Saint Joseph, a.k.a. Leopold Bloom
Baumann, Paul
SAINT JOSEPH, a.k.a. LEOPOLD BLOOM ON FATHERHOOD & HOPEFULNESS PAUL BAUMANN J e were lying in bed discussing our children, as married people sometimes do just before turning off the light...
...How did we, once vowed to perpetual procrastination, get in so deep among the pacifiers, Legos, and dollies9 How did we come to a reconciliation with plastic and polyester, with Pampers and the color pink...
...Serve...
...Like liturgy, literature uses language and drama to immerse us in a recreated and revivified world...
...Motherhood is an irrevocable umbilical connection Women carry life within them as well as nurture it with the substance of their own bodies...
...So Joseph's status as foster father may be worth thinking more about Compared to the intimacy, risks, and rewards of motherhood, all fatherhood is, Joyce suggests, a kind of foster fatherhood...
...Then bowed down the highest tree, Unto his mother's hand...
...Well, maybe he didn't exactly appear...
...We had somehow let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang...
...Through Mary, Christians have been able to embrace the full humanity of Jesus, for in looking at Christ they "looked on the flesh of a kinsman, taken from the tranquil human substance of the Virgin's womb " Alongside the mystery of Mary's "yes" to God stands the cunous figure of Joseph, who was as obedient and faithful in his way as Mary was in hers Under the circumstances, you might say Joseph's chaste fidelity was a miracle in its own right "Let him pluck thee a cherry,/ That brought thee now with child," the Joseph of popular imagination confronts his wife's apparent betrayal Yet the Joseph of tradition miraculously soldiers on, laboring like a very bandog, searching for shelter where Mary can give birth, fleeing to Egypt to protect his young foster son, traveling to Jerusalem to have his first-born dedicated at the Temple, returning to the Temple courtyard in search of Jesus when he was left behind as a twelve-year-old "Son, why have you treated us so9 Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously," Mary repnmands her son only to be told a mystery "How is it that you sought me," Jesus replies "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house9" In such riddles, we are vividly reminded of Joseph's surrogate status Yet his fidelty did not waver, not much, anyway...
...By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments7" Bloom answers...
...For Joyce, artistic creativity mimics and even partakes of the mystery of creation itself...
...Bloom is also, of course, married to another Mary (the famous Molly), a Mary who is very much a second Eve, an earth mother, a sign of creation and renewal, and of life itself...
...The truths of fiction and the truths of biblical religion are not unrelated...
...In this regard Joyce reminds us that the Virgin Mary in fact gives birth to a son who is also her own father...
...What satisfaction can one expect from the heavenly solicitor for such notoriously undervalued properties as Peru, Belgium, Canada, and China9 Or should I petition "Joseph the Joiner," as James Joyce impiously described the world's most famous carpenter, cuckold, and foster father, "patron of the happy demise of all unhappy marriages...
...Turning to my overworked, overwrought, and under-Catholicized (read Jewish) wife, I put a hand on her deflated belly, that omphalos of our little world...
...He created the kind of mysteries, enigmas, and signs in his fiction that he had initially found in Catholic doctrine and ritual, and he borrowed freely from Catholicism in doing so...
...Bemoiled with bills and drooping under a freely willed load puts the right gleeful spin on the mock epic adventure of fatherhood and husbanding Conceivably the angel's real words to Joseph were, Cleave to her...
...Joseph's gospel appearances are confined to the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, although his status as Jesus' foster father is referred to briefly elsewhere...
...Each of our children had kicked but more often fluttered about in utero, and I remembered how uncanny and unnerving it was to feel such palpable life inside my wife's familiar body...
...As Anthony Burgess wrote in his wonderfully engaging study ReJoyce, the human message of Ulysses is simple1 We need each other atherhood is one way in which men live that need, and is perhaps the most seductive way in which we try to extend our imagined control over life...
...Joseph and Mary walked Through an orchard good, Where was cherries and berries So red as any blood...
...Happily, the problem is resolved by the intervention of an angel, to this day the most practical solution to the problem of suspected adultery...
...But it was more...
...In this regard, I think the tribute to that "insignificant man" Joseph in Rahner's collection of sermons, The Great Church Year, can aptly be applied to the inconspicuous Leopold Bloom: "the life of this insignificant man did have significance, it had one meaning that, in the long run counts in each person's life: God and his incarnate grace....Who can doubt that this man is a good patron for us1...
...O then bespoke Mary, With words so meek and mild "Pluck me one cherry, Joseph For I am with child...
...Only "when his sovereignty is excluded, is he able to believe in the Word of God...
...Both Joyce and the Bible suggest that such hubris is less a temptation for women, who in giving birth to all new life have a more realistic understanding of our connection and dependence on the source of life itself "In this sovereignty"—in this human longing for mastery and autonomy—"man is not free for God's Word...
...hat is not a bad way to describe what happens in Joyce's novel...
...Molly is the center of things, and like the Virgin Mary she sanctifies in Joyce's scheme the bonds created between human beings by their bodies In the famous litany of affirmation with which she concludes the novel, the adulterous Molly Bloom is understood to be just as much the handmaiden of creation as her virgin prototype...
...Mimicking the mythic structure of Homer's Odyssey, Joyce follows Stephen and Bloom, his Telemachus and Ulysses, as they wander the city on their mundane rounds and unknowingly in search of one another...
...Serve...
...So it is not surprising that a mother comes first, at least from the human side of things, in the Christian story of redemption...
...God himself takes the stage as the Creator and not as a partner to this Virgin," Barth wntes Yet it is within a woman's body that this new creation and ultimate self-revelation of God takes form...
...But Joseph's notorious marital forbearance did cross my mind It was not so much that my wife was about to reveal the up-till-then unsuspected real paternity of my children...
...Mommy seems to come first in myth, fairy tale, and popular prejudice...
...But to a large extent, any cult of Saint Joseph lay dormant through the first millennium of Christianity...
...According to biblical scholar John P. Meier, Joseph was most likely a native of Nazareth and an observant Jew...
...Children are a real bond, don't you think," I said dreamiiy"Yes they are," she replied with a slyness of tone that should have alerted me to the banana peel ahead...
...Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son ...Fatherhood . is a necessary evil....Fatherhood in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man...
...If Joseph must call upon angels to assuage his doubts over Mary's miraculous conception, Bloom calls upon the angels of his better nature to accept with loving equanimity his wife's waywardness...
...From the only begetter to the countless begotten—from Joseph the carpenter to Leopold Bloom the advertising man—human fathers are but intermediaries...
...sking what we know about the "real" Joseph is a bit like asking what we know about real sightings of Elvis...
...My wife was asserting, in her whimsical way, a certain primacy of place in regard to our offspnng...
...Astounding...
...Very much like Bloom's return to the adulterous Molly, Joseph turns away from any attempt to control things...
...In the maternity hospital scene where Stephen finally meets Bloom, Joyce celebrates the mystery of new life in his commendation of a new father...
...and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit...
...How can there be peace with justice if one's neighbors' property values ascend heavenward while yours languish in purgatorial suspension...
...Joseph was an old man, And an old man was he, When he wedded Mary In the land of Galilee...
...Where at first we feel most excluded—"Where exactly do you fit in...
...But now cheer up, my dearest, And do not be cast down...
...He was, after all, a family man if not a property owner...
...Do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit," goes history's most famous reassurance of a suspicious husband...
...Bloom asleep alongside Molly and Joseph alongside Mary are icons of hopefulness That, at least, is what this husband, father, and tender of livestock takes away from their strikingly similar stones ? 16...
...that what we receive in return is not ours to keep...
...Ah, family life If it didn' t have a patron saint, someone would have to invent one...
...And the procreative body obviously takes center stage...
...It is in the nature of things, I suppose...
...Like Joseph, Bloom is a cuckold who yet demonstrates a larger and truer loyalty, and in doing so a redemptive sense of human possibility...
...Joyce rejoices...
...Obviously there is little we can know...
...Cleave to her...
...Mamafesta," is what Joyce called Finnegans Wake...
...As Malcolm Bradbury has written, Joyce's work retains the redemptive imagery of the church as well as its message of love...
...Once those doctrines were firmly established, Joseph could emerge as a more substantial figure in his own right...
...Toil on, labor like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang...
...asked my wife—we are ultimately most at home For finally, we cannot make ourselves happy Fulfillment must come from outside—it must come as a gift That is the multifaceted paradox embodied in these two figures Joseph and Bloom participate in the transcendent by the measure of their self-abnegation...
...Dependency is somehow equated with humanity in both instances In choosing faith and constancy over doubt and separation, Joseph establishes himself as the guardian of the savior of the world and subsequently as a protector of children and virgins down through the ages To be sure, Joseph's willingness to give credence to what the Holy Spint tells him m his dreams also established him as the butt of a million jokes As a befuddled cuckold, he became a stock figure of ridicule in story, legend, and song...
...Toil on, labor like a very bandog...
...But while our world had become more crowded, I would argue that it also became larger...
...Fathers, however, are physically detached, apart Connection must be forged...
...That is, in fact, as deep as the world itself—which is what I take Joyce to mean when he describes human life as "soaring imperishable impalpable being...
...Like Joseph, he is a prosaic figure yet "a just man...
...Every new creation needs a foster father, Joyce contends...
...No, it was rather that Saint Joseph's unique circumstances exemplify the ambiguities surrounding paternity already alluded to...
...Paternity, like any good and truly human thing, is something given to us, not something we can claim authorship of...
...0 then bespoke the baby Within his mother's womb— "Bow down then the tallest tree For my mother to have some...
...Constancy, for which Joseph is rightly remembered, is the essential virtue Without it—without daily human promise-making and keeping—we cannot hope to see ourselves or life whole...
...To Saint Joseph, another overanxious father9 To Saint Joseph, the patron saint of petit-bourgeois dutifulness and uxorious discipline ("When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him...
...Of course, Joseph was not above worldly or stereotypical masculine concerns...
...What are we to make of the "powerless figure of Joseph...
...Scripture, as usual, contradicts i itself on many of the relevant facts...
...I want to get at the curiously diffident figure of Joseph by way of Joyce, and by aligning him with the equally self-effacing figure of Leopold Bloom, the cuckolded hero of Ulysses...
...Ulysses, for example, devotes each episode to an oblique discussion of a different bodily organ "My book is among other things the epic of the human body," Joyce said...
...My wife, too, thought of that mysterious liquid universe m which her children leapt and tumbled as numinous and achingly wondrous as first love An unexpected, unearned, incalculable visitation...
...O eat your cherries, Mary, O eat your cherries now, O eat your cherries, Mary, That grow upon the bough .." In religious art, at least until relatively modern times, Joseph is usually portrayed as an elderly man, lending credence to both Jesus' otherworldly paternity and making more plausible Mary's perpetual virginity As a heavenly patron, Joseph—Mary's chaste and holy spouse and Jesus' father— was thought to be particularly well situated to intercede on behalf of his earthly clients...
...Doubtless that is the obvious and yet difficult point All human constancy seems miraculous given the transitory nature of things...
...I'm becoming my father," moans one exasperated son after another as he raises his children...
...Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering alhncluding most farraginous chronicle...
...he's only ten...
...But to whom does the beleaguered and undervalued property owner, fantasizing a killing on the real estate market and early retirement to pursue pious works, cry...
...But now there are (gulp) three more very Godpossibled and equally grasping souls in the picture...
...At least I think I took it in the spirit in which it was intended It was, in part, a legitimate complaint about the dishes I had left unwashed in the sink...
...In Ulysses, that love is manifest in the life Bloom and Molly have shared, and which now, despite every betrayal, is an inexpungeable part of who they are individually...
...More on that soon ) But about our children Those mites of God's clay, the fruit of our lawful embraces...
...Like a good many couples, we had known each other for many years before marrying and having children...
...I took no offense...
...At least I have received no hint of such a complication...
...So I contemplated further how those mites of God's clay had forged a bond between my wife and me that was deeper than the word "domesticity" suggests...
...Learning of Mary's condition, Joseph is perplexed—as perplexed as the most incredulous New Testament reader...
...Saint Joseph, I vaguely remember, appeared before me at that moment...
...He may have been concerned about Mary's safety, for the penalty for adultery was stoning...
...In this context, it is pleasing paradox that patriarchal religion should single out as a model of fatherly duty a man who is denied any biological connection to the son for whom he is remembered, and in whose name he is venerated...
...By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou has done a doughty deed and no botch...
...Ulysses employs a variety of narrative techniques, especially parody and stream of consciousness, to present the events of one day, June 16,1904, in Dublin Stephen Dedalus, an aspiring writer, and Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly are the central characters...
...and he called his name Jesus...
...My wife laughed...
...Joseph is not with Mary at the foot of the cross...
...Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with butcher's bills at home and ingots (not thine1) in the countinghouse7 Head up1" Maybe it takes a Joyce to evoke without cliche the joy and nagging mystery ot fatherhood—its uncertainties so easily distorted by the language of "family values...
...Joyce pulls back the veil before the quotidian to reveal the mythic or transcendent quality of human existence...
...And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb...
...Saint Joseph, like Leopold Bloom, remains a compelling figure because of the way he relinquishes sovereignty where we expect him to demand it most In looking to either one, it is possible to see that what we pnde ourselves on giving to others—-our trust, fidelity, and love—is not ours to withhold...
...While I don't think biology is destiny, I do think that it is, well, biology...
...Bloom is the truest father because he is the least vain of men...
...they find reconciliation not in retribution or even justice but through faith and love, they embrace human finitude as an affirmation of mystery, not its denial...
...What could I do but stand by at a discreet distance, seeming to tend the hve11 stock somewhat in the manner of Saint Joseph...
...It is often the last word on the lips of the dying...
...Joyce again...
...The ties that bind mothers to children are physiologically irrefutable, emotionally unmistakable, and, I realize, culturally highly suspect...
...Like Joseph, Bloom is a practical family man, a Jew, a provider and protector...
...Or that the man—Joseph, that is—is conspicuously shunted to the side...
...the futility of triumph or protest or vindication the inanity of extolled virtue- the lethargy of nescient matter the apathy of the stars...
...In other words, Bloom will trust his heart against the logic of the calculating world...
...To the extent that "the male [is understood] as the specific agent of human action and history" such perishable human accomplishment is subordinated to God's power as creator and redeemer Joseph as representative man is a symbol of all human vanity, of "the sovereignty of human will and power and activity generally " In this sense, perhaps it is as fathers—as worldly creators—that men are most tempted to imagine themselves self-sufficient and self-perpetuating...
...Or the words of Joyce...
...I took this teasing in the spirit in which it was intended...
...Promise-keeping connects the past to the future—and promise-keeping, of course, is how God makes himself known to his chosen people...
...Yes," she said, "yes," in the manner of Joyce's expansive Molly Bloom but in shorter sentences...
...To Saint Joseph the obedient taxpayer ("In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled")'' To the church's patron of harried fathers of families ("And he rose up and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod") and working men ("Is this not the son of the woodworker...
...No actual word of Joseph's is recorded in the New Testament...
...Would she ever stop tormenting him—not that he didn't deserve it Why does he act like that, anyway9 It can't be sex...
...That paradox is compounded by the constant and eerie discovery of oneself in one's offspring...
...What seems certain, at least according to scholarly consensus, is that Joseph's conspicuous absence from the accounts of Jesus' ministry in all likelihood indicates that he had died before Jesus began his public life...
...Stephen Dedalus, the novel's protagonist and a spiritual orphan, must find his way to Leopold Bloom, his mystical foster father...
...Barth regards Joseph's exclusion as a judgment...
...What Joseph's occupation was, except that he worked as a craftsman, is uncertain...
...How did my life end up looking more like Saint Joseph's than like my original role model, James Bond...
...You have to be given one of those heedless Godframed Godgiven preformed possibilities to appreciate how onerous and liberating custodianship can be...
...LEOPOLD BLOOM ON FATHERHOOD & HOPEFULNESS PAUL BAUMANN J e were lying in bed discussing our children, as married people sometimes do just before turning off the light and just after tossing aside in bitter and covetous disgust the real estate transactions in the local newspaper...
...So where, exactly, do you fit in...
...More a knowing laugh...
...Joseph, as we have observed throughout this essay, is point15 edly "excluded...
...He who was entrusted, as tradition tells us, with the sublime secret of the Incarnation and, more prosaically, the care and guardianship of Virgin and son...
...Nevertheless, I confess that I suspect motherhood is closer to the center of things, if by the center we mean the source of life "They all write about some woman," Molly Bloom observes...
...For he has done great things for me," she might have said in the manner of Mary according to Luke...
...This is attributed to the problems Joseph's status as husband presents to both the idea of Mary's virginal conception and her perpetual virginity...
...Obviously, the virginal conception of Jesus lies at the heart of the Christian incarnational message 14 and any real understanding of Joseph As the historian Peter Brown has written in The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, "the cult of the Virgin offered the luminous inversion of the dark myth of shared fallen flesh " Mary's motherhood of Jesus redeems "the physical bonds created between human beings by their bodies...
...Karl Rahner, the late German theologian, writes of the lives of saints that "the events of this earthly life are not simply gone and past, over and done with forever, but they are preparatory steps that belong to us for eternity, that belong to us as our living future...
...And, as it turns out, a keen rummator on Saint Joseph's travail) Would our oldest, heir apparent and apparent visitor from Mars, ever learn to pay attention and stop tormenting his sister, we asked each other...
...Then she cried, "See, Joseph, 1 have cherries at command...
...It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten...
...On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void...
...Joseph is obedient...
...Where did they come from...
...Mary and Joseph, Molly and Leopold, I want to say, are two of a kind For Joyce fatherhood is a powerful sign of the paradoxical nature of reality Similarly, Karl Barth, the Protestant theologian, saw in the mystery of Jesus' birth a sign of the ultimate nature of God What was the meaning, Barth asked m his explication of the Creed, of "the miracle of the procreation of Jesus Christ without a father"9 Mary's virginal conception of Jesus was not a sexual but a pneumatological act...
...The metaphysical connotations of fatherhood alluded to above had more or less banished comparative real estate values from my mind...
...But for Joyce, paternity is a sign of the limited nature of our control...
...Leopold Bloom's transcendent virtue is this sort of dogged constancy This humane steadfastness prepares him to become Stephen Dedalus's spiritual father...
...O then bespoke Joseph— "I have done Mary wrong...
...In this sense, Bloom can be seen as a kind of Joseph—and perhaps Joseph as a kind of Bloom...
...Scripture is determined to provide answers of a sort to the delicate questions about Joseph's and Mary's conjugal life...
...In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou has fructified with thy modicum of man's work...
...Maybe it is sex Jesus...
...The faithful are vulnerable to the mockery of the world As Joseph is As Leopold Bloom is in his essentially chaste marriage to the adulterous Molly Joyce even plays these two cuckolds off against each other "Qui vous a mis dans cettefichue position1*" Stephen Dedalus idly remembers a Frenchjoke "C'est lepigeon, Joseph " Similarly, Buck Mulligan, Stephen's blaspheming companion, put the implausibility of Jesus' origins into the "Ballad of the Joking Jesus " I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard My mother's a jew, my father's a bird With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree, So here's to disciples and Calvary Ulysses is notoriously the chronicle of the exceedingly ordinary events of that June day in 1904 (the actual day Joyce met his wife Nora) Joyce's mock epic gives to the humblest of human activities and the humblest of lives the solemnity of ritual In both Joyce and die story of Joseph, what is most characteristically human depends on memory and the tangible presence of the past That depth of time and experience finally depends on simple, or not so simple, human constancy and love...
...Indeed, the popular imagination finds it hard to separate Joseph from the idea of cuckoldry, even if he has been cuckolded by the Progenitor of us all In the traditional English "Cherry Tree Carol," Joseph emerges as a very human figure indeed...
...he took his wife, but knew her not until she had borne a son...
...Paternity may be a legal fiction," Stephen Dedalus further speculates...
...We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we " I ventured to express these aboriginal feelings to my less mystically inclined roommate...
...But as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, 'Joseph, son of David, do not fear ...'") Not a wicked or unfriendly laugh...
...Questions about the Virgin Birth and Mary and Joseph's chaste marriage are outside the competence of scholarly investigation, Meier wmningly notes...
...From the only 13 begetter to the countless begotten, every human father is a standin...
...Joseph's fate, like Leopold Bloom's, is especially suggestive...
...How we make sense of this paragon of fatherhood who yet is not a father in the strict definition of the word tells us something about the nature of God as well as our own destiny...
...Thou art all their daddies, Theodore...
...In Matthew, for example, it is Joseph, not Mary, who receives the Annunciation of Jesus' birth...
...Joseph, as Joyce might say, seems utterly superfluous in the central drama of the Incarnation...
...Life's betrayals cannot be remedied through human mastery and manipulation Bloom, the doting family man, knows that self-sufficiency is an illusion Love puts an end to self-sufficiency...
...Stephen Dedalus finds that mystical estate, that spiritual legacy, in the advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, the uncommon common man Joyce makes the unlikely hero of his novel...
...Fatherhood is emblematic of the power and paradoxes of creation...
...This man of humble, everyday routine, this man of silent performance of duty, of honest righteousness and of manly piety, this man who was charged with protecting the grace of God in its embodied life...
...Understanding what fatherhood's "modicum of man's work" entails is not a straightforward proposition...
...At least that's what Joseph appears to have done...
...And if read broadly, Joseph's consternation over Mary's seeming procreative autonomy is the consternation of every man over a woman's procreative near self-sufficiency...
...How would Saint Joseph handle this9 Patiently, I know...
...Joyce, as is well known, imbued his fiction with the kind of spiritual revelations or "epiphanies" he no longer found compelling in Irish Catholicism...
...They are most fully themselves, and their stories most open to a transcendent reality, when they are least self-regarding...
...Who is a father and who a son is not at all easy to unravel...
...That's transubstantiation for you1) Fatherhood is an artifice in a way motherhood never can be In some sense it really is a matter of apostolic succession, a leap of faith—is that why we call God the Father Almighty...
...When will the two-year-old stop throwing her dinner dishes across the kitchen and taking off PAUL BAUMANN is the associate editor o/Commonweal This essay has been adapted from A Tremor of Bliss Contemporary Writers on the Saints, edited by Paul Elie Copyright 1994 © by Paul Baumann Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company her soiled diaper in the living room...
...We were, after all, urged 12 on to self-fufillment as a generational, even constitutional duty...
...For sirs," Stephen Dedalus puts it, sounding uncannily like Pope John Paul II, " . our lust is brief...
...Even the incarnated God needed one ut to return, for the moment, to my wife and me in our bourgeois bedroom...
...Understandably, he "resolved to divorce her quietly...
...Certain aspects of reality can only be captured in narrative and storytelling...
...O then bespoke Joseph, With answer most unkind, "Let him pluck thee a cherry That brought thee now with child...
Vol. 121 • December 1994 • No. 22
