Untangling ideas in writing, literature, art, Western culture

The first short story in James Joyce’s “Dubliners” (this month’s motleyread) is “The Sisters”, a slightly enigmatic story of an adolescent boy facing the death of his informal mentor, Father Flynn. Only half-way through the first page this sentence seized me:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.

Of a number of themes and motifs in “The Sisters” the theme of paralysis intrigued me the most. Father Flynn’s strokes produce a literal paralysis, and his subsequent death itself represents a final paralysis (indeed, I sensed just a hint of fear of live burial–a terrible counterpart to a misdiagnosed paralysis–in the narrator’s viewing of Flynn’s body, implicit, perhaps, in the confusion that the narrator and the sisters seem to experience as they talk of Flynn as if he were still alive).

At a most basic level, paralysis is an inability to act for one’s self. I saw this as a psychological paralysis in the narrator, as he first wills himself to not speak of Flynn’s death before his uncle and Old Cotter, and then seems unable to speak at all in Flynn’s house. This paralysis in life appears in the actions of the women, too, who can’t quite seem to verbalize the reality of Flynn’s death. “Did he … peacefully?’” the aunt asks; the sisters, too, seem almost unable to complete their thoughts about Flynn, and speak of him in hypotheticals, in speculations, with halting self-consciousness:

She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house; and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice to his breast.

I’m not quite able to connect this as I should, but it seems this persistent theme of paralysis in life connects to another dominant theme: the ineffectualness of religion for Flynn and his neighbors. Religion here seems unable to sustain the living or confront and explain death. By not providing these desired comforts, religion does nothing to alleviate the feeling of paralysis the living may feel when confronted with death; indeed, it may, by controlling actions and speech invoke it’s own partial paralysis on its followers (I marked a couple almost involuntary superstitious actions in the story). For the dead, we wonder if it provides escape from the paralysis of death. As if hoping for some sort of happy peace for the dead Flynn, the narrator fancied “that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin.”

“But no”, the narrator realizes, perhaps beginning to settle into an understanding of Flynn’s ineptitude. This is reinforced by Flynn’s own inability to literally grasp the chalice (alive or dead), the strangeness that both Old Cotter and the narrator seem differently aware of, and his improper laughing (possibly weeping?) alone in the confessional.

Wide awake and laughing-like to himself…. So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…

So the story ends, halting in its explanation in the same way that the women stop themselves from speaking the reality of Flynn’s dying. In this case there is some ambiguity in the ending ellipses, as either Eliza is unable to complete the story, or the narrator himself is unwilling to face the conclusion symbolized by “an idle chalice on his [Flynn's] breast.”