James Joyce: AMGOD Dogma, God Ma or Go Mad?

Joyce and Jesuitical Modernism

Don’t get me wrong. I like Joyce. He lived once near a library in Drumcondra I used visit often. His world was very familiar. I studied his work and still do. I recognise his father’s humour. But I wonder whether Joyce’s rejection of the Church is what it seemed. I think in particular of his interest in the Book of Kells. He unravelled it in some ways. But he was fascinated by its layers and saw it as essentially Irish. The labyrinthine motif continues in his technique. Joyce’s life becomes associated with books, as are the lives of many monks. He became fairly monastic in an artistic-production sense and travelled to Europe like Irish missionaries Columbanus and Gall did. His disdain for the Church may have been more for Caesarean elements superimposed on Ireland. He said he was a Jesuit rather than a Catholic. He considered becoming one and later respected them still.

James Joyce in Finnegans Wake pre-empted a contemporary discussion about whether rivers are alive bringing an ancient insight to the front. But he demonstrated consequences of a naturalistic disposition or fallacy in the worldview he embraced. He followed the logic of de-dogmatised de-supernaturalisation and perilous psychic state we would live in to its necessarily illogical conclusions. Joyce was willing to abandon the Church, retaining a lingering disposition maybe towards the Virgin Mary for a while at least. Unlike others who are satisfied with trivial psychic revelation, he indicated the overwhelming dedication that would be needed to replace that discarded. Accordingly he was scathing about lesser attempts and pale substitutes. He knew the richness he left behind whatever great objections he had.

Dublin had given two important influences to late 19^th century Catholicism. One was George F. Dillon and the other George Tyrrell. The former saw the Antichrist attacking the Church, particularly through Freemasonry, and the latter a need to modernise against the theological nightmares of dogma which obscured Christ and might even suggest that it was anti-Christ. The War of the Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization (1885) by Dillon is one of the original infiltration books that came a long time before Taylor Marshall. Tyrrell was a convert and critical modernist. Malachi Martin picks him out as influential and maybe we can even say intellectually revolutionary. Tyrrell was later described as prince of the modernists. Figures like Dillon watching out for infiltration might wonder why figures like Tyrrell would not do the decent thing (like Joyce did) and leave. Joyce’s worldview informed some of the players that shaped contemporary Ireland. Modernism in Catholicism took a hold within it and postmodernism without. Whatever infiltration is happening by ‘burrowing in’ (as a pope warned nearly 90 years ago) was merely downstream of original entryism into science led by anti-religious men like Thomas H. Huxley and the X Club in the 1860’s, following earlier internal illumination of organisations. Joyce satirised conspiracy thinking and Judeo-Masonic conspiracies in mouths of some of his characters, perhaps reproducing the zeitgeist.

There is a curious connection. George Tyrell, the modernist who converted from Anglicanism became a critic of the Church he joined. He wanted more lived experience and interior life. In 1899 he published a controversial article called A Perverted Devotion which criticised sermons on hellfire. Anyone familiar with Joyce’s work will recognise the critical hinge of graphic sermons on hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen in Ulysses is still plagued by guilt but Bloom assuages that sense. Bloom a secular Jew, would have chimed with the Tyrrell of conscience and compassion. But there is another intriguing pointer. George Tyrrell was born a minute around the corner on Dorset St. from where Joyce locates Bloom’s house on Eccles St. If we walked from there to All Hallows (less than a kilometre up in Drumcondra) we would be where Dillon studied. Joyce was educated by Jesuits. He was arguably aligning in his work with modernists within the Church. Joyce, Tyrrell and Bloom had problems with dogmatism. Tyrrell saw revelation as constant and continuing. Joyce sees the world revealing itself in his literature. Maybe Tyrrell bloomed in Joyce’s imagination.

Go Mad: Going Mad From the Presence of God or the Absence

In Finnegans Wake Joyce anticipated the postmodern trend and showed how mind in night-time loses pretensions of coherence of the day-time stream of consciousness indicated in Ulysses. There the subconscious was riddle enough and challenge of rationalising a world, treated as more Godless after A Portrait of An Artist As a Young Man, involves a demanding search. It is not that God is denied, but rather rejected in a Promethean way. While William James identified the stream of consciousness, Joyce relinquished the other dimension of his work on variety of religious experience for a left-brained parkour-tour through reality. It is not madness from God’s presence but from absence. Deconstruction of God was done through mythologisation and re-mythologisation, but you end up waiting for Godot or God though.

Experience becomes maddening in his work because Joyce knows what is there. Following the logic of the stream of consciousness, the world becomes reduced to cycles and loops one cannot escape but merely observe and become. Joyce saw through fake religious replacements of world-vision discarded. Theosophy was merely a Protestant sect in Ireland, at least to him. It might be Otiosesophy if I may follow his punning technique. He knew what he was letting go of.

Carl Jung understood the power of Catholicism. He also studied Joyce up-close. He realised James could dive into deep realms whereas with the same neuroplastic tendencies his daughter would sink and drown. I suggest the vast majority of the world is not in the shoes of James Joyce but his daughter Lucia. Lucia was affected by her unrequited love for Samuel Beckett. Jung treated Lucia but it did not work in the long-run and she was institutionalised later. Beckett underwent psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London. There is a cost to abandonment of what artists find dull. Joyce knew what he was doing. He wanted to forge the conscience of a race, a divine blacksmith like a new god. He is Daedalus but wants to elevate to Hephaestus and become a god. Yet you take his vision for yourself at you own peril, without tools he had or understanding what he is saying.

Joyce shamanically also ascends like Icarus into the heavens and dismembered is just capable of reconstitution through painstaking artistic struggle. But others who embrace mechanistic materialism, have limited choices. They will go mad with exposure to the vast incomprehensibility of meaningless impression in a natural cosmic loop or live in a reduced world of remembrance of things past where networks induce amnesia and AI-zheimer’s. Joyce was painting a civilisational picture that anticipated modernist and postmodernist flow of information which overwhelms and leaves us to become a stream in an endless cycle trapped in a naturalistic metaphor whose only alternative is the machine or a quest to be superhuman. You cannot escape because the ladder is kicked away and you have collapsed the wave-function of your own cognition through conceptual reduction sacrificing mystery for naturalistic and then mechanical certainty. That was why Bloom thinks of the dynamo. In Glasnevin Cemetery, where I was a few months ago, Bloom at the funeral reduced life to an image of hearts as pumps that stop. Life becomes a set of machines. It is great to have myths but living in one unable to find a way out is different.

Joyce would have laughed at spiritual snippets being presented as substitutes for Catholicism. He rejected the fear of hellfire in A Portrait. But he was under no illusion. Descent into impressionistic incessant unstructured meaninglessness of mere sentiment was only for the mentally strong and maybe superhuman. A maddening eternity of incomprehensibility may suit some more, than one of fire, but Joyce is pointing to the price. He wanted to make the book immortal through impenetrability but is definitely showing you must be willing to pay the price when you reject a superiorly coherent Catholic worldview. You must wander the shore because you have not paid Charon. The idea of contemporary smug replacement-spirituality with incoherent or naïve claims to love and meditation with a blindfold to evil is something he would not have tolerated. In rejecting Catholicism, he knew there were no substitutes and no pretending. So he explored full consequences of retreating to the sensory dreamworld of endless images, associations, repetitions, associations, synchronicities and cosmic puns on the disorientating carousel.

Alternatively spirituality is knowable and popular but merely a nice feeling at times to help you operate in a crazy distorted operating system of a doomed world. It is a beach between the real world and the unconscious where you can see the stars. It asks nothing but a bit of time and someone to listen to your story. Everything is about your subjectivity, your story and your truth. Everything is about you, your sensation, sentiment and capacity to delude. Every simple explanation is welcome, every responsibility denied. Some spiritual-but-not-religious people become really hostile to ‘dogma.’ They spit it out. Dogma is the unnecessary element of religion. Once you exscind dogma (presumably all that stuff about loving your neighbour, killing, stealing and so on) and the idea that you must be responsible for your own actions (rather than merely your own sentiment and sensation and psychic survival) how is value or an objective world sustained?

Joyce would see that dogma in reverse is amgod. Amgod reflects who God was in the Bible. I AM WHO AM or I AM THAT I AM or I AM THAT AM. Who is? God. AMGOD. AmGod (or the semordnilap amgod) must have dogma. Otherwise you can make it up yourself. Otherwise there is no point. Otherwise you must stay in a naturalistic loop. Otherwise we cannot break out of our own sensory limitations. We expect no intervention or reception. Dogma is in Armageddon the Goddamn Era, a No Dad Gamer. Joyce would have also seen the anagram God Ma and ideas of the divine feminine. He might have thought of Gaia. His spectre would chuckle when he saw that people are advocating the Gaia hypothesis when its proponent proceeded to write a book about us being superseded by super-intelligent machines. Today it is IAMWHOAI or IAMTHATAI or gAIa. No dogma - go mad.

Remember Joyce is source of the monomyth of Joseph Campbell. But ‘follow your bliss’ carefully avoids two fundamental questions. One is what is the cost? Secondly where do I end up? Campbell reflected a lot on Faustian civilisation. However his solution is Faustian in a sense of Christopher Marlowe. Unfortunately Mephistopheles might be waiting for you. Joyce took that risk. He was Daedalus and Icarus aspiring to more but would not have denied the risk he ran. It does not have to be the sadistic hell envisaged by priestly projections but any well-balanced person is aware that there are some things they could do (but mostly won’t) which would make their internal life a torture in a way difficult to purge.

I suspect Joyce would have copped on that Christ came in cosmic terms, not for some middle-class dinner table idea of Christ consciousness, but also to warn our species about the Singularity, simulation or simulacrum of the message becoming the medium. Perhaps Christ came to stop us going mad. Joyce’s sense of devilment and diablementality would probably not have changed, but he would have known most people will be driven crazy by AI and will take the communion chip for their salvation. Just as you cannot walk onto the highway and need a licence and vehicle, so you need you digital ID and a prosthetic device virtually attached or attached to live in the new world IT superhighways. You won’t then have to worry about madness because your free will will be overridden. You will only be made mad if it or IT chooses. But have no doubts about where you go.

When you decide I amgod you elect yourself and worship you own will (as in Aleister Crowley’s Thelema). Thelema is the word used for ‘will’ in the Lord’s Prayer. In focusing on your own will to triumph over God’s will you must forego possibility of alignment. Without cord of connection you must voyage to an unknown destination. You privilege Gnosis (over mere gnosis) thus taking temptation from fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge or the process of knowing is critical. You believe your will in a closed-system based on your own physiological and psychic desire is capable of overriding an open-system of belief based on recognition of a higher pattern. Just as movement from God’s will to yours is a massive reduction, so abandonment of the ladder of connection through history of revelation commits to a futile effort to be a constant stream of impression in a tumbling machine of endless cycles. Nietzsche’s endless return is predicated on a demonic suggestion and suggestive of a necessary position or loop that has to flow on from a reduction to a de-supernaturalised context. Here Comes Everybody leads to no one, nowhere. You fall like in The Fall or like Finnegan in the song - off the ladder.

The shift from Virgin to dynamo echoes that from spire to Ferris Wheel and tower to loop evident in the Chicago World Fair of 1893. These were dynamos Russia would use to bring communism. The wheel rivalled the Eiffel Tower. Joyce was going back to Vico but naturalistic focus locks you into a loop impossible to escape without intervention. Sufficiently locked in it is only penetrable by a mystical, supernatural or divine intervention. That is what the Tower of Babel is about. Joyce shows it but believes artists can create a new language through their engagement. As Chesterton explained, madness is not about absence of reason but over-extension of it. We enter eternal recurrence because we have taken down the ladder (or fallen off), closed the doors of perception, exhausted power of reflection and rejected simple grace we are told is on offer; even facilitated by interventions we will not believe in lest it jeopardises certainty of our commitment to the wheel and psychic washing-machine that tumbles in a terrible permanent revolution whilst laundering our soul.

A Speculation: Parody of Modernity

Joyce could not abandon the liturgy. He was suspicious of the religion of art Blake might make. The opening of Ulysses mocks the start of the traditional Catholic Mass.

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: - Introibo ad altare Dei.”

He was arguably reducing or reimagining ritual in the secular. But he could also have been parodying modernism like a trickster armed with knowledge of what was being rejected. Joyce did not reveal his hand. But some suspect it. He was unravelling the Book of Kells and liquefying it into a liquid modernity in an ancient cycle but with a new scale which would liquidate humanity. I think we must pay attention to Vico’s theories which inform his work. He felt the modern, democratic period fit that cycle and chaos, the next one was on the way. That would lead to return of the Divine. Joyce understood what modernism was and how its drift into postmodernism was part of a disintegrating society rather than his disintegrating mind. Modernism itself would be fruitless and merely hasten the end of that it sought to modernise. If the Divine returns in the cycle it follows chaos. The Flood was a motif in Finnegans Wake. People are today unable to swim in a data-flood of our period of licence. Maybe Joyce was merely ‘immanentizising the eschaton’ having scouted the future with maps of the past.

Like in the song Finnegan’s Wake which informs the title Finnegans Wake (with the apostrophe dropped) the assumption of death is premature echoing the Resurrection and that could be the Church too, counterintuitively for Joyce’s intellectual children.

“But would anyone, short of a madhouse, believe it? Neither of those clean little cherubum, Nero or Nobookisonester himself, ever nursed such a spoiled opinion of his monstrous marvellosity as did this mental and moral defective (here perhaps at the vanessance of his lownest) who was known to grognt rather than gunnard upon one occasion…”

Joyce mentioned closeness between madness and genius. He was a genius. It may even be that the professors he mocked will paradoxically realise the joke is on them. They are tending to disembodied intelligence trapped in endless recursion. They confuse the present mythic meaninglessness for Divine return not realising it must be chaos. Watery rather than hot but presumably eternal pain would have to be psychic to work and is more likely to be reflection of our own internal state, disembodied and carried with our new currency literally through us in the digital-idea, digital-currency, digital-tag system. Amazon. Yangtze Memory, Columbia Data, Nile, Indus Net are the rivers today in the IT simulacrum. Flood-data and dataism mix with pseudo-Oriental reductions. You will die and be a drop assimilated into the ocean. This is naturalistic Westernism of the East of which it has no clue. It only knows we know less of it than we do of Christ. Without genius in the world Joyce intuited you are just left with madness and data-drowning. That is the AI promise incarnated today. What might Joyce have said about such speculation? To hell with it! Oddly, a resurrected Church purged post-infiltration, modernism and through revelation might leap up full of life and shout or sing,

“Thunderin' blazes! You think I'm Dead?"