“THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED: Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!” (Joyce 489)
While the bible, or as it stands here, the representative of the Christian faith and its teachings, also relates well to Bloom and his struggle in religious identity – it haunts no other more than Stephen Dedalus, and thus, lies here in his inner psyche.
Earlier, we saw Stephen use his ashplant to violently break Bella’s chandelier as a way to reject his dead mother’s calls for divinity and grace to save him, and bring him back to his Catholic roots. We’ve seen this continuous distaste for religion, or at least those teachings of his own upbringing, from Stephen countless times throughout the book, but interestingly enough, like Joyce himself, Stephen is only able to truly criticize or mock the faith because of his detailed knowledge of it.
Here in this highlighted section of Circe, just before being punched in the face my Private Carr, Stephen imagines a priest and a pastor, Father Malachi O’Flynn and Reverend Mr. Haines Love, performing the Consecration Mass (supposedly). In reality, Joyce, or Stephen, turns the black mass into a joke by indicating that the mass is honoring the devil and consecrating itself in more explicitly sexual manners with buttocks and a carrot, rather than simply turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ (Briand 318).
Clearly, like Joyce, who has projected a large portion of his own upbringing onto Stephen Dedalus, questions the holy nature of religious ceremonies and is haunted, through his mother’s vision, by the faith’s calling to him.
Though, it’s important to note that even here, even while drunk and about to be punched in the face in the middle of a very heated argument, Stephen thinks of faith. And yes, luckily for his own intellectual ego he mocks it even through his imagination, but still, a Father and a Reverend show up and say something similar to a prayer in this time of conflict – so the teachings are more engrained, and possibly believed, than he may care to admit.
Fiona Bardhoshi
Works Cited
Briand, Paul L. “The Catholic Mass in James Joyce's ‘Ulysses.’” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 4, 1968, pp. 312–322. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25486726.