"Dubliners" and the art of losing

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by John Gordon

A viaries aside, there are no nightingales in North America. Perhaps you didn't know that, it never having occurred to you to itemize your homeland's non-beings. In fact, I can think of only one country about which such a statement is commonly made. Everybody knows that there are no snakes in Ireland. We know this because the Irish have told us a story about it, the story being that there used to be snakes galore until someone, St. Patrick, chased them out. It is a story about an absence, made possible by the assumption that such an absence must have resulted from an act of subtraction. That something is not there means that someone took it away.

Doubtless the snakes are not missed much, but other absences are another matter. Take the official map of Ireland, a map that oddly includes a piece of someplace else. To contemplate a country thus represented is to take into account a part of it that is not there, because -- you will be told-it was taken away. This habit of noticing something missing and hypothesizing about how it got away seems to built into the Irish character, at least in the works of James Joyce. In Ulysses the Citizen considers an expanse of plains and sees an absence of trees, therefore a sign of (English) deforestation (U 268). Leopold Bloom explains what he considers the exiguous physiques of the native women as resulting from Ireland's sunlessness (U 521), the "tenebrosity" that Stephen in turn calls an "Egypt's plague" of divine withdrawal (U 322). Ergo, Irish womankind has ceased to fill out properly because the sun has ceased to shine on her -- as it has, by contrast, on the voluptuously Mediterranean Molly. Stephen has been raised to think of his country as a kingdom without -- therefore deprived of -- its rightful (uncrowned) king, who is now dead -- therefore murdered: when Mr Casey alludes to an incident 'before the chief died," Mr Dedalus corrects him: "Before he was killed, you mean" (P 36). As for Mr Dedalus's antagonist, Mrs Riordan, when she and her fellow Catholics seek out their island's center of spiritual authority they must settle for the pro-cathedral -- literally "for the [absent] cathedral," translated approximately as "not a cathedral." Dublin is the only major Catholic city without a Catholic cathedral. It used to have one, but it was taken away.

Not being mad, I don't wish to become involved in assessing the merits of such perceptions. Enough to remark that there is this habit of mind, to which Joyce is attuned. How did the crow become black and hoarse? It was once fair and melodious, but (in Ovid's account) was deprived of its beauty by an angry god. How did women come to be genitally what Bloom calls them, "the cloven sex," distinguished by absence, not presence? Rabelais's version encourages us to thing of them as men, mutilated. Come to that, how did the sexes come into separate existence at all? Plato's Aristophanes imagines an original rotund androgynous ideal cut into halves by yet another angry god. You will find variations on these and other creation-subtractions stories, including the one about Patrick and the snakes, distributed throughout Finnegans Wake. They attest to Joyce's continuing participation in what he elsewhere shows to be the Irish habit of looking hard at what isn't there.

The reliability of this approach as a detector of truth is re regrettably equivocal. Yes, on the one hand it can, like Sherlock Holmes's attention to the non-barking dog, sharpen the perception to clues otherwise overlooked: the Citizen is essentially right about deforestation. On the other hand, it can mistakenly posit things that were never there: the same Citizen is wrong that Bloom's failure to buy drinks amounts to his withholding shares in a windfall. Parnell wasn't really a king, and he wasn't exactly killed.

Just how to take what isn't there has long been recognized as a major issue of Joyce interpretation, most famously addressed by Hugh Kenner in his exposition of what he calls Joyce's "rhetoric of silence." That this issue is Joyce's own, one generated spontaneously out of the lives lived by his people and their characteristic and characteristically Irish ways of trying to make sense of them, seems to me to be signaled by an already much-discussed word on the first page of Dubliners, "gnomon."(1) "Gnomon" has several different meanings arguably relevant to the text that follows, but in this case Joyce is insistent about which we are to consider as paramount: it is 'the word gnomon in the Euclid." The gnomon in Euclid is two things. It is the sign of an absence, and the product of a process, the process of subtraction. To make a gnomon, what you do is to take a rectangular piece of paper, crease it in half along width and length, then cut out one of the four smaller rectangles marked by the creases. (The map of modern-day Ireland, properly rendered, approximates such a figure.) A gnomon illustrates engineered absence, a sign of something subtracted.

The young boy whose narrative introduces us to gnomons as it ushers us into the world of Dubliners is on "vacation," a period of time vacated -- emptied out, etymologically. He is looking for something that is not there, the reflection of the two candles that will signal Father Flynn's death. From the beginning, then, absence is a sign, and a presence would be a sign of absence. When those candles show up, they have, we are told, been subtracted from the chapel (D 16), where presumably they occupied the Gospel and Epistle horns of the altar. The last time that Father Flynn was in that chapel, he was sitting in the confessional, talking to himself, because the penitent's place on the other side of the screen was vacated. In his turn Flynn had been found in that confessional by people who "couldn't find" him anywhere else (17), and who were looking for him to give the last rites to someone soon to be no more.