Catholic Influence on Concepts of Death and Dying in Joyce's Writings

Abstract

Catholic Influence on Concepts of Death and Dying in Joyce's Writings Michael Patrick Gillespie Although this article will look chiefly at the ways in which Joyce's experiences with religion shaped his treatment of the end of life, like most issues related to his works a full understanding can come only through consideration of a broader cultural context. Catholicism played an integral part in almost every aspect of the Irish ethos at the time that James Joyce was growing to manhood in Dublin. To catch the flavor of his world, he fills his narratives with references to all aspects of Catholic belief, and he readily draws on its prayers, liturgies, dogma, and traditions for a rich source of metaphor. With that in mind, one states the obvious in saying that any thorough study of his fiction must include attentiveness to how Joyce understood Irish Catholicism and how he represented its diverse aspects throughout his fiction. Such an analysis needs to emphasize, not conventional Catholic teachings, but Joyce's subjective impressions of them: Joyce, like any other human being, constructed his environment based on his personal understanding of everything he encountered in the world. As such, a discussion of his views on Catholicism would be markedly distinct from any objective review of the church's influence in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. To be sure, one of the specters that has troubled countless discussions of Joyce's relationship to the church is that of positing an essentialist, reductive understanding of Catholicism. Doing so can easily construct a straw-man argument; many such arguments reflect a view that overlays personal animosity toward aspects of the church, almost as if settling old scores. As a result, one's appreciation of the Catholic culture of Joyce's fiction will not be materially enhanced by objective, social scientific efforts more fittingly employed by historians—for instance, gathering data on attendance at mass from 1880 to 1900. In fact, such information could very well mislead one's comprehension of Joyce's representations. Instead, the thoughtful literary critic must emphasize attentiveness to the subjective instincts of an artist endeavoring to capture a particular tone and perspective of a specific societal cross-section—lower middle class, Catholic, and urban—that he wishes to inculcate into his [End Page 114] writings to enhance a reader's sense of the way particular characters saw and reacted to their world. The key to such an approach is the acknowledgement of Joyce's sophisticated sense of the range of feelings informing the attitudes toward the Catholic church that were held by even the most ordinary citizens whom he depicted in his fiction. Only a few of Joyce's Dubliners, for instance, seem inclined to participate in the Devotional Revolution—the surge in public piety in the latter part of the nineteenth century effected largely through the work of Cardinal Cullen—or to submit to the ecclesiastic tyranny that sought to regulate every aspect of their lives. A clear example of the impulse to resist such efforts at control comes when Simon Dedalus, in a fit of anger during the Christmas Dinner scene in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, famously invokes what has now become the shopworn cliché characterizing the Ireland as "an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter."1 Many of Joyce's characters showed, time and again, a relationship with Catholicism, far removed from the supposed lockstep conformity to church dictates that stereotypical portrayals of Catholic Ireland present as an oversimplified donnée. In fact, many were openly antagonistic. A few sentences after the passage quoted above, Simon Dedalus brags about a grandfather, saying "he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them to put his two feet under his mahogany" (P 33).2 Examples of this of sort of energetic anticlericalism abound, often mixed with sardonic humor. One of the most forceful and amusing appears in Ulysses when Ned Lambert's recollection of a rough-and tumble clash of church and state gives a perfect sense of the offhanded undermining of episcopal...