Abstract
In this chapter, Jack Dudley pairs Joyce’s famous letter to his brother Stanislaus about paralysis with Joyce’s criticism of Irish Catholicism. Dudley argues that Joyce saw the Catholic religion as stifling and paralytic, thereby offering Dubliners as an escape route that could free readers and characters from Catholic paralysis. However, Joyce might have been anti-Catholic, but his work was not barren of religiosity, spirituality, or the sacred. Reconsidering the way that Dubliners engages with the spiritual, Dudley reads “Grace” as antithetical to Catholicism but not a rejection of religion itself. Instead, the story “demonstrates that the central idea of redemption and liberation for Joyce was a spiritual one, framed and described out of the material of his religious upbringing, set to new but nonetheless transcendent purposes.”
I like the notion of the Holy Ghost being in the ink-bottle. 1
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Dudley, J. (2017). From “Spiritual Paralysis” to “Spiritual Liberation”: Joyce’s Samaritan “Grace”. In: Culleton, C., Scheible, E. (eds) Rethinking Joyce's Dubliners. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_10
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