Marguerite Alacoque was born in 1647 in Burgundy and became
an intensely pious child. As a teenager, after four years of
debilitating rheumatic fever, she made a vow to the Virgin
Mary (whose name she added to her baptismal name) that she
would become a nun, at which point she is said to have
immediately recovered her health. Several years after that,
she had a vision in which Christ urged her to fulfill her vow,
telling her that his heart was full of love for her and taking
that heart out of his chest and placing it in hers. In 1671
she entered a convent run by the Order of the Visitation of
Holy Mary, and over the next few years she continued to have
visions of the Sacred Heart. Her superiors slowly came to
accept her visions as authentic, and after her death in 1690
the Jesuits
cultivated her devotion to the Sacred Heart, leading to
official church recognition in the late 18th century. In 1824
Pope Leo XII declared Sister Margaret Mary to be Venerable.
Pope Pius IX beatified her (hence Mulligan's "Blessed") in
1864, and in 1920 she was canonized (made a Saint) by Pope
Benedict XV.
Alacoque's devotional practice became more popular in Ireland
than in any other European country, with the possible
exception of France. In an article titled "The Sentence That
Makes Stephen Dedalus Smash the Lamp," Colby Quarterly
22.2 (June 1986): 88-92, Frederick K. Lang observes that "Ten
other countries would follow suit, but Ireland was apparently
the first to dedicate, or, more properly, consecrate itself to
the Sacred Heart" (90). Joyce, he notes, referred in a 23
October 1922 letter to "the Sacred Heart to whom Ireland is
dedicated" (Letters 1.191). The reasons for the Irish
enthusiasm are obscure, but it was undoubtedly stimulated by
an influential devotional magazine called The Irish
Messenger of the Sacred Heart which the
abstinence-promoting Jesuit priest James Cullen began
publishing in 1888. In Circe Davy
Stephens hawks copies of "Messenger of the Sacred
Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint
Patrick's Day supplement. Containing the new addresses of all
the cuckolds in Dublin."
In the Dubliners story "Eveline," a "coloured print
of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque" hangs
on a wall in Eveline's home. In exchange for believers
consecrating their lives to the Sacred Heart, Jesus supposedly
made them twelve "promises," one of which was to bless any
home in which an image of the Sacred Heart was displayed. So
popular was this devotion that most Irish Catholic homes in
1904 appear to have contained Sacred Heart prints. It is clear
that Bloom has encountered these icons on people's walls,
because when he looks at a carved version in the cemetery he
thinks that the heart should be turned sideways and painted
red:
The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart
on his sleeve. Ought to be sideways and red it should be
painted like a real heart. Ireland was dedicated to it
or whatever that. Seems anything but pleased. Why this
infliction? Would birds come then and peck like the boy with
the basket of fruit but he said no because they ought to have
been afraid of the boy. Apollo that was.
ยง Jesus's
appearance of being "
anything but pleased" carries
iconographic significance. Lang quotes from
Devotions to the
Sacred Heart, a book published in Dublin in 1841 that
Joyce almost certainly knew: "From the greater number [of
humankind] I receive ingratitude, contempt, irreverence,
sacrilege, and indifference... but what is still more afflicting
is, that I receive these insults from hearts which are
peculiarly consecrated to my service
" (90).
But Bloom is blissfully ignorant of this implied reproach. With
the words "
Heart on his sleeve," he connects the sense of
"infliction" to an unrelated literary work, Shakespeare's
Othello.
In that play's opening scene Iago assures Roderigo that his
devotion to Othello is nothing but a false front disguising
vengeful egoism:
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end;
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.
(58-65)
By inverting God's "I am what I am" from the book of Exodus,
Iago says not only that his inner nature belies his outward
appearance, but also that he is a kind of Satanic anti-God. This
pithy self-definition coheres with his anti-Christian ethics.
The kind of mutual devotion exemplified by Jesus and Sister
Margaret Mary is anathema to him. Opening up his emotions in
that way, he says, would be like hanging his heart on his arm
for birds to tear at. Having pulled this alternate image of an
exposed heart from his memory, Bloom appears to lean more to
Shakespearean skepticism than to Catholic religiosity. He
projects something like Iago's self-protective scorn onto the
carved face in the graveyard. Jesus, he imagines, does not much
like having his chest wall opened up for females to fawn over.
In fact, he finds it seriously annoying.
The thought of birds pecking at hearts leads him into yet
another irreverent association. The ancient Greek painter Zeuxis
(ca. 464-ca. 400 BCE) was reputed to have painted some grapes
with such perfect
trompe l'oeil realism that birds flew
at the canvas trying to eat them. In his
Natural History
Pliny the Elder recorded this anecdote along with two others.
Zeuxis, he wrote, painted his grapes as part of a competition
with Parrhasius and admitted defeat when he asked Parrhasius to
pull the curtain in front of his painting, only to be told that
the curtain
was the painting. Gifford notes the second
story: "Zeuxis subsequently painted a child carrying grapes and
when birds flew to the fruit with the same frankness as before,
he strode up to the picture in anger with it and said, 'I have
painted the grapes better than the child, as if I had made a
success of that as well, the birds would inevitably have been
afraid of it'" (35.36). Clearly this is the source of Bloom's
thoughts about an unnamed boy: "
Would birds come then and
peck like the boy with the basket of fruit but he said no
because they ought to have been afraid of the boy."
The folds of Joyce's sentences contain one final allusion,
though this one does not figure in Bloom's consciousness. He
thinks, "
Apollo that was," mixing Zeuxis up with Apelles,
another Greek painter famed for realism, and mixing the man
Apelles up with the god Apollo. These minor mistakes would be
unremarkable were it not for a certain tongue-twisting rhyme
that uses both names. Slote cites Fritz Senn's observation that,
in a 15 September 1935 letter to his daughter Lucia, Joyce
referred to some doggerel lines familiar to Italian children:
Apelle, figlio di Apollo,
Fece una palla di pelle di pollo,
E tutti i pesci vennero a galla
Per mangiare la palla di pelle di pollo
Fatta da Apelle, figlio di Apollo.
(Apelle, the son of Apollo,
Made a ball of chicken skin
And all the fish came to the surface
To eat the ball of chicken skin,
Made by Apelle, the son of Apollo.)
Here the reader's hunt for relevant contexts trails off into
delightfully silly wordplay that Joyce could hardly have
expected English speakers to know and that does not come close
to commenting on the cult of the Sacred Heart (or anything
else in Ulysses, for that matter), though it does
continue Shakespeare's theme of animals pecking at flesh. Some
of his allusions, it seems, are games that the author is
playing only with himself, in chains of verbal, visual, and
conceptual association that the reader can scarcely begin to
follow. A spectacularly accelerating version of the children's
rhyme can be heard in the video displayed here.
