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James Joyce: ‘For a boy of his age in a Dublin day school, he seems to have had considerable sexual experience'
Ah yes. James Joyce. No getting away from him today. The great artificer. Some smithy. Some soul!
Joyce 'could have been persuaded to become a Jesuit but for one essential element in his personality which precluded this possibility,' the Benedictine priest said.
And that essential element was 'his unusually precocious sexuality,' the speaker explained.
So the 2012 Catholic Church's 50th Eucharistic Congress in Dublin was told.
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You might think neither Joyce or sexuality would be your usual fare at a Eucharistic Congress. You would be right. But this was Bloomsday, June 16th, 2012, and the speaker was that most eclectic and erudite of men, and then abbot of Glenstal Abbey in Limerick, Mark Patrick Hederman.
He said of Joyce that 'for a boy of his age in a Dublin day school, he seems to have had considerable sexual experience. His sexuality formed the warring partner in the struggle towards his ultimate destiny.'
Joyce 'realised that the call to the priesthood meant the eradication of this vital aspect of himself. He saw the Catholic Church as a call to a certain kind of perfection which demanded emasculation and evisceration.' Ouch. But true.
The good abbot believed that Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man described 'the bitter and lonely struggle between these two warring elements in an almost unbearably sensitive youth. The famous sermon on hell was the final blow to the possible vocation to the priesthood.'
Hardly the first or only time an overwrought clerical imagination killed off the very thing it hoped to inspire.
In what was a most enlightening lecture, Hederman proposed that, along with Homer's Odyssey, there was a parallel structure in Joyce's novel Ulysses – that of the Mass, which coincided with its beginning, middle and end.
To underline this view, those familiar with the Latin Mass will immediately recognise Buck Mulligan's mock heroic opening words in Ulysses; 'Introibo ad altare Dei' (I will go to the altar of God).
'Joyce, I would hold, was a religious man. He wasn't an atheist. He believed that the humanity being presented, endorsed and canonised by the Church was a fake. He gave his life to defending the orthodoxy of humanity,' said Hederman who, many would suggest, has frequently found himself doing just that too.
Precocious, from Latin praecox, for `maturing early.'
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