Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion

by Geert Lernout

From the very beginning James Joyce's readers have considered him as a Catholic or an anti-Catholic writer, and in recent years the tendency has been to recuperate him for an alternative and decidedly liberal form of Catholicism. However, a careful study of Joyce's published and unpublished writings reveals that throughout his career as a writer he rejected the church in which he had grown up. As a result, Geert Lernout argues that it is misleading to divorce his work from that particular context, which was so important to his decision to become a writer in the first place. Arguing that Joyce's unbelief is critical for a fuller understanding of his work, Lernout takes his title from Ulysses, "I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve?", itself a quote from Mark 9: 24. This incisive study will be of interest to all readers of Joyce and to anyone interested in the relationship between religion and literature.

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2010

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The tendency of Catholic critics to try and claim Joyce as a Christian make little sense; it's a pretty intellectually dishonest tendency and the author of this book is right to criticise it. With that said, though, I felt like it could have done a much stronger job in arguing for the centrality of atheism/freethought to Joyce's works. In particular, the discussion as it relates to Finnegan's Wake and the notes around it seem far too brief.

It's quite clear that Joyce was an atheist and a distinct opponent of the Catholic Church. There is no shortage of evidence for this. But to posit that "unbelief" filled the same role in his literature that religious critics want to think religion did – this takes more hermeneutics than the author has done here. In spite of (or perhaps because of) his atheism, Joyce had an ongoing fascination with religion, and attended Good Friday masses regularly (he approached it not as a believer, but as someone interested in the "primitive religious drama" on display – his brother Stanislaus' words). I may sound a bit harsh here but I don't think the author has adequately integrated all this into a proper, coherent exposition of the role of religion in Joyce's work.

This book is perhaps most valuable for the research the author has done in terms of collecting all these disparate letters, diary entries, early drafts, etc. I would recommend it to anyone interested in this kind of research, but also to anyone wanting to hear an atheist perspective on the posthumous Joyce religion wars – even if the perspective is not as rigorous as it could be.

[DeterminedStupor]

Have only read through Chapter 1: Joyce and the Church According to the Critics.