A “Digging Deeper” Episode of Deeper Stories
A reference:
Joyce's "The Sisters": A Development
Florence L. Walzl
James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1/2, JJQ 50 YEARS: JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY UNIVERSITY OF TULSA 1963–2013 (Fall 2012-Winter 2013), pp. 73-117 (45 pages)
Joyce's correspondence verifies that he kept changing "The Sisters"
as his concept of Dubliners enlarged from an original plan of ten stories
for The Irish Homestead magazine, through a twelve-story version
sent to the publisher Grant Richards, on December 3, 1905,
a fourteen-story version sent to him as final on July 9,1906,
and to the eventual fifteen-story version published in 1914.
—Florence L. Walzl
I may get back to Walzl, or you may read the article before I do. We’ll see. She’s a serious scholar comparing numerous versions of the story. I’ll just stick with the two.
Some quick notes:
First thing, in my analysis, I said it’s most likely Nannie is deaf. I’m probably the only person who first thought it was anything else, but the original version says it plainly. She’s deaf.
Great Britain Street. Here’s another thing I didn’t realize. The shop, Drapery, is located at the street level of the house where Father Flynn lives. It only struck me because the original version says the house is on Great Britain Street and both versions refers to the shop (on Great Britain Street) as a house.
To better enable your own comparisons of the works, I’ve posted the text of the 1914 Dubliners version to accompany to the original text and the Dubliners-version audio. If you’re a subscriber, there’s nothing wrong with your email. I posted it quietly because I didn’t want to bother you with an inundation of Sisters-related emails.
Other stories won’t likely enjoy so many posts. The Sisters is the most changed and, second only to The Dead, is one of the most important pieces of the collection.
The Sisters: A Comparison
The Homestead version has been called more akin to Romanticism than the final version’s Modernism. My first clue of why that might be is in the first line and repeated thereafter: Providence.
Romanticism: a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.
—Oxford Languages
Modernism: a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors. It evolved from the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason. Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence.
—Poetry Foundation
In Dubliners, gone is the suggestion the boy was guided by Providence and of his being a prophet for correctly guessing the priest’s death. This is the distinction critics make in calling the original (more) Romantic.
We find this change also in a less veiled style of writing. Joyce goes from, did it reveal the ceremonious candles in whose light the Christian must take his last sleep, to, for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. The writing presents the world as it is, clearly.
That doesn’t mean there’s no room for the symbolic, but even the symbolic becomes crisp.
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 to look upon its deadly work.
It strikes me as odd to make such a distinction between one version speaking of Providence and the other of “some maleficent and sinful being,” but the latter is clearly a mental process and (I argue) a key for opening the symbolism of the work as a whole. It describes not the work of the supernatural, but the cruelties in the way we think about the sick and mentally ill.
As a writer, this encourages me to be clear in descriptions and the setting of facts. The 1914 version is better written and poetic, and important details aren’t lost within indirect sentences.
And take a step back to compare the relative strength of these openings:
Three nights in succession I had found myself in Great Britain-street at that hour, as if by Providence.
There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.
His revision is succinct, powerful, and clear. We know exactly where we are in the narrative, which is ironic, as the first version tells us what street we’re on but little else. The first version is passive. The final version is blunt and sure. His original doesn’t even mention death until the second paragraph; until then he dances around the subject, repeatedly referring to the character’s impending death as “it”. Then we’re given the new material, the rumination over the word paralysis, and we have room for his pondering because the situation is as clear in our minds as it is in the text.
As we move on to Old Cotter, I may contradict everything I just said. The first version is roundabout in setting up the death, and then plain in setting up Cotter. It tells plainly Cotter’s concerns, while the second gives us mystery with his inability to articulate. The opening clarity makes this mystery of speech possible and meaningful.
The first version gives us information but none of the momentum in the revision. Cotter’s speech becomes the question that propels the story forward. What was wrong with the priest? Why shouldn’t a child be around a man such as that? The lack of answers sends us searching for closure and informs us how to view the rest of the story. This, too, is a type of clarity and simplicity. The original is indirect, while the second guides the reader.
Opening (1914) paragraph: Sets the narrative and introduces us to the conflation of illness and sin.
Second (1914) paragraph and following (until the trip to the shop): immediate cut to his coming down to supper in the middle of Old Cotter’s opinion. There’s conflict in that opinion. The dialog in the original is lifeless by comparison, but here our emotions rise to the narrator’s defense while we also worry if there really was something dangerous about the priest. The offending suggestions and unanswered questions make for an engaging and meaningful interchange between the adult characters that propels the story forward.
Writers often talk about the scene and the sequel. In the original, there wasn’t enough conflict to warrant a sequel, a moment in the story that reflects on what happened in the scene. Now a sequel is demanded and given when the narrator tries to sleep but is haunted by Old Cotter’s words and visions of the dead priest’s face. None of that existed before.
The Drapery scene: up through the reading of the posted card, there are some minor editorial changes. Only in the second paragraph, do we resume with the meaningful changes. In the original, the boy is shocked to find the old man was really only sixty-five. Joyce replaces that with the more immediate and important emotion. The reality of the death sets in and the boy finds himself “in check.” The first version comments on the priest sitting in the room behind the shop, but this one presents us with the narrator wanting to complete this common ritual only to find himself blocked by the reality of death.
The second version narrows the action. The boy brings him the snuff (a present of his aunt) instead of the aunt bringing it herself. It keeps the relationship between the priest and the boy central. In the original, the sisters are introduced here (and we’re told Nannie is almost deaf), but they’re removed entirely from the scene in the revision. The details all switch to focus on the boy and priest, the subject of the mystery set forth by Old Cotter’s speech.
In the next paragraph, after the omitted line about not believing the priest dead which has now been contradicted, the boy lacks the courage to visit and walks away on the sunny side of the street, feeling like the death has freed him in some way. He chastises himself, remembering all the priest taught him, which brings us to details from the original version. Again, the specificity and the unanswered questions in the beginning give direction and focus to the narrative now. The guilty feeling of freedom is natural, but it takes on a sinister tint here, as does the priest’s strange smile.
These changes at the start guide the writer as well as the reader. He knows his own focus and what details stray from that focus.
Visiting the dead:
It was an oppressive summer evening of faded gold.
It was after sunset; but the window-panes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds.
The change in description calls to mind the opening and looking to the windows for the candles set at the head of the corpse. Drawing the reader’s mind back to a detail would be meaningless unless that detail were clear and meaningful in the first place.
Details are increased here, giving Nannie more action before she fades into the background. This has become necessary as this is the sisters’ first introduction, but it also keeps the information about the sisters where its most important. Added to this, as well, is the action of the boy feeling the need to be silent. He tip-toes and rejects the crackers for fear they’d be too loud. None of these details appear in the original, and they speak to a natural instinct of respect for the dead. It also suggests he fears he may wake the dead, which carries the weight of the mystery that lies between the priest and the boy.
Joyce’s dialog carries the niceties of society. When reading The Dead, for example, every real and true utterance is a shock of rudeness. Polite conversation is shallow. We have that here but the final version chooses its polite conversation more carefully. The details of the story may be the same, but now they reflect the climax of the mystery Joyce has been building. The dialog heightens the mystery as much as it sheds light upon it.
Every change in The Sisters hearkens back to that stronger opening and the mystery set in Old Cotters speech. Joyce found that mystery within the series of events he’d already written, with the only wholly new section being the attempts to sleep and the dream. However, that change early on inspired change throughout the piece, giving new meaning and focus to the moments Joyce had previously imagined.
End.
Further Notes:
In 1904, Joyce wrote to his friend, Constantine R Curran:
"The Sisters" was the start of a collection of stories. I am writing a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.
The use of the word epicleti has inspired thousands of words of explanation. In brief, it refers to the Eucharist and the transubstantiation of the bread into the body of Christ.
Hemiplegia is a paralysis of one side of the body.
(Quote from Joyce’s note taken from the reference noted at the top.)
Surprisingly, in view of Joyce's stated intention to C. P. Curran, there is no mention of paralysis and no detail that can be specifically pinpointed as hemiplegia (a unilateral paralysis), let alone total paralysis. There are also no suggestions of immoral conduct. And in this description, there are no mysterious gnomons, no inferences of simony, and no hints of sodomy.
—Florence L. Walzl
Walzl goes on to detail changes in the wake. After letters seeking the practice of burying priests, Flynn went from wearing his habit to wearing vestments. In the original, he’s holding a rosary. In an intermediate draft, he holds a cross, as was standard practice. In Dubliners, he holds the chalice which forgoes realism for symbolism.
Of the story’s title, she writes:
Even in the bare context of this original version, meaning emerges. As in the prose epiphanies Joyce was writing at this period, realistic actions and descriptions convey the moral significance. Father Flynn, a representative of the clergy, is unable to sustain the duties of his office. The sisters as representative of the laity, pious and poor, ignorant or deaf, sustain him at great sacrifice to themselves. It was not a meaning readers of The Irish Homestead would welcome.
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