The American Ghosts of James Joyce

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

Far from fading with age, James Joyce’s influence on the literary world remains alive and well. Even before his death, James Joyce haunted great American writers with the beauty of his prose. In the latest Lenten season of Global Catholic Literature, we will discuss the literary afterlife of James Joyce’s celebrated short story collection Dubliners as it appears in the stories of five great American Catholic writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.F. Powers, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Edward P. Jones.

James Joyce declared that “I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” The American author Edward P. Jones remembers, as a young writer, “admiring Joyce’s bold and evident love of his Dublin people; I knew all the people in that book because they weren’t doing anything different than what black people in Washington, D.C., were doing . . . Dubliners planted a molecular seed of envy in me, made me later want to follow Joyce and do the same for Washington and its real people.” When his collection Lost in the City was named a finalist for the National Book Award, Jones told an interviewer, “I am Catholic.” It shows. Like the haunted Dublin of his forebear James Joyce, Jones’s Washington, D.C., is visited by spiritual powers left off the tourist maps. American Catholic writer J.F. Powers also acknowledged that Joyce “had a profound influence on me—Ulyssesis a great book.” This too shows. In his National Book Award-winning novel Morte D’Urban, he makes Malory’s Morte D’Arthur a lodestar just as Joyce did Homer’s Odyssey. But the influence is no less evident in his short stories. Revealing the extent to which he inhabited Joyce’s Dubliners, the perpetually restless Powers settled into his Minnesota city by means of his Irish influence: “St. Paul is just right for me . . . perhaps I could make it my Dublin.” In stories like “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” he does, dramatizing—like Joyce—the subterranean contests of the human spirit. In 1928, F. Scott Fitzgerald “sank down on one knee before Joyce” during a Parisian dinner the America author affectionately came to call “Festival of St. James.” On the flyleaf of his copy of Dubliners, Fitzgerald wrote that “I am interested in the individual only in his rel[ation] to society. We have wandered in imaginary lonlines [sic] through imaginary woods for a hundred years—too long.” In stories like “Absolution” and “Benediction” characters challenged by their societies’ zeitgeists come into tragicomic relation to sacraments that share affinities with Joyce’s “The Sisters” and “Grace.” Of her own debt to Dubliners, Katherine Anne Porter declared what “a revelation that small collection of matchless stories could be. It was not a shock, but a revelation,” and in stories like “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” and “A Day’s Work” she, like Joyce, cathartically manifests her characters’ unnerving paralysis. Flannery O’Connor wrote to her friend Father McCown that Joyce “can’t get rid of” his desire for “a Catholic completeness of life . . . no matter what he does,” suggesting that “it may be a matter of recognizing the Holy Ghost in fiction by how he chooses to conceal himself.” In her own story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” as in Joyce’s “Araby,” adolescent adventures to travelling shows climax in pangs of conscience that put them on the tightrope leading to God.

Dates: Mondays in March, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm. Via Zoom.

• March 10
• March 17
• March 24
• March 31

Registration:

• Early Bird Registration: $65 through February 10
• Regular Registration: $75 through March 1

Collegium Institute will provide copies of the readings to all participants in the United States. International participants are welcome to join, but please note that we can't guarantee that we will be able to send you a copy of the texts if you live outside of the US.

Host or Publisher Collegium Institute