Content provided in partnership with
James Joyce's "The Sisters": chalices and umbrellas, ptolemaic Memphis and Victorian Dublin
Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Susan Swartzlander
Almost 30 years ago, Berni Benstock published a note about "The Sisters," questioning whether the short story had "come-of-age," a point "when a critic takes it upon himself to summarize the compendium of previous criticism, cut away, the accumulation of erroneous conjectures, and make some definite final statements about it -- rare distinction for a short story." Despite those "definite final statements," Berni found "room for at least another two cents worth of commentary" (Benstock 32). Perhaps there never are final words to say about Joyce's texts, and it is precisely the mystery, the complexity, the ambiguity that Joyceans find so absorbing.
- More Articles of Interest
- Not "too much noise": Joyce's "The Sisters" in Irish Catholic perspective -...
- James Joyce's darkly colored portraits of "mother" in Dubliners - Special...
- Dubliners. - book reviews
- Who killed Mrs. Sinico? - "A Painful Case" - Special "Dubliners" Number
- "Dubliners" and the art of losing - Special "Dubliners" Number
I would like to explore once more the tantalizing mysteries of "The Sisters," assuming two of Berni's main points -- his diagnosis of the priest's madness as a crisis of faith: the priest "comes dose to losing his mind because he is seriously on the verge of losing his faith; as well as his assertion that the infirm Father Flynn "contributes to a view that the Church is both corroded and a dangerously corrosive force" (Benstock 33).
As a story about the loss of faith and the corruption of religious values, Joyce's "The Sisters" has its roots in a Georg Ebers novel of the same title. The German Ebers, an Egyptian archeologist and author of historical romances, based his fiction on historical documents. In the case of The Sisters, Ebers focused on the ancient Memphite cult of Serapis, an institution that worshiped the Egyptian and Greek equivalents of the god Osiris, a god of death and resurrection.
Joyce peppers his story with allusions to the world Ebers recaptures.(1) Joyce's references to the East include the boy's dream, the word "gnomon," and the epithet Rosicrucian. The boy dreams of "long velvet curtains and a swimming lamp of antique fashion. I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange -- in Persia, I thought" (13). Appropriate for a story about death, this image recalls a festival of lamps that honored the dead one night a year in a commemoration observed throughout the East. The rows of oil lamps fastened to houses were intended "to light the shades on their return to their old homes and back again to the realm of the dead" (Frazer 398).
The word "gnomon," which the boy contemplates in conjunction with "simony" and "paralysis," also points toward the East. Not only is Alexandrian Greece invoked with the naming of Euclid, but Egypt has long been considered the source of geometry -- the gnomon in particular -- as a way of measuring a loss. Herodotus tells us that any man whose property sustained damage from Nile flooding would appeal to the king, "who would send inspectors to measure the extent of the loss, in order that he might pay in future a fair proportion of the tax at which his property had been assessed." The historian surmises that "this was the way in which geometry was invented, and passed afterwards into Greece -- for knowledge of the sundial and the gnomon and the twelve divisions of the day came into Greece from Babylon" (Herodotus 169). In "The Sisters" the gnomon not only symbolizes a significant loss, in this case the loss of faith, the word signals that one dimension of Joyce's story will involve Eastern influences.
A third example of joyce's suggestive technique occurs when the uncle calls his nephew "that Rosicrucian there" (11). Members of the "Ancient Order of Rosae Crucius" believed themselves to be "mystically in touch with the Great White Brotherhood of Egypt," a priesthood that flourished in the fifteenth century BCE, recalling the cults of Memphis. This "international fraternity of religious mystics" advocated a "dreamy aesthetic withdrawal from worldly concerns" (Gifford 30). Rosicrucians, and many historians, trace the origins of early Christian asceticism to these ancient Egyptian movements.
Intrigued by an historical approach that discerns patterns repeated in different times and places, Joyce delighted in weaving together details to illustrate that ancient Eastern philosophy, religion, and politics held some meaning for modern experience. While engaged in writing and revising "The Sisters," Joyce definitely had such Irish and Eastern correspondence in mind.(2) In the 1907 lecture he delivered in Trieste, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," Joyce described the Celtic language as "oriental in origin . . . identified by many philologists with the ancient language of the Phoenicians." More than the language evolved from the East, however: "The religion and civilization of this ancient people, later known by the name of Druidism, were Egyptian" (CW 156). Perhaps most indicative of Joyce's design in "The Sisters" was his pronouncement that "Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead. Its death chant has been sung, and on its gravestone has been placed the seal" (CW 173).
