Marguerite Alacoque was born in 1647 in Burgundy and became
an intensely pious child. As a teenager, after four years of
debilitating rheumatic fever, she made a vow to the Virgin
Mary (whose name she added to her baptismal name) that she
would become a nun, at which point she is said to have
immediately recovered her health. Several years after that,
she had a vision in which Christ urged her to fulfill her vow,
telling her that his heart was full of love for her and taking
that heart out of his chest and placing it in hers. In 1671
she entered a convent run by the Order of the Visitation of
Holy Mary, and over the next few years she continued to have
visions of the Sacred Heart. Her superiors slowly came to
accept her visions as authentic, and after her death in 1690
the Jesuits
cultivated her devotion to the Sacred Heart, leading to
official church recognition in the late 18th century. In 1824
Pope Leo XII declared Sister Margaret Mary to be Venerable.
Pope Pius IX beatified her (hence Mulligan's "Blessed") in
1864, and in 1920 she was canonized (made a Saint) by Pope
Benedict XV.
Alacoque's devotional practice became more popular in Ireland
than in any other European country, with the possible
exception of France. The reasons for the enthusiasm are
obscure, though it was undoubtedly stimulated by an
influential devotional magazine called The Irish Messenger
of the Sacred Heart which the abstinence-promoting
Jesuit priest James Cullen began publishing in 1888. Joyce's
early fictions glance often at the pervasive presence of the
Sacred Heart in Irish Catholic homes. In part 5 of A
Portrait of the Artist, as Stephen tries to write about
E.C., he recalls being in her parlor, "asking himself why he
had come, displeased with her and with himself, confounded by
the print of the Sacred Heart above the untenanted sideboard."
In "Eveline," a "coloured print of the promises made to
Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque" hangs on a wall in Eveline's
home, and "Grace" notes that Mrs. Kernan "believed steadily in
the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic
devotions."
The "promises" that Jesus made to Sister Margaret Mary,
supposedly twelve in number, included blessing any home in
which an image of the Sacred Heart was displayed, giving peace
and consolation to the family therein, inspiring its members
to seek perfect holiness, and guaranteeing that, if they took
communion on the first Friday of every month for nine months,
"they shall not die in My displeasure nor without their last
Sacraments." Believers made their own pledges in return,
consecrating their lives to the Sacred Heart and promising to
give Christ all their love and strive to please Him in all
their actions. So popular was this devotion that most Irish
Catholic homes in 1904 appear to have contained Sacred Heart
prints.
It is clear that Bloom has encountered these icons on
people's walls, because when he looks at a carved version in
the cemetery he thinks that the heart should be turned
sideways and painted red:
The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart
on his sleeve. Ought to be sideways and red it should be
painted like a real heart. Ireland was dedicated to it or
whatever that. Seems anything but pleased. Why this
infliction? Would birds come then and peck like the boy with
the basket of fruit but he said no because they ought to have
been afraid of the boy. Apollo that was.
ยง Bloom's
reflections on the Catholic cultus (highlighted above in bold
type) are interrupted by a phrase that has nothing to do with
it: "
Heart on his sleeve." The source of this image can
be found in Shakespeare, and its implications are very
different. In the first scene of
Othello Iago assures
Roderigo that his devotion to Othello is nothing but a false
front disguising vengeful egoism:
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end;
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.
(58-65)
By inverting God's "I am what I am" from the book of Exodus,
Iago says not only that his inner nature belies his outward
appearance, but also that he is a kind of Satanic anti-God. This
pithy self-definition coheres with his anti-Christian ethics.
The kind of mutual devotion exemplified by Jesus and Sister
Margaret Mary is anathema to him. Opening up his emotions in
that way, he says, would be like hanging his heart on his arm
for birds to tear at. Having pulled this alternate image of an
exposed heart from his memory, Bloom appears to lean more to
Shakespearean skepticism than to Catholic religiosity. He
projects something like Iago's self-protective scorn onto the
carved face in the graveyard: "
Seems anything but pleased.
Why this infliction?" In Bloom's imagination, the
conventionally saccharine image of a Sacred Heart becomes more
comically realistic. Jesus, it seems, does not much like having
his chest wall opened up for females to fawn over. In fact, he
finds the "infliction" seriously annoying.
The thought of birds pecking at hearts leads him into yet
another irreverent association. The ancient Greek painter Zeuxis
(ca. 464-ca. 400 BCE) was reputed to have painted some grapes
with such perfect
trompe l'oeil realism that birds flew
at the canvas trying to eat them. In his
Natural History
Pliny the Elder recorded this anecdote along with two others.
Zeuxis, he wrote, painted his grapes as part of a competition
with Parrhasius and admitted defeat when he asked Parrhasius to
pull the curtain in front of his painting, only to be told that
the curtain
was the painting. Gifford notes the second
story: "Zeuxis subsequently painted a child carrying grapes and
when birds flew to the fruit with the same frankness as before,
he strode up to the picture in anger with it and said, 'I have
painted the grapes better than the child, as if I had made a
success of that as well, the birds would inevitably have been
afraid of it'" (35.36). Clearly this is the source of Bloom's
thoughts about an unnamed boy: "
Would birds come then and
peck like the boy with the basket of fruit but he said no
because they ought to have been afraid of the boy."
The folds of Joyce's sentences contain one final allusion,
though this one does not figure in Bloom's awareness. He thinks,
"
Apollo that was," mixing Zeuxis up with Apelles, another
Greek painter famed for realism, and mixing the man Apelles up
with the god Apollo. These minor mistakes would be utterly
unremarkable were it not for a certain tongue-twisting rhyme.
Slote cites Fritz Senn's observation that, in a 15 September
1935 letter to his daughter Lucia, Joyce referred to some
doggerel lines familiar to Italian children:
Apelle, figlio di Apollo,
Fece una palla di pelle di pollo,
E tutti i pesci vennero a galla
Per mangiare la palla di pelle di pollo
Fatta da Apelle, figlio di Apollo.
(Apelle, the son of Apollo,
Made a ball of chicken skin
And all the fish came to the surface
To eat the ball of chicken skin,
Made by Apelle, the son of Apollo.)
Here the reader's hunt for relevant contexts trails off into
delightfully silly wordplay that Joyce could hardly have
expected English speakers to know and that does not come close
to commenting on the cult of the Sacred Heart (or anything
else in Ulysses, for that matter), though it does
continue Shakespeare's theme of animals pecking at flesh. Some
of his allusions, it seems, are games that the author is
playing only with himself, in chains of verbal, visual, and
conceptual association that the reader can scarcely begin to
imagine.
A spectacularly looped version of the children's rhyme can be
heard in the video displayed here.
