Joyce and Fellini: The Catholic Connection (Part Two of Four)

For Guido and Stephen -- and, presumably, for Joyce and Fellini -- the deviation from Catholic mores is an artistic mandate. Called to serve an aesthetic end, each protagonist must "pass beyond the challenge of the sentries" (Joyce, 208). In other words, he must reject the other masters which vie for his servitude. Chief among these is the Catholic faith. The Church's unwavering position on sexuality -- its call for abstinence before marriage and marital fidelity -- interferes with the aesthetic aspirations of Fellini and Joyce. For each artist, sex is closely aligned with art. His work focuses on dealings with women. Most of these are sexual, either literally or figuratively. In Portrait of the Artist, Joyce has Stephen enter relationships, real and imagined, with school girls, whores and other strange, alluring women. Similarly, in Otto e mezzo, Fellini has Guido undergo trysts, both real and imagined, with his wife, his mistress and his feminine ideal. Guido even fantasizes that the women in his life have united to comprise a harem. Naturally, he imagines himself to be the sole client.

In these examples, the artistry of Joyce and Fellini is clearly heretical. Nonetheless, it would seem that they have not completely severed their ties with the Church. Rather, they seem to have retained an innate reverence for Catholic teachings, out of which has been born a nagging sense of guilt.

It is to dispel this "Catholic guilt" that Fellini or Joyce seek to discredit the Church. He does so by portraying Mary and the priests in an unholy light. In this way, they appear as fallible as the artist himself. The latter shows, moreover, how Catholic doctrine is impractical in secular life. Of Fellini's efforts in this regard, the critic Nicole Zand writes, "[he] rediscovers what Bernanos stated thirty years before...that, despite all effort, it is not possible to be both totally of this world and totally Christian, in a world where to be totally of the world is precisely to be what Guido cannot stop being - a man 'of the flesh.'"

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