Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination: Reinventing the Word by Gregory Erickson. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Hardback. 240pp. £85.
Theologically-oriented literary criticism on James Joyce has experienced something of a renascence in recent years. Fr. Colum Power’s James Joyce’s Catholic Categories (Wiseblood) appeared in 2016, followed shortly after by Chrissie van Mierlo’s James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate’s Wake (Bloomsbury, 2017). Michael Mayo’s James Joyce and the Jesuits (OUP) appeared in 2020 and my own James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality: Postcritical and Postsecular Reading in Dubliners and Ulysses (Edinburgh) was published in 2023. Power recovered Joyce’s interest in Catholicism through a thorough-going analysis of relatively unexplored aspects of Irish Catholicism that consistently retained Joyce’s interest, while Van Mierlo focused on Joyce’s apostasy (crucially different from seeing him as heretic) in his final, experimental novel, Finnegans Wake. And, to name just two, there are significant chapter-length studies on Joyce and religion in recent monographs such as Lynne Hinojosa’s Puritanism and Modernist Novels (Ohio State, 2015), and Steven Pinkerton’s Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh (Oxford, 2017). My own thinking about Joyce and religion has been greatly influenced by a slightly older critical study, Roy Gottfried’s ground-breaking Joyce’s Misbelief (Florida, 2008), which shows how, beginning with his transcription of the Book of Revelation at age 16, Joyce often tried to explore Protestant conceptions of Scripture over against the magisterium of the Catholic Church[1] in order both to critique what he saw as a repressive faith (a particularly virulent strain of Jansenism prevailed in the Irish Catholic Church during his time) and to reimagine his role as an artist. Collectively, these titles not only betoken a revived interest in Joyce and religion as part of the literary-critical turn to religion in the last fifteen years but also they suggest how Joyce reappropriated and reimagined compelling Scriptural doctrines and narratives, such as the Good Samaritan parable, for his own artistic ends.
Gregory Erickson’s Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination is part of Bloomsbury’s well-received series, New Directions in Religion and Literature, which, along with Baylor University Press’s series in religion and literature, has published many compelling titles in this burgeoning area. Erickson explores the question of Christian heresy in Joyce, but he also reads theories of heresy through Joyce’s works themselves. Although the entire study is fascinating, breaking genuine new ground in Joyce studies, I found Erickson’s analyses of Joyce’s fiction through theological heresies more convincing than his analyses of heresies through Joyce’s work. The most useful and compelling chapters for me were the fifth one, “Joyce, Medieval Heresy, and the Eucharist,” and the sixth one, “Alternative Reformations: Iconoclasm and Finnegans Wake.” The epilogue on reading the Book of Mormon and Finnegans Wake together is unconvincing, however. The fictitious theology of Mormonism really did not influence Joyce at all, appearing only in a couple of passing references in Finnegans Wake (although to be fair, that is not the thrust of this chapter). It should be pointed out to Erickson that the Church of Latter Day Saints is certainly not “a major global branch of Christianity,” but an heretical cult invented by Joseph Smith in the early 1800s that explicitly denies many central tenets of Christianity including the Trinity (187).
“Joyce often tried to explore Protestant conceptions of Scripture over against the magisterium of the Catholic Church”
I also wished for more than brief references to Joyce’s short story collection, Dubliners, and for more treatment of Joyce’s Bildungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, than an early six-page discussion of that novel. Much work has been done in recent years on the relationship between Dubliners and the forms and ethics of Jesus’ parables. Critics such as Jill Shashaty, Jack Dudley, and myself have traced the parables’ narrative influence on Joyce, as well as how, despite his departure from Catholicism, Joyce’s lifelong spiritual bent is reflected in his fictional portrayals of hospitality. As a founder and former president of the International Society for Heresy Studies though, Erickson is understandably more concerned with Joyce’s departures from Christian orthodoxy than in any lingering Christian sympathies–yet one can’t help but feel they would be mutually illuminating.
Had he wished to pursue an heretical reading of A Portrait, however, Erickson could have found ample room to do so by examining Joyce’s fascination with three heretics: Charles Stewart Parnell, Lord Byron, and the Prince of Darkness himself—Satan! It’s simply not true that “Heresy,” as Erickson contends, only “may be in the background throughout most of Portrait” (19, emphasis added). Stephen Dedalaus actively embraces heretics and heresy beginning on the second page of the novel, when as a young Catholic boy, he crosses the bright sectarian divide at that time by playing with the little Protestant girl Eileen, after which he is bizarrely told by his aunt that eagles will punish him by pulling out his eyes. Later, through his repeated identification with Parnell, Byron, and finally Satan, he steeps himself in heterodoxy, finally choosing to become something like a Satanic rebel in his aloof heresy and rejection of family, home, faith, friends, and Ireland.
“Joyce perhaps suggests that he finds greater truth in Christ’s parable of a stranger offering hospitality than he did in the eucharist”
Erickson argues that heresy purports “to break away from modes of thinking cemented as ‘normal’ by Christian orthodoxy,” and he desires to “acknowledge how Western metaphysical and critical thought are linked to patriarchal Christian theology” (5). Three objections come immediately to mind here. First, Erickson neglects to note that Irish thought and faith were long conceived of as being outside the mainstream of Western thought and orthodox Christianity, in part because of the late emergence of writing on the island and also because of its island status.[1] Geographic and cultural isolation enabled the Irish to embrace a syncretistic religion that yoked Irish paganism and folk Catholicism together prior to the doctrinaire and canonical changes of the post-Famine “Devotional Revolution” (c. 1850-1880).[2] Erickson seems unaware of Joyce’s interest in Irish folk Catholicism and indeed even of this syncretistic tradition.[3]
Secondly, Erickson displays a related tendency to use reductive phrases such as “Western literature and theology” (see page 19, instance), flattening the rich diversity of literature and theology in the Western hemisphere. Is Marquez really a “Western” writer? Or Toni Morrison? Is Mexican evangelical Protestantism “Western” in any real sense? Moreover, Erickson conceives of Christianity, founded in the Middle East, heavily shaped in North Africa, and now with its majority living in the Global South as inherently Western and “patriarchal.” The aforementioned turn to religion in recent literary criticism has, still, unfortunately, not led to the banishment of such inaccurate cliches.
These objections aside, Erickson’s book makes valuable contributions to the continuing conversation about Joyce and particularly Christian theology, including his many fictional forays into heresy. After the opening chapter articulating his theory of Christian heresy, Joyce, and the Modernist imagination, Erickson presents a series of intriguing chapters, including a selective history of heresy; a reading of Joyce as a potential Gnostic (which seems a stretch to me given Joyce’s thoroughly i/Incarnational imagination); a compelling discussion of the lingering presence of the fourth-century heretic Arius, who haunted Joyce’s theory of art; an imaginative and necessary chapter on Joyce, medieval heresy, and the eucharist; and finally a chapter on alternative Reformations in Finnegans Wake.
“Joyce believed we should feast forever on his own words, rather than on the words of Scripture or the eucharistic meal”
Concerning the penultimate chapter, although Erickson clearly is not an adherent to the school of “Radical Orthodoxy” articulated by Catherine Pickstock and its founder John Milbank, who have sought to recover a trinitarian ontology through a rich comprehension of the “event of the Eucharist” (Pickstock, cited on 122), he does present seriously their aims, although he notes that he believes both Joyce and Derrida use “the loss of presence itself as a space to create new, multilayered meanings” (122). This is a smart and thoughtful chapter that recognizes both negative and more positive recreations of the eucharist in almost every episode of Ulysses. It shows, for instance, how “Circe” is “a magical event made out of the mundane daily bread of the rest of the novel” with its “identifiably Eucharistic structure.” Thus, Stephen Dedalus opens this hallucinogenic episode (its expressionistic dramatic style is both overwrought and misleading, from my point of view, for truly apprehending the characters of both Stephen and Leopold Bloom) by “chanting the introit to the Mass, just as Mulligan did on the first page,” while Stephen and Lynch “continue to chant from the mass while they metaphorically characterize sex workers as baptismal waters,” before the scene concludes with “a type of Black Mass” (131). However, the true climax of this episode—much more to be trusted than these blasphemous sendups of the Mass—occurs when Leopold Bloom reenacts the parable of the Good Samaritan, rescuing Stephen Dedalus after an attack by a British soldier. As he does so, he uses verbatim dialogue from Joyce’s short story “Grace”. By arranging the chapter thus, Joyce perhaps suggests that he finds greater truth in Christ’s parable of a stranger offering hospitality than he did in the eucharist[2] , in which he seemingly found an absence of signification. Such a view is certainly in keeping with Joyce’s emphasis on a more humanist, less supernatural Christ, which he would have gained from reading secular accounts of Jesus’s life such as David Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835) and Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1864), as explored by Erickson in an earlier chapter (88-9). In this later chapter, Erickson’s brilliant juxtaposition of “squints” (unadorned internal windows of medieval churches used by the laity to obtain glimpses of the elevated host) and rood screens represents a genuine contribution to Joyce studies. “It is this tension—between part and whole, between fragmentation and unity—that is explored in Joyce, and screens and squints act as useful metaphors for the process of reading Ulysses” because these devices “both obstruct and enhance.” Thus the entire novel “suggests fragmented glimpses of the ‘real presence’ seen through the blasphemy of Mulligan, the heresy of Stephen, and the Jewishness of Bloom, each offering their own incomplete versions of Catholic transubstantiation as an artistic experience” (134).
Erickson never makes this claim, but I will: much as I admire and enjoy Joyce’s works, I cannot go along with his clear desire that we worship him and them. Late in his penultimate chapter, in discussing the concluding episode of Ulysses, “Penelope,” narrated by Leopold’s fleshy wife Molly Bloom, Erickson states that “Molly’s chapter makes words into flesh, makes the text material.” He here intimates my strong suspicion that Joyce believed we should feast forever on his own words, rather than on the words of Scripture or the eucharistic meal. [3] This, to me, may be Joyce’s most disturbing heresy. Erickson articulates this heresy further in his final chapter, “Alternative Reformations.” There he argues that “in Finnegans Wake, Joyce is recreating a type of ‘scripture’ that, like reading the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, or a medieval wall painting, forces us to see a text as a multi-directional discourse across history and through destruction and reconstruction rather than as a synchronic or teleological text” (165). Ingeniously, he uses his experience of reading the Finnegans Wake notebooks at the University of Buffalo (mostly through the lone computer on which many of them are stored because of the fragility of the pages) as the “art of poetry. As decaying objects. As scripture” (166). This is a fairly brief but very suggestive moment in this valuable study, although I cannot (and Joyce did not) concur with Erickson’s concluding claim that all texts are decaying into nothingness (172). If this were really true, would Joyce have claimed about Ulysses that “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality?”
Joyce, although he claimed elsewhere to have the mind of a grocer’s assistant with his emphasis on lists and catalogs, thought himself the high priest of literature in a line descending from Homer and Milton. He believed his literary works were radiant art that would continue to be read, argued over, and discussed forever. These continuous “events,” along with the “event” of reading his work repeatedly, replace the event of the eucharist in Joyce’s mind. He offers his words to the reader as secularized food and drink to nourish them. Erickson’s fine book goes some way toward confirming Joyce’s conviction that, although he was a heretic, he and his works would be immortal.
Richard Rankin Russell is Professor of English and Graduate Program Director of English at Baylor University.
[1] Given its longstanding (though now rapidly collapsing) status as a staunchly Roman Catholic nation, it surprises many to know that, prior to the Reformation, Ireland was frustratingly non-conformist with regard to Rome. When William the Conqueror subdued England under a papal banner in 1066, a level of conformity came to England which its subsequent kings and bishops always struggled to extend to Ireland. It took post-Reformation oppression and the nineteenth-century Potato Famine to drive most of the nation into the arms of Rome, although the northeastern counties, with their majority-Protestant population, would eventually become the current state of Northern Ireland, which remains part of the United Kingdom.
[2] Emmet Larkin first posited the theory of the Devotional Revolution in “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-1875,” The American Historical Review 77, no. 3 (June, 1972), 625-652.
[3] For an articulation of Joyce’s interest in folk Catholicism, see Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company by Mary Lowe-Evans (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). For a compelling exploration of the Irish syncretistic tradition, see J.M. Synge and the Western Mind by Weldon Thornton (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979).