“A Suave Philosophy”:
Reconciling Religious Identities in Joyce's Works
Eishiro Ito
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Abstract
This paper explores how religious conflicts and reconciliation are described in James Joyce’s works. It aims to demonstrate how indispensable Joyce’s literary and religious journey to the East was before his reconciliation with Christianity. Buddhism seems to have played an important role as a counterpart of Christianity. Joyce became familiar with Buddhism through Theosophy in Dublin.
In 1903 he wrote a review for H. Fielding-Hall’s The Soul of a People, in which steeping himself in the Oriental Burmese atmosphere, he showed his admiration for Buddhism as “a suave philosophy” “which put war aside as irrelevant” as Richard Ellmann notes (CW 93). Reading Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus, Joyce compared the portrait of Jesus Christ with that of Gautama Buddha in Stephen Dedalus’s interior monologue in Stephen Hero (SH 189-90). Jesus is portrayed as a single man in the Bible while the married man Gautama is narrated together with his wife Yasodhara and their only son Rahula, although both Jesus and Gautama renounced the world around 30. Love, marriage and family life seem to have been very significant for Joyce even considering them as religious matters. He wrote his novels to resolve his religious conflicts after all. Keywords: James Joyce, Christianity, Buddhism, Orientalism, Burma (Myanmar) |
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full version is available in The Journal of Policy Studies, Vol.15, No.1. Iwate Prefectural University, November 2013, 37-47. Copyright 2013
Eishiro Ito
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