Perception and impact of a story is often dependent upon the mood of the reader as well as background, beliefs, hopes, knowledge and fears. Today was the perfect day to read a section where Stephen, along with his schoolmates, is on retreat and listening to the rector delivering a sermon on Heaven and Hell. I especially liked Hell, and just need to share some of it with you. My background is Catholic so maybe that explains a part of it, but I assure you that the rector’s version of the afterlife is not quite what I’d learned from the more gentle Sisters of Nazareth nor the priests of our good parish.
However, it clearly explains why Stephen Dedalus is scared shitless over his bouts of lustful thinking. I have to tell you that this whole eighteen-page segment made the whole book for me. I also have to tell you that I often laughed out loud and just thoroughly enjoyed the reading. You can wonder why, but I did. I’ll excerpt here a small portion, but a goodly amount of the sermon is available to read here , for the curious, with thanks to The Literature Network which has the whole of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man along with many, many fine pieces of literature.
— Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.
And what is Joyce’s purpose in dedicating almost twenty pages to this sermon? That’s where it gets interesting. While I might laugh with glee, Joyce (as I found out by cheating a quick peek at the background of this story and of the author when I was trying to find a place online that had this available so I didn’t have to type it all nor shortchange you) perhaps was severely affected by his own Catholic upbringing. Might I even venture that while he could be placing this here as a sarcastic comment or even derisive attack on the Church, he may indeed harbor fears that even adult intellectual thinking cannot override.
There is no metaphor in this passage, nor much in the book except by way of purposeful vagueness; this sermon is told straight out in all its brutal form of hell being hell. Oh yes, and with the adamant assurance of accuracy.
Scary, huh? Yet still, I laughed. Why? Because God Himself couldn’t come up with the kind of hell created by the zealot. Only the flawed human mind could imagine and build this type of evil.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology