Thoughts on Joyce’s “The Sisters”

February 1, 2010

I have to remind myself that Dubliners was intended, as I understand it, to be closer to a novel than a collection of individual stories. It was certainly written to be read as a whole, which can make it problematic to discuss any single story in isolation. Not a lot happens in “The Sisters” in the same way not a lot happens when you hold a key in your hand… but it’s a necessary start to unlocking a door (or a treasure chest) and sometimes a key has interest in and of itself.

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“The Sisters” isn’t just a setting of the stage, establishing the theme of paralysis, but one of the effects of paralysis: incompleteness. The boy’s education is incomplete as is most of the conversation between old Mr. Cotter and the boy’s uncle… not to mention that as a boy he is himself necessarily incomplete. Reverend Flynn’s faith is incomplete (and insufficient). The sisters’ lives, without the Reverend to take care of, are incomplete.

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Barbara notes that an early draft of “The Sisters” was actually a poem. I didn’t know that. But the simple clarity and beauty of Joyce’s language—when he chooses to employ it that way!—is one of the aspects of his writing I enjoy most. Listen to Barbara’s reading of the first paragraph. Do you hear the muscular music of Joyce’s prose? Even with the mundane parenthetical aside (“it was vacation time”), the whole paragraph sings, but the latter third is most striking:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

This kind of music is hard to explain. I run into the same kind of trouble I find myself in when trying to explain Jack Gilbert’s poetry, and often end up just thinking (and sometimes saying): I guess you either hear it or you don’t. Or, as Dick Hugo liked to put it, “I’m just lucky I guess.”

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Joyce is a wellspring from which a wide variety of writers drink. You can trace Joyce’s stylistic DNA through writers as diverse as Faulkner, O’Connor, Hemingway, and Carver.

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What to make of the religious aspects of the story? As a representative of the Catholic church—of which Joyce was, to put it kindly, not a big fan—Reverend Flynn figures in the story mostly as a grotesque figure in his habits, in his possibly syphilitic demise, and finally in the form of his body, the morbid centerpiece of the story (despite the title).

Mr. Cotter insinuates there might have been more wrong with the Reverend than a simple nervous breakdown or even a loss of faith, but it’s never made clear what wrongs Cotter has in mind. I tend to think it’s merely the suspicions and cynicism of an old man when confronted by the precocious and preternaturally studious and serious young man, a common character for Joyce… but it’s easy to make a case otherwise considering the vision the boy has of Flynn attempting a kind of confession to him and the image of Flynn’s tongue lying on his lower lip. And once going down that path all kinds of hay can be made with things like the ambiguous story of the broken chalice (“…it was the beginning of it … it was the boy’s fault”), the fact that the boy is quite young yet the priest seems to have spent some time schooling him in minutiae of operations of the church and various kinds of sin, and Freudian objects like the “velvet curtains” and “swinging lamps.”

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Am I the only one who figures Joyce’s opening line to be purposefully allusive to Dante’s Inferno (“Abandon hope ye who enter here”). On the other hand, perhaps speculation about potential priestly pederasty has started to warp my perception.

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“No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.”

Tags: books, dubliners, james joyce, motleyread, reading