The Superior, The Very Reverend John Conmee S. J.

“The tidal waterway, the Anna Liffey, mother of Dublin, plays as ever her part in Joyce’s Dublin. As a creative force she is older and greater than Christ or Caesar. If Christ left Dublin the city would still exist. Man can invent fresh gods as he needs them and new gods would replace the old; if the hand of one Caesar let fall the reins, the hand of another would take them up. But if Anna Liffey deserted Dublin, Dublin would cease to exist.” – Frank Budgen

“Wandering Rocks”, Ulysses’ tenth episode, opens with “The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J.” stepping out of his presbytery on Gardiner St., just around the corner from the Blooms’ home in Eccles St. If you’ve read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, you’ll recall Fr. Conmee as the Jesuit priest who saved a young Stephen Dedalus from being beaten over a pair of broken glasses. In Ulysses, Stephen hasn’t forgotten the Jesuit priest’s past kindness, thinking back in “Scylla and Charybdis”: “A child Conmee saved from pandies.” Leopold Bloom also encountered Fr. Conmee, though in name only, back in “Lotus Eaters” as he entered All Hallows Church: “Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee S. J. on saint Peter Claver S. J. and the African Mission…. Conmee: Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguishedlooking.”

Now we get to spend some time with the man himself. Fr. Conmee is on his way to Artane, north of Dublin, to secure a place for Paddy Dignam’s son in an orphanage. He thinks:

“What was that boy’s name again? Dignam. Yes…. Mr Cunningham’s letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good practical catholic: useful at mission time.”

So far, both Stephen and Bloom’s recollections about Fr. Conmee check out: he’s merciful to children, he knows Martin Cunningham, and he’s big on missions.

The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J.

Fr. John Conmee was a real person and an important figure in James Joyce’s youth. Because of Fr. Conmee, Joyce gained admission to the prestigious Clongowes Wood College at a younger age than was typical. When the Joyce family fell on hard times, Conmee arranged for all the Joyce boys to attend Belvedere College free of charge. In large part, Conmee is the man responsible for Joyce’s top-tier Jesuit education. Despite all this, when Herbert Gorman described Conmee as a “very decent sort of chap” in his biography of Joyce, the Artist himself crossed out the phrase and amended it to “a bland and courtly humanist.” Despite Conmee’s generosity and advocacy for the young Joyce, it seems that he felt a certain coldness or distance in Conmee’s demeanor. This sense comes through in Joyce’s portrayal of the priest in “Wandering Rocks”, where we meet a Conmee who’s never outwardly unkind, but he does seem distant from the various Dubliners he meets on his journey.

Fr. Conmee v. Viceregal Cavalcade

“Wandering Rocks” is divided into nineteen subsections, the first of which is Conmee’s story. His section bookends the episode opposite Lord Dudley’s Viceregal Cavalcade that closes the episode. Within the symbolic structure of “Wandering Rocks”, Conmee and Dudley are apparent foils, representing the opposing forces of Church and State, respectively. If the Liffey symbolically becomes the Bosphorus in the mythological correspondences of the episode, then Conmee and Dudley are the two clashing rocks that Jason and the Argo had to survive on their journey for the Golden Fleece.

Stuart Gilbert explained in his book, Ulysses: A Study, that Conmee represents the Asiatic bank and the “spiritual antithesis of material glory,” while Dudley represents the European bank and the “pomps of the world.” Kevin Sullivan, in his book Joyce among the Jesuits, concurs, arguing that Conmee is “a kindly Christian humanist who would have the will of God done in all things” who “receives the Assisian curtsies of ample-leaved cabbages as he passes by,” while Dudley’s Viceregal Cavalcade “is no more than a show of pageantry and display of power” that “is greeted not by cabbages and schoolboys but by obsequious policemen and ‘the Poddle River hanging out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage.’”

These interpretations are outliers, however. Most other commentators see Conmee and Dudley as having more in common than different. The assumed opposition of Church and State ruling over Ireland calls to mind Stephen’s comment in “Telemachus” that the Irish are servants of three masters – English, Italian, and a third who wants Stephen for odd jobs. Dudley represents the English, of course, and Conmee the Italian (Roman) Church. The third is the Irish upper class, who we see greeting and saluting both Conmee and the Viceregal Cavalcade, often rather fawningly.

It’s very easy to dismiss the English as the obvious baddies, as Sullivan does, without acknowledging the oppression of strict Catholicism on the lives of average Irish folks like Stephen and Bloom. Frank Budgen, in his book James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, wrote that “Christ and Caesar are here not in conflict – only in opposition…. They are complementary and are so considered by the Dubliners who salute them.” Scholar Trevor Williams notes that both Conmee and Dudley “attract obeisance” and their respective visual splendor distracts from the oppression caused by the institutions they represent.

Scholar Len Platt goes one step further, arguing that the Church and State are actually in collusion as rulers of Ireland, favoring a power sharing agreement with the British government over support for Irish independence movements in the late 19th century. When it comes to Conmee as an individual, he is repeatedly revealed in “Wandering Rocks” to be far more interested in the comings and goings of the prominent people in Dublin society, particularly the nobility, rather than the working classes and the impoverished. Platt demonstrates how this was silently telegraphed at the end of “Scylla and Charybdis,” which ends with a quote from the Shakespeare play Cymbeline:

Laud we the gods
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
From our bless’d altars.

Joyce, of course, expects you to know the next line, which continues (though not in Ulysses):

Set we forward. Let
A Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together.

In the figures of Conmee and Dudley, a Roman and British ensign are indeed waving friendly together, even if neither party directly thinks it.

Schoolboys & High-Class Women

We can learn a lot about Fr. Conmee from the company he keeps during the little sliver of his life we see in “Wandering Rocks.” The first person he talks to in Mountjoy Square is the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that she was a real person, her name was Bessie (though Conmee never uses it), and that we discuss her family and their connection to the Joyces here. Fr. Conmee and Mrs. Sheehy’s interaction is merely keeping up appearances between Church and State, friendly, polite, appropriate, and never overly familiar.

After Sheehy and Conmee part ways, he meets three young Belvedere students. Conmee is quite warm to the trio, recalling his gentle, empathetic nature in Stephen’s youth. We learn their names are Jack Sohan, Ger. Gallaher, and Brunny Lynam, and we can assume the boys come from money as they are able to attend Belvedere College, but where does their money come from? Jack is assumed to be the son of John Sohan, who was a pawnbroker at 38 Townshend St. in 1904. Ger. Gallaher is the name of a family friend of the Joyces; his brother Fred was the model for Ignatius Gallaher, the debonair journalist from the Dubliners story “A Little Cloud” and the apple of Myles’ Crawford’s eye, so perhaps there’s some family connection there. Brunny is assumed to be a bookie’s son, as later in “Wandering Rocks” Lenehan wants to “to pop into Lynam’s to see Sceptre’s starting price” in order to place a bet on the Ascot Gold Cup horse race.

While these children are innocents, their prominent fathers have made their fortunes exploiting the people of Dublin and keeping them trapped in an eternal cycle of poverty. In the book Surface and Symbol, Robert Adams wrote, “it’s clear that there is a joke here, and the butt of it is Father Conmee.” Conmee is sweet and indulgent with the little Belvedere boys, though he doesn’t know them personally, even trusting them with his mail. He is still kind to the crowd of Christian Brothers boys he encounters later, but they just get a wave and a few kind words, while inwardly he notes the untidiness of their caps. Those filthy urchins are positively useless at mission time!

The third person Fr. Conmee chats with on his way to the tram is Mrs. McGuinness. These two seem oddly infatuated with one another. Mrs. McGuinness bows to Fr. Conmee, while Conmee is dazzled by her aura, describing her as “stately,” having a “fine carriage,” and having a “queenly mien” like that of Mary Queen of Scots. Conmee laments in this case, “And to think that she was a pawnbroker!” They once again exchange pleasantries, though Conmee seems a bit flustered, worrying about what he should say to her. His interest in Mrs. McGuinness never crosses a line, though I suppose we can’t really know as their dialogue is only implied rather than reported. It just feels unpriestly to me to comment on a woman’s fine carriage. Unlike Mrs. Sheehy, Mrs. McGuinness is not described in terms of her husband. It is speculated by some commentators that this is because her husband has become disreputable, similar to the situation with Mrs. Mooney in the Dubliners story “The Boarding House.”

Conmee salutes plenty more locals on his way to the tram at Newcomen Bridge. He is clearly known and liked in his community. However, it is notable with whom he stops and chats: the wife of a Member of Parliament, the sons of wealthy men, and a pawnbroker. We can infer that these are all members of his community, just like the various shopkeepers he merely salutes. It’s reasonable to assume that these three represent groups who are “useful at mission time,” like Martin Cunningham. As with Cunningham and his job in Dublin Castle, they are also tangential to the levers of power. None of these folks are pulling the levers exactly, but Conmee is aware of their status and the money and prestige it brings the Church. Scholar Mark Osteen in his book The Economics of Ulysses argues that priests like Fr. Conmee are “pawnbrokers of souls” as they are just as mercenary in the pursuit of their business as the Mrs McGuinnesses of the world. Notably, the descriptors used by Conmee liken Mrs. McGuinness’ beauty to British power, as she is “stately” and “queenly;” his highest compliment is a comparison to a literal British queen! Of course, this saintly woman, bowing to a high-ranking Jesuit priest, will refuse a meager pawn to the Dedalus sisters as they try to scrape together a few pennies to feed themselves. Boody Dedalus wishes “a bad cess ” to her queenly mien.

Adams points out a particularly subtle and interesting use of the simultaneous scene depicting a Dubliner who never crosses Conmee’s path: Denis J. Maginni professor of dancing &c. He pops up in the earliest of this episode's many intrusions. Immediately before Fr. Conmee and Mrs. McGuinness chat, we readers see Maginni passes Lady Maxwell on the street, elsewhere but simultaneously. Like Fr. Conmee, Maginni dons a silk hat and bright, distinctive clothing. In this “ironic counterpoint,” Adams points out that it exposes how ridiculous Conmee and McGuinness’ meeting is. He writes: “Courtly Father Conmee looks at Mrs. McGuinness and thinks ‘how like a lady”; we look at him and think, ‘how like a dancing-master.’”

Fr. Conmee and the Nightmare of History

History is the playground of Fr. Conmee’s imagination. He enters a historical reverie around the time he spots Eugene Stratton’s grimace on an advertisement on the hoardings of a tram stop. Stratton, a minstrel performer, was a white man dressed in black face makeup as a sham black man, mocking real black people. We discuss Stratton and the portrayal of black people in Ulysses more broadly in this interview with scholar Ryan Kerr. Stratton’s rictus grin provokes a cascade of thoughts in Conmee’s mind, a rambling run-on sentence about “the souls of black and brown and yellow men and of [Conmee’s] sermon on saint Peter Claver S. J. and the African mission and of the propagation of the faith.” Bloom saw an advertisement for this sermon back in “Lotus Eaters” and was fairly skeptical. We discuss Bloom’s reaction here.

Peter Claver was a Jesuit priest, like Conmee, who earned his sainthood “ministering” to enslaved African people in Colombia in the 1600’s. Claver’s mission sounds noble and humanitarian in Conmee’s recollection (“saving souls”), but the souls Claver and men like him “saved” didn’t necessarily have agency in their conversion. Their cultures were eradicated, first by the inhumanity of the chattel slave trade and then by Catholic priests “saving” them. Men like Claver did little to improve their converts’ material conditions, focusing instead on their converts’ souls. Conmee’s calculation of the “millions of black and brown and yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last hour came like a thief in the night” recall Osteen’s comment that these priests are “pawnbrokers of the soul,” tabulating how many souls they’ve claimed, and making sure the line always goes up. Conmee offers no comment on the horrors of colonialism or slavery, just the horror of not being baptised. Stuart Gilbert interprets Conmee’s thoughts here as those of “a kindly humanist” in contrast to the Viceroy’s non-reaction to the same poster. In fairness to the aristocracy, both passages comment on Stratton’s lips, but the Viceroy’s doesn’t use a slur to describe him while Conmee’s does. In the end, this passage poses the question, would you rather be colonized by an indifferent aristocrat or a kindly humanist priest? The result is the same regardless.

Fr. Conmee next fantasizes about the “joybells… ringing in gay Malahide,” Lord Talbot de Malahide, and “old worldish days, loyal times in joyous townlands, old times in the barony.” The last phrase, “Old Times in the Barony,” is the title of a booklet published by the real Fr. Conmee in 1902. Platt describes the book as a “Catholic elegy for Protestant landlordism.” Conmee describes an idealized past in a town called Luainford, a play on his native Athlone, in which the people were more pious and family-oriented, and where there was an “absence of any contention between classes and creeds.” I don’t know when in Irish history Conmee thought there was no contention between classes and creeds, but he’s really showing his hand with this one. In short, Conmee dreams about the lower classes in Ireland meekly knowing their place, while, in fact, the nation is on the eve of a major revolution in 1916. Most of the Dubliners we meet are wax nostalgic for historic figures like O’Connell, Emmet, and Parnell, who sought independence for Ireland. Conmee prefers a history with an entrenched class system (in which he is naturally at the top), where he gets to chat with fancy ladies and sidestep grubby beggars, as God intended. History is when everyone loves John Conmee:

“Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and honoured there.”

Some cracks begin to appear in Conmee’s recollection of the glory days when he thinks of Mary Rochfort. I think Conmee is drawn to Mary’s story because she was the first countess of Belvedere, which is also the name of the school where he works. Mary’s husband, Robert Rochfort, was truly a monster. He accused Mary of having an affair with his brother Arthur, and while it seems she was innocent, Robert blackmailed her into confessing. For her “crime,” she was locked away for 30 years of house arrest in one of the Rochfort’s grand homes near Lough Ennell in Co. Westmeath. Robert built himself a separate mansion called Belvedere House, beside which he erected the Jealous Wall. This freestanding wall is Ireland’s largest folly, or fake historical ruin. It looks like the ruined wall of an older manor house, but it was built in the 1780’s alongside Belvedere House. The jealousy it commemorates has nothing to do with Mary or Arthur, but rather to block the view of Robert’s house from his other brother George, who lived nearby. George had his own Belvedere House in Dublin, which eventually became Belvedere College, so we’ve come full circle.

Needless to say, these real-life nobles are not as cheerful or honorable as Conmee imagines them to be. He is happy to blame women’s sinful nature and humankind’s “tyrannous incontinence” and move on with his “charming day.” In order for one to awaken from the nightmare of history, one must admit that it is a nightmare. Conmee is happy to simply keep daydreaming.

Fr. Conmee: An Unjust Steward?

I’d like to consider Fr. Conmee in terms of the Catholic virtue of Charity. His passage opens with him setting out to do a charitable act for young Dignam, although we never see him complete it (presumably because that occurs outside the one-hour timeframe of “Wandering Rocks.”) Over the course of his time on the page, Conmee thinks about Dignam once in the opening paragraph and then never again. He never mentions the boy’s first name, except to note how his surname kind of sounds like a Latin word. We also get the sense that he’s merely helping Dignam to squeeze donations out of Martin Cunningham, so famously “useful at mission time.”

There’s also the question of how humane it is to send young Dignam to the orphanage in Artane. His days of mooching cigarettes and watching boxing matches are over, to say the least. Such institutions were rife with sexual and physical abuse, as well. On the other hand, Dignam may find himself literally starving on the street without Conmee’s help, due to the lack of a meaningful social safety net. None of this crosses Conmee’s mind. His duty to the boy is entirely an official function of his job, requiring no further contemplation. Williams writes, “Conmee does not feel the contradictions and fragmentation that other, exploited, characters are subjected to….”

The first person Fr. Conmee meets in “Wandering Rocks” is a onelegged soldier, who holds “out a peaked cap for alms towards the very reverend John Conmee S. J.” Conmee doesn’t open his purse, which contains one crown. This is a particularly symbolic amount of money for a wealthy man who spends much of his time on the page wistfully daydreaming about the British nobility. Conmee keeps the crown tightly sealed in his purse and offers a silent blessing, which costs him, a wealthy man, nothing. He moves on fairly quickly:

“He thought, but not for long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward….”

Conmee is only concerned with spiritual matters when it comes to the onelegged sailor. As long as he blesses the sailor, increasing the chances for the man’s soul to reach Paradise after death, Conmee’s charitable work is done. He is a man of God not concerned with worldly affairs. Osteen states that Conmee choosing to withhold his money from the beggar “signals failures of providence or charity and distortions of reciprocity.”

Conmee wields Shakespeare against the onelegged sailor, quoting Cardinal Wolsey from Henry VIII: “If I had served my God as I have served my king He would not have abandoned me in my old days.” He thinks that the sailor should serve God over King but not about the material conditions that would drive an impoverished person to join the armed forces in the first place. There’s also the possibility that the sailor lost his leg supporting the type of colonial adventurism that made Conmee’s beloved nobles so wealthy. Serving State rather than Church comes with an income, three hots, and a cot. Serving God gets you good vibes and a blessing, although in Conmee’s case, I think “serving God” mainly means donating at mission time. Conmee’s charity feels extremely conditional and not especially Christlike. Contrast this with Molly Bloom, who tosses coins down to the sailor as he passes 7 Eccles St., no hesitation, no questions asked. Conmee’s brief interaction with the onelegged sailor, combined with his indifference to Dignam, demonstrates the shortcomings of a system of conditional religious charity as a social safety net, and how it traps people in poverty.

I find Conmee’s reaction to the news of the General Slocum disaster particularly upsetting. Conmee passes Grogran the Tobacconist where he spots a headline about a ferry, the General Slocum, caught fire in the East River in New York City. 500 people, mainly children on their way to a church picnic, died in the catastrophe. Leopold Bloom’s heart weeps for the victims in “Lestrygonians.” He sums the tragedy up as a “Holocaust.” Our beneficent Fr. Conmee laments that the victims were “unprepared,” which means they had the grave misfortune to die while Protestant, as the victims were mainly German Lutherans, and shrugs it off as, “in America those things were continually happening.” The sinking of the General Slocum was thought of as the worst maritime disaster of the 20th century prior to the sinking of the Titanic, and the worst manmade disaster in New York City history until the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. However, if Conmee minimizes the disaster, he doesn’t have to trouble himself thinking about it. Presumably if the boat had been packed with barons and earls, Conmee would have wept openly, even though they, too, would have had the grave misfortune of dying while Protestant. To return to the matter of Dignam briefly, I think one motivating factor in helping him is keeping him out of a Protestant orphanage, like those run by Catholic defector Rev. Thomas Connellan. Young Paddy turning Protestant would be a fate worse than death.

Before arriving at his tram stop at Newcomen Bridge, Conmee spots a man (whose “hat of dirty straw” Conmee can’t help but notice) working on a barge piled with turf, or peat dug from bogs used to heat homes. Conmee marvels at the goodness of the Lord, who was so kind and benevolent to make “turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people.” This is such a simplistic and shallow comment on the conditions of people in rural Ireland. Cutting turf is an enormously labor intensive process. The Good Lord may have put it in the ground by divine providence, but he made it awfully difficult for the humble turf cutter to access His bounty. This is a child’s understanding of both Irish history and Christianity, two subjects that Conmee seems quite invested in. During Conmee’s lifetime, the people of rural Ireland starved in the Famine and were then evicted from their homes by a colonial government who had made them tenants on their own land in the first place.

Conmee is no Stephen Dedalus, torturing himself over the finer points of Church doctrine. To him, the world is exactly as it should be – some people, like the Earl of Aldborough, build the city’s largest house just to waste it, while others huddle around a turf fire that the Lord provided. Perfection according to God’s design. Williams states, “it could not logically occur to [Conmee] to question the reality he contemplates so benignly, its surface as smooth as his watch and his style.” Once on the tram, Conmee is almost insulted that he isn’t surrounded by people grinning ear to ear: “The solemnity of the occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee excessive for a journey so short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum.”

Fr. Conmee’s worldview is telegraphed very early on in “Wandering Rocks.” After meeting the onelegged sailor, Conmee thinks fondly of Fr. Bernard Vaughan, a British Catholic priest with a strong Cockney accent and a love for Ireland, and more importantly, a member a very good family. Vaughan was a real man. He also appears in the Dubliners story “Grace” as Fr. Purdon, who the “Grace” crew see speak at St. Francis Xavier’s Church in Gardiner St., Fr. Conmee’s church.

A Jesuit evangelist with a flair for publicity, Vaughan cultivated his celebrity by preaching from boxing rings as well as in churches. Joyce considered Vaughan an absolute charlatan and indulged in what we would now call “hate-watching” his career. In fact, Adams wrote that Joyce followed Vaughan's career, “in an almost excessive delight in its absurdities and vulgarities.” James Joyce: King of the Haters. Joyce named him “Purdon” in “Grace” after a street in Dublin’s red light district. Portraying Conmee as an enjoyer of Vaughan's sermons damns him by association.

In “Grace,” Fr. Purdon/Vaughan directs his sermon to pews stuffed with the rich and influential men of Dublin. He expounds on the Parable of the Unjust Steward from Luke 16:1-13 presenting it as “one of the most difficult texts in all the Scriptures… to interpret properly.” That’s also kind of the point – this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about and is in no position to interpret this complicated passage. It also decreases the chances that his congregation will disagree with him since they likely don’t understand the parable either. While Purdon weaves this parable into a pro-business sermon, the final line of the parable is quite contradicts him: “No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” The irony of this choice is clear for the context of “Grace,” and I think this irony is meant to echo in Fr. Conmee’s passage in Ulysses. Conmee, an unjust steward, worships both God and mammon, but one more than the other.

The Lady Maxwell Question

There’s one final interaction in Fr. Conmee’s day to discuss. In the final scenes of Fr. Conmee’s section of “Wandering Rocks,” he walks while reading from the Liturgy of the Hours, a series of prayers that Catholic clergy are meant to read at specific hours of the day. We see him reading the Nones, prayers that are typically meant for 3pm. He lightly chastises himself that he “should have read that before lunch. But lady Maxwell had come.” As we saw him descend the presbytery steps at five to three, we can infer that he meant to read the Nones early as he had scheduled this trip to Artane for 3 p.m. In the intrusion where we see dancing master Maginni, he passes Lady Maxwell at Dignam’s corner, which according to Gifford and Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated, is only about a half mile from Conmee’s location. Potentially, Lady Maxwell met with Fr. Conmee around noon and left a little before 3 p.m. What were they discussing all that time?

Scholar Margot Norris’ article “Possible-Worlds Theory and Joyce’s ‘Wandering Rocks’: The Case of Father Conmee” focuses in part on this missing information. She floats several possible theories. It’s possible that, like Cunningham, she is also very generous at mission time, and so Conmee makes time for her. He never comments on this, though, just that she “had come” and prevented him from completing his prayers. The single fragment where he thinks of her comes on the heels of an extended reverie about the allegedly adulterous noblewoman Mary Rochfort. He concludes her story with the thought:

“Who could know the truth? Not the jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed adultery fully, eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris, with her husband’s brother? She would half confess if she had not all sinned as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband’s brother.”

He then imagines himself conducting a noble wedding. In this fantasy, he refers to himself as “Don John Conmee,” seemingly a play on Don Juan. Does this mean Fr. Conmee is… a ladies’ man? Norris notes there’s nothing that crosses a line with Mrs. Sheehy or Mrs. McGuinness, though I think he focuses a bit too much on Mrs. McGuinness’ figure. Bloom recalls him as “distinguishedlooking” in “Lotus Eaters,” so presumably he’s easy on the eyes. Norris also notes his confidence is buttressed in part by knowledge that he brushed his teeth with arecanut toothpaste. Was this for Lady Maxwell’s benefit? Is there a double entendre in the admission that “Lady Maxwell had come”?

Conmee’s prayers are derailed by Lynch and his lover tumbling out of a bush, and the priest responds by “blessing them gravely.” Lynch later recalls the episode to his boys in “Oxen of the Sun,” including the detail, “He was walking by the hedge, reading, I think a brevier book with, I doubt not, a witty letter in it from Glycera or Chloe to keep the page.” We know that Conmee marks his breviary with an ivory bookmark. Lynch is not a reliable narrator, but does this imply that Conmee does have a reputation as a bit of a Don Juan? It’s impossible to know one way or the other with the incomplete information we have in Ulysses. This is the main thrust of Norris’ argument as well. By leaving gaps like this, Joyce allows our imaginations to run rampant.

In conclusion, given what we can glean about Fr. Conmee’s worldview and habits, I have a hard time seeing him as a foil to the Lord Dudley and the Viceregal Cavalcade. Church and State, though at counter purposes in some ways, have more in common with one another than they do with any ordinary person in Dublin. Their goals overlap more than we might like to think. Thus, a representative of the Church can offer no redemption to ordinary Dubliners. Through this, Dublin must find redemption through a people’s prophet, one who can see through the false priests and corrupt officials and usher them into a utopian New Bloomusalem.