an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 10, February 2013, ISSN
1552-5112
Joycean Eucharistics: Something to Chew On
I
Well, I
never saw anything like it in all me born puff! There I was walking up
II
Now let us
speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to give good paper and
they might. There was a sort of scholars along either side the street, that is
to wit Robert yclept D’Alonzo of Little Rock College Chicago with other his
fellows Gary Keleghan, representing the spirit of John Wall, and Rodney
Sharkey, scholars of literature all. All too had once rode out together in
III
Bearing
what shape did the panel commence on the Morning of June 11th 2012?
For it was
shaped as a horizontal triad as part of which D’Alonzo spoke first followed by a
paper from Wall, who was very well up beneath (meaning he was to be found in
good spirits in New Zealand, so that his paper as delivered in Dublin was read
by Gary Keleghan, poet). Finally, to
complete the triumvirate and speaking shortly thereafter, Sharkey. That is to
say, first the Pope then the Cardinal and then the Bishop.
Of what
did all three speak?
Of and
around the following comment from Joyce to his brother Stanislaus:
Don't
you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and
what I am trying to do? To give people
some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the
bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its
own. (My Brother’s Keeper, 116)
So it was
to be that each of the three there gathered spoke on Joycean approaches to the
Eucharist, and how it transformed his artistic strategy.
And what
had the Pope to say on the subject?
D’Alonzo
argued that towards the end of Ulysses,
Bloom and Stephen are figured at the crossroads of Hellenistic Cynicism and
early Christianity. Punning on the role of ‘dog-ma’ in the refiguring of a
Cynic/Christian relationship, D’Alonzo argued that the body of Christ and the
body of Diogenes have more than just a passing resemblance, with the result
that Ulysses can offer a
liberation/awakening from the nightmare of (ecclesiastical) history. From
Joyce’s observations about a “decrepit street cur” in the early essay “Ecce
Homo,” to Foucault’s assessments of the early Christian body in
Cynically-influenced sects such as the Domini canes, to Buck Mulligan’s
characterization of Stephen as “dogsbody” just after the mock consecration at
the shaving bowl, to the dog Garryowen’s recovery of Bloom’s parental caring
nature in the Circe episode, the culmination of a pre – and post – Christian
Cynical “care of the body” comes to pass in the gentle encounter between Bloom
and Stephen at the cabman’s shelter. As Bloom assists Stephen to his feet,
Stephen felt “a strange kind of flesh of a different man” (Ulysses, 660); a physical, historical and social transformation.
Having
established how Joyce plays on the Cynic/Christian interstice, D’Alonzo drew
attention to how – in one of his final seminars at the Collège de France – Michel
Foucault spoke of the early Christians beginning to adopt some of the motifs of
Hellenistic cynicism. For example, Christians elevated bread into the body of
Christ. D’Alonzo argued that Joyce’s Ulysses re-sets this moment,
and it is crystalized in Bloom’s “internal satisfaction” with the smell of “our
daily bread” from James Rourke’s bakery:
…of
all commodities of the public the primary and most indispensible. Bread, the
staff of life. (Ulysses,
706)
For
D’Alonzo, Ulysses promotes a return
to an early Christian/Cynic interstice, re-replacing the Eucharist with bread,
and replacing “dog-ma” with a gentle aesthetic truth-telling (parrhêsia),
in roaming patterns, never quite sure of a fixed home.
And so it
was that on a day of Catholic celebration it was fitting that the cynics – and
Foucault – were also acknowledged for their role in proposing a brotherhood of
humanity, and a promotion of genuine forms of love.
Of what
then did the Cardinal – through the medium of Kelleghan – speak?
Wall,
through the Kelleghan whole, spoke of how transubstantiation is of immense
interest from a literary theoretical point of view. He noted that according to
Catholic theology it is not a metaphor. It is not “as if” the body and blood of
Christ have become infused in the bread and wine. Rather, the two radically
different sets have become identical.
Wall suggested that theology displays an insistence on identity when
there is only mimetic similarity accompanied by radical, irreconcilable
difference. In this way, he proposed
that Ulysses produces and reproduces
itself as a virtual space in which intensive quantities come together in
encounters with configurations in extended space to produce new meaning. Thus
transubstantiation in Joyce is not a single truth. To demonstrate this he
focused on the psychologically pressing figure of Stephen’s mother:
Across
the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the
wellfed voice beside him. The ring bay and skyline held a dull green mass of
liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green
sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud
groaning vomiting. (Ulysses, 4)
Wall
argued that there is a powerful mimetic drive that interweaves the lines of
This
mimetic series traces out something like a geo-human space in the novel.
Illness, the human body, the maritime surroundings of the city, artefacts and
human psychology combine to form a habitus, one where the constitutive elements
are linked by nature, economics and systems of communication and also by tone,
texture and rhythm. There takes place in the flows set up between body, sea,
psychology and artefact a new kind of space, one that cannot be characterized
primarily in terms of measurement. It is
a virtual space — a real virtual space, elemental and heterogeneous — and if it
is transubstantiation then it is transubstantiation in the service of producing
differential identity, and therefore new meaning. In this way, Wall argued that Joyce proposes
a pluralistic, productive and profound understanding of transubstantiation. And
with this the Wall hath spoken.
And of what
then – by way of conclusion – did the Bishop bubble and squeak?
He spoke
of how on Sunday 29th March 1925 the Legion of the Virgin Mary
marched on Monto – Dublin’s brothel area − and on each door nailed a
picture of the sacred heart. Once the
legion felt it had reclaimed the place, its Director, Frank Duff, hung a
crucifix in the centre of the flats. He recalled in a 1979 RTE interview:
I
climbed up on top of the chair, and, reaching up as far as I could on this
lofty wall, I drove a heavy spike into the wall and we put that crucifix on it
as a formal taking possession of the place. (Fagan, 101)
In the
mind of Duff and the Catholic hierarchy this moment symbolically represented
the taking possession of and slow transformation of Monto; indeed, so
completely changed was the place by the occasion of
Responding
to this historical moment, Sharkey argued that Duff’s use of the word
‘possession’ is very appropriate; so too might be the word ‘occupation.’
Sharkey argued that Duff’s actions amounted to a religious occupation, which in
turn was synecdoche for what was taking place in
Conversely,
Sharkey proposed that Joyce is a suitable figurehead for an alternative ‘Occupy
Movement.’ Utilizing Leo Knuth’s brilliant reading of the ‘Wandering Rocks’
episode of Ulysses (Chapter X),
Sharkey argued that Joyce’s novel works as an aesthetic foil to Duff’s symbolic
gesture. Bloom, who appears in the
central section of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ – with 9 sections on each side – is
also placed by Joyce at the topological centre of the city, under Merchant’s
arch. As Father Conmee and the Viceroy, representative of the Church and the State
(the two institutions to which Stephen feels enslaved) move in opposite
directions away from the centre, “we can make the two routes form an X on the
map of Dublin, with Bloom practically at the intersection of the two lines,”
crucified by thoughts of the Molly and Boylan affair (Knuth, 406). Thus,
although the twin lines of Joyce’s X are representative of Church and State,
they also constitute a topological metaphor for Joyce’s own creative occupation
of Dublin as host; a creative refashioning that ushers out dogmatism (both the
Church and State are seen to be departing the city) while reinstating the
earthy and sensual as Bloom buys The
Sweets of Sin, a cheap erotic novel, for Molly. If Frank Duff felt his crucifix was a
symbolic act of possession and occupation, Joyce creates a fictional heterocosm
that seeks to transform the material realm, if not in substance then certainly
in thought. Thus, James Joyce’s X is
like an intellectual occupation, which is what proper appreciation of the
Eucharist is, apprehension of and intellectual meditation on the meaning of
being a Host.
Furthermore,
by capturing Monto in the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses, Sharkey proposed that Joyce’s work perpetually sensualises
the
The
Wake endlessly recounts stories
revolving around a constant immixture of otherness into the [Irish] nation with
the successive waves of assimilation turning Picts, Vikings, Norsemen, Norman
invaders, British settlers, Jewish merchants, Chinese traders and so on into a
restless but predominantly Irish mass that would seethe and irrupt at times.
(Rabaté, 177)
So it is
that Joyce brings to literary discourse a new understanding of creativity and
sensualism, and to the relationship between notions of indigenous culture and
the Other he brings the need for an imminent and constant
transformation in which we hear a ‘collideorscape (FW 143.28) in all ‘flores of
speech ’ (FW 143.04). Thus Sharkey concluded that Joycean Eucharistics have
much to say to a modern, plural
And with
this he did cease to speak, which is probably just as well.
IV
And lo then
did we perceive them, ever them, old school critical heretics surrounded on all
sides by a great brightness, and lo, a bell did ring and they were changed, all
changed, for they had come, and saw, and were transformed, so that the raiments
of the mortal priests did disappear and fall away, and they were transformed
into He – the great James Joyce – as boy and man and creator, so that the three
parts of a trinity did materialize in Trinity, and corresponded to the three
stages of Elvis as had been foretold by the venerable theologians Crilly and
McGuire. And so it was that the Trinity trinity were changed, changed utterly,
and so did head off to Kehoes for an early morning pint, and a glass of Jameson
and milk, for without their shovel they could not go to work.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 10, February 2013, ISSN
1552-5112
References
Fagan. Terry and the North Inner
City Folklore Project, Monto, Madams,
Murder and Black Coddle,
Joyce, James. Finnegans
Wake.
− Ulysses,
ed. Hans Walter Gabler.
Joyce. Stanislaus, My
Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years.
Knuth, Leo. “A Bathymetric
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, James
Joyce and the Politics of Egoism,
