James and Joyce

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UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA FACULDADE DE LETRAS

James and Joyce

Maria Rita Antunes Botelho Furtado

Orientador: Professor Doutor Miguel Bénard da Costa Tamen

Tese especialmente elaborada para obtenção do grau de Doutor em Teoria da Literatura

2021

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UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA FACULDADE DE LETRAS

James and Joyce

Maria Rita Antunes Botelho Furtado

Orientador: Professor Doutor Miguel Bénard da Costa Tamen

Tese especialmente elaborada para obtenção do grau de Doutor em Teoria da Literatura

Júri:

Presidente: Prof. Doutora Maria Cristina de Castro Maia de Sousa Pimentel, Professora Catedrática e Directora da Área de Literaturas, Artes e Culturas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Vogais:

– Prof. Doutor Brett Ryan Bourbon, Associate Professor of the University of Dallas – Estados Unidos da América (1.º Arguente);

– Prof. Doutor António Maria Maciel de Castro Feijó, Professor Catedrático da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (2.º Arguente);

– Prof. Doutor Jorge Vaz de Carvalho, Professor Auxiliar da Faculdade de Ciências Humanas da Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Vogal);

– Prof. Doutor João Ricardo Raposo Figueiredo, Professor Auxiliar da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (Vogal);

– Doutor Miguel Bénard da Costa Tamen, Professor Catedrático da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (Orientador)

Esta tese teve o apoio da Universidade de Lisboa através de uma Bolsa de Apoio ao Doutoramento (BD2015)

2021

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To my parents

To my sister

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Acknowledgements

First, I must thank Professor Miguel Tamen, who has always greatly influenced my work. Not only for having introduced me to William James back in my undergraduate years but, mostly, for having always encouraged me to pursue this endeavour, regardless of the many imponderable events that ended up occurring. For this, and for his kind generosity, I shall always be grateful.

To Professor António Feijó, I owe my interest in James Joyce. Yet, most of all, I am thankful for every conversation he kindly agreed to have had with me, both on the book Irishmen claim can drive you to insanity and on my academic work in general. Thank you so much.

Professor João Figueiredo is one of the people most responsible for my having kept studying literature. I shall never forget the kind words he told me after class one day, and to which he one way or another kept returning. For that, I am very thankful.

I must also thank the entire Programme in Literary Theory, where I began to learn how to read. The Programme’s vast and varied offer of seminars, along with the subjects and Professors it allows us to be acquainted with, is something to be treasured. In this regard, I am most grateful for having had the opportunity to study with Professor Brett Bourbon.

I must also thank the University of Lisbon for the fellowship granted to me to support my Ph.D. It was this that allowed me to focus more on what I truly wanted to write. Thank you.

My friends have always supported me. I am lucky to have made (and kept) so many during this whole process. Thank you Ana Cláudia Santos, Ana Ferraria, Inês Rosa, Jorge Almeida, Luís Borges, and Teresa Gonçalves. And thank you so much Joana Merim, Maria Sequeira Mendes, Nuno Amado, and Ariadne Nunes, who read parts or entire chapters of this thesis. How you supported me cannot be put into words, and I owe you much more than dinner.

I am also very grateful to Harvey Wiltshire for having proofread this thesis attentively.

Moreover, his encouraging comments were much appreciated. I must also thank Nuno Quintas for all his encouragement and last-minute support with formatting and many other proofreading issues;

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I am very thankful to have numbers on these pages. Thanks are also due to Alexandra Oliveira and João Nuno Silva for their help with parallax. And finally, धन्यवादः(dhan’yavādaḥ) Luke Jordan, for the Upanishads and much more.

I am also lucky to have many friends who, despite not always getting what I was doing spending time at libraries, supported me from day one and somehow knew the right way of asking how the work was going: Ana Pais, Cátia Prazeres, Sérgio Esperancinha, Marisa Falcón, Sara Carvalho, Sara Magno, Sónia Jesus, Tito Ferreira, Anita Teófilo, Rui Romão, Joana Bernardo, Ricardo Pinela, Edna Costa, Maria João Fialho, Diogo Leôncio, Tomás Costa Ramos, Gonçalo Gama Pinto, Pedro Gomes, Miguel Almeida, Bárbara Soares, Diana Tarré, and Inês Pais. It is a long list. I am that lucky.

The support of my whole family has been crucial. I am very thankful to my grandmothers, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, and my brother-in-law Mateus Granado, as well as João Carlos Nunes Corrêa and Richard Nicholas. Thank you just for listening.

David has been around since the inception of my final idea for this work, and he put up with my reading Joyce’s jokes aloud. There is not much that can beat this. Thank you for sticking around and for listening to every rant and the occasional enthusiastic speech.

My parents and my sister are my pillars. To them, I dedicate this work. I could not have written a single line of this thesis without their love and support, and no acknowledgement can ever do justice to the importance they have in my life. I am forever grateful for every minute we ever spent and will spend together.

Finally, I must thank Ana Teresa Vale.

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Abstract

In this thesis, we will look into a work of philosophy and a work of literature as allies when it comes to discussing particular issues, namely self-knowledge. Thus, the idea that we are self-reliant when it comes to knowing ourselves will be disproven through the analysis of James Joyce’s Ulysses and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. In what follows, we will argue that despite people understanding each other or not, the two chosen authors show us that it is only through our interactions with others and our trying to comprehend them that we can ever hope to understand ourselves. However, James and Joyce do not provide us with a recipe that — should we follow it through — will inevitably lead us to achieve self-knowledge. Instead, we have two

pseudo-solutions, for none of their ways of thinking about this offers any guarantee of success.

However, both James and Joyce indicate that there is no other way of knowing oneself than the one each of them presents. The risk we take is misunderstandings or even total blindness when it comes to comprehending others. Precise formulas for knowing oneself are inexistent, and all that we can do is either settle or keep going, hoping for the best possible result.

Keywords

James — Joyce — Sources — Experience — Metempsychosis — Autonomy — Solipsism — Other Minds — Self-Knowledge — Toleration — Blindness — Misunderstandings

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Resumo

Nesta tese, iremos ler um texto filosófico e um texto literário, considerando-os aliados quando se trata de discutir determinados assuntos, nomeadamente questões de autoconhecimento. Assim, a ideia de que somos auto-suficientes quando se trata de nos conhecermos a nós próprios será contestada através da análise de Ulysses, de James Joyce, e de The Varieties of Religious

Experience, de William James. No decurso desta tese, argumentaremos que independentemente de as pessoas se compreenderem umas às outras ou não, os dois autores escolhidos mostram-nos que é apenas através das nossas interacções com outras pessoas, bem como das nossas tentativas no sentido de as percebermos, que podemos esperar sequer esperar conhecermo-nos a nós próprios.

Porém, James e Joyce não nos oferecem uma receita que, caso a sigamos com atenção, nos leva inevitavelmente ao auto-conhecimento. Em vez disso, o que ambos nos apresentam são pseudo- soluções, já que nenhum dos modos como se debruçam acerca deste assunto oferece qualquer garantia de sucesso. Ainda assim, tanto James como Joyce indicam que não há outra forma de nos conhecermos a nós próprios que não aquela que cada um apresenta. O risco que corremos implica mal-entendidos ou até uma cegueira total quando se trata de compreender os outros. Apesar de fórmulas precisas que levem ao auto-conhecimento serem inexistentes, tudo o que podemos fazer é resignar-nos ou continuar em frente, na esperança de chegar ao melhor resultado possível.

Palavras-chave

James — Joyce — Fontes — Experiência — Metempsicose — Autonomia — Solipsismo — Outras Mentes — Autoconhecimento — Tolerância — Cegueira — Mal-entendidos

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List of Abbreviations

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — Portrait Essays in Radical Empiricism — Empiricism James Joyce — JJ

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings — Blindness Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth — Pragmatism The Anxiety of Influence — Influence

The Consciousness of James Joyce — Consciousness

The Correspondence of William James: April 1908-August 1910, vol. 12. — Correspondence The Principles of Psychology — Principles

The Varieties of Religious Experience — TVRE The Will to Believe — WB

Ulysses — U

Ulysses on the Liffey — Liffey Writings 1902-1910 — Writings

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The subjective world is also an intersubjective world, the world of “I” and “you”, and drawing a line between the two isn’t easy because others are of us.

Siri Hustvedt

“If I am not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”

And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were the same age as herself to see if she could have been changed to any of them.

Lewis Carroll

And nothing here shows me the image of myself.

A. R. Ammons

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Introduction

Imagine living in a world where people need each other in order to know themselves, but also one in which no one fully comprehends one another. We borrow a book simply because we enjoy reading about the History of Europe and our friend who lends it to us assumes that we want to read it because we are planning a trip to the main historical places of five countries. That was, after all, why our friend read that book. James Joyce’s characters go about their lives navigating this type of misunderstanding. What we see in Ulysses is, precisely, people repeatedly misapprehending each other’s words and intentions. However, not understanding one another can derive from the idea that, if we do not share the same experiences, we should avoid making assumptions because we can never truly know what another person is thinking. What saves us from absolute chaos is tolerance; a type of tolerance that comes from knowing that at least in this respect — that of not sharing and therefore not understanding the experiences of other people — we are all in the same boat. With this idea of tolerance in mind, we now arrive in the world of William James, to the extent that his seminal work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, shows him attempting to deal with this problem.

That being said, this essay takes as its starting point the discussion of the role other people play when it comes to knowing oneself. That other people not only exist but also have thoughts and an identity of their own is a given. Furthermore, other people’s thoughts have a way of influencing our own and so, in this work, two distinct ways of dealing with this idea will be explored: we can either assume that everyone’s thoughts (and identity) are the result of our absorbing (knowingly or unknowingly) the thoughts of others, or we can claim that there is something unique about who we are, something that we have to cling to in order to recognise ourselves, for it defines us. These represent two ways of trying to solve some kind of identity crisis. However, they could lead to the same conclusion: either we are a particular amalgamation of other people’s thoughts, or we are that which cannot be found anywhere else. Yet, claiming that our identity is the result of a particular

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amalgamation of thoughts is akin to saying that our identity is unique, for no two amalgamations are the same. What interests me, then, is not to distinguish between these two notions but rather to focus on two different ways of describing the process of achieving some degree of self-knowledge (whether or not there is such a thing as an effective process that leads to our knowing ourselves) which, nonetheless, depend on how we relate to other people. In Joyce’s case, what is proposed is that we look outside ourselves to try to assemble a puzzle made of pieces that come from different boxes; when it comes to James, what we have is a box filled with pieces that come from different puzzles and we have to discard those that do not correspond to the picture on the lid.

Considering Ulysses and The Varieties of Religious Experience, the first question to be asked is why use a work of fiction and another of philosophy to probe these questions of self-identity?

Moreover, this question is closely followed by another: why these two works in particular?

Initially, this dissertation was intended to examine Saint John of the Cross’s poem and commentary The Dark Night of the Soul, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace. Quickly, however, the project became preoccupied with the role one played in two types of peculiar or mystical experiences and with whether or not there was agency when it came to becoming one with God or with one’s memories. Sudden flashes of memory that could be triggered by eating cake and drinking tea were, in my view, not that different from the result that, should God be so kind as to bestow one with divine grace, came from an ascetic or spiritual life.

That result is freedom from suffering and profound knowledge of the self or of God. Either we learn that we are who we are and nothing else, or we learn who God is and our sense of self becomes intertwined with the true identity of the divine (or we hope that someday it does).

Regarding mystical or religious experience, William James was already to make a few appearances in this first project. And yet, reading Ulysses not only stuck with me for some reason, it also struck a chord with the ideas I had been having concerning The Varieties of Religious

Experience for a long time.

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Even in the first iteration of this project, there was already a nascent interest in identity, with the notion of losing oneself to God (a major Jamesian concern), or how our mundane lives

expressed and built our ideas on the self (a fundamental topic of both Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time). I found myself increasingly troubled, not so much by the role of memory as something that is triggered almost in spite of us, or even with the idea that — like Proust’s descriptions of flashes of memory — God could overwhelm us by taking over our identity or sense of self, but rather it was the notion that it is to others that we owe much of who we are and how we see ourselves that kept gaining strength in the back of my mind. Consequently, none of the texts that I previously wanted to explore seemed to engage with these ideas as much or as clearly as the two I ended up choosing.

After successive readings of Ulysses and The Varieties of Religious Experience, I began to find that there were subjects that both these works helped to clarify. They do not say the same things, but their worries are similar; and these include ways of looking in and ways of questioning the importance of what I say and of who I am. I can be so influenced by others that I risk losing what makes me unique or, on the other hand, the influence other people have over me can be such that my uniqueness can only be found in what I see in them. Either way, to know what it is that our profoundest selves consist of is not an easy task to undertake, and both James and Joyce show us a world where all that we can do with regards to this is our best, with no guarantee to ever be able to fully know our selves.

But why not look for examples taken from literature or philosophy exclusively? My answer is rather commonplace and it is another question: why not use both types of text? After all, the vocabulary that we use to write novels and philosophical texts is the same. It could be said, however, that the main difference is that in the case of the novel we are dealing with non-existent people (whether or not Joyce’s characters were inspired by his acquaintances is irrelevant to us), whereas on the other we are dealing with real people. Where James is concerned with helping himself and helping others, Joyce does not seem to intend to teach anyone anything. Yet, to not want to teach anything does not mean that a reader of Ulysses finishes the book without learning

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something. And this is the classical idea of the role of literature and philosophy: both teach us something about how to live, as Martha Nussbaum summarises:

For the Greeks of the fifth and early fourth centuries B.C., there were not two separate sets of questions in the area of human choice and action, aesthetic questions and moral-philosophical questions, to be studied and written about by mutually detached colleagues in different departments. Instead, dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical inquiry in ethics were both typically framed by, seen as ways of pursuing, a single and general question:

namely, how human beings should live. (15)

Nussbaum also notes that Plato’s resistance, in the Republic, to poetry and poets did not relate to what literature could do, but rather with how it did it. For Plato, there was a correct way of teaching, and that did not include the lies and fictions perpetrated by literature. Plato’s problem was that there were correct forms for particular teachings, and the form used by poets was always, regardless of what was being taught, the wrong one. Plato did not see “forms of writing (…) as vessels into which different contents could be indifferently poured; form was itself a statement, a content” (15) and a good person cannot be affected by the lies of poetry. Aristotle, however, “defends the claim of tragedy to tell the truth; and his own ethical view (…) is close to views that can be found in the tragedies” (18). Regardless of Aristotle having written philosophical works and not tragedies, this should not diminish his insight concerning these matters. And what I am inclined towards is that we learn, from infancy, through storytelling, as much as we still do in adulthood, and as much as we learn from reading any philosophical work. After all, the vocabulary we use is the same, whether the subjects talked about are based on real people or made-up characters.

A great argument for reading philosophy and literature together can also be found in James’s

“The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, that is quoted by Nussbaum:

the philosopher is just like the rest of us non-philosophers, so far as we are just and

sympathetic instinctively, and so far as we are open to the voice of complaint. His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of the best kind of statesman at the present day. His books upon ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than

dogmatic, — I mean with novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform. (300)

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As Nussbaum notes, James is asking for an alliance between philosophy and literature, not a

surrender. This alliance should serve our questioning the world, human nature, personal inquiry, and any kind of deep questions. Precisely because it is not a dogmatic novel, one that imposes a

moralistic and final worldview, Ulysses could have served James in his search for an alliance. And it is as allies that I intend to read James and Joyce side-by-side.

Nussbaum helps my undertaking further, claiming that often literature and philosophy are not only allies but they complete each other in the task of helping us understand more about the world:

if the enterprise of moral philosophy is understood as we have understood it, as a pursuit of truth in all its forms, requiring a deep sympathetic investigation of all major ethical

alternatives and the comparison of each with our active sense of life, then moral philosophy requires (…) literary texts, and the experience of loving and attentive novel-reading, for its own completion. This involves, clearly, an expansion and reconstruction of what moral philosophy has for a long time been taken to be and to include. (26-27)

Furthermore, the

dialectical approach to works of literature [does not] convert them from what they are into systematic treatises, ignoring in the process their formal features and their mysterious, various, and complex content. It is, in fact, just this that we wish to preserve and to bring into philosophy — which means, for us, just the pursuit of truth, and which therefore must become various and mysterious and unsystematic if, and insofar as, the truth is so. The very qualities that make the novels so unlike dogmatic abstract treatises are, for us, the source of their philosophical interest. (29)

Agreeing with Nussbaum, philosophy and literature can work together. They bring us closer both to understanding each type of text and to an understanding of particular aspects of human life,

especially — as will be here the case — the problem of how to know oneself. In that regard, James and Joyce are unlikely allies, but allies nonetheless. If on the one hand, we have some of the most organised and clear prose on human and religious experience, on the other we are put before the often chaotic workings of the human mind. Even though Ulysses and The Varieties of Religious Experience do not seem, at first, to deal with the same type of problems, they help clarify particular

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issues concerning the perception of the self. Still, throughout this work, I will examine, in detail, the similarities between the two texts as a way to next look into their differences.

Accordingly, this essay will begin by addressing a very down-to-earth problem: a problem of sources. In the first chapter, I will point out what seems to be the most evident similarity between the two authors: both James and Joyce based their works on sources. They drank from the fountain of foreign thoughts and ideas and, using that which they found most useful, wrote Ulysses and The Varieties of Religious Experience. I will argue, however, that the way James and Joyce use sources begins to show not only how their minds function but also that something is revealed through a particular method of work. The use of sources, which is a first sign that one can get lost in emulation or that we try to push others and their different ideas away, will help us build the main foundations to the discussion of the subsequent problems.

Following the first chapter, in its role of introducing the major problems ahead, the second chapter will deal with James’s concept of pure experience and Joyce’s use of the Greek term

“metempsychosis”. Indeed, Joyce’s idea that we can never know who the thoughts that we think actually belong to will be fundamental for our analysis of Ulysses throughout the remainder of the dissertation. James’s definition of experience as a permanent work in progress will have the same importance in our reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience. Alongside the first chapter, this will also form the basis for the following two and, as such, will begin to point at the idea that solipsism and autonomy are crucial topics for both our authors.

With this in mind, the third problem will deal, precisely, with autonomy and solipsism. Both James and Joyce consider that no man is an island, but the reasons why they do are not the same. Be it as it may, our dependence on other people, from each author’s point of view, will be scrutinised, and a very important conundrum will be raised: if solipsism, or absolute/radical autonomy, is an impossibility, how can we show our uniqueness when it is something both authors wish for (even though in different ways and with different purposes)?

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In the end, this dissertation will turn to deal with exactly this idea of uniqueness and with who we are. Hence, the fourth and final problem will address our understanding of ourselves and each other. For both James and Joyce, other minds exist and are crucial for our sense of self.

However, misunderstandings or even not comprehending other people at all is a constant problem in Ulysses and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Even if Joyce may not be worried about real people, nor may he be concerned with helping anyone understand anything about real life, he still shows us that there is always a risk of not quite understanding what other people tell us. By contrast, James is very much worried about the consequences of our not understanding each other.

Yet, as he argues, we can only aim for the best, and, as we already saw in this introduction, the only way to do that is to become as tolerant as we can. Following this final problem, a short conclusion describes the overarching concern of this essay, by suggesting that, even though identity is

perceived as fluid for both James and Joyce, there is still a difference in the way they both perceive it as such, which has mainly to do with the limits of said fluidity.

In this description of the chapters, I am already pointing at the idea that the main purpose of this work is not to write a theoretical essay on the relation between philosophy and literature. Still, I intend to show, while analysing Ulysses and The Varieties of Religious Experience, that a novel and a philosophical treaty can, in fact, be allies. Furthermore, this essay is not concerned with

psychology, even though self-knowledge is also a psychological endeavour. What I am looking for is, then, to read two distinct texts and see what strikes me as fundamental to each of them, even though each author deals with each problem in different ways and reaches different conclusions.

Therefore, what differentiates James and Joyce is not a matter of different topics but rather a particular attitude when it comes to dealing with similar issues.

Finally, it is important to state that to analyse the work of an author is not to solve their problems for them. Recurrently, it is rather to point at those problems and see that their solution can often be either not sought after (as a particular problem of life is accepted as it is) or it can be regarded as unattainable. Considering one or the other, how we live and our ideas concerning

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particular aspects of life may very well determine how we write: we can become restless

philosophers or somewhat playful novelists. However it may be for both James and Joyce, what counts is oftentimes more the problem than the solution to it. After all, a problem solved is one less book to write, one less joke to tell, one less thing we can do with our minds.

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I — A Problem of Sources

When thinking about oneself, i.e. when attempting to answer the common question “who am I?”

one does not immediately think about a certain context or a particular framework: the place where we were born, along with all the people who have helped us grow, the ones we still get along with, those we forgot, the books we have read, the songs we came across, and so much more. However, if self-inquiry continues, thinking about such things becomes inevitable. Concerning our

psychological and physical traits, our thoughts, our likes and dislikes, and so on, it is difficult to draw a definite line between us and whatever is not us. As was explained in the introduction, my aim is not to figure out exactly what the “self” is (which sometimes seems like a quasi-mythical entity). Nevertheless, throughout this work, it will become clear that a first approach to that so- called “self” seems to rely on entities external to it, namely other selves. As such, this chapter will examine particular approaches to “other selves”¹. Accordingly, this chapter will demonstrate how William James’s and James Joyce’s approach to other people as sources on which to base their work allows us to differentiate their respective approaches to the self.

Regarding “other selves”, this chapter will show that both William James and James Joyce considered — even if not overtly — self-inquiry to be dependent on one’s perception of other people, which becomes very clear when we examine how they used the sources on which their works are based. The use of textual or non-textual sources reveals, for both authors, a map to how they think about other people. However, the existence of other people represents different ways of thinking and so, even though their thoughts are alien to us, we will see that for both authors, they still work as gateways to one’s own mind. Therefore, this chapter will examine the different ways that each author used the sources they chose to base their works on and will point out what this use means not only for the structuring of those works but also for a revelation of both authors’

Weltanschauung (to use a term dear to James), i.e., to their worldview. Hence, the first steps

1 And not with the philosophical problem of “other minds”, which will be briefly addressed in the final chapter.

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towards proving that the way James and Joyce either unveil or seem to hide their sources is revelatory not only of each authors’ method but also of a certain way of life, based on a particular form of self-inquiry.

Whilst the problems relating to self-enquiry and “other minds” will be explored in subsequent chapters, it is important to begin as precisely as possible by pointing out the fact that both authors used a great variety of sources² — for not only James but also Joyce are well-known for having made use of other people’s writings, thoughts, dreams and experiences (to name but a few) to write their works, which means that the kind of sources used are almost as numberless as the sources themselves. However, as noted, to carry out our undertaking it is crucial to scrutinise how James and Joyce positioned themselves before those very sources. To that end, I will analyse a series of passages, principally from James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and Joyce’s Ulysses, to determine how, in both texts, the sources the authors invoke were used to express a particular viewpoint regarding their identity, even if none of them openly approaches that subject.

Ultimately, as was stated above, this will reveal a form of self-inquiry; an effort towards knowing oneself that is deeply rooted in the idea that to do so, one must know, try to know, or merely acknowledge the existence of other people.

I will begin with an analysis of a selection of the lectures that constitute William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and one of his most famous essays, “The Will to Believe”. In both these works, James dedicates a large number of pages to the legitimisation of religious beliefs in a tone which, more often than not, sounds condescending. As an example, “The Will to Believe”, an essay essentially about every person’s freedom to hold the belief that they find most appealing, begins by supporting a person’s right to adopt a religion despite what their intellect tells them:

to show you that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects, I have brought with me tonight something like a sermon on justification by faith to read to you, --I mean an

2 In spite of considering it important to look at sources in order to draw my main argument, to embark on a study concerned with describing them is not the goal of this work. Even though certain sources, in particular, will be acknowledged and considered crucial for the understanding of the works that are being read here, the work of inventory has already been done, namely by Weldon Thornton in Allusions in Ulysses or, in the case of James’s text, by himself, for they are referenced throughout The Varieties of Religious Experience.

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essay in justification of faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced. “The Will to Believe”, accordingly, is the title of my paper. (WB 1-2)

Here, James is defending people with a propensity for faith or religious beliefs, against those he calls “tough-minded” (a Jamesian expression from Pragmatism) intellectuals. Speaking to intellectuals, and more than that, to intellectuals whose “intellect may not have been coerced”

regarding a “believing attitude in religious matters”, James feels the need to speak in favour of those whose minds do not admit a possibility other than that of religious belief. Before James could ever begin his major effort towards understanding these particular kinds of people, i.e., before having written The Varieties of Religious Experience, he somehow felt the need to justify and legitimise their existence. Or, as he put in a letter to Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse about “The Will to Believe”,

My essay hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals, because the total “evidence”, which only the race can draw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that faith could not be absolutely vetoed, as certain champions of “science” (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world. You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic point of view, you emphasize more the dangers;

while I, from my polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk. (Letters II 207-208)³

Arguing in favour of “the right to run [the] risk” of the dangers associated with having a religious belief is one of the things for which William James is most famous, and it is my intuition that the main reason why he so very heartily argued in favour of the “Right to Believe”⁴ is mainly to do with his assumption that anything capable of changing one’s behaviour⁵ comes from belief. However, all

3 In a letter to Dickinson S. Miller, James had already said virtually the same thing:

When a hypothesis is once a live one, one risks something in one’s practical relations towards truth and error, whichever of the three positions (affirmation, doubt, or negation) one may take up towards it. The individual himself is the only rightful chooser of his risk. Hence respectful toleration, as the only law that logic can lay down. (Letters II 49)

4 In the same letter, James claims that this should have been the title of his essay: “[‘The Will to Believe’] should have been called by the less unlucky title the Right to Believe” (Letters II 207)

5 As James puts it in “Philosophy”, “Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is but

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these beliefs do not regulate the same kind of behaviour, and there seems to be something to which only those who have faith/religious beliefs can get access. As something that is part of what makes us human, and as something that conditions one’s behaviour and even one’s access to knowledge in a special way, religious beliefs have to be considered valid, and not “absolutely vetoed”, as those

“champions of ‘science’” argue.

In spite of James considering that religion has the ability to help one widen one’s knowledge about the world, in the sense that it allows first-hand access to particular characteristics of human beings, this does not imply that James has any kind of religious belief himself. With this in mind, James’s use of the word ‘toleration’ in the letter quoted above appears to gain new significance. In

“The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness”, James contends that “nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves” (TVRE 109); to feel the need to legitimise whatever volition or tendency appears, therefore, to be an indication that the one who speaks may not share those same volitions or tendencies. Moreover, throughout The Varieties of Religious Experience, the reader encounters many little, often veiled, confessions regarding James’s incapacity for having religious beliefs or a true religious experience. Thus, the whole purpose of James’s Gifford-Lectures-turned-book seems to be an attempt to rationally figure out something that he cannot totally understand. Indeed, James ends up affirming as much when he asserts that

The only sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what I have striven to do (TVRE 325)

Consequently, as an outsider to “such emotions”, the sources James uses seem to be a way for him to grasp and define “religious experience”, but, unlike what happens in Joyce’s novel, in The

one step in the production of active habits. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought’s practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought’s significance.”

(TVRE 444) — The highlight is mine. This implies a very broad interpretation of the term, for it can include virtually anything, from religious beliefs to mundane beliefs concerning our day-to-day lives, such as believing that it will rain, therefore we should wear boots.

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Varieties of Religious Experience, these sources are in plain sight, working not only as scaffolding that sustains the text, but also (and mainly) as the bricks, paint, and roof tiles of the whole book, that is to say, as all that can clearly be seen when one looks at a finished edifice.⁶ Furthermore, James states that “‘religion’ cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name” (TVRE 26), which is why, as can be read in the preface, he explains that

In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among the extremer expressions of the religious temperament. (TVRE VII)

Such a pluralistic view of the topic James is studying in The Varieties of Religious

Experience, which comes from his pluralistic view of the universe⁷, justifies his use of sources and his emphasising of them. If James considers that the only way to get as close as possible to

whatever he deems to be the truth about a subject is to be acquainted with the many personal truths that contribute to forming the essence of that particular subject, he not only needs to use as many sources as possible, but he also ends up revealing his method of work. Likewise, the same can be said for when James attempts to make a specific topic clear to other people while, at the same time, trying to understand it himself. If to study a subject implies knowing (or attempting to know) as many particular or personal truths⁸ as possible, for they are what constitutes the essence of anything resembling an ultimate truth⁹, defining that subject ends up being, for James, totally dependent upon showing how one should study it. The method used for understanding something becomes apparent, in James’s case, in his explaining and thinking about that very subject. Otherwise, The Varieties of Religious Experience not only would not have the word “Varieties” in the title¹⁰ but also — and

6 This has to do with the type of text each author is writing, philosophy vs. literature. We looked into this in the introduction, and will again in the final remarks to this dissertation. However, it is also indicative of the way the mind of each author works, which is what matters the most here.

7 In the sense that, as James writes in a letter to Minot Judson Savage, “All that my pluralism contends for is that there is no where extant a complete gathering up of the universe in one focus, either of knowledge, power, or purpose. Something escapes, even from God.” (Correspondence vol. 12, 407) This idea will be crucial further ahead in this dissertation.

8 And experiences. As we will see in the following chapter.

9 An impossibility for, as we will keep seeing, James is not an absolutist.

10 See chapter III.

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these two are connected — it would not have as many examples and citations as it does. Therefore, the method chosen by James when it comes to dealing with his topic is a representation of how he feels about approaching complex issues such as religion, about which he cannot draw on his own experience (to go back to the idea of beliefs being in the origin of actions). This is clearly put at the beginning of “What Pragmatism Means”, when James describes the pragmatic method, which he has always endeavoured to use:

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. (…) [It] is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. (Pragmatism 28)

This, of course, can only lead to one conclusion, which is that pragmatism, as James himself puts it,

“does not stand for any special results. It is a method only” (Pragmatism 31). This method has to do with a search for those practical differences between certain notions, and to look for practical differences means to look for real experiences of real people for whom those particular notions may or may not result in different behaviours.¹¹ What comes of this is a tolerant disposition (let us recall the idea of toleration in James’s letter to L. T. Hobhouse), for any belief could be valid in the sense that, as long as it produced practical results in the lives of those who had it, it could be a piece of the puzzle that is a larger truth, which is what leads to James’s attempt to legitimise faith.

Still, notwithstanding James’s endeavour towards legitimising faith — which can be seen in his tolerance regarding the use of sources —, we will now see how his attitude concerning religious faith is biased and how James shows us that he is actually going beyond understanding what he cannot grasp. Ultimately, this results in James becoming inclined towards understanding how both his mind and his personality work.¹²

11 It then becomes clear that James’s concern is not trying to prove the veracity of religion in a scientific, precise, and irrefutable way, but rather to understand what religion causes (in terms of its fruits, as we will see in the next chapter) and how it does it.

12 This problem will be mainly dealt with in chapter IV. However, it will be often alluded to throughout this work, hence its appearing here.

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In “Religion and Neurology”, James asserts that “all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs (…) are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content” (TVRE 14), suggesting that there is nothing truly distinctive when it comes to religion and religious experience. Indeed, it is statements like this that first drew me to the arguments that this chapter presents. Both religion and religious experience are

psychological phenomena like any other, the implication is that religious love, religious happiness, and other religious feelings are merely different forms of love, happiness, and other feelings:

There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling plus a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in every religious experience without exception.

As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act. (TVRE 28)

When he asserts that there “seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw”, James is, of course, deflating an idea of religious emotion. This deflation, or rather this reduction of every religious phenomenon into mere psychological phenomena, is what allows James to find common ground between himself and that which is alien to him. Furthermore, doing this is what will enable him to reject the

differences he finds in other people and which he cannot comprehend, showing that the tolerance he proclaimed is, as its definition implies, not synonymous with any sort of blind acceptance. This ultimately biased view of religion, religious faith, and religious experience is the ultimate reason why we begin to see that he could never truly accept any of them.

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In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy¹³, Rainer Forst explains that a general concept of toleration

is marked by the following characteristics. First, it is essential for the concept of toleration that the tolerated beliefs or practices are considered to be objectionable and in an important sense wrong or bad. If this objection component (…) is missing, we do not speak of

“toleration” but of “indifference” or “affirmation.” Second, the objection component needs to be balanced by an acceptance component, which does not remove the negative judgment but gives certain positive reasons that trump the negative ones in the relevant context. (…) The said practices or beliefs are wrong, but not intolerably wrong. Third, the limits of toleration need to be specified. They lie at the point where there are reasons for rejection that are stronger than the reasons for acceptance (…); call this the rejection component.

(“Toleration”)

In James’s case, the rejection component, as Forst calls it, is very much present.¹⁴ James does not show indifference towards the problem he proposes to tackle in The Varieties of Religious

Experience, but at the same time he does not show full acceptance either. Therefore, and again going back to the letter James wrote to Hobhouse, James demonstrates tolerance towards this topic.

Moreover, as a way to complement this definition of “toleration”, but also to reinforce James’s position towards religion and religious experience, the entry on “Toleration” in the Oxford English Dictionary states that it is “the action or practice of tolerating or allowing what is not actually approved; forbearance, sufferance.” The idea that a tolerant attitude means a “practice of (…) allowing what is not actually approved”, is useful to better understand what I am aiming at.

This being said, James cannot help but make certain observations like calling Billy Brayy Bray (a preacher and one of his subjects) “an excellent little illiterate English evangelist” (TVRE 249) or remarking that Margaret Mary Alacoque — a mystic saint — is a

poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us (…) to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies. (TVRE 345)

13 This encyclopedia will serve our purposes on other occasions.

14 This will be examined in greater detail in chapter III.

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Indeed James does seem to reject what he cannot accept, and tolerance¹⁵, not acceptance, is certainly the fitting term to describe his feelings towards the subjects he recurred to and whom he considered to have had religious experiences relevant enough to be used as sources.

However, to make the fact that James is not studying religion from the inside even clearer, it is useful to quote the following, from “Mysticism”:

Whether my treatment of mystical states will shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand. (TVRE 379)

Here we see that James really does think of himself as mostly incapable of enjoying mystical states.

Even though his use of the adverb “almost” when talking about his inability to enter in mystical states himself could mean that he may sometimes, and given the right conditions (we infer) enjoy them, we know that for James this enjoyment occurred mainly through the use of recreational drugs, such as ether and nitrous oxide, which work as a replacement for mystical states provided by the Grace of God. As James continues,

nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to;

and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. (…)

Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide

intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of

consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. (…) No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. (…) Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. (…) Those who have ears to bear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.

(TVRE 388-389)

Here, we can see that James’s curiosity concerning different states of consciousness had mainly to do with an idea of gaining access to certain aspects of reality that were somehow concealed to him

15 The topic of toleration, though in a slightly different light, will come back in the final chapter.

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due to his not being able to have a true mystical experience (and by true we here mean religious)¹⁶. That inability did not mean, however, that whatever pseudo-experience he might have during an

“artificial mystic state of mind” would necessarily be false: for James, a religious mystical

experience and one that occurs during a drug-induced state of mind are not different in kind. Drugs could, in this sense, work as a shortcut to connect with the divine, to which everyone (and not just a few chosen ones who were lucky enough to be ingratiated) could have access. However, because the drug-induced mystical state is artificial, after the experience one goes back to being one’s original self, in spite of whatever truth may have been revealed (“this truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to”), and so the risk of one losing what one may consider to be one’s identity is negligible.¹⁷

To further explain, James’s definitions of mystical experiences will be explored; first as defined in lectures XVI and XVII, both titled “Mysticism”, and then by further examining what he had already claimed in lecture IX, “Conversion”. Above all, James’s search for a definition for terms such as “mysticism” or “religion” is crucial to understanding what is being achieved in The Varieties of Religious Experience. When looking into terms that he cannot fully comprehend, we see James’s struggle towards understanding those particular words, and we can even see him pointing at the reasons why those concepts are particularly difficult for him to grasp. One such example is James’s enumeration of what he considers to be the main characteristics of a mystical experience, which he describes as follows:

1. Ineffability. — The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to

16 Even though we are looking into James’s search for artificially induced mystical states of consciousness, throughout this work we will also look into other experiences James had, that were akin to religious mystical experiences. However, as we will see, James did not consider those experiences to have been religious, and they did not have the power to change his opinions and beliefs, which is fundamental when it comes to true religious mystical experiences.

17 This idea will be developed in chapter III.

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understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.

2. Noetic quality. — Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.

These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found. These are:

3. Transiency. — Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.

4. Passivity. — Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily

performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the

characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no significance for the subject’s usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states, strictly so called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, however, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures. (TVRE 380-382)

Regarding religious mystical experience, we had already seen that James’s “constitution shuts [him]

out from their enjoyment almost entirely” (TVRE 379). Here, however, we can begin to see what James meant above, by “almost”: James could have had a particular type of mystical experience by recurring to a particular type of drug. Like a true mystical experience, James’s experiences with ether were ineffable (“the subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words” — note the similarities between this and what is said in the previous quote, about James’s experience: “if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense”), had a noetic quality (again, both descriptions are similar, “although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge” and “my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken”), and finally, they were transient (once more, James’s experience fits the description:

“Mystical states cannot be sustained for long” and “This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the

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moment of coming to”). Moreover, considering that an experience with only the first two characteristics is already seen as mystical, James’s experience belongs to the wider group of

“mystical experiences”. Also, even though James actively pursued what he calls “artificial”

experiences, which could be a way of trying to gain more control an thus circumventing the final characteristic, “passivity”, even true religious experiences can be sought after (through such things as “fixing the attention” or “going through certain bodily performances”). Be it as it may, this is not a fundamental characteristic and James considers that an experience can be a mystical one even if it does not have it. Also, as we saw concerning religious emotions, James had explained that “there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract ‘religious emotion’ to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in every religious experience without exception.” (TVRE 28)

This being said, James also claims that he could only experience mystical states at second hand because his “own constitution shut [him] out from their enjoyment almost entirely” (TVRE 379). From statements such as this, we can see why a difference in degree is important: artificial mystical states of consciousness are not religious mystical states of consciousness. Otherwise, James would have had access to them, and even though we saw that there could be certain spiritual exercises that one could actively pursue to try to have a true religious mystical experience, it seems to me that “passivity” is one of the keywords here. Ultimately, for James, a true religious mystical experience depends on the idea of Grace, and God bestows grace on whomever he finds worthy, whether or not that person performed any sort of specific action¹⁸. The problem with this, it seems to me, is its irreversibility: when God is the agent of the experience — i.e., when the mystical experience comes from God — the changes that come with it, concerning not only one’s way of life but also one’s identity, are crucial and permanent.

18 A useful and concise definition of grace for us here is the one given by Robert Adams in the essay “Must God Create the Best?” Here, Adams defines grace as “a disposition to love which is not dependent on the merit of the person loved.” (324) Even though there could be particular differences when it comes to the understanding of grace for Catholic or Protestant Christians, for example, whether grace works intrinsically or extrinsically in a person or whether sacraments may or may not play a part in it, it is nonetheless something that is granted by God. Even for Catholics for whom grace could be sought after, through actions, however meritorious a person may be, it can still not be granted.

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In “Conversion”, James helps us understand what is meant by an irreversible or permanent change when he declares that a conversion is a transformation; this is why someone who converts to a particular religious faith goes through a modification that renders them not exactly the same as they were before. What happens is that a transformation occurs when something that used to occupy a peripheral area of our interests, now occupies its centre, which implies that it begins to condition our behaviour in a profound way. The implication of this is that “to say that a man is ‘converted’

means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take the central place, and that religious aims form the habitual center of his energy.” (TVRE 196) Using an example that James gives in the same lecture, even if a president enjoys camping during the holidays, from the moment he decides to live among nature and to cut wood every day, he is no longer a president, but a full-time camper:

The President of the United States when, with paddle, gun, and fishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness for a vacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The

presidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the official habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those who knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not “know him for the same person” if they saw him as the camper.

If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes a permanently transformed being.

Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a “transformation.” (TVRE 193-194)

What happens to this hypothetical president is, in fact, a kind of conversion (though not a religious one), for this experience had the ability to turn a president into someone whose whole life revolves around camping. However, in spite of James asserting that transformations of this kind may happen to anyone, he declares that not everyone is an ideal candidate for religious conversion, stating that

there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion: first, the present

incompleteness or wrongness, the ‘sin’ which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass. (TVRE 209)

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A useful example for understanding this idea is that of Saint Augustine, as used in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Like many saints, Augustine is part of the group of ideal candidates for conversion. According to how James understands his character in “The Divided Self”, Augustine’s feeling of incompleteness resides precisely in him being aware that he is sinning.

This awareness causes him pain and so, as James asserts, “Augustine’s psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a divided self which has never been surpassed.” (TVRE 171-172) As James explains, what Augustine was missing was a violent occurrence — i.e. the voice that he ended up hearing and which led him to read a passage from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans

— that might impel him to leave the lower tendencies behind. Even though James is interested in issues related to faith and religion, this interest does not seem to necessarily imply that he intends to reach any kind of “positive ideal”, or that he wants to run away from something that he considers sinful (let us recall that we claimed that toleration was that which underlay how James viewed his subjects, and that toleration ended up implying rejection). Furthermore, the thing to which James feels attached is not considered by him as something that he should escape from¹⁹, meaning that his wills are not divided, unlike those of Augustine.

It seems, therefore, that for James, the biggest problem of conversion and, consequently, of faith and religious mystical experiences is their characteristic of irreversibility, i.e., that which causes a president to become a full-time camper (as we saw, when we looked into James’s drug- induced mystical experiences). What we take from this is that James’s experiences with ether may have been a way for him to experiment with mystical experiences without ever risking the chance of undergoing any kind of perpetual change; because James believes that ether is a surrogate for divine grace, he also believes that hallucinations caused by the drug are a way of guaranteeing the

reversibility of the experience, eliminating the risk of any kind of change of identity caused by a change of beliefs. In a sense, this is not very different from what children do when, while playing, they pretend to be thieves; they believe in the existence of thieves and find it funny to think and live

19 There are two things to which feels attached: his will and his intellect. We will look into them in “A Problem with Autonomy.”

James and Joyce

UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA FACULDADE DE LETRAS

James and Joyce

Maria Rita Antunes Botelho Furtado

Orientador: Professor Doutor Miguel Bénard da Costa Tamen

Tese especialmente elaborada para obtenção do grau de Doutor em Teoria da Literatura

2021

James and Joyce

Maria Rita Antunes Botelho Furtado

To my parents

To my sister

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abstract

Keywords

Resumo

Palavras-chave

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

I — A Problem of Sources