I’ve enjoyed the Motley Read, and owe much to Chris for organizing it. The extended pace was a little stretched, but my winter has been busy enough that it has allowed me to actually kept pace, and over the weeks I’ve returned to more than one story to review, reflect, or even re-read entirely.

My own productive/creative activity has been limited blog posts and a total of ten roughly-illustrated postcards sent through out mailing list. Though I haven’t drawn anything seriously in over a decade, this practice has been liberating and enjoyable, as it’s freed me from the intellectual pressure of trying to write cogently on these muti-layered stories while allowing me to focus on key scenes as I visualized them, and even interpret or infer nuances from the story through my compositions.

I’ve been delighted with responses from the handful of fellow Motley Readers who have taken the time to digitize and publish these postcards on their blogs. Unfortunately, at least half of the postcards have been either lost or neglected, and I’ll probably never see those again except in my memory. If I had been more ambitious I would have made prints; maybe for some other work in some lesser season!

I never intended to produce one postcard per story, but now that I’m just 5 shy of a “set”, so to speak, I’m now considering illustrating “An Encounter”, “Araby”, “Eveline”, “Clay”, and “The Dead”, if only to keep or mail to myself.

It’s a postcard hinting at “A Painful Case”–perhaps my favorite story from Dubliners. Who is it from? “The Imitator”, apparently!

…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.

I apologize to the other motley readers–and especially the postcard-writers–for not posting these up sooner; February has been a looong month!

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.”