The heretical Auctoritas of Giordano Bruno: the significance of the Brunonian presence in James Joyce's the day of the rabblement and Stephen Hero.

Bruno, Giordano. Opera omnia. Decr. S. Offi. 8. Febr. 1600.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum. (1)

Extravagance followed. The simple history of the Poverello was soon out of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies. Joachim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs of initiation cast their spells upon him.

James Joyce, "A Portrait of the Artist." (2)

The textual moment in which, in the words of Jean-Michel Rabate, Joyce first brought "Bruno's covert authority to bear on a precise diagnosis of Irish paralysis" (3) occurred in November 1901 with the publication of his pamphlet, The Day of the Rabblement. The circumstances surrounding the publication of The Day of the Rabblement and the exact identity of the cryptic "Nolan" have long been known. However, the historical and literary contexts in which Joyce encountered Bruno are relatively unexplored, particularly with regard to the circumstances of the nineteenth-century scholarly rehabilitation of Bruno's writings; his contemporary lionisation by the anticlericalists of the Italian Risorgimento; and the underground interest in Bruno that existed in English literary culture during the late 1880s and 1890s. This article discusses Joyce's acerbic pamphlet as the first of the belligerent sorties that he wrote in his "open war" (4) against the Roman Catholic Church, and the pervasive and paralysing influence of the bourgeois Catholic morality that it helped to maintain in the contemporary cultural and intellectual life of Dublin. It discusses Joyce's reading of Bruno's Italian dialogues and how this encounter steeled him in his own struggle with Catholic orthodoxy, and explores his covert employment of Bruno as an heretical auctoritas in The Day of the Rabblement and Stephen Hero. It argues that an historicist examination of Joyce's dialogue with Bruno provides an extremely effective means of realizing some of the urgency and offensiveness of his critical engagement with contemporary Catholicism during the 1900s.

In an interview with James Knowlson in September 1989, Samuel Beckett revealed that the only remark Joyce ever made about "Dante ... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce," was that, although he liked the essay (which was written at his own behest and instruction), he thought there "wasn't enough about Bruno; he found Bruno rather neglected." (5) His comments are, to a large extent, justified; and even though the essay was first published in 1929, Joyce's estimation of "Dante ... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce" remains as a salutary and instructive comment on the treatment of Joyce's complex relationship with the writings and legacy of the "heresiarch martyr of Nola" (6) in Joycean criticism to date. Beckett's discussion of Joyce's encounter with Bruno and his appraisal of the significance of the doctrine of the coincidence of contraries in the Wake is relatively telegraphic, when compared to his more expansive accounts of the importance of Dante's "system of poetics" and the Viconian theory of the "inevitably of cyclical evolution," (7) and, in fact, is cribbed largely from J. Lewis McIntyre's 1903 study of the Nolan, Giordano Bruno. (8) This observation is not intended as a negative criticism. Beckett's observation that the first covert reference to Bruno by Joyce occurs in The Day of the Rabblement in 1901, where the cryptic allusion to the "Nolan" threw "the local philosophers [...] into a state of some bewilderment," (9) and his precise elucidation of the axiomatic principle of Bruno's immanentist philosophy, remains the general consensus on this subject. Indeed, Liberato Santo-Brienza in "Joyce's Dialogue with Aquinas, Dante, Bruno, Vico, Svevo ...," published in 1998, and the most recent article to broach the topic Joyce's relationship with Bruno, says little that is not contained in Beckett's essay of 1929, and merely recycles the accepted view that Joyce, whilst still an undergraduate, identified with "Bruno's rebellious disposition towards any form of temporal authority and dogmatic power," (10) and later employed the Brunonian doctrine of the coincidence of contraries as a principle of formal technique in the Wake. As Theoharis Constantine Theoharis observed wryly in 1988, this consensus has "become one of the cliches of Joyce criticism (especially criticism of Finnegans Wake). Like all cliches this one is true, but rarely understood or spoken of with penetrating or precise intentions." (11)

Research on the nature of the Brunonian presence in Joyce's writings remains very much a coterie, if not a neglected, interest; and amidst the plethora of critical literature that exists on Joyce, there are no more than a dozen or so articles and books which attempt to explore, at varying lengths and with varying degrees of success, the significance of the Brunonian trace in the Joycean text. (12) Beyond Rabath's agile theoretical discussion of the Nolan and the development of a poetics of indeterminacy in the Wake in Joyce Upon the Void, the most significant and seminal research on Joyce's encounter with Bruno has been undertaken by Sheldon Brivic, Elliot B. Gose, Robert D. Newman, and Theoharis: that is, scholars who are primarily concerned with ascertaining the significant of Brunonian traces and allusions in Ulysses, and not in the Wake. Nevertheless, while Rabate and Gose do provide cursory attention to the contexts in which Joyce encountered Bruno, the formalistic precision of the majority of these studies is not complemented by any historicist scrutiny or refinement. The engagement with Bruno is not read in the context of Joyce's textual negotiations with contemporary Catholicism, and there has been no systematic study of the significance of the Brunonian presence in Joyce's writings as a whole. Joyce did not encounter Bruno in a vacuum and, it can be argued, any study of the function or presence of philosophical, mystical, patristic or theosophical systems or elements in the Joycean text should be read in the context of his determination to effect a sundering with the Church.