The post-Catholic Joyce
Filtered through my deconstructed Catholic faith, Ulysses holds up surprisingly well.
Century illustration (Source images: Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY / Creative Commons)
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Stephen Dedalus says, early in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Twenty-five years ago, when I was starting my dissertation research on this groundbreaking novel from 1922, I spent some time analyzing the significance of this statement in the context of Irish history and Joyce’s artistic theory. Now, I don’t have to analyze it. I just get it. I am watching an epoch of history unfold, and I don’t like where it seems to be going.
In the last few years I’ve watched dangerous forces coalesce into a rising fascist movement in the United States and seen many former associates and acquaintances assent to conspiracy theories and revisionist history. I have frequently thought this is what it might have felt like in Europe in the 1930s.
Large portions of my life, work, and identity were formed in a pocket of ultraconservative Catholicism that has lent its considerable political influence to backing some of the most dangerous movements in US culture today. My experience of religious deconstruction has not included disaffiliation from the Catholic Church, but it’s still been a shake-up. I find myself constantly pausing to reevaluate beliefs I once held, trying to determine what still has value and what should be discarded.
