Catholicism's Joycean weapon.(Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company)(Book review)

Mary Lowe-Evans. Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. xi + 190 pp. $69.95

IN 2008, the University Press of Florida's Florida James Joyce Series published several texts that challenged the uncompromising rejection of Catholicism widely perceived in Joyce's works. Mary Lowe-Evans's Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company is a welcome addition to what series editor Sebastian D. G. Knowles dubs this "third wave of Joycean Catholic studies." In her project, Lowe-Evans challenges the commonplace assumption that Joyce's ambivalence towards Catholicism constitutes a totalizing refusal of the religion, arguing instead that his criticisms of the Irish Catholic Church also convey a nostalgic yearning for the comfort and stability of the faith that "enable[s] rather than dismantle[s] the institutional church." Defining Joyce's Catholic nostalgia as his "obsessive urge to return to a, paradoxically, dead but mysteriously vital and intellectually challenging body of Catholic dogma and ritual," she locates this nostalgic urge in his frequent references to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Catholic benediction service. Although previous critics have highlighted the satirical nature of these representations, Lowe-Evans persuasively contends that embedded within this cynicism are attempts to "employ, exploit, reinvent, and thus ensure the survival of Catholic doctrine and dogma," which she attributes to Joyce's "'faith in the soul'" and his guilt over his mother's death. …