Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue

1. Silence and Fractals in “The Sisters”

❦ 23 1 Silence and Fractals in “The Sisters” MICHAEL GRODEN AND VICKI MAHAFFEY Mike and Vicki agreed to write two independent ten-page essays on “The Sisters ” and to exchange them. They met in a Pizza Express in the Bloomsbury section of London to comment on one another’s drafts. Vicki liked Mike’s essay, but Mike had reservations about Vicki’s: she had outlined a way of understanding the damage that the story alludes to but does not identify, which is exactly what Mike discouraged readers from doing. Moreover, Vicki’s tone was passionate , in sharp contrast to the dispassionate observational acuity that Mike appreciated in the boy and believed the critic should emulate. Vicki ruminated over Mike’s comments for several months, trying to find a way of approaching the story that might accommodate both their perspectives. This essay is the result of that process. At the gateway of Dubliners we find this spare, narratively uneventful story about death and damage told from the sharply perceptive yet uncomprehending perspective of a young boy. We may well look for a Dantean inscription above this “door” to a collection of stories about Dublin: Per me si va ne la città dolente. Per me si va ne l’etterno dolore Per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore fecemi la divina podestate, la somma sapienza e’l primo amore. 24 ❦ M IC H A E L G RODE N A N D V IC K I M A H A F F E Y Through me you go to the grief-wracked city. Through me to everlasting pain you go. Through me you go and pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator. I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and Primal Love. The inscription ends with the famous words “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,” which is usually translated, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” (Alighieri 2006, 20–21).1 The reader of “The Sisters” is indeed entering a “grief-wracked city,” the hopelessness of which is marked in the first sentence: “There was no hope for him this time.” In order to explore this urban underworld of stagnation and despair with the requisite sympathy and clarity of mind (with what Dante calls Love as well as Justice), its readers, like its characters, must be willing to postpone the consolation of meaning, defined as a conceptual framework that arranges isolated perceptions into larger patterns. If this hope for immediate apprehension of meaning is not left at the door, readers will be effectively barred from entering the collection of stories, for “The Sisters” is its portal. Although meaning has been banished from the consciousness of both characters and narrators, the narrator’s responses to sensual stimuli are almost preternaturally acute, and readers would do well to imitate that heightened sensitivity to sight and hearing. Joyce’s underworld is not just the city of Dublin at the turn of the century, but the unconscious minds of his characters. In order to see beneath the textual surface, readers must sharpen their perceptions and delay judgment, reading the silences as well as the words and looking for the geometries of fact and feeling that subtend what is consciously expressed. Readers of “The Sisters” are immediately confronted with a dilemma, then: given the reluctance of the narrator to explain what is going on, whether to himself or to an imagined audience, is the reader being prompted to generate explanations or to resist them (remembering that to resist explanation 1. Kirkpatrick translates the last line of the inscription differently: “Surrender as you enter every hope you have.” Silence and Fractals in “The Sisters” ❦ 25 is to accept the almost surgical delineation of irreparably damaged lives)? Alternatively, if we are prompted to do both, to understand and accept the inevitability of such damage under the prevailing conditions, how might we—with the equal measures of justice and love that characterized the creator of Dante’s hell—scrupulously create a context for passing through and beyond the specter of characters hopelessly trapped in their ordinary lives? This interpretive crux is mirrored by what might be called an affective one concerning our reaction to the priest in the story: to what extent do we respect and even admire the priest’s fatherly “wish” for the boy, his willingness to mentor him, and to...