By Grant Wei
(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)
THE CHIMES: Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!
The midnight chimes, historically serving as a connecting force between churches and communities, represents the connectedness between Catholicism and Irish identity even given trends towards secularization. According to the secularization thesis, which “interpreted secularization as the natural outcome of modernization,” as society organizes around a more capitalist authority, the more religious institutions lose their authority to affect politics (Lewis 19). The progression of secularization could be seen through trends in church attendance, as “[regular church attendance] declined fairly sharply near the end of the nineteenth century” (Lewis 3). Yet, as can be seen in Joyce’s response to the Nietzsche’s claim that churches exist as “the tombs and sepulchers of God,” the presence of religion in Ulysses is one representative in its revival (Lewis 4). Even given the trends towards secularization, “the church still contains some sort of power, which [it is] associated with the ritual function of ‘robing’ compulsions as ‘destinies’: the church receives its power from the dead and from its along association with central functions of human (or animal) life around which sacraments have arisen” (Lewis 2). Even in the context of modern Ireland, the church still retains its power as a symbol of Irish nationalism.
Although institutions of religion no longer directly control politics, iconography associated with the church, such as chimes, are still associated with ideas such as “the regulation of sexuality and reproduction” and “the passage of time” (Lewis 6). Despite the decline in church membership, however, the church still controlled much of the rites of passage in society, as “large majorities of the population still baptized and married in church throughout the 1950s” (Lewis 3). Church attendance, especially after the World War I, leveled off for the first half of the twentieth century” (Lewis 3). Echoing the popular sentiment regarding the importance of spirituality in face of the increase of materialism, Joyce “outgrew” his fascination with Nietzsche, which “fueled his rejection of religion,” which he “associated Nietzsche with the false artist,” which can be seen when Buck Mulligan jokingly claimed “to be the Übermensch” (Lewis 178 - 179). But, similar to secularization, Joyce also lampoons the role of churches to affect politics through the midnight chime’s ability to make Bloom mayor, which is ironic since Bloom is Jewish and does not subscribe to the Catholic church. Sourcing itself from “distant steeples,” the midnight chimes authority to empower Bloom parallels the Catholic church’s power to dictate the nationalistic agenda.
Religion serves as a means to experience spirituality, but in modernism, the primary discussion had been centered around religion as a “structure of faith than with its truth content” (Lewis 20). Given the modernist need to “revive some conception of sacred community even in an era of purely private experience,” Joyce attempts to recall the supernatural experience through his psychedelic account of Bloom in Circe (Lewis 22). Through accounting Bloom’s experience with the chimes, a symbol of the church, Joyce elaborates on his need of recreating a community centered around religion through a “secular sacred” experience that reflects a spiritual calling “without reference to the supernatural” (Lewis 21). Within the lens of the mythical method, Joyce, through Bloom’s absurd yet quasi-religions interactions with the chimes in a hallucinatory scene in “Circe,” signifies the importance of spirituality within the society organized around the dominance of materialism and operates under the society's “inability to mediate between the two poles of signification, of meaning” (Gates 55). In other words, through operating under the tone of irony, Joyce explicitly lampoons spiritual experiences all the while implicitly glorifying its importance in the organization of society. Realizing the importance of reclaiming the importance of religion in the response to secularization, Joyce sought to revive critique institutions of religion (especially in conjunction with his critique of Irish nationalism) while emphasizing the importance of spirituality.
Works Cited
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter. Gabler, Garland, 1986
Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2010.