'The sisters' and 'An encounter' - Considering in detail one o two passages, discuss Joyce's treatment of the church in Dubliners.

Why does this breakdown occur? There is much evidence to suggest that Joyce’s main target is dogma within the Catholic Church, and it is at this point where symbols become blurred – does his hatred of religious dogma reflect a deeper resentment of the repetitive, retentive banality of Dublin or is he claiming that Dublin has only stagnated because of Catholicism’s fixation with ritual and ceremony? Both claims are true to a degree, although the dominant idea is that of religion instilling a fondness for ritual and ceremony: as the church fails to provide spiritual comfort people turn to a substitute (often Joyce satirically describes alcoholism as a formal procedure of sorts, where it is integrated into the mind of the drinker) which they consume in the same way. This substitution creates a deeply flawed society where symbols stand in for reality, just as poor substitutes stand in for religion. For example, in The Sisters the young boy is offered “a little glass of wine” and “some cream crackers.” He says, “I declined.” The food is a comically trivial replacement for the body and blood of Christ, and shows not only the façade of spirituality but also its symbolic rejection (this rejection is even more worrying as it is shown to be an instinctive reaction from the child).

Although Joyce, through broad symbolic structures tracks the failure of spirituality, this only occurs because of the failure of the transmission. Indeed, Richard Ellman finds a “residue of faith” in Ulysses and claims Molly Bloom, as a mildly autobiographical character, has some “vague theism” and looks down at atheists. Thus we can see that Joyce had some faith, although it is unclear what outlet this took: his approach to atheism is recorded in A Painful Case (showing a desire to transcend faith and achieve the status of a Nietzschean Übermensch) and An Encounter, where the “queer old josser” (through his desire to “whip” children) represents the Puritanical desire for purging all sins through sadism. The repetition of words and the use of ellipses lend a trance-like quality to the passage and his monologue is like a perverted sermon. Looking at these extremes, I think that much of the aggression and cynicism present in Dubliners comes from an inability on Joyce’s part to reconcile the two – one of the functions of his biblical allusions is to describe a time when religion was pure and untainted by any intermediary. Mr. Duffy cannot achieve perfection ironically because of a ridiculous adherence to dogma (Joyce even writes, “his life rolled out evenly – an adventureless tale”) and the “queer old josser” falls victim to exactly the same problem.