'The Sisters' by James Joyce

Mr Kemp

Samuel Beckett, reflecting on his relationship with James Joyce in his later life, said that Joyce 'believed in words'.

This is more profound a sentence than it initially appears. Throughout his entire career, Joyce ‘believed in words’, believing in their power, their importance, and their mutability. Readers of Ulysses and the fewer readers of Finnegans Wake will be aware of Joyce’s facility and fascination with language, but this obsession goes right the way back to ‘The Sisters’ the first short story in his first published collection Dubliners (1914).

The story is ostensibly a simple one, about a young man who finds out that a priest who has been close to has died. The boy goes to the priest’s funeral and we are told in a roundabout way of the priest’s deterioration. The narrator, at the start of the story, shows that his morbid fascination with the priest’s death is one that exists through language:

'Every night as I gazed up at the window 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. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and look upon its deadly work.'

U8th students will have things to say about the symbolic importance of ‘gnomon’ and ‘simony’ here (not to mention ‘paralysis’), but it’s worth drawing attention to how Joyce wants us to see these words qua words. The words themselves jar with the narrator’s imagination and sound ‘strangely’ in his ‘ear’; reciting the word paralysis becomes a kind of ritual that is performed ‘every night’; and by the end of this paragraph the word is alive, a kind of ‘being’, capable of ‘deadly work’ (is it just me who thinks there’s something to say about the way ‘deadly work’ is only one slip of the pen from ‘deadly word’?).

Reading the story again, I’m struck by how much the story is about the power of language as it is about a rather crusty and ambivalent priest. It’s about how we take in the world through language, and learn about life and death through words. It’s not for nothing that the boy realises that the priest is dead through language, by reading a 'card pinned on a crepe'. It is through language, the printed word, that death is made manifest. For both the reader and the narrator of the story, the ultimate end of the priest is made real through the process of reading the message, which 'persuaded [the boy] that he was dead.'

It’s no surprise that Joyce chose this story to start his collection, and, essentially, to start his entire career, with a discussion of the power of language. As Beckett said, he believed in it.