James Joyce Quarterly

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.

(7) [End Page 201]

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...