'Joyce he said, 'James Joyce'

Joyce was an author committed to busting literary taboos, in particular taboos about human sexuality. His determination to explore sexuality in life and in print gave an added twist to his anti-clericalism, which, in turn, was born out of his background in Irish nationalism. His family were bourgeois, followers of the Home Rule party, led by Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell's political downfall in 1891 at the hands of respectable Irish society (he was caught having an affair with a married woman) coincided with the Joyce family's tumble into poverty. Joyce's father spent the rest of his life in semi-employment, grubbing amongst the members of the rabblement. His mother, Mary, died in 1903 from cancer of the liver, weakened by years of poverty and fifteen pregnancies. Joyce was barely 21 at the time. He described the scene in a letter to his future common-law wife:

When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin – a face grey and wasted with cancer – I understood I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.

In his works he took a long hard look at that system: a system that not only exhausted his mother but his mother country, Ireland. Joyce was an implacable opponent of British imperialism, in life and works, from start to end, from the imperialist allegory of After The Race to the shooting of the Russian general in Finnegans Wake.

 

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After about a page one of the sisters stops 'as if she were communing with the past'. The conversation takes a turn. She too noticed 'something queer' about the priest. He was 'too scrupulous'. Priesthood 'was too much for him'. He was 'a disappointed man'.

It turns out, during a ceremony, the priest broke a chalice, the cup Catholics believe to carry the blood of Christ. For a priest this would be a serious thing. The sky didn't open up. The ground didn't swallow him whole. Nothing happened.

There we have it, a simple tale undermining the institutions ceremonies of the church: clear enough even to the casual reader. The eagle-eyed reader, however, will go back over the pages. Why is the story called The Sisters when they play such a peripheral role? What's with these heavily emphasised words 'paralysis', 'gnomon' and 'simony'?

A 'gnomon' is a piece of a parallelogram (we spend much of the story making sense of half finished sentences and suggestive phrases). 'Simony', in the Catholic Church, is the act of buying spiritual favours or powers. Think again about the sisters, two unmarried, elderly women of independent means. What was their means? Their brother, of course.

In an impoverished Catholic country like Ireland, sons and daughters were often sent off to join the church as a good source of income for the family. Joyce leaves a few hints in the story as to the class background of the sisters, not least the description of 'them new fangled carriages that makes no noise… them with the rheumatic wheels'.

The church is a good career move? This was political dynamite! Joyce followed this up with two more stories, one featuring references to mental illness and sexual perversion, the other drinking and gambling. They were turned down by the Homestead. There was further infamy when it was realised the 'paralysis' Joyce hinted at in The Sisters could've been the 'general paralysis of the insane', the latter stages of syphilitic infection.

Already we have teased out a number of themes that run through Dubliners (and on, through the rest of his work). Paralysis: in the form of the old priest's illness or Mr Duffy's hermit like life. Paralysis: like Eveline stuck on the wharf, or the canvassers huddling in the committee room because it's raining. Moments of deception and betrayal are cast through the book. Mrs Mooney's tender trap in The Boarding House; Corley swindling rich women; the nationalists' betrayal of the principles of Parnell.

 

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