Tarisicius: A
Hagiographical Allusion in Joyce’s “Araby”
H. George
Hahn
In his story "Araby " Joyce alludes
to a Roman martyr both to designate a comic touch by the narrator and to deepen
the themes of disillusionment and deflated romanticism. This purposefully
melodramatic allusion also provides another example of how closely religion is
woven into Joyce's life and fiction.
When the narrator recalls that his
youthful love for Mangan's sister dominated his consciousness, he remembers
specifically that:
Her image accompanied me even in places the most
hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go
to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by
drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill
litanies of shop-boys... the nasal chanting of street-singers who sang... a
ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single
sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a
throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips in strange prayers and praises which
I myself did not understand (Joyce 28-29).
The religious language in this
passage--image, litanies, chalice, prayers--and in the rest of the story has
commonly been read as Joyce's vehicle for relating the disenchantment of puppy
love to the disillusionment with religion;[1] in this passage the boy's
"chalice" carried "through a throng of foes" is his secret love for the girl,
herself depicted as a Madonna-Magdalene figure. Yet none of the many
commentators on Joyce's symbolism and allusions has recognized the subtle but
encompassing motif of the passage, that of Tarsicius, a minor saint known as the
"Boy Martyr of the Holy Eucharist." The standard Roman Catholic hagiography
since the eighteenth century, Butler's Lives of the Saints, describes him as a
third-century acolyte who, while carrying the Blessed Sacrament in his clothes
to Christian prisoners, was discovered and killed by heathens with sticks and
stones (4: 335).
That the attentive, widely read and youthfully devout
Joyce knew of the Tarsicius story is virtually certain, for an immensely popular
novel had made it highly visible. The Irish Cardinal Wise-man's Fabiola; or, the
Church of the Catacombs (1854) is an embellished revision of Butler on
Tarsicius. In it Wiseman emphasizes the youth and sense of religious mission of
the orphan-saint who, when bearing the sacrament under his tunic to catechumens,
moves through a hostile crowd, is discovered as a Christian and stoned to death
(263-67). Published as a rifle in the Popular Catholic Library series, Fabiola
was "an instant and even spectacular success" (Fothergill 920). Not only did the
novel have an avid Irish readership, but it was also translated into Italian,
French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, German, Danish, Polish, Slovenian, and
Dutch (Fothergill 900), thus becoming, and with it the Tarsicius story, a widely
shared piece of British and European Catholic folklore.
That the
Tarsicius story--via Wiseman's novel in print or oral retelling -- would have
entered Irish schools and homes is beyond question. An Irish cardinal's tale of
persecution and martyrdom in ancient Rome had definite metaphorical value for
Catholics living under the rule of Protestant England, the time of "the troubles
in our native land." Indeed, "Irish faithful" and "English heathens" were common
phrases among Catholic Dubliners.
The allusion to Tarsicius is further plausible when set next to a kindred but more familiar allusion to a martyr in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There, Stephen Dedalus (who also had been a student at Clongowes Wood College) identifies himself with the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, when "crossing Stephen's, that is, my green" (249). The allusion to St. Stephen who, because of false charges of blasphemy, was stoned to death, serves much the same purpose as does the subtler allusion to Tarsicius--that of a Catholic boy identifying himself with a hero on a religious-like mission who was stoned to death by a hostile crowd.[3] Butler's Lives makes the connection between Stephen and Tarsicius. In citing his source for Tarsicius as a fourth-century poem of Pope St. Damascus, Butler notes that "one Tarsicius, like another St. Stephen stoned by the Jews, suffered a violent death rather than give up the divine body to raging dogs" (4:335). The recurrence of the martyr imagery in Joyce's story and novel is the more striking because, though he published them two years apart in 1914 and 1916, Joyce had been working on both concurrently as early as 1905.
Like the orphan Tarsicius, the boy of Joyce's story is orphanlike, living not with his parents but with an aunt and uncle. Like Tarsicius, he bears his "chalice," a sacred trust on a special mission. Like Tarsicius, he must pass "through a throng of foes." Like Tarsicius, his ultimate destination is a sacred place--for Wise-man's saint, the catacombs, for Joyce's boy, the bazaar of Araby that he likens to "a church after a service." [4] And like the Tarsicius story, Joyce's story ends in a sacrifice, not of a life but of an illusion.
Given the Irish Catholic schooling of both the character and his author, the allusion to Tarsicius is appropriate. To the Catholic boy, the boy-martyr's life was a perfect metaphor of his own situation, a secret harboring of a religiously intense love in a world "most hostile to romance." To the narrator (as well as to Joyce and many Catholic readers), his own incongruously heroic and melodramatic allusion, recalled after years, could only elicit a smile at the remembrance of boyhood innocence.
The Tarsicius allusion is thus another figure, in what Stone calls the palimpsest of Joyce's writings, one "rich with shimmering depths, strange blendings, and tantalizing hints" (409). And recognition of the allusion evokes a deeper appreciation of the layered texture of "Araby" with its origins deep in Joyce's boyhood. <!--pagebreak--> NOTES
1 See especially Stone, who offers the most detailed study of the story's themes (self-deluding blindness, self-inflating romanticism, decayed religion, mammonism, the coming into man's inheritance, the gulf between appearance and reality) and techniques (particularly the literary, political, religious, and biographical allusions). See also Ghiselin 199, who traces the Christian imagery to show how "hope, faith, and love itself are destroyed" for the boy.
2 Fitzpatrick 252. N.B. also the custom, begun by the Tractarians, of using saints' days to date letters, essays, etc.
3 The story of St. Stephen is first recorded in The Acts of the Apostles 6:8-8:3.
4 Dubliners 32. The -Church association is furthered in this passage by Joyce's allusion to the moneychangers in the temple, a biblical allusion to profanation derived from Matthew 21:12 ff., Mark 11:15 ff., and John 2:13 if.
WORKS CITED
Butler, Alban. Lives of the Saints. 1756-1759.4 vols. Ed. Herbert Thurston, S. J., and Donald Attwater. New York: Kennedy, 1956.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.
Fitzpatrick, Edward A. Ratio Studiorum. St. Ignatius and the Ratio Studiorum. Trans. A. R. Ball. New York: McGraw, 1933.
Fothergill, Brian. Nicholas Wiseman. London: Faber, 1963.
Ghiselin, Brewster. "The Unity of Joyce's Dubliners." Accent 16 (1956): 75-88, 196-213.
Joyce, James. "Araby." Dubliners. 1914. London: Penguin, 1973.
-----. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968.
Stone, Harry. "'Araby' and the Writings of James Joyce." Antioch Review 25 (1965): 375-410.
Sullivan, Kevin J. Joyce Among the Jesuits. New York: Columbia UP, 1957.
Wiseman, Nicholas Patrick Stephen. Fabiola; or, The Church of the Catacombs. 1854. New York: Garland, 1976.
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Source: Papers on Language & Literature, Summer91, Vol. 27 Issue 3, p381.
