Not "too much noise": Joyce's "The Sisters" in Irish Catholic perspective - James Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1993 by Thomas Dilworth

The Visitation and the raising of Lazarus are the myths underlying the story. (By 'myth' I mean not untruth--as the lexicographers of the Enlightenment defined it--but a story that engages a person at the deepest level of fear, desire, or awe.) The raising of Lazarus is the primary myth, but it blends with the enlivening visitation to the precursor by the newly incarnate Son. The boy refuses to raise the priest by refusing to be his successor. This is symbolized by his withholding full communion from him. All this has its punning verification in the sign in the drapery shop below: "On ordinary days a notice used to hang in the window, saying: Umbrellas Re-covered. No notice was visible now for the shutters were up" (11-12). The boy refuses to 'recover' the priest. It is a denial of composite myth, the penultimate irony of the story.

The ultimate irony is that the denial of myth may cancel its positive content but does not erase the pattern. By refusing to resurrect the priest and by refusing full communion with him, the boy approximates the priest more deeply than by dreamily hearing confession and symbolically taking communion. The boy finishes his relationship with the priest by withholding love. (If their relationship is symbolized by the word "gnomon," then surely the missing part of the parallelogram is love.) The boy has already mirrored the priest by having an ulterior motive that diminished friendship. Since young people respond to love with love, responsibility for its absence may lie chiefly with the priest for selfishly wishing to live on, or live again, through the boy. But by reciprocating in kind, by withholding love, the boy corresponds most deeply and completely to the priest. What the priest desired has consequently happened, though not as the priest intended--for the boy would deny the priest life and liberty.

If he had loved the priest, now dead, he would not, of course, really have liberated him or given him life. But he would have liberated himself. Instead, he binds himself to the type of the man he rejects. The significance of that may have some resonance in the wake's taking place two days short of American Independence Day.(19) In any case, like the shop's umbrellas advertised by the sign now out of sight, the priest has been, in this unintended sense, "Re-covered."

The dreamed confession and the sherry and crackers are symbols. The biblical Visitation and the raising of Lazarus are underlying myths. Their inherent meanings--forgiveness, communion, rebirth--operate as symbols and a metaphor of what the boy denies the priest, and that is love. In this, the boy contradicts the archetype of Jesus. Love is what had apparently been lacking in his "friendship" with the priest all along. The surest indication of this from the boy's perspective is something that no interpreter of the story has noticed--that nowhere in his retrospective narrative does the boy express the slightest warmth or affection for the priest.

NOTES

1 The title of Mark Schorer's famous article.