Backgrounds for Joyce's Dubliners

Donald T. Torchiana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138186606
• eBook ISBN: 9781317286837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

First published in 1986. Dubliners was James Joyce's first major publication. Setting it at the turn of the century, Joyce claims to hold up a 'nicely polished looking-glass' to the native Irishman. In Backgrounds for Joyce's Dubliners, the author examines the national, mythic, religious and legendary details, which Joyce builds up to capture a many-sided performance and timelessness in Irish life.

Acknowledging the serious work done on Dubliners as a whole, in this study Professor Torchiana draws upon a wide range of published and unpublished sources to provide a scholarly and satisfying framework for Joyce's world of the 'inept and the lower middle class'. He combines an understanding of Joyce's subtleties with a long-standing personal knowledge of Dublin. This title will make fascinating reading for scholars and students of Joyce's writing as well as for those interested in early twentieth century Irish social history.

1

“The Sisters”:
The Three Fates and the
Opening of Dubliners

“The Dead” continues to be admired as the best story in Dubliners, indeed perhaps the best in English in this altogether deadly century. Yet “The Sisters,” the story opening the volume, the first of three stories treating the theme of childhood, is no less important with its insinuating first paragraph offering that strange concatenation of paralysis, simony, and gnomon, not to mention the story’s constant push of inconclusive dialogue and seemingly anticlimactic ending. What’s more, Joyce’s first published story, which, highly revised and expanded, came to serve as the first step to “The Dead,” remains even today his most controversial piece in Dubliners.

I shall review briefly some predominant interpretations of “The Sisters,” then pause to show how details of the story partly bear out these theories, and finally offer my own speculations on the story by concentrating on four important words in it—Rosicrucian, gnomon, simony, and Providence—the last absent from the final version, the first three new to it. By way of conclusion, I shall try to face up to the implications of my reading.

The dominant reading of the story is more or less shared by the critics Kenner, Tindall, Magalaner, and Kain.¹ With Tindall tending to push these points to extremes, their account, considerably trimmed, discovers difficulty in the title; sees Father Flynn as somehow symbolic of God, the Pope or the Irish Catholic church; detects in the cream-crackers-and-sherry episode a rather truncated or shadowy version of the Eucharist; senses that the three words in the first paragraph are somehow significantly connected; puzzles over the oriental motif; and generally gives the story over to the boy. Tindall’s reading is the most suggestive in its promise for a closer scrutiny, especially in his puzzling over the “Rosicrucian boy” and his associations with Yeats.

Of course more intricate readings have always been available, especially those that suspect a homosexual relationship between the boy and the priest, or see the latter as a kind of paralyzed Christ, an unrisen Lazarus, and even a gnome or gargoyle. One interpretation discovers in old Cotter’s mumbled hostilities an ignorant concern over the boy’s masturbation—a secret sin against which he is adjured to take cold baths lest his head, too, go soft.²

As an alternative to such articles, Thomas Connolly published in 1965 his important essay “Joyce’s The Sisters’: a pennyworth of snuff.”³ Wielding Occam’s razor in the fashion of a poleax, Connolly clears the board of any hint of simony, transubstantiation, popery, defrocked priest, homosexuality, gargoyles, or sacrilege.⁴ Thus far Connolly’s article comes as a breath of critical fresh air. But when he reduces the story to merely a general theme—the response that the boy makes to the death of his old friend—and finally concludes, with the figure of the gnomon in mind, that incompleteness is the real paralysis in the story I must part ways with him.⁵ Consequently, apart from a subdued objection from Bernard Benstock,⁶ we are more or less back where Joyce left us in 1914.

But not quite. Since writing these words, I have also read Florence L. Walzl’s two further contributions to the subject. Both perform a service for Joyce scholars, and one offers an original contribution toward understanding the story. Let me review them for a moment.

The first is an omnibus essay that loosely brings together just about all that has been said on “The Sisters.”⁷ Long-winded and occasionally wandering as her essay may be, Professor Walzl provides a judicious synthesis on such matters as changes in the text, the characters of the priest and the boy, the importance of the story for the beginning of the volume, and so on. Along the way Professor Walzl explains for the first time the uncle’s wish that the boy “learn to box his corner” as an important phrase in carpentry—and, I might add, for which a carpenter’s rule is needed, but more on that later.

Her second essay, written in conjunction with Burton A. Waisbren, MD,⁸ attempts to establish Father Flynn’s death as caused by paresis, or what was then called general paralysis of the insane. They conclude that “in his [Joyce’s] final version of The Sisters,’ he used a medical symbol for what he believed was the social and psychological situation of the Irish people.”⁹ While the authors provide some analogous phrases from Osier’s description of paresis for passages in the story, the real source for their argument is Stanislaus Joyce’s entry in his diary for 13 August 1904:

He [James Joyce] talks much of the syphilitic contagion in Europe, is at present writing a series of studies on it in Dublin, tracing practically everything to it. The drift of his talk seems to be that the contagion is congenital and incurable and responsible for all manias …

This is where the authors stop quoting. But Stanislaus goes on to say: “and being so, that it is useless to try to avoid it. He even seems to invite you to delight in the manias and to humour each to the top of its bent.”¹⁰ While there is more, the obvious questions immediately come to mind. Are we to believe that as many as ten of the stories are probably based on congenital syphilis, as in Ghosts? And how is paresis here symbolic? Is it to indict Dublin for clandestine sin and sex, as the authors imply? What, if so, has the point to do with the title, the broken chalice, and the priest’s dying old? Are we truly meant to take seriously old Cotter’s and Uncle John’s hints of the priest’s sinfully sexual nature or that of one of his parents? If paresis has addled his wits, why, then, the insistence on Father Flynn’s scrupulosity? When so many more questions might be raised, I’m afraid the Walzl and Waisbren essay may well turn out to be a mare’s nest.

I

Yet the details of the story do indeed hint that the characters are suffering from something more than incompleteness. Consider the much revised death-notice of Father Flynn:

1st July, 1895
The Rev. James Flynn (formerly of St. Catherine’s Church, Meath Street), aged sixty-five years R.I.P.¹¹

This notice, a typical unsmiling set piece in Joyce’s work, as usual quietly hints so very much. Initially, the death of a priest on the day of the Feast of the Most Precious Blood is more than mildly ironic, especially since he felt responsible for a broken chalice. Something of the same irony at the expense of the Catholic church in Ireland may reside in the fact that 1895 is the centenary year of the founding of Maynooth; moreover, Father Flynn’s death at the age of 65 gives him a 50 per cent chance of having been born in the year of Catholic Emancipation, 1829. His life may yet be that of the resurrected Catholic church in Ireland. In addition, the Freeman’s Journal, which supposedly bore the announcement of Father Flynn’s death on 1 July, also recorded a more famous death for 29 June, that of the great English agnostic Thomas Huxley. To have been retired from St Catherine’s Church in Meath Street is in some sense to repeat an earlier sundering, for in the thirteenth century the parish of St Catherine was separated from the original parish, St James’s; or, as the parish historian has put it, “…it was deemed advisable to dismember St. James’s from St. Catherine’s, and to erect the latter into an independent Parish.”¹² Moreover, the earlier St Catherine’s Church was on the northwest corner of Thomas Street and Bridgefoot Street.¹³ In Thomas Street, Robert Emmet was executed in front of the porch of the Protestant St Catherine’s Church. As one guide to Dublin puts it, “From that time, this spot has been regarded as a holy place by the people of Ireland.”¹⁴ Combining these memories of patriotic and religious moment, we may also recall that 1 July, Old Style, memoralizes the defeat of another James in 1690. Who, we might ask, now rests in peace?

Generalizing from these flashes of the past compressed in Father Flynn’s death-notice, we might also ask what it meant to live in Great Britain Street behind a shop selling goods to keep water off infants? Or what might portend in being one of three children born in Irishtown, all three named after British sovereigns? And what pain did such a death bring, denying as it did the priest’s last wish to revisit the place of his birth, Irishtown, that locale south and east of Dublin where the native Irish momentarily fled after being ordered out of Dublin by the Lord Deputy in 1655?¹⁵ To speak to the boy of the catacombs, of the Irish College in Rome, and of Napoleon may have been for Father Flynn also to brood over the rumor that the Pope was a supposed prisoner of the Freemasons in the catacombs—a theme in Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican—and over Pius VIT s virtual imprisonment by Napoleon, who had also closed the Irish College in 1798. What, finally, are we to think of the ignorant condemnation of Father Flynn from the mouth of a red-nosed former distiller of other spirits, a bore with the socially dubious name of “old Cotter,” the English equivalent of “cottier” in Ireland?

A like tragedy remains to be mentioned. Professor John Kelleher has been kind enough to remind me in a letter of the important social background in this story, the title alone suggesting the ruin that has fallen not only on Father Flynn but also on his sisters as well. Apparently, a promising boy from a poor family in Irishtown, especially if he went to the Irish College in Rome, might expect two of his sisters to earn money and help put him through his training. After serving as his housekeepers when he went up the ecclesiastical ladder, his sisters might expect their rewards: a decent chance at good marriages. We know of Father Flynn’s accomplishments and learning, yet we are also made aware of his sisters’ flat accents and malapropisms. The conclusion must be that his scruples, his breakdown, and then his strokes have been the wreck of all his promise and their rewards, since the Flynn sisters had to care for their brother until his death and are left ignorant, near-destitute, aged spinsters, victims themselves of wrong choice. On this level—that of the easily expendable priest, no matter how brilliant—the boy also might ponder well Father Flynn’s “great wish for him.”

Thus, the suggestions surrounding the priest alone hint of mighty forces past and present hostile to Ireland, the faith, and Father Flynn’s own unimpaired existence, and his sister’s also. Even an unscrupulous man might have found himself disappointed and crossed in such an ethos. Yet the question remains: how are these intimations of national and religious disaster in Father Flynn related to other episodes—the boy’s dream of Persia, the visit to the death-room ablaze with tawny gold light, the memory of the good father dozing or bespattered with snuff, even the seemingly endless and halting dialogue between Eliza and the boy’s aunt that concludes the story?

II

Perhaps I should try to answer these questions by first posing another of my own. Given Father Flynn’s painful antecedents, what kind of impression are we meant to imagine he makes on the boy, especially if we recall old Cotter’s last words on the ill results of the boy’s friendship: “It’s bad for children because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect …” What effect does such a mentor have on a boy in whom he inculcates the niceties in distinguishing among sins or impresses with “the duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional”? One such effect or influence may be largely aesthetic: to inculcate writing as a transforming ritual with the power of creating a conscience—in short, the literary theory behind the volume itself. Consider four important words that may make particular this claim.

The first is found in the phrase directed at the boy by his uncle—“that Rosicrucian there.” In the year of Father Flynn’s death appeared also W. B. Yeats’s essay “The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux.” Yeats’s subject is the death-sleep of the imagination in literature and its hoped-for reawakening in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: James Joyce’s Method in Dubliners
• 1 “The Sisters”: The Three Fates and the Opening of Dubliners
• 2 “An Encounter”: Joyce’s History of Irish Failure in Roman, Saxon, and Scandinavian Dublin
• 3 “Araby”: The Self-Discovery of a Double Agent
• 4 “Eveline”: Eveline and the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque
• 5 “After the Race”: Our Friends the French, the Races of Castlebar, and Dun Laoghaire
• 6 “Two Gallants”: A Walk through the Ascendancy
• 7 “The Boarding House”: The Sacrament of Marriage, the Annunciation, and The Bells of St George’s
• 8 “A Little Cloud”: the Prisoner of Love
• 9 “Counterparts”: Hell and the Road to Beggar’s Bush
• 10 “Clay”: Maria, Samhain, and the Girls Next Door in Drumcondra
• 11 “A Painful Case”: the View from Isolde’s Chapel, Tower, and Fort
• 12 “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”: Fanning the Phoenix Flame, or the Lament of the Fianna
• 13 “A Mother”: Ourselves Alone
• 14 “Grace”: Drink, Religion, and Business as Usual
• 15 “The Dead”: I Follow St Patrick
• Conclusion: Joyce, Dublin, Dubliners, and After
• Index