Catholic Ireland: from the Mass to the Epiphany

In the summer of 1904, the Irish writer, editor, painter and mystic George Russell (his pseudonym was Æ) asked a 22-year-old promising Dublin poet called James Joyce if he could write story for the paper Russell edited, The Irish Homestead.

It was an odd journal for Joyce’s first published fiction, a weekly newspaper set up to promote the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, committed to improving the economics of Irish farming through co-operative societies. In a way it was a progressive journal. Joyce offered a story called ‘The Sisters’, an early version of the one that would open his collection Dubliners eventually published ten years later in 1914.

Was the story also progressive? Well, maybe a bit too much, because its picture of a child’s account of an old Catholic priest dying from paralysis of the insane carried implications of sin and abuse that were to be too much for Joyce’s later Irish and English publishers. The eventual story offered simony along with paralysis as his diagnosis of the ills of his fellow Dubliners. (Simony is the practice of charging for dispensation for sins, foremost among the spiritual crimes that the young Joyce laid against the wealthy Irish Catholic church.) The printers smelt blasphemy along with possible obscenity in the work and the long history of censoring and then banning Joyce began.

The story is heretical in that it takes the teaching of the church to talk about secular art. Its structure leads up to an ‘epiphany’, a concept that Joyce was developing in the earliest versions of his semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist and recorded in the fragments of a manuscript that survives called Stephen Hero. The development of the concept as founded in Catholicism was also recorded by Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, who records James asking:

Don’t you think there is 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 permanent artistic life of its own. … for their mental and moral uplift.

‘So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think there was something wrong with him…’

As developed through the stories in Dubliners the epiphany emerges as one of the foundational methods of modern fiction, a profoundly ambivalent, if frequently contradictory, mixture of moments of seeing, repression, secrecy, clarity and insight. Joyce’s Stephen calls the epiphany ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.’ The original Epiphany was, of course, an event recorded in the New Testament, the showing of Christ to the three wise men, 12 days after his birth. The secret of the redemption of mankind was shown to the world. The feast of the epiphany is celebrated by Christians on 6 January every year; Joyce’s great mature story of failure, disappointment, betrayal and epiphanic recognition of all of those things, ‘The Dead’, takes place on that feast day.

As Joyce’s writing developed in increasingly experimental ways, so did the epiphanic, as a technique but also as a way of conveying inner modes of knowing and experiencing. Joyce himself could also blaspheme his own idea: in the next story of Dubliners the first, or perhaps false, epiphany is a man exposing himself to boys mitching off school. Joyce also knew that epiphany has much to do with language, with what we say and how we formulate thought and language, both to ourselves and to our readers.

His writing can often be quite explicit, and Joyce exposes readers to explicit language, thought, feeling, and actions. The interior monologue, as developed through Ulysses, for instance, presents a myriad of epiphanic moments, of characters experiencing the consistent perceptual overload of everyday objects along with the plenitude of everyday inner desires, apparitions, fantasies and memories. And when Joyce finally allows the hero of Ulysses to go to bed after 18 hours of adventures, the text records an extra-large full stop – or even a blot on the page. Showing forth the inexpressible and the unwritable, consciousness is subsumed in sleep. The author then turns the novel over to the other person in the bed, Molly Bloom, whose monologue creates an entirely new thing.

Pause for thought…

Now that you’ve read the article, take a look at the question below and let us know what you think in the comments.

• What is your understanding of Joyce’s critique of Ireland as a ‘Catholic’ country?