparatively clear and unambiguous, yet, as ever, Shaun’s slippery language compromises the manifest meaning of his words at the very moment of enunciation. The introduction of the vignette retains the ring of a ‘surprisingly nice day’,35 and the tone could be taken as flippant, or even genteel. The inclusion of multiple nationalities, warring under their respective standards, further complicates the terms of the conflict. Here, ‘the grand germogall allstar bout’ (176.20) sounds as much like a battle between the Germans and the Gauls staged at the Grand-​ Guignol, as a sporting fixture. Likewise, the ‘weltingtoms extraordinary’ (176.21) are Wellington’s men at Waterloo and British Tommies in the trenches, as well as the Wakean gossipmongers Tom and Shorty. The depiction of Irish rebels fighting under the flag of the republic is hardly unambiguously positive, when ‘the grim white and cold bet the black fighting tans’ (176.24–​5), and the reference to a gamble or bet may be a remnant of the sporting lexicon employed. Also present on the field, the ‘roth, vice and blause’ (encapsulating Samuel Roth’s piracy of Ulysses, among other pejorative qualities) can be both the Union flag of Great Britain and the French tricolor. The conflict described now extends beyond the shores of Britain and Ireland, transforming into a battle with Germany, this last nation identified as ‘the noyr blank and rogues’ (176.23–​4) –​encapsulating the black, white and red colours of the German flag up until 1918. Shem can now be viewed as a coward on multiple fronts, participating in neither the war in Europe nor in the conflict at home. The integrity of the Shaunish voice is further undermined through the manner in which recourse to Bloody Sunday, or any violent conflict, serves a purpose that appears more personal than political. Shaun’s narration flags Shem’s cowardice in the face of danger, and he absurdly portrays his brother fleeing from Christine Casey provides a brief description of the window, calling it a ‘rare political image in stained glass’ in Dublin: The City Within the Grand and Royal Canals and the Circular Road, with the Phoenix Park (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 64. 35 The description of ‘that surprisingly bludgeony Unity Sunday’ was inspired by an entry in Buffalo notebook VI.B.10 (p. 69) which reads ‘surprisingly nice day’. 34

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the scene of the shootings ‘in a bad fit of pyjamas’ (176.24–​6), a combination of ill-​fitting nightwear, and a petulant tantrum. Two pages later the scenario is again picked up as we are told about how ‘after the thorough fright he got that bloody, Swithun’s day’ (178.8) Shem lacked the guts to leave his place of safety and join the angry Catholic mob. In this telling, the religious nature of the battle is significantly heightened. The blood of the fallen that smears ‘every doorpost in muchtried Lucalizod’ (178.9) invokes the massacre of the Gentiles and the Passover of the Jews, as told in Exodus, and the echo of Vico in the crowd’s chant of ‘O pura e pia bella’ (178.17) transforms their crusade into a Holy War of sorts.36 The final explicit allusion to the Croke Park massacre occurs when we hear of Shem cowering in a hiding place, ‘on akkount of all the kules in Kroukaparka’ (178.30–​5), with ‘kules’ combing the Irish cúl (goal) with the number of ‘kills’. The name of the football stadium doubles as an onomatopoeic rendering of Shem’s terrified moans and croaks. The heavy-​handed conflation of religious and national identity, interspersed with the ludicrous extremes of brotherly rivalry, may well reveal more about Shaun than Shem. As is the case elsewhere, the Shemmish figure recedes into the background somewhat, and it is the bigoted, hyprocritical Shaun who is the primary target of the satire. The historically immediate Bloody Sunday vignette does, all the same, open up interpretative possibilities that lead in alternate directions to much of the book’s historical subject matter. Locating Shem in the Ireland of the 1920s, an Ireland that he had not directly experienced, Joyce the absent apostate imagined the consequences for his art had he stayed or returned. The homecoming is not portrayed as heroic or redemptive, and the ‘opprobrious papist’ (172.34) is persistently denigrated as unimpressive, anti-​heroic and cowardly by his brother. For his own part, Shem apparently fails to overcome, or even confront, his accusers.

The voice of the artist: Shem-​Mercius speaks At the simplest narrative level, the relationship between Shaun and Shem (later Justius and Mercius) is a power struggle between two warring brothers, with Shaun striving to do his sibling down in order to assert his own superiority. As the representatives of the power of the Church, and of Art, respectively, the

As McHugh notes, this is the cry of the holy wars in Vico’s heroic age.

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pair do, however, speak to far larger cultural concerns and anxieties. Joyce’s fears for the future of the artist in the fledgling state were not limited to abstract aesthetic expressions, something that is communicated in his words to Arthur Power: ‘Now I hear that since the Free State came in there is less freedom. The Church has made inroads everywhere, so that we are in fact becoming a bourgeois nation, with the Church supplying the aristocracy [. . .] and I do not see much hope for us intellectually.37 The Shaun/Shem or Justius/Mercius dichotomy has a strong bearing upon our conception of Joyce’s notion of the future of the artist-intellectual in the new Irish state all the same, and in this strange imagining that future is especially bleak. Paralyzed into inaction by fear and intimidation, the voice of the artist is, in the main, usurped by one who ostensibly stands for a conservative, Catholic and nationalist Ireland. Joseph Brooker has observed that Joyce’s fears for the nation in fact came to pass. Drawing on the historical work of Gemma Hussey and Julia Carlson, Brooker notes that both William Cosgrave, and then De Valera, claimed never to have set foot in the Abbey Theatre.38 A similar picture is painted by Caitriona Beaumont, who has charted the startling rise in the censorship of printed material in the 1930s. This was a consequence of legislation introduced in the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act, the negative ramifications of which have been discussed by a number of contemporary historians.39 Perhaps the most striking of these accounts is the image conjured by J. J. Lee, who contrasts the material gains made by the Church of the day with a lack of contribution to the intellectual life of the nation: Rarely has the Catholic Church as an institution flourished, by materialistic criteria, as in the Free State. And rarely has it contributed so little, as an institution, to the finer qualities of the Christian spirit. Censorship, Irish style, suitably symbolised the impoverishment of spirit and the bareness of mind of the risen bourgeoisie, touting for respectability.40

On the most part, this increasingly restricted culture seems to have enjoyed popular support, at least in certain quarters. On 9 May 1923, the Irish Independent reported that the newly tabled Censorship of Films Bill was ‘certainly a step in the right direction’,41 and when the legislation first came into force in January Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, edited by Clive Hart (London: Millington, 1974), p. 65. Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics:  Transitions in Reading and Culture (Madison:  The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 186. 39 Caitriona Beaumont, ‘Women, Citizenship and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922–1948’, Women’s History Review, 6 (1997), 563–85 (p. 566). 40 J. J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 159. 41 Anon, ‘Censorship of Films’, Irish Independent, 9 May 1923, p. 6. 37

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1924, they went on to add that ‘it cannot be disputed that a Censorship of pictures is much needed’.42 Naturally there were also voices of dissent, particularly with regard to the suppression of literature, something that comes through in the words of one Mr Fred P. Kennedy of the Bronx, New York, in a 1931 letter to the Connacht Tribune: The individual Irish citizen is now deprived of the means to decide for himself whether many books in his own judgement are good or bad, important or trivial. A group of men in Dublin have arrogated that right to themselves. They not only judge for him, but deny him the right to judge for himself.

The correspondent goes on to complain about the banning in Ireland of a novel by American Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis, and describes Ireland as ‘a laughing stock throughout civilisation’.43 A far more prominent critic of the new culture of censorship was Yeats, who famously campaigned for freedom of literary expression in the burgeoning state.44 Joyce’s remarks to Power regarding the fate of the artist in the Free State echo the concerns of his more liberal-​minded contemporaries, and anticipate the insight of more recent historiography. The creative manner in which the Wake is able to dramatize such concerns is, naturally, entirely unique. We have seen throughout this discussion that Shaun-​Justius constantly suppresses the voice of Shem-​Mercius, and his rafts of accusations serve to quash the perspective of the other. As the chapter draws to a close, the power dynamic takes on new, and increasingly surreal, dimensions. The chapter concludes with a magical scenario in which Justius takes on the role of a conjuror or wizard who is literally able to point ‘the deathbone’ (193.28) and render the living motionless –​a deadening display of absolute power and control. Dismissing Shem as mad, the sleepy spell is intoned using the chant ‘Insomnia, somnia somniorum’, which concludes, like a prayer, with a characteristically Shaunish, yawning ‘Awmawm’ (193.29–30), lazily calling for mother. Were the chapter to close on this note, the outlook for the artist or penman would be bleak indeed, but the conclusion of the sequence is not quite so clear-​ cut as this. The possibility for the resurgence of the creative spirit emerges at the very close of the chapter, when we hear a final Shemmish outburst that is voiced by Mercius. In one of only a handful of existing commentaries on the passage, Robert M. Polhemus describes Mercius’ final outburst in adulatory terms,

Anon, ‘Censorship of Films’, Irish Independent, 15 January 1924, p. 4. Fred P. Kennedy, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Connacht Tribune, 18 April 1931, p. 2. Yeats’s interventions in the censorship debate have been documented by R. F. Foster in his, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II. The Arch-​Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 293–​342.

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claiming that his response to his brother constitutes ‘one of the most resonant sentences in literature’.45 Given the actual content of the speech by Mercius, the sense of gravitas and profundity Polhemus attaches to the words does feel somewhat overblown. Through the phases of chapter I.7, the reader has patiently awaited the arrival of the much talked of Penman. When we finally hear from him, the defence uttered by Mercius does little to aid our understanding of the whole. The monologue is a schizophrenic affair in which the speaker addresses ‘hisself ’ (193.31), by definition both Shem and Shaun, and incorporates the language of his brother’s perverse confessional employing a mock-​Shakespearean diction: ‘My fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault!’ (193.31–​2). Read generously, the sentence can be viewed as an act of refutation via appropriation, with Shem flinging the derogatory words that have been hurled at him back at his accuser. There remains, all the same, a hint of the stammering, debased artist, driven half-​insane. Ironically, just as Shem-​Mercius has suddenly found his voice, so again he quickly loses it. A short way into his monologue, the narrative voice acquires a distinctly ALP-​like register when we hear a plaintive cry of ‘because ye left from me, because ye laughed on me, because O me lonly son, ye are forgetting me!’ (194.20–​1). The confusion of voices that occurs between Shem and ALP at this moment is indicative of a larger thematic concern:  the respective statuses attached to ALP as ‘author’ of The Letter, and to Shem as its scribe. As the passage winds to a close, the agent behind the actions with which the chapter closes is a little ambiguous, and it seems likely that it is Mercius himself who ‘lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak’ (195.4). This second spell results in a perpetual question that logically belongs to ALP: ‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq uoiq!’ (195.5). Although the next chapter is taken up with the life story of ALP, and the gossip she inspires, we will have to wait until the very climax of the Wake to hear the voice of Anna Livia fully realized.

45

Robert M. Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 296.

‘My unchanging Word is sacred’ (167.28)

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The bullish Shaun-​Justius, who dominates proceedings in ‘Shem the Penman’, is just one of several avatars for Shaun linked to a position that is ostensibly pious and orthodox, and at the same time hypocritical, mercenary or lascivious. A pertinent example is the Mookse in the (anti)parable of ‘The Mookse and the Gripes’; this popelike autocrat is an absurd embodiment of ultramontane authority, something that is asserted via his own insistence that he is ‘superbly in [his] supremest poncif!’ (154.11–12) before the snivelling, but ultimately recalcitrant, Gripes. Likewise, the childish hands that annotate the ‘Nightlessons’ can, loosely speaking, be split into the purportedly scholarly notations of Shaun (Kev), and the more subversive interpolations of Shem (Dolph). The notion that Shaun represents the less palatable side of the pair is well established, and Fritz Senn’s account of this ‘dogmad Accanite’ (158.03) is exemplary of criticism in this vein in which Shaunish values are placed in opposition to the anti-​orthodox logic of the author of the Wake.1 Shades of the same might be discerned in Burrus/​Caseous, Chuff/​Glugg, Ondt/​Gracehoper, and so on. As ever in the Wake, concrete character determinations and distinctions cannot entirely hold good, and this is especially true of the twinned Shem and Shaun, whose orbits naturally overlap considerably.2 Concomitantly, a straightforward conception of hero and antagonist runs counter to the logic of the book. In his juvenile manifestations, as Nick in the Mime for example, the Shaunish figure seems considerably more harmless than elsewhere. This is a reflection, of course, of the childish scenario. Crucially, when he appears in chapter III.3 in the guise of Yawn, the tables are turned when it is the Shaunish figure who is

Fritz Senn, ‘Dogmad or doubliboused?’, James Joyce Quarterly, 17.3 (1980), 237–​61. An early attempt to map the manner in which their orbits both amalgamate and diverge appears in Hart, pp. 130–​4.

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subjected to a lengthy courtroom-​style interrogation by Mamalujo. Through its preoccupation with the alleged sin in the park, this encounter takes on a marked religious dimension, and ultimately functions as a thoroughly Irish rendering of the Inquisition. The apparent shift in the power dynamics shows a fresh side of Shaun, and when he repeatedly confounds his interlocutors with his wily, slippery language, readerly sympathies gravitate somewhat in his favour. This shift might be accounted for by the fact that Shaun does not really speak as himself here; rather, one manifestation of Shaun is fading away (Yawning) as he gives way to other voices, a sequence of events that is preparatory to his transmogrification into the new HCE. The bigoted and hypocritical nature of Shaun is, all the same, a mainstay of Wake criticism, and a crucial feature of the narrative in the first two chapters of Book III, otherwise known as the Watches of Shaun, now distinct passages that were initially conceived and drafted as a single block.3 As ‘Watches’ these passages take in the liturgical language of the Easter vigil, as well as the Watches of ‘Circe’. Recognized as one of the most intelligible portions of the work with regard to action and plot, this section of the book is also vital for a consideration of the Wake’s treatment of the hierarchies and social rituals that dominate lived experiences of faith, and of the religious types depicted. The rich texture of these chapters mimics and critiques certain strains of Catholic discourse in a manner that cannot be detected to such an extent elsewhere, or at least this is not realized in so immediate a fashion. Glimpses of such a vision might come through with the cast of Jesuit teachers in Stephen Hero/A Portrait, with Fr Purdon in ‘Grace’, and most pertinently with regard to the present discussion, in the insight into Fr Conmee that is gained in ‘Wandering Rocks’, and each instance is replete with subtleties and ambiguities of its own. What is attempted in the Wake is considerably more ambitious, and far-​reaching, leading ultimately to one of the most accomplished parodies of clerical rhetoric in English literature. That said, the precise social, historical and political scope of the portrayal of Shaun at this point has been the subject of only a small number of critical responses, and just one significant study has sought to substantially analyse Shaun-​Jaun’s lecture in the Second Watch in relation to a particular culture of Irish, and British, Catholicism. This appears in Cheryl Herr’s 1986 book Joyce’s

A detailed account of the composition history of chapters III.1–2 occupies Wim Van Mierlo in ‘Shaun the Post: chapters III.1–​2’, in How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Chapter-​by-​Chapter Genetic Guide, edited by Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), pp. 347–​83.

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Anatomy of Culture –​a landmark for the study of the Wake in context –​in a reflection on the ‘politicoecomedy’ (540.26–​7) of the Wake, where Herr reads Jaun’s words in the light of the observation that a great deal of Catholic discourse contemporary with Joyce was founded not upon ‘revelation but economic utility and social conventions’.4 This portmanteau also, crucially, acknowledges the dark humour of the piece. Herr’s commentary is itself thorough and revealing, and it also opens the door to further important excavations and conversations.

Greedo! (411.21): Shaun’s hungry prayer As a priestly or preaching type, Shaun takes centre stage in the first chapter of Book III, which revives the question and answer mode from chapter I.6, a device that will only intensify as we head into the Third Watch. The clock has struck the zero hour, and the assertion that events transpire in ‘nonland’ (403.18), in no fixed time or place, may now be a consequence of the fact that the darkness has ‘rendered all animated greatbritish and Irish objects nonviewable to human watchers’ (403.23–​4). Notably, these figures now function as objects rather than as subjects in the events that are to follow, perhaps an indication that the influence of the British State over its former subjects is on the wane. Tindall and others have identified fourteen distinct questions that are levelled at Shaun at this point, ‘one for each station of the cross’,5 and the chapter oscillates between adulatory descriptions of Shaun in the third person, the questions themselves and Shaun’s own disarming responses. From the opening lines, a first person narrator (a version of the ass who accompanies Mamalujo) indulges in quasi-​hagiographical language by hailing ‘the voce of Shaun’ as the ‘vote of the Irish’ (407.13–​14): a De Valera type. This voice, according to the narrator, might be compared to the purest Palestrina. It is a voice that will transcend the efforts of the great Italian tenors. Shaun’s own words in response to the various questions posed do not, suffice to say, quite live up to the ideal, and the manner in which the ass’ portrait undoes itself first becomes apparent with regard to costume or dress. Hailed in the darkness with cries of ‘Shaun! Shaun! Post the post!’ (404.7), the legendary figure emerges from the shadows, or so claims the ass, ‘dressed like an earl in just the correct wear’ (404.7), a statement that echoes the preoccupations of Gerty MacDowell in its Cheryl Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 258. Tindall, p. 224.

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concern for sartorial standards. Superficially, this description of the priest-​like Shaun’s ‘popular choker’ (404.25–​6) and ‘starspangled zephyr with a decidedly surpliced crinklydoodle front’ (404.27–​8) can be conceived, with transatlantic flourishes, as the inverse of the disparaging portrait of Shem contained in the Penman chapter which was complete with ‘falsehair shirts’ and ‘neverworn breeches’ (183.18). The paradoxical claim that Shaun’s ‘classy mac Frieze o’coat’ (404.17) is one of ‘far suparior ruggedness’ (404.18) crystallizes the ‘true’ nature of his get-​up, or at least another side to the coin. The language of advertising bleeds through when we hear about ‘his providence wellprovided woolies with a softrolling lisp of a lapel to it and great sealingwax buttons’ (404.22–​3); absurdly the buttons are ‘a good helping bigger than the slots for them’ (404.23–​4). Such redundant hyperbole is everywhere present in the portrait, for, as the ass has it, Shaun sports ‘everything the best’ (404.33). The prominent nod to Boucicault’s Shaun the Post quoted immediately above is, then, just one means by which the constructed nature of the scenario is brought home, a sense that is affirmed in the cloying cry, ‘What a picture primitive!’ (405.3). Preceded as this is with two muddled versions of popular blessings that are overladen with stereotypical language (‘Ah, then may the turtle’s blessings of God and Mary and Haggispatrick and Huggisbrigid be souptumbling all over him!’, ‘and may his hundred thousand welcome stewed letters, relayed wand postchased, multiply, ay faith, and plultiply!, 404.34–​505.1), the sense that the figure we are viewing is a kind of stage, or indeed screen, Irishman is all the stronger. As observed on pages 41–42, the manner in which Catholic nationalist, British imperialist, and ultramontane agendas collide in Joyce’s depiction of structures of power in early-​twentieth-​century Ireland present untold difficulties to the reader who, removed by the distance of a century, will struggle to navigate this dizzying maze of discourse (incomprehensible enough to many of Joyce’s contemporaries), and who will strain to arrange these threads in accordance with any current political frame. Again, as noted on page 42, Gibson works to untangle at least some of these knots through attention to the manner in which Joyce appears to fall in with the accusation that the Catholic Church in Ireland was ‘the political accomplice of the [British] State’,6 an observation that clears the way for a number of important new readings of Ulysses. Gibson’s claim will require some qualification for a reading of the Wake, where a figure like Shaun is alternately pictured as both a true nationalist –​something that is exaggerated to such an extent that it is, in the end, ludicrous –​and something of a sham. The Gibson, p. 84.

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importance of such tensions should not, however, be ignored, as shown in abundant examples from this portion of the book. Tellingly, Shaun is most exercised and passionate when he is asked about an incident when he allegedly painted the town ‘a wearing greenridinghued’ (411.24), a switch from red to a proud nationalist green. Like HCE in the initial chapters of the Wake, his excited response functions as both affirmation and denial, a confusion that is exacerbated by the injection of the language of psychoanalysis: ‘Somebody may perhaps hint at an aughter impression of was wrong. No such thing! You never made a more freudful mistake, excuse yourself!’ (411.34–​6). In this animated outburst Shaun might also be thought a champion of emigration: ‘New worlds for old!’ (412.2). In keeping, at least to an extent, with Gibson’s observations about Joyce’s critique of the clergy in Ulysses, ideas of social aspiration or pretension, bound up with a mercenary interest, present a vital antidote to the notion that Shaun-​Jaun might truly be thought the voice of the masses. For the ass, he is briefly ‘a prime card’ (405.14) or ‘topping swell’ (405.21), descriptors that sound decidedly English and upper class. Moreover, as ‘Jaunty Jaun’ (420.1, my emphasis) in chapter III.2, a man who seeks to seduce young girls, Shaun can easily be imagined as something of a rake. In a literal nod to the perambulations of Fr Conmee in Ulysses ­chapter 10, Jaun doffs his ‘hat with reinforced crown’ (430.17–​18) to Issy. The supposition that Joyce likely had Conmee in mind at this point is affirmed when we realize that he had previously cracked one of the central jokes of chapter III.2 in ‘Circe’, when Conmee emerges ‘[m]‌ild, benign, rectorial, reproving’ as ‘Don John Conmee’ (U, 15.3673). Again sounding decidedly genteel, Jaun bows to the girls before beginning to speak, delivering himself ‘with express cordiality, marked by clearance of diction and general delivery’ (431.21–​2). This tone will soon pass as his diatribe becomes increasingly aggressive, and jaggedly wrought. We would be foolish to rely too heavily on yet another deeply unreliable narrator. Nonetheless, the ass’ account of Shaun in the initial pages of Book III is both highly entertaining, and symptomatic of key aspects of the whole. Resuscitating a metaphorical device first deployed in ‘The Dead’ –​where ‘three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniform’ (D 197) become emblematic of soldiers of different stripes on the battlefield –​Joyce’s treatment of the politics of ingestion takes on new dimensions when this is mapped onto an account of Shaun’s diet. In this instance, battle lines and allegiances are demarcated none too clearly, a consequence of the fact that Shaun’s voracious appetite will take in anything and everything. All the same, much of the imagery here is overt enough. Breakfast

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begins with a helping of orange juice (‘bless us O blood and thirsthy orange’, 405.33) that can be thought a bloodthirsty beverage tied in with the colours of the Orange Order. Like Buck Mulligan before him, Shaun seamlessly conflates the language of the Mass with more pressing bodily desires. Breakfast continues with a disgusting ‘half of a pint of becon’ (405.33), chased up with an appropriately posh sounding ‘segment of riceplummy padding’ (405.34). The rice pudding also represents the white plane on the Irish flag. Unable to control his impulses, for dinner Shaun tackles a seemingly endless glut of meats, including steaks of every cut and variety, and an abundance of treats from Britain, Ireland and beyond. There are no traces of poverty or hunger here, and the desire to consume cannot be quelled. To top things off, a little greenery: Shaun ingests or inserts like a suppository, ‘in their green free state a clister of peas, soppositorily petty, last’ (406.19–​20). The smooth workings of his digestive system, it seems, will take priority ahead of any national loyalty. The connection between appetite and consumption on the one hand and pseudo-religious expressions on the other is echoed a few pages later in Shaun’s throwaway affirmation about the steadfast nature of his faith: ‘ghee up, ye dog, for your daggily broth, etc., Happy Maria and Glorious Patrick, etc., etc. In fact, always, have I believe. Greedo!’ (411.18–21). The words Joyce erroneously attributes to the radical nationalist Archbishop John MacHale in the garbled account of the First Vatican Council that appears in ‘Grace’, punctuated with a leonine cry of ‘Credo!’ (D, 642), translate into a half-​hearted, hungry Our Father. No radical defender of the faithful, Shaun’s sentences trail off into lazy ‘etceteras’, his cry of belief only a gluttonous indulgence.

‘sinning society sirens’ (50.21–​4): The origins of Shaun’s sermonizing discourse Beginning as simply ‘Shaun’ in chapter III.1, the protagonist of Book III then transforms into the preaching ‘Jaun’ as he bids goodbye to his sister and her entourage of school chums, and delivers ‘a long absurd and rather incestuous Lenten lecture to Izzy’ (L I, 216). Here, as we have seen, he becomes a Don Juan type. In a happy accident, the transition into the quintessentially Hispanic Jaun/​ Juan also echoes the name of the mysterious Juan Vivion de Valera, the Spanish or Cuban sculptor who was purportedly the father of the future president, as well as contributing to the playful manner in which the Wake conflates Irish



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and Continental modes of Catholicism. That said, this is the point in the Wake that invokes a particular brand of Catholic rhetoric, and one that might have its roots very much closer to home, in a most concerted manner. As I observed earlier, the lecture in question has received careful consideration from Herr, who has identified a number of precursors for Jaun’s ostensibly moralizing discourse. These include the infamous Fr Bernard Vaughan’s Mayfair sermons, delivered during the London social Season of 1906, and published as the Sins of Society, as well as Vaughan’s later collection What of Today? (1914); the preaching of Fr Thomas Burke (1830–​1882); Fr Charles Jerome Callan’s Illustrations for Sermons and Instructions (1916); and The Preacher’s Vademecum (penned by ‘Two Missionaries’ in 1921). All of these sources, broadly speaking, mirror Jaun’s purported concern for bolstering the institutions of marriage and parenthood and condemning the chaos and moral laxity of the modern world.7 It is more than likely that the genre flagged by Herr is at the heart of the parody in the Second Watch of Shaun, and of the figures named one can be supposed to have been of especial interest: Fr Bernard Vaughan, S. J. Born into an old recusant Anglo-​Welsh family, Bernard was one of eight sons (six of whom became priests, and three of those bishops) of Colonel John Francis Vaughan and his first wife Elizabeth Louisa née Rolls, a woman of high enough social status to have been painted by controversial English artist William Etty, better known for his voluptuous nudes. Like Oliver St John Gogarty years later, Vaughan was educated at the prestigious Jesuit school Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1866 at the age of nineteen. Despite never climbing the ranks of the Catholic hierarchy like his brothers, he established an international reputation as a gifted orator, and this was probably the reason why he was moved from a parish in Manchester to Farm Street, Mayfair.8 That something of a cloud hung over Vaughan might be suggested by the fact that he successfully brought a libel action against the newspaper The Rock in June 1902, and he was sometimes accused of being overly fond of publicity.9 This is a trait that can be mapped onto Jaun who, like any good celebrity preacher, likes to keep well in with the press. For Jaun, the pressmen whom he threatens, and who would love to get hold of a good sex scandal for their tabloids, take on characteristics of two of Christ’s most important disciples, becoming ‘Peter Paragraph Herr, p. 277 and passim. C. C. Martindale, Bernard Vaughan, S.J. (London: Longmans, 1923), passim. 9 A correspondent for The Rock had accused Vaughan of being a seditious outlaw who owned no nationality. For a transcript of the hearing see Anon, The Jesuit Libel Case (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1902). 7 8

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and Paulus Puff ’ (438.19). Jaun notes parenthetically that he ‘keepsoaking them to cover my concerts’ (438.19–​20); that is, he resorts to plying them with either alcohol or cash so as to ensure good coverage. We know that Joyce was familiar with Vaughan, and in a letter dated 10 October 1906, the year in which the Mayfair sermons first appeared in print, he declared facetiously that ‘Fr. B. V. is the most diverting public figure in England at present. I never see his name but I expect some enormity’ (L II, 182). It has long been established that Vaughan was the model for Fr Purdon in ‘Grace’, a man who, like Shaun, is fond of economical metaphors. At the moment at which the short story collection was initially intended to close, Purdon demonstrates this proclivity by instructing the men at his retreat to ‘set right [their] accounts’ (D 97). Vaughan is twice thought of in Ulysses, once by Bloom, who is less than enamoured of the speaker (‘Christ or Pilate? Christ, but don’t keep us all night over it. Music they wanted’, U, 5.398–​9), and later by Fr Conmee, who is wavering in his praise of the preacher when he reasons that Vaughan is ‘a zealous man, however. Really he [is]. And really [does] great good in his way. Beyond a doubt’. Conmee’s hedged compliment is couched within a train of thought that ironically contrasts the recollection of Vaughan’s ‘droll eyes and cockney voice’ with the knowledge that this figure came from a ‘good’ (i.e. upper class) Welsh family (U, 10.33–​8).10 The social politics that are at stake here underpin Gibson’s claim that what so exercised Joyce about figures like Vaughan was their complicity with the British State, and the worrying degree to which puritanical English values had come to influence the character of the Irish Church.11 Vaughan is also present in both the compositional materials for the ‘Work in Progress’, and the Wake itself. In the early notebook VI.B.10, Joyce jotted down the following from an obituary of Vaughan that appeared in the Irish Times on 1 November 1922:  ‘Fr Bern. Vaughan granted /​privilege of portable altar’ (VI.B.10.13). This phrase would eventually be incorporated into a description of St Kevin’s altar cum bathtub in Book IV, where we hear of his ‘having been graunted the praviloge of a priest’s postcreated altare cum balneo’ (605.7–​8). Lernout has also sensibly suggested that a number of notebook entries that appear in Buffalo notebook VI.B.1 alongside the entry ‘Fr Vaughan’ might be derived from his sermons, although the phrases in question are too generic to make a certain identification possible. These include such platitudes as ‘Now, we stray & belong’

As Lernout has noted, the reference to Vaughan’s use of Cockney appears to be anachronistic, as this was a technique that Vaughan employed while preaching in 1911 (see Lernout, p. 70). 11 Gibson, p. 84. 10



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and ‘Let em all come’.12 What is certain is that a number of the phrases included in this cluster were incorporated into the opening pages of Shaun-​Jaun’s leave-​ taking lecture at the close of chapter III.1, and the opening of chapter III.2, as follows: ‘Thou’rt passing Hence’ and ‘parents dear’ (both included at 427.18), ‘how you wd miss me’ (included at 431.24), and ‘result of yr teaching’ (see 431.23).13 Vaughan also rears his head in the published text. In Book I, a description that functions as an amalgam of clerical types brings Vaughan’s ‘palpitating pulpit’ –​ the platform on which a heart-​stirring oration will take place –​into focus. It is a spectacle to which ‘sinning society sirens [. . .] fortunately became so enthusiastically attached’ (50.21–​5), and the title of Vaughan’s 1906 work is now fused with a reference to the immoral or siren-​like behaviour that he condemned. The coincidental chiming of Vaughan’s name with the Shaun-​Jaun-​Haun-​Yawn sequence might also have suggested a parallel between the book’s Shaunish elements and the famous Jesuit, and such a conceit would be entirely in keeping with Joyce’s opportunism and love of happenstance. In the final chapter, a more overt allusion to Vaughan is nested within a description of the ‘pettyvaughan populose’ (609.2). The masses who turn out to hear the man are now painted as a petty bunch. Jaun’s jaggedly punctuated tirade surely contrasts starkly with the dynamic rhetoric of the clerical celebrities of Joyce’s day. With regard to content, however, it is no challenge at all to find commonalities between the features of modernity condemned by Vaughan, and Jaun’s warnings to his sister. Vaughan’s preoccupation with the evils of gambling resonates in the disappointed exclamation, ‘Ah, dice’s error!’ (433.30), indicating that the bet will be lost. Typically, Jaun’s directives to his sister take on a sexual dimension, and in the warning, ‘Never play lady’s games for the Lord’s stake’ (433.13) the gambling stakes are mingled with ideas of sexual propriety. Likewise, the Jesuit’s disgust at excessive drinking and smoking is mirrored in Jaunish directives the likes of ‘[d]‌on’t on any account acquire a paunchon for that alltoocommon fagbutt habit’, and ‘[w]hen parties get tight for each other they lose all respect together’ (436.24–​5). Jaun’s eyes, as ever, are firmly fixed on the bedroom door. The preacher’s aversion to liberal politics, and his especial disapproval of suffragism and socialism, can also be heard in the words of Jaun. A crude caricature of the New Woman is dismissed as that ‘high powered hefty hoyden’ (436.3), and he condemns the drive for social equality as something that will See Lernout, p. 201. The nature of these entries has been noted by the compilers of the Brepols facsimile in James Joyce, The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: VI.B.1, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), p. 132.

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render ‘the great unwatched as bad as their betters’ (435.31–​2). Vaughan’s disgust at popular literature, described in Sins of Society as ‘putrid novels [. . .] in which only too many of the present generation disport themselves and wallow swinelike’, along with the view that his parishioners ought to ‘spend less time on newspaper, magazine and romance-​reading and so create quite a series of daily moments for spiritual reading’,14 is mirrored in Jaun’s own concerns about appropriate reading for girls, something that is further discussed on page 91. All in all, Vaughan might be thought the most prominent and absurd representative of a peculiarly prudish and Victorian strain of English Catholicism, an extreme example that was ripe for caricature. The opportunity to take up jests and jibes rehearsed elsewhere for the Shaun portions of the Wake appears to have been too good to miss. The transference of Vaughan-​like phrases from notebook to working drafts, along with the broader parallels that are established over the course of chapter III.2, might compare to the appropriation of material inspired by Chiniquy’s The Priest in ‘Shem the Penman’ that is discussed on pages 60–66. That two men who occupied such polarized positions with regard to the Catholic Church should contribute to the book’s Shaunish discourse feels counter-​intuitive, but this presents no difficulty in Wakean terms. Here, all such moralizing discourse is subject to pastiche and parody, and ultimately debased, as its hypocritical excesses are teased out and lambasted. Whether the material originates with a prominent Jesuit speaker or the scurrilous anti-​Catholic propaganda of a Presbyterian minister, it will serve just as well.

Carnival Cullen’s ‘Lentil Lore’ (440.9): Cullenite Catholicism in chapter III.2, and beyond The multiplicity of voices present in this portion of the work must be kept in mind. All the same, a second ecclesiastical figure can be thought to have a particular bearing on the passage at hand: the first Irish cardinal, Paul Cullen. Jaun’s recommendation that Issy consult ‘pious fiction the like of Lentil Lore by Cardinal Cullen’ (440.8–​9) part way through his tirade sounds at first like a throwaway remark, as this is just one of many items that make up Jaun’s recommended reading list, as well another instance of the cluster of beans and pulses that is often associated with Shaun. Employing typically Wakean humour, 14

Bernard Vaughan, The Sins of Society: Words Spoken by Father Bernard Vaughan of the Society of Jesus in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Mayfair During the Season 1906, 7th ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tobner and Company, 1906), p. xvii and What of Today? (New York: McBride, Nast and Company, 1915), p. 87.



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alongside the conceit that the writings of the cardinal are a fiction after all, the punning title conflates an austere figurehead of the Catholic establishment with a celebratory carnival, something that is perversely fitting in context as, in its original sense, a carnival is a carne or meat festival held to celebrate the end of Lenten austerities. The allusion is in fact more historically precise than it at first appears, and Cullen issued a number of lengthy Lenten pastorals throughout his career that were reproduced for the consumption of the public. It is difficult to determine how widespread the circulation of these documents could have been, or what sort of print run they would have enjoyed. A surviving copy of the pastorals held by the British Library was printed by James Duffy in cheap pamphlet form, indicating that this item was intended for the mass market. The cultural impact of Cullen’s ‘devotional revolution’ in Ireland has already been discussed (see also p. 22), and historians now view this period of transition as crucial in the history of the Irish church. The all-​pervasive influence of the cardinal was humorously conjured by contemporary satirist Francis Mahony (better known as Fr Prout) when he spoke of the ‘Cullenisation’ of Catholic Ireland.15 In a manner that neatly maps onto Stephen’s declaration that he is ‘servant of two masters [. . .] an English and an Italian’ (U, 1.638), Mahony splices the colonialist endeavours of a foreign power with the agenda of the ultramontane primate. The line that Mahony draws between Cullen’s ultramontane policy and the might of an imperial power is reflective of a particular view of the character of the Irish Church at this time, a view that Joyce explicitly engages with. The figure of Cullen is derisively invoked in the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait, and the origin of this detail of the novel may well lie in the Stephen Hero manuscript. There the cardinal is on Stephen’s mind when he reflects that his fellow Debating Society members revere the ‘memory of Terence MacManus’ (a militant nationalist rebel whom Cullen controversially refused to honour with a lying-​in-​state at the Pro-​ Cathedral in Dublin) ‘not less’ than that of the ultraconservative Cullen (SH, 173). Owing to the large amount of material that is missing from the extant Stephen Hero manuscript, it is not possible to make direct comparisons between many portions of the earlier work and A Portrait. By the time Joyce came to produce his first novel, however, the incident involving the cardinal and MacManus’s remains is not linked to Stephen’s observations about his fellow students, but rather to the outrage of Simon and his friend Casey, who openly scoffs at Cullen. During the Christmas dinner scene, anger at the Catholic clergy’s betrayal of the national cause is vivid in the minds of the older generation when Simon expresses his

15

Cited in Bowen, p. x.

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dismay at the manner in which the bishops of Ireland ‘betrayed’ MacManus (P, 38). In the transition from the early juvenilia to A Portrait, Joyce no longer has his fictional avatar directly recall the cardinal’s contempt for a Fenian hero. Yet he clearly wished to retain the memory of the incident; consequently, traces of nationalist outrage linger in the mouths of the older men. Given the cultural centrality of the cardinal, these early allusions are hardly unexpected. Popular conceptions of the future cardinal’s towering presence, albeit viewed through the absurd lens of a popular English satirical magazine, are apparent in a cartoon of Cullen from an 1851 issue of Punch, where the rotund archbishop is depicted straddling Ireland from Armagh to Tuam, brandishing a fiery cross. A further indirect nod to Cullen’s looming presence can be detected in ‘The Sisters’, the story with which the Dubliners opens. Upon learning of the death of Fr Flynn, the grieving, unnamed boy narrator recalls that his friend had studied at the Irish College in Rome, as a consequence of which he had been able to teach the boy proper pronunciation of Latin, and tell him stories about the catacombs and Napoleon. Flynn had coached the boy in some of the finer aspects of the faith, and put him through his paces by testing him on the responses of the Mass (D, 4–​5). We are told the priest died on 1 July 1895 at the age of 65, putting his date of birth at around 1829 or 1830 (D, 4). Given this timeline, Fr Flynn’s period of study at the Irish College could just about have coincided with the tail end of Cullen’s time in Rome. Cullen was appointed to the rectorship of the Irish College in 1831, and remained involved with the institution until his translation to the See of Armagh in 1849. Whether or not Joyce actually intended to imply that the two men had been in Rome together seems besides the point. More relevant is the fact that the priest depicted in the opening pages of the first major work stands as an, albeit absent, embodiment of the new type of Irish Catholic priest. Educated in an institution that had been revived and moulded by Cullen himself, the intention was that these men would carry the devotional habits learned in Rome back home to Ireland. All things considered, Cullen’s Lenten Pastorals can be thought to be one likely source of inspiration for Jaun’s speech, and regardless of whether or not Joyce had a particular printed source in mind when he came to pen the Second Watch of Shaun, there is something distinctly Cullenite and (albeit ironically) pastoral about Jaun’s speech as a whole. Genetically speaking, there is strong evidence to support the idea that Joyce initially conceived of Shaun’s address to his sister as a kind of Lenten pastoral. In the earliest drafts of the chapter he warns, ‘O be careful during this lenten pastoral season when spring is in the making’ (47482b–​16; JJA 57: 33). The Lenten theme is also present in a well-​known description of this section of the Wake sent to Harriet Shaw Weaver, quoted on page 80.



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A pastoral letter differs from a sermon, the genre more often associated with Jaun’s lecture by Wake critics, in a number of aspects. A sermon, and the related, but by no means identical, homily, is frequently composed by the priest by whom it is delivered, and is often modelled on a particular Bible passage that forms the basis of a reflection on how scriptural lessons might benefit the lives of the gathered company. A prime example of this genre are the sermons reproduced in Vaughan’s Sins of Society, where the extrapolated morals of a series of New Testament parables are applied to scenarios encountered in modern-​day life. Where the topic of a sermon is not a single passage from Scripture, preachers nevertheless usually employ narrative tropes in order to locate their message within the ‘story’ of everyday life, although the elegance with which this is done of course depends upon the skills of the orator. In contrast, a pastoral letter, usually referred to as simply a pastoral, is composed by a higher authority than a local parish priest, usually a bishop, to be read aloud at Mass by each local clergyman in the diocese. These documents are usually concerned with the dissemination of specific information, rather than communicating a poignant narrative. This ‘top-​down’ system of spreading the word is echoed by Jaun when he states that his message comes not from himself, but ‘from above. The most eminent bishop titular of Dubloonik to all his partybusses in Dellabelliney. Comeallyedimseldamsels, siddle down and lissle all!’ (432.19–​ 22). The language points in multiple directions, and one reading suggests that the message has come via the Archbishop of Dublin, a role occupied by Cullen for some quarter of a century. At a microscopic textual level, a comparison of a list of Lenten rules and regulations contained in one of Cullen’s published pastorals reveals a certain affinity with the form and tone of the Jaunish discourse, a sample of which is reproduced below. Predictably, where Cullen is able to keep dietary restrictions and religious observations in focus, Jaun quickly becomes absorbed with matters sexual. Cullen 1. Milk and white meats are allowed Jaun Never miss your lostsomewhere as usual at one meal every day in Lent, mass for the couple in Myles you except Ash-​Wednesday and Wednesday butrose to bridesworship. Never and Friday in Holy Week. On Sundays hate mere pork which is bad such meat and eggs can be used at for your knife of a good Friday. every meal. Never let a hog of the howth 2. Eggs are allowed on every day, except trample underfoot your linen of the first and last Wednesdays, and all the Killiney. Never play lady’s games Fridays in Lent. for the Lord’s stake. Never lose 3. Meat is prohibited on All Wednesdays, all your heart away till you win his Fridays, Saturday of the quarter tense, and diamond back. (433.10–​5) the four last days of Holy Week. On all other days it is permitted at one meal.

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Further parallels can be seen with Cullen’s pastorals and the content of the Second Watch of Shaun. Jaun’s condemnation of ‘secret satieties’ (435.31) maps onto Cullen’s particular obsession with the evils of Freemasonry. More broadly, the emphasis placed on correct female behaviour that is a constant theme of Jaun’s diatribe echoes the primate’s concerns for the proper behaviour of Irish Catholic women in the modern world, something that crops up throughout the pastorals when he warns against excessive vanity in dress, and against modern entertainments such as parties and drinking. This insistence on modesty for Irish Catholic girls comes through most strongly in his 1854 Lenten pastoral in a manner that connects particularly strongly with Jaun’s concerns: Never engage in those improper dances imported from other countries, and retaining foreign names, such as Polkas and waltzes, which are so repugnant to the notions of strict Christian morality [. . .] and are at direct variance with that purity and the modesty of the female character for which Ireland has ever been distinguished.16

The theme of dance, something that is too often considered exclusively in a narrow biographical framework in relation to Joyce’s daughter Lucia, emerges twice with Jaun: once in a warning to Issy about men who wish to trespass ‘on your danger zone in the dancer years’ (439.3), and again as he threatens her with violence if he learns that she has been performing ‘tangotricks with micky dazzlers’ (444.27). The latter comment is more overtly bound up with the image of Lucia, with the inclusion of the words, ‘I’ll homeseek you, Luperca’ (444.35–​6). All the same, there is a larger sense in which Jaun conflates modern dance with sexual indiscretion that has more in common with Catholic discourse in late-​ nineteenth and early-​twentieth-​century Ireland and Britain than it does with Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Naturally, the religious texts discussed thus far would only reach those following the demands of the faith by attending Mass regularly, or at least those who made the effort to turn out when a popular preacher was performing. With regard to immoral behaviour that entirely flouted the rules of polite society, Cullen’s pastorals have little to say, and the subject of prostitution is largely off the table. This is not, as one might predict, the case with Jaun, whose feverish imagination gives rise to a scenario in which a girl might become ‘guilty of unleckylike intoxication’, and thus involve herself with ‘a prominent married member of the vicereeking squad’ (438.25–​8). In Jaun’s version

16

Paul Cullen, Pastoral Letter. . . On the Holy Season of Lent (Dublin: James Duffy, 1854), p. 7.



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of events this leads to the girl becoming ‘a detestificated companykeeper on the dammymonde of Lucalamplight’ (438.29–​31), otherwise a prostitute. The term ‘companykeeper’ was noted down by Joyce in Buffalo notebook VI.B.16, and is taken from a Connacht Tribune article from 12 April 1924. The article in question is entitled ‘Doing the Devil’s Work’, and it relays the Bishop of Galway’s remarks about the bad behaviour of modern Irish girls: another voice that now makes its presence felt in this mosaic of priestly condemnation. Jaun’s language here is laden with beautiful ironies. The Protestant social purists who form the ranks of the vice-​seeking brigade are transformed into ‘vicereekers’, individuals who stink of corruption themselves. Yet Jaun’s motivations in warning Issy in this way stem from the fact that he wishes to have his sister for himself. Katherine Mullin has registered some surprise at the fact that there was in Ireland no home-​grown branch of the anti-​vice purity movement so popular with English and American Protestants.17 This lack indeed feels odd, and the staunchly conservative Cullen may have seemed just the man to take up the cause. It would certainly be a mistake to assume that the Catholic hierarchy were more liberal about such matters, and a most likely explanation for this state of affairs lies in the unique political situation of the Irish Church at this date. Cullen was frequently preoccupied with ensuring the place of Roman Catholic values in day-to-day life, something that is illustrated by his championing of Catholic education in Ireland, and his dogged pursuit of a Catholic University. As Cullen’s surviving correspondence illustrates, these matters occupied his time and thoughts far more than the issue of vice and, moreover, such priorities make perfect sense given that Cullen took over the religious stewardship of Ireland just a couple of decades after the repeal of the majority of the Penal Laws. A  further explanation may lie in the fact that the Catholic hierarchy wished to distance themselves from activities typically associated with a proselytizing, Protestant influence. In such circumstances, it would have hardly been politic for the Catholic hierarchy to have been seen to be in collusion with the Protestant-​led social purity movement. In the decades following the inception of the Free State, Irish Catholics did go on to launch a concerted campaign against prostitution in the red-​light district of Dublin, the area better known as the Monto that is immortalized in Ulysses ­chapter 15. In just a few short years, the brothels in the area had been all but Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 20–​1.

17

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cleared. Founded in Dublin in 1921, Frank Duff ’s ‘Legion of Mary’ – a Marian society that essentially doubled as a social reform lobby – was largely responsible for this feat. As Duff ’s latest biographer explains, his project was kick-​ started by the foundation of the Sancta Maria hostel for reformed prostitutes in Dublin in 1922.18 In certain respects this movement can be thought similar to the type of body that Joyce acted as prefect to during his Belvedere days, the type of organization that is associated with Issy at the Wake in the guise of a juvenile ALP: ‘Hetty Jane’s a Child of Mary’ (27.11–​12). If the Marian devotion that underpinned these groups was, to an extent, similar, the social reach of Duff ’s movement appears to have been far greater. Operating under a Rome-​ sanctioned Marian banner, and with a larger degree of political freedom at hand, Irish Roman Catholics now took their faith to the streets. While this movement may have been relatively alien to the Joyce who wrote Ulysses, it formed an unmistakable part of the social and religious landscape by the mid-​1920s, the period during which Joyce primarily developed the Watches of Shaun.

‘Bring the devil era’ (473.08): Glimpses of the new Ireland It is not possible, and nor would it be desirable, to attempt to pin down the Shaun chapters to just a handful of sources. As Herr rightly points out, ‘the fact that we cannot go back to a specific source [. . .] is important, for throughout the Wake Joyce emphasizes the circulation of cultural ideas and ideals that lack definite origin’.19 The manner in which the Jaun sequence is able to take in an array of voices, and yet produce an effect that (at moments, at least) feels immediate, and all too human, is a reflection of the Wake’s wider achievement. Moreover, the potential precedents for Jaun’s odious brand of morality is something the chapter self-​consciously, if absurdly, calls attention to with the inclusion of a list of recommended reading materials for Issy. The transition into a discussion of appropriate literature is marked by images and ideas associated with censorship and persecution, and Jaun’s desire to destroy offending books is made abundantly clear when he advises, ‘I’d burn the books that grieve you’ (439.34). The suppression of ‘bad’ or dangerous books had been a concern for the Church of Rome since at least the sixteenth century, when the first Roman index of

18

Finola Kennedy, Frank Duff: A Life Story (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates, 2011), pp. 78–​85. Herr, p. 258.

19



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prohibited books, the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum, was published in 1559 during the reign of Paul IV, a codex that contained a list of works prohibited by the highest ecclesiastical authority. Such concerns are not so historically remote as they might at first appear and, as recently as 1903, Leo XIII had issued an encyclical on ‘The Prohibition and Censorship of Books’. As discussed on pages 71–72, a rise in the censorship of literature in Ireland occurred within a few years of the inception of the Free State, typified by the laws enacted by the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. The Act allowed for the indefinite banning of works deemed, by a reviewing board, to be ‘in general tendency indecent or obscene’, as well as works that were seen to be advocating ‘the unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage’.20 This last set of concerns are also mirrored in the Jaunish diatribe, although his position is typically double-​faced. Many of the items on Jaun’s recommended list, those books targeted at ‘chiefly girls’ (440.21), simply betray his casual misogyny, and gesture towards the limited access to theology –​or indeed literature as a whole –​deemed appropriate for women living in a conservative religious society. Jaun believes that a ‘sifted’ approach to learning is best for females, as it will do their ‘arts good’ (440.19–​20), an indication of the kind of gentle artistic endeavours he does approve, complete with the suggestion that such occupations will do their arse good. Advising Issy to ‘trip over sacramental tea into the long lives of our saints and saucerdotes’, lives that have been ‘cut short into instructual primers by those in authority for the bitterment of your soughts’ (440.21–​4), he advocates that lowly laypeople (those ‘soughts’) should take their faith second hand from the relevant authority, rather than embark on a study of Church history and Scripture themselves. Appropriately enough, the recommendation has been conflated with the genteel ritual of taking tea. This is depicted as another Shaunish enthusiasm, and the description of the elaborate breakfast that was discussed on pages 79–80 closes with a hymn to this beloved hot beverage, blending its salute with a dream of ALP: ‘Houseanna! Tea is the Highest!’ (406.28). A more concrete allusion to Catholic children’s literature, and potentially more resonant for the Wake as a whole, is Jaun’s reference to the pious tales of Fr Francis J. Finn, S.J. (1859–​1928), an American born Catholic of Irish descent

20

Act of parliament, cited in Donal O Drisceoil, ‘Frank O’Connor and Literary Censorship’, in Censorship Across Borders: The Reception of English Literature in Twentieth-​Century Europe, edited by Catherine O’Leary and Alberto Lazaro (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), pp. 27–​41 (p. 27).

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who achieved great popularity with his novels for Catholic young men. Allusions to almost all of Finn’s literary productions appear in the Wake, and the majority of these in chapter III.2, a consequence, in the first instance perhaps, of the punning potential of his name.21 These allusions are different in nature from, say, Joyce’s extensive use of Chiniquy in chapter I.7 as, rather than engaging with the details of Finn’s prose, he seems content to allude simply to titles. Nonetheless, the inclusion of references to so many indoctrinating books for children can be said to represent another prong of the chapter’s multifaceted critique of the activities of the Church in this era. The very existence of these works bears witness to the wily modes employed by the Church to influence the young. The scenarios developed in such works might also be said to find a distant echo in the playground games of the Mime. There, the competition between the angelic, blonde-​haired, blue-​eyed Shaun/​Chuff and his dark, diabolical brother Shem/​ Glugg has the surface appearance of innocence, but, as is the case with Finn’s schoolboy stories, betrays a great deal more going on besides. As argued in the previous section with regard to Cullen, several of Jaun’s recommendations do point towards specific authors and/​or works, many of which can be viewed as distorted, or debased, versions of authors or publishers of Catholic literature (although, as ever, the selection is bizarre and in many respects unfathomable). The authority of Jaun’s ‘orthodox’ reading list is, furthermore, slyly undercut by a parenthetical mention of the act of ‘exsponging your index’ (440.9). To wipe clean your copy of the Index of Prohibited Books implies that the distinction between wholesome, orthodox reading and banned, rebellious books might not be so clear-​cut after all. The point is only reinforced by the inclusion in Jaun’s list of two individuals who had, at one time or another, been placed on the Index. The first of these formerly banned writers is the Irish Jesuit Richard Archdeacon (who also wrote under the name McGillacuddy, hence the pun at 440.15). Alfred Webb claimed that Archdeacon’s seventeenth-century tract A Treatise on Miracles (here transformed into a rather less holy sounding ‘Traitey on Miracula’ or Dracula) was the first printed book to appear in both English and Irish (see 440.2).22 The CE reports that Archdeacon’s Theologia Tripartita was placed on the Index in 1700 owing to its treatment of the peccatum philosophicum (CE, ‘Richard Archdeacon’). Despite the fact that his alleged McHugh lists eleven allusions to titles by Fr Finn in his Annotations, which account for the majority of the cleric’s output. 22 Alfred Webb, Compendium of Irish Biography: Comprising Sketches of Distinguished Irishmen, and of Eminent Persons Connected with Ireland by Office or by their Writings (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1878). 21



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error was later corrected, he continued to be referred to in subsequent editions of the Index as a writer who had previously been banned. The second example of Jaun alluding to a writer who had a less than straightforward relationship with the Catholic hierarchy is his recommendation of Dante or ‘Denti Alligator’ (440.6), although Issy is advised to skim over the works of this toothy beast. It might be said that the exiled Florentine rightly belongs in Shem’s domain, and further mischief is wrought by branding the Commedia a trek ‘Through Hell With the Papes’ (440.5–6) – a nod to the fact that Dante condemned a number of popes to hell. Bearing in mind the fact that Jaun alludes specifically to the Index, it is perhaps also Dante’s polemical essay, De Monarchia, that Joyce had in mind. As the American Lutheran scholar George Haven Putnam noted, ironically the bitterly anti-ecclesiastical Commedia escaped condemnation of even expurgation from Rome, whereas De Monarchia was placed on the Index. This is a discrepancy that he attributes in part to the patriotism and desire for Italian literary glory of the Church’s censors.23 Inconsistency or changeability may well be part of the point. Adopting the role of Professor Jones in chapter I.6, a Shaunish persona declares, ‘my unchanging Word is sacred. The word is my Wife, to exponse and expound, to vend and to venerate’ (167.28–9), a claim that seeks to place the (saleable) Word of the individual on a par with the Word of the Bible. The manifest meaning of these words, with their emphasis on unchanging truths, runs counter to certain tenets of Catholic modernism, particularly the notion of the historical evolution of dogma, previously discussed on page 15, and echoed in Stephen’s thoughts in ‘Telemachus’. While there is little room for theological nuance in Jaun’s diatribe, Shaun-Jaun is, all the same, hardly a figure we would associate with steadfastness, rigour, or constancy. Rather, the emphasis in chapter III.2 is on the tangled, and frequently contradictory, net of social and sexual expectations that the lecherous preacher throws at Issy’s feet, in a speech that is by turns cordial, pleading, boastful, paranoid and violent. Joyce’s overwhelming concern with the ideological deficiencies and hypocrisies of the Catholic Church, and especially the Church in Ireland, could be construed as a symptom of a failure of imagination on the part of the author, a relentless return to themes that had preoccupied him since the very earliest sketches in prose. Along with the obvious fact of the book’s radical linguistic 23

George Haven Putnam, The Censorship of the Church of Rome and its influence upon the Production and Distribution of Literature: A Study of the Prohibitory and Expurgatory Indexes, Together With Some Consideration of the Effects of Protestant Censorship and of Censorship by the State: Volume II (New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1907), p. 308.

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innovations, such a claim is rendered in every respect false in the light of the astonishing temporal reach of this portion of the work. Here, Joyce keeps a sceptical eye trained on the Church past and present but also looks to the future, and throughout the Watches of Shaun the prospect of a new dawn is dangled, tantalizingly, before the reader. The conclusion of the First Watch looks forward to the return of Shaun, when ‘by the grace of Votre Dame, [. . .] the natural morning of your nocturne blankmerges into the national morning of golden sunup’ (428.16-18), a passage that blends a period of national mourning with images of rejuvenation. Similarly, at the close of the Second Watch we hear a prophecy of the instant when ‘the west shall shake the east awake’ (473.22), the moment at which Gaelic Ireland will be gloriously reborn. At this time ‘decades of longsuffering and decennia of brief glory’ (472.36) can be left behind. From this point on a heavily romanticized Shaun, in the guise of ‘rural Haun’ (471.35), embarks on a ‘photophoric pilgrimage to your antipodes in the past’ (472.17). Despite the Antipodean destination, the language conveys a vision of Ireland past that is described in adulatory and nauseating terms by the narrator. Shaun-​Haun becomes ‘the crooner born with sweet wail of evoker, healing music’ (471.36–​472.1), the most absurd embodiment of a particular mode of cultural fetishism. This ludicrous ideal can be viewed as a burlesque of the worst excesses of a certain brand of revivalism, for it is a portrait that is laden with images associated with a rural locale, folklore, and the west of Ireland, and that playfully incorporates several words modelled after Gaelic linguistic patterns. Such a view would fall in, to an extent, with Len Platt’s characterization of Joyce’s approach to such literature as all-​out polemical assault, although nothing here is quite so clear-​cut.24 If Shaun’s holy mission will take him back to the past, the spectre of the future also looms large, ‘ere Molochy wars bring the devil era, a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark’ (473.7–​8). The devilish era of De Valera is on the horizon, yet at the opening of the Third Watch we will be plunged, again, into darkness. The dawn is not yet here.

24

Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-​Irish:  A  Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), passim.

‘sweet madonine’ (158.1)

3

The Wake’s Womanly Devotions

Shaun’s lecturing, and lechery, has been shown to mirror, and skilfully undermine, key aspects of Catholic clerical rhetoric from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Thus far, however, this study has said little about those who are the targets of his moralizing discourse, nor the lives of Irish women as depicted throughout the Wake as a whole. While this element of the work does not always relate directly to the book’s religious preoccupations, the ‘Waking Women’, as they have memorably been described by Sheldon Brivic,1 are a vital element of the Wake’s engagement with the world of Catholic Ireland, both past and present. In keeping with its multiplicious method, the book reflects and refracts elements of lived experience so as to produce ‘characters’ that embody, or take on some of the characteristics of, various shades or types of women’s lives. These associations are by no means static or fixed; rather they are fluid and ever-​shifting, densely wrought and intricately networked. The tropes associated with ‘girlhood’ and ‘womanhood’ at the Wake often seem reductive, or even glibly misogynist; and these categories for denoting the phases of women’s lives themselves feel increasingly remote and ideologically laden to twenty-​first-​century readers. The vocabulary employed to depict various modes or models of ‘femininity’ is often troubling, but it is no act of apologism to contend that the book enacts a constant challenge to its own terms of representation. The success of such a challenge is a matter for further consideration. One woman in the Wake who has received little critical attention is Kate. As ‘Kothereen the Slop’ (556.32) she is located at the bottom of the social ladder, and squarely in the domestic realm, a sense that is encapsulated in the schema of characters devised by Robbert-​Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet in which Kate is associated with the following traits: 

Sheldon Brivic, Joyce’s Waking Women: An Introduction to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

1

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James Joyce and Catholicism Symbol: K Capacities: female servant, an old version of Anna Livia, guide Position: subordinate, cleans and delivers messages Situation: as a hen she finds the letter on the tip behind the hou[s]‌e Technique: indignation: I just scrubbed the floor! Colour: soapsuds-​brown Costume: apron Language: music while you slave, ‘tip!’ Tone: O! O! O! O! That this should happen to me! Grumpy Geographic equivalent: midden heap, the museum Art: fine, clean Body part: hands sticking out from rolled up sleeves Animal: hen.2

Following this description, Kate might be compared to the ghoulish ‘Old Gummy Granny’ in the Circean nightmare or the disappointed Maria in ‘Clay. Archival evidence provides a further, pertinent identification for this figure. In the notebook VI.B.11, a document that was composed between late September and late November 1923, appear the following notes about a Dublin character named Kate Strong: ‘Kate Strong –​widow /​scavenger (Ch. I) cleansed but sparingly /​pigs walk about /​bogoath /​no footpaths /​snipe shot in St Stephen’s Green /​George’s st.: country lane’ (VI.B.11: 145). Otherwise known as Widow Strong, Kate was an infamous scavenger and tax collector who, it is recorded in the city’s Annals, was solely charged with keeping Dublin’s streets clean in the mid-​seventeenth century. James Atherton assumed that Joyce took Kate Strong from D. A. Chart’s Story of Dublin, a history that is exploited for the Wake in numerous places, and which includes a brief description of ‘[t]‌he most odious of the Dublin tax collectors’.3 The notes in fact are a very close match with a passage from Ada Peter’s 1907 work Sketches of Old Dublin, which Joyce probably found reproduced in a newspaper.4 Therein, Peter relates details of the dirt and chaos in the Dublin of the day, along with Kate Strong’s inability to fulfil Robbert-​Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, ‘Oversystematizing the Wake: The Quiz Chapter as the Key to a Potential Schema for Finnegans Wake’, Genetic Joyce Studies, 4 (2004). . Accessed 1 January 2016. Paragraph 16. 3 James S. Atherton, The Books at the ‘Wake’: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959 [1974]), p. 91. 4 The text of Peter’s Sketch runs as follows (the phrases that correspond with Joyce’s reading notes are emboldened): ‘That the streets were narrow, badly paved, and ill lit, can be imagined when it is remembered that such was the usual state of affairs in most cities, but our character for cleanliness and order was not of a high standard; it must, however, be recorded that there was only one scavenger employed by the city council, and not alone was this the case, but the official in question was a widow. Now this lady –​and it is truly remarkable that so long ago women’s rights with regard to civic appointments should have been acknowledged –​took a solemn oath to do her duty in keeping the city nice and clean, but she evidently lacked the ability or the sense of responsibility that her position entailed, 2

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her cleaning duties. Peter’s description is as much concerned with the radically different topography of the old town as it is with Widow Strong herself. The source material suggests that Joyce somehow linked Kate to a particular vision of Ireland’s early modern past, and more specifically to the less palatable aspects of the history of the city of Dublin. Here, Kate is reduced to the hen-​like figure who picks over the dirt and chaos of ‘old dumplan as she nosed it’ (79.28–​9). It is a position that simultaneously affords a kind of power, as she has access to the scraps and detritus of the city’s history that ordinarily remain out of sight. When it comes to matters of religion or belief, Kate’s associations are diffuse: as a representative of ‘Old Ireland’ she could be linked to traditional expressions of Catholicity, and she is also sometimes depicted as a superstitious entity, for example when she appears as ‘Miss Rachel Lea Varian’ in the Mime at the start of chapter II.1 (221.12–16). Of course, given the book’s radical approach to the very idea of a personal narrative, it is not possible to establish backstories or life histories in a conventional, novelistic fashion, and in the case of ALP (remembering that Kate can be thought an older version of Anna Livia) this fact is most pronounced. One version of her biography, such as we hear it within the ‘gossipaceous’ (195.4) economy of the washerwomen’s chatter in chapter I.8, hints at a traditional rural girlhood, lived out ‘in county Wickenlow, garden of Erin’ (202.36–​203.1). A symptom of the book’s convoluted anthropomorphic play, this is the source of the River Liffey itself. In this juvenile phase, we hear how she has lain with a man who may be a Land Leaguer or ‘landleaper’ (203.7), an invader who sounds Scandinavian and who is ‘wellingtonorseher’ (203.7) as the water flows past Wellington Quay. Yet another version of events tells of an early sexual encounter with one Michael Arklow, ‘a local heremite’ (203.18), a man who can be conflated with the Fr Michael who appears elsewhere. As the speaker puts it, ‘O, wasn’t he the bold priest? And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy?’ (204.4–​5). Many ideas about ALP’s courtship and marriage circulate, but one tale persists: she has married HCE, a man who is frequently marked as an outsider, a difference that is often depicted with recourse to Anglo-​Protestant imagery. Cliches for it is recorded against her –​Kate Strong was her name that “she scarce kept the way from the Castle to the church clean, or that from the mayor’s house to the church, and neglected the rest of the city, which she cleansed but sparingly, and very seldom [. . .] many of [sic] principal thoroughfares had no side paths, and only posts at intervals divided the roadway, and protected the passers-​by from the equestrian traffic. We would hardly care to meet “the gintleman what pays the rint” walking about at his own sweet will when going shopping in the best parts of the town, yet so usual was this sight that it became necessary to employ men to kill the pigs running about the streets, and cart them away. If one wished to take a quiet stroll up an almost country lane, it could be done in those far distant days by passing up what we now know as the busy mart of South Great George’s Street, but then called George’s Lane, and lying just outside the city walls. The fashionable Grafton Street of to-​day, too, was but a zigzag outlet to the green pasture of St. Stephen, where indeed sheep grazed and snipe were shot.’ Ada Peter, Sketches of Old Dublin (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Waker, 1907), pp. 196–​7.

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associated with gossip, rumour and accusation cloud a great deal of what we hear of the past lives, and potential triumphs or misdemeanours, of both HCE and ALP, perpetually deferring access to anything that could be thought of as the truth of the matter. In the case of ALP, questions of character and background, religious and cultural affiliation, are further complicated by the mythical or spiritual register deployed. The sheer scope and magnitude of Anna Livia has often led to her being considered an All-​Goddess of sorts, an identification that rings true when she is hailed ‘in the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities’ (104.01) at the opening of chapter I.5, to give just one example. This invocation is born out of the fusion of the openings of conventional Muslim and Christian prayers, merging an appeal to ‘Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate’ with a sign of the cross. The fusion of traditions continues as the language falls into the cadence of a paternoster, embroidered with words associated with sewing or finishing a garment: ‘haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!’ (104.2–​3). This is not the only place where divine or semi-divine associations are suggested. Despite her more realistic qualities –​the sense of Anna as a thoroughly downtrodden woman who has suffered at her husband’s hand –​ glimpses of ALP in the role of maternal goddess, or anti-​goddess, surface on several occasions. With regard to Joyce’s particular use of Marian imagery it should, however, be noted that he most often associates the Blessed Virgin Mary with ideas of girlhood or young womanhood in the Wake, rather than the maternal ALP. Catholic girlhood is represented collectively at the Wake by the Maggies or rainbow girls, twenty-​eight girls who represent the days of a menstrual cycle, and who become twenty-​nine when they are accompanied by Issy. As is the case with Shem, Issy speaks rarely but is often present, for example as one of the girls in Phoenix Park with HCE, or as the object of desire that the boys fight over in the Mime. It is not until the footnotes that punctuate the children’s ‘Nightlessons’ (a feature of the chapter that was not developed until late in the composition history)5 that her subjectivity bursts through. In the monologues associated with Issy at the heart of the Watches of Shaun (pp. 457–​61 and pp. 527–​8) her distinctive, lisping and gossipy voice is further realized, a voice that is distinguished by the fact that she often addresses a double, sister, or alter ego. This striking duality has led to many attempts to identify the sources of inspiration for Issy. Possible models for her character include the two Isoldes from the Tristan legend; Dean Swift’s ‘Esthers’, Johnson and Vanhomrigh; A detailed account of Joyce’s overhaul of chapter II.2 in the mid-​1930s, one of the most genetically complex chapters in the book, appears in Luca Crispi’s essay ‘Storiella as She Was Wryt: Chapter II.2’, in How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Chapter-​by-​Chapter Genetic Guide, edited by Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), pp. 214–​49.

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Alice Liddell and Isa Bowman, the girl who played Alice on the London stage; ‘Peaches’ Browning; Christine Beauchamp; Lucia Joyce; the eponymous Colleen Bawn of Boucicault’s play; and the goddess Isis from the Book of the Dead. A preoccupation with doubling is readily discernible in the kinds of literary, historical, mythic and cultural associations linked to Issy, some of which feature more prominently than others. Moreover, just as Issy is characterized by her dual or split nature, the critical reaction to this figure has been appropriately divided and perplexed. Despite the inherent complexities and contradictions of Issy (and indeed all the characters at the Wake) some of the earliest critical responses to her are simply dismissive. Glasheen, for example, describes Issy as a ‘triumph of feminine imbecility’ in her Third Census. Glasheen’s remarks are brief, and perhaps not fully considered, and a more substantial commentary on Issy’s capacities appears in Margot Norris’s 1974 work The Decentered Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’.6 There the critic employs a Lacanian vocabulary to argue that ‘the lack of alienation and intrasubjective conflict’ experienced by women like Molly Bloom, Gerty MacDowell and Issy herself is costly with regard to their capacity for ‘self-awareness’.7 Norris’s comments might be compared to the opinions of second wave feminist critics like Kate Millett who argued, in her landmark Sexual Politics, that Joyce’s fiction simply reiterates a primitive masculine understanding of women as nature and the ‘eternal feminine’.8 In feminist criticism of the 1980s the waters became increasingly muddied, as more intricate and nuanced commentaries emerged. The difficulty lies in the fact that Issy cannot be easily forced into a single mould, for she is neither a stereotypical, passive female born of a misogynist imagination, nor an intellectual subject who challenges patriarchy with the prowess of her mind. Studies by Shari Benstock, Bonnie Kime Scott and Jean-​Michel Rabaté have grappled with Issy and, while the insights are valuable, more questions remain asked than are answered.9 A final observation regarding the niche reception history surrounding Issy relates to context. In her mythic dimensions Issy can be thought of as archetypal, and where more precise historical allusions have been explored the Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 138. 7 Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 53. 8 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1969]), p. 285. 9 Shari Benstock, ‘The Genuine Christine:  Psychodynamics of Issy’, in Women in Joyce, edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 169–​96. In Joyce and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Brighton: Harvester, 1984) Bonnie Kime Scott writes that Issy’s uncensored libidinous discourse gives rise to ‘a denied part of humanity, which both Freud and Joyce wished to summon forth from the glass’ (p. 187). For Rabaté in Joyce upon the 6

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frame of reference is often rather narrow; for example, the new psychiatry practised by the likes of Morton Prince, or the biography of Lucia Joyce. Of course it is not possible, nor would it be desirable, to read Issy in the same way one would approach more conventionally realistic characters like Emma Clery, Milly Bloom or Gerty MacDowell. Nonetheless, in her flirtations and frustrations –​voiced in colloquial, ‘girlish’ phrases –​Issy often emerges as a figure who feels all too human to the reader, and as a young woman who is culturally and temporally bound.

‘My latest lad’s loveliletter’ (459.23): Issy’s missive revisited As observed on page 76, there have been few attempts to understand Jaun’s sermonizing lecture in chapter III.2 in the light of particular historical conditions, and a rare example of this kind of commentary is the valuable study by Herr previously cited. Herr’s impression of the part played by Issy in the Second Watch of Shaun is, in spite of the nuance of her approach to Jaun, oddly brief and idealistic. Of Issy’s speech that runs from page 457.25 to 461.32 –​a direct response to Jaun’s meandering diatribe that is hereafter referred to as the ‘loveliletter’ (459.23) –​Herr asserts that this knotty piece of prose renders ‘the church not only innocuous but also incredible’, and goes on to claim that ‘in the oddly ideal world of the Wake, the sermon is harmless entertainment, and the church [. . .] effectively defused as a social force’.10 The light-​hearted and comic elements of the loveliletter cannot be ignored, and at a most basic level the passage at hand can be viewed simply as a burlesque of courtly love. Here Isolde/​Issy offers a piece of tatty old nosepaper as a token of devotion to her departing hero, in a manner that was likely inspired by the crude parody of the Tristan legend Joyce produced shortly after publishing Ulysses.11 Then the published version is, naturally, far more sophisticated than the early sketch. As we have seen elsewhere, Void (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), Issy’s language also allows Joyce to air a kind of feminine

discourse that had previously been buried, likening his treatment of his young female protagonist to the author’s desire to listen to his troubled daughter until he finally understood her (p. 105). Herr, pp. 258–​9. 11 David Hayman considers the ‘Tristan and Isolde’ vignette to be a foundational ‘node’ for Finnegans Wake. ‘Tristan and Isolde’ dates from the spring of 1923, and therefore belongs to the first period of writing post-​Ulysses. Jed Deppman has described the vignette as ‘a Hollywood style version of the medieval tale’, and goes on to state that the ‘1923 Wake vignettes neither mimic medieval forms of language per se (à la Pound) nor join the ongoing Gaelic revival (à la Yeats) [but instead constitute] medieval material [. . .] reinscribed in, or by, modernist aesthetics’ [Deppman, ‘The Return of Medievalism:  James Joyce in 1923’, in European Joyce Studies 13:  Medieval Joyce, edited by Lucia Boldrini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 45–​78 (pp. 45–​6)]. Despite Deppman’s claim for the essentially modernist nature of the vignettes, when it comes to the early versions of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ it is hard to see these as anything other than a hackneyed version of a courtly love scene in which the hyperbolically Americanized Tristan goes on his way, leaving his devoted lover behind. 10

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the mythic is fused with a cultural frame of reference that feels far more immediate, and images and ideas associated with Catholicism in Ireland in the post-​ Cullen era form an important strand of the conversation. The loveliletter is peppered with allusions to the props and practices of devotional Catholicism, and Issy deploys this imagery so as to frame her sexuality in religious terms, charming her correspondent with ‘sweet nunsongs’ (457.29) rather than sweet nothings. Towards the start of her missive, in the playful caution ‘so you’ll mind your Veronique’ (458.14), she alludes to the Veronica, or Sudarium, one of the most important Christian relics.12 In this formulation, the Veronica is employed as a tool in her flirtation strategy, a means by which to chide and tease her lover. More sexually explicit is her transformation of the forty hours devotion, or Quarantore, into the rehearsal of multiple sexual positions in the tradition of the Karma Sutra, ‘between us by your friend the pope, forty ways in forty nights’ (458.4–​5). The promise to ‘pack [her] comb and mirror to praxis oval owes and artless awes’ becomes an act of both religious and romantic homage as Issy promises to ‘follow [Jaun] pulpicly as far as come back under all my eyes like my sapphire chaplets of ringarosary’ (458.36–459.1). Similarly, a reference to ‘my fragrant saint’ (460.5) blends the whiff of a lover with the saintly odour of sanctity. There is less and less room for insinuation and covered words as her speech continues, and as the loveliletter reaches its conclusion Issy makes her intentions plain with regard to a potential lover: ‘I’ll strip straight after devotions before his fondstare’ (461.21–2). Despite the humour of the piece, this is no straightforward subversion or diffusion of Church authority because the densely layered language serves as an illustration of Issy’s absolute entanglement in Catholic discourse. At the microscopic level, these touches add an important religious element to the loveliletter, and this is also achieved via a series of parallels with the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses. The reader is invited to link Issy to Gerty MacDowell, a girl whose relation to, and entrapment in, Catholic Dublin on 16 June 1904 is apparent. It has become something of a commonplace with historicist readings of ‘Nausicaa’ that Gerty’s failure to attract a husband is connected to a uniquely difficult set of social circumstances. As described on page 24, the demography of post-​famine Ireland, with its high levels of postponed marriage and permanent celibacy, is crucial here, and something that has informed the critical 12

The Sudarium of St Veronica is a piece of cloth believed to contain an imprint of the true face of Christ made on the road to Calvary when a woman in the crowd (apocryphally known as Veronica) reached out to wipe Jesus’s face. The cloth was venerated in the early years of the Church, but disappeared at some point after the Sack of Rome. Interest in the ‘Holy Face of Jesus’ was given new impetus after two French nuns claimed to have seen visions promoting this devotion in the 1840s. The devotion was officially sanctioned by Leo XIII in 1885, three years after Joyce’s birth.

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appreciation of the earlier fiction. In this world, Gerty’s attempt to enhance her appearance and self-​presentation by exploiting images from the popular press, sentimental fiction and the Marian imagery of the Church ultimately cannot compensate for her physical disability: the ‘marriage market’ is simply too tough. Issy, too, can be read through this lens, and in some of the key Issy-​passages the Wake poignantly invokes the very culture in which Gerty resides. A broad comparison of these two ­figures –​painted as silly, vain, flirtatious –​is readily apparent, and a picture that is richer still emerges through a consideration of precise intertextual relations. Gerty’s dependence on cosmetics such as the ‘eyebrowleine’ recommended by Madame Vera Verity in the Princess Novelette (U, 13.111), and her interest in ‘blushing scientifically cured’ (U,13.113) can be placed alongside the more dubious sounding products mentioned in the loveliletter, like ‘pure clean lupstucks’ (460.2) or ‘Pouts Vanisha Creme’ (461.2–​3). Owing to the multiple linguistic planes along which the Wake operates, the latter image conjures Pond’s Vanishing Cream, Dean Swift’s Vanessa, and a larger sense of erasure or invisibility. A  preoccupation with dress, as Gerty pores over the fashion pages of the popular press, is also echoed in Issy’s concern with the minutiae of fashion, ‘what exquisite buttons’ (458.24), but in chapter III.2 matters are complicated by the fact that Issy’s perplexing talk flips, often incomprehensibly, between herself and her double. As is the case in the earlier work –​where fantasies are dragged down to earth –​pretensions of glamour are short-​lived. Gerty’s reflection that ‘at last she found what she wanted at Clery’s summer sales, the very it, slightly shopspoiled but you would never notice’ (U, 13.159–​60) is explicitly appropriated in order to deliver a backhanded compliment to the double. When Issy pronounces that ‘you’ll love her for her hessians and sickly black stockies, cleryng’s jumbles, salvadged from the wash’ (459.7–​9), the second-​rate, debased image is foisted onto a second vision of the self. The ‘sumptuous confection’ of an outfit imagined in ‘Nausicaa’, ‘grey trimmed with expensive blue fox’ (U, 198–​9), is also inelegantly distorted in the loveliletter, becoming an ‘expensive rainproof of pinked elephant’s breath grey of the loveliest sheerest dearest widowshood over airforce blue’ (461.5–​6). A rainproof or waterproof coat is hardly the stuff romantic dreams are made on, and the reference to widowhood implies that the daydream has already evaporated. The social promotion that a successful performance of femininity is designed to bring about, gestured towards by Gerty’s desire to become ‘Mrs Reggie Wylie T.C.D.’ (U, 13.196), is also hinted at in the loveliletter. A description of practising ‘oval owes and artless awes’ in front of the mirror (encapsulating the recurring Wakean pattern of omega to alpha) sounds like the process of shaping one’s

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mouth in front of the glass in order to produce ‘correct’ pronunciation, possibly a means of seeking acceptance at a higher social level. That the ‘awes’ are ‘artless’ suggests the attempt is not quite successful. The Wake passage also alludes to a higher class man, conflating royalty with the niceties of the lawn tennis court in a description of ‘my prince of the courts who’ll beat me to love!’ (460.12–​13). Violence looms large in Gerty’s reflections on the grim reality of marriage when we hear how ‘she had even witnessed in the home circle deeds of violence caused by intemperance’ (U,13.297–8). And the same is true of Issy’s tennis metaphor. Through the second meaning of ‘beat’ (460.12) the connection between romantic love, or its social expressions, and physical brutality is realized. The clash between tone and subject matter again produces a devastating effect. The Catholic imagery nested within ‘Nausicaa’ and the loveliletter is suggestive of a further significant overlap between the two major works, as well as important new directions. What is subtly wrought and insinuated in ‘Nausicaa’ through a technique of cross-​cutting the ‘seduction’ scene on Sandymount Strand with scenes from the nearby Star of the Sea Church is crystallized in the Wake through the manner in which religion and sex are interlinked in Issy’s divided mind. The nubile young woman might have certain physical advantages over Gerty, yet, as Jaun’s rambling diatribe forcefully illustrates, she is also subject to the terms of a religious culture that promotes a range of conflicting, and therefore often impossible, ideals. ‘Nausicaa’ is famed for its role in the successful prosecution of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of the Little Review, in February 1921. With Issy, Joyce pushes beyond the earlier rendering of performance and desire that provoked the ire of the New  York Society for the Suppression of Vice. In the loveliletter, Issy does not so much ‘package herself ’ for the male consumer –​a metaphor that Garry Leonard has employed in his commentary on Gerty –​but unabashedly offers herself up, at one moment pledging loyalty to Jaun alone, at the next contemplating trysts with other lovers.13 In contrast to the virginal imagery that feeds the sentimental portrait of Gerty in the first part of ‘Nausicaa’, here modesty has no place. The loveliletter becomes increasingly obscene and perverse as it moves along, culminating in a request for Jaun to guide or coach Issy through the sex act. Her request is enunciated by an infantilized voice when she begins ‘to thalk thildish’ (461.28), pledging to ‘thay one little player’, or say one little prayer, ‘before doing to deed’ (461.29–30). On the one hand, the 13

Garry Leonard, Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 98–​141.

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flagrant obscenity of the piece can be viewed as an act of joyful abandon, demonstrating a complete disregard for the lecture that came before. On the other, the power dynamic of the exchange invites a reading that is far less positive and affirming. As the chapter literally reaches a climax, Issy’s journey towards satisfaction is abruptly cut off by Jaun in the following beautifully executed set-​piece: Coach me how to tumble, Jaime, and listen, with supreme regards, Juan, in haste, warn me which to ah ah ah ah . . . . —​MEN! Juan responded fullchantedly to her sororal sonority, imitating himself capitally with his bubbleblown in his patapet and his chalished drink now well in hand. (461.30–​5)

The switch between voices mirrors the manner in which Bloom takes over the narrative at the climax of ‘Nausicaa’ because the moment is realized not by Issy herself, but by Jaun, when he completes her murmurs of arousal with a religious, patriarchal exclamation –​a bold, and appropriately capitalized, AH-​MEN! His cry is the culmination of the ‘Amens’ that punctuate the first two Watches of Shaun, forming an essential part of the grammar of the chapters. To consolidate his salute to his devoted sister, Jaun’s toast of ‘chalished drink’ (461.35) merges a celebratory slug of alcohol with the chalice of the Mass. He comments smugly that she is a very ‘gullaby’ (462.15) or gullible girl, before offering Dave the Dancekerl as surrogate, and being waved on his way by an entourage of adoring Maggies.

‘For the price of two maricles’ (425.19–29): Mariology in Finnegans Wake Devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary play a minor or background role in the shaping of Gerty’s character when we catch sight of her Child of Mary badge tucked away with her juvenile horde of treasures ‘in the drawer of her toilettable’ (U, 13.637), and when traditional epithets for the Virgin ring out as backdrop to activities on Sandymount Strand. Mariological ideas and images are used more extensively in the Wake in relation to Issy and others, a reflection, it seems, of the escalating importance of the Virgin. This is something that feeds unmistakably into the prevalent religious culture of the Free State. Despite the centrality of this strand of Catholic thought, the manner in which Joyce’s fiction experiments with Marian ideas and images has received relatively little attention. One notable exception is the work of Mary Lowe-Evans, which makes a case for the importance to Joyce of the startling elevation of the Mother

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of God in the ‘Golden Era of Mary’, c. 1850–1950. As I argued on page 43, Lowe-​ Evans’s approach to Joyce’s attitude to Catholicism is questionable because throughout her study she endeavours to present him as a man with latent conservative Catholic sympathies. This attitude colours her approach to what she perceives as Joyce’s ‘Mariolatry’ –​a fusion of Mariology and idolatry –​when she contests that ‘Joyce’s nostalgic designs on Mother Mary’s womb [are] conservative; in conformity, that is, sometimes with official, sometimes with quasi-​official Catholic church strategies for controlling its members’.14 This alleged conformity is cast in a fetishistic light for, according to Lowe-​Evans, ‘in the case of Mary, the church, too, is a fetishist, and indeed Joyce’s fetishistic preferences reflect the Church’s.15 As previously shown, despite the manifest content of his work, the claim that Joyce remained, in essence, a religious conservative is by no means unique. Lowe-​Evans’s chain of reasoning is, all the same, suspect: Joyce’s supposed ‘womb fixation’, a desire to return to the mother’s body that is articulated in Freudian terms, is linked to his feelings about the Blessed Mother. The diagnosis of Joyce’s ‘Mother Lode’ itself treads upon shaky ground, and, moreover, there is no necessary link between the longing for a mother and conformity with the Church’s own Mariological impulses and excesses. An implicit, and indeed explicit, critique of the means by which Mother Mary has been appropriated and deployed by the Church can be discerned in the fiction up to, and including, Finnegans Wake. In ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, Stephen’s oration behind the scenes at the National Library includes a famous statement about the true nature of the mystical estate of paternity, as opposed to the physical or objective reality of maternity, and most crucially the reality of a mother’s love:  ‘Amor Matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction’ (U, 9.842.4). What is less commonly noted is the manner in which Stephen’s reflections are bound up with cynicism about popular affection for the Virgin, when he opines, using typically florid language, that on the mystery of paternity ‘and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe’ was the Church established. It is ‘founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood’ (U, 9.839–​42). In Stephen’s colourful account, the image of the Madonna that is embraced by the crowd becomes nought but a distraction that diverts the masses from the real incertitude that defines the filial relation between begetter 14

Lowe-​Evans, pp. 65–​6. Lowe-​Evans, pp. 65–​6.

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and begotten, which is at once the apostolic succession that bolsters the pontiff ’s claim to absolute spiritual authority and the procession of the Son from the Father that is at the heart of the Christian revelation. The deployment of the word ‘cunning’ to describe the stratagem of the Roman hierarchy suggests deliberate manipulation, something that is, arguably, not without precedent. When faced with the threat of the Protestant Reformation three centuries earlier, the Church had dug in and turned to its glorious past, reaffirming through the decrees of the Council of Trent such practices as the issuing of indulgences, pilgrimages, the veneration of the saints and their relics, the production of icons, and the cult of Mary. For a Church under threat from within or without, the image of Our Lady  –​beautiful and modest, with her arms outstretched to comfort her children –​becomes a most powerful weapon when flung to the mob. With regard to the precise reach of Stephen’s remark, one likely candidate for the wily representative of the Roman hierarchy who is invoked with reference to the ‘cunning Italian intellect’ (U, 9.840) is Pio Nono himself. In this domain, the most important contribution of this Marian pope was the 1854 encyclical Ineffabalis Deus, a document that officially defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception for the first time. Contrary to popular belief, the dogma does not refer to the conception of Jesus by a virgin mother (i.e. the Virgin Birth), but rather to the claim that Mary of Nazareth is the only human being to have been conceived without the stain of original sin. As the pontiff is keen to stress, the Immaculate Conception is in fact an ancient piety that had never been formally articulated as dogma. In keeping with the Church’s desire to preserve the sense of its historical permanence and unchangeable character, the ‘new’ dogma is considered simply a formal articulation of the way in which the Blessed Virgin was understood and venerated throughout the ages. Unsurprisingly, the encyclical is full of hyperbolic, overblown language. Neither God the Father nor God the Son receive much attention, but Mary is exalted and praised as ‘more beautiful than beauty, more lovely than loveliness; more holy than holiness’.16 When Pio Nono’s long reign came to an end upon his death in 1878, the act of flinging the Madonna to the mob that is scathingly alluded to in Stephen’s words continued apace. Leo XIII was also an exceptionally Marian pope who gained the nickname ‘The Rosary Pope’ owing to the record-​breaking eleven encyclicals that he issued promoting this form of Marian devotion. He encouraged 16

Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus: Apostolic Constitution Issued by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1854 . Accessed 1 January 2016 (para. 24).

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the faithful to wear scapulars dedicated to Our Lady (perhaps the ‘Godforsaken scapulars’ associated with Shem at 183.18) and the formation of sodalities, like Joyce’s own at Belvedere, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. The excesses of the popular cult of Mary can be seen to come into play in A Portrait when Stephen composes his juvenile villanelle. In a startling conflation of the sacred and the profane, the act of composition is transmuted into something akin to the conception of Jesus in the virgin womb, when ‘Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin’s chamber’ (P, 217). This moment gives rise to the erotically charged language of the Villanelle to the Temptress, complete with some of the strangest religious imagery in the novel. Here the earth itself functions metaphorically as the priest’s censer, swinging, swaying, emitting ‘smoke of her praise’ (P, 218). In an extension of the blending of secular and holy realms, the image of the bird-​girl is overladen with Marian symbolism (‘pure’, ‘softhued as ivory’, in ‘slateblue skirts’ that ‘dovetailed behind her’, Portrait, 171) at the moment of the birth of Stephen’s artistic imagination. The question of whether or not the villanelle is intended as an ironic deflation of the pretensions of the young poet has divided responses to A Portrait. It is nonetheless clear that the burgeoning artist has already begun to reject his juvenile poetic experiment, a transition that is, of course, realized in the radically different aesthetics of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The Church of Rome might have promoted the cult of Mary from ‘top-​down’ as it were, but events of a rather more supernatural nature would bring the Virgin closer than ever to her people in the popular consciousness. The increase in reports of visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary could be viewed as both symptom and cause of a shift in the devotional culture.17 What is certain is that Marian apparitions were a mainstay of popular Catholicism in Joyce’s Ireland, and a phenomenon to which he responds in his fiction, and particularly in the two major works. One intriguing expression of this occurs in chapter II.1 of the Wake in a description of a hymn sung by a bunch of ‘happy little girlychums’ (234.34), a version of the Maggies, which chimes with the language associated with Gerty, and her chums Edy Boardman and Cissy Caffrey: O, the swinginging hopops so goholden! They’ve come to chant en chor. They say their salat, the madiens’ prayer to the messiager of His Nabis, prostitating their selfs eachwise and combinedly. Fateha, fold the hands. Be it honoured, bow the head. May thine evings e’en be blissful! Even of bliss! As we so hope for

Eugene Hynes, Knock: The Virgin’s Apparition in Nineteenth-​Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008), pp. 98–​108.

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ablution. For the sake of the farbung and of the scent and of the hoilodrops. Amems. (234.34–​235.5)

McHugh annotates this passage in relation to its prominent Islamic theme: salaat is an Arabic term for daily prayer, and the Sura Al-​Fatiha, or ‘The Opener’, is the title given to the first chapter of the Qur’an to be recited seventeen times daily. In context, the address to one ‘Fateha’ (235.2) also brings to mind Fatimah of the Ahl al-​Bayt. She was the daughter of Muhammad who was closest to The Prophet, and is a figure who is venerated across the Muslim world. Again bearing the Islamic context in mind, ‘His Nabis’ – a phrase that encapsulates the Hebrew Nabi, prophet – invokes Muhammad himself. According to the lines that follow, which mimic a childish song, he is Prophet of ‘allahlah lahlah lah!’ (235.8). This is not the extent of the passage’s religious frame of reference, and in a coincidence that we might imagine to have delighted Joyce, the Islamic terms map easily onto a Marian theme. The ‘madiens’ (235.1) or maidens’ prayer, a Magnificat of sorts, is what initially brings the Virgin to mind and, within this frame of reference, two visions of Mary make themselves known. ‘Salat’ (235.1) can be read as an allusion to Our Lady of La Salette, a French apparition reported by two children at La Salette-​Fallavaux in 1846. Following this pattern, ‘Fateha’ simultaneously becomes Our Lady of Fátima, a very well-​known manifestation of the Virgin who purportedly appeared to three children in rural Portugal in 1917. Heightening the Catholic dimension, the word ‘ablution’, along with its original sense, communicates hope for the absolution of sin, and further confirmation of an intentional overlaying of two religious traditions comes through at the close of the passage, when the language slides into the rhythm of the sign of the cross. The Wakean rephrasing of the refrain includes ‘farbung’ (235.5), German for dye, alongside elements that conjure smell (‘the scent’, 235.5) and water (‘the holiodrops’, 235.5) respectively. These are elements employed to create spectacle in diverse forms of worship. In his attempt to establish a sense of equivalence across religious traditions, Joyce is characteristically far from neutral. In this instance, the act of prostrating in prayer (whether a Christian or Islamic act of devotion) becomes the act of ‘prostitating’ (235.2), or prostitution. The link between religious acts and a certain kind of economy comes through more overtly in a Wakean reference to ‘the price of two maricles’ (425.20), a pun that feels too obvious and evocative to have been entirely without precedent.18 The word appears as a dialect rendering of miracle in William Carleton’s mid-​century tale ‘The Black Prophet –​A Tale of Irish Famine’, serialized in the Dublin University Magazine: ‘ “Why, then,” said her stepmother, looking at her with mingled anger and disdain, “is it tears you’re sheddin’? –​cryin’ no less! Afther that, maricles will never cease.” ’ Dublin University Magazine: A Literary and Political

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The link between Mary, miracles, and money calls to mind two of the best-​ known modern Marian apparitions: most famous of all, Bernadette Soubirous’s visions at the Grotto of Massabielle, close to the town of Lourdes in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in 1858–​9; and, closer to home for Joyce, events in the village of Knock, County Mayo in 1879, when several witnesses claimed that the Virgin Mary, flanked by St Joseph and St John the Evangelist, had appeared in front of the gable wall of Knock Parish Church. Both are present in ‘Lotus Eaters’ when Bloom observes a church service, and his conclusion about the efficacy of the bodily cures associated with such sites is simple: ‘Thing is if you really believe in it’ (U, 5.365). Ulysses and Finnegans Wake contain a handful of allusions to Lourdes. For example, playfully picking up on the oral similarity between ‘Lourdes’ and ‘Lord’, one of the midwives Stephen spies on the beach is described swinging her bag ‘lourdily’ (U, 3.32). Likewise, the crude caricature of Anne Kearns in the ‘Parable of the Plums’, who is described as the kind of woman who rubs Lourdes water into her lumbago (U, 7.949), is indicative of the social type that Stephen associates with this particular piety. A further brief allusion is present in the Wake via a cry of ‘My Lourde! My Lourde!’ (299.6) that features in the children’s Nightlessons. This is, in fact, an accurate spelling of Lourde, as opposed to the French Lourdes, in the Gascon Occitan of the region, and is evidence of an attention to linguistic nuance that is also present in the Latinate or Hispanic flourishes incorporated into a Wakean reference to St Bernadette: ‘and how are Bernadetta’s columbillas?’ (430.35–​6). Given Joyce’s particular concern with Catholicism in Ireland it is, however, to be expected that it is the apparition at Knock that receives most attention. There appears a brief Joycean nod to events at Knock in Dubliners when, faced with the prospect of a retreat in ‘Grace’, Tom Kernan retorts, ‘I bar the magic lantern business’ (D, 194) –​a reference to a popular conspiracy theory about Knock, namely, that the image was projected onto the gable wall of the parish church using a magic lantern.19 Unsurprisingly, in the fantastical and temporally unstable world of the Wake, Joyce’s take on Knock is more elaborate and extensive, and there is some (albeit limited) evidence of his interest in Knock in surviving compositional documents. In Buffalo notebook VI.B.5, Journal, Vol. XXVIII (July–​December 1846), 75–​94 (p. 82). Hardly known for the integrity of his portrayal of the Irish peasantry, Joyce nonetheless wrote to Stanislaus from Rome on 6 November 1906 and noted that Carleton was one of a number of Irish authors he planned to read. 19 Hynes notes that the Magic Lantern thesis gained popular currency very shortly after news of the apparition broke, something that was explicitly refuted by MacPhilpin (Hynes, pp. 211–​14).

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which dates from 1924, the following cluster appears: ‘John MacPhilpin /​Tuam News /​Miracles of Knock ND /​S Jos /​S John’ (VI.B.5.141). The note clearly points to The Apparitions and Miracles at Knock (Dublin: Gill, 1880), penned by Tuam News editor John MacPhilpin, as Joyce’s source; the information recorded is of the most basic and preliminary kind, indicating that he may not have actually read the book. ‘ND’ simply designates Notre Dame (an appropriate nod to the wave of Marian apparitions in France), and the notes ‘S Jos’ and ‘S John’ relate to the figures who accompanied her. Evidence of a persistent interest in this topic is potentially contained in notebook VI.B.14, the next notebook to be compiled after VI.B.5. In this document an explicit reference to the ‘legend’ of Knock is made, surrounded by several related images, which, according to Joyce’s usual strategy of somewhat haphazard note-​taking, were not inspired by an Irish source, but rather an account of Les légendes du Mont-​Saint-​Michel.20 Again the blending of Hiberno-​and Franco-​traditions is apparent. What is certain is that Joyce took up this theme when composing ‘Shem the Penman’ and amid Shaun’s character assassination of his brother, which is discussed at length in Chapter 1, he inserted a bizarre vignette about Knock. The narrative is, as ever, convoluted, and what facts might be extracted run as follows. One evening Sackerson –​here depicted as a ‘blond cop’ (186.17) who is associated with the KKK or ‘Kruis-Kroon-Kraal’ (186.19), just before Shem is called a ‘coon’ (187.12)  –​is out on patrol. In the guise of ‘petty constable Sisterson’ (186.19) he encounters a staggering, drunken Shem on his way home from visiting with a ‘protoprostitute’ (186.27), a version of Issy (‘Arcoiris’) and a Maggie (‘Mergyt’, 186.28). The inclusion of Sackerson in the guise of constable demonstrates further knowledge of certain theories about the alleged apparition, and, as Hynes notes in relation to the magic lantern hypothesis, one theory was that a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary had produced the projection. In this garbled rendition of events, Shem is ultimately either apprehended or rescued by the officer, although rescued from what is unclear as the logic of Shaun’s tall tale, if such a thing existed to begin with, breaks down yet further. 20

On p. 21 of Buffalo notebook VI.B.14 Joyce recorded the following phrases (the lettered sequence is taken from the Brepols edition for ease of reference): (a) quella santa donna; (b) the yellow world; (c) dislocated reason; (d) tell in style of legend (Knock); (e) knights head on altar; (f) priest; (g) helmet, gauntlets & drawn sword; (h) Helen & Montgomery; (i) miraculised; (j) pays de predilection for Devil (Brittany); (k) Delaney (Delauney); (l) Jeremy De Dazzler; (m) the dubious pilgrim; (n) the good overnoisy Sexton who does not genuflect enough before M St Michel. More information about the source material, and the correspondence between source and notes, appears in Mikio Fuse, Robbert-​Jan Henkes, and Geert Lernout, ‘Emendations to the Transcription of Finnegans Wake Notebook VI.B14’, Genetic Joyce Studies, 10 (2010). . Consulted 1 January 2016.

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Thus far, the purpose of the sketch is entirely unclear aside from the manner in which it affirms Shem’s drunken and debauched nature, hammering another nail into his coffin through the medium of gossip. Via the conflation of the Knock Mary with the Knockmaroon Gate in Phoenix Park, it also serves to conflate a site associated with divine relation and HCE’s obscure crime and fall, something that might well account for the fact that events are so heavily obscured. A clearer agenda can also be unearthed in a description of ‘the ligatureliablous effects of foul clay in little clots’ (186.23), part of a wider pattern of references to the ‘pollute stoties’ (186.21) of Dubliners. The famous clay of Knock that was scraped from the Church walls by pilgrims in the hope of getting relief from fleshly ills becomes, in this rendering, associated with a Latin-​sounding ligature, the reliability of which sounds decidedly suspicious as it is also libellous. A romanticized view of popular devotions is then brutally undercut, or rendered a mere chimera. This is a theme that will again be taken up by an Issy-​style voice, ventriloquized by Yawn, in the Third Watch of Shaun; although, according to Wakean principles, this cannot be wrought via a straightforward denouncement or exposé of the beliefs of the masses, but rather by the bewildering collision of the world of Knock, and Joyce’s own early stories, with contemporary concerns. It is to this important fragment of the work, shot through with Catholic and Marian imagery, that I now turn my attentions.

‘A glorious lie between us’ (527.36): Catholic girlhood through the looking glass The passage in question, hereafter referred to as the Looking Glass, rises from the darkest depths of the inquisition of Yawn by Mamalujo, when the Shaunish voice begins to crumble and give way to other speakers, a precursor to his transformation into HCE. The fractured, girlish voice that breaks through is unmistakably Issy’s, and her appearance is heralded by a whispered appeal to ‘[l]istenest, meme mearest! They were harrowd, those finweeds! Come, rest in this bosom!’ (527.3–4), words that ostensibly offer comfort to her Other or ‘Me Me’, here simply a mirror image, although the language is by turns affectionate and derogatory. Throughout, the Looking Glass is peppered with adulatory descriptions of the Self/​Other, allowing the speaker to revel in thoughts of physical beauty in a manner which, again mimicking ‘Nausicaa’, serves to widen the gap between an idealized discourse and a certain kind of reality. And as matters

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progress, it becomes increasingly clear that the speaker is offering consolations or reassurances in response to an elusive event, an act that sounds sexual in nature. As an iteration of the mysterious scene in the park, and something that binds Issy and her double to the two girls implicated in HCE’s fall, it is a secret that must be guarded at all costs. Indeed, it is the one piece of information that Mamalujo have been at pains to discover throughout the torturous inquisition that occupies the length of the Third Watch. At the level of word play, Joyce incorporates two popular modes of Marian devotion into the language here: the rosary and the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Otherwise known as the Litany of Loreto, this well-​known prayer constitutes a lengthy and elaborate plea for Marian intercession that we have already heard from the congregation at the Star of the Sea Church in Ulysses ­chapter 13. On page 108 it was noted that Leo XIII was especially fond of the rosary, and during the course of his papacy he also made a contribution to the fluid text of the Litany, adding the epithets Regina sacratissimi Rosarii (Queen of the Most Holy Rosary) and Mater boni consilii (Mother of Good Counsel) to the list of attributes included in the official version of the prayer. In this instance, devotional language is not subverted in the crass, libidinous manner that we saw from Issy in the loveliletter. Then it is hardly put to orthodox use either. All three traditional Mysteries of the Rosary are present in the Looking Glass and, far from connecting this imagery to matters spiritual, Issy’s first two punning allusions in this vein are linked to the body. The Sorrowful Mysteries (decades of the rosary which are supposed to commemorate sorrowful scriptural events such as Christ’s torture and execution) are reduced to ‘soreful miseries’ (527.10). In context, the painful misery in question is a menstrual period. When the Joyful Mysteries (traditionally comprising decades dedicated to contemplation of The Annunciation, The Visitation, The Nativity, The Presentation, and The Finding of Jesus at the Temple) surface a few lines later, the frame of reference is again far from holy. A cry of ‘O be joyfold! Mirror do justice’ (527.21–​2) indicates that the potential source of joy is not these pivotal moments in the life cycle of Jesus and his mother, but rather an aesthetically pleasing reflection in the glass. The rosary sequence is completed in the following phrase, which offers some tantalizing clues as to what Issy’s secret might be: ‘Still with me you, you poor chilled! Will make it up with mother Concepcion and a glorious lie between us, sweetness, so not a novene in all the convent loretos, not my littlest one of all, for mercy’s sake need ever know, what passed our lips or’ (527.35–​528.3). The ‘glorious lie’ (527.36) could be the Resurrection itself, the most important of the Glorious Mysteries. With regard to Issy’s more immediate concerns, the lie in question is a blind that she proposes to pull down as a means to mask the truth

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about the transgression that has occurred, something that must be hidden from the young women of the convent. Reference to ‘mother Concepcion’ (527.36), along with the generally titillating nature of her discourse, suggests the crime committed was a crime against fecundity. Turning back to the second phase of the rosary sequence, the allusion here is at least double, and Issy’s self-​absorbed exclamations ferment into a garbled version of the Litany of Loreto: ‘taper of ivory, heart of the conavent, hoops of gold!’ (527.22–​3). These particular titles for the Virgin (Tower of Ivory, House of Gold) are two of the most metaphorical and poetic images found in the Litany, and are familiar to readers of A Portrait as the phrases included in Dante’s memories of childhood teasing from Protestant youngsters. They provoke Stephen to link the image of the tower to Eileen’s white hands, and lead him to conclude that the metaphor relates to ‘a cold white thing’ (P, 36), hardly an inviting image of the Blessed Mother. Dante’s anecdote feels authentic as there are plenty of examples of the abuse of the Litany in anti-​Catholic literature from the first half of the nineteenth century and, from an orthodox Catholic perspective, the prayer hardly fares any better in the hands of the mature Joyce.21 For Issy, the words have become drained of any religious content, as they are solely employed in the service of her vanity and in her deception of The Four. While the style here is radically new, and a marked departure from anything that appears in the fiction up until 1922, in one further element of her speech Issy can be compared to Gerty MacDowell. This has to do with the way in which the passage paints a rose-tinted picture of the future. In a scenario that can be taken as an expression of the love of the Self/​Other, or the love of a man, wedding bells chime when we hear about how ‘[i]‌t will all take bloss as oranged at St Audiens rosan chocolate chapelry with my diamants blickfeast’. She adds, deploying characteristically double-​edged puns, that ‘Father Blesius Mindelsinn will be beminding hand’ (528.5–​8). The imagery, however bizarre and surreal, has now become sumptuous, and the vision incorporates lavish foodstuffs and diamonds as someone walks down the aisle of St Audeon’s to the sound of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. As was the case with Gerty’s dream of becoming Mrs Reggie Wylie, T.C.D., religion constitutes an unavoidable element of this dream of social elevation. Put bluntly, ‘oranged’ (528.5) suggests a Protestant colour scheme as well as a more innocent and natural posy of orange blossoms. 21

Just one of many examples of Protestant literature condemning the Litany published in the first half of the nineteenth century is the anonymous work The Spirit of Popery: An Exposure of its Origin, Character, and Results. In Letters from a Father to his Children (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1840). After describing the Litany to his children, the author adds the following, ‘I am sure, my dear children, it has been very difficult for you to restrain feelings of horror at the reading of such statements’ (p. 216).

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Moreover, St Audeon’s Catholic Church stands opposite an ancient church of the same name that belongs to the Church of Ireland (an appropriate allegory in a passage that has doubling at its core), and Mendelssohn’s march would be less commonly associated with Catholic ceremonies. It is no stretch to interpret these allusions as a reflection of the social pecking order in turn of the century Dublin and, alas, just as Gerty’s bubble bursts with the realization that her dream wedding will never be, so too in the Looking Glass does the vision fail to endure. As the vignette reaches its climax, the confusion caused by Issy’s split subjectivity again poses the reader untold difficulties when one side of her being begins to fade, calling out parting advice to her counterpart. The speaker’s last words, while decidedly ambiguous, are hardly affirmative in nature. She refers to a future time when ‘I lie with warm lisp on the Tolka’ (528.13), which simultaneously plays on the homosexual undertones of the Looking Glass, and leaves us to imagine a girl lying face down in the River Tolka. If we are to take seriously Fordham’s suggestion of a Hamlet parallel in the Shaun-​Issy relationship, this functions as a restaging of the tragic heroine’s ‘muddy death’ (Hamlet 4:7).22 If the reader has been left perplexed by the dizzying language of the Looking Glass, this is also true of Issy’s audience, the inquisitors who, when present as a quartet, form Mamalujo. In this respect, the Looking Glass monologue (or more accurately, duologue) can be said to have had the desired effect because the men are left none the wiser about the nature of the event Issy wishes to conceal. Her listeners can only rehash the discourse that has been thrown at them, throwing out bemused inquiries that question Issy’s sanity, and propose an incestuous interpretation, among other things. Picking up on Issy’s religious frame of reference, Mamalujo generate the following ‘riddle’, or mathematical game, in an attempt to comprehend what they have heard: ‘Think of a maiden, Presentacion. Double her, Annupiacion. Take your first thoughts away from her, Immacolacion. (528.19–​21). Hispanic flourishes are more than appropriate given the strong Cult of Mary in that nation and, in the punning economy of the Wake, Pio Nono’s ‘Immaculisation’ of Mary through the articulation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is reconfigured as an ‘Immaculation’ (528.20–​1), a kind of inbuilt inoculation against sin. On one level, this passage can be viewed as a humorous summation of the irreverent approach to modern Mariology that is a feature of the book as a whole. With no clear logic or chronology in view, Mamalujo generate references to three stories associated with the life of the Virgin: her (apocryphal) Presentation at the Temple as a girl, the Fordham, p. 14.

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Annunciation announcing the conception of Jesus, and lastly her Immaculate Conception. Our Lady of Knock also comes into focus, and a reference to the apparition is conflated with an oft-​cited line from Matthew’s gospel: ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you’ (Matthew 7:7), now heard as ‘Knock and it shall appall unto you!’ (528.21). The heavy-​handed conflation of the divine revelation promised to those who seek it in Matthew with that which appals is somewhat facile. The reintroduction of Knock at this moment does, all the same, add an important dimension to the Looking Glass as a whole, which can now be viewed as a version of an encounter between visionary and apparition. The fact that Mamalujo respond in such a confused manner suggests that, while Jaun may have had the better of Issy in the previous chapter, here she has succeeded in beguiling her audience. Her victory is hardly unambiguously positive. Issy shoulders a heavy burden when she takes over her mother’s role as the keeper of truths and guardian of her father’s secrets. In response to this, the language thrown out by the perplexed members of Mamalujo is deeply troubling. The fragmentary verbal ejaculation, ‘[c]‌luse her, voil her, hild her hindly’ (528.21, most obviously glossed as, close her, veil her, heed her kindly) indicates that, regardless of any kindly intentions, the troublesome female who knows too much must be covered and veiled, effectively shut off from the world.

‘Ah weary me!’ (556.21): A glance to the future Thus far, we have seen some of the ways in which Issy seeks to outwit her interlocutors with her slippery language, often appropriating images from the very religious culture that seeks to contain her. Her disruptive potential at the Wake is, all the same, not usually primarily linked to these moments, but rather to her role as authoress of the footnotes that accompany the Nightlessons. Marian Eide has claimed this as an act of feminist subversion, whereby ‘Joyce choose for the girl writer the most scholarly space on the page, that of reference to the vast body of accumulated knowledge’, a positive view of Issy’s role that, while taking a different tack, might be compared to the celebration of female sexuality in the Wake that is a feature of post-structuralist readings of both ALP and Issy.23 Especial attention has been paid to the longest footnote, which appears on page 279, a moment where the girlish voice becomes so expansive that it engulfs the body text. The language of this longest footnote (hereafter cited by 23

Marian Eide, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, in James Joyce in Context, edited by John McCourt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 76–​87 (p. 85).

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line number within the footnote) does not deploy Catholic imagery so overtly as is the case with some of the examples just discussed. The religious theme does, nonetheless, come through in the end. The footnote is a bewildering outburst that opens with an erotic invitation: ‘Come, smooth of my slate, to the beat of my blosh!’ (l. 1). Mimicking the uneven tone of the Looking Glass, Issy casually remembers a suicidal moment, ‘I was thinking fairly killing times of putting an end to myself and my malody’ (l. 3–​4), before sliding into some apparently unrelated advice to her sister regarding ‘the propper way’ to write (l. 3–​6). This shift towards the idea of education is important for the passage as a whole. Instead of learning to conjugate verbs, she speaks of a time ‘when we will conjugate [i.e. copulate] together’ (l. 8–​9). She further declares that she will ‘slip through [her] pettigo’ and ‘get [her] decree’ (l.12–​ 13). Educational milestones, such as the ‘little go’ examination, now take place in the bedroom. Her ‘impending marriage’ (l. 18–​19), that most valuable decree, may well take precedence over the attainment of a university qualification. At this point, the gist of Issy’s words becomes more unfathomable still. Now comes a series of gossipy inquiries relating to the fates of other women. With names like ‘Olive d’Oyly’ (l.21), a reference to the popular Popeye comics, things have ostensibly become more light-​hearted. If the language thus far has been risqué, or at least a little titillating, now Issy’s words devolve into something that is thoroughly obscene. As the speaker imagines sitting astride a ‘Drewitt’s altar’ (l. 27) and ‘slapping [her] straights’ (l. 28), she is apparently encouraging a sexual encounter in a ritualistic setting. It is now becoming harder and harder to view this piece in the subversive, celebratory or liberated terms that have sometimes been employed to describe it. The Druidical rite might involve ‘clouts of illscents’, (l. 29) or clouds of incense, and in this respect the scenario comes closer to a conventional Catholic Mass. This colouring becomes more pronounced when Issy begins to wind up. Her words are suddenly clearer, and more immediately comprehensible, when she tells of ‘the good fother with the twingling in his eye [who] will always have cakes in his pocket to bethroat us with for our allmichael good’. She appears to enjoy chomping on the sweet treats, with a cry of ‘Amum. Amum. And Amum again’ (l. 32–​4). The scenario draws together suggestions of impropriety between Issy and one Fr Michael that haunt the book, and here the tale is taken to the very worst extreme. The priest may offer his cakes to young girls in order to ‘sweeten them up’, and in this context it is hard not to interpret the disturbing pun ‘bethroat us’ as being distinctly sexual.

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Despite the dark undertones that run through the passage entire, rather than rejecting or challenging the premise of the sexual economy, Issy appears to acknowledge its powers. Her repetition of the word ‘Amum’ invokes a distorted life cycle of sorts, where the gauntlet passes from mother to daughter. At the more literal level she is simply repeating the word ‘Amen’ with her mouth stuffed full. Continuing with this rather accepting, passive tone, her closing moral is simply this: ‘It’s the surplice money, oh my young friend and ah me sweet creature, what buys the bed while wits borrow the clothes’ (l. 35–​7). Her statement is typically convoluted, yet its underlying message is clear enough. In order to obtain surplus or, more appropriately given the clerical theme, ‘surplice’ money, and a secure domestic situation, a young woman must make full use of her wits in order to forge ahead. Where this strategy might actually lead hardly sounds like a promising prospect, because it is something that frequently involves exploiting her sexuality to its full advantage. But, in truth, it is not possible to reach any firm conclusions regarding Issy’s destiny, simply because we are given no firm indication of what her future will be. Appropriately enough, given the Wake’s temporal distortions –​and the backwards direction in which Shaun is travelling throughout the Watches –​the final detailed description of Issy in the Wake relates to a scenario that is furthest back in time. At the opening of chapter III.4, we are introduced to the girl in her crib, the ‘infantina Isobel’ (556.1), when a voice speculates about the possible lives she will lead. The futures imagined for the babe are woven from stereotypes, and all involve taking a veil of one kind or another: first she appears as ‘sister Isobel’, ‘the beautiful presentation nun’ (556.5; 4), then as ‘nurse Saintette Isabelle, with stiffstarched cuffs’ (556.7), and lastly as ‘Madame Isa Veuve La Belle’, a grieving widow in her ‘weeper’s veil’ (556.9–​11). When the narrator begins to trail off into a sleepy reverie, it is simply a circle of courtship, marriage, and wifely burden that occupies his mind as he intones, ‘for soon again ’twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me!’ (556.20–​1). Whether or not the prediction will come to pass is not a question that is easily answered. As is the case at the close of ‘Shem the Penman’, we must wait for the arrival of ALP at the dawn of the new day in order to gain a stronger sense of what the future might hold.

‘Pu Nuseht’ (593.23)

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‘Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!’ (593.1). Light bleeds through the cracks. A new day is breaking. According to the book’s Viconian cycle, Book IV marks the dawn of the period of renewal, and the coming of the age of gods that rightly follows the human era. All nations and faiths might now arrive. The Hindu goddess Sandhya is here, a personification of the twilight. As a garbled ‘Sunday’ these words mark the end of the process of creation and the beginning of the world. This Sunday can also be the day of Christ’s resurrection or simply a thrice repeated proclamation of holiness in the Latin Mass: Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. In keeping with the book’s blending of endings with beginnings, the climax of Eliot’s The Waste Land is present, words famously described in the poet’s own notes for his work as ‘a formal ending to an Upanishad. “The Peace which passeth understanding” is our equivalent of this word’.1 Joyce parodied Eliot’s conceit in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1925, translating his ‘shantihs’ into a rather more bourgeois sounding run of questions that is equally fitting here: ‘Shan’t we? Shan’t we? Shan’t we?’ (SL, 309). The new dawn is replete with possibilities for the individual. If the book, on one level, represents the journey of a single dreamer awakening from ‘a sound night’s sleep’ (597.2), this is the moment at which the dreams of night begin to slip away. But any semblance of order –​a glimpse at the wide awake world –​might be too much to ask for. The resurrection may equally be that of Tim Finnegan at his own wake, as depicted in the ballad from which the book borrows its title. While this final chapter tells us a lot about the Wake’s family drama, consolidating much that we already know, in other respects relations between family members continue to shift significantly. This is particularly the case in the progression from the father to the son with Shaun and HCE, and the awakening conscience of ALP. The dawn is imagined in various ways in the Watches, and the return in glory of the wandering Shaun is pre-empted at the close of both chapter III.1 and chapter III.2. Something similar to the anticipated event is now under way with the T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–​1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 76.

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rearrival of the awakening giant. Given the backward direction in which we have been travelling throughout the Watches, it is appropriate that the image of the rising sun is now inscribed accordingly, ‘Pu Nuseht’ (592.23). It is possible to extract some sense from the chaos at this point, and it is apparent that the world’s media (Tass, Patt, Staff, Woff, Havv, Bluvv2 and Rutter –​news agencies hailing from Russia [Tass, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union], Poland [the Pat or Polska Agencja Telegraficzna], Italy [Agenzia Stefani], Germany [Wolffsche Telegraphenbüro], France [Agence Havas], and finally the British [Reuters or Rutters], see 593.6) are called to the resurrection of a Christ-​like celebrity. As ‘Array! Surrection!’ (593.2–3), and as a reinvention of the ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’, this is the culmination of all prior insurrections. The call to ‘O rally, O rally, O rally!’ (593.3–4) can feasibly relate to all and any mass demonstration or gathering, although there is the lingering sense that the events of another Easter week are of particular importance: those that transpired at the General Post Office in Dublin in 1916. By turns these rallying cries sound political and religious, but in the end this might all be an advertising stunt, a ‘Clogan slogan’ for the promotion of Guinness: ‘Confindention to churchen. We have highest gratifications in announcing to to pewtewr publikumst of pratician pratyusers, genghis is ghoon for you’ (593.16-18). If EarwickerPorter is a redeemed man, he might resume his trade as a publican. Understood in this way, the overture to Book IV functions as a perverse depiction of a figure who has finally taken his place among the nations of Europe, and the world. The structure of the final Book/​chapter of the Wake is fivefold in nature: Part 1 concerns the awakening of the sleeping giant; Part 2 is St Kevin; in Part 3 a druidic version of Berkeley explains to St Patrick the ‘illusiones of the colourful world’ (JJA 63: 146a; BL 47488 f.99); ALP’s long-​deferred letter finally appears in full in Part 4; and Part 5 marks the transition into ALP’s famous closing (and opening) monologue. The composition history of Book IV is markedly different to that of the bulk of the Wake. Where the other chapters were crafted by means of the accretion of material over an extended period of time, serious work on the final chapter did not begin until February 1938. The ricorso, integral as it is to the structure of the whole, has its origin in an altogether different place than the rest of the Wake. It took in, from the outset, the spectre of the Second World War, as well as the massive culture and political transitions that were taking place across the water in Ireland. The most crucial of these was the replacement of the original 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State with a new constitution, following a national plebiscite on 1 July 1937. The revised constitution was the product I have been unable to discern the allusion behind ‘Bluvv’.

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of the Fianna Fáil government in power since 1932, and steered by De Valera. De Valera’s own objections to the original terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which shaped the initial Free State constitution, are indelibly inscribed into the fabric of the Wake via multiple punning allusions to ‘Document Number One’, the original Treaty, and ‘Document Number Two’, De Valera’s proposed alternative. The return to the beginning is the best-known feature of the climax of the Wake. When Joyce began writing Book IV in the late 1930s he enacted a parallel move; he picked up two of the earliest sketches for ‘Work in Progress’, sketches that had been composed in early 1923, and wove them into the fabric of the almost complete book. The sketches in question are burlesques of the hagiographies of St Kevin and St Patrick; and in addition a further allusion links back to the earliest saintly vignettes. This return is signalled by a brief mention of ‘the domnatory of Defmut’ (593.21), Domnat being a variant of the name of the Hiberno-Belgian St Dympna or Dymphna of Geel. Dympna first appears in the avant-texte of the Wake in a very early sketch about an anonymous schoolgirl at her lessons (NLI MS 41,818). As is the case with all of the early sketches, composed for a project that was not yet recognizable as Finnegans Wake, there is a bizarre, and perhaps heavy-handed, conflation of the ancient and the modern. Joyce’s strange depiction of a schoolgirl who knows how to ‘stage manage’ her legs in the correct position soon gives way to an ironic catalogue of virtues, and claims for ‘her prudence’, ‘her piety’, ‘her pity’ and ‘her charity’ serve as a mock litany for a not-so-virginal Virgin. The implicit religious theme becomes explicit when it is suddenly revealed that the girl in question is ‘in point of fact Saint Dympna’. If Book IV is forward-looking in its promise of a new day, it is also persistently backward-looking in its absurd rendering of Ireland’s early Christian past. Similarly, the text of the Revered Letter, which had fallen away during the process of revision in the mid-1920s, leaving behind only the pseudo-scholarly commentaries in chapter I.5, is now reestablished, albeit in a very different form to the letter that was originally drafted.3 From Book I onwards, HCE is depicted as a hunted man who is the subject of endless rumours about his alleged transgression in Phoenix Park, an event that, so it transpires, may not have occurred after all. During his encounter with the Cad in chapter I.2, Earwicker’s protestations of innocence serve largely to incriminate him, setting loose the chain of gossip that inspires ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ (44–​7), a Wakean take on the traditional broadside Van Hulle places particular emphasis on the textual history of the Revered Letter, tracing its history across 16  years of composition. Dirk Van Hulle, ‘The Lost Word:  Book IV’, in How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Chapter-​by-​Chapter Genetic Guide, edited by Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 436–​61.

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ballads about sensational crimes which were a hallmark of popular culture in early Victorian Britain and Ireland. The book also frequently hints at HCE’s religious persuasion(s), and his names (or initials) imply that he is aligned with a Protestant and/or Church of England tradition. Such an association reaches its apotheosis in the HCE-monologue of chapter III.3, where, in defence of his actions in the park, he proclaims that he ‘can take off [his] dudud dirtynine articles of quoting here’ (534.11–​12). HCE’s version of the thirty-​nine articles of the Anglican faith, pronounced with a characteristic stutter, is entwined with the potentially ‘dirty’ act of the public removal of clothing (‘duds’). Or it is simply the case that his dirty articles of clothing are on his mind, the very items that the washerwomen put through the mangle in Chapter I.8. In ‘Shem the Penman’, Shaun castigates his brother as a ‘prattlepate parnella’ (173.11), a figure who might, with an especially cruel inflection, be comparable to Simon Dedalus and his cronies in their prattling support of Charles Stewart Parnell and the Home Rule movement that was championed by their ‘poor dead king’ (P, 39). Parnell comes in and out of focus throughout the book, and his appearance is often signalled by the leitmotif ‘When you sell, get my price’, variations of which appear on at least fourteen occasions. This is an echo of Parnell’s alleged insistence that the Irish people should settle for no less than Home Rule in return for his scalp.4 All told, however, it is the sinning HCE, rather than Shem, who has more in common with the Protestant politician who was hounded from office following his betrayal by the Catholic bishops, at least according to one version of the story. In the Wake, theological debates surrounding the nature of human sin are not often absorbed or represented on their own terms, as, for example, in the case of the Pelagian material discussed on pages 58–9. The book is frequently concerned with the social mechanisms by which sins, or simply misdemeanours, are evaluated, be it in the titillating environment of the confessional (at least as this figures in the imagination of Pastor Chiniquy), via the gossiping washerwomen who wring out the Dubliners’ dirty laundry or by the crowd of pub customers who debate HCE’s guilt in chapter II.3. The infinitely deferred revelation of HCE’s supposed crime –​whether similar in nature or not to Parnell’s affront to the moral order after embarking upon an affair with the married Kitty O’Shea  –​constitutes a peculiarly Joycean, or more accurately Wakean, mode of evaluating sins or transgressions:  firm judgements cannot be upheld as the events themselves remain cloaked in obscurity. The origin of this tale appears to lie in R. Barry O’Brien’s important early biography The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell –​1866–​1891, in Two Volumes (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1898): ‘ “Don’t sell me for nothing”, interrupted Parnell. “If you get my value you may change me to-​morrow” ’ (Vol. II, p. 278).

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The sleeping giant who reawakens in Book IV, alternately and concurrently Tim Finnegan or HCE himself, looks somewhat different to any version of the patriarch at the Wake we have previously encountered, and it is possible that the Shaunish side of HCE’s character has now started to win through. Such a merging of identities is dramatized in the Third Watch of Shaun, when the voice of an incapacitated Yawn eventually cedes entirely to that of the father, the giving way of father to son that the narrative entire pre-​empts. With a cry of ‘Amtsadam, sir, to you! Eternest cittas, heil!’ (532.6), HCE as Adam, father of the human race, becomes the personification of a reformation centre of Calvinist Protestantism. Hailing a call of greeting from Amsterdam to the Eternal City, or a laudatory, Germanic ‘heil!’, there is also the sense in which Rome is called to heel. Whatever the lineage of this figure as he emerges at the dawn in Book IV, a rare moment of (relative) clarity implies something firmer through the self-​identifying statement of a figure who might be both Shaun-​Kevin and HCE himself, and who moreover purloins Molly Bloom’s famous call of affirmation at the close of Ulysses: ‘Oyes! Oyeses! Oyesesyeses! The primace of the Gaulls’ (604.22). As primate of both Gaels and Galls, possessing the highest religious authority in the land, he is the last in a line of archbishops to feature in the Wake. But unlike earlier allusions to Cullen, McCabe and Walsh he remains mysteriously nameless, a ‘mitrogenerand in the free state on the air’ (604.23–4), while wearing, or inducing, a mischievous grimace. Adopting the Gaelic nomenclature of Eire that was a hallmark of De Valera’s new constitution, images associated with the radio are also present. The punning association of Eire and air evokes an important institution for the new Ireland: the founding, in January 1926, of 2RN, known as ‘Radio Athlone’ to Joyce. The first radio station to be launched in the Free State, and the forerunner of modern-​ day RTÉ, chose to model its call sign after the last words of the song ‘Come Back to Erin’, a decision that speaks to a certain Joycean punning playfulness. A  cry of ‘And 2 R.N. and Longhorns Connacht, stay off my air!’ (528.28–​9) is part of Mamalujo’s confused response to Issy’s outburst in chapter III.3, discussed on page 116.  Likewise, the radio is a crucial device in chapter II.3 where, appropriately enough, a sermon is one of the broadcasts that filters through.5 The broadcast playing at HCE’s bar begins with a Jesuitical ‘Am. Dg.’ (ad majorem Dei gloriam, 324.23), and concludes with a Laus semper Deo converted into pounds, shillings, and pence (‘Ls. De.’, 325.3). This is an appropriate framing device when one thinks Jane Lewty writes about this device in ‘Q.R.N, I.C.Q:  Joyce, Radio Athlone and the 3-​Valve Set’, Hypermedia Joyce Studies, 8.1 (2007). . Accessed 1 January 2016.

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of the kinds of sermons depicted by Joyce throughout his works, sermons that are, to adopt Fr Purdon’s metaphor at the conclusion of ‘Grace’, concerned with the economy of salvation, and the balancing of one’s spiritual ledger. Managed by the Irish Post Office under the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs (a department founded in 1924) the radio sits squarely in Shaun’s realm, and, as can be seen in the following description by Maurice Gorham, the expectations heaped upon Irish radio are suitably Shaunish in nature: It was expected to revive the speaking of Irish, to foster a taste for classical music, to revive Irish traditional music, to keep people on the farms, to sell goods and services of all kinds, from sausages to sweep tickets, to provide a living and a career for writers and musicians, to unite the Irish people at home with those overseas, to end partition.6

This somewhat humorous and exaggerated summary contains a grain of truth, and it is not altogether surprising that the national broadcasting service of an emergent state should be bound up with political hopes and national mores. The radio might be powerful, but such an entity as the ‘primace’ described in Book IV need not rely on the radio waves in order to disseminate his message across the air. His ‘mitrogenerand’ (604.23) bishop’s mitre renders him akin to nitrogen gas as he seeps into the pores of society through the very atmosphere.

‘The leader, the leader!’ (593.13): Nationalisms old and new The opening pages of Book IV function as a chaotic restaging of all that has gone before, with countless recognizable Wakean motifs reoccurring anew. This is also the moment at which the Wake most concertedly maps its more geographically immediate cultural and historical themes onto the wider world, ‘In that earopean end meets Ind.’ (598.15–​16). Inevitably, this process is a two-​way street, and that which is projected outwards is taken back in and reconstituted according to the Wakean (anti)system: the West End of London town meets the East. The escalating conflict in Europe, and beyond, looms large at this point, the full reach of which could hardly have been widely anticipated as early as 1938. As an explanation or illumination of the writing that has gone before, this

Maurice Gorham, qtd in Donal P. Corcoran, Freedom to Achieve:  The Irish Free State, 1922–​1932 (London: Gill and Macmillan, 2013), p. 212.

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drowsy piece will hardly suffice. Certainly its intention cannot be to communicate something meaningful via a flurry of self-reflexive statements addressed to a reader who has made it this far about the near-impossible task of reading the text that has gone before. From what can be teased out, it appears that the resurrected hero now described possesses a startling admixture of characteristics which the reader has come to associate with HCE and Shaun by turns. Such an exchange and intermingling has important political, and politico-​religious, overtones: whereas the Catholic(ish) Shaun is on the rise, elements of the old, Anglo-​Protestant HCE linger on. Given Joyce’s abiding preoccupations, it is no surprise that the act of usurpation is crucial at the Wake, an idea that is humorously conveyed in relation to recent Irish history via several Wakean variations upon the slogan ‘Move up, Mick, make room for Dick’, a crude reference to the succession of Michael Collins by Richard Mulcahy following the assassination of the former on 22 August 1922. Just like the infinitely indeterminate crime of HCE, no two eyewitness accounts of Collins’s murder entirely match. Turning back to the world of Ulysses (with regard to both the setting of the earlier work and the period of its composition) key themes in Irish political history in the first two decades of the twentieth century are indelibly inscribed, and communicated with astonishing verbal economy, at the opening of Book IV. A cry of ‘Sonne feine, somme feehn avaunt!’ (593.8–​9) within the first few lines, a fitting addition to a passage that is full of slogans, mimics the rhythm of Sinn Féin Amháin (Ourselves, Ourselves Alone), and avaunt suggests a turning away. Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin newspaper is inevitably lurking somewhere close by, and here a (mock) invocation of an Irish-​Ireland is conflated with the killing fields of the Somme, and potentially the conscription of Irish troops for the British Army. An exclamation of ‘the leader, the leader!’ (593.13), a pressman’s call for a juicy lead, again mischievously evokes nationalist discourse with its allusion to the periodical of the same name. Founded in 1900 by David Patrick (‘D. P.’) Moran, the Leader quickly became the mouthpiece of an outspoken brand of Catholic nationalism. Collected in the 1905 work, The Philosophy of Irish-​Ireland, Moran’s journalistic contributions enshrine such crucial identifiers as the speaking of the Irish language, and the playing of Gaelic sports, as the hallmarks of national identity, accompanied by a fair helping of vitriol and bigotry. The Leader itself plays a notable part in the genesis of the Wake, and this publication is the source of a number of reading notes; it is one among many instances of Joyce’s ongoing investment in the Irish press in the 1920s and 1930s.

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The notes from the Leader include several entries from a regular, quasi-​fictional feature with the appropriately polysemous title ‘Our Ladies’ Letters’, a column that began in 1908 and lasted until the 1960s.7 The letters in question were purportedly exchanged between one ‘Peg’, resident in a provincial town, and one ‘Moll’, an inhabitant of Dublin, and the burlesqued depiction of colloquial women’s language may well have been a source of inspiration for some of the stereotypes associated with ‘feminine’ diction and style with Issy and ALP. Entries inspired by this column include the likes of:  ‘tis the life of him’ and ‘without my teeth’ (VI.B.10.29), an image that immediately conjures the women of Eliot’s ‘Game of Chess’ in The Waste Land; and ‘I’m ashamed of the /​bit of butter’ (VI.B.10.30), which is the source of one of Issy’s most human-​sounding proclamations in the loveliletter:  ‘Of course, engine dear, I’m ashamed for my life (I must clear my throttle) over this lost moment’s gift of memento nosepaper which I’m sorry, my precious, is allathome I with grief can call my own’ (457.32–​5). Another fictionalized feature that caught his eye was ‘As Others See Us’, a column made up of the none-​too-​subtle letters penned by the Cockney ‘John Bull Junior’ to a friend in England, notes that are the source of some of the quintessentially English collocations in the Wake.8 Buffalo notebook VI.B.10 also includes notes taken from more straight-​laced commentaries, including the ‘Current Topics’ of the day, and a piece entitled ‘A Candid Critic on the Government’ that appeared in the Leader on 11 November 1922. The author of this opinion piece takes a number of swipes at the likes of Cosgrave and O’Higgins, and his critique of the Provisional Government on behalf of Irish-​Irelanders includes remarks about a perceived lack of investment in Irish industry and labour. As the columnist opines: ‘A good deal of the work performed at home has been handed to un-​Irish and anti-​Irish firms, whilst firms with any tinge of Irish-​Ireland management have been ignored’.9 We have seen elsewhere that the precise nature of Joyce’s interests can never be predicted, and his idiosyncratic notes from the Leader, which steer away from direct political statements towards the (semi)veiled expression of such ideas in a fictional guise, may well be a consequence of the fact that he was already more than familiar with the political ideology of the likes of Moran, something that can be detected in the earliest journalistic writings that Joyce produced at Trieste. The linguistic tics and tropes by which the philosophy of Irish-​Ireland Joyce’s interest in this particular column is noted in Lernout’s essay, ‘James Joyce: the odious and still today insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher’, in Reading Notes: Variants 2/​3, edited by Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 303–​25 (p. 311). 8 Lernout, ‘notesnatcher’, p. 311. 9 Unsigned article, ‘A Candid Critic on the Government’, Leader, 11 November, 1922, p. 325, column 2. 7



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might be voiced and circulated was of equal interest to the man who would go on to create the Wake. Gibson has commented upon the importance of both Griffith and Moran for Joyce in relation to ‘Circe’, emphasizing the distinction between the modes of cultural and political nationalism embodied by the two men, and laying especial emphasis on the importance of Moran with regard to some of the humour in Ulysses ­chapter  15.10 As he has it, ‘[m]‌uch of the laughter in “Circe” at the expense of sentimental idealism turns out to be laughter at an essential foreign (Victorian) construct ludicrously at odds with Dublin’s nighttown and its denizens’.11 Naturally with regard to the context for the composition of Book IV, and the chapter’s larger political preoccupations, times have moved on considerably. Thomas C.  Hofheinz has astutely observed that ‘the final section of Finnegans Wake opens with dawn breaking over Ireland, an Ireland linked to modernity by a cluster of references to the first fifteen years of the Irish Free State’.12 This important feature of the text, which reaches beyond a cluster of allusions into crucial structural and thematic preoccupations, has been too often overlooked. Possibly as a consequence of Hofheinz’s interest in the Wake’s treatment of historiography, rather than particular social, political or cultural themes, his consideration of this set of related allusions is somewhat brief, and his insights open the door to a more extensive discussion of politico-religious themes at the Wake. One feature of this cluster of allusions is the manner in which Joyce plays with the word ‘Healiopolis’, an ironic name given to the Vice-Regal lodge in Dublin when Tim Healy took up the role of the Free State’s first governor general. If ongoing tensions between Britain and Ireland are implied by the references to Healy, AngloIrish politics are placed firmly on the table when we learn that ‘wisely for us Old Bruton has withdrawn his theory’. The implication could be that ‘Old Britain’ has at last relinquished her claim to Ireland, although the waters are muddied by an idiosyncratic reference to Richard Burton’s retracted theory regarding the source of the Nile.13 In typically Wakean fashion, the claim is immediately countered by

Andrew Gibson, ‘“Strangers in my House, Bad Manners to Them!”: England in “Circe”’, in Reading Joyce’s ‘Circe’: European Joyce Studies 3, edited by Andrew Gibson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 179–​221. See also the relevant chapter of Joyce’s Revenge. 11 Gibson, ‘Strangers in My House’, p. 189. 12 Hofheinz, p. 35. 13 There are a number of factors that may have led Joyce to Burton. In one sense, his exploits in Africa in search of the source of the Nile render him the quintessential English colonial explorer. Burton’s appointment as consul to Trieste in 1870, and his subsequent death there in 1890, may have left a lingering cultural memory in the place the Joyces called home for so many years. Further, his interest in erotic literature, resulting in the publication by Burton of an English translation of the Karma Sutra, may have held a certain appeal. 10

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an assertion that implies both an affirmation and a contradiction, ‘you are alpsulumply wroght!’ (both 595.18-19). Right, wrong, or simply overwrought. A further, and more precise, hint at the new political order is to be found just a few lines previously, with a mention of ‘Newirgland’s premier’ (595.10). The blending of Ireland with New England reflects an abiding Wakean concern with Hiberno-​American connections, something that is most prominent in the recurring motif of the letter from Boston, Mass. As the first man of a new Ireland and an individual born in New York, and therefore a product of the New World, De Valera is more than likely the primary reference. A Shaunish association is established through the list of food-related absurdities that spiral out from this description, including the likes of ‘confects’, ‘bullyoungs’, ‘smearsassage’, ‘patates’, and ‘steaked pig’ (595.10–11) which echo, in part, Shaun’s gargantuan carnivorous acts in Book III, discussed on pages 77–80. As ‘premier’ his raging appetite might now traverse the counties of Ireland: ‘for limericks’ (Limerick); ‘for waterfowls’ (Waterford); ‘for wagsfools’ (Wexford); ‘for louts’ (Louth); ‘for cold airs’ (Kildare); ‘for late trams’ (Leitrim), and so forth, the list runs on (cf. 595.10–17). The most resonant phrase relating to the recent history of the Free State that the chapter invokes is HCE’s ‘articles thirtynine of the reconstitution’ (596.8-9), which blends a description of the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England as laid down by Thomas Cranmer and others with De Valera’s incremental revisions to the constitution, culminating in the new constitution of 1937 (something previously associated with HCE at the pivotal moment in the Third Watch). Most crucial of these changes was the removal of Article 17, which required oaths of allegiance to the Crown. HCE’s hybrid phrase gestures towards a persistent British influence in the Free State, and more broadly the compromised nature of the Anglo-​Irish Treaty,14 a thoroughly ambiguous moment of national awakening or renewal that is, arguably, dramatized in the Wake with the transformation of Shaun-​Yawn into HCE in the Third Watch. Moreover, the HCE who bursts forth at the crescendo of chapter III.3 is explicitly associated with De Valera when he makes mention of a process whereby he has ‘devaleurised the base fellows for the curtailment of their lower man’ (543.1–​2), an act that implies both valorization and devaluation. Here there is the implicit sense that any major political shift or transition might be an ambiguous or compromised affair. Whether we look to the reformation of the English Church that is at the heart of HCE’s declamation of his articles of faith in his own defence, or the 14

Hofheinz reaches this conclusion regarding the inclusion of images related to the Free State in Book IV at pp. 35–​8.



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political makeup of Ireland in the years following Partition, each can be viewed as a scenario whereby one dogmatic system of thought simply cedes to another. Given the heavy involvement of future Primate of Ireland John Charles McQuaid in the drafting of the 1937 constitution,15 and the fact that De Valera’s proposed changes were vetted twice by the Vatican before being placed before the Dáil Éireann, the religious direction in which Ireland was heading must have been more than apparent when Joyce began work on Book IV in early 1938. The impact of the conservative, Catholic agenda of the 1937 constitution has received significant attention from feminist historians. As Caitriona Beaumont puts it, the new legislation had particularly disastrous consequences for Irish Catholic women, setting back women’s liberation by several decades by enshrining traditional Catholic approaches to marriage and abortion into law.16 As shown in Chapter 2, Catholic attitudes to marriage and family life are subjected to concerted critique in Jaun’s lecture to Issy. And the permanence of the marriage vow, as inscribed in the new constitution, now bleeds into ALP’s language in the final pages of the Wake: ‘And though dev do espart’ (626.31–​2). The moment of reawakening that is depicted in Book IV is a universal resurrection or renewal, an act that spans any spatial or temporal plane imaginable. It is also something that takes place ‘[b]‌y dim delty Deva’: the delta of the River Liffey that is ALP; the northern English town of Chester taken back to its Roman roots; and now a place that sounds as though it has been overwritten with the name of Ireland’s third president. Here, at last, our ‘mudden research’ (595.25) into the Wake’s midden heap of history has led us into the ‘deep deep deeps of Deepereras’ (595.28). Returning to the prominent motif of the rising sun, one last aspect of this idea is worth remarking upon, and that is the manner in which this metaphor was already a part of the visual language of Home Rule. Memorably, Joyce calls attention to this when the ad-​man Bloom contemplates the Freeman’s Journal header and recalls a witticism that he attributes to Griffith: Sun burst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest. (U, 4.100–​4)

McQuaid’s heavy involvement, in partnership with De Valera, is recounted by John Cooney in John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 16 Beaumont, p. 574. 15

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Considering the healthy dose of irony that is part and parcel with Griffith’s description, a celestial impossibility given both the position of the parliament building and the direction of the rising sun, it is appropriate that Book IV should resuscitate this device in the service of the strangest act of awakening in English literature. At the dawn of the new day, the chapter looks as far backwards as it does forwards as seen in the account of the backwards-barrelling Shaun-Kevin that we are now treated to.

‘doctor insularis of the universal church’ (606.7–​8): St Kevin’s ‘Irish Ireland’ The hyperbolic literary conventions of the hagiographer or myth-​maker ring out at the opening of ‘St Kevin’, when, in a protracted clearing of the throat, the narrator relates how such a tale has come down to us: ‘as we have seen, so we have heard, what we have received, that we have transmitted, thus we shall hope, this we shall pray’ (604.27–​31). Our ‘slippery dick the springy heeler’ (604.29) has retreated from the world, paradoxically, ‘in the search for love of knowledge’ (604.31–​2). Such a thing may be achieved ‘through the comprehension of the unity in altruism through stupefaction’ (604.32–​3), hardly the most penetrating of spiritual or intellectual pursuits. As the vignette progresses, the activities associated with this fledgling saint-​in-​the-​making will only become more absurd. If the larger impact of a philosophy of Irish-Ireland is implied in references to both Moran’s Leader and Sinn Féin with which the chapter opens –​and indeed in the extremes of certain of the Citizen’s attitudes in Ulysses ­chapter 12 –​ this idea is here taken to its (il)logical extreme with St Kevin. As ‘doctor insularis of the universal church’ (606.7–​8), the hermit joins the ranks of the likes of Augustine of Hippo, Jerome and Aquinas, as Doctor of the Church. That his church is ‘universal’ or catholic may run counter to the isolationist logic of the whole. The work of this insular islander is undertaken in a bathtub cum altar, rendering Kevin ‘ninthly enthroned, in the concentric centre of the translated water’ (606.3–​4),  cut-​off from the outside world by nine concentric bodies of water. The inward-​looking ideology that had its roots in the thinking of the likes of Moran was translated from cultural expressions to economic policy under De Valera, who levied exceptionally high taxes on imports in a bid to encourage local industry. More extreme was the retaliatory economic Trade War between Ireland and Britain from 1932–​8, the immediate context for the composition of Book IV. And a parallel drive towards self-​sufficiency, albeit depicted in ludicrously overblown terms, is at the heart of the revised portrait of the ‘anchorite’



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(605.27) Kevin, which Joyce put together some sixteen years after composing the initial prose sketch. The ideological and pragmatic dimensions of the ‘Anglo-​Irish Trade War’ have, again, received significant attention from historians of Ireland in the first decades of the Free State. Mary E. Daly, among others, has it that the dispute over payments was simply an effect of larger constitutional disagreements; it was in sum a consequence of De Valera’s desire to dismantle the 1921 treaty.17 For Daly, ‘[b]oth countries sacrificed economic interests for political ends, with constitutional issues taking precedence over a trade and financial settlement’.18 The birth of the Wake coincides with the end of this bout of hostilities and the new steps that Ireland took towards establishing free trade. The book’s engagement with the idea of international trade is, all the same, far from clear-cut. As part of a supposed defence of her husband in the course of her letter, ALP claims that her husband has the national interest in mind when it comes to his consumption of dairy, calling him ‘the man what never put a dramn in the swags but milk from national cowse’ (615.26–7). But when we turn back, again, to the story about Shaun’s gigantic appetite in chapter III.1, any interest in Irish produce is shown to be a sham by means of the punning portmanteaus used to describe the dishes that he consumes. For example, ‘Corkshire alla mellonge’ (406.3) might blend an English Yorkshire pudding with an Irish treat originating from the county of Cork. The linguistic flourishes employed hint that this is, after all, a Frenchified mixture. Whether viewed through the lens of Ireland in the first decades of the Free State or any other historical moment, no successive waves of depression or austerity will inhibit the well-fed Shaun. Gluttony will trump loyalty to the national cause every time. The burlesque of Kevin’s hagiography is, naturally given the subject matter, as much religious as it is political, and by this point it may be impossible to distinguish between the two. Christopher Bjork has discussed two flawed models of purity that underpin the St Kevin sketch at both the surface and archival level.19 The prominent allusion to Fr Bernard Vaughan’s ‘portable altare cum balneo’ (605.8), now the vessel of water in which Kevin lies, was noted in relation to the presence of Vaughan at the Wake on page 82. A further important source of inspiration, and a source of curiosity to Joyce at a very early stage in the composition history, is a series of newspaper articles related to the trial and execution of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters for the murder of Edith’s Mary E. Daly, Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922–​1939 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), p. 155. 18 Daly, p. 155. 19 Christopher Bjork, “‘Sinted Sageness’: Some Sources for Kevin in Finnegans Wake”, Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce, edited by David Hayman and Sam Slote (Amsterdam:  Rodopi, 1995), pp. 85–​100, p. 86. 17

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husband, Percy.20 This latter story, a cause célèbre in Georgian London, would function as a crucial source of inspiration for the whole book. The Thompson/ Bywaters scandal may well have prompted the idea of HCE’s ‘original’ crime, as well as the notion that the rumour would be transmitted by the popular press. Viewed in the light of these two important sources of inspiration, the St Kevin sketch can be interpreted as yet another iteration of the idea of the hypocrisy of the religious. This is an idea that recurs throughout the book, especially, have we have seen, in the first two Watches of Shaun. The surface appearance of purity masks something far darker going on besides. When it comes to the details of Kevin’s miracle-​making, R. J. Schork has discovered an additional source that in tone and content feels crucial for the passage entire: the Life of Kevin that appears in John Canon O’Hanlon’s nine volume reference work, Lives of the Irish Saints.21 Less of a ‘double-​edged’ source than the likes of those relating to Vaughan and Thompson/​Bywaters, this is a scholarly reference work that draws upon a number of Latin sources. Nonetheless, this source betrays a more macabre flavour: saint-​making is a bloodthirsty business. Providing an infancy-​narrative of sorts, O’Hanlon describes the various miracles that were attributed to Kevin in childhood, and it is these which are explicitly taken on and parodied in Book IV of the Wake. In keeping with the tone of the whole, the miracles as they now appear are of the most ironic and irreverent nature. The hermit has carried hot coals but dropped them (‘dropping by the way the lapful of live coals’, 604.35); has subjected himself to nettle stings, although the incident actually sounds more sexual than painful (‘smoothing out Nelly Nettle and her lad of mettle, full of stings’, 604.36–​605.1); and he has fed only on ‘gnewgnawns bones’ (605.1), a description as cannibalistic as it is pious, and that contains an embedded reference to Newman. Finally, the narrator notes that Kevin has left ‘all the messy messy to look after our douche douche’ (605.1–​ 2), which is an infantilized way of saying that Kevin has abandoned the ‘messy’ world in order to be responsible for our baptisms, or simply our personal hygiene. We know from surviving notebooks that Joyce pored over hagiological works, and countless clusters of entries have been traced to saintly sources. I noted on page 58 that Joyce obsessively took notes from Patrician hagiographies while compiling the notebook VI.B.14, and, as Wim Van Mierlo and Ingeborg Landuyt have demonstrated, another source of inspiration was F. J. Sheed’s The Irish Way, a book Vincent Deane, ‘Bywaters and the Original Crime’, in ‘Finnegans Wake’: teems of times, edited by Andrew Treip (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 165–​204. 21 R. J. Schork, ‘Sheep, Bones, and Nettles: St. Kevin’s Childhood Miracles’, Writing Its Own Wrunes For Ever: essais de génétique joycienne, edited by Daniel Ferrer and Jacquet Claude (Tusson, Charente: Du Lérot, 1998), pp. 151–​62 (pp. 155–​56). 20



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from which Joyce took notes in the early 1930s.22 This work places portraits of the saints alongside modern-day holy men and women, and sets out to illustrate the superior qualities of a distinctly Irish brand of Catholicism by asserting that ‘the Irish way is St. Patrick’s way’.23 The collection had a number of contributers including Joyce’s university acquaintance C. P. Curran, who offers sketches of St Laurence O’Toole and Mary Aikenhead. Somewhat bizarrely, portraits of the likes of St Patrick, St Brendan and St Columcille are made to sit alongside more modern figures like Michael O’Clery (remembered in the Wake as the compiler of the Annals of the Four Masters) and the famous temperance campaigner Fr Theobald Mathew, who is also mentioned on a number of occasions. Genetic criticism has additionally flagged J. M. Flood’s 1917 work Ireland: Its Saints and Scholars as a key source.24 Joyce’s sources of inspiration are relevant to a reading of St Kevin because, at this moment, the satire does not target the kind of romantic vision of Ireland’s pre-Christian past that might be associated with the ‘Celtic note’ of the AngloIrish Literary Revival. Rather, the genre that is parodied here, albeit it in a manner that is as playful as it is scathing, is the religious Life, and, more broadly speaking, the excesses of the manner in which contemporary Catholic writers sought to mythify Ireland’s religious heritage. Joyce’s interest in, and response to, the ‘Catholic revival’ throughout his lifetime is an area in which a great deal of research remains to be done. This is in particular the case with the relationship between Joyce and Padraic Colum. Colum, who eventually forged a career in New York City, represents another bridge between Ireland and Irish Catholic America – a connection that the Wake builds time and again. After ‘St Kevin’ comes an impenetrable sketch featuring St Patrick and Berkeley in the guise of a druid, a set-​piece that revisits central aesthetic questions regarding the relationship between language and experience. The piece is rendered is so convoluted a manner, however, that the reader will struggle to extract any sense from the exchange. A perverse logic is precisely the point, and amid the fog of incomprehension some light touches of humour shine through. Within the druid-Berkeley’s account of the spectrum of visible light, there remains the sense that all of the colours seen may in fact be green. Inverting the terms of the original legend, it is now the case that St Patrick has been converted Wim Van Mierlo and Ingeborg Landuyt, ‘Catholicism, Nationalism, and Exile: Sheed and Ward’s Irish Way in VI.B.34’, Genetic Joyce Studies, 2 (2002) . Accessed 1 January 2016. 23 F. J. Sheed (ed.), The Irish Way (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932), p. vi. 24 Wim Van Mierlo, ‘Joyce’s Sources: Intertextuality and Pretextuality in Finnegans Wake’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Miami, 1997), pp. 85–​97 and passim. 22

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by Ireland, rather than vice versa. This is a peculiarly Wakean version of the process that saw a Romano-British saint transformed into an Irish national hero. It is with more than a little sense of relief that the reader at last emerges from the St Patrick vignette, when the recognizable voice of ALP, and the words of her long-​displaced letter, finally break through.

‘But a puny’ (627.22–​4): The revelation of ALP The question of ALP’s religious allegiances is a thorny matter, a problem that is exacerbated by the gossipy narrative economy of the Wake. Turning to the stories spun by the washerwomen in ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, and to the account of ALP’s malicious gift-giving extravaganza that was discussed in the Introduction, the frame of reference is far from Catholic. As one who administers to ‘the Smyly boys at their vicereine’s levee’ (209.33–4) ALP morphs into Dublin-born philanthropist Ellen Smyly, founder of the well-known Smyly mission homes, institutions that have often been associated with a Protestant, proselytizing influence in Ireland. Pointing in another direction entirely, the washerwomen’s description of ALP’s gargantuan ‘period gown of changeable jade’ is a dress so lavish that it will ‘robe the wood of two cardinals’ chairs and crush poor Cullen and smother MacCabe’ (200.2–4). The fact that the green of the dress is of a ‘changeable’ variety might suggest a wavering national allegiance. While the ‘logic’ of the image is extremely hard to follow, it is entirely in keeping with Joyce’s attitude towards the Catholic hierarchy that this, albeit ludicrous, image of ostentation and excess is connected with the likes of Cullen and McCabe. Throughout ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, ALP’s costumes are significant not only because of what is projected by her clothing, but also owing to what is disguised by her strange garments. A case in point is the descriptions of dress that abound in the washerwomen’s strangest story about ALP, a precursor to the tale of the gifts. As it is related to us, the story revolves around a time when ALP stole her son’s ‘shammy mailsack’ (206.10), a quintessentially Shaunish image that contains Shemmish and shamming traces. Mirroring the organic fashions of the marriage of the trees that constitutes one of the funniest parodies in ‘Cyclops’, ALP, now a version of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, has let her hair down, coated her body with ‘pistania mud’ (206.31) and other undesirable substances, and fashioned ornaments for herself out of natural materials found in the landscape (206.29207.20). The rivery woman now wishes to blend with the earth or the river bank.



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The narrator tells us that ALP stands ‘between two ages’ (207.36), and this sense of temporal slippage is reflected in her protean costume. With her pointed ‘sugarloaf ’ (208.10) hat that is adorned by a band of gorse, one hundred streamers, and a ‘fishnetzveil’ (208.10), ALP’s dress, fashioned from the oddments of the river, apes a medieval sugarloaf with flowing ribbons. Simultaneously, her costume is imbued with traits that speak, both directly and indirectly, to the idea of two religious tribes. ALP’s polymorphous dress is overladen with politico-​religious associations, and in this instance the imagery is more sectarian than Church historical. This facet of the tale becomes apparent when the narrator reverts to the earlier image of ALP’s enormous and potentially murderous ‘period gown’, the tail of which now drags ‘ffiffty odd Irish miles behind [her] lungarhodes’ (208.26). ALP may be dressed in a colossal, organically decorated gown which renders her at one with her habitat, but it is made apparent, by means of a glimpse at the ‘bloodorange bockknickers’ (208.15) hidden beneath her heavy skirts, that her true colours are now showing through. If any claim to authenticity can be made with regard to the washerwomen’s tall tales, these masculine knickerbockers, coloured a deep and bloody Unionist orange, indicate that the allegiances of this primal, elemental creature may well lie somewhere over the water. From this point on, the mood is increasingly militaristic. ALP’s ‘blackstripe tan joseph’ (208.17), a type of cloak, is now affiliated with David Lloyd George’s infamous band of temporary constables, the ‘Black and Tans’. In this imagined incarnation, which makes mention of ALP’s ‘rushgreen epaulettes’ and ‘a leadown here and there of royal swansruff ’ (208.17-20), her loyalty to the green of home is counterbalanced by the implication that she is a royalist soldier of sorts. A canny operator, ALP covers the trappings of her mixed loyalties, as well as the militaristic strands of her personality, with a ‘civvy’, or civilian, ‘codroy coat’ (208.20). If the religious allegiances or associations intended for ALP are hard to fathom, this problem is magnified tenfold in the case of her husband. The Wake’s attitude towards all shades of Protestant Christianity, and indeed any and all dissenting traditions, could warrant a study of its own. And the figure of HCE is at the nexus of this web of associations. When the renascent HCE invokes a ‘preprotestant caveat’ (534.16) in defence of his actions in chapter III.3, he starts to function as a figure who predates the Reformation, or even the Great Schism that fractured the early Christian church from east to west. Similarly, his insistence on the ‘pontofacts massimust’ (532.9) of the matter as proof of his clean conscience casts HCE as Pontifex Maximus, the high priest of pre-Christian

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Rome from whom the pope derives his title. In the important HCE-monologue of chapter III.3, otherwise known as the Master Builder, the scope of HCE’s religious affiliations is captured beautifully by the claim that as a youngster he was ‘intended for broadchurch’ (533.27). A less ambiguous truth might be found in the exclamation that ‘[t]here is nothing like leuther’ (536.36). Unfortunately, in this playful formulation, Luther himself is a little leathery. In a speech that is littered with allusions to Protestant strands of Christianity, HCE as Master Builder claims credit for the construction of the great urban centres of the world. The grandiose, and quite literally gigantic, endeavours that are associated with the Wake’s patriarch at this moment may be what leads Bernard Benstock to suppose that the book is a celebration of HCE’s reformation spirit.25 This is something that he believes Joyce could have indulged in without recourse to restrictive Protestant religious creeds. Benstock’s reading is plausible owing to the manner in which the Wake privileges schismatic thinking, and as a universal dissenter HCE functions as an important source of disruption and chaos. All the same, when grand metaphors are translated into domestic, human terms – as all things are at the Wake – HCE’s professed integrity will not hold out for long. During the Master Builder speech it is apparent that HCE does not indulge in schismatic thinking for its own sake, but rather for the purpose of bolstering his own defence. In an attempt to prove his innocence with regard to the incident in the park, he calls witnesses like ‘our private chaplain of Lambeyth and Dolekey, bishopregionary’ (533.8–9), relying on members of the Anglican hierarchy to speak to his ‘clean charactering, even when detected in the dark’ (533.13–14). A pattern of slippage can be detected from the book’s opening chapter onwards, and this is evident when we hear about the elevation of Earwicker and his ‘long vicefreegal existence’ (33.30). As viceroy or another prominent member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, his lifestyle may be both free and regal, but, in a typically Wakean double-handed gesture, such an existence might of necessity be frugal. At the opposite end of the social spectrum, in the comparatively wide-awake world of chapter III.4, HCE and ALP, in the guise of the Porters, are associated with several shades of ‘low’ Protestantism when they are labeled ‘episcopalian’ and ‘free kirk’ (559.26; 29) respectively. The transition from ‘high’ Anglicanism to ‘low’ protestantism represents a crucial shift in the presentation of HCE’s character. As Mr Porter in the impossibly dark barroom scene of chapter III.4, he becomes a bankrupt publican whose reputation has been dragged into the gutter. See Benstock, ‘The Final Apostasy’, p. 433.

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According to Wakean principles, religious affiliations go hand in hand with a range of supplementary character traits, and the most prominent of these is the frequent association of HCE with invaders or conquerors of all colours and stripes. As an ancient Scandinavian, and more specifically a Dane, HCE is firmly linked to the Viking violators of ancient Dublin. Conversely, HCE’s Anglo-​ Protestant leanings put him in league with all invaders who have crossed the water from the opposite direction. Translated into domestic terms, this invader is sometimes depicted as a violent or drunken individual. This can be seen in the washerwomen’s tall tale about ALP’s prodigious capacity for childbearing, when they tell us that ‘she can’t remember half of the cradlenames she smacked on them by the grace of her boxing bishop’s infallible slipper’ (201.31–3). Here, her ‘boxing bishop’ (presumably HCE himself) becomes imbued with a kind of Papal Infallibility, or at least he owns a slipper that might possess such qualities;26 and the act of naming is inseparable from violence in the sense of boxing or beating. More troublesome still is a story about the time when ALP procured young girls for her spouse, calling them ‘to go in till him, her erring cheef, and tickle the pontiff aisy-​oisy?’ (198.12). The conflation of a perverse pontiff or pope with Parnell as Erring Chief is entirely in keeping with the manner in which the washerwomen cast aspersions on the characters of both HCE and ALP in the course of their speculative discussion. In a further, and blunter, account of the couple’s courtship, the washerwomen suggest that the invader HCE has ‘raped [ALP] home’ (197.21). As readers who have survived the journey to the final pages of the Wake, we are surely deserving of some reward. ALP’s missive written in defence of her husband, and placed under the microscope with regard to its material properties in chapter I.5, has acquired near mythic trappings by this point. Alas, when the document is finally left open on the table at the conclusion of Book IV, there are far more questions outstanding than answers given. While it appears at first that ALP will embark upon a ‘pure’ defence of her much-​maligned husband, the terms of her defence soon slide into what sounds like an accusation, for ‘is it forbidden by the honorary tenth commendmant to shall not bare full sweetness

The phrase ‘infallible slipper’ is not without precedent. It appears, for example, in a book of 1875 entitled Men Who Have Made the New German Empire in the context of a description of Bishop Strossmayer’s refusal to accept the dogma of Papal Infallibility:  ‘The Ultramontane press triumphantly announced beforehand that the bishop would declare his readiness to recant his heretical errors, and to kiss the papal foot-​covering henceforth as an infallible slipper. It turned out no go, to use an expression of vulgarism’. G. L. M. Strauss, Men Who Have Made the New German Empire: Volume 1 (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1875), p. 267. The context here is suggestive, but further evidence would be required to claim this definitively as Joyce’s source.

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against a nighboor’s wiles’ (615.32–​3). The mode of narrative slippage that dominates the tone of the letter as we at last get to hear it is characteristic of ALP’s talk about HCE throughout. Characters such as the Cad and Sully, who feature in early versions of the crime as told in Book I, are again present, but the full nature of what has transpired remains entirely out of reach. The definitive tipping point in ALP’s words occurs as her oral letter enters its postscript, and she finally accepts that her man will not rise up as she has desired. There is an emotional shift in tone when she acknowledges that ‘I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You’re but a puny’ (627.22–​4). HCE is not her risen Christ, but a physically diminished puny man. The awakening of Ireland, and the world, into the fresh morning of modernity at the close of the book is a moment that is filled with possibility; it signals a point of transition that is redolent with hopes that have yet to come to fruition. The further shift into abstract and anthropomorphic language as ALP enters her death throes renders the larger social implications of this moment of awakening impossible to grasp. Yet the writing retains, until the very end, a human core. The concluding portion of the Wake has led John Bishop to claim that ALP now becomes the ‘New Free Woman’, an individual who envelopes everything that is inside the book.27 This approach typifies a celebratory critical tradition with regard to the last words of Anna. But as we saw with Issy, such a view cannot entirely hold good owing to the perplexing manner in which women at the Wake both affirm and transcend the structures that have forged them. In this final stretch for the river-​woman who is flowing out to sea, the language of patriarchal theology dominates. The ending, and beginning, of Finnegans Wake lacks the affirmative power of Molly’s ‘Yes’ when ALP’s fading voice announces her return to the Father. This is a return that is dominated by a shivering fear when she states that she will come ‘back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father’ (628.1–2). ALP’s revelation about her husband may have come too late, as she is now faced with death. All she can do is pass the keys of knowledge on to her daughter: ‘Lps. The keys to. Given!’ (628.15). It is hers to run with.

John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 382.

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Some three-​quarters of a century since the appearance of Finnegans Wake in print, and the premature death of its creator shortly thereafter, Joyce’s attitude towards the faith he was born into has not shifted. This simple fact may not be immediately apparent in the wealth of criticism that encroaches upon this realm. The subject of James Joyce and Catholicism, and/​or the Catholic Joyce, remains something of a battleground; the trenches remain muddy as positions are inevitably bound up with larger questions of national and cultural allegiance. The author’s decision to leave the Catholic Church, and his subsequent apostatic attitude towards the faith, is on one level fairly straightforward, and at another endlessly complex. It is unlikely that this will quell our desire to pin down and define, at the same time as seeking to open the work up and explore. If we discount, or at least suspend our belief in, further substantial archival discoveries the likes of the handful of early sketches for Finnegans Wake purchased by the National Library of Ireland in 2006, the words on the page, and the content of the extant manuscripts, are essentially what we have to go on. The fact that a single work has provoked such diverse responses, critical and creative, is of course a testament to its power. Were the Wake not such a difficult, funny, highfalutin, lowbrow, obscene, erudite, and so very human a beast, such debates would not be possible in the first place, at least not in any meaningful sense. The Wake by its very nature both invites and precludes firm critical pronouncements, and it is all too tempting to proclaim new dogmas about this essentially anti-​dogmatic work. Among the interpretations included in James Joyce and Catholicism there are likely numerous missteps and misapprehensions. But if errors are the portals of discovery this was likely part of the book’s aim all along. I have traced one path, which I hope will shed some light on certain central themes and preoccupations. This includes several ideas (e.g. the playful excesses of Joyce’s anti-​clericalism, the icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the book’s scathing attitude towards ultramontane authoritarianism) that are abiding preoccupations throughout the Joycean oeuvre, rendering it necessary to pay

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these themes proper attention, in their proper context, in the work with which Joyce ‘closed his account’. An almost infinite number of different approaches are possible. There can be no definitive set of advantages for reading Finnegans Wake, be these education or class-​based, social, national, linguistic, or religious. Contrary to some persistent perceptions, this is not an exclusive club that sets a membership bar at a premium. The ideally educated, polyvocal and poly-​national reader who might approach the work in some imagined scenario would inevitably, like the rest of us, hit a few bumps along the road. Seventeen years worth of toil resulted in a book that was designed to be read, and to be read by anyone with the passion and sheer bloody-​minded determination to meet its demands. Catholicism remains, all the same, one important path into the book for many first time readers; it is a peg on which to hang some tatters of understanding within the darkness of the whole. As the world of Joyce’s Dublin slips further below the historical horizon, these flashes of recognition and comprehension might come via only half-​ remembered words or experiences, originating with grandparents, or increasingly great-​grandparents. Any kind of comprehension is of value at the Wake, and the road by which this is achieved is not of primary importance. The dramatic changes that took place in the Roman Catholic Church as a consequence of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council of 1962–​5 render the Church that Joyce knew, and left, an increasingly alien entity. This can be seen most clearly in the current papacy of Francis, and more changes are, in all likelihood, to come. This state of affairs need not be viewed as hindrance or obstacle, and historical distance may allow for a greater, rather than decreased, level of insight. Some things cannot be seen when they are too close to us. Likewise, as the first decades of De Valera’s Free State pass from living memory into the realm of history ‘proper’, this allows for new kinds of consideration that are only possible with a sufficient amount of water beneath the bridge. It could be argued that, in some respects, Joyce’s epic human drama was destined to forever miss its mark. His instincts about the increasingly conservative and Catholic direction in which Ireland was heading were correct, and as a consequence the author did not gain a wide appreciation in his home country until the last years of the twentieth century. By this time, the Catholic Church, post Vatican II, had so dramatically changed that a great deal of the religious culture that is at heart of the Wake was rendered obsolete and unrecognizable to the new generation, although perhaps not quite so unrecognizable as is sometimes assumed. We do not know what Joyce would have made of the new generation of Irish writers, coming from Catholic backgrounds,

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who rose to prominence in a (semi)independent Catholic Ireland, and Joyce’s potential attitude towards the likes of Flann O’Brien, Seán Ó Faoláin and Patrick Kavanagh remains a subject for speculation. What seems assured, given his behaviour throughout his lifetime, is that Joyce would have always kept one eye trained on home. Moreover, given the manner in which the Wake engages with events in Ireland immediately contemporary with the period of its composition, it can also be thought a great novel of the Irish Free State, albeit composed entirely in absentia. These facts of the reception history do not in any way diminish the weight of the Wake’s achievement nor the sheer power of its historical grasp and insight when it comes to the impact of cultures of faith upon lived experience. As a human drama that in certain important ways relates to a very specific place and time, the book invites us to reconsider our conception of that age. Elements of Joyce’s vision of Edwardian Ireland and Britain, and indeed his view of the birth of the Irish Free State, will be detected in contemporary historiography. The vision will never quite be the same, quite as perceptive, or fundamentally quite as good. At a more universal level, and one that this study has in some respects steered clear of, the Wake will have a great deal to say. The manner in which the book, while retaining its humour, tears at the fabric of a conservative, dogmatic, sexually and intellectually stifling society can, and perhaps should, be seen as a model for all ages.

Bibliography Works by Joyce James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce: Volume I, edited by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957). James Joyce, Stephen Hero, edited by Theodore Spencer et al. (New York: New Directions, 1963). James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964). James Joyce, The Workshop of Daedalus, edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1965). James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce: Volumes II and III, edited by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966). James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking; London: Faber and Faber, 1975). James Joyce, Dubliners, edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (London: Penguin, 1976). James Joyce, The James Joyce Archive, edited by Michael Groden et al. (New York: Garland, 1977–​9). James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Garland, 1984). James Joyce, Critical Writings, edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). James Joyce, The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: VI.B.1, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). James Joyce, The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.6, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). James Joyce, The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.10, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). James Joyce, The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.14, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).

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Joyce Criticism Atherton, James S., The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974). Baird, J. L. and Owens, Coílín, ‘Shem as Crucified Word: FW 185–​6’, James Joyce Quarterly, 14.3 (1977), 251–​4. Beckett, Samuel, et al., ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico . . . Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for his Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1929, rpt 1960). Begnal, Michael H. and Eckley, Grace, Narrator and Character in ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1975). Benstock, Bernard, ‘The Final Apostasy: James Joyce and Finnegans Wake’, English Literary History, 28.4 (1961), 417–​37. Benstock, Bernard, Joyce-​again’s Wake: An Analysis of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965). Benstock, Shari, ‘The Genuine Christine: Psychodynamics of Issy’, in Women in Joyce, edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 169–​196. Bishop, John, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). Bjork, Christopher, ‘ “Sinted Sageness”: Some Sources for Kevin in Finnegans Wake’, in Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce, edited by David Hayman and Sam Slote (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 85–​100. Boyle, Robert, ‘The Artist as Balzacian Wild Ass’, in A Conceptual Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’, edited by Michael H. Begnal and Fritz Senn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), pp. 71–​82. Boyle, Robert, James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). Bradley, Bruce, James Joyce’s Schooldays (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982). Brivic, Sheldon, Joyce’s Waking Women: An Introduction to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1995). Brooker, Joseph, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2004). Campbell, Joseph and Robinson, Henry Morton, A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1947). Cheng, Vincent, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Costello, Peter, James Joyce, The Years of Growth: 1882–​1915 (London: Kyle Cathie, 1992).

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153

Index Abbey Theatre 71 Alacoque, St Margaret Mary 17 n.22, 26 Albigenses 54, 56–​7 Alexander IV 5 Alighieri, Dante 34, 93 Allen, Grant 15, 17 ALP awakening at dawn 73, 119, 121 as giver of gifts 25–​7, 136 critical celebration of 140 as delta 131 The Letter of 73, 122, 131, 133, 139–​40 as Michael’s lover 13, 62, 99 post-​structuralist readings of 117 in relation to Issy 90 religious affiliations of 100, 136–​8 and tea 91 tone and diction of 73, 128 as victim of violence 100, 139 as younger Kate 99 Ancestral Catholicism 18–​22 Anderson, Margaret 105 Anglo-​Irish Trade War 132–​3 Anglo-​Irish Treaty 123, 130, 133 Anglo-​Irish War 66–​70 Anna Livia Plurabelle, see ‘ALP’ Anticlericalism 27, 68, see also Chapter 2 Antinomianism 54 Archdeacon, Richard 92 Atherton, James S. 37, 98 Atkin, Nicholas 7, 10, 25 Augustine of Hippo 132 Aquinas, St Thomas 13–​14, 35–​6, 51, 132 Baird, J. L. 51 ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ 122–​4 Barry, Kevin 68–​9 Barry, William Francis 12 Batifol, Pierre 15 Beaumont, Caitriona 71, 131 Beckett, Samuel 30 n.45, 34 n.3, 53 Begnal, Michael H. 50 n.2

Behan, Brendan 68 Benstock, Bernard 5, 38, 138 Benstock, Shari 101 Berkeley, George 122, 135 Bishop, John 29, 140 Bjork, Christopher 133 Black and Tans 68, 137 Blondel, Maurice 44 Bloody Sunday (1920) 67–​8 Bloom, Leopold and Bernard Vaughan, 82 and Chiniquy 60 in ‘Circe’ 59 and Griffith 131 in ‘Lotus Eaters’ 111 and Maria Monk 62 in ‘Nausicaa’ 106 Bloom, Milly 102 Bloom, Molly 101, 125, 140 Bloom, Virag 61 Bohemian Brethren 54 Book of the Dead 101 Boucicault, Dion 19–​22, 78, 101 Bowen, Desmond 22–​3, 85 n.15 Bowman, Isa 101 Boyle, Fr Robert 39–​40, 50–​1 Brivic, Sheldon 97 Brooker, Joseph 71 Browning, ‘Peaches’ (Frances Belle Heenan) 101 Bruno, Giordano 33, 53–​5 Bunkley, Josephine M. 62 n.27 Burton, Richard 129 Butt, Isaac 27 Bywaters and Thompson trial 133–​4 Cad (character) 22, 123, 140 Caelestius 54, 59 Cairo Gang 68 Chadwick, Owen 7, 13 Chart, D. A. 98 Chaucer, Geoffrey 51

156

Index

Cheng, Vincent J. 41 Chiniquy, Charles Paschal Télesphore 60–​6, 84, 92, 124 Church of England, see ‘Protestants and Protestantism’ Churchill, Winston 34 Clery, Emma 4–​5, 102 Collins, Joseph 54 n.11 Collins, Michael 127 Colum, Padraic 135 Columcille (St) 135 Connacht Tribune 72, 89 Connolly, Thomas 44 Cosgrave, William T. 28, 71, 128 Cranmer, Thomas 130 Cullen, Cardinal Paul 22–​7, 84–​90, 92, 103, 125, 136 Curran, C. P. 135 Dáil Éireann 131 Daly, Mary E. 133 Deane, Vincent 55, 59, 83 n.13, 134 n.20 Dedalus, Simon 23, 27, 85, 124 Dedalus, Stephen aesthetic theory of 51 compares God to the artist 2 critical approaches to 35–​6, 43–​5 and Cullen 85 eschews Protestantism 16 and heresy, 4–​5, 53 and the Litany of Loreto 115 and Lourdes 111 in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ 107–​8 as ‘servant of two masters’ 85 view of Church history by 16, 18, 93 Villanelle of 109 de Sade (Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis) 61 De Valera, Éamon 28, 38, 71, 77, 94, 123, 125, 130–​3, 142 De Valera, Juan Vivion 80 Dillon, John 67 Dominic (St) 56 Donoghue, Denis 55 Downes, Gareth Joseph 41, 53 n.10 Dubliners 113 ‘Clay’ 98 ‘The Dead’ 79 ‘Eveline’ 24 ‘Grace’ 12–​13, 76, 80, 82, 111, 126

‘The Sisters’ 86 Duff, Frank 90 Duffy, Eamon 7–​8, 13 n.14 Duffy, James (publisher) 85 Dympna (St) 123 Earwicker, see ‘HCE’ Eide, Marian 117 Eliot, T. S. 35, 121, 128 Ellmann, Richard 3, 35–​6 ‘Epiphanies’ 62 n.27 Fairhall, James 41 Famine, Irish 23–​4, 26, 103, 110 n.18 Fenton, Elizabeth 60–​2 Fianna Fáil 28, 123 ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ (ballad) 21–​2, 125 Finnegans Wake advantages for reading 142 as an act of apostasy 5–​6 coincides with end of Trade War 133 as a human drama 1, 52, 90, 138, 140, 141–​3 indeterminate intent of 2, 30 use of the Catholic Encyclopedia in 4, 55–​9 linguistic alchemy of 57 links to Catholic America 135 as a model for all ages 143 Pound’s view of 1 prioritises history over the contemporary 38 punning economy of 21, 116 resists dogma 38, 43, 49, 55, 75, 141 resists systematic approach 30 seeks out heretical ideas 4 as Shem’s work 66 temporal confusion in 6, 29, 42, 67, 111, 119, 137 usurpation crucial to 127 see also individual sections and subsections Finn, Fr Francis J. 91–​2 Fleischmann, Marthe 36 Fordham, Finn 30, 49, 52 n.8, 116 Foster, R. F. 68, 72 n.44 Francis (pope) 142 Franco-​Prussian War 13 Freeman’s Journal 25, 131 Freud and Freudianism 101 n.9, 107

Index Gaelic League 27 Gibson, Andrew 41–​2, 78–​9, 82, 129 Glasheen, Adaline 37, 101 Gnosticism 54 Gorham, Maurice 126 Gottfried, Roy 3, 44–​6 Grattan, Henry 28 Greene, Graham 35 Gregory, Lady Augusta 2, 20 Gregory XVI (pope) 8, 23, 58 Griffith, Arthur 127, 129, 131–​2 Hales, E. E. Y. 7, 9 Hamlet 116, 136 Harrington, Timothy 67 Hart, Clive 37, 71 n.37, 75 n.2 HCE as Adam 125 as Amsterdam 125 and the ‘crime’ in the park 22, 59, 100, 113–​14, 123 as De Valera 130 as dreamer 29 and the Free State 31 and Imperialism 38 as invader 139 and Loisy 16–​17 as Master Builder 138 as the new Shaun 76, 113, 121, 125, 127 as Parnell 124, 139 as Porter 122, 138 and Protestantism 45, 99, 124, 127, 130, 137–​8 rumours about 49, 100, 123–​4, 127, 134, 139–​40 as Tim Finnegan 125 as viceroy 138 and violence 139 and Walsh 27 Healy, Tim 67, 129 Heap, Jane 105 Hederman, Mark Patrick 51, 55 Herr, Cheryl 76–​7, 81, 90, 102 Hofheinz, Thomas C. 29–​30, 129–​30 Hohoff, Curt 35 Home Rule 27, 124, 131 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 35 Hughes, Eamonn 42–​3 Hynes, Eugene 109 n.17, 111–​12 Hynes, Sam 35

157

Ibsen, Henrik 20 Index Librorum Prohibitorum 17, 90–​3 ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’ 58 Irish Free State campaigns against prostitution in 89, see also ‘Legion of Mary’ and censorship 70–​3, 91 embodied by HCE 31 Finnegans Wake a great novel of 143 importance of the Virgin Mary for 106 and Irish-​Ireland 28 Justius invokes 67 Joyce comments to Power about 71 passes from living memory 142 persistent Anglo-​Irish tensions in 129 and the radio 125–​6 revised constitution of 28, 122–​3, 130 see also ‘Anglo-​Irish Trade War’ Irish Independent 71–​2 Irish Literary Revival 94, 102 n.11, 135 Irish National League 67 Irish Republican Army 68 Issy as the 29th Maggy 100 alludes to MacHale 13 alludes to Pius XI 17 as Arcoiris 112 critical response to 101–​2, 117 and dance 88 diction inspired by the Leader 128 as Fr Michael’s lover 13, 62, 119 imagined future lives of 119 incestuous implications for 24, 89, 116 as Isolde 100, 102 as a juvenile ALP 90 longest footnote of 117–​19 in the ‘Looking Glass’ 113–​17 ‘Loveliletter’ of 102–​6, 114, 128 and Lucia Joyce 88, 101–​2 Mariological imagery and 106 models for 100–​1 receives keys from ALP 140 recommended reading for 90–​3 speaks rarely 100 see also Chapter 3 Irish Times 82 Islam 6, 110 Jameson, Fredric 29 Jansen, Cornelius 54, 57–​8

158

Index

Jerome (St) 64–​5, 132 Jesuits, see ‘Society of Jesus’ Joachim of Flora 5 Joyce, James continues to read Irish newspapers 127 finds Vaughan diverting 82 idiosyncratic reading habits of 12, 17 leaves the Catholic Church 3, 36 lends characteristics to Shem 66–​7 limits his resources 58 looks up account of the First Vatican Council 12 parodies Eliot 121 pores over Patrick’s hagiography 134 reads The Priest 62 is sceptical of Protestantism 61 takes notes from rationalist accounts of the Bible 15 writes to Lady Gregory 2 Joyce, Lucia 51, 88, 101–​2 Joyce, Stanislaus 3, 12, 34, 111 n.18 Kain, Richard M. 36 n.8 Kavanagh, Patrick 143 Kenner, Hugh 21, 35, 37–​8, 43 Kime Scott, Bonnie 101 Kinane, Thomas H. 58 Ku Klux Klan 112 Kristeva, Julia 39 Laberthonière, Lucien 44 Lacan and Lacanianism 38, 101 Lammenais, Hugues-​Félicité Robert de 8 Landuyt, Ingeborg 52 n.7, 134–​5 Larkin, Emmet 7, 22–​5 Leader 28, 126–​8, 131–​2 Lee, J. J. 71 Legion of Mary 90 Leslie, Shane 33–​4 Leo XIII (pope) 13–​15, 23, 91, 103 n.12, 108–​9, 114 Leonard, Garry 105 Lernout, Geert 3, 7–​8, 15–​17, 35, 38–​9, 43–​ 4, 55 n.14, 59 n.21, 62–​3, 66, 82–​3, 112 n.20, 128 Liddell, Alice 101 Little Review 33, 105 Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, see ‘Our Lady’

Lloyd George, David 137 Loisy, Alfred 15–​17, 44 Lowe-​Evans, Mary 43, 106–​7 Luddy, Maria 24 Luther, Martin 138 MacDonagh, Oliver 27 MacHale, Archbishop John 12–​13, 22, 80 Mackinnon Robertson, John 15 MacPhilpin, John 111–​12 Maddox, Brenda 62 Magalaner, Marvin 36 n.8 Maggy and the Maggies 100, 106, 109, 112 Mahony, Francis (‘Fr Prout’) 85 Mamalujo accompanied by an ass 77 interrogation of Yawn by 21, 76 in Issy’s Looking Glass, 113–​17, 125 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward 11 Marcion of Sinope 54 Mariology 10, 43, 106–​13, 116 Mason, Ellsworth 36 n.8 McCabe, Cardinal Edward 125, 136 McDowell, Gerty 24, 45, 77, 101–​6, 109, 115–​16 McGreevy, Thomas 34 McHugh, Roland 54, 70 n.36, 92 n.21, 110 Merton, Thomas 35, 43 Miller, David W. 7 Monk, Maria 62 Moran, D. P. 28, 127–​9, 132 Morrison, Steven 39 n.15, 53 n.10 Mulcahy, Richard 127 New Historicism 29, 40 Newman, Cardinal John Henry 134 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice 33, 105 Nicholas of Cusa 54 Nolan, Emer 41 Noon, Fr William T. 35–​6 Norris, Margot 101 O’Brien, Flann (Brian O’Nolan) 143 O’Brien, William 67 O’Connell, Daniel 27 Ó Crualaoich, Geroid 18 O’Hanlon, John 134 O’Higgins, Kevin 128

Index

159

O’Shea, Kitty 27–​8, 124 Our Lady apocryphal stories about 116–​17 cult of 108–​9, 116 of Fátima 110 ‘Golden era of ’ 107 Immaculate Conception of 108 of Knock 111–​13, 117 of La Salette 110 Leo XIII and 13 Litany of 106, 114–​15, 123 of Lourdes 25, 111 as patron of Ireland 13, 23 Pio Nono and 9, 108 scapulars dedicated to 109 Owens, Coílín 51

and ALP 138 Dante’s attitude towards 115 and HCE 45, 99, 124–​5, 127, 130, 137–​9 and Irish nationalism 28 and Issy 115–​16 Joyce has little care for 34 limits of for Joyce 46, 61 ‘literary advantages’ of 44 in North America 60, 89 rationalist approaches to the Bible and 14 and social purity 89 and the Smyly mission homes 136 Stephen eschews 16 Punch 86 Putnam, George Haven 93

Parnell, Charles Stewart 27–​8, 41, 124, 139 Partition 8, 67, 126, 131 Patrick (St) 13, 23, 26, 58, 66, 80, 122–​3, 135–​6 Paul IV (pope) 91 Pelagius 54, 58–​9 Penal Laws in Ireland 18, 22, 89 Peter, Ada 98–​9 Petre, Maude 15 Pius IX (pope) 8–​13, 26 n.41, 108, 116 Pius X (pope) 15–​16 Pius XI (pope) 17 Plan of Campaign 27, 67 Polhemus, Robert M. 72–​3 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and anticlericalism 23, 27 Biblical references in 45 ‘Christmas Dinner Scene’ of 27, 85–​6 Dante Riordan’s memories in 115 and heresy 4–​5 Jesuits in 76 and Joyce’s biography 36 and ‘Shem the Penman’ 51–​2 Stephen eschews Protestantism in 16 and Stephen’s Villanelle 109 Post-​structuralism 39, 40, 44, 117 Pound, Ezra 1, 102 n.11 Power, Arthur 71 Prince, Morton 102 Prostitutes and Prostitution 88–​90, 110, 112 Protestants and Protestantism

Quakerism 54 Quarterly Review 33 Rabaté, Jean-​Michel 101 Radio Athlone 125 Raidió Teilifís Éireann 125 Ricœur, Paul 29 Riordan, Dante 27–​8, 115 Roman Catholic Church attitude towards Bible Scholarship 14, 91 Council of Trent of 108 ‘devotional revolution’ of 23–​5, 85 and the founding of Vatican City 17 First Vatican Council of 11–​13 in the Free State 71, 131 histories of 7 Immaculate Conception dogma of 24, 108, 116–​17 Joyce describes leaving 3 Joyce inculcated in the teachings of 33 the modernist crisis in 15–​17 Nicene Creed of 18 and Irish nationalism 23, 27–​8, 41–​2, 78–​9, 85–​6 and Papal Infallibility 11–​13, 139 and prostitution 89–​90 Second Vatican Council of 7, 142 sexual abuse in 61–​2 Syllabus Errorum of 10–​11 Thomist revival in 13–​14 see also individual sections and subsections

160

Index

Rosary 24, 55–​6, 103, 108, 114–​15 Royal Irish Constabulary 68, 112 Schlossman, Beryl 39–​40 Scholes, Robert 44 Schork, R. J. 134 Seán Ó Faoláin (John Francis Whelan) 143 Senn, Fritz 50 n.2, 75 Shaun and the Anglo-​Irish War 69 as Burrus 75 as Chuff 75, 92 as De Valera 77 gluttony of 77–​80, 130, 133 Hamlet parallel with 116 as Haun 21, 94 as Jaun 102 as Justius 50, 55, 64–​5, 67, 70–​3, 75 as Kevin Barry 68–​9 as Kev or Kevin 75, 125, 132–​6 as Mookse 17 as Nick 75 as Ondt 75 as Professor Jones 93 and the radio 126 as Shaun-​the-​Post 20, 77–​8 transforms into the father 22, 125–​7, 130 as Yawn 20, 76, 130 see also Chapter 2 Sheed, F. J. 134–​5 Shem is associated with Parnell 124 as Caseous 75 as Dolph 75 as Glugg 75, 92 as Gracehoper 75 as Gripes 17, 75 juvenile surrogates for 26–​7 as Mercius 50, 67, 70–​3 speaks rarely 100 visits with a prostitute 112 see also Chapter 1 Sinn Féin (newspaper) 127, 132 Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ 35, 37 Smyly, Ellen 136 Society of Jesus 15, 35–​6, 76, 81, 83–​4, 92, 125 Sollers, Philippe 39 Soubirous, St Bernadette 111 Stephen Hero 44 n.25, 76, 85

St Stephen’s (university magazine) 33 Strayer, Joseph 57 n.18 Strong, Kate 31, 97–​9 Sullivan, Kevin 36 Sully (character) 140 Sultan, Stanley 37 Swift, Jonathan 100, 104 Tallett, Frank 7, 10, 25 The Four, see ‘Mamalujo’ ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ 33, 53 ‘The Holy Office’ 14 This Quarter 59 Thurston, Luke 38 n.12 Tone, Wolfe 28 Transubstantiation 52 Tristan and Isolde 100, 102 Turmel, Joseph 15 Tyrrell, George 15, 44 Ulysses 2, 16, 18, 28, 66, 90, 102 censorship of 33, 105 early guides to 37 episodes of ‘Circe’ 59, 61, 76, 79, 89, 98, 129 ‘Cyclops’ 132, 136 ‘Lestrygonians’ 60 ‘Lotus Eaters’ 111 ‘Nausicaa’ 102–6, 113 ‘Penelope’ 125, 140 ‘Proteus’ 5, 52 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ 107–8 ‘Telemachus’ 16, 18, 53, 93 ‘Wandering Rocks’ 62, 76 Joyce may have oversystematized 30 Leslie objects to 33 Lourdes and Knock in 111 McGreevy comments on 34 portrayal of the clergy in 42, 79 piracy of 69 the politics of 78 radical aesthetics of 109 Vaughan in 82 world of 127 Unionists and Unionism 69, 80, 137 Ussher, Arland 35 Van Hulle, Dirk 123 n.3, 128 n.7 Van Mierlo, Chrissie 12 n.13

Index Van Mierlo, Wim 76 n.3, 128 n.7, 134–​5 Vatican Councils, see ‘Roman Catholic Church’ Vaughan, Fr Bernard 81–​4, 87, 133–​4 Veronica (the Sudarium) 103 Virgin Mary, see ‘Our Lady’ von Hügel, Friedrich 15 Walsh, Archbishop William 27, 125 Waterloo (Battle) 69 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 52–​3, 86, 121 Weber, Nicholas 56 ‘Work in Progress’ Buffalo notebooks VI.B.1, 28, 82–3 VI.B.2, 15 VI.B.5, 111–12 VI.B.6, 55–6 VI.B.10, 69 n.35, 82, 128

VI.B.11, 98 VI.B.14, 58, 112, 134 VI.B.16, 89 burlesques for 1 early sketches for ‘St Kevin’ 123, 132–6 ‘St Patrick’ 123 ‘Tristan and Isolde’ 102 ‘Young Issy’ 123 Exagmination of 34, 53 n.9 role of happenstance in 55 reading notes for 55, 63, 84 galley proofs for 57 Vaughan in, 82; World War I 69 World War II 122 Yeats, W. B. 19–​20, 72, 102 n.11 York Tindall, William 37, 77

161