One word is missing from the title of Colleen Jaurretche's book on James Joyce and negative mystical theology, and that word is "an introduction." For the book is nothing more than an overview of the major apophatic writers and their indisputable influence upon Joyce's novels, with a special emphasis on his aesthetics. The book is beautifully written, and hence a pleasure to read, which makes its brevity even more frustrating. This should not be read as a derogatory statement because, in spite of the slight incongruity between the ambitious title (which makes one expect a thorough account of the mystical tradition and its entangled bearings upon Joyce's aesthetic philosophy) and the actual analysis, the book has many merits, which I will point out in what follows.
The first chapter, a succinct presentation of medieval mystical tradition, begins with an analysis of Joyce's 1911 lecture on Blake, in which the former's appropriation of theology for the formulation of an aesthetic creed is pursued with minute attention to the details indicating this shift. Finnegans Wake is seen to emerge directly from the nondiscursive texts of the mystics (at this point, only Finnegans Wake is used for exemplification, which helps keep the focus on the apophatic writings). One of the first systematic meditations on the interiority and inherent sensoriality and sensuality of the mystical experience is that of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Jaurretche draws from the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology to prove her claim that the Areopagite's representation into words of spiritual understanding and insight and his reconstruction of the way in which the mind comes to know obscurity are, basically, an aesthetic theology. What one has to appreciate in the way all these mystical works are presented is the preciseness of details relevant for delineating Joyce's "sensual philosophy" - essentially, an aesthetic view based on the via negativa of mystical theology. The medieval aesthetic theory of perception that Dionysius helped shape (according to which there is a progression from physical perception, through imagination, towards the state of prayer) informs Saint Bonaventure's treatise Itinerarium mentis in Deum, where he considers the mind as God's image and hence part of the eternal Wisdom. He emphasizes the role of the self-reflexive activity of contemplative imagination, and that of memory in reaching divine understanding. The relinquishing of all intellectual activities is what unites Dionyisan introspection and Bonaventure's apprehension of the divine with the famous fourteenth century anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. Jaurretche analyzes this English addition to the negative way as a literary text with a focused view of God; it serves her pursuit of the connections between negative theology and the aesthetic imagination. By adding some brief comments on Aquinas, she can thus safely conclude that mystical texts, in their quality "as theoretical models for the impulse towards creativity, representation, and the limits and possibilities of human understanding" (24-5), provide Joyce with a paradigm for the evolution of consciousness in its indissoluble relationship to the body. In this chapter on "medieval abstrusiosities," by far the most original part is the one where the author discusses two famous texts by Saint John of the Cross, the poem "The Dark Night" and its explication, The Dark Night of the Soul, as well as his depiction of the crucifixion and the sketch of the ascent of Mount Carmel. The commentaries on the two visual representations are particularly sharp. While the Dark Nights primarily deal with purgation described in terms of bodily pleasure and desire, thus portraying the fiery constitution of identity based on absence and lack, the drawings summarize the negative way itself in a nondiscursive aesthetic presentation.
The following chapters center almost exclusively on Joyce; the author seems to rely a lot on the readers' support in establishing a thorough net of connections between the previously outlined mystical canon and the Joycean one. This is not an altogether unenjoyable intellectual exercise, but it almost makes necessary some acknowledgements to the readers for their sense of solidarity and their part in the critical enterprise. In a true postmodern fashion, the author of a book on Joyce has been contaminated by the very style of the writer she analyzes (as Joyce is famous for incessantly challenging not only the army of scholars but also his readership). Before the close reading of the "sensual philosophy" at work in the novels, Jaurretche stops for the duration of the chapter at Joyce's critical writings, which she integrates within the larger framework of the late nineteenth century preoccupations with defining literary imagination. The most influential figure in the transition from nineteenth to twentieth century ideas was Walter Pater. Other writers that formed the intellectual milieu typical of the fin-de-siècle were Francis Thompson, James Thomson and G. M. Hopkins, all contributing to Joyce's interest in the Middle Ages and to his progressive breaking down of the divisions between mental and physical experiences. Jaurretche relies on Pater's demonstration that the origins of modern aesthetics lie in the medieval negative theology and reads medieval ideas into texts by the four writers mentioned above, as well as by W. B. Yeats and O. Wilde.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is framed as a Bildungs-roman that records Stephen Dedalus' progress on the via negativa. >From a world of sensations filtered within the recesses of the mind, Stephen develops a conception of art as secularized holiness. Jaurretche follows closely the unfolding of the novel and stops at famous passages, which come to yield new meanings under her scrutinizing critical gaze. She is at her very best, and moves freely through the novel, having much more confidence than in dealing with the mystical corpus of texts. The fact that the author's style is so smooth almost turns against her, because the captivated reader cannot help wanting more connections established between the actualization of mystical experience in the canonical texts presented in chapter two and the novel's detailed mapping of how art crystallizes itself from within the chaos of the senses. Jaurretche locates the turning point in Stephen's "negative" transformation from a potential priest into a rebellious artist in the phrase "A day of dappled seaborne clouds"; her subsequent analysis of the epiphany on the shore and of Stephen's opinions about the relationship between the artist and his art add fresh nuances to these heavily interpreted sections.
Perception is the guiding principle in the approach to Ulysses, from which the author selects a few chapters for extensive commentary. Jaurretche sees the three main characters of the book as three different manifestations of the actuality and potentiality of human experiences. In keeping with the apophatic strain, she attempts to interpret the protagonists' respective excursions through the day in terms of a confrontation between reality and imagination, doubt and certainty, mind and flesh, as reflected in "Proteus," "Calypso," "Lotus-Eaters," "Lestrygonians," "Scylla and Charybdis," "Circe," and "Penelope." Stephen, Bloom and Molly's streams of consciousness speak not only of the total negation of authority and hierarchy but also of the inexhaustible power of the mind to register the outside world and internalize it to an almost unbearable richness. The analysis of "Proteus" is very elaborate and faithful to the disclosure of meaning embedded in the obscurity of Stephen's language and acts upon the world. Jaurretche manages to formulate a highly consistent view of this over-interpreted chapter. "Scylla and Charybdis" is particularly fit for an apophatic reading, in its movement from outward representation to the reality (both ontological and aesthetic) within. In these two chapters Stephen is as close to mysticism as he will ever get.
As a book of the night, Finnegans Wake seems to arise straight from the "cloud of unknowing," from the dark revelatory potential of the senses. Centered on all-pervasive nothingness, it is Joyce's most systematic appropriation of negative theology. In this final chapter Jaurretche chooses a thematic approach and speaks about memory, the resistance of God to knowledge, the search of the unknown through the known, all issues already detailed in he presentation of the mystical tradition. Also, she prefaces the analysis of longer passages from the Wake with a couple of cross-references between the Wake and The Dark Night of the Soul; in both cases, her focus on words and phrases yields a rich commentary that beautifully parallels the inexhaustible Joycean text.
The Sensual Philosophy finds its place among a series of books, briefly mentioned in the introduction, that have accounted for Joyce's relationship to Catholicism, scholasticism, the Jesuits, and theology and religion in general. It seems that Jaurretche's primary goal is to offer a possible map of the filed, without particular concerns for comprehensiveness. This may explain the scarcity of bibliographical references. However, if the absence of Derrida's essay on negative theology ("How to Avoid Speaking: Denials") can still be considered a personal choice to reject contamination by an omnipresent theorist, ignoring a major figure in contemporary onto-theological thinking such as Jean-Luc Marion (God without Being) can hardly be regarded in the same manner. If only for this reason, Jaurretche's book on Joyce's negative way is just a beginning, a necessary and promising one.
Rodica Ieta
University of Western Ontario