Bong brought out the best in me. He was very convincing and systematic. I could never say no whenever he approached me for a project. And he would always be very diplomatic and nurturing, even encouraging me to bring in my friends in the endeavor! It was a joy to serve with him. He felt sad when the group had to retire twenty-three members because of the year-old retirement age set by the diocese. That time I joined, there were about eighty ministers. Now they are more than He eventually ended up compiling five thick manuals for the EMHC.
Henry became so enamored with serving that he even sought noontime Masses at the nearby St. He recalls that he never attended Mass at De La Salle. His first calling to service was when he was requested to help distribute Holy Communion by a certain Fr. Leon S. But the experience obviously touched him more than he knew. Years later, he became a member of the covenanted Catholic community, Pagibig ng Diyos, where he says his spirituality deepened. He thought at first that after the three days of the session, that would be it.
But the Lord had other plans. He and spouse, Joyce were chosen as coordinators and they found themselves attending prayer meetings, even if it ran into conflict with his regular Wednesday basketball practice.
For Henry, that was a major shift. What a stupid olla podrida of the Bible and so forth James Joyce is: just stewed-up fragments of quotation in the sauce of a would-be-dirty mind. In whatever circle they inhabit on the opposite shore, presumably they are still passing each other without the tribute of recognition. It would need a book to do justice to the rivalry between these two near-contemporaries whose literary careers and personal histories have so much in common, yet who remain so deeply opposed.
In this brief essay I attempt only to identify two major points of contention: realism as a method and sexuality as a subject.
Realism is just one of the arbitrary views man takes of man. It sees us all as little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance. Emma and Charles Bovary are two ordinary persons, chosen because they are ordinary. But Flaubert is by no means an ordinary person. Yet he insists on pouring his own deep and bitter tragic consciousness into the little skins of the country doctor and his dissatisfied wife. So that both Flaubert and Verga allow their heroes something of the hero, after all.
The one thing they deny them is the consciousness of heroic effort. Now if you substitute Molly and Leopold for Emma and Charles I think you have essentially the same point, though Lawrence would not be so generous to Joyce as to Flaubert.
Second, that ordinary life is quite heroic enough for Joyce, provided one pays sufficiently close and respectful attention to it. What Joyce did not know was that Connie Chatterley seems to have been conceived deliberately as the antidote to Molly Bloom! Yes it is, Frieda. It is filthy. This Ulysses muck is more disgusting than Casanova. I must show that it can be done without muck. But there is a serious point at issue, concerning the treatment of sexuality in nineteenth century realism. Joyce regards with equanimity every possible sexual act that is freely chosen; but he does not stop there.
More heretic than scientist, Joyce becomes a Manichean in reverse, preferring the flesh that affirms to the spirit that denies. His sexual epiphanies are moments when the woman displays both qualities intensely and simultaneously. The whore in Portrait, for example, is a priestess of the body. A real priest would raise the host up to heaven then bring it down into the mouth of the communicant, who kneels below him.
In the vision of the bird-girl, and in the erotic letters to Nora, Joyce excites himself with a sacred love-object who displays for him her profane functions of excretion; the most intense sexual experience is one that mingles, sacrilegiously, the most exalted with the most vulgar.
For Joyce, then, the spiritual idea adds spice to the raw hungers of sensuality; and this is precisely what offends the Lawrentian sexual ethic. In sexual relations, Joyce dwells obsessively on indirect or incomplete modes of consummation; he is fascinated by everything that may intervene between desire and performance.
A partial list of these intermediate conditions would include idealization of the woman , fantasies of the inaccessible other, voyeurism, fetishism of garments, symbols, the written word , fear of exposure, surrogate or vicarious satisfaction, complaisance, jealousy, the incest taboo, impotence. Lawrence did not read Joyce closely enough to appreciate the full extent of his rejection of sexual immediacy.
But he read enough to support a psychic indictment, that in Joyce the worm of consciousness preys on the living flesh of desire.
To this Lawrence adds a moral judgement, directed against the demotic quality of sex in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Lawrence ceased being a chapel-going orthodox Christian in his late teens; but there persisted in his emotional makeup much of the Calvinist division of mankind into the elect and the preterite those who are without grace and rejected by God. Not unlike Joyce, Lawrence dares to be a heretic, by making sexual union the center of his heterodox religion.
And just as in the orthodox Calvinist tradition, determining the exact degree of grace in the soul becomes an esoteric art. There is also a Calvinist anxiety about salvation, though now associated with sexual instead of explicitly religious consciousness. My general point here is that sexuality in both authors demonstrates the subtle complicity between Modernism and religion; Modernism might even be considered a religious revival, challenging the Victorian idea that religion would wither away and be replaced by science.
Yet Joyce and Lawrence are firmly heterodox; it almost seems that they preserve religion because it enables heresy, perversion, and sacrilege.
For Joyce, before there can be sweets, there must be sin. Calvinism has a different interplay between rule and transgression. There, Lawrence is best understood as an antinomian: one who believes that the elect are incapable of sin, following Titus i. Lawrence applies a similar rule to sexual acts. This can be sign of preterition, for acquaintances like J. Joyce, on the other hand, wants the sacred and profane to merge, in bed, chamber pot, or individual pair of trousers.
Letters IV, The Rainbow was banned in ; in it was re-issued in the U. Women in Love was privately published in the U. Letters VI, Olla podrida: a spicy stew of meat and vegetables. I am assuming here that the bird-girl encourages Stephen to watch her urinate. Selected Letters Mellors makes a similar complaint about his first marriage.
Delany, Paul. New York: Basic Books, Ellmann, Richard.
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