James Joyce Quarterly Pub Date : 2021-03-02 , DOI: 10.1353/jjq.2020.0041 Michael Patrick Gillespie
Reviewed by:
- James Joyce and the Jesuits by Michael Mayo
- Michael Patrick Gillespie (bio)
The title of Michael Mayo’s book, James Joyce and the Jesuits, echoes Kevin Sullivan’s Joyce Among the Jesuits.1 Unlike Sullivan’s study, however—which closely traces the stages of Joyce’s education at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and University College Dublin as a way of understanding the intellectual ambiance that shaped his authorial consciousness—Mayo’s book is at once more [End Page 200] focused (relating the impact of St. Ignatius’s meditations on how Jesuits taught their students to perceive the world) and much broader (seeing connections between the Ignatian world view and that of several prominent psychoanalysts and critics).2 Joyce and the Jesuits is a problematic title for me, since it is not broadly concerned with the works of Joyce nor the range of interactions that Joyce had with various members of the Society of Jesus (the formal designation of the Jesuits), but that disparity is not necessarily something for which Mayo should be held accountable.3
Nonetheless, this title can lead to needless misassumptions on the part of its readers. Mayo’s title will suggest to many, initially at least, that it falls into the category of studies that use the institutional features of Catholicism to come to an understanding of Joyce and of his writings. In fact, that is not at all the case. Unlike many critics who have written about religion and Joyce, Mayo is not concerned with dogma, liturgy, or metaphysics. Further, he does not use his book to work out his own unresolved issues with the various aspects of Catholicism or to argue pro or con about Joyce’s ultimate fealty to the Church. Rather, Mayo finds a useful analytic model in the dialectic tension within Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (also called The Spiritual Exercises), which he presents as giving Joyce a framework for thinking, not belief, and he sees it as a central concept for understanding Joyce’s writings.4 Early on, Mayo uses examples from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to show how Joyce’s writing rhetorically accommodates idealism and cynicism without privileging one over the other.
This form of thinking is at the heart of Mayo’s interest in the ideas of Ignatius of Loyola. Throughout the introduction, Mayo traces affinities between Joycean and Ignatian habits of thinking. He makes a strong case for Joyce’s familiarity with The Spiritual Exercises and Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu, a document compiled in 1599 that standardized the system of Jesuit education and one to which Joyce’s teachers rigorously adhered.5 He quotes the Jesuit psychoanalyst W. W. Meissner to give readers a sense of the content of The Spiritual Exercises:6
The reshaping of identity that the pilgrim [Loyola] sought in the cave of Manresa was distilled into the practices of the Spiritual Exercises. He proposed to his followers and to those whom he directed in the Exercises the same end—a restructuring of the self, of one’s sense of self, one’s identity, in terms of total commitment to God’s will and to unstinting enlisting in His service. The entire corpus of the Exercises is organized and directed to this end. It proposes nothing less than a restructuring of one’s life, one’s ideals and values, one’s goals and hopes.
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The Spiritual Exercises are a collection of meditations composed by Ignatius, and, although Mayo does not explore its structure in great detail, his application to Joyce uses a sense of the profound spiritual aims of these meditations as a basis for understanding the process of conceptualization that informed Joyce’s creative approach: “both writers [Joyce and Ignatius] force their readers to confront these parallel crises of belief and language as intensely as possible, forcing us into carefully constructed situations of ambivalence, frustration, and loss” (2).
Before beginning a specific discussion of what Mayo does with Joyce and the Jesuits, I want offer an apologia for my response. I...
中文翻译:
詹姆斯·乔伊斯(James Joyce)和耶稣会士(Michael)的耶稣会士(评论)
代替摘要,这里是内容的简要摘录:
审核人:
- 詹姆斯·乔伊斯(James Joyce)和耶稣会士(Michael Jeo)
- 迈克尔·帕特里克·吉莱斯皮(Michael Patrick Gillespie)(生物)
牛逼迈克尔·梅奥的书,他的标题詹姆斯·乔伊斯和耶稣会士,回声凯文Sullivan的乔伊斯在耶稣会士。1然而,与沙利文的研究不同-梅奥的书再次[沙漏]追溯了乔伊斯在Clongowes Wood学院,Belvedere学院和都柏林大学的教育阶段,以此来理解塑造其创作意识的知识氛围。 [200]集中讨论了(圣伊格纳修斯的冥想对耶稣会士如何教学生感知世界的影响)和更广泛的内容(看到了伊格纳蒂斯的世界观与几位著名的心理学家和批评家之间的联系)。2 乔伊斯和耶稣会士对我而言,这是一个有问题的标题,因为它并不广泛地涉及乔伊斯的作品,也不广泛地涉及乔伊斯与耶稣会各成员的各种互动(耶稣会士的正式称号),但是这种差异并不一定对此Mayo应该负责。3
但是,该标题可能会导致读者不必要的误解。梅奥的头衔至少在最初至少会暗示许多,它属于利用天主教的制度性特征来理解乔伊斯及其著作的研究范畴。实际上,事实并非如此。与许多评论宗教和乔伊斯的评论家不同,梅奥并不关心教条,礼拜仪式或形而上学。此外,他不会用自己的书来解决自己在天主教各个方面尚未解决的问题,也不会就乔伊斯对教会的终极忠贞进行赞成或反对的争论。相反,Mayo在Loyola Ignatius的精神练习(也称为“精神练习”)中的辩证张力中找到了有用的分析模型。),他为乔伊斯提供了思考的框架,而不是信念,他认为乔伊斯是理解乔伊斯作品的核心概念。4早些时候,马约(Mayo)以《青年画家肖像》中的例子为例,展示了乔伊斯(Joece)的著作在修辞学上如何兼顾了理想主义和犬儒主义,却又不让彼此折衷。
这种思维方式是梅约(Mayo)对洛约拉(Loyola)的依纳爵(Ignatius)思想感兴趣的核心。在整个引言中,Mayo追溯了Joycean和Ignatian的思维习惯之间的联系。他有力地证明了乔伊斯对《精神锻炼与比率研究所》的理解,乔伊斯于1599年编写了该文件,该文件规范了耶稣会的教育制度,并且乔伊斯的老师严格遵守该制度。5他引用耶稣会士精神分析家WW迈斯纳(WW Meissner)的观点,使读者对《精神练习》的内容有一定的了解:6
朝圣者(Loyola)在曼雷萨(Manresa)洞穴中寻求的身份重塑被提炼为精神锻炼的实践。他向追随者和他在演习中指示的人提出了相同的目的-在对上帝旨意的完全承诺和不屈不挠地服侍他方面,对自我,自我意识,身份的重构。练习的整个语料库均已组织并为此目的。它提出的只是改变一个人的生活,一个理想和价值观,一个目标和希望。
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精神练习是由伊格内修斯(Ignatius)组成的冥想的集合,尽管梅奥(Mayo)并未详细探讨其结构,但他在乔伊斯(Joyce)中的运用却运用了这些冥想的深刻精神目的,作为理解概念化过程的基础。乔伊斯(Joyce)的创造性方法告诉我们:“ [乔伊斯(Joyce)和伊格纳修斯(Ignatius)]的作家都迫使他们的读者尽可能强烈地面对这些平行的信仰和语言危机,迫使我们陷入精心构造的矛盾,沮丧和迷茫的境地”(2)。
在开始具体讨论Mayo对乔伊斯和耶稣会士所做的事情之前,我想对我的回答表示歉意。一世...