“There was no hope for him this time” [On James Joyce’s ‘Two Sisters’ and ‘The Dead.’]

I wrote this initially as a submission for the magazine The First Line. In addition to soliciting quarterly stories with provided opening lines, it also accepts non-fiction submissions of short essays in which writers can expound on their favourite opening line of literature. The following is my submission, regarding James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners, which was ultimately unsuccessful.

 “There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke”  

 Perhaps the readiest association with James Joyce is obscurity. His novels, beginning with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, become increasingly more difficult until their culmination of ultimate incomprehensibility in Finnegans Wake. One can navigate this novel with the requisite annotations – the recognition, for example, that the storm of letters in the third paragraph (beginning ‘the fall’) is meant to represent impending thunder. Yet the difficulty in parsing the novel has most recently been evinced by a California reading group which took twenty-eight years (1995-2023) to read it.

(Finnegans, which begins in media res, coils into itself, with its ending latching onto its beginning; that the group is now starting the novel again is a delicious encapsulation of this.)

However, it is wrong to suggest that Joyce is entirely obscure or impenetrable, and that he is not capable of writing more traditional narratives. As excellent as his more consciously modernist extravagances may be, he was more than adept at writing simple, naturalistic stories. His sole short story collection, Dubliners, is testament to this.

Its opening story, ‘The Sisters,’ depicts the mental deterioration of a priest, Father Flynn. In the opening line, we read of him having a third stroke: ‘There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.’ Typically of Joyce, with his careful and precise ministration of language, ‘stroke’ also serves as a striking metaphor for the passing of time and presages Flynn’s impending death.

As he gets older, Flynn finds himself increasingly struggling with his health and with the rigours of the priesthood. The eponymous sisters, Eliza and Nannie, say how this was particularly difficult for him, as he is unduly ‘scrupulous’ and ‘[t]he duties of the priesthood were too much for him.’

The culmination of this is him accidentally dropping a chalice. Although it did not contain the host – and so its spilling would not constitute an act of desecration – this accident nonetheless ‘deeply affected his mind.’ The story concludes with the sisters explaining how, one night, he was found ‘sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession box, wideawake [sic] and laughing-like softly to himself,’ at which point everyone ‘knew there was something gone wrong with him.’

The melancholy that suffuses this story, as well as much of the collection, is carefully and artfully rendered by Joyce. Joyce was notorious for his careful attention to detail and how he shepherded words with the acuity of a poet. While Flynn’s mistakes are attributable to his stroke and thus not his fault, the ravaging effect of the guilt he feels negates this. This serves as an exemplification of Joyce’s disdain for Catholicism and Catholic guilt in particular. (This is most notably explored in Portrait, in particular Father Arnall’s chilling sermon about Hell.)

Along with obscurity, excess is also frequently attributed to Joyce (albeit unfairly.) His final two novels are veritable behemoths, which took him a combined twenty-four years to complete (although, in the latter case, this was due to Joyce’s increasingly ill health and impending blindness; at least some of the novel was transcribed by Joyce’s friend, the playwright Samuel Beckett). Yet ‘The Sisters’ is contained, short, adheres perfectly to Poe’s ‘unity of effect,’ and truly warrants the old cliché of there not being a word too many.

As well as its wonderful beginning, Dubliners has an outstanding ending. Indeed, I do not think it unduly hyperbolic to say that it is one of the most exquisite, poignant, and resonant endings in all of literature. ‘The Dead,’ which concludes the collection, partly relates to Gabriel Conroy learning that his wife Gretta had once been loved by a man called Michael Furey, who had died after exacerbating an existing illness by waiting for her outside her window in the winter. As Gabriel reflects on this, he realises how he ‘had never felt like this towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love,’ and then he stands at his window, watching the snow falling below.

Gabriel then thinks about his own death: ‘The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.’ The final three paragraphs of the story are exquisite. Taken in toto, their cumulative power and beauty are highly evocative. The final paragraph – of the story and also the book – is outstanding. It concludes:

[…]snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as herd the snow falling faintly though the universe and faintly falling, the like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This sublime, numinous, almost cosmic conclusion constitutes Joyce at his upmost mastery of the short-story form, and exemplifies his ability to tell traditional stories, and transform the medium in the process.