In Nestor Mr. Deasy urges Stephen not to carry his
money loose in his pocket, warning him that "You'll pull it
out somewhere and lose it." Stephen's problem, he says, is
that "you don't save." Later in the novel Bloom forms similar
impressions. By making a Protestant and a Jew agree about
Stephen's terrible money
problems, the novel insinuates a cultural critique of
Irish Catholicism. In Eumaeus Bloom makes the
criticism explicit, arguing that "in the economic, not
touching religion, domain, the priest spells poverty." His
thinking here recalls that of the great German sociologist Max
Weber.
Joyce modeled Stephen's financial profligacy on his own
behavior. In 1904 he wrote to Nora Barnacle, "How could I like
the idea of home? My home was simply a middle-class affair
ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited" (Letters
II, 48). To a considerable extent these "spendthrift habits"
remained ingrained in him even after he established a home
with Nora, fathered two children, and worked to support his
family. In Ulysses he seems to assign blame to
environmental influences larger than just a ne'er-do-well
father.
The would-be paternal advice of Mr. Deasy is charged with no
small amount of cultural antagonism. The financial wisdom that
he offers—"You don't yet know what money is. Money is power"—may
express the ruling-class complacency of landed Ascendancy
elites, or the prudential earnestness of Ulster Presbyterians,
or both, but it certainly does not speak to the Catholic
sensibility of Stephen, for whom wealth and power alike are
unimaginable and undesirable abstractions. This confrontation
in the headmaster's office feels emblematic of the gulf
between Irish Protestants and Catholics, which has only grown
since an artificial border between North and South prompted
segregation and emigration.
Deasy may despise the "jew
merchants," but the book suggests that they share his
ethos of saving and prudent investment. Bloom, who has learned
thrift from his Jewish father and does not waste money on
alcohol like most of his fellow Dubliners, has managed to
accumulate a respectable amount of savings and owns shares in
a Canadian railway business. He is acutely aware that only
these savings stand between him and the penurious old age that
awaits men like Ben Dollard, and he believes that something in
Catholic culture encourages people to neglect the cultivation
of worldly prosperity.
In Eumaeus, after telling Stephen about the
anti-Semitic attack he endured in Cyclops, Bloom
defends his ethnic heritage: "History—would you be surprised
to learn?—proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the
inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when
Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has
much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are
imbued with the proper spirit. They are practical and are
proved to be so. I don't want to indulge in any... because
you know the standard works on the subject and then
orthodox as you are... But in the economic, not touching
religion, domain, the priest spells poverty. Spain again,
you saw in the war, compared with goahead America. Turks.
It's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd go
straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live
better—at least so I think."
Chief among "the standard works on the subject" at the
time Joyce wrote his novel, although it was not translated
into English until 1930, was Max Weber's The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5). Weber
sought to explain the economic success of the northern
European countries (and of "goahead America," which he
visited and was tremendously impressed by) precisely by
identifying their "proper spirit" or Geist.
This spirit, he argued, was the Protestant ethos of working
hard, saving money, and putting money to work—what is now
commonly called the Protestant work ethic.
Weber believed, with Bloom, that religion typically has the
effect of valuing otherworldly goods and devaluing prosperity
in this world. But he argued that Luther and Calvin, by
attacking the idea of gaining salvation through priestly
intervention, located morality and spirituality in the secular
world of work. People could now find callings not in
traditional religious vocations but in their chosen
occupations, an attitude which led to the accumulation of
money. And Reformation churches, especially the Calvinist
ones, taught believers not to waste that money on sinful
luxuries, or the charitable donations so encouraged by the
Catholic church, but to invest it. Weber quotes the adage of
his secular saint Benjamin Franklin that "money can beget
money": put to work, it grows.
The issue for Weber, and seemingly for Joyce as well, is not
whether to choose one religion or another, but rather to
assess how well different religions value human industry and
thrift. Judaism does not enter into Weber's calculus, but
Bloom's words suggest that it should: its "practical,"
this-worldly orientation makes it a candidate for praise, not
for abuse, in the secularized modern world.
