I am the servant of two masters. Catholicism as a colonial force in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

FACU LDADE D E L E T R A S U N I V E R S I D A D E D O P O RTO Tiago Sousa Garcia 2º Ciclo de Estudos em Estudos Anglo-Americanos, variante de Literaturas e Culturas I am the servant of two masters Catholicism as a colonial force in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 2013 Orientador: Professor Doutor Gualter Cunha Classificação: Ciclo de estudos: Dissertação/relatório/Projeto/IPP: Versão definitiva Acknowledgements Writing this dissertation was, for me, perhaps one of the most challenging tasks I ever endeavoured, one I would surely fail if not for the help of a number of wonderful people I was lucky enough to meet. In particular, I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor, Professor Gualter Cunha, the best guide I could ever hope for, for his kindness, wisdom, insightful – sometimes painfully so – commentaries, and his willingness to work on a tight schedule; I would also like to thank my former Professor Rui Carvalho Homem who formally introduced me to Joyce's work; my fellow Joycean Márcia Lemos who was kind enough to join me and Professor Rui Carvalho Homem in a public session where we discussed some of the issues dealt by this work; my friends Maria Inês Marques, Zélia Moreira, Pedro Almeida, Alexandre Marinho, Sílvia Neto, Sofia Araújo, Vítor Fernandes, Marta Correia, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes and Helena Lopes for their unconditional support and patience and my brother and parents for their understanding and love. Lastly, I would like to thank Kate De Rycker for taking care of me whenever I needed, for arguing me into new ideas and insights, for her extra patience whenever I had lost mine, for her unique gift of making it all worthwhile. Thank you all. Abstract Keywords: Catholicism; Religion; Ireland; James Joyce; Narrator; Post-Colonial; Stephen Dedalus; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As soon as James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published (first serialised in 1914, then published in 1916), critical discourse has focused on the relationship between its main character, Stephen Dedalus, and the Catholic Church. This discourse, however, mainly tried to establish Stephen – and Joyce – as a lapsed Catholic. In the past half-century, critical attention has left the subject untouched, a few notable exceptions excluded. In this thesis, the subject of Stephen's Catholicism is once more taken into consideration, making use of post-colonial methodological tools, not to ascertain the degree – if any – of Stephen's Catholicism, but to describe his relationship with the church as akin to that of a colonial subject. This will enable an understanding of the issue not as a dichotomy of adherence, but rather as a far more complex, and far less decisive, relationship than previously suggested. Resumo Keywords: Catolicismo; Religião; Irlanda; James Joyce; Narrador; Pós-Colonial; Stephen Dedalus; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Desde que A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man veio a público (primeiro serializado em 1914 e, mais tarde, publicado em 1916), que o discurso crítico se tem focado na relação entre o personagem principal, Stephen Dedalus, e a Igreja Católica. Este discurso, porém, procurava sobretudo definir Stephen – e Joyce – como um Católico perdido. A crítica Joyceana, nos últimos cinquenta anos, com a excepção de alguns casos digos de nota, não se tem dedicado a este tema. Nesta dissertação, a questão do Catolicismo de Stephen é novamente considerada através de ferramentas metedológicas da teoria pós-colonial, não para estabelecer o grau de Catolicismo de Stephen – se o existe – mas para descrever a sua relação com a Igreja como semelhante à de um homem colonisado, permitindo assim que a questão seja tratada não como uma dicotomia de aderência ou não à fé, mas como uma relação diferente da sugerida pelo discurso crítico tradicional, bastante mais complexa e bastante menos clara. Table of Contents Introduction......................................................................................................................11 God's name, my name, my story......................................................................................35 Composition of place.......................................................................................................61 Paradise lost, paradise regained, paradise rejected..........................................................78 Lotus eaters: conclusions...............................................................................................114 Bibliography..................................................................................................................122 I am the servant of two masters 16 wanting a piece of the pie and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They shouldn't call themselves subaltern17 In all fairness, Stephen didn't call himself a subaltern, and even if he did, he wouldn't have meant it as Spivak defines it. It was my critical interpretation that associated Stephen's servant with Spivak's subaltern. Even if Spivak's clear-cut definition might threaten my reading18, I still believe that to look at Stephen as one who considers himself as subaltern, one without voice, might prove fruitful. Consider what Stephen says to Davin in Portrait: «When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets» (P 171). Just before, he had also said: «This race, this country and this life produced me, [Stephen] said. I shall express myself as I am» (P 170). Throughout Portrait, particularly towards the end of the narrative, Stephen is adamant in his desire to express himself, apparently without ever being able to do so. He will not think himself capable of expression, I argue, while he is still held back by the nets thrown at him – nationality, language, religion – by accident of birth. His own sense of self is built on the notion that he cannot speak. Accordingly, he sees himself as a subaltern, as per Spivak's definition. However, as I said before, this is his own subjective perception of his own condition. Whether a critic would agree with this self-assessment is a different question altogether and again, to my argument, irrelevant. Post-colonial criticism, I believe, will serve as fertile ground to my critical interpretation of Portrait and will enable me to move away from previous analysis of religion in Joyce's work. By looking at it as a power relationship between an elite and a subaltern mass, rather than trying to find out if Stephen is inherently Catholic or if his refusal is absolute, I will underline the instances where he wasn't able to free himself completely from his coloniser's influence. It may help my argument if one thinks of it as a language – much like the Irish, even as an independent nation, keep English as one of their official languages, so does Stephen continues to speak in Catholic, even if he did renounce it and its politics. As a result, my work will not try to prove if there's any Catholicism in Stephen, but if his mind and worldview have somehow been affected, influenced or informed by his Catholic upbringing. I will not try to prove that Stephen has a Catholic mind or whether or not he has abandoned Catholicism for good, as previous critics have explored. What I will do is isolate and 17 Leon De Cock, «Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa», in Ariel: a review of International English Literature, 23:3, July 1992, pp. 45-46. 18 On a personal note, I both admire and resent Spivak's fierce defence of her argument. If, on the one hand, she is trying to defend herself against detrimental attacks by clarifying and delimiting her concept, on the other hand she is preventing the critical concept to grow and gather new meanings and usages. Arguably, she is taking the ethically charged mission of not letting subalternity be overused and, thus, lose its ability to define what she considers the true subalterns. In doing so, she is also taking advantage of her enormous influence in critical thinking to silence or dismiss different critical opinions. It's as if Joyce came back to life and said that all criticism of his work was a misappropriation of his words. I am the servant of two masters 17 explain why Stephen's thought can be called Catholic in certain specific instances, by considering such instances within a wider power relationship framework. To which, I believe, post-colonialism offers an interesting and fruitful approach. For instance, consider the famous non serviam Stephen utters to his friend Cranly, quoted above: «I will not serve that in which I no longer believe» (P 208). Stephen's words are famously taken from Lucifer's rebellion against God. The traditional critic discourse would point out that Stephen's profession of unbelief is made in the same Catholic terms that he is trying to refuse and, consequently, he hasn't really freed himself. A post-colonial reading, on the other hand, will underline that if Stephen's language of unbelief is Catholic, it is because the only way to repel the dominant other is to refuse it in its own terms. Thinking in historical terms, the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 wouldn't have taken effect if it hadn't been ratified by Westminster. Up until then, Independence Wars were fought, but independence wasn't achieved until it was accepted by the Imperial power structure. Or if one wants to fall back to Shakespeare, Caliban's words to his master Prospero make a perfect synthesis of my post-colonial approach: «You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is I know how to curse»19 – what I will be doing throughout this dissertation is, in a word, to underline Stephen's cursing. As I've stated before, Stephen Dedalus will be the object of my investigation. Any research dealing with religion in James Joyce's works would find plenty of possibilities of study, but a large scope analysis would be impossible in so little space. By focusing on Stephen, I will limit myself to a specific character in a specific situation and, even though such an approach will be inherently deficient, it will allow for a deeper understanding of Stephen's relationship with Catholicism, rather than a superficial analysis of Joyce's large body of work. In this respect, my self imposed limited corpus will come as an advantage rather than as an impediment. It is better, I believe, to allow myself the space for an extensive analysis of an admittedly restricted subject. Working with religion, choosing Stephen as my main subject was straightforward: his plight with Catholicism and belief is, by far, the most developed in all of Joyce's characters. I'm not claiming, however, to exhaust the theme. In fact, my aim is to reopen what has been a more or less silent critical subject for the past few years, by posing more questions than those that I can possibly answer. Equally fruitful would be to apply to Joyce himself the same approach that I will be using in this dissertation. Be that as it may, to do so would also mean to change the overall mode of this research. It wouldn't so much be a literary study as a biographic essay. Unfortunately for all Joyce's biographers, Richard Ellmann set the bar too high for all contenders. Even though his work is anything but definitive – particularly since 2012, when Joyce's work was no longer held under the 19 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.364-365, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, London, Arden Shakespeare, 2001, p.1077. I am the servant of two masters 18 protecting hands of his estate – to work biographically to whatever degree is also to rewrite Ellmann's work, a task too heavy and somewhat impossible for many, including me. After years without a new Joyce biography, Gordon Bowker has recently published his attempt: James Joyce. A biography20. Critical consensus is yet to be achieved about Bowker's work, however it seems that Ellmann's will remain the standard Joyce biography for a few more years. Adam Mars-Jones, reviewing Bowker's book, said that «Gordon Bowker has missed the chance to say anything new and interesting about the great writer»21. Personally, I choose not to take on Joyce himself not out of a fear of failure, but because I rather work within the freedom of fiction. While working on a fictional character, my interpretation will remain true as long as it's coherent and sane, while if working on a real person, I would always have reality – and some fierce reviewers – to disprove me. Even so, working solely on Stephen Dedalus brings its own set of difficulties. Stephen is a unique character in modernist fiction, whose lifetime, according to traditional criticism, spreads through three books. My approach to the subject, however, makes this traditional view less obvious. The connection between the three Stephen Dedalus (or Daedelus, in Stephen Hero's case), is mainly established biographically, that is to say, we know that it was the same person who wrote the three volumes, and we know that his biography serves as a model for Stephen's. If one doesn't take into account Joyce's life as an element of criticism, as I don't, to assert that there is a continuity between the character Stephen in Portrait and the character Stephen in Ulysses, one has to rely entirely on internal evidence. For example, in the first chapter of Ulysses, and numerous times throughout the book, Stephen will recall his University friend Cranly, with whom he had a crucial conversation about religion and family: «Cranly's arm. His [Buck Mulligan's] arm» (U 7). The problem is that internal evidence alone, when it comes to fictional characters, might not be proof enough. It's impossible to prove beyond doubt that the character named Cranly that Stephen refers to in Ulysses, much like Stephen himself, has an inherent claim to be the same Cranly whom the young artist befriends in Portrait. The same reasoning can also be applied to other references in Ulysses. When Stephen thinks about his time at Clongowes for example: «So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the same» (U 11). Arguably, one could take his cryptic remark about being another and the same to be a conscious statement of continuity between the two books. Yet, there's nothing but interpretation in it. Nonetheless, to completely dismiss the hypothesis of Stephen's continuity would be to ignore a decade's old critical tradition simply to abide by a personal methodological impossibility. To strictly limit myself to Portrait's Stephen 20 Gordon Bowker, James Joyce. A biography, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011. 21 Adam Mars-Jones, «James Joyce by Gordon Bowker – review» in The Guardian, 1st of July 2011 [available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/01/james-joyce-gordon-bowker-review, last accessed 15th of March 2013]. I am the servant of two masters 19 would be missing on a much larger body of critical insight to be gathered from Stephen's contradictions at different stages of his fictional life. Consequently, relying solely on internal evidence and on an established critical tradition, I will assume that there is a continuity in Stephen's character between, at least, Portrait and Ulysses. As far as Stephen Hero is concerned, proving continuity is more than a simple methodological issue. The book was never published during Joyce's lifetime, which poses further and more difficult questions. Is Stephen Hero part of Joyce's work, or should it be discarded as mere literary curiosity? If it is part of his body of work, is it a previous version of Portrait or does it hold a position of its own in the joycean canon? And if it is a former version of Portrait, should its narrative be considered as explanatory of the novel that followed, or should it be considered as something that was rewritten? Foucault lurks at the back of my mind, questioning my methodology. Whether one chooses to discuss such issues or not, I consider it relevant that a statement of awareness should be made. In order to avoid such questions that would lead me astray to a rather theoretically heavy debate, I will confine my reading to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. On occasion, I will refer to Ulysses and Stephen Hero, but merely to illustrate an argument already approached in Portrait, rather than as further investigation. A more complete study would have to encompass at least both Portrait and Ulysses, however that would require a much more thorough analysis than mine. Also, by restricting my reading to Portrait I will focus on the process of rebellion rather than on its after-effects. An appropriate metaphor would be that I'm writing the history of the revolution rather than studying its aftermath. The main question that my research will try to answer is, quite simply, if one can consider Stephen to be a subject of Catholicism, and if Catholicism can act as a colonising force on its believers or ex-believers. To do so, I will examine every instance where Stephen's behaviour, language and thought can be, somehow, connected to Catholicism. I am fully aware of the difficulty of the task. For one, to determine if an expression can be called Catholic, as opposed to Protestant, or atheist, is an almost impossible task. It seems quite clear under certain circumstances, like Stephen's confession in the third chapter of Portrait, but, for the most part, it remains elusive and ultimately subjective, to consider a specific situation as definitely catholic. An expression that has been used for decades is to claim that Joyce himself had a «Catholic frame of mind». And even though recurring to such a concept would save me a lot of trouble and headache, I find it faulty, erroneous and somehow misleading. Geert Lernout, whose work on Joyce's religiosity tries to prove beyond doubt that Joyce is not in any way Catholic, writes: And what can it possibly mean, to say that someone has a mind with a I am the servant of two masters 20 catholic structure and what would such a catholic structure look like? […] both Joyce and Baudelaire refer to catholic doctrine and practice in their work, as do other writers who attack religion in general or the catholic church in particular: how could one disagree with religion without referring to its doctrines and practices? But reference to catholic matters cannot be enough and certainly something more must be meant when we claim that these writers' minds had a 'catholic structure'. For one thing, this catholic structure must be fundamentally different not just from other non religious structures, but even […] from a general christian or protestant structure. If we disregard catholic practices or beliefs, does sin and more specifically original sin not exist for protestants? It seems that the two claims, Maritain's about Baudelaire and Mary Colum's about Joyce, do not tell us much more than the claim that a thorough catholic education leaves such an indelible imprint on the mind that even heretics and atheists cannot escape from it. The dissidents end up expressing their revolt in the very language they are trying to get away from. Since it has been impossible to describe in detail what, exactly, this imprint entails, such a claim should be considered with the greatest hesitation.22 Lernout is right: the concept of catholic structure of mind seems too vague to pin down. One cannot define it and isolate it properly without falling into subjective interpretation or ideological bias. It is not sufficient to say that if a certain author writes about Catholic practises he or she undoubtedly has a Catholic point of view of the world. By that reasoning, the mere allusion to Holocaust might make me a Nazi. This is, obviously, an over-simplification of Lernout's argument, but one that synthesises his criticism of the definition of a Catholic frame of mind. Lernout emphasises the underlying fallacy of early Catholic readings of Joyce's work: the argument starts from the conclusion – that Joyce's mind had been informed by Catholicism – to reach its evidence. Lernout argues against such practises by pointing out that, from that perspective, every reference to Catholicism would be understood as symptom rather than allusion, as evidence created to prove guilt. Such technique is, clearly, biased police work and, at best, faulty criticism. To a degree, every critic is guilty of such crime, Lernout and I included. One must always start from a hypothesis, a direction, a reading. There would be no argument otherwise, only a motley inventory of quotations. As with many things in life, the secret is knowing when to stop, or, in this case, to realise when one is bending the evidence to prove an argument23. 22 Lernout, op. cit., 211-212. 23 It should be stated that this is not directed at the critics Lernout is analysing or at any other particular early critic of Joyce. It is merely an explanation of Geert Lernout's reasoning. I am the servant of two masters 21 Lernout also makes clear that there are too many similarities between Catholicism and other Christian practises, particularly between Catholicism and Anglicanism. However, I must disagree with his thought when he claims that, by dismissing Catholic practises, it's even harder to distinguish a Catholic frame of mind from a Protestant one. On the contrary, I think that through specific Catholic theology, a clearer definition can be achieved. I'm thinking specifically about such issues as transubstantiation and mariolatry, items of faith undoubtedly Catholic in their nature. Furthermore, there is a degree of ambiguity about what is meant by Catholic practises. Does it refer merely to what one might call Catholic rites, such as communion, mass, the liturgy? If so, I agree with his assertion that there are too many similarities between Catholicism and other Christian confessions, particularly with the Anglican High Church, whose disagreements with Roman Catholicism could almost be reduced to an historical accident rather than a clear theological departure: high church forms of anglicanism, especially in this period [Joyce's lifetime, particularly his formative years], were extremely close to catholicism in the majority of […] issues. In fact, under the influence of the so-called Tractarians, by the turn of the twentieth century, the 'catholic' faction of the Church of England had adopted not just many of the rituals, but a good part of the doctrines of the Church of Rome.24 To understand Catholicism, even Catholic practise, as a mere collection of rites, liturgy and theology, specifically in Ireland and specifically in this period, is not enough. Catholicism should be understood as not simply confined to the religious dimension stated above, but as an all inclusive sphere that influences one's day to day life – a cultural sphere within a larger cultural background. Catholicism, and even more so in Ireland, touches all aspects of life. It's not only religion: politics, identity, social relations, to a greater or lesser degree, are all influenced by Catholicism. Lernout's strict definition of Catholicism as religion is evidence of the current belief – political in itself – that religion should limit itself to its religious role and not control or influence other aspects of one's life. Even if such debate had already started by the end of the 19th century, it was far from being being accepted by everyone. As History proves, and even more so in Ireland's case, Catholicism was still as much cultural as religious. My understanding is that the very phrasing of «Catholic frame of mind» is misleading and prone to attack. Unlike Geert Lernout, I still don't fully disagree with the concept but rather with the 24 Lernout, op. cit., p. 213. I am the servant of two masters 22 implications that such phrasing has. What I mean is that there may be an inherent difficulty in trying to isolate and define what has been called «Catholic frame of mind», however such difficulties might not hold true if one looks for the effects of it, rather than attempted definitions. In some ways, it's like a differential diagnosis or to explain wind. In medicine, a differential diagnosis is attempted when a certain issue cannot be proven by a direct exam. Then a doctor, or a team of doctors, proceeds into proving or disproving a specific disease from a shortlist of possibilities by examining isolated aspects of a condition, by watching the symptoms and attempting treatment. At the end, if everything goes well, a diagnosis is achieved by ruling out every other possible disease. The same goes for the wind: we know that wind is nothing but moving air, but there is no way to see air shifting through space, except by analysing its effects – that is to say, by looking at the leaves moving with it. So, by looking at the effects of what has been called the Catholic frame of mind, as in, by noting that Stephen is compelled to look for confession and absolution at the end of the third chapter of Portrait, or by looking at his reluctance in indulging his mother's wish to participate in a ritual that he claims not to believe, one can gather more and more useful information than by merely claiming that his reaction is simply based on some sort of an acquired inclination. Also, by using such a concept, one would be jumping to conclusions – anything Stephen says or does even remotely connected to Catholicism would immediately be ascribed to his Catholic frame of mind. If I'd decided to make use of such a concept, I would simply have to equate it with a concept of colonial subject – literally saying that a Catholic frame of mind equals colonial subject of catholicism – and conclude that, therefore, Catholicism acts as a colonial power, a process that would be futile, unnecessary and uninteresting. So, instead of using such formulae, I will use the tools of post-colonial criticism to examine rather than conclude anything about Stephen's mind. If one looks at such examples as those above, instead of ascribing them to his bent will, one should ask if he was free to say or act differently and, if so, why wasn't he, who or what impeded it. In a nutshell, rather than limiting myself to a volatile frame of mind, I will be looking at it socially as well. Another aspect that separates my argument from Geert Lernout's is our different subjects of choice. While Lernout worked on Joyce's personal belief, or lack of, I will look at a fictional creation whose existence is confined to what is written of him. Lernout, besides having to consider what Joyce has been described saying or doing, also has to speculate on what he might have been thinking. On the other hand, since Stephen's whole existence is confined to Stephen Hero, Ulysses and Portrait, I can only consider what is there described. So, contrary to Lernout's, my subject has a clear finite existence and his mind exists only in these three books. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum in recent criticism of Catholicism and James Joyce is Mary Lowe-Evans. In the introduction to her book Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and I am the servant of two masters 23 Company, while talking about the short story «The Sisters», she writes: [The Sisters] incorporates elements of the Catholic nostalgia – the obsessive urge to return to a, paradoxically, dead but mysteriously vital and intellectually challenging body of Catholic dogma and ritual – pervading Joyce's works. That nostalgia, I contend, derives from the «faith in the soul» Joyce owns early in his career in [a] letter to Lady Gregory […] and accounts for his decision to make «the gestation of a soul» the principle of order for Portrait.25 At a first glance, Lowe-Evans concept of Catholic Nostalgia might seem similar to the earlier Catholic frame of mind, although with a slightly different terminology. If that were the case, a Catholic frame of mind would be defined as one who desires to return to Catholicism, even if just out of curiosity. And to a point, Lowe-Evans argument can be simplified to such an understanding without much loss. Another issue that I find faulty, or, at least, doubtful, with Mary Lowe-Evan's argument, are her use of such charged words as soul, whose many definitions within and outside religion can be problematic. Just in the two Joyce quotes mentioned in the fragment above, soul can mean extremely different things in their respective context. The first one, «faith in the soul», might not have anything to do with the Christian definition of soul but rather as a synonym of self. The second one clearly plays on both the Christian soul and on a concept of personal essence – Stephen moves from a preoccupation with his Catholic soul to define himself as an artist, or someone with an artist's soul. To make such distinctions flat, particularly when one discusses religion, can be dangerous and oversimplified. My major disagreement, however, is with the methodology in use to define the concept of Catholic nostalgia, which is radically different from that of Joyce's early criticism: Lowe-Evans makes use of psychoanalysis to prove her argument. In her definition of Catholic nostalgia it's the ideologically charged «obsessive urge» that strengthens the argument, if one is to accept a psychoanalytic reading, or weakens it, if one is to refuse it. The argument throughout the book is perfectly sound within a psychoanalytic framework, even insightful at times. However, looking at it from the outside of that school of thought, some claims border on the ridiculousness. In the second chapter, «Dogsbody 'Marys' his mother», as the title already hints, Lowe-Evans goes to great lengths to suggest that most, if not all, of the female characters in the joycean cannon, and even some male ones such as «The Sisters»' Father Flynn, are actually representations of Joyce's mother who, in turn, is idealised as a mixture of the real, historical, May Joyce and the Virgin Mary. As the 25 Mary Lowe-Evans, op. cit., p. 1. I am the servant of two masters 24 old saying goes, if it's not one thing, it's your mother. All crude simplifications aside, probably the major reason why I believe Lowe-Evans argument is unhelpful outside a strictly psychoanalytic reading is that making a claim such as Joyce's writing displays signs of Catholic nostalgia is irrefutable by the very nature of psychoanalysis itself. Even if Joyce, foreseeing future criticism, had written a line that read I do not have any sort of Catholic nostalgia, a psychoanalytic reading would just take that statement not at its face value but as a conscious denial of a subconscious reality. In other words, you can never disprove a psychoanalytic reading by simply denying it. So, when Mary Lowe-Evans makes claims such as the ones summarised above, the mere assertion is its own argument. Geert Lernout shares a similar view of my main concern with Mary Lowe-Evans work, even though he doesn't quote directly or mentions her in his study: The problem of claiming the existence of a mind with a catholic structure in the case of somebody who does not consider himself catholic and who, according to the rules of that church cannot even be accepted as catholic, is ultimately ethical. It reminds me very much of the classic psychoanalytical idea according to which the degree of insistence with which the patient rejects a psychoanalytical diagnosis becomes a measure of the fundamental correctness of the diagnosis and of psychoanalysis itself. The fact that I insist that I do not want to have sex with my mother is proof that that is precisely what I unconsciously crave to do. In both cases the superiority of the religious or psychological frame of reference goes unquestioned, in fact it cannot even be questioned, because it is never made explicit or, to use Karl Popper's phrase, is is never made falsifiable: no circumstances are given in which the opposite might be shown to be the case.26 Even with all the objections I may have to Lernout's clear cut, black and white-ish view of Catholicism in Joyce27, I'm inclined to agree with his argument when it comes to psychoanalysis. However, even if we can't prove that such a person is or isn't part of Catholicism in any way, the vehement refusal shows, to my understanding, a degree of abnormal interest in such matters. While Lernout claims that Joyce never returned to Catholicism – and his argument is sound – and LoweEvans implies that he never left catholicism, neither seem to take into account the why of his continued interest, Lernout dismissing the possibility that Joyce's attitude is anything more than 26 Geert Lernout, op. cit., p. 212. 27 Lernout is clearly at the opposite side of Lowe-Evans, however his argument is, in essence, Joyce is not in any way Catholic because he says so, and so, to a degree, as much definitive and irrefutable as Mary Lowe-Evan's psychoanalysis of Catholic nostalgia. I am the servant of two masters 25 assertiveness and Lowe-Evan's claiming it as a sign of a Catholic nostalgia. My argument, on the other hand, as I have repeatedly said before, will try to understand the why and how come of such obsession in Joyce's fictional character, without muting it as simple truths or meaningful denials. While the concept of Catholic behaviour that I tried to outline above can be hard to define and harder to defend, it doesn't seem to be hard to understand and even accept. Simply, what I will be looking for is evidence that Catholicism influenced Stephen's acts and words. However, the second major question that my work will tackle is, admittedly, a riskier one, that is, to take Catholicism to be a colonial force. Risky not only because to argue for it will require a certain degree of abstraction but also because I will be tackling a basic concept within post-colonial theory, that of the nation. Nation is a central concept to post-colonial theory because, at its very foundation, lies a war between peoples, one, the coloniser who oppresses the other, the colonised – and both sides defend themselves as a nation. Interestingly enough, the coloniser's relationship tries to include the colonised in its concept of nation, however the coloniser finds it nothing more than imperialist rhetoric built to hide the real superiority with which the people from the metropolis regard them. In fact, as Benedict Anderson has shown28, social climbing within the Imperial sphere becomes impossible to a colonised subject. The best they can aspire to is to a metropolitan education that will get them, if all goes well, close to the top of the colonial structure where they were born, and even then there would probably be an imperial envoy at a higher rank. This sense of social frontier is one of the major factors to the creation of imagined communities that, in modern times, took the form of nations. A community of people that cannot get to the higher ranks of society defines itself against a community of people that can. From that point of view, Catholicism might fail to compare itself with a nation. If anything, Catholicism is very inclusive of its members in hierarchy (although for centuries a non-Italian pope would be unthinkable, but then again, the concept of Italian didn't come into existence until the nineteenth century), bishops and cardinals from all over the (Western) world had a say in Roman affairs. However, I still believe that, even if one cannot call the Catholic church a nation, one can still look at its power and influence as colonial. Within Joyce's work one finds ample evidence of it, as I hope to show in the following chapters. The concept of nation that I tried to outline above is one of binary oppositions, that is to say, that one group of people define themselves as different from another group of people. Such an understanding of nation is indebted to Edward Said's groundbreaking work Orientalism (1978) and its roots go back to the Hegelian master-slave relationship. In the Introduction to Orientalism, Said clearly states that «the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its constrasting image, 28 Benedict Anderson, Immagined Communities, London, Verso, 1991. I am the servant of two masters 32 eternity. It is an immense power indeed. The question remains: what is he actually offering Stephen? If Stephen were to pursue priesthood, would he really have crossed to the other side, would he really become the coloniser, or simply a camouflaged subject within the power structure? I will return to these questions later in this work but, for now, let me indulge in speculation. The reader knows that Stephen will not become a priest. Within Catholicism, there is a certain mystical event that could, possibly (but not surely), be equated with being born on the coloniser's side: the vocation, the call. Those who hear the call are the church's true princes. Stephen, who has thought of priesthood but who does not have the vocation, could never become a true coloniser. He would have been, quite literally, a mimic man, resembling other priests without actually being one. He, like so many others before and after him, would have shown the thinness of the Church's power by his mere ordination. This is, as I have said before, simple speculation. Its only value is to create a possible equivalence between a secular and a religious power, without any textual evidence to do so. Nonetheless, it does provide an illustration of Catholicism's power structure as akin to that of a colonial power. Let us consider the same fragment of Portrait one last time, particularly in what concerns the priest's obsession with power. He mentions it no less than nine times in such a short speech. Power, authority, the priest is obsessed with it and tries to reel Stephen in with this prospect. Equally as revealing is the fact that so much stress is put into temporal power rather than divine one. The priests' power over their fellow man is, if not as great, almost next to God's, and that in a community where all men should bow to the almighty. A priest has more power than the saints, the angels, the Virgin Mary. And that is, I contend, because a priest has the power to control other men, something that no divinity has. In fact, this particular point of view is backed up by historical data. The Roman Catholic Church had not only political power over Catholic nations but holdings of its own, where the Pope was the actual ruler of the people, besides being also their spiritual guide. Such de jure temporal power, however, declined with the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, in particular with the unification of Italy which displaced much of the papacy's territories into the newly formed state. The Pope's loss of direct temporal dominion over his people had to be replaced by a different kind of hold that would, at the same time, fight the modernist47 crisis in Catholicism. A perfect example of this occurred at the 1870 First Vatican Council, when the dogma of Papal Infallibility was approved. Up until then a doctrinal decision had to be approved by a council of bishops, 47 The modernist crisis of Roman Catholicism is a general label for various widely different lines of thought that developed within the Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernism claimed for a revision of certain theological and liturgical aspects of Catholicism, proposing in some cases an approximation with Protestantism. Although condemned at first, modernist ideas eventually led to the Vatican Council II which changed the face of Catholicism to what we know today. I am the servant of two masters 33 reducing the influence of the papacy and decentralising power. According to Geert Lernout, the ratification of the dogma of Papal Infallibility contributed to «redifine the nature of the church, its authority and its relationship with the temporal powers»48. The end result was a reinforcement of the Pope's power over the church and its people. While the Pope could no longer send an army to enslave the people, he could, for example, issue a doctrinal proclamation forbidding the believers to vote for the elections of the newly created Italian state, threatening with excommunion anyone who defied it. Catholic theology became stricter and stricter towards the end of the nineteenth century as an attempt to secure temporal power over a community – the Catholics – through divinely sanctioned doctrine. I use here the word community quite deliberatively. I've shown that one can find grounds to consider Catholicism a colonial force both within Joyce's work and history; but I also find that a theoretical approach to it might be fruitful. Even if one cannot simply state that the Roman Catholic Church is the same as a nation – though, as I've explored before, it has the same narrative strategy as the modern nation defined by Bhabha –, one can see at least one similarity: the concept of community. Benedict Anderson defined a nation as an imagined political community, and imagined as limited and sovereign. Limited because it acknowledges that, no matter how large a community, it will never consider itself to encompass the whole of the human race; and sovereign because it refuses the reign of divinely ordained dynastic realms. Even if during the middle ages it fancied itself as a nation, Catholicism fails quite clearly at both dimensions posited by Anderson: its messianism dreamed of a universal all-encompassing membership and the papacy claimed divine power. Even if it is true that, during the middle ages, such divine power could be a reality for most if not all believers, Anderson claims that, during the Enlightenment and Revolution period, when the concept of nation was born, it would be impossible for even its most devout believers not to confront themselves with «the living pluralism of […] religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch»49 – or, in other words, if so many faiths claim the same unique divine power, it undermines the very concept of a divinely ordained realm. However, one aspect that Catholicism always held true, was that of community. Anderson defines a community as something where «regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail […] [it] is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship»50. While nation can be defined to exclude Catholic, the concept of imagined community that Anderson uses to define nation can be applied to Catholicism quite clearly. Imagined because, according to Anderson, a real community would require each member to know each other. Since this is impossible to all but the 48 Lernout, op. cit., 34. 49 Anderson, op. cit., 7. 50 Idem. I am the servant of two masters 34 smallest of groups, any sense of community is always imagined and developed by, as he argues, such elements as a common language. Catholicism's adherence to Latin and it's resistance to vernacular was, at first, an attempt to secure their messianic vision of a Universal faith and later, as I shall demonstrate in the chapters that follow, as a means of subjugation. While such an approach to Catholicism might appear unorthodox at first sight, I believe it can greatly contribute to a fresh understanding of religion in James Joyce's work. In the next chapters I will look closely at Stephen's behaviour in Portrait, examining it to conclude if he has been somehow conditioned by his catholic upbringing. I will refer to post-colonial theory whenever fit but I will not, however, simply give another post-colonial reading with a slightly different twist. What I will do is provide post-colonialism with new and compelling questions and, hopefully, contribute to the opening of new paths in both post-colonial and joycean critique. I am the servant of two masters 35 God's name, my name, my story «Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...» (P 5). These are the opening lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They are Stephen's opening lines (or his father's, or his father's through Stephen). It is a common discussion amongst readers and book lovers: which are the greatest opening lines in literature? This piece of literary pop culture, shallow as it sounds, has the ability to generate the most inflamed attacks and the most passionate defences. Hundreds, maybe thousands of top ten (or top one hundred, or top random number) opening lines in literature have been compiled throughout history, all of them capable of gathering a huge upheaval of commentaries criticising the exclusion or inclusion of a number of inevitably randomly selected quotations. Any newspaper culture editor worthy of the name knows that a selection of literature's finest openings is a sure way of gathering attention to the book section of the paper when news is scarce. A quick internet search will return countless lists, each one unique. A recent The Observer top ten51 collects a number of classics – Joyce, Austen, Twain – and still the comment section of its website adds and subtracts names to the list. Some of the most usual contenders in lists such as this include Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, George Orwell and, occasionally, James Joyce. The criteria for the selection are always fuzzy at best, and non-existent most of the times. In the aforementioned The Observer top ten, for example, the first line of Ulysses is given as one of the ten best lines, yet the justification for its inclusion seems pale in comparison to the possibility of including the opening lines of Finnegans Wake: «This is the classic third-person opening to the 20th-century novel that has shaped modern fiction, pro and anti, for almost a hundred years. As a sentence, it is possibly outdone by the strange and lyrical beginning of Joyce’s final and even more experimental novel, Finnegans Wake»52. The motives for including Ulysses's first line are undermined by their own justification, making clear the ultimate futility of such an exercise – it is not the line itself that matters, but the book where the line comes from. That is the reasoning backing up the choice of Ulysses' admittedly conventional opening line over more experimental ones. Yet, there is something to be said for convention. If I were to select my top ten opening lines 51 Robert McCrum, «The 10 best first lines in fiction», in The Observer, Sunday 29th April 2012 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2012/apr/29/ten-best-first-lines-fiction]. 52 McCrum, ibidem. I am the servant of two masters 36 in literature, personal as it sounds – for personal all such lists are – Portrait's fairy tale opening would be at the top of the list, above Nabokov's Lolita's enchanting rhythm, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina's iconic synthesis, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice's wit, George Orwell's 1984's abnormal normality, and even above Finnegans Wake's mid-sentence experience. There is nothing more conventional in fiction than starting a tale with once upon a time, and with reason. Most languages will have a similar formula with which to start their own folklore tales53. Consequently, little attention is given to the formula itself. However, on a closer look, one realises how rich with meaning it can be: the time of the action is set from the very beginning as something that happened in the past, yet the uncertainty of when it actually happened gives an immediate aura of fantasy to the narrative. Four common words hint at verisimilitude while clearly stating that what follows is fiction. For once upon a time is a formula too charged to mean anything else. To start a narrative with it is to put a giant screaming neon sign reading this is fiction. This is, in part, what the opening lines of Portrait do. Yet, the convention is immediately subverted by the follow up and a very good time it was, adding a degree of subjectivity and personal experience to what is about to be told, as if the narrator was present during the narrative and was looking back fondly to that time past. To the screaming neon sign, a small or is it? had been added. One of the reasons why the first lines of Portrait are so relevant lies precisely in this defrauding of expectations, a small turn of phrase that commands the reader to go back to the beginning, to read anew and in a different light those four words that he has read or heard hundreds if not thousands of times before. In so few words, the reader has been made to reconsider a whole literary tradition and his own preconceptions about it. Furthermore, the musicality and rhythm of the sentence, taking the reader back to the early childhood of fairy tales, develops throughout the first paragraph in an almost melodic prosody, only to be broken by the three short, simple sentences that, once again, come unexpected to the reader: «His father told him that story: his father looked at him through the glass: he had a hairy face» (P idem). This sudden break will set the tone for the rest of the narrative, a narrative that must be fought against, full of silences, leaps, half truths and deficient understandings. Rather than the fairy tale cruise promised by the first lines, the narrative of Portrait is a tremendous puzzle missing key pieces. It is up to the reader to put the puzzle together as best as he can. The break from the first paragraph to the second is an example of this: it is a tale within a tale, told by someone to someone else, with no authoritative judgement or description mediating experience, almost incomprehensible – or at least meaningless – without prior 53 «Era uma vez», in Portuguese, «Il était une fois» in French, «C'era una volta» in Italian, for example. I am the servant of two masters 37 knowledge of Irish mythology54 or Joyce's biography55. It is only when one reads the second paragraph that one understands that the first was written not in the voice of the narrator nor in the voice of Stephen's, maybe not even in the voice of his father – instead, in the voice of his father as heard by Stephen and retold by the narrator. There is nothing simple or conventional about Portrait's opening lines. The reason why I started this section of my work discussing the pop culture obsession with literature's opening lines and with a defence of Portrait's virtues in this domain is precisely because I wanted to briefly discuss the role of the narrator and its implications for my reading of the novel. Portrait's narrative virtuosity is something of a calling card to the novel. On her introduction to the Oxford edition of Portrait, Jeri Johnson notes that «[Joyce] moved the narrative centre of consciousness from a wholly independent third-person narrator to one which exists between Stephen and the third-person narrator»56. This type of discursivity is sometimes classified as free indirect speech, defined by Gérard Genette as when «the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two voices are then merged»57. Genette's, and most common definitions of free indirect speech, however, fall short of describing what exactly happens within Portrait. Actually, free indirect speech refers to every instance of narration that can be ascribed to be the character's words without presenting it as such, as it happens when a character speaks without being preceded by «then he said». What happens in Portrait is something slightly different, slightly more complex than this. It is not that Stephen's words are given within narration without any indication, instead, the narration itself is given as if Stephen was the narrator, without shifting to a first-person perspective58: While there is still a third-person narrator, that narrator presents Stephen's perceptions: the attitudes towards others and events are his; they are 'seen' by or 'focalized' by him. And because they are viewed by him, they reflect something about him. All go to the ends of characterizing the young artist-in-the-making.59 54 The «moocow» is a version of an Irish myth about a cow that took little children away from home to a fairy world from whence they would eventually return. Cf. Jeri Johnson in P, p. 224, n. 5.1-3. 55 In a letter to his son James, John Joyce wonders if he «recollect[s] the old days in Brighton Square, when you were Babie Tuckoo, and I used to take you out in the Square and tell you all about the moo-cow that used to come down from the mountain and take little boys across?», John Stanislaus Joyce, letter to James Joyce, 31st January 1931, in Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (eds.), Letters of James Joyce, vol. III, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, p. 212. 56 Johnson, «Introduction», in P, p. xiii. 57 Gérard Genette, «Discours du récit», in Narrative Discourse. An essay on method, transl. Jane E. Lewin, New York, Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 174. 58 The perspective will eventually shift to a first-person one in the final pages of the book, when the reader is given a glimpse of Stephen's diary. 59 Johnson, idem. I am the servant of two masters 38 This has been a much discussed feature of Portrait and one of Joyce's most brilliant narrative innovations in this book. Hugh Kenner is responsible for establishing a tradition in this regard. When arguing against Wyndham Lewis' fierce criticism of Joyce's work, he established the famous «Uncle Charles Principle». The specific passage under attack is one at the beginning of chapter II: «Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had creased and brushed scrupulously his black hair and brushed and put on his tall hat» (P 50). Lewis objected to the use of the verb repair, for that would be the verb which lesser narratives would use to describe the action. Kenner, on the other hand, claimed that uncle Charles repairs to the outhouse precisely because that would be the type of vocabulary the character himself would use: 'repaired' wears invisible quotation marks. It would be Uncle Charle's own word should he chance to say what he was doing. Uncle Charles has notions of semantic elegance, akin to his ritual brushing of his hat; we hear him employing the word 'salubrious,' also the word 'mollifying.' If Uncle Charles spoke at all of his excursions to what he calls the outhouse, he would speak of 'repairing' there. Not that he does so speak, in our hearing. Rather, a speck of his characterizing vocabulary attends our sense of him. A word he need not even utter is there like a gnat in the air beside him, for us to perceive in the same field of attention in which we note how 'scrupulously' he brushes his hat. This is apparently something new in fiction, the normally neutral narrative vocabulary pervaded by a little cloud of idioms which a character might use if he were managing the narrative. […] Uncle Charles, puffing away at his pipe in the outhouse he calls 'his harbour' is a Namer, and deserves to have something named after him. So let us designate the Uncle Charles Principle: the narrative idiom need not be the narrator's.60 While Kenner speaks of idiom, Johnson prefers to use idiolect, «the form of language used by a particular individual, an idiosyncratic 'style', one characteristic of this person and not that»61. Common to both commentators – given, perhaps, the huge influence Kenner holds over every subsequent generation of Joyce critics – is the fact that even if they acknowledge Portrait's peculiar narrator, it's to a third-person narrator that such peculiarities are ascribed. Johnson clearly states that «the narrative stays insistently third person. Stephen does not narrate this novel; he is narrated by 60 Hugh Kenner, «The Uncle Charles Principle», in Joyce's Voices, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1978, 17-18. 61 Johnson, idem, p. xx. I am the servant of two masters 39 it»62 and that «[t]his may be Stephen's idiolect but the narrator has appropriated it to his own ends»63. What I would like to consider here for a moment is the possibility that the third-person narrator be Stephen himself, narrating his own story. No commentator dared to venture such possibility for good reason: there is no textual evidence to prove this supposition. Consequently, I am moving within the realm of speculation and aware of it. In my hypothetical scenario, Stephen thus becomes the complete antithesis of Tristram Shandy: while one positions himself as an eye witness to events he couldn't possibly have witnessed, such as his own conception, the narrator in Portrait positions himself outside the narrative while describing things no one but Stephen could have testified to, and doing so in a way that no one but Stephen could do. If my hypothesis were to be taken, Stephen would thus be narrating himself while trying, at the same time, to create a gap between Stephen-the-story-teller and Stephen-the-character. While such a theory of depersonalization could be convoluted, it wouldn't be uncharacteristic of him. Towards the end of the novel, when asked about his past by his friend Cranly, he looks back to realise that «[he] was someone else then» (P 202, emphasis added). If such depersonalization can happen in time, arguably it could happen in discourse as well. If one is to consider momentarily that Stephen is the narrator disguising himself under a thirperson, one must ask who he is narrating the story to. A first impetus might be to ascribe the narration to the act of writing, that is to say, that Stephen would be the author of his own book. Taking a step back from the text itself, and given Portrait's semi-autobiographical nature, it isn't hard to consider this a rather accurate hypothesis: one need only change Stephen's name to James. However, I brought this different perspective about the novel's narrator to the equation not because I want to venture yet another biographic reading of it, but because I would like to raise the question of Stephen's subalternity64. Allow me to ask again: who is he narrating this story to? Because every communication act presupposes a sender and a receiver, if the fictional Stephen is talking about himself through narrative, who is he talking to? He might be, in fact, writing his own book. Or he might be simply narrating to himself, as a lonely, isolated child might do. If that were the case, the whole narrative would be a document to Stephen's inability to speak, or rather, to make himself heard. He would become the ultimate subaltern, whose own life narrative would be unheard by anyone but himself. Throughout the narrative, as I shall demonstrate further on, Stephen will always try to make himself heard, and more often than not, he will fail. Narrating his own story to himself could thus be his admission of defeat, an acknowledgement of the impossibility of communication 62 Jonhson, ibidem. 63 Johnson, idem, p. xi. 64 Subalternity as defined by Spivak and explored in the introduction. I am the servant of two masters 40 to the world outside the subject, a quasi solipsism. Although tempting, my hypothesis of Stephen as the narrator in disguise clashes with two fundamental aspects of the narration: first, there is no formal proof that Stephen is the one setting the words to paper, that is to say, grammatically, the narrator of Portrait remains firmly attached to the third-person; second, the narrative remains in the present at all times. If Portrait had been narrated by Stephen himself, it would have implied that Stephen would be writing at some point in time after the closure of the novel, thus placing the whole narrative in the past; yet, other than in the various flashbacks, the narrative keeps itself strictly in the present; the flashbacks themselves are often a remembering of events already narrated in the story, as it happens whenever Stephen looks back at his time at Clongowes later in the novel. Such temporal displacement might be one of the single most crucial differences between a first-person and a third-person narrator: because the relationship between a first-person narrator and his story imitates the temporal continuity of one's life, it means that the narrator would be hampered by his own memory, reconstructing rather than retelling, what he felt, thought and did at the time of the action. As Dorrit Cohn writes, in her Transparent Minds, the relationship between a first-person narrator and his past self «imitates the temporal continuity of real beings […] therefore, the first-person narrator has less free access to his own past psyche than the omniscient narrator of third person fiction has to the psyches of his characters»65. Portrait's narrator, for all his insight into Stephen's mind, shows none of these traits. While this temporal continuity between the self that experienced the events and the self now retelling the story could be argued away with various hypothetical scenarios, when allied to the lack of grammatical proof, that is, in the absence of an I in the narrative voice, the possibility of Stephen being both the narrator and the protagonist becomes implausible – even impossible. As Cohn argues, «the continued employment of third-person references indicates, no matter how unobtrusively, the continued presence of a narrator»66. The question remains: what to make of Portrait's narrator? Cohn proposes a possible classification for narratives of consciousness. The major division is between firstand third-person narrators; within third-person narrators one finds three separate possibilities: psycho-narration, «the narrator's discourse about a character's consciousness»67; quoted monologue, «a character's mental discourse»68; and narrated monologue, «a character's mental discourse in the guise of the narrator's discourse»69. The first point one must bear in mind when using Cohn's classification is that these 65 Dorrit Cohn, Tranparent Minds. Narrative modes for presenting consciousness in fiction, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 144. 66 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., p. 112. 67 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., p. 14. 68 Ibidem. 69 Ibidem. I am the servant of two masters 41 categories do not define the narrator as a unified identity, but only the different techniques used throughout the narrative. As such, the techniques employed by Portrait's narrator are not enough to define him as anything else than a third-person narrator, however they are quite revealing of his ambiguous relationship with Stephen. As Cohn notes, «[Portrait] contain[s] hardly any quoted monologues, but instead long stretches of narrated monologues combined with psycho-narration»70, which adds up to the added difficulty that «[Portrait's narrator] cannot be grasped as a separate entity within the text. His most striking characteristic is, in fact, that he is ungraspably chameleonic»71. The effect of these techniques, particularly of the narrated monologue, is of creating «a kind of mask, from behind which sounds the voice of a figural mind»72. While Cohn's structural definition of narrative techniques for conveying consciousness in fiction are of undisputable utility, because her argument relies so heavily on grammatical elements, her definition falls short of actually illuminating the reason why Portrait's narrator pries so much into Stephen's mind. Weldon Thornton gives a step forward in that direction by questioning how much of what one reads is Stephen conscious, and how much is the narrator's vocalising of Stephen's unconscious mind. His argument is that it doesn't really matter the degree to which the narrator's words are an accurate depiction of Stephen's mind, for all of it goes to establish not only Stephen's individual psyche but the various external factors contributing to the definition of Stephen's character: while much of what Joyce presents to us through the print on the page lies beyond Stephen's conscious awareness and control, all of it should be regarded as forming part of his psyche – either of his individual psyche, or of the cultural or social psyche that underlies it73. Consequently, although Stephen and the narrator are definitely separate identities within the book, the narrator's discourse can still be regarded as an expression not only of Stephen's individual stance, but of his social and cultural surroundings as well. If Cohn's proposed structural definition of narratives of consciousness relied solely, or mostly, in grammatical categories and differentiation, Thornton adds to this an exegetic dimension, understanding the narrator's problematic stance not only by its enunciative person but by his function within the narrative. Thornton goes further than Cohn without, however, claiming that the narrator can be an accurate depiction of one's consciousness – that is, one does not think merely in words let alone sentences. As such, while a 70 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., p. 71. 71 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., p. 30. 72 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., p. 102. 73 Weldon Thornton, The Antimodernism of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1994, p. 120-121. I am the servant of two masters 48 Fleming is clearly the most outraged of all. He was the one questioning the reason behind the punishment to be administrated to the whole college and he is now inciting a rebellion. Yet, in this he is alone. The silence that fell after his rebellious cry couldn't be more deafening and Wells quickly changes subject. The boys may feel the injustice, but fear has taken control of their actions. The withholding of knowledge is effective to create the fearful atmosphere, and fear is a powerful weapon. If Simon Moonan, Tusker, Corrigan and the other boys who were caught are to be flogged or expelled, according to their personal choice – is it really a choice? –, who can imagine what would happen to any boy who joined a rebellion? Throughout the boys' speculative discussion, Stephen's mind will begin to drift away in his own considerations about what happened. He may be shocked to learn that the boys have stolen money – «How could they have done that?» – but he is even more so when the event turns from simple crime to sacrilege. It was bad enough to steal, but to drink altar wine was more than a crime, it was a crime against the sacred: The fellows were all silent. Stephen stood among them, afraid to speak, listening. A faint sickness of awe made him feel weak. How could they have done that? He though ot the dark silent sacristy. There were dark wooden presses were the crimped surplices lay quietly folded. It was not a chapel but still you had to speak under your breath. It was a holy place. […] A strange and holy place. (P 34, emphasis added) The way in which Stephen thinks of the sacristy characterises the way he sees the crime committed by his school mates is good evidence of the moral standpoint from which Stephen judges their action. It was not the stealing itself, it was that they had perpetrated a crime against the sacred. The sacristy was a strange and holy place, where silence and darkness dwelt. When the hypothesis of sacrilege was discarded for a more worldly one – and, as it was too worldly, a greater sin – Stephen is left to his own devices to try and figure out what smugging meant. He did not know, he dare not ask, and the boys would not explain any further, resting the discussion on the somewhat obscure term. One might even suppose that Athy himself who had told everyone that they were being punished for smugging, or any of the other boys, was not clear on what the word really meant: – Smugging. All the fellows were silent: and Athy said: I am the servant of two masters 49 – And that's why. Stephen looked at the faces of the fellows but they were all looking across the playground. He wanted to ask somebody about it. What did that mean about the smugging in the square? Why did the five fellows out of the higher line run away for that? It was a joke, he thought. (P 37) Athy offers no other explanation and the boys ask no further questions. We know that Stephen is unsure about what it might mean and that he is afraid to ask what it could be – he now knows that by admitting lack of knowledge to the other boys he is putting himself into a subservient position, as he had learnt from the do you kiss your mother incident. The other boys themselves might be experiencing similar thoughts. Whatever it is, smugging is a crime – or a sin – grave enough to prevent further discussion. Stephen, left to himself, can only think of crimes sinful in their nature. While the other boys have closed the case on what the perpetrators have done and have moved on to punishment, even when they are all back in class, writing their latin themes, Stephen, sitting quietly, unable to write after breaking his glasses, will go back once more, mixing the crime of stealing with the sacrilege of drinking altar wine. The boys, he thought, must have stolen something sacred: But why were they to suffer for what fellows in the higher line did? Wells had said that they had drunk some of the altar wine out of the press in the sacristy and that it had been found out who had done it by the smell. Perhaps they had stolen a monstrance to run away with it and sell it somewhere. That must have been a terrible sin, to go in there quietly at night, to open the dark press and steal the flashing gold thing into which God was put on the altar in the middle of flowers and candles at benediction while the incense went up in clouds at both sides as the fellow swung the censer and Dominic Kelly sang the first part by himself in the choir. But God was not in it of course when they stole it. But still it was a strange and a great sin even to touch it. He thought of it with deep awe; a terrible and strange sin: it thrilled him to think of it in the silence when the pens scraped lightly. But to drink the altar wine out of the press and be found out by the smell was a sin too: but it was not terrible and strange. (P 39, emphasis added) Because Stephen is unable to comprehend what smugging meant, he seems to have put it out of his mind. He moved on to what he thinks could have happened. What Stephen thinks is, undoubtedly, informed by his Catholic environment. He cannot even consider that the boy's crime I am the servant of two masters 50 was anything as mundane as a simple theft: if they stole anything, it had to be a sacred item. That would be cause enough for the general punishment and the atmosphere of fear that took the Clongowes' boys by their flogged hands. Stephen's mind will speed through the irreverence of drinking wine – it was a sin too, but it was not a serious one, he thinks – to the full out blasphemy of stealing God88. Precisely because he had to explicitly think it impossible to steal God is evidence enough that his mind is working symbolically with that assumption, or that it has at least considered it. The words Stephen uses to characterise all things sacred – dark, silence, strange – are an indication of the boy's fascination with religious imagery. His mind will quickly drift away from the hypothesis of stealing a religious object, to the function of this object, to the rite surrounding the object, and to all its corresponding pageantry: the incense, the candles, the flowers, the music and the choir chants. Consequently, the boys who stole the monstrance would have been guilty of destroying the sacred ritual as well. More than the theft of a golden object it's the disruption of the ceremony that troubles Stephen. Even if the monstrance had been empty, it was still a strange and terrible sin to touch it, not because it was valuable, but because this particular object was sacred and associated with a sacred rite. The word Stephen chooses to qualify the gravity of the sin is also meaningful: strange. The same strangeness he used to describe the sacristy – a strange and holy place. The sacred and the religious are strange to Stephen, not because they are out of the ordinary – he must have experienced enough masses by this point in life to have grown accustomed to this sort of strangeness – but because they are mysterious, something which his mind cannot quite apprehend, a type of knowledge that has been kept away from him. The way Catholicism exerts power over the young boy is, much like the priests over their students, and the students on one another, by keeping things mysterious, secret, and strange – that is to say, by withholding knowledge. One cannot fight what one cannot understand. There is at least one further example of someone putting Stephen into a subservient position by withholding knowledge, perhaps the clearest example of all, albeit probably the one with the least consequences. When Stephen is committed to the infirmary with a fever, another boy shares the space with him, Athy. Athy seems friendly at first, and tries Stephen with a riddle: – Can you answer me this one? Why is the county of Kildare like the leg of 88 Catholic theology holds that God is present in both bread and wine in the Eucharist. This is the dogma of transubstantiation. Stephen may not have thought in the same terms about the drinking of wine because there was no object associated with transubstantiated wine in the story told by Wells. The monstrance, on the other hand, has only one function: to display God. The transubstantiation occurred long before the object's appearance in the ceremony, consequently Stephen cannot think of it without thinking of God, as he does with the wine. There is, nonetheless, a degree of sacredness associated with drinking the wine in the sacristy that operates as an undertone for both the boys discussion and Stephen's reverie, making it a sin, rather than a simple theft, albeit not a «strange and terrible one». I am the servant of two masters 51 a fellow's breeches? Stephen thought what could be the answer and then said: – I give up. – Because there's a thigh in it, he said. Do you see the joke? Athy is a town in the county Kildare and a thigh is the other thigh (P 20) Stephen, either by his inability to solve riddles, as he had explained before, or affected by the fever, could not provide his school mate with any worthy answer. Perhaps he didn't try hard enough, for Athy's mood will quickly change from playful to accusative. «That's an old riddle, he said» (ibidem), as if demanding an explanation. How can you not know this? Of course there is yet another undertone to Athy's sudden change of humour: nationalism. A fellow who does not know his own nation cannot be a good fellow. The playfulness will change to accusation, and the accusation to punishment and subjection: – You know, he said, you can ask the riddle another way? – Can you? said Stephen. – The same riddle, he said. Do you know the other way to ask it? – No, said Stephen. – Can you not think of the other way? he said. He looked at Stephen over the bedclothes as he spoke. Then he lay back on the pillow and said: – There is another way but I won't tell you what it is. Why did he not tell it? His father, who kept the racehorses, must be a magistrate too like Saurin's father and Nasty Roche's father. He thought of his own father […] and he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys' fathers. (P 21) Athy, having tested Stephen on his adeptness at solving riddles, or, in other words, on his ability to get along with his fellow school mates, decided he was neither a good fellow nor a good nationalist, perhaps not even very clever, for he could not give a fair try at the riddle nor at the different way to ask the riddle. He immediately turns to superiority – I'm not going to tell you the answer – and to silence. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, perhaps, like Stephen, I feel outraged about not understanding why I can't, as a reader, know what the different way of asking the riddle is – and that is one of the wonders of Portrait's narrator. The fact is that Stephen himself will place this event along the same lines as the ones I've explored above: why could he not know? The link I am the servant of two masters 52 between the withholding of knowledge is his, not mine. His mind will try to cope with it by reasoning that Athy's father must be a magistrate, while his is not. Knowledge is something that is only privy to magistrates' sons, and he felt sorry for his father for not being a magistrate, or more likely, for himself, being deprived of his answer and feeling as an outsider in the community. His father had told him that he would fit right in, «he would be no stranger [at Clongowes]» (ibidem), but Stephen has trouble finding it so. The connection that Stephen makes between being denied information and not being a magistrate's son is revealing: he has already internalised the idea that he is at the bottom of the school's society, perhaps that he shouldn't even be there. Yet there he is. Let us turn once more to Stephen's geography book. Stephen reads the list from top to bottom, to place himself, and from bottom to top to define himself: «he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he» (P 12). There are at least two possible readings to this definitive that was he: that he defined himself as an Irish, Clongowes student in the Class of Elements, or, on the other hand, that he was, first and foremost, Stephen Dedalus, that is to say, that Stephen defined himself not exactly as part of the community but as above and in spite of it. If that is so, Stephen's efforts at an individualist self-definition could not go unsanctioned by his immediate community: [The list] was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page: Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation. Clongowes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation. (P idem) Fleming took it upon himself to restrain Stephen's hint of individualism. Yes, it was all for a cod, a joke, yet, the old saying goes, many a truth is said in jest. Stephen cannot define himself as Stephen, that is just his name. He is, most of all, an Irishman; a Clongownian and a Catholic. Fleming has condensed, erased, clarified and censured Stephen's self-definition. He cannot escape community, whether it calls itself his nation, his dwellingplace or his religion. The boy's effort at self-narration has been overwritten by the larger narratives, for they, as Bhabha has shown and as I have previously explored, will always overwrite the individual narrative. Stephen was literally trying to write himself into the margin (of his book and of his communities), and even so the larger narrative of nation and, most significantly, religion overwrote him. There is no space for self- I am the servant of two masters 53 definition within the larger narrative, for the individual can only be allowed to exist on what complies with it. He is not Stephen Dedalus, that is just his name, and it really doesn't matter where he is – Clongowes is, after all, just the current dwellingplace89. The only sanctioned elements of definition he is allowed to have are his nation and his religion. He is an Irishman and a Catholic. That is all. Stephen's efforts at self-definition through naming are not without precedent. In fact, just after reading the flyleaf of his geography book, the young boy's mind will jump to the reasoning on which he based his own attempted identity. Stephen is fascinated with words and his boyish thought shifts from one word to the other, trying to grasp its essence: «That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt» (P 7) or «Suck was a queer word. […] And when [the dirty water] had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder» (P 8-9). Another such queer word is God. What does it mean? God's name was God, and God is God, as simple as that. In a futile attempt to grasp the concept of everything, Stephen tried to understand God as the one who would be able to think of the Universe: It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to god and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God. (P 13, emphasis added) Stephen's ruminations on God's name derive from both his relationship with words and with his struggle to understand identity. If God's name is God, just as his name is Stephen, why can't he just be Stephen? Working in the background of Stephen's mind is, of course, the Christian notion that God's name is also the mark of his identity, for there are no other gods. Consequently, God has no name but God. Of course, the actual theological debate in which Stephen has unwittingly thrown himself into is much more complicated than his young mind can apprehend. The significant passage where God tells Moses how He should be called is the subject of much controversy. The Douay Bible90 has it like this: 89 As it happens with most religions, Catholicism sees earthly life merely as a transitory stage to eternal life, where the soul will be next to God. 90 The Douay Bible, or the Douay-Rheims Bible, is the Catholic translation of the bible, the first into English, written I am the servant of two masters 54 Moses said to God: Lo, I shall go to the children of Israel, and say to them: The God of your fathers hath sent me to you. If they should say to me: What is his name? what shall I say to them? God said to Moses: I AM WHO AM. He said: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS, hath sent me to you. (DRB Exodus 3, 13-14) While the King James' Version is slightly different: And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. (KJB Exodus 3, 13-14) The difference between the Catholic and the Anglican versions are small, but significant. The Catholic version flexes the name of God – I am who am becomes he who is when Moses retells it – while the Anglican version will take God's name more literally – I am that I am remains I am when Moses is to retell it to the children of Israel. Consequently, while Anglicanism has the name of God as its self-definition, Catholicism will define God not by the name but by being: Finite beings are defined by their essence: God can be defined only be being, pure and simple, nothing less and nothing more; not be abstract being common to everything, and characteristic of nothing in particular, but by concrete being, absolute being, the ocean of all substantial being, independent of any cause, incapable of change, exceeding all duration, because He is infinite91 The question of God's name becomes even more complicated when one looks at the different as an effort of Counter-Reformation, in order to repel the influence of the Anglican version of the sacred texts. The Douay Bible, as well as King James' Authorised Version, is available on-line at http://www.drbo.org/ (King James' at http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/). I will quote from both on-line versions using the acronyms DRB and KJB for the Douay and King James' versions respectively, unless expressly noted otherwise. When doubt arises from the correction of a certain passage, I will recur to printed editions, namely the Douay edition of 1837, printed by Richard Coyne in Maynooth and the King James' edition of 1841, printed in London by Longman, Orme, Brown, Longmans and Barrit and Co. 91 Anthony Maas, «Jehovah (Yahweh)» in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8. New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1910 [Retrieved 8 May 2013 from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08329a.htm]. The Catholic Encyclopedia is a work contemporary with Joyce that gathers all of Catholic theology at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is invaluable for anyone wishing to understand the official Catholic position at the time, the same Joyce would have been taught. It is freely available on-line at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/. I will quote from this source. Scanned volumes are also available. I am the servant of two masters 55 representations of the sacred tetragrammaton, supposed to be God's true name, YHWH. On one such instance, in the same Exodus, the Douay bible has it «That appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, by the name of God Almighty; and my name ADONAI I did not shew them» while the King James' prefers «And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them» (DRB and KJB Exodus 6, 3). The immediate difference between the two bibles can be easily explained. According to Jewish law, it was forbidden to pronounce God's name, as inferred from the second92 commandment, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Consequently, whenever the sacred tetragrammaton occurred in the Bible – and it did appear a lot, up to six thousand times in the Old Testament93 – it was to be substituted in reading by the hebrew word Adonai, meaning Lord (Kyrios in Greek, Dominus in latin). As such, and even though there is no impediment to pronounce the tetragrammaton in Catholicism, the Douay Bible kept the jewish intent on not translating YHWH, using adonai whenever it came up. This translation is in line with the Catholic theological position mentioned above that God cannot be defined by a name but by his own being – eternal, absolute, all powerful, and, consequently, God's real name would be of little importance. The Anglican version, however, will use a version of the tetragrammaton, Jehovah. The history of such translation, in Catholic historiography, is quite interesting in itself. Ancient Hebrew had no graphic sign for vowels. The non-utterance of the name of God, forbidden by law, meant that the actual pronunciation of YHWH was lost in time. When the vowels' graphic signs were developed, the vowels of adonai were attributed to YHWH, hence Jehovah94. What I would like to underline here is the fact that Anglicanism has a slightly stronger hold to God's name than Catholicism, though its practical effects in everyday religiousness are similar. While Catholicism dismisses the tetragrammaton, or God's real name as unimportant, Anglicanism will keep it in its scriptures (though more recent editions will usually opt to translate it as LORD, in all caps or small caps so as to distinguish it from other occurrences of the word 'Lord') which indicates that the naming of God goes beyond the Catholic definition of who he is. In simpler terms, Catholicism is uninterested in 92 In Catholicism and Lutheranism; third commandment in Judaism, Greek Orthodoxism and several Protestant denominations. 93 The Catholic Encyclopedia, idem. 94 Cf. A. R. Buckland and A. Lukyn Williams (eds.), The Universal Bible Dictionary, Lutterworth Press, London, 1956 (1st ed. 1914), «Jehovah», p. 234: «When, however (in the eight and ninth centuries A. D.), the vowel-points were added to the Hebrew consonants, those of Adonai were given to YHWH instead of its own. Hence, if the first 'a' were slightly slurred it was possible to read YeHoWaH, which actually happened.» Although The Universal Bible Dictionary has no clear sectarian affiliation, it is reasonable to assume that its origins are protestant, for the preface will note that biblical quotations come from the Authorised Version. However, this historical reading is also that of Catholicism, cf. The Catholic Encyclopedia, idem, and Christos. Enciclopédia do Cristianismo, Verbo, Lisboa, 2004, «JHWH», p. 487: «A pronúncua exacta de JHWH não é conhecida. A sua leitura vocalizada com 'a' e 'e' (Jahweh) é desaconselhada porque irreverente e, por isso, ofensiva para a fé judaica. Completamente infundada é a vocalização com 'e', 'o', 'a', donde Jehowa ou Jeová.» I am the servant of two masters 56 God's real name – he is simply defined as God – while Anglicanism will acknowledge that God has a name, be it YHWH or I am that I am. At this point in the narrative, Stephen might not know the theological issues at play behind the concept of God's name, much less the historiography of the tetragrammaton, but he is certainly aware of the importance of it. In his small digression he will fight and try to resolve his boyish doubts about the nature of God's name. For one, if God's name is God, how can it be that in French it is Dieu? And how can it be that in all languages there's a different word for God? (Would he consider Allah to be God's name as well?) Stephen will fall back to Catholic theology to explain this conundrum. For God's name is not a word, or to put it another way, God's name is all words that refer to God, so God's name is not one word but God itself. Stephen demonstrates a remarkable ability to deal with difficult concepts and overcome them with relative ease. Nonetheless, this is not so much proof of his powerful intellect as it is the effect of a strong Catholic hold on the young boy mixed with his understanding of languages: he knows different words in different languages can mean the same thing in the real world, and he knows that God is not defined by his name but by what he is. So God and Dieu are both God's name because they refer to the same being, and they are both God's name because God's name is its own definition. Consequently, God's real name is God, much like ivory's and ivoire's real name is the thing itself, the matter of which an elephant's tusk is made. What I deem most interesting in all of this, for my argument, is the fact that Stephen's attempt at self-definition will operate the same devices that Catholic theology uses to define God. God's name is God, just like his name is Stephen. That is precisely what the young boy attempts when he tries to write himself into his geography book: he wrote his name because his mind had been informed to understand God's name as God's definition. As such, and because he could only think of God, his self-narrative will appropriate Catholic theology to achieve its definition. I should make clear, however, that I am not suggesting that Stephen thinks himself akin to God, nor that he does it consciously, not even subconsciously. It is simply how his mind operates within a Catholic power structure: his mind has been constricted to work in such a way, his understanding of the world and of himself at this point in the narrative is Catholic. Stephen cannot help but to think of God in all he does, so much so that when he develops a fever and is sent to the Clongowes' infirmary, he will start immediately to muse upon his death and his funeral. The fever began when he was thrown into a ditch, the day before, by his personal tormentor, Wells: He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next to his skin. That was mean I am the servant of two masters 57 of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch95 because he would not swop his little snuff box for Wells's seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty96. How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum. (P 8) Clearly Stephen has trouble fitting with his fellow schoolmates, and Wells in particular has taken a shine to humiliating the young boy. The aggression couldn't be clearer: he is literally thrown into a sewer, likened to human waste, physically abused for not complying with Wells' demands. He is not the son of a magistrate, he will not understand the threat in his school mate's proposed deal, and he will not be able to answer correctly – nor could he, as I have explored before – to the trap question of whether or not he kisses his mother before going to bed. All this may contribute decisively to his obsession with his own death while he lies in the infirmary bed. Even if it is natural for a young child to fear death – once one has learnt about it – and deem himself ill enough to be near death, that seems a weak explanation for his escapist thoughts, most clearly seen, perhaps, in the letter he mentally composes to his parents: Dear Mother I am sick. I want to go home. Please come and take me home. I am in the infirmary. Your fond son, Stephen. (P 19) Interestingly enough, the emphasis Stephen puts in the letter is not so much of how sick he is, how he feels terribly ill and approaching death. Stephen prefers to emphasise where he wants to be instead – I want to go home, please take me home – and where he is now and doesn't want to be – I am in the infirmary, one might add at Clongowes – a piece of information that even a child would know it was implied and unnecessary. Where would one be when one is ill enough to ask for one's parents if not in a medical care facility? Stephen doesn't want to go home to get better quickly, he wants to go home to escape Clongowes and its question-asking, ditch-throwing school mates 95 «'square' refers not to the shape of the ditch, but to its location. The 'square' was the boys nickname for the outside lavatory behind the dormitory; the 'ditch' either the slate through running across it or the cesspool for it», Johnson in P, p. 227, n. 8.10. 96 «as in the childhood game of 'conkers', a horse chestnut with a hole drilled in it through which a string is passed; held by the string, one chestnut is hit against another in an attempt to best the opponent by breaking his chestnut. This one has beaten forty others (either directly or by beating others which had themselves beaten others, so totalling forty)», Johnson in P, p. 227, n.8.11. I am the servant of two masters 64 considerable descriptive power – or the narrator's through him – fails him, becoming somewhat paralysed. Stephen almost cannot describe Father Dolan positively: he isn't old, he is not young, his eyes aren't black, or grey, they have no colour, he repeats whitegrey twice, he is bald and he wears glasses. So much for his schoolboy eloquence. Stephen becomes the subaltern to the priests', one priest in particular, authority. He was tried without judgement, punished without mercy. His last hope at justice in the form of a power appointed advocate, Father Arnall, couldn't or wouldn't do more. Father Arnall's position in Clongowes hierarchy isn't clear, but it would be expected that he would defend the boy he himself excused from writing. At a point, Father Arnall himself seems to be put on trial – Father Dolan dismisses his explanation and immediately leaves him out of the conversation. Perhaps Father Arnall had already lost his credibility when he failed to report the two boys who, in Dolan's opinion, deserved flogging. Or perhaps there is some sort of golden-rule, much like with the boys, stating that priests should not undermine one another's authority, yet this is precisely what Father Dolan does. There wasn't an actual trial. The punishment Stephen endures is arbitrary and, for that, even more violent. Such mindless violence, of course, can also be damaging to the regime. Stephen will feel betrayed by Arnall and wronged by Dolan. And, perhaps worst of all, he will feel ashamed in front of his school mates, losing even what little respect he had in Clongowes, a good academic reputation: «Then to be called a schemer before the class and to be pandied when he always got the card for first or second and was the leader of the Yorkists!» (P 43). Stephen's shame, however, isn't exactly a product of being belittled before his school mates, nor of having shown weakness by lightly sobbing with pain. In fact, it's the exact opposite. Stephen is probably aware that being pandied would work towards his inclusion with the other boys rather than the other way around – he'd become one of them, not the perfect little over-achiever he was before. His outrage comes from not having been made any distinction between him and the other flogged boy, Fleming: «Father Arnall told them both they might return to their places without making any difference between them» (ibidem, emphasis added). The narrator's words are quite telling: it's not that Stephen is, at this point in the narrative, against authority by default. He thinks Fleming had been deservingly punished. It's the fact that nothing had been done to separate the actual offender from him, the innocent man. As Vicki Mahaffey notes, «Stephen's aim is to establish for himself an authority comparable to the authority he admires and resists, to see himself raised above his peers, and to resist any awareness of the universality – the commonness – of his feelings»102. Interesting to note is the fact that even though Stephen cannot think of the figures of authority as anything else but priests, as we've seen before, a conflicting value system – a Catholic one, quite clearly – is confusing him: «The prefect of studies was a priest but [what he did] was 102 Vicki Mahaffey, op. cit., p. 290. I am the servant of two masters 65 cruel and unfair» (ibidem), as if there were no such thing as a cruel and unfair priest. Cruel and unfair are, perhaps, the most frequent words in the aftermath of Father Dolan's visit to the class. Stephen's mind will be dominated by thoughts of cruelness and unfairness and their derivatives and synonyms throughout the day. Most significantly, they will find echo in his newly found acceptance in the boy's fraternity. Possibly for the first time in the young boy's life, his father's golden rule will actually make sense. It really is a question of us versus them, boys versus masters, subalternity versus power: – It's a stinking mean thing, that's what it is, said Fleming […] – You really did broke your glasses by accident, didn't you? Nasty Roche asked. Stephen felt his heart filled by Fleming's words and did not answer. – Of course he did! said Fleming. I wouldn't stand it. I'd go up and tell the rector on him. – Yes, said Cecil Thunder eagerly, and I saw him lift the pandybat over his shoulder and he's not allowed to do that. […] – I wouldn't stand it, Fleming repeated, from Baldyhead or any other Baldyhead. It's a stinking mean low trick, that's what it is. I'd go straight up to the rector and tell him about it after dinner. – Yes, do. Yes, do, said Cecil Thunder. – Yes, do. Yes, go up and tell the rector on him, Dedalus, said Nasty Roche, because he said that he'd come in tomorrow again to pandy you. – Yes, yes. Tell the rector, all said. And there were some fellows out of second of grammar listening and one of them said: – The senate and the Roman people declared that Dedalus had been wrongly punished. (P 44) It becomes hard to tell how much of Stephen's eventual rash decision to go up to the rector was a product of his own outrage and how much of it was peer pressure. As Stephen thinks, when he is about to give up, «[t]he fellows had told him to go but they would not go themselves» (P 45). He is right. Fleming in particular might be understandably angrier at his own punishment than Stephen's, yet he urges Stephen to go, as if by doing it Stephen would be vindicating him as well. In a way, he is. Stephen's rebellion – let us borrow this term from now on – has been signficantly approved by the «senate and the Roman people». He is now the representative of his fellow I am the servant of two masters 66 students, their leader and vindicator in the fight against their masters' oppression. Yet, he wonders if he is up to the task, or even if his plight is fair and lawful. The young boy will struggle between living up to his schoolmates' expectations and accepting his fate as unchangeable. Interestingly, his thoughts of rebellion will follow a clearly historical path, while his thoughts of obedience will be clouded in fear. By appealing to a historical background in his struggle, Stephen is expressly inserting his plight into a historical narrative of great leaders and great victories against oppression: A thing like that had been done before by somebody in history, by some great person whose head was in the books of history. […] Those were great men whose names were in Richmal Magnall's Questions103. History was all about those men and what they did and that was what Peter Parley's Tales about Greece and Rome104 were all about. (P 44-45) Much like it happens with the infirmary scene, Stephen's outward self-sacrifice lies upon foundations of a desire to glory in posterity. Significantly, by inscribing himself into history, Stephen is also equating his, and his classmates' struggle, within a framework of greater historical narratives. Their fight is no more about escaping undeserved punishment, it's about their own freedom, Stephen reasons. As Weldon Thornton notes, «one of [Stephen's] fundamental ways of coming to a sense of his own self is by identifying with various literary characters or historical figures»105. Of course, all great leaders must have a great nemesis. Father Dolan's undiscriminating punishment is the public face of the enemy, and his fearful looking figure suits the part, but what Stephen is really fighting against is the atmosphere of fear that has fallen upon Clongowes following his school mates crime (or sin). Stephen realises that the only reason for his punishment was precisely the climate of repression that had set after they had been found. Watching the perpetrators in the refectory, Stephen acknowledges that «[t]hat was why the prefect of studies had called him a schemer and pandied him for nothing» (P 45). When left alone to his own thoughts in the silence of the refectory, Stephen's willingness to become the saviour for his whole community will face a great adversary: Stephen's own fear. He will begin to have second thoughts about the part he has been pushed to play in Clongowes history. No longer cheered by his school mates, he stands alone in his fight – and fear can be a fearful adversary: But he could not go. The rector would side with the prefect of studies and 103 History book used to teach elementary history and geography. Cf. Johnson in P, p. 235, n. 45.1-2. 104 Conflation of two books by the same author, Peter Parley, used in children's indication. Cf. Johnson, in P, p. 235236, n. 45.3-4. 105 Weldon Thornton, op. cit., p. 153. I am the servant of two masters 67 think it was a schoolboy trick and then the prefect of studies would come in every day the same only it would be worse because he would be dreadfully waxy at any fellow going up to the rector about him. (ibidem) As it becomes clear from the fragment above, Stephen's fear derives not only from the fear of being pandied again, but significantly because of his certainty of not being believed by hierarchy. Stephen is quite aware of his position as a subaltern within Clongowes hierarchy, and he is positive that his plight will go unheard, for hierarchy will always protect the power against the subaltern. His mind is so deeply moulded by hierarchy that Stephen resorts to trying to find a way in which he could survive despite the hierarchy and despite the punishment: «No, it was best to forget all about it and perhaps the prefect of studies had only said he would come in. No, it was best to hide out of the way because when you were small and young you could often escape that way» (P 46). What is weighin on Stephen's mind is, I argue, a form of what Bhabha defined as sly civility, that is to say, a mode of operation between coloniser and colonised where both find the possible confort on their respective positioning in the power structure by ignoring the other's thinly disguised provocations. Strictly speaking, Bhabha's sly civility is best applied to discourse. Sly civility derives from the hybrid position of the coloniser over the colonised, fashioning itself as both ruler and father: «What threatens the authority of colonial command is the ambivalence of its address - father and oppressor or, alternatively, the ruled and reviled – which will not be resolved in a dialectical play of power»106. Such hybridity in the coloniser's discourse opens up space for a play between both roles of father and oppressor, where the coloniser can make clear the irreconcilability of such roles. Sly civility is thus a «mode of contradictory utterance that ambivalently reinscribes across differential power relations both colonizer and colonized […] [putting] on trial the very discourse of civility»107. The concept of sly civility might, perhaps, be better understood by an hypothetical situation. Let us consider that two people of a colonised community are talking within earshot of someone from the coloniser community. The colonised start talking about the coloniser using an outwardly innocent moniker that, nonetheless, has derogatory implications known to both sides. The coloniser upon hearing this has two basic courses of action: either he'll act on it, by punishing or confronting the colonised, or he'll ignore it. If he takes action, he is also endangering his role as father to the colonised; if he doesn't, he is undermining his own authority. Whatever action the coloniser decides to take is irrelevant, for sly civility has already shown the ambivalence of his position. Sly civility is not, therefore, an active way of fighting the oppressor, but rather a form of making oneself comfortable in an uncomfortable environment. Stephen's consideration of inaction, of not saying 106 Homi K. Bhabha, «Sly civility», in op. cit., p. 97. 107 Homi K. Bhabha, idem, p. 95. I am the servant of two masters 68 anything, of not fighting back, could thus be argued to work within a framework of sly civility. By doing nothing, Stephen would be putting to trial Father Dolan's actions. If he did come the next day, and if he pandied Stephen once again, he would be compromising his role as, well, father to the children at his care, for everyone – both Stephen's classmates and Father Arnall – would see it as doubly undeserved; if he didn't come in the next day, or if he did but didn't pandy Stephen, then he would be undermining his own authority and putting in check his actions of the day before. Stephen, of course, could not begin to grasp the consequences of his desire for inaction and will dismiss it as simple cowardice, for it came from fear rather than a carefully calculated decision to problematize Father Dolan's actions. Stephen's fear is a direct result of the Catholic hierarchy's power over him, a power so great that it will eventually lead him to start questioning his own innocence, admitting the possibility of actually deserving to be punished. His humiliation had been too great, too public, for it to be as unfair as it seems to him: «he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a schemer» (P 44). Inherent to Stephen's thoughts is a phenomenon commonly called catholic guilt. I will not pursue this line of investigation because, so far, there is no scientific consensus about a predominance of excessive guilt in Catholics over other religious groups. However, even if there is no scientific evidence, Stephen's reflections do reveal an excessive and inexplicable amount of guilt, of the same type of that is usually identified as Catholic. This Catholic guilt is usually characterised by an individual taking an excessive amount of personal responsibility over events or actions that cannot be personally ascribed to him. It mainly derives from the rite of Confession, and its emphasis on personal guilt over sin. Reading a version of the famous Maynooth Catechism, the same Joyce and Stephen would have learnt during their formative years, one finds that contrition is one of the necessary elements of Confession, with contrition defined as «[a] hearty sorrow and detestation of sin, for having offended God, with a firm resolution of sinning no more»108. Such emphasis on personal responsibility over sin is said to be the reason for an overbearing sense of guilt within the Catholic community. Even if there is no actual proof of this phenomenon, the fact is that Stephen's reaction seems to fit with this paradigm, by considering the possibility of having actually done something wrong – or of just looking like someone who does something wrong. It seems that Stephen cannot escape from Catholicism, not even from its stereotypes. But escape he does. All the self-doubt Stephen experienced from the moment he was urged by his school mates to fight back until the moment when he stands in the brief window of 108 The Most Rev. Dr. James Butler's Catechism: revised, enlarged, approved, and recommended by the four archbishops of Ireland, as a general catechism for the kingdom, Dublin, The Catholic Book Society, 1836, p. 63. I am the servant of two masters 69 opportunity he has to go up to the rector wasn't enough to stop him: «turning quickly up to the right, [he] walked up the stairs and, before he could make up his mind to come back, he had entered the low dark corridor that led him to the castle» (P 46). There is no turning back now. Facing the rector, Stephen's self-conscious subalternity will again act up, preventing him from presenting his case to the rector, but even against this Stephen fights: «Stephen swallowed down the thing in his throat», «Stephen swallowed down the thing again» (P 47). The thing in his throat preventing him from speaking becomes a physical manifestation of subalternity that Stephen manages to overcome. The rector, of course, will stand by the power structure and dismiss Father Dolan's actions as a mistake, underplaying Stephen's complaint: «it was a mistake; I am sure Father Dolan did not know», «Father Dolan did not understand» (P 48). Father Dolan did understand and Father Dolan did know, he was told by Father Arnall about it. Stephen, however, is not interested in punishing Father Dolan neither in fighting back against oppression. As it becomes clear, Stephen wishes only to secure his own safety, even if he had fancied himself akin to great historical figures and even if his school mates will rejoice with his partial victory. Partial victory it is, and one will not understand how partial until the rector, by this time the Jesuits' provincial109, retells the story to Stephen's father in the second chapter: Father Dolan and I, when I told them all at dinner about it, Father Dolan and I had a great laugh over it. You better mind yourself Father Dolan, said I, or young Dedalus will send you up for twice nine. […] I told them all at dinner about it and Father Dolan and I and all of us we all had a hearty laugh together over it. Ha! Ha! Ha! (P 60-61). It wasn't a victory, not even for Stephen who, even though free from punishment, was ridiculed by the power structure. It was, as Stephen's father put it, simple diplomacy: «Shows you the spirit in which they take the boys there. O, a jesuit for your life, for diplomacy!» (P 60). In other words, the rector knew Stephen had been unjustly punished but couldn't admit Father Dolan's zealousness. He thus offered the boys at Clongowes an opportunity to reconcile themselves with power without actually compromising authority. Of course the boys couldn't understand that: they were just glad Stephen was heard. Stephen himself felt freer than ever, his fight had, in his opinion at the time, paid off, «he was happy and free» (P 49). Stephen's freedom, however, despite his victorious cry, couldn't be complete. He will immediately refrain himself by adding that «he would not be in anyway proud with Father Dolan. He would he [sic] very quiet and obedient: and he 109 Provincial is the highest ranking Jesuit in a province, in this case Ireland. Cf Johnson in P, p. 235, n.40.13-15. I am the servant of two masters 70 wished that he could do something kind for him to show him that he was not proud» (ibidem). Clearly Stephen doesn't understand it as a conditional freedom, he frames his decision – at least he thinks it's his decision – as a magnanimous act of gracious victory. Yet, his emphasis on obedience betrays something different, something the rector of Clongowes would be very aware when he granted the school boy his wish: obedience is, after all, one of the Catholic moral virtues. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on «Obedience» states that it is not regarded «as a transitory and isolated act but rather as a virtue or principle of righteous conduct»110, and so it would be expected of a Catholic, specifically of a young boy being educated at a Catholic school, to show obedience to his masters both for their position and for their role in Catholicism. Consequently, the rector's concession was a true act of diplomacy: giving something the other party required without actually losing anything. Stephen and the other boys see it as a victory, the rector and the other masters know it was a very small one. Both of them, however, are seemingly unaware of Stephen's truly remarkable move: his strength in confronting hierarchy marks his first departure from Catholicism. By going up the hierarchy, Stephen is actively refusing the virtue of obedience he was supposed to hold at every time. Perhaps because he is subconsciously aware of his disobedience, he puts so much emphasis on his effort to obey Father Dolan from then on. There is a loophole in which Stephen could be arguably trying to position himself: obedience is first and foremost an obligation to God, while the obligation «to obedience to superiors under God admits of limitations. We are not bound to obey a superior in a matter which does not fall within the limits of his preceptive power»111. Even if the question of whether or not Father Dolan's actions fall outside of his power can be a matter of dispute, it seems unnecessary to go into so much depth. The fact is that Stephen has purposefully ignored a Catholic precept by denying Father Dolan the legitimacy to punish him. This first rebellion against Catholicism, albeit a veiled one, is, in my opinion, one of the most relevant elements of this scene, for it shows for the first time Stephen struggling with an invisible power over his individual actions that he cannot quite identify – and that is why Catholicism can be said to act as a shackling power over its subjects. The fact that Stephen is seen to juggle with the concepts of obedience and, significantly, pride – of which we will have much to say later in the following chapter –, after his supposed victory constitutes proof that his act of rebellion could not completely dismiss the hold Catholic doctrine had over his actions. This scene can thus be argued as a synthesis of Stephen's progress in his relation with Catholicism. Its language of oppression and rebellion allied to a background of Catholic power and practise fighting for control of Stephen's mind against his own individuality and sense of justice provides a prologue to the rest of the novel 110 Joseph Delany, «Obedience», The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11, New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1911 [Retrieved 8 May 2013 from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11181c.htm]. 111 The Catholic Encyclopedia, ibidem. I am the servant of two masters 71 in what concerns Catholicism as a colonial power. Catholicism is not the only larger narrative fighting for Stephen's soul, as it were. There is another such larger narrative that will try to take over Stephen's mind, a narrative that has been historically associated with Catholicism in Ireland but that has, nonetheless, moments of collision with religion. I'm referring, of course, to Irish nationalism, the topos that, alongside Catholicism, is one of the major themes of Portrait and much of Joyce's work. Although, historically, Irish nationalism of the late nineteenth century had strong connections with Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, its arch-narrative concurred with the Catholic one for primacy over its people. The Christmas dinner scene can be regarded as one of the clearest examples of this dispute. At the table, besides Stephen's parents, sat uncle Charles, a friend of Stephen's father John Casey, and Mrs. Riordan, know by Stephen as Dante112. Discussion breaks out at the table when someone113 retells an anecdote about a hotelkeeper named Christy, supposedly a manufacturer of «champagne»114, who had said «I'll pay you your dues, father, when you cease turning the house of God into a pollingbooth» (P 25). To this, Dante replies, full of scorn that it's a «nice answer […] for any man calling himself a catholic to give to his priest» (ibidem). The issue quickly evolves from a rather academic, though by no means dispassionate, should religion interfere with politics to an outright attack and defence of Catholicism vs Nationalism – «if it comes to that, no God for Ireland» (P 32). The table is unevenly divided. Casey and Dante are the most fierce contenders; Simon Dedalus is on Casey's side, though he is also, at times, trying to preserve the peace at the table – and, in fact, as William O'Neill makes clear, both Mr. Casey's and Simon Dedalus' ideas of themselves «have been formed entirely by the institutions that govern them»115; uncle Charles and Mary Dedalus are mostly silent, though probably silently endorsing Casey and Dante respectively; Stephen is but an observer, trying to make sense of it all. Stephen's mother Mary is, perhaps, the most intriguing character in this scene, despite her small role, or precisely because of it. As Michael Wainwright notes, «Dante's volubility is a dramatic contrast to the silence of Stephen's mother»116. The few lines she is given are to try and prevent a discussion – «For pity's sake and for pity sake let us have no political discussion on this day of all days in the year» (P 26) – or to protect her child from the foul mouthed anger – «Really, Simon, said Mrs Dedalus, you should not speak that way before Stephen. It's not right» (P 27). 112 Dante being both a child's mispronouncement of «Auntie» turned into a family nickname and a reference to Dante Alighieri, author of the Catholic epic Divine Comedy and a major influence on Joyce. 113 Simon Dedalus and John Casey seem to be discussing the anecdote amongst themselves, but there is no direct reference as to who utters the sentence that provokes Dante's retort. 114 There seems to be no clue as to what this «champagne» might refer. Jeri Johnson advances explosives, but with a question mark. Cf. Johnson in P, p. 230, n.23.25. 115 William O'Neill, «Myth and identity in Joyce's fiction: disentangling the image» in Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 40., n. 3, 1994, p. 386. 116 Michael Wainwright, «Female suffrage in Ireland: James Joyce's realization of unrealized potential» in Criticism, vol. 51, n. 4, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2009, p. 658. I am the servant of two masters 72 Even though she doesn't engage directly in discussion, one can assume that she would be on Dante's side, given her devotion to the Church. Another hint of Mrs. Dedalus partisanship can be found in her willingness to follow Dante when the old lady storms out of the room, or on her veiled criticism of the other party, first by trying to dissuade Dante privately rather than out loud as she has been doing with her husband, and later by dismissing the other party with a pinch of contempt: «Mrs Riordan, don't excite yourself answering them» (P 32, my emphasis). Mrs Dedalus role in this scene has been consistently underread by critics, yet I find in her a perfect example of what Spivak called subalternity. She is indeed, the most subaltern of all the characters at the table, alongside Stephen who doesn't utter a single word117. Mrs. Dedalus seems not only to be a subject of Catholicism – rather than a champion of it, as that role is fulfilled by Dante – but also of a patriarchal powerstructure – significantly a social order endorsed by the Catholic church – who prevents her from openly defending her point of view. The pressing question here is, precisely, what point of view? The reader hears not a whistle from Mrs. Dedalus regarding her own opinions on the issue at hands. She mainly tries to keep the dinner going as peacefully as possible and her child protected, as any good wife should. Her warnings to her husband are only meant to restrain his anger, never to contradict him. She is thus doubly silenced by Catholicism and by her gender role. She is, after all, a Catholic woman who must defend her faith, as Dante does, and also obey her husband. Pope's Leo XIII encyclical «Arcanum» provides a clear definition of the Catholic Church's stance regarding married women: The husband is ruler of the family and the head of the wife; the woman as flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone is to be subordinate and obedient to the husband, not, however, as a hand-maid but as a companion of such a kind that the obedience given is as honourable as dignified118 Obedience to her husband might be honourable and dignified, but it's still a subjection of a woman to a man, one that Mrs. Dedalus has to comply with, if for nothing else, for her Church. On the other hand, the Catholic Encyclopedia also states that «In religious and moral matters, the common obligations and responsibilities of men and women are the same. There is not one law for a man and another for a woman, and in this, of course, the canons follow the teachings of Christ»119, that is to say that a wife must also defend Christ and its Church, as any other Catholic must. Mrs 117 Apart from being given the honour of saying grace before the meal started (P 24). 118 Leo XIII, «Arcana», apud Augustin Rössler and William Fanning, «Woman», The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15, New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1912 [Retrieved 8 May 2013 http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/15687b.htm]. 119 The Catholic Encylopedia, idem. I am the servant of two masters 73 Dedalus is thus positioned in a hierarchical limbo, having to obey her husband as the Church commands, and having to defend her Church against her husband. She is doubly subjected to two power structures: Catholicism and Patriarchy. She may speak, but she has no voice. Stephen, on the other hand, albeit silent, manages to have a voice, if for no one else, at least to the reader. He doesn't speak per se, but the reader is given a glimpse of what is happening in Stephen's mind through the narrator, and even that occurs scarcely. Only twice does the narrator turn to Stephen, which, in itself, might be read as proof of Stephen's attentiveness to the heated discussion. When the narrator does pay attention to him, the boy's reactions are quite telling: Stephen looked with affection at Mr Casey's face which stared across the table over his joined hands. He liked to sit near him at the fire, looking up at his dark fierce face. But his dark eyes were never fierce and his slow voice was good to listen to. But why was he then against the priests? Because Dante must be right then. But he had heard his father say that she was a spoiled nun and that she had come out of the convent in the Alleghanies when her brother had got the money from the savages for the trinkets and the chainies. Perhaps that made her severe against Parnell. And she did not like him to play with Eileen because Eileen was a protestant and when she was young she knew children that used to play with protestants and the protestants used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin. Tower of Ivory, they used to say, House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold? Who was right then? (P 29) This first instance of Stephen's thoughts can be quite elucidating. For one, there is a clear juxtaposition of politics and Catholicism in the young boy's mind. His value system by this time in the narrative ranks Catholicism and Nationalism as good. Hence his first perplexity. The narrator starts by describing Mr. Casey in a pleasant light, but if he is so good, why isn't he on the side of the priests? If priests are good, and Mr. Casey is good, they must surely be on the same side. If they're not, then certainly Dante is right about him. By following his thought, one realises that this scene might be one of the first times, if not the first, when Stephen's childish certainties are put to the test. Dante herself, a figure for whom Stephen has mixed feelings of terror120 and love, has been questioned. Stephen now recalls the time when he overheard his father badmouth her, significantly by pointing to her failed experience at a convent121, as if undermining her affiliation to the Catholic 120 See the scene were Dante threatens Stephen with an eagle that will come and pull out his eyes if he doesn't apologise, in the very first section of the novel (P 6). 121 Richard Ellmann offers an explanation to what Dante's real life counterpart reasons for being a spoiled nun are: she inherited her brother's fortune and left the convent to find a husband (Cf. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 25). There is, of course, no reason to assume that the fictional Mrs Riordan had similar I am the servant of two masters 80 eleventh century, over theological, ecclesiastical and political differences. The Western Schism, which might have contributed to the later Protestant Reformation131 – itself a schism, though not usually referred to as such –, happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when the papacy was claimed by two different men and their respective supporters, and was mostly driven by politics rather than theological issues. Even though general understanding, backed by historical fact, takes schism to refer only to major divisions within the Church rather than the personal action of one individual, its definition still applies to fractures between one subject and the body of the church: schism does not necessarily imply adhesion, either public or private, to a dissenting group or a distinct sect, much less the creation of such a group. Anyone becomes a schismatic who, though desiring to remain a Christian, rebels against legitimate authority, without going as far as the rejection of Christianity as a whole, which constitutes the crime of apostasy.132 As one can infer from the fragment above, schism and heresy are not exactly the same thing. Although, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, «heresy and schism nearly always go hand in hand»133, they differ in the fact that heresy constitutes a perversion of Catholic dogma while schism means only a break with Catholic hierarchy. Schism, therefore, presupposes a voluntary disengagement with Catholicism but not necessarily a different system of belief or a complete lack of belief. Although it would be perhaps easier to equate Stephen's ultimate refusal of Catholicism as an act of atheism, Portrait offers no proof that the young artist had abandoned spirituality. In fact, Stephen will confess to his university friend Cranly towards the end of the novel, that he is not at all sure of whether there is or is not a God134. Schism might thus be the most accurate description, in Catholic vocabulary, of Stephen's self-chosen break with Catholicism. As Roy Gottfried notes, an unbeliever [is] someone for whom religious issues and questions would have absolutely no weight or interest. Stephen is certainly not that; no one who could repeatedly entertain questions of the Trinity, or of church history, or of transubstantiation, could have any claim on agnostic unbelief.135 131 «The severest blow was dealt by the disastrous papal schism (1378-1418) which familiarized Western Christians with the idea that war might be made, with all spiritual and material weapons, against one whom many other Christians regarded as the only lawful pope», in Johann Peter Kirsch, «The Reformation» The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12, New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1911 [Retrieved 8 May 2013 from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12700b.htm]. 132 Jacques Forget, «Schism», The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13, New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1912 [Retrieved 8 May 2013 http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13529a.htm]. 133 Ibidem. 134 Cf. P 205. I will look at this conversation thoroughly later in my argument. 135 Roy Gottfried, Joyce's Misbelief, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2008, p. 1. I am the servant of two masters 81 Gottfried's argument departs from the same basic issues my work does, as I have explained in the introduction, however his approach differs from mine in its point-of-view. Gottfried explains Joyce's, and his characters, stance from the authoritative point of view of religion, while I have been looking through a post-colonial lens, shifting my analysis to the subject rather than to the powerstructure. Nonetheless, Gottfried's argument can be quite illuminating and his assessment of Stephen's character, although made in theological terms, can be aligned with mine: Orthodoxy resides in the authority outside an individual; it is collective and incapable of error. To embrace the variety of other possibilities is to take a stance that resists subordination and asserts individuality.136 Authority outside the individual is precisely what Stephen will try to fight. The nature of such authority, I argue, is akin to a colonial authority precisely because it works to erase individuality, and overwriting a collective narrative in its stead. Gottfried will also emphasise the schismatic dimension of Stephen's movement, particularly when looking at three scenes in the second chapter where he is accused not of schism but of heresy: when Stephen is made to confess to Heron of his interest in Emma; when he recalls an occasion when his English master accused him of having heresy in his essay; when Heron accused him of favouring heretic poets such as Lord Byron. The critic underlines that there is only one reference to schism in Portrait, however, much later in the novel and enshrined in a conversation about art and language with the dean of studies. In this triptych of the second chapter, however, Gottfried finds the emphasis of its action not on heresy but on schism: words of rupture in various participial forms recur: «ripping», «split», «cleft», «torn». These words objectify Joyce's keen interest in the possibilities of a «breaking through» that creates freedom and possibility, and they are all synonyms for schism. If one does not submit to authority, to the voice of the rector in the church, but even parodies it, persisting in heresy, then one produces a schism. Schism is the unstated, primary concern of the heresy scenes, where religious choice resides in literary gesture. And for Joyce, schism is the very means by which art is made.137 I agree with Gottfried's assertion that schism is much more relevant in these scenes – as it is 136 Roy Gottfried, idem, p. 3. 137 Roy Gottfried, idem, p. 14, my emphasis. I am the servant of two masters 82 in the remainder of the book – than heresy. Stephen's journey is not one of arguing with dogma, but one of refusing it and its authority138. When looking at the scenes mentioned above, one quickly realises that Stephen is not challenging the Catholic Church's dogma, but its authority. The first scene of this triptych occurs when Stephen is about to play a part in the Whitsuntide play at Belvedere: he is to play the lead role, «that of a farcical pedagogue» (P 61). Stepping outside of the chapel where the festivities are taking place, Stephen meets his schoolmate Vincent Heron, accompanied by another boy who Stephen doesn't recognise. Although, as Carolyn L. Matthews underscores, while Heron calls Stephen his friend, «[their] relationship is based on constraint and torment»139. Heron immediately incites Stephen to mock their rector in the play: «I was just telling my friend Willis what a lark it would be tonight if you took off the rector in the part of the schoolmaster. It would be a ripping good joke» (P 63). As had happened previously with his unjust punishment at Clongowes, Stephen is once again being selected to represent his schoolmates against authority. However, this time around it is not a question of us versus them, not one of justice nor freedom. Simply, it derives from Heron's self-fashioning as the bad boy, as opposed to Stephen's model behaviour. Heron, in this scene, can be recognisable as an early prototype of what will later become Buck Mulligan in Ulysses: he claims not to be pleased by the coloniser's action over its subjects (in Heron's case Catholicism, in Mulligan's British Imperialism), but he will play along for personal gain. As the narrator reveals, Heron is as good a student as Stephen, and as important and influential: «Stephen and Heron had been during the year the virtual heads of the school. It was they who went up to the rector together to ask for a free day or to get a fellow off» (P 64). Yet, Heron proudly opposes Stephen's good behaviour: «No, said Heron, Dedalus is a model youth. He doesn't smoke and he doesn't go to bazaars and he doesn't flirt and he doesn't damn anything of damn all» (P 63). Heron implies that, because Stephen does none of those things, while he, one infers, does, Stephen is, therefore, again not one of the boys. Yet, once again, it's Stephen, the outsider, who has been challenged to play a trick – or confront, or face – the authority figure. Heron might fashion himself as a bad youth – and therefore a model to others like himself – but he doesn't seem to have the courage to do it personally. Yet Heron's challenge was nothing but a test. His real interest lies precisely in destroying Stephen's image as a «model youth»: – You're a sly dog, Dedalus! – Why so? said Stephen. 138 Cf. Roy Gottfried, idem, p. 16: «To be heretic is to argue with dogma in a dialogue, often with the sense of exploration and investigation of the truth. To be schismatic is to argue against dogma, resisting authority, insisting upon difference, and thus to embrace willingly and after the fact the freedom of the outside and opened space». 139 Carolyn L. Matthews, «Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man» in The Explicator, vol. 50, n. 11, 1991, p. 38. I am the servant of two masters 83 – You'd think butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, said Heron. But I'm afraid you're a sly dog. – Might I ask you what are you talking about? said Stephen urbanely. – Indeed you might, answered Heron. We saw her, Wallis, didn't we? And deucedly pretty she is too. And so inquisitive! And what part does Stephen take, Mr Dedalus? And will Stephen not sing, Mr Dedalus? Your governor was staring at her through that eyeglass of his for all he was worth so that I think the old man has found you out too. I wouldn't care a bit, by Jove. She's ripping, isn't she, Wallis? (P 64) To Heron, the fact that Stephen has a friend of the female sex coming to see him perform at the Whitsuntide play is proof that Stephen is not as perfect as he seems. The velocity with which Heron will shift his position regarding religious authority is astonishing. No longer does he seem interested in making a fool out of the rector. Quite the contrary, Heron will take the part of the inquisitor, forcing Stephen to confess a supposed infraction of the Catholic code of conduct: «So you might as well admit, Heron went on, that we've fairly found you out this time. You can't play the saint on me any more, that's one sure five» (P 65). Although Heron's outward speech seems to endorse his self-fashioning as a bad boy, the fact is that by aggressively insisting that Stephen admit his supposed infraction, he is embodying a surrogate figure of authority conducting an interrogatory. Specifically, Heron is embodying a Catholic figure of authority. By threatening Stephen to admit that he can't «play the saint anymore», Heron is taking the Catholic virtue of humility as Stephen's most grievous fault. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, humility can be defined as «[a] quality by which a person considering his own defects has a lowly opinion of himself and willingly submits himself to God and to others for God's sake»140. Consequently, although Heron pretends – or believes – his admonition to be merely playful, he is in fact serving as a mouthpiece of Catholic doctrine and authority. You're not being a good Catholic, he seems to say, because you're not humble. Heron is not so much interested in forcing Stephen to admit that he has an admirer as he is in forcing him to recognise the lack of humility in his behaviour. If Heron's interrogation plays on this double dimension of being both a playful alliance and an attack on Stephen's sin, Stephen's answer doubly fulfils Heron's expectations. By reciting the Confiteor, the Catholic prayer of confession, Stephen mocks Catholic authority and rite – as Heron had asked him to do during the play – while submitting himself to it: «bowing submissively, as if to meet his companion's jesting mood, began to recite the Confiteor» (P 65). Interestingly enough, Stephen's 140 Arthur Devine, «Humility», The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7, New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1910 [Retrieved 8 May 2013 from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07543b.htm]. I am the servant of two masters 84 confession is much more subversive to Catholic doctrine than Heron's jesting accusation. Heron seems to be outwardly mocking Catholic authority while, in fact, abiding by it and being a mouthpiece for it, Stephen is openly abiding by it (thus playing the saint Heron accuses him of being) while subverting Catholic rite by taking it out of context and using it unnecessarily and even sinfully, for the confession «came only from [his] lips» (ibidem)141. Stephen seems to have finally learnt how to appease his companions while keeping his individuality. Reciting the Confiteor is confessing nothing of what Heron demanded, it is simply following his jesting mood. Despite Stephen's jesting mood, it is nevertheless worthy of notice that Stephen acknowledged Heron's interrogation as being Catholic-informed and responded accordingly. He could have admitted that yes, he was a sly dog after all, or he could have denied any knowledge or guilt in the situation. The fact that Stephen answered through Catholic rite shows his inability to escape it. Stephen immediately equated admittance with confession and proceeded as such. Tellingly enough, the narrator describes Stephen's bowing as submissive. Mockingly as it might be, Stephen acquiesced to the Catholic undertone of Heron's accusation and responded through the appropriate Catholic rite, submitting himself to his classmate authority. Carolyn L. Matthews argues that «in the dialectic that ever demands an 'other', he is this other who is passive and must submit»142. The second scene of the heresy triptych also depicts Stephen submitting to authority. While he is reciting the Confiteor for Heron's amusement, Stephen looks back at another time when Heron tormented him, when he was still in number six143. It all started, however, when Stephen was publicly accused of heresy by his English master, Mr. Tate: Mr Tate, the English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly: – This fellow has heresy in his essay. A hush fell on the class. Mr Tate did not break it but dug with his hand between his crossed thighs while his heavily starched linen creaked about his neck and wrists. Stephen did not look up. It was a raw spring morning and his eyes were still smarting and weak. He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar. A sort loud laugh from Mr Tate set the class more at ease. 141 As mentioned before, confession presupposes contrition, that is a «hearty sorrow and detestation of sin» (cf. Butler's catechism, p. 63). Therefore, if Stephen's confession came merely from his lips, it lacked contrition and cannot be considered as true repentance. 142 Carolyn L. Matthews, op. cit., p. 39. 143 Six years away from leaving school. At the time of the Whitsuntide play, he is in number two, consequently Stephen is remembering what happened four years before. Cf. Johnson in P, p. 240, n. 65.35. I am the servant of two masters 85 – Perhaps you didn't know that, he said. – Where? asked Stephen. Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay. – Here. It's about the Creator and the soul. Rrm... rrm... rrm... Ah! without a possibility of ever approaching nearer. That's heresy. Stephen murmered: – I meant without a possibility of ever reaching. It was a submission and Mr Tate, appeased, folded up the essay and passed it across to him saying: – O... Ah! ever reaching. That's another story. But the class was not so soon appeased. Though nobody spoke to him of the affair after class he could feel about him a vague general malignant joy. (P 66) Heresy might be too strong a word to qualify Stephen's error, though, strictly speaking, it was a corruption of Catholic dogma. Stephen's error, as he soon identified, was to not allow the soul the possibility of ever approaching God, while Catholic doctrine allows for the approaching but not for communion: «doctrine allows that the soul yearns for communion with its creator, is granted grace to approach, but never reach, such communion»144. However, because Stephen quickly corrects his mistake, it cannot be considered heresy, for as long as he «remains willing to submit to the Church's decision he remains a Catholic Christian at heart and his wrong beliefs are only transient errors and fleeting opinions»145. Therefore, Mr. Tate's blunt accusation falls into overzealousness. Interestingly enough, as his title betrays, Tate is not a member of the clergy but a lay teacher. His stress on Catholic theology is doubly interesting precisely because of that. Like Heron, Mr. Tate is functioning as a mouthpiece for the Catholic order, yet his position is even more complicated given his authority status within a Catholic hierarchy. Tate is, arguably, a mimic man, as defined by Bhabha, that is to say, one from outside the power-structure – he is not a priest in a Catholic school – being given a position of power within the hierarchy. Tate's overzealousness is thus an example of his own partial presence, he is almost a priest, but not quite. Because Tate's judgement of Stephen's work is based on Catholic doctrine – rather than other elements more pertaining to an English classroom –, Tate displays the ambiguity of his position: neither priest nor teacher but something in between. Also, by evaluating Stephen's work based solely on Catholic doctrine – we have access to no other comment on the schoolboy's essay –, the English master is also revealing how far Catholicism has been infused into education. Granted, Belvedere is a 144 Jonhson in P, p. 240, n. 66.30-3. 145 Joseph Wilhelm, «Heresy», The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7, New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1910 [Retrieved 8 May 2013 from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm]. I am the servant of two masters 86 Catholic school, yet even so the curricula of the various disciplines should not, one expects, be so deeply charged with religion in a normal situation. It would be understandable, if misguided, that Catholicism had acted to prevent science from challenging belief. However, in Mr. Tate's English class, regardless of how far one tries to find, there is no evidence of actual grammar or literary corrections to Stephen's essay. If his work wasn't perfect from that perspective, it would be expected that some corrections had been made by Tate and remembered by Stephen; if it was, then Tate's insistence on heresy demonstrates that a Catholic classroom is much more than a denominational group: it is a place where knowledge has been informed and filtrated through Catholicism. As Charles Andrews underlines, «Schools, hospitals, and churches are public fixtures that exhibit to varying degrees their Christian foundations. In the most public of Irish institutions – education, health care, and the mass – religion shapes social function»146. As such, by admitting his error and correcting it, Stephen is acquiescing to the authority of Catholicism, as Gottfried notes: «His 'submission' of a correction to the instructor is the public equivalent of his 'admission' to Heron. He acquiesces to authority»147. Yet, this second submission to his schoolmaster is double: he is not only admitting his error in the essay, he is also acknowledging that an error of Catholic doctrine is sanctionable within an English class. As Richard Bizot argues, «To bend or not to bend is of course a recurring question for Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. […] bending the head in the classroom […] has considerable symbolic weight behind it»148. In Dante's words, God and Religion before everything. The third and last scene of this heresiarch triptych arguably starts in Tate's classroom. By publicly accusing Stephen of heresy, by pointing his inquisitorial finger at him, Tate opened up a space for similar accusations amongst the schoolboys. The hush that fell over the class after Tate's accusation fed by Stephen's delay in explaining what he meant by it – we have no measure of time but Stephen's subjective time experience allows for a scrutiny of Tate's person in excruciating detail – contributes to this atmosphere. For even after Stephen's correction the class was not appeased. The «general malignant joy» that Stephen felt after class is both an expression of schadenfreude and an anticipation of a changing of roles. If mimic man Mr. Tate, a layman with no known connections to the power-structure (except in his English teaching function) can accuse someone of heresy, so can a schoolboy. By occupying a position of mimicry within a Catholic power structure, Mr. Tate has opened a breach on the very basis of Catholic authority that will enable the schoolboys to judge one another by doctrinal measures. Through this breach in the wall of authority, Catholic doctrine 146 Charles Andrews, Modernism's National Scriptures: Nation, Religion and Fantasy in the Novel, 1918-1932, PhD Thesis, Loyola University, Chicago, 2007 147 Roy Gottfried, op. cit., p. 12. 148 Richard Bizot, op. cit., p.64. I am the servant of two masters 87 will spill into the boys' everyday life. Interestingly enough, Mr. Tate's hybrid position did nothing to weaken the authority of the Church, as one might expect giving that his partial presence questions the basis of the priests' authority. Quite the contrary, Mr. Tate's use of Catholic measures to evaluate an English essay had the effect of making crystal clear, to the boys and to the reader, that Catholicism should not, and does not, confine itself to the chapel: it is a measurement for everyday life, and every single detail of one's life – what one eats, thinks, does, reads, etc. – is subject to Catholic scrutiny, and that such scrutiny and judgement is not only the priests' task but the whole community's. A few days later, that is exactly what happens. Stephen is walking when he is stopped by Heron and two other boys. The four start walking together, keeping what is seemingly a friendly chat, when the matter turns to literature and one's personal preferences. Heron will argue for Alfred Lord Tennyson as the best poet, a safe and conventional choice. At this Stephen reacts saying that Tennyson is «only a rhymester» (P 67). Questioned who he thinks was the greatest poet, Stephen will give his tormentors the excuse they were looking for: – Byron, of course, answered Stephen. Heron gave the lead and all three joined in a scornful laugh. – What are you laughing at? asked Stephen. – You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He's only a poet for uneducated people! […] Heron went on: – In any case Byron was a heretic and immoral too. – I don't care what he was, cried Stephen hotly. […] – Here, catch hold of this heretic, Heron called out. In a moment Stephen was a prisoner. – Tate made you buck up the other day, Heron went on, about the heresy in your essay. […] Nash pinioned his arms behind while Bolan seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter. Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the knotty stump Stephen was borne back against a barbed wire fence. – Admit that Byron was no good. – No. – Admit. – No. – Admit. – No. No. (P 68-69) I am the servant of two masters 88 What was lurking behind Tate's admonition in the English class has now been given full prominence in Heron's threat: Catholicism and Catholic doctrine are the yardstick for every instance of life, particularly in what concerns literature. The only argument149 posited by Heron against Byron was based on Catholicism – that Byron was an heretic – and, for him and his companions, argument enough. Byron is not Heron's target, however, he is using the Romantic poet simply as an excuse to reprise Tate's accusation of heresy against Stephen. Only this time, Stephen chose not to give in to his schoolmate's authority. Because of that, he must be punished. Once more, Heron functions as the armed force of the hierarchy he claims to subvert. By physically assaulting Stephen, Heron and his partners are giving the young boy a taste of what disobedience feels like. Stephen's decision not to acquiesce to authority has but one reason: he will not relinquish art for religious morality. He sees no authority in Catholicism to censure poetry. Yet the whole affair can be reconfigured as to fit by Catholic or Christian models. His punishment can arguably be considered as a re-enactment of Christ's Passion. Charles Andrews notes that «Stephen's assimilation into a Christ-narrative also suggests Joyce's re-conception of Christian mythology»150. One could easily link the cuts of the cane and the blows of the cabbage with the cruel Roman soldiers tormenting Christ: «And they struck his head with a reed: and they did spit on him. And bowing their knees, they adored him» (DRB Mark, 15, 19); «And they came to him, and said: Hail, king of the Jews; and they gave him blows» (DRB John, 19, 3). The crown of thorns with which Christ had been crowned king of the jews turns into a barbed wire fence, crowning Stephen as king of the heretics. If Stephen's punishment can be regarded as a re-enactment of the Passion of Christ, then Heron and his companions have traded places with Stephen. Stephen now becomes Christ-like while his tormentors are akin to the enemies of the Church they accuse Stephen of defending. The interpretation of this equation can be problematic and somewhat misleading. I don't mean to suggest that Stephen, by recalling the events in this manner, is trying to reclaim the position of defender of the Church in the events, nor that he is consciously fashioning himself as a Christ amongst his unbelieving classmates. If anything, the biblical narrative is parodied in Stephen's recalled recreation. There is no nobility in being assaulted with a cabbage stump, there is no nobility in being left sobbing and aching. Nonetheless, the parody of Christ's torment is not necessarily subversive, not necessarily a perversion of Catholic narrative: there is no direct reference to it and no underplay of Christ's suffering; it's not even a conscious association. Stephen is simply reimagining the events with Christian imagery – not necessarily Catholic, yet identifiable as such because it would be what the young boy has been exposed to. By taking the biblical narrative as an 149 Heron also claimed that Byron was for uneducated people, that is, for people of foul tastes, that is, for people not abiding by Catholic mores. 150 Charles Andrews, op. cit., p. 6. I am the servant of two masters 89 archetype for his own suffering, despite its less than heroic nuances151, Stephen is complying by the greater power-structure of Catholicism. Furthermore, the issue that Heron presses Stephen to admit to is ambiguous to say the least. He urges Stephen to admit that Byron was «no good». Not a good poet, perhaps, or perhaps not a good person, that is a heretic. Even if Heron means 'not a good poet', his criteria for this is still heresy. Stephen's refusal is not only a defence of Byron, but also a defence of himself against accusations of heresy. He could not admit to Byron's heretical stance – his previous answer to this is elusive, «I don't care what he was» – for that would be an open attack on the power-structure. If Stephen is seemingly standing up for himself against hierarchy, his behaviour is still being conditioned by Catholicism by refusing to admit to heresy and by reenacting his martyrdom in Catholic imagery. Although what explicitly connects these three scenes are ideas of heresy, I believe that, as I've tried to make clear above, heresy lies in what Stephen is accused of rather than on what he actually does. From Stephen's point-of-view, his actions are not those of an heresiarch but of one who struggles to find the limits of religion and religiousness in his day to day life on the edge of what is lawful and what is not according to Catholic precept. Accordingly, Stephen is close to various forms of breaking away, schisms if you will, without actually taking the step forward and openly parting from the body of the Church, not even in the last scene (first in narrative time) when he defends Byron. As Gottfried argues, it is not associated ideas of heresy, complicity and contrition that connect these scenes, but rather an accumulating pressure against ideological, artistic and spiritual bondage. It is a wish (on Stephen's part, on Joyce's part) to release the strictures that maintain narrative repetition […] and to to think freely, outside of convention and conventional wisdom.152 In other words, throughout these three scenes Stephen is testing the limits of his belief and his various possible answers: mocking, acquiescence, resistance. None of those possible reactions, however, will be enough to set Stephen free from the shackles of Catholicism. In each, he is also admitting its authority, he is fitting his answers to comply with the power-structure in one form or another. While Stephen's mind keeps wrestling with the limitations imposed by Catholic authority, 151 Furthermore, although having been glorified by Christian dogma, Christ's crowning is made with the intent of mocking him. Being attacked with cabbage stumps, Stephen could be arguably recreating the mocking in the biblical narrative, not mocking the narrative itself but its Christian glorification. By doing it, he is not fighting doctrine but highlighting it. 152 Roy Gottfried, op. cit., p. 13. I am the servant of two masters 96 aspirations to any connection amongst themselves. Their pain is not shared, it is individual. By the juxtaposition of these two types of separation, I believe one can read Father Arnall's re-imagination of the Catholic hell as a dichotomy of being within a desirable community – that is, with God and the other just souls – or closed outside of any hope of community, even an ill-one – the damned souls. This Catholic vision of hell as a complete deprivation of human connection thus recreates the Catholic precept of community on earth. The second element I would like to stress in Father Arnall's sermon on hell is, as I've hinted before, one more directly connected with the narration than anything else. As I shall discuss below, Stephen will feel as if Father Arnall's words were personally directed at him, as if he was the sole recipient of the priest's sermon. An element of narration will emulate Stephen's solipsism. Although most of the scene is dominated by Arnall's sermon, Stephen's thoughts and reflexions will occasionally interrupt the priest's speech. Shortly after Arnall's initial remarks, for a number of paragraphs, the dialogue mark will disappear from the narrative, thus dissolving the possibility of direct speech, and Stephen's thoughts will become enmeshed with the sermon itself. As this happens, the narrator will retell the sermon as it is being internalised by Stephen, reinforcing the young man's belief that the sermon is being preached directly to him and to his soul. The narrative mark of the priest's words will reappear later, during the second segment of the sermon, yet its effect has already been taken in by the reader: we now know that, despite the presence of all the other boys, the words are directed at none other than Stephen. The sermon's emphasis on community and Stephen's sense of it being personalised creates a perfect synthesis of why he has been so affected by it: by sinning, Stephen has shut himself away from the rest of the body of the Church and the preacher's words are now painting his own personal hell. In most occasions, Stephen's thoughts will echo this idea of punishable individuality. The underlying message of the sermon is quite clear: if you join the community here on earth, you'll enjoy an eternity of happiness in the after-life; if you choose to stay away from the community, not only will you be left alone by yourself, you will be damned to hell for all eternity. Later in the novel Stephen will consider this idea of hell as not being so hellish after all, for what is the alternative? «An eternity of bliss in the company of the dean of studies?» (P 202). For the time being, however, the prospect of eternal damnation will greatly affect his young mind. As the preacher speaks throughout the days of the retreat, the reader has a glimpse of Stephen's mind and his reactions. Right from the start, when the priest's words and Stephen's thoughts become entangled, Stephen's first signs of paranoia become evident, with the young boy believing there would be no time for redemption, feeling the cold embrace of death as he hears the sermon: I am the servant of two masters 97 He felt the deathchill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling the throat. No help! No help! He, he himself, his body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it! Nail it down into a wooden box, the corpse. Carry it out of the house on the shoulders of hirelings. Thrust it out of men's sight into a long hole in the ground, into a grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping worms and to be devoured by scuttling plumpbellied rats. (P 94) Once again, as had happened in the Clongowes' infirmary, Stephen is imagining his own death. This time, however, there are no glorious bells tolling, no gathering of the college to pay homage to him in the funeral celebrations. Stephen's childish glorification of death has been replaced by the cruel fear of dying outside the grace of God. The emphasis here now lies on the rotting of the body. Stephen's platonic division of body and soul, already hinted at before in his first visit to the prostitute, becomes even more evident in his fantasy of death: he had yielded to his body and that was why he had sinned, he was a creature of the body, no more than a common animal, «he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat» (ibidem). The body will get its punishment by rotting and being devoured by vermin in the grave; but the soul would have to be judged by God, as Father Arnall through Stephen tells: «God, who had long been merciful, would then be just» (ibidem). Stephen becomes increasingly aware of his shifty adherence to Catholicism during his time of hypocrisy. Even if he did try to dissociate his sinning from his piousness, there is no room in doctrine for such partial presence. If you are part of the Church, the totality of your actions and thoughts are controlled by it, if not, punishment will come. «For the pious and believing catholic», Arnall says, «for the just man, death is no cause of terror» (P 96), but Stephen's piousness was nothing but a facade and a just Catholic man would not keep the company of prostitutes. Increasingly Stephen will identify himself as the sole recipient of Father Arnall's sermon, thus furthering his sense of guilt. An unnamed speaker says – perhaps Mr. Tate as he is mentioned in the same segment and wouldn't be expected to attend the retreat –, Father Arnall «rubbed it into you well» (P 105). «Every word was for him. Against his sin, foul and secret, the whole wrath of God was aimed. The preacher's knife had probed deeply into his diseased conscience and he felt now that his soul was festering in sin» (P 97). As it happens with heaven and hell, if happiness is communal, sin is individual, despite similar reactions from his classmates around him, «[h]e put us I am the servant of two masters 98 all into a blue funk» (P 105). The sermon penetrates Stephen with such violence that he begins developing physical symptoms of his internal turmoil – «He came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers» (ibidem) –, prompting Stephen to let go of the various metaphors he used before to address his sordid life and to start enumerating the numerous ways in which he had sinned: The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils: the sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless of bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed; his monstrous dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by harlots with gleaming jewel eyes; the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly for days and days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or beneath some hingeless door or in some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly. Mad! Mad! Was it possible he had done these things? (P 97) Although he has now shedded the metaphors and hidden allusions of the narration, he didn't let go of the Catholic idiom: he hasn't been masturbating to dirty pictures – also literally dirty, covered by the soot of the fireplace – he had sinned in thought and deed. Furthermore, a new piece of information about Stephen's life of sin has now been revealed: the confession letters. Even kneedeep in his life of sexual outlets, Stephen felt the Catholic commandment to confess his sins. The most interesting aspect of this small curiosity is the double function of the confession letters: at the time, perhaps unwittingly, Stephen used the act of writing them as a substitute for the Catholic sacrament. Yet, after confessing himself to the page, Stephen the sinner revealed and revelled in the perverse possibilities hidden in the act of confessing, by fantasising about his revelations being read not by a priest, who could absolve him, but by someone who could join him in sin. Now confession is his only chance of salvation. «There was still time […] No escape. He had to confess, to speak out in words what he had done and thought, sin after sin» (P 106). Once Stephen came to the inevitable conclusion that he had to confess his sins, not by letter to some random person passing, but vocalising his deeds to a priest, shame overcame him: «The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh: confession. But not there in the chapel of the college. He would confess all, every sin of deed and thought, sincerely: but not there among his school companions» (P 106). There is no specific requirement for a Catholic to confess to a certain priest, however keeping the same confessor is advised. Although Stephen is aware that a confessor is obliged under the seal of I am the servant of two masters 99 confession to keep secret whatever is heard in confession, he still feels ashamed of disclosing his sins to someone who he might encounter in everyday life. At the end of Arnall's three day sermon, Stephen has but two feelings: shame and fear. Within a Catholic power-structure the only way to escape the fear of eternal damnation would be to confess, however auricular confession, to say word for word what he did, is punishment in itself. Yet Stephen cannot escape it; Catholicism is both the judge of his actions and the door to his forgiveness, and to go through that door, one must go to confession. Furthermore, his mind has been so deeply affected by Catholic discourse, that the same discourse will infiltrate the narration when Stephen is alone with his thoughts, examining his soul. The narrative replicates the structure of a catechism, direct questions with direct, if somewhat unjustified, answers: «Why was he kneeling there like a child saying his evening prayers? To be alone with his soul» (P 115). Stephen's desire to confession didn't come out of a sense of morality. It was rather provoked by the fear aroused in him by Father Arnall's words: «He waited in fear, his soul pining him, praying silently that death might not touch his brow as he passed over the threshold, that the fiends that inhabit darkness might no be given power over him» (P 114). Though the narrative of confession is filled with selfless notions of having offended God, of being ashamed of having caused God pain, of not being «worthy to be called God's child» (P 115), Stephen's impetus came directly from the fear of eternal damnation. As it happened in Clongowes, Stephen is forced to submission simply by fear of punishment. Until he can let go of such fear, he will never be truly free from the Church. Hence his new-found desire to reconciliation with God, hence why his previous sinning was just that, sinning, rather than rebellion. Like Lucifer, Stephen fell out of God's favour by sinning; yet, he hasn't uttered his non serviam yet. Instead, through confession, he goes to beg God's forgiveness. As the moment of the actual confession approaches, Stephen's thoughts of shame will greatly increase, almost turning him around in his decision: «He could still leave the chapel. He could stand up, put one foot before the other and walk out softly and then run, run, run swiftly through the dark streets. He could still escape from the shame» (P 120). In Stephen's fleeing desire there's no hint of rebellion, no sense of actively wanting to stray away from the Church. If he had already freed himself from the Church's power, he would have had no trouble leaving the chapel, wouldn't even have felt the necessity to go there in the first place. However, because he is still not free, because Catholicism is still in command of his thoughts and actions, his desire to leave cannot be ascribed to anything else but the shame he feels in what he had done; and the shame itself is a creation of the Catholic doctrine that infuses his mind. The fear inculcated in him by the masterfully painted picture of an eternity in hell, however, was stronger than his shame. When the door of the I am the servant of two masters 100 box opened, «[h]e stood up in terror and walked blindly into [it]» (ibidem). There was no turning back now. As the confession starts, with Stephen gasping for air a third of the way through the Confiteor, the youth begins by saying that he hasn't confessed for «[a] long time» (P 121). A Catholic must confess at least once a year for Easter; saying that he hasn't confessed in eight months wouldn't be a long time, frowned upon at the most, but not a long time. Stephen's idea of time here is more affected by the number and the severity of sins he committed since he last confessed. Although only being obliged to confess once a year, it would be expected that he had confessed immediately after committing a mortal sin such as lust. Stephen's sense of time has thus been thwarted by the heavy conscious of having both sinned and not repented sooner. A long time may have passed, but still Stephen seems wary of disclosing what actually led him there. He starts enumerating his sins according to their perceived gravity: masses missed, prayers not said, lies, moving up to sins of anger, envy, gluttony, vanity, disobedience (to his parents more so than to his masters, one assumes), moving up again to sloth until finally the priest asks «Anything else, my child?» (P 12), as if knowing of what was still unsaid. Unable to hide it any longer, Stephen confessed the sins that were troubling his mind. At this point, a sort of anti-climax occurs. While the reader, and probably Stephen as well, might have expected a more severe reaction from the priest, the old man seems little more than nonplussed, even slightly bored by the tales of Stephen's lustful ways. One imagines that the old priest had probably heard the same story countless times before. Although Stephen's perception of the confessor's reaction is in-line with the shame and fear he felt at the time, the actual narrative of the priest's movements and words reveal little more than a textbook reaction, re-enacted thousands of times, of the church's position on Stephen's sin: The priest passed his hand several times over his face. Then, resting his forehead against his hand, he leaned towards the grating and, with eyes still averted, spoke slowly. His voice was weary and old. – You are very young, my child, he said, and let me implore of you to give up that sin. It is a terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills the soul. It is the cause of many crimes and misfortunes. Give it up, my child, for God's sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. You cannot know where that wretched habit will lead you or where it will come against you. As long as you commit that sin, my poor child, you will never be worth one farthing to God. Pray to our mother Mary to help you. She will help you, my child. Pray to Our Blessed Lady when that sin comes into your mind. I am sure you will do that, will you not? You repent of all those sins. I am sure you do. And you will promise God now that by His holy grace you will never offend Him any more by that wicked sin. You will make that solemn I am the servant of two masters 101 promise to God, will you not? (P 122) Stephen promises, he was sorry, how he regretted it, and «God had promised to forgive him if he was sorry» (P 120). Yet, because his regret came from fear of being condemned to an eternity in hell and not necessarily out of love of God, one wonders how forgiven Stephen might have been. Yet, because he complied with the power-structure's demands – regretting his sins, going to confession, promising not to indulge in them again – Stephen is absolved: «he bent his head and heard the grave words of absolution spoken and saw the priest's hand raised above him in token of forgiveness» (P 122). The chapter ends, rather meaningfully, the next morning, with Stephen waiting to take communion in the college chapel. «The ciborium160 had come to him» (P 123), the last sentence of the third chapter, is both the culmination of Stephen's internal turmoil and new found piety as well as a preview into the action of the next chapter. Communion, also a synonym of community, a word of the same root, is exactly the crossroad Stephen will face next: whether to take part in the priesthood, as he is invited to do, or to refuse any affiliation with the body of the Church as he eventually does. The narrator leaves the chapter as a cliffhanger: will Stephen take communion when the ciborium approaches him, or will he break free? Literally, at that moment, he will, and in doing so, he will undergo a complete transformation of his everyday life. Catholicism threatened Stephen into becoming the perfect subject, and the boy now lives every hour of his day according to the religion's precepts. The first paragraph of the fourth chapter is symptomatic of how thorough Catholicism's control of one's life really is: Sunday was dedicated to the mistery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to the Holy Ghost, Tuesday to the Guardian Angels, Wednesday to saint Joseph, Thursday to the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Friday to the Suffering of Jesus, Saturday to the Blessed Virgin Mary. (P 124) Stephen has now laid out his everyday life according to instructions. Literally. As Jeri Johnson notes, Stephen's weekly schedule has been created according to the plan for devotions outlined in The Sodality Manual; or a Collection of Prayers and Spiritual Exercises for Members of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary161. «His daily life was laid out in devotional areas» (P 124), the narrator's own words, not mine, «Every part of his day […] circled about its own centre of spiritual energy» (ibidem). Stephen had wholeheartedly devoted himself to amend his life, to 160 The vessel used to hold the Eucharist. 161 Cf. Johnson in P, p. 256, n. 124.1-5, I am the servant of two masters 102 become as much the saint now as he was before the sinner. Not only did he pray constantly, he also furthered his piety by mortification of his body, punishing each of his senses as best as he could: «striving […] by constant mortification to undo the sinful past rather than to achieve a saintliness fraught with peril» (P 126). Stephen has never been under more subjection to the Catholic powerstructure than he is now, to the point of blindly following the precepts he could not understand or agree with – «it seemed strange to him at times that wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so distinct in their nature that each should be prayed for apart from the others» (P 125). Yet, even during this state of almost saintliness, fear still lurks at the back of his mind, what if he has not paid for his sins yet? What if the first confession wasn't valid? What if, what if. Fear has been a constant element in Stephen's Catholic upbringing, from his days as a child at Clongowes until now: «It humiliated and shamed him to think that he would never be freed from [his sins] wholly, however holily he might live or whatever virtues or perfections he might attain» (P 129). Furthermore, his new ascetic life poses dangers of its own: Stephen, who once had sinned with pride, now dangerously approaches self-righteous pride. His devotion will have him believe he is closer to sainthood despite his constant fear of not having amended himself yet – «The very frequency and violence of temptations showed him at last the truth of what he had heard about the trials of the saints» (ibidem) – and will drive him away from the company of his fellow subjects of Catholicism: To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples. (P 128) Stephen has outbursts of anger when someone, even his mother, disturbs his daily rituals of penitence, even if by simply coughing. He recognises in himself the same nervous twitches he has often seen in his masters' faces and he is now discovering their cause. Stephen's inability to connect with other humans is directly caused by his excessive piety – he is closer to saints than to other humans, and although he is aware of this flaw in his life, he is unaware of its implications. If community is at the very basis of Catholicism, his individuality in religion is a subversion of the Catholic doctrine. Subversion through submission: there is such a thing as being too obedient, apparently. His ascetic life is destroying his faith from the inside. As much as Catholicism preaches community, it operates on the individual, and even its path to salvation becomes, as Stephen now experiences, everyone trying to secure heaven for himself. This contradictory position Stephen finds himself in can be argued as being a direct result of the ambiguity of the Catholic narrative, as I am the servant of two masters 103 defined by Bhabha. Stephen has stopped living his life as he would do normally in order to mould it according to what is defined by the narrative of Catholicism, only to find that the actual community defined as Catholic couldn't be further away from that narrative. By turning himself into the narrative of the perfect Catholic man, Stephen discovers that there is no such thing as the perfect Catholic man in his everyday life, thus exposing the inherit failure of the narrative of Catholicism. It's from this duplicity of being the model Catholic that Stephen will re-enact Lucifer's story. Lucifer, like Stephen, was once closer to God than any of the other angels, and because of that, he fell to damnation: Thy pride is brought down to hell, thy carcass is fallen down: under thee shall the moth be strewed, and worms shall be thy covering. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning? how art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations? And thou saidst in thy heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the most High. But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit. (DRB Isaiah, 14, 11-15) Lucifer, the name Satan was known by before his fall, is a curious symbol; his name is believed to mean simply morning star, and although the above passage from Isaiah is traditionally understood as a reference to Lucifer's fall, it refers to a Babylonian king. Perhaps most interestingly, Lucifer, in its original meaning of morning star, is also used to refer to Jesus himself in 2 Peter 1, 19, though all translations will choose a periphrasis of Lucifer rather than using it as a proper noun, as it happens in the fragment above, thus furthering the popular belief that Lucifer refers to Satan before his rebellion. Lucifer is thus a double symbol of falling from grace and of light in a dark place and, as such, embodies the perfect synthesis of both Satan's and Stephen's path. The popular narrative of Lucifer's fall, perhaps most famously rewritten by John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), holds that Lucifer, God's favourite angel, consumed by jealousy over God's newest creation, Man, leads a revolt to occupy God's throne, and is defeated by God's army and cast away into the depths of hell. Lucifer's, now Satan, famous words in Paradise Lost have echoed through the years as the ultimate expression of pride: «Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven»162. Stephen's narrative of rejection, however, slightly differs from Lucifer's. He was not after the power given by God, he was offered the power. His rejection of the Church begins when he is offered a place in the priesthood by the director of Belvedere, a scene I referred to before. The priest's emphasis on the 162 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I.263, New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1851, p. 125. I am the servant of two masters 104 power held by the ministers of God is quite telling of the Church's ambition to rule mankind, as I've explored before, though Stephen, at that point in the narrative, having realised the disconnection between the Catholic narrative and the lives of Catholics, is less than thrilled by the prospect of such power. That is not to say that he refused priesthood lightly, he did consider being ordained, though he thought of it as serving in a minor role, away from the minister's central place in the mass: He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his shoulders covered with a humeral veil, holding the paten within its folds, or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as a deacon in a dalmatic cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his hands joined and his face towards the people, and sing the chant Ite, missa est (P 133-134) His longing for the secondary role is both an extension of his piety, a strive for humility despite his pride in becoming a minister of God, and an expression of his ultimate refusal of Catholic community, for he wanted to be forgotten by the people, not their leader, and even if he saw himself as a celebrant, he saw it as being «in a church without worshippers» (P 134). At this point, Stephen is more seriously considering priesthood, and he wonders what secrets about the Catholic narrative he might learn. If he were to become a priest, Stephen would be given access to the knowledge of the Church, something that he had always been denied: «He listened in reverent silence now to the priest's appeal and through the words he heard even more distinctly a voice bidding him approach, offering him secret knowledge and secret power» (ibidem, my emphasis). Knowledge and power are two sides of the same coin that has now been offered to him. Yet, despite all his musings in knowledge and power, of his fantasies about Catholic rite and pageantry, Stephen doesn't seem to consider the vocation with any spiritual inclination. Perhaps prompted by the director's curious statement of how ridiculous he thought franciscan priests looked walking around in the streets in their vestments – «I used to see them out cycling in all kinds of weather with this thing up about their knees! It was really ridiculous» (P 130) –, Stephen's thoughts about priesthood will focus on more material, visible signs. The life he saw ahead was not one of joy: «It was a grave and ordered and passionless life that awaited him» (P 135). His inclination to think of priesthood in material terms will, shortly after taking his leave from the director, tip him into the abyss of nonpriesthood: I am the servant of two masters 105 He was passing at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street, and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of his soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom. The voice of the director urging upon him the proud claims of the church and the mystery and power of the priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory. His soul was not there to hear and greet it and he knew that the exhortation he had listened to had already fallen into an idle formal tale. He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world. The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall. (P 136, my emphasis). The last sentences of the excerpt above hold in them the smooth movement of a leaf falling from a tree, as opposed to the violent fall Satan and his angels suffer from heaven. Stephen realises, by wondering what his window might be, how disconnected he feels from what the Church expects of its ministers, regardless of his obedient and orderly behaviour. There are several keywords that one can take from the narrative of Stephen's non serviam, one being the absence of the non serviam itself: the emphasis he puts in freedom being, perhaps, the most revealing. Freedom is exactly what Catholicism had denied him so far, and freedom is what he would have to hand over if he wished to pursue the power and knowledge offered to him by the power-structure. Morse, in his Catholic reading of Joyce's work, argues that Stephen «renounces Catholicism not because he is irreligious but because he is anti-authoritarian»163. Stephen, or the narrator prying into his wonderings, also admits the impossibility of living up to the Catholic idea of community, he was destined to be forever apart from others. Most curiously, he mentions the «proud claims of the church», much like before he had noted a «strong note of pride» (P 133) in the director's voice. Pride, one must keep in mind, is defined by the Catholic Encyclopedia as «the excessive love of one's own excellence» and 163 J. Mitchell Morse, op. cit., p. 4-5. I am the servant of two masters 112 individual breaking free from a power-structure under which he has been living. Cranly may not have been able to understand why his question was not accurate to Stephen – he hadn't been as close to the power-structure as Stephen to realise clearly just how oppressive it really is – but he has the single most commented upon remark by critics of Catholicism in Portrait: «– It is a curious thing […] how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve» (P 202). Adherents of Catholicism in Joyce will cling to Cranly's disbelief in his friend's position expressed through his detached «you say you disbelieve»; detractors will cling to Stephen's answer that he once believed, but that he is someone different now. My reading is plural insofar as it encompasses both positions: I agree with Cranly, Stephen's mind is supersaturated with Catholicism, but I also confirm Stephen's statement that he is someone else now: he has defied the power-structure, even though he still speaks Catholic. His individual war against the powerstructure of Catholicism is thus the only reason why he refuses, despite Cranly's appeal, to perform lip-service at the mass and indulging in his mother's wishes: in doing so, he would be giving in to the power-structure and loosing an already hard battle. «If I could» (P 203), he says, but he can't, not without betraying the freedom he fought so hard to obtain. The fact is that it is not an issue of faith Stephen is striking at, but one of freedom. Stephen openly admits to Cranly that he both feels and is afraid that the host might indeed be the body and blood of the son of God; yet, it is not the eternal punishment he fears in taking a sacrilegious communion, but the fact that he would be giving in to «a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration» (P 205). Stephen is «not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too» (P 208) by moving away from the Church. Freedom comes at a great price, but a price Stephen is willing to pay. Rather a lifelong freedom than «an eternity of bliss in the company of the dean of studies» (P 202). Towards the end of the dialogue – and the narrative – Stephen will be as direct and clear about his position as he can: I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning. (P 208) In doing this, Stephen is stating once and for all his refusal of subjection to the Catholic narrative (as well as the nationalist), as well as the motives for such rejection: the freedom to act, express and create as an individual. As I've established in the beginning of this work, Stephen's fight I am the servant of two masters 113 is one of self-expression, of having a voice which has been denied by his condition as a subaltern to the power-structure of Catholicism. Even if he must use silence, his individual silence can be much louder than the one imposed on him by the narrative of Catholicism. Stephen's striving for selfexpression has been a long, difficult fight. However, by the end of Portrait, he believes that he has won, that he has set himself free from the shackles of Catholicism. Yet, in speaking, he unwittingly reinforces the nets flung at him by Catholicism; when he acts, he does so by replicating the structures in which he was taught to act, and when he thinks, his mind is supersaturated by the very thing he wished to free himself from. Catholicism is a powerful force. Despite having claimed not to serve it anymore, in freedom Stephen re-enacts countless times the very things he wished to flee from. Because he is no longer a subject of Catholicism, a subaltern of Catholicism, he is now finally free to speak. And isn't it curious that when he does speak, he speaks in Catholic? I am the servant of two masters 114 Lotus eaters: conclusions In the chapter commonly known as «Lotus Eaters» of Ulysses, the second of the second part of the book, Leopold Bloom visits All Hollows church. Upon entering, Bloom notices that a service is taking place, «Something going on: some sodality» (U 77). Bloom joins in, sitting at the back, from where he starts observing the believers. «Nice discreet place to be next to some girl» (ibidem), he thinks still with Martha's letter in his mind. His attention, however, is quickly diverted by what's happening during the mass he accidentally joined: The priest went along by them, murmuring, holding the thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out a communion, shook a drop or two (are they in water?) off it and put it neatly into her mouth. Her hat and head sank. Then the next one: a small old woman. The priest bent down to put it into her mouth, murmuring all the time. Latin. The next one. Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don't seem to chew it: only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a corpse why the cannibals cotton to it. (ibidem) Looking through Bloom's eyes one can get a fresh perspective over what, for dozens of pages, we've been trying to analyse from its centre, that is to say, from Stephen's perspective. Bloom's curious gaze is a precious help to understand how Catholicism looks like to a non-Catholic. The moment Bloom comments upon is, quite clearly, the taking of the Eucharist. The mumbling he hears from the priest is, as he later recognises, Latin. Latin, one must keep in mind, was the official language of the Church before Vatican II, in which every rite was performed. As we've seen before, in the introduction, the use of Latin in Catholicism had the outward appeal of being an universal language that could unite Catholics of all nations under the same community. Its more direct effect, however, is one of subjugation, for the number of believers who could actually understand Latin, instead of mindless repeating the latin answers of the mass over the years, would be limited at best. Speaking in a language one cannot comprehend is, of course, a way of taking power away from the subject, for how can one fight back if not by arguing? Latin wouldn't be left out of the mass until the middle of the twentieth century. Consequently, during Portrait's narrative time, as well as during I am the servant of two masters 115 Ulysses', the mass would have been in Latin. Bloom is quite aware of the effects of practising a religion in a language one does not understand: it stupefies the believers into submission. That is why it is a «good idea», as he says: Latin as well as other elements of the mass, is used to elevate the rite into an aura of mysteriousness and dignity, to endow it with a touch of superiority so that the Catholic community will fear it as well as admire it. In this, Bloom is unwittingly voicing a commentary akin to Benedict Anderson's idea of sacred languages, that is a language that would function not only as a medium for communication amongst the religious community, but part of the community's identity of sacredness in itself. Anderson writes that «[all] the great classical communities conceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of the sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power»169. In this, Christianity until the sixteenth century and Catholicism in particular until the mid-twentieth are a perfect example. One of the major fragmentary issues between Catholicism and Protestantism was precisely the language issue: while the reformers voiced the necessity for turning to vernacular, Catholicism refused it. This refusal, ultimately grounded on the very sacredness of the language, conforms to Anderson's argument. Yet, its ultimate consequence, and perhaps the greater motive behind it, was to keep Catholic hierarchy profoundly centralised and in command of the flock. Catholic hierarchy thus assumed the position of interpreter between the word of God and the common people. As Anderson concludes, «the literati [those who could understand the sacred language] were adepts, strategic strata in a cosmological hierarchy of which the apex was divine. The fundamental conceptions about 'social groups' were centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-orientated and horizontal»170. Bloom has a knack for identifying breaking issues within the Church: first the language and its attendant consequences, then the large theological quarrel of transubstantiation. He is right, Catholics, as if cannibals, truly believe that they're eating the body of Christ, or his corpse, as Bloom put it. That is yet another issue separating Catholics from Protestants: the question of whether or not the host becomes the actual body of Christ. The Catholic Encyclopedia, on the issue of transubstantiation defends its reality by arguing that the words Christ uttered at the last supper could not be read to mean anything else but that: When, therefore, He Who is All Truth and All Power said of the bread: "This is my body", the bread became, through the utterance of these words, the Body of Christ; consequently, on the completion of the sentence the substance of bread was no longer present, but the Body of Christ under the outward appearance 169 Benedict Anderson, op. cit., p. 13. 170 Idem, p. 15. I am the servant of two masters 116 of bread. Hence the bread must have become the Body of Christ, i.e. the former must have been converted into the latter171 Yet, if within Christendom, despite their differences, opinions might diverge but are still understandable to one another, Bloom gives us the perspective of a non-Christian to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: eating the corpse of a man, isn't that what cannibals do? Bloom's candid reflection provides us with the fresh perspective I was looking for. In this scene, Bloom's comments are those of an anthropologist commenting on a foreign and strange culture: cold, analytical, detached, slightly judgemental and based on his own understanding of the world. Bloom's world view might be slightly more inclined towards the Protestant position on what concerns the issue of the Real Presence of Christ, giving a veiled endorsement of their view that the consecration of the bread must be taken figuratively, or at the least, as consubstantiation172 rather than transubstantiation, as the Lutherans have it; for if it is taken too literally, that's what Catholics are: cannibals. However, most interestingly for our argument, Bloom points yet another function of the communion: its ability to control through a token of sacredness the subjugated body of the Church: Something like those mazzoth: it's that sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it's called. There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish. Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old fellow asleep near the confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year. (U 78) During his immediate reflexions on what he observes, Bloom has tapped in to some of the cruxes of my argument: most significantly, the notion of Catholic community as central to its doctrine, the promise of happiness in afterlife and the sedative power of ritual. For sedative it is, if it keeps them happy – read non-rebellious. This dimension of the taking of the Eucharist had already crossed Bloom's mind before, when he was considering the proselytising missionaries in Asia: 171 Joseph Pohle, «The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist», The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5, New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1909 [Retrieved 8 May 2013 from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05573a.htm]. 172 The doctrine that sustains that the blood and body of Christ coexists with the substance of wine and bread. I am the servant of two masters 117 «Wonder how they explain it to the heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium» (U 77). Furthermore, the chapter title «Lotus eaters» refers to a parallel arch-narrative in the Odyssey: when Odysseus arrived at the land of the Lotus-eaters, they were offered lotus to eat. The men who accepted the offer lost their desire to leave. The Eucharist is thus, in Ulysses, the equivalent to the numbing flower of Homer, numbing Catholics by the host. In his observation, Bloom is not only voicing the famous Marx dictum that Religion is the opium of the people; he is openly stating that, opium for opium, drug for drug, numbness from numbness, might as well take one from which one can awake. Geert Lernout, commenting on the same section, concludes that according to Bloom, the catholic church is a powerful organization that has evolved an almost total control over its members, who give up their freedom in return for the feeling of being part of a community with their fellow believers and with the divine.173 While I focused more keenly on confession, Bloom's comments on the sacrament of the Eucharist are much more poignant than mine could ever be: taking the communion is both a rite of belonging, a rite of subjugation and, perhaps less clearly so, a rite of exclusion. That is to say, those who are, and those who are not part of the Catholic community are differentiated by the Eucharist. Let us consider, once again, Stephen's Easter duty and the reason why he couldn't conform to his mother's will: if he did so, even if just by lip-service, he would be rejoining the same community he had fought so hard to escape from. To take communion would be, quite literally, to take part in the community. The same reasoning goes to Bloom: although he converted to Catholicism, he does not take part in it by taking communion. Furthermore, not only does he not take part of it, he looks at the consecrated host as an outsider, revealing the role played by the transubstantiated bread in my post-colonial reading of Catholicism: a sign differently interpreted by opposing groups. In «By bread alone. Signs of violence in the mid-nineteenth century»174, Bhabha explores the curious reactions of the coloniser when a mysterious loaf of unfermented bread, the chapati, starts circulating in a village. The ancient tradition now has been transformed by the British powerstructure into a sign that an insurgency is approaching. That is to say that the bread innocently handed from hand to hand becomes the site of a discoursive time-lag; or, in other words, because it is read in a moment of crisis and social unrest, and because it is incomprehensible to the coloniser, it must be a sign of a rebellion. Simplifying the analogy, a sign – bread in both cases, Catholicism and Bhabha's argument – has no essential value; it is read differently by different groups; the way in 173 Geert Lernout, op. cit., p. 153. 174 Bhabha, «By bread alone. Signs of violence in the mid-nineteenth century», in op. cit., p. 198. I am the servant of two masters 118 which these different groups read the sign serves as a defining element of adherence to the group. The consecrated host functions, I argue, in much the same way as the chapati precisely because it becomes a sign read differently by Catholics and non-Catholics. When Bloom looks at it, because he is an outsider, he intelligently identifies the effects of communion – the sheepishness, the mind control of the people, the integration in the community, the promise of eternal happiness – but he fails to identify the single most obvious meaning it has for a Catholic: to take communion is a duty. A duty that has, obviously, been derived from Catholic theology: it's the body of the saviour and «nothing can conduce more to a holy life»175. Yet, most of all, Catholics do it because that's what they must do, and the obedience to such a precept defines them as Catholic: taking the Eucharist not merely as a sign, not merely as a symbol, but as the actual body of Christ. Between Stephen and Bloom, one can reunite and reconstruct the idea of Catholicism as a colonial power: its effects as seen from the outside, amusingly identified by Bloom in the fragment above, are, to a Catholic subject, synthesised in a simple obligation imposed on them by the power-structure. At the end of this odyssey, how can one tackle the difficult questions posed at the start? Can Catholicism be regarded as a colonial force through Stephen's perception of it? Was Stephen a subject of Catholicism? Did he manage to break free from it in the end? It is my conviction that I've managed to prove that even if an absolute certainty about the answer to this questions is impossible, there is at least enough evidence in Portrait to back my argument. Mary Lowe-Evans finds that in Joyce's work «much of the nostalgic subject matter and many of the textual strategies Joyce employs derive from and subsequently reproduce certain troubling anomalies inherent in Catholic dogma in spite of Joyce's apparent unorthodox, ironic, and/or subversive intentions»176, a conclusion that, although using a widely different methodology than mine, is in line with my own thoughts. By framing Catholicism in a post-colonial framework, I tried to demonstrate that, despite one's beliefs, religion can still act, censor, and restrain a large part of our day to day life. In this, Bhabha's concept of nation as a narrative has been central: the Catholic narrative actively fights any attempt of individualism. Individuals must not define themselves, they must be defined by Catholicism. The Catholic emphasis on community is a sign of the attempt to overwrite individuality. Consequently, individuals have no voice of their own and are, as per Spivak reasoning, subalterns to the community's narrative. I've advanced, through a reading of Stephen's unjust punishment and rebellion during his first year at Clongowes, how the Catholic power-structure works. Admittedly, the priests' power over their students comes at first glance from the educational setting they find themselves in. Yet, Catholic doctrine is used as law as much as any other school rule. It is 175 Butler's catechism, p. 61. 176 Mary Lowe-Evans, Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2008, p. 58. I am the servant of two masters 119 impossible to dissociate the two. The priests are in charge because they are teachers, but they are teacher because they are priests. Catholicism has a strong hold on education facilities in Ireland – even to this day – and by controlling one's education it is rather clear that one's mind can be controlled as well. The micro-structure I found at Clongowes of repression, community, fear and punishment will replicate itself throughout the rest of the novel. Whenever Stephen deviates from Catholic doctrine, he will be punished, shamed, tortured with devilish visions of an eternity of pain. Whenever Stephen complies by the power-structure's demands, he will be rewarded, even invited to join the higher hierarchy. That is to say that whenever Stephen behaves, thinks and speaks by the Catholic narrative, he won't get into any trouble. Yet this comes at a price: an overwriting of his individuality, as clear as when Fleming, one day for a cod, rewrote Stephen's self-definition. Stephen learns that when he plays exactly what the Catholic narrative asks of him to the most useless Oxford comma, his ability to self-expression will disappear, thus becoming an absolute subaltern. Paradise lies in community, punishment in individuality. When Stephen eventually chooses punishment over a grave, serious and joyless life and an eternity in the company of the priests who educated him, he will take back his ability to speak. Curiously, we never see Stephen as talkative and engaged in conversation with other people as much as in the fifth chapter; yet, his conversations tend to sound more like monologues, particularly those where he doesn't engage at all with the narratives which shaped him – Nationalism, Catholicism – as happens when he explains his aesthetic theory to his friend Lynch. This monological conversation only furthers the sense that Stephen, though now able to self-express, finds himself utterly alone amongst the dominant narratives. For when dialogue does appear, most notably with Davin and Cranly, it appears because Stephen engages with those narratives from which he had fled. Yes, Stephen does manage to set himself free from the prison of Catholicism, he does find a voice of his own and thus overcomes the subaltern position the reader finds him in at the start of the narrative. Yet, the Catholic narrative, even if unable to overwrite Stephen's desire for individuality completely, managed to sink in deep enough to transform his attempt at self-expression. Stephen finds himself using the language of Catholicism, finds himself compelled to seek in his friends a substitution for the Catholic rites, most clearly the sacrament of confession177, and finds that his mind is supersaturated with the things he claimed to disbelieve. When Cranly points out this very obvious fact to him, Stephen doesn't comment on it. One can only imagine what might have gone through the mind of a fictional character: the closest we've got when Stephen, reincarnated in Ulysses, claims to Haines that he is 177 «The presiding ritual that locks Stephen into his limited Irish subjectivity is that of confession. Both the explicit Catholic (and specifically Ignatian) practice of imaginative self-examination, as Joyce conceives it, and the development of Stephen's limiting lyric stance continually enact a subjectivity in which the speaker reveals his examined inner self to an imagined audience», Jonathan Mulrooney, «Stephen Dedalus and the politics of confession», in Studies in the Novel, vol. 33, n. 2, 2001, p. 167. I am the servant of two masters 120 the servant of two masters, English and Italian, Imperialism and Catholicism, much like, in his previous incarnation in Stephen Hero, he had openly stated that «[t]he Roman, not the Sassenach, was for him the tyrant of the islanders»178. Even if Stephen will never be quite as clear in Portrait as he was in Ulysses or Stephen Hero, both Empires, from my point-of-view, can be regarded equally as colonial forces. Yet, in Ulysses, things have changed drastically from what they were in Portrait. Stephen has returned to Ireland, whereas before, he was keen to get away from it; he is now a teacher, whereas before we saw him only as a student. Stephen's subservient position in Ulysses is, therefore, completely different from the one we see in Portrait. He is now an authoritative figure to his students – with limited power, admittedly. By returning to Ireland, his ability to self-express through exile, as he claimed he would do to Cranly, seems to have failed. Stephen's remark that he is the servant of two masters might, then, come as a disillusioned cry of someone who found it impossible to thrive by self-expression alone. From this, one could follow his own self-analysis and conclude that no, Stephen couldn't get away from the narratives that were thrown at him when he was born. Be that as it may, the fact is that, at the end of Portrait, this was not what I find. Stephen will repeatedly write in his diary expressions of freedom: «Free. Soulfree and fancyfree. Let the dead bury the dead. Ay. Let the dead marry the dead» (P 209). The diary itself, as Michael Levenson noted on a brief review of critical opinion about Portrait's final segment, has a long tradition of being regarded as an example of Stephen's revolt: «The shift to the first person then appears as an assertion of individuality and a repudiation of public norms»179, adding later that «the final movement of the novel plays out a drama between the individual speaker and the speech of the tribe»180. The change of the narrative mode into diaristic might in fact point towards the possibility of Stephen having finally found a voice of his own, not needing to hide behind the mask of a troublesome narrator anymore. Be that as it may, the truth is the very act of writing a diary highlights the impossibility of making oneself heard. Who reads a diary? No one but its author. A diary is the only form of narrative that has, at its underlying definition, the impossibility of an audience. Writing a diary is not communicating. At most, it is a further attempt at self-definition, this time impossible to be overwritten by a humourous friend. However, such impossibility also furthers the inevitable conclusion that no one is there to read; that Stephen, if he adamantly insists on detaching himself from the community, will not be heard. Yet, for us, the readers who are able to listen to Stephen, his diary is priceless. In another entry, confronted by his mother about the very possibility of returning to the Church, Stephen 178 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, New York, New Directions, 1944. 179 Michael Levenson, «[Stephen's diary: the shape of life]» in Philip Brady and James F. Carens Critical Essays on James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, G. K. Hall & Co., 1998, p. 37. 180 Michael Levenson, op. cit., p. 43. I am the servant of two masters 121 writes: «Then she said I would come back to the faith because I had a restless mind. This means to leave the church by the backdoor of sin and reenter through the skylight of repentance. Cannot repent» (P 210). For all his assertiveness, however, as Jonathan Mulrooney claims, «[Stephen's] expressive stance is a lyric one that has so deep an investment in the linguistic formulations of a Catholic confessional identity as to be inseparable from them»181. As such, Stephen cannot and will not repent, even if he may be admitting in Ulysses that he is still under the spell of Catholicism, but he still uses the same language of sinning and atonement he had learnt from the power-structure; his actions are still measured and filed under the same categories imposed on him by the narrative of Catholicism. At the end of Portrait, Stephen is adamant: he had left the Church for good, he cannot come back. He had fallen, after all, he had said he would not serve, and, as Karl Beckson concludes, «Stephen's vocation as artist, no longer dependent on his Catholic faith, is now free to embrace the ancient myth of the 'old artificer'»182. Service, as the Stephen in Ulysses seems to acknowledge, doesn't depend entirely on one's own volition, «Stephen develops a conception of reality, a consciousness, that is informed and indeed created by the continual regimented experience of his Irish Catholic family, school, and church environment»183. Stephen might think himself free from the narrative of Catholicism, yet Catholic is all he knows how to write, and although writing at the margins and outside the lines as much as he can, he is still writing the same book as countless others have written throughout the centuries: the book of Catholicism. 181 Jonathan Mulrooney, op. cit., p. 165. 182 Karl Beckson, The Religion of Art. A modernist theme in British literature, 1885-1925, New York, AMS Press, 2006, p. 114. 183 Jonathan Mulrooney, op. cit., 167.