…the LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.
Genesis 2:17
By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.
Genesis 3:19
James Joyce’s short story “Clay” uses clay as an ironic representation of Maria’s faith in God, one that is specifically reflective on a belief immortality. The clay which Maria blindly must identify in the family saucer game recalls the Biblical origin–and end–of Man; his mortality. For Maria, this fearful eventuality should be solved by her Catholicism, which states Man may move beyond this dumb substance, into an infinite glory with God. Joyce, however, makes some subtle suggestions that Maria may be fooling herself, the most elegant of which comes in Maria’s reaction–and the others’ lack of response–to her touching of the clay:
She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage.
When I read this–already primed for the mortality symbolism of clay in “Little Cloud”–I imagined that Maria might face a similar surprise when, penultimately “blindfolded” in death, there is no one who can call out to her, and nothing for her to see!
If Joyce’s symbolism here isn’t an indictment of religious faith itself, at least it suggests cracks and quivering in Maria’s own faith. Such imperfections in one’s faith are not so remarkable, though in Maria’s case they are more troubling in light of her apparent dissatisfaction and disappointments in her own life, which she seems to willfully ignore, discount, or gloss over. This is poignantly illustrated when Maria sings the first verse of the song “I Dreamt that I Dwelt” twice. Whether consciously or unconsciously she obfuscates the second verse’s reference to eros–which Maria has not found–in favor of the first verse’s focus on agape–which Maria hopes to obtain.
I say this is troubling because it is one thing to hope for life after death as a remedy for dying, but quite another to hope for life after death as a remedy for living.
