James Joyce’s Debt of Love

On this Bloomsday, let me tell you a love story. I know, I know, (in the words of John Gordon) “novels in which love is the answer are a dime a dozen, usually the opposite of the kind of sinuous, irony-heavy productions we expect from modernist authors.” But Ulysses’ love story comes sans sentimentality, for, as Stephen Dedalus says in a telegram to his mocker Buck Mulligan, “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.”

Maybe against your better judgment, you’ve bet on the difficult good of Joyce’s signature prose (I will not call it purple unless you hear in that word truly royal, a majestic artistic articulation more regal than the “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” with which the novel opens). Maybe you’ve paid to Charon, along with the $3.33 plus tax of your used paperback edition, the debt of sustained, soulful attention, and descended to the depths of this long Dublin day, not beleaguered by the blind alleys of the modern labyrinth that entrap protagonist Stephen Dedalus.

But then you meet this portrait of the artist as a young man in action and are put off by his pedantry and malarkey. It may help to know that even the author of Ulysses sympathizes with your antipathy, although his love for this nerve-testing son of a drunkard keeps him from giving up on the lad just yet. Joyce confessed to his friend Frank Budgen that the wandering advertiser Leopold Bloom was a readier muse than his spiritual son Stephen because the latter “has a shape that can’t be changed.”

I beg you, though, just once, dear reader, on this longest Dublin day, let’s leave Bloom’s protean charms aside and see if Stephen—whose mother loves him madly from beyond the grave—shows any capacity for conversion or if he really, after all, can’t be changed. What, if anything, could morph the soul of a hopeless case sap like Stephen Dedalus?

From beginning to end, Stephen suffers “agenbite of inwit” (or qualms of conscience) over the way he treated his dying mother. Only the hardest of hearts wouldn’t chafe at Stephen’s meanness to Mrs. Dedalus; his unwillingness to kneel at her deathbed grates against the undying truth that (as Stephen’s friend Cranly put it) a mother’s love is the “only true thing in life.” The harm he did to his mother infects even his strident theory on Shakespeare. Early in the novel, in Dublin’s National Library, Dedalus alleges an alienated playwright whose great works were born of the wounds left by sexual usurpation and betrayal, arguing that the bard had “no truant memory” when it came to past offenses (perceived or real).

We see that Stephen’s memory dies slowly, too. Ruminating on the author of Hamlet, he wonders whether “any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?” As John Gordon puts it, “a corollary question might have been: ‘Will any man ever love anyone if he has not loved his mother?’”, a question that has haunted Stephen since the last days of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when in his journal the young Dedalus jots that:

Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen.

Unless you realize that the promethean Stephen at the end of Portrait is portrayed ironically—as an arrogant upstart rather than a revolutionary artist who, having unshackled himself from the strictures of Church and country, has the actual ability to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” it can be hard to enter Ulysses sympathetically; the truths Joyce tells us through Stephen arrive indirectly, through irony. See how the apprentice-apostate can’t help but profess his faith in Mrs. Dedalus’s prayer that her boy might both know and feel—for, as Pascal knew well, “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”

Mother’s love doesn’t leave off. In the underworld episode of “Circe” Mrs. Dedalus, with a “green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth” (in commemoration of her death by cancer) reminds Stephen that though he failed to kneel as she bid him, “You sang that song to me. Love’s bitter mystery.” Her son pleads that she “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.” Unsurprisingly, given humanity’s talent for errors (what Joyce would call “portals of discovery”), the identification of that “word known to all men” has been a point of no small contention for over one hundred years.

In Sensational Joyce (July 1, 2025), seasoned critic John Gordon makes the case that “Stephen is asking for knowledge that, on one level, he already has.” Convincingly, he links Stephen’s “Tell me . . . mother” with the traditional “Tell me, Muse” of The Odyssey, suggesting that the son’s address is “of the nature of an invocation, which is to say a request to be given information with which the speaker simultaneously reveals his familiarity and has some idea of the answer he will receive.”

More: “Perhaps they are asked because the answer is known. One purpose served by such exchanges, like those of the Mass or catechism, is affirmation.” That “on one level” evokes “notional” versus “real” knowledge, a distinction found not in Aquinas but in St. John Henry Newman. “’Nobody,” Joyce insists, “has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church.”

In Grammar of Assent, Newman notes that “Real apprehension, then, may be pronounced stronger than notional, because things, which are its objects, are confessedly more impressive and affective than notions, which are the objects of notional. Experiences and their images strike and occupy the mind, as abstractions and their combinations do not.” Maybe another way of getting at the bitter “afterwit” (Stephen’s word for L’esprit de l’escalier) of love’s deracinated mystery is that Stephen possesses a very fine notion of—but lacks real knowledge of—love.

Doubting his own theory of Shakespeare’s fraught erotic triangles, Stephen asks himself, “Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men,” and he chases this answer with a passage from Aquinas (“Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original”): “Amor vero alquid alicuid alcui bonum vult” where, in Summa Contra Gentiles, the Angelic Doctor defines true love as the act of genuinely wishing the good of another.

Stephen’s familiarity with Aquinas’s notional definition is not inconsequential. If the definition does not infuse love into his soul, intellectual clarity can illumine the search for charity. Ask yourself, “Now, come on, really, do I wish the good of any other, truly?” and see if it doesn’t immediately incite you to get your will in order.

Because the explicit answer of “Love, yes. Word known to all men” appears only in the 1984 Gabler edition of Ulysses, and the editorial addition has its doubters, we would do well to look elsewhere, also, for hints that love is in fact the answer. When, much later, lost in “Circe,” Stephen asks his mother the word known to all men, she gives a real rather than a notional answer: “Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee?” she asks, “Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is all-powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual and forty days’ indulgence. Repent, Stephen.”

Here she stirs from his “no truant memory” experiential examples of love, images that “strike and occupy the mind,” in a manner that makes them “more impressive and affective than notions.” This amalgamation of visceral memories and love’s hard command that he repent elicits from Stephen a disturbed and disturbing declaration: “The ghoul!” he cries, morphing her image instead of subjecting himself to the metamorphoses of charity: “Hyena!”

But her love is undeterred, and her desire to make that love real goes beyond memories into solicitations for his future welfare: “I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that boiled rice every night after your brainwork. Years and years I loved you, O, my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb.”

Her command that he repent, combined with the reality of that boiled rice, serves up love on a dish that is simultaneously all-demanding-otherworldly and incarnate in every grain of boiled rice. If Stephen is to know no bitter aftertaste as he eats the delivered dish, he’ll need to do whatever she tells him, repentance rooting out remorse.

There is no afterwit in the afterlife, no after-the-fact invention of the perfect reply to some dilemma that put you on the spot when you were lost in the labyrinth of life. For all his witty theories of Hamlet and the ghost of his father, the apparition of his mother contains the heart of the heart of Ulysses’ story, the day’s most undeniable proof of “what the heart is and what it feels. Amen.”

Nobody (one of Odysseus’ aliases, incidentally, “Nobody,” the protagonist’s clever comeback when the Cyclops solicits his injurer’s identity) will ever love anybody if he has not loved his Mater Misericordiae. (I wanted you not to wholly hate Stephen, but in her mercy, Mrs. Dedalus literally descends into hell, appearing to her son during his infernal visit to a brothel, revealing, ironically, the sentimental love a man will seek if he fails to first pay the beautiful debt by which amor verus is born).