In Telemachus Mulligan says, "The aunt thinks you
killed your mother" and he reproaches Stephen: "You could have
knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you."
Here he resembles his model Oliver
Gogarty, who casually declared to all his acquaintances
“that Joyce was ‘mad,’ and ‘had killed his mother by telling
her what he thought’” (Ellmann, 173). But Mulligan overstates
the facts, assuming that they were similar to those
surrounding Joyce’s mother’s death in August 1903, and
Stephen's confrontation with his mother in Circe
suggests that, rather than acting from cavalier disregard for
her, he felt mortally threatened by the demand to kneel down
before a God whom he had pledged in A Portrait of the
Artist not to serve any longer. The filial guilt
prompted by his dream of the dead woman is nothing
compared to his terrified feeling that she has returned from the
afterlife to reproach him for impiety
and demand that he "Repent!"
Ellmann writes of Mary ("May") Joyce’s illness, “Her fear of
death put her in mind of her son’s impiety, and on the days
following Easter she tried to persuade him to make his
confession and take communion. Joyce, however, was inflexible;
he feared, as he had Stephen Dedalus say later, ‘the chemical
action’ which would be set up in his soul ‘by a false homage
to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of
authority and veneration.’ His mother wept, and vomited green
bile into a basin, but he did not yield. His aunt Josephine
Murray argued with him” (129, emphasis added). Four months
later, in Mrs. Joyce’s final hours, “she lay in a coma, and the family knelt about
her bed, praying and lamenting. Her brother John Murray,
observing that neither Stanislaus nor James was kneeling,
peremptorily ordered them to do so. Neither obeyed”
(136).
Joyce may have refused to compromise his spiritual integrity
by making false declarations of faith, but he was not so
priggishly self-righteous as to attempt to ruin other people's
spiritual consolations. After his mother's death, he comforted
his nine-year-old sister Mabel, sitting beside her on the
stairs with “his arm around her, saying, ‘You must not cry
like that because there is no reason to cry. Mother is in
heaven. She is far happier now than she has ever been on
earth, but if she sees you crying it will spoil her happiness.
You must remember that when you feel like crying. You can pray
for her if you wish, Mother would like that. But don’t cry any
more’” (Ellmann, 136). The Stephen Dedalus of Telemachus
was as sensitive to his mother's suffering as Joyce was to
Mabel's: "Silent with awe and pity I went to her
bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed."
Given such complex family dynamics, the accusation made by
Gogarty and Mulligan seems callous and shallow. Joyce
felt there was some, but only some, truth to the charge. At
the end of August 1904 he wrote to Nora, “My mother was slowly
killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment, by years of
trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked
on her face as she lay in her coffin—a face grey and wasted
with cancer—I understood that I was looking on the face of a
victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim”
(Ellmann, 169). But he did not back down from his principled
stand about kneeling in prayer. In the following paragraph of
the same letter he wrote, “Six years ago I left the Catholic
Church, hating it most fervently....I made secret war upon it
when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it
offered me....Now I make open war upon it by what I write and
say and do.”
Ulysses appears to heighten and focus the guilt
Joyce felt, maximizing its narrative importance as much as the
treatment of the black
panther episode minimizes the narrative importance of
those events. His anguish at the ghost's implicit demand that
he kneel down in prayer attains a shattering climax in Circe,
when it explicitly commands him to pray and repent: "Prayer
is allpowerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the
Ursuline manual and forty days' indulgence. Repent,
Stephen....Repent! O, the fire of hell!" The threat
of fiery hell recalls the grand guignol horror of the
Jesuit priest's sermons in part 3 of A Portrait, which
terrifed Stephen into piety. By refusing to submit again to
the almighty bludgeoning, he also, interestingly, plays the
part of Don Giovanni, who
refuses to "Repent!" even as the statue threatens him with
eternal damnation.
