Burns ADM

An Analysis of the Strange and Sinful in Joyce’s “The Sisters”

8 October 1992

“It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look
upon its deadly work,” (Joyce, 9) observes the young narrator of Joyce’s
“The Sisters” as he introduces the thematic dichotomy of emotion that
accompanies several characters’ contemplation of the strange and
unfamiliar. Most prominently affected by these emotions are the boy and
his ordained friend, Father Flynn. Devoted to understanding the most
profound mysteries of the Catholic church, Father Flynn buries himself in
the catacombs of tradition that lie far below the familiar, placating
Catholic religion that the other Dubliners know. But in so doing, he
loses sight of the more superficial aspects of Catholicism, and
eventually suffocates, paralyzed under the weight of the knowledge and
mystery he has explored. The layers of Dublin’s mysteries run deep into
language, history, and contemporary culture, and Father Flynn can go only
so far. Aware of his limitations, he hopes to continue his tradition,
his quest, with the aid of the narrator, who, torn between fear and
longing, comes closer than most to the strange essence, but whether he
(the boy) ever understands more than his mentor is a question unanswered.
It is fitting that just as Father Flynn leaves so many questions
unsolvable, Joyce, too, leaves so much open to conjecture. However, a
careful study of the text reveals at least that the story in its entirety
can be interpreted as a search through strangeness for truth, for
essence, for quiditas as a reaction to that search, and as an
illustration of the cycle that such a search generates.
The first sentence of “The Sisters” implies a difficult effort at
last defeated. “There was no hope for him this time: it was his third
stroke.” Two strokes the victim survives, but the third kills him. The
narrator’s first described source of verification, of truth, is a
Catholic ritual: the boy “knew that two candles must be set at the head
of a corpse.” He reveals his reliance on and knowledge of Catholic
tradition, but with the use of “must” he also suggests a strict personal
obedience of it. He does not see two candles and wonder. He sees two
candles and knows. Also, the boy seems to have created rituals of his
own, as “night after night [he] had passed the house and studied the
lighted square of the window” and “every night [he] gazed up at the
window” (9). There is a contentment in his regularity, a kind of
reassurance to counteract an experience (i.e. walking by the candle-lit
window of a paralytic old man) that ordinarily could be overwhelmingly
fearful for a boy. In taking that walk “night after night”, he masters
it as well as he can, but is still stricken with fear of the strange. “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.” And this fear grows worse with the knowledge
that illuminated by those two candles is a death, a concept with which
the boy probably had been immediately unfamiliar. “Now [‘paralysis’]
sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being.” The
notion of paralysis, of the inability to move, to manipulate what one
normally can manipulate, makes little or no sense to him, but when life
itself is drained away, the nonsensical takes a malevolent form. What is
crucial to note, though, is that despite his fear, despite his inability
to fully understand, he “longed to be nearer to it” (9), presumably so
that he could understand and perhaps, by extension, master it.
This initial paragraph, even the boy himself, serves as an analog
for the experience of Father Flynn. But this is not evident until much
later in the story, because rather than write directly about the priest’s
experience, Joyce introduces instead his mysterious nature. He develops
the character from a subjective point of view within the story before he
constructs the plot. The characters define, or attempt to define,
another character before they act their roles in the plot. The scene
becomes a study in contrast of reactions to the strange. Where the boy
was frightened but interested, his elders are unsure and condemning.
The boy’s personal relationship with the priest is something “bad
for children” (10), apparently because of the adult’s feelings toward the
priest. There is a tension that pulls the narrator from side to side,
from the priest to the other adults, who appear afraid to lose him to the
strange ways and the “great wish” of the Father Flynn. The adjectives
used to describe him bespeak an explicit attitude of uncertainty, and an
implicit dislike and fear. Old Cotter cannot put into words the
strangeness of Father Flinn, and must start by defining with a negation
and end by trailing off. “No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly...but there
was something queer...there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell
you my opinion...” (9-10). He continues without any more certainty than
he began with: “I think it was one of those...peculiar cases...But it’s
hard to say...” (10). From this, one can conclude that either Old Cotter
does not understand Father Flynn, or that if he does, he is unwilling or
afraid to confront the issue. The adults’ propensity to skip over
strange matters hints at their mere superficial understanding of profound
matters, and rather than admit or realize their ignorance, they label it
“peculiar” and “uncanny”. Only the boy and the Priest, and later to a
degree, Eliza, confront the weightier mysteries. The priest seemingly
knows this and enlists his young friend to explore with him the rituals
of the church. The adults have a less developed sense of this, though
it is enough to warrant discouraging the boy from having such friends.
“Let him learn to box his corner. That’s what I’m always saying to that
Rosicrucian there: take exercise.” The uncle’s curious reference to the
boy as a “Rosicrucian” connotes he, on a hyperbolized plane, imagines the
boy to be a acolyte learning the darkest plots and plans of the secret
order that itself was immersed in cabala and the ancient arts. It
suggests, too, that the superficial, ignorant Catholics such as the Uncle
and the others, were superior to and more normal than those who, like
Flynn and the boy, went below the surface. And likewise, one might
suspect that Flynn didn’t particularly care for the Catholics who sinned
in their ignorance. The boy, in lieu of the priest, judges Cotter to be
a “tiresome old red-nosed imbecile”. (11) Yet he admits to feeling at
times “uneasy” with Father Flynn. Again, the tension between the two
sides, with the boy in the middle, is apparent.
The narrator’s account of studying the esoteric elements of
Catholicism is essential to the understanding of Father Flynn as a man
completely dedicated to discovering the answers to the mysteries of the
church. It is in this account that a likely definition of “the great
wish” can be found. The boy realizes “he had taught me a great deal,” he
“showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the
Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts,” and his
description of that teaching illustrates how passionate the priest was in
passing on the knowledge of ritual and toward the knowledge itself.
Educated in the birthplace of Catholicism, the priest learned catechism
the way catechism should be learned, probably from men who had thorough
understanding of pure Catholicism. He seems to have viewed himself as
missionary to the boy, not to teach him the simple facts of Jesus, Mary,
and eternal salvation, but the larger secrets of the catacombs, and about
Napoleon Bonaparte, and...the meaning of the different ceremonies of the
Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had
amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one
should do in certain circumstances. (13) Each of these has its own
meaning, its own origin, its own tradition, and the priest sees it as his
duty to not only know the intricacies, but also to pass them on to the
next generation, without losing any meaning or seriousness in the
communication. Father Flynn’s method of inculcation affects the boy
indelibly, and grants him an understanding that though not fully mature
is far better developed than that of the other adults. “The duties of
the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the
confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever
found in himself the courage to undertake them.” The other adults do not
have such a sense of the gravity involved in the church. They accept it
as a responsibility, but when it comes to grasping the unfamiliar ideas
behind the tradition, they pull away, frightened of what it may demand of
them. They haven’t “the courage to undertake them,” and instead must
perform them without awareness of the meaning behind their actions. Note
how Nanny unconsciously performs a Eucharistic ceremony when she “went to
the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wine-glasses.
She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine.
Then...she poured out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us.
She pressed me to take some cream crackers also, but I declined” (15)
Surely Father Flynn would be less than pleased to see such mindless
exercises, but he sees something different in the narrator. The boy, in
his genuineness, elicits from him a pensive smile, a facial expression
that carries a significance throughout the story. The smile comes when
Father Flynn is pleased with what has happened. He smiles when the boy
can recite litanies, and when he sees progression toward truth and
understanding.
Father Flynn’s corpse, however, does not smile. “The fancy came to
me that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin. But
no” (14). There is no moment of understanding before his death, no
unification with the primordial, with the katholikos, the universal.
There is no epiphany for Father Flynn. The boy’s “fancy” of the smile,
followed by his quick realization that there is no smile is emblematic of
his being pulled between the two sides. He is deceived for a moment, but
then sees the “truculent, gray and massive” face, while the others
misread him as “peaceful and resigned”. In the coffin, he is
determined, not passive, but his grip on the chalice is “loose”, perhaps
symbolic of his incomplete comprehension of the most obscured mysteries,
e.g. the origins of Catholicism and the Grail.
It is unlikely that Father Flynn would lie in his coffin “resigned”
to death, especially after he convinces himself that he must confess.
“It was that chalice that he broke....That was the beginning of it. Of
course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean.
But still...”(17) Eliza now is being as direct as she can be, more
direct than any other adult in the story, but she still has some of the
blindness of the others. The chalice, representative of the mysteries,
does not “contain nothing”. It contains the knowledge of the Church and
the hopes of Father Flynn, and the destruction, the spilling out of these
hopes, stops his search for truth. This inability to understand anymore,
this necessity of ceasing to dig deeper into the origins and mysteries,
this is Father Flynn’s sin, and he knows it. He may even believe that
the chalice fell from his hands as a sign to stop his search, and that
would imply to him that his searching, that to which he devoted his life,
was one consuming mortal, fatal sin.
His stroke seizes parts of him until he cannot move, until he is
paralyzed in body and in spirit. Paralysis becomes real for him.
Smiling “in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to
himself” (18), he understands only that he will understand nothing more.
He laughs softly as he did while hearing the boy recite litanies, and he
hopes the boy will continue his search for the truth in the roots of true
Catholicism. Those who discover him in the confessional, those who
witness his laughing, can do nothing but react as Old Cotter did, and
think without resolution that “there was something gone wrong with
him...” (18). The story ends with that ellipsis; the story ends with
that which is missing. The story begins with gnomon, i.e. that which is
missing. Father Flynn spends his life in search of that gnomon, and he
struggles against simony, a corrupt, superficial process that
artificially replaces the substantive (wealth) with the ephemeral, that
which is not there (blessings and grace). The struggle ends in a
deadlock, a paralysis, a death, and in the middle of this struggle is the
narrator, who himself is deadlocked between the superficial, nearly
mindless ritualism of his elders and the profound Catholicism of Father
Flynn. The narrator understands his position on a conscious level, but
at times it victimizes him subconsciously. After he tries to understand
the mystery of Cotter’s unfinished sentences, he dreams of stasis, of
“the heavy, grey face of the paralytic” (11). He withdraws and
consciously “tries to think of Christmas,” not because it is a happy
occasion filled with presents and jubilance, but because Christmas in his
family is free of the profound ritual Father Flynn with prefer. It is
easy to imagine his aunt and uncle going through the holiday season
without sincerely considering the purpose and origin of Christmas. At
Christmas, the narrator is free from striving towards the unknowable,
just as he feels “as if [he] had been freed” after Father Flynn dies.
Thoughts of Christmas are not enough to deter his subconscious, though,
and the face follows him. The boy’s belief “that it desired to confess
something” suggests he knows what Father Flynn’s sin is. In the
“pleasant and vicious region”, a phrase reminiscent of the fear and
longing in the first paragraph, “it began to confess” (11) as it “smiled
continually”. The smile is that smile of understanding, the smile of
faith that the boy will carry on the work. The narrator returns the
smile “feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin,” but he fears
that he, too, will die of paralysis, and he blocks out the rest
remembering only “long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique
fashion” (13). One of the most puzzling pieces of the account is the
narrator’s reference to absolving “the simoniac”. This suggests a
morally-inverted Faustian bargain wherein Father Flynn tries to buy a
more complete understanding, or actually to know the same magic that
Simon Magus tried to buy. This could be his sin, and if it were the
boy could very well know about it, but Joyce provides no other explicit
evidence to support it, and the only implicit evidence is the snuff-
stained garments that are not so pure and clean as they once were.
It is more probable, though, that Father Flynn’s sin, as he
understands it, is his inability to thoroughly understand and transcend
the gnomon/simoniac dichotomy that eventually stops and kills him.
Father Flynn’s overwhelmed student, the narrator, meanwhile represents
the hope of both sides, and though he fears the same paralysis that
halted Father Flynn, he cannot help but draw near, because he remains
hesitant to partake in the thoughtless rituals of his elders. Joyce
leaves the narrator’s choice undocumented and unexplained, though he
allows one to conjecture that if the boy chooses to chase the unknown, he
too will someday reach paralysis, but if he obeys the superficial
religion of his elders, the mysteries will not be studied, and their
essence, that which is missing, never will be known.