EPTThe Team Liquid Book Club - Page 5
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This week's #TLBC IRC meeting will be this Saturday at 10:30 AM PST | ||
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Whole
United States6046 Posts
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farvacola
United States18869 Posts
On May 08 2013 08:29 Whole wrote: I just read the short stories. I went in expecting it to be about Irish resistance, but all of the stories are just about Irish people doing Irish things. So are one of the points of the stories just to simply write about Irish life and publicize it? Yep, Dubliners could be considered a sort of panoramic view of Dublin seen through the eyes of the people who live there. It is also important to keep in mind that a "maturation" takes place as the stories progress. These first 4 stories could be considered the "children's" stories in that they focus on the perspectives of youth as they look up at the world around them. As we continue on, the protagonists will become older and older, and the subject matter will become more and more complex, both in form and content. "Ivy Day in the Green Room" is by far the most political story, and while the Irish cultural revival rarely takes center stage, it certainly begins to inform more of the writing as things go on, just as one tends to become more and more knowledgeable of the world around them as they grow older. | ||
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Whole
United States6046 Posts
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packrat386
United States5077 Posts
That said, I was trying to figure out the ending. It seems to me like she had some kind of a dream in which she got left behind (or stayed behind?) but it was all very unclear to me. Any help on how to read that? (I'm an engineer, bear with me) | ||
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llIH
Norway2147 Posts
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Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21247 Posts
On May 09 2013 04:14 packrat386 wrote: Finished Eveline. I really like the theme of emigration in a work meamt to capture the spirit of the irish people. I think it did an especially good job of highlighting the conflict between not wanting to lose familial and social ties vs feeling trapped in a particular role. That said, I was trying to figure out the ending. It seems to me like she had some kind of a dream in which she got left behind (or stayed behind?) but it was all very unclear to me. Any help on how to read that? (I'm an engineer, bear with me) She was about to actually leave to Buenos Aires with Frank when, at the docks, she had a change of heart. She ends up resisting as Frank and the crowds board the ship, and remained in Dublin. | ||
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negativedge
4279 Posts
** On account of their supposed economy, it is a general rule of thumb when dealing with short stories to pay particular attention to the opening paragraph. Should the story be well constructed, it is often thought that these paragraphs are of thematic and/or structural import. It is advisable to assume that interesting details presented at the beginning of a story are not incidental. If you are looking for a place to orient yourself in a short text, it is a good idea to keep anything striking about the introduction in mind. Given the patience and stylistic economy of the stories of Dubliners, this is not a bad rule. The introduction to “The Sisters” is encapsulated by death, sin, and detail. Death is signified by change, in that the protagonist is made aware of its occurrence or its delay via minute differences in the lighting within Father Flynn’s window. The movement of change within this scene connotes death, but death itself is a result of paralysis, the first of three particular words with mysterious associations that Joyce focuses on in this paragraph. There is a gap between the sign of death and the cause of death, and this gap takes the form of opposition, which may be seen as the newfound “maleficence” the protagonist attributes to the name of paralysis. While confronting the reality of death and the various “realities” of the paralysis that grip not only the characters and events of this story but of the entire collection, the protagonist fixates instead on the word paralysis and its particular aural and imagistic associations within his mind. The linguistic, associative, intellectual play of the word paralysis in the protagonist’s mind is characterized by a certain mutability that is absent not only in the meaning of paralysis, but also in the actual instance of paralysis, which both produces death through rigidity and then becomes an attribute of it. The language is alive where the reality is not. The play of this relationship signifies the “deadly work” of perception in the face of causation. This is an ordering principle of Dubliners. I would tell the reader to look for these gaps. Where does the language, the narration, or the imagery of these stories exert a certain weight or produce a kind of leverage against the action? It is as much a question of what the particulars hide as one of what they reveal. The protagonist relates paralysis to the word “gnomon” though a measure of linguistic play. Why gnomon? The text helpfully gives us the Euclidean relation, which reveals one of the word’s several meanings. If you are versed in Euclid, are reading an annotated copy of the story, or are inquisitive enough to fire up your internet browser, you will find that a Euclidean gnomon is the remainder of a parallelogram in which a smaller duplicate parallelogram has been removed from one of its corners. This provides us with a few relevant principles of the gnomon. From the general to the specific: 1) the gnomon is a whole from which a part is missing; 2) the missing part is a microcosm of the the whole; 3) the separation of the part from the whole fundamentally alters the nature of what remains. This structure is applicable to Dubliners and its various parts. Within “The Sisters,” the “part” of the story that we might view as “missing” is the particular nature of Father Flynn. Nearly every character in the story save the protagonist offers some unfinished pronouncement on Father Flynn’s history, social status, or mannerisms. Old Cotter notes that “there was something queer…. […] something uncanny about him.” He also has his “own theory” about Father Flynn’s “peculiar case” which remains unuttered. To the aunt, “he was a disappointed man” about whom she had “heard something.” To Eliza he was “too scrupulous.” In general, the ambiguous “they” of Dublin thought that “there was something gone wrong with him.” It is intimated that he lost his position within the church. The protagonist is quiet in this regard, which one might take as his youthful lack of understanding or interest in the universal pronouncements of the adults around him. The first half of the story showcases the protagonist’s quick eye, his inquisitiveness, and his anger toward the incompetency of the remaining adults in his life. But as the events move forward his viewpoint and mannerisms are erased from the narration. As the story develops, the protagonist recedes further into the background, left with the remnants of a dream, the dissociated impressions of particular words and interjections, a preoccupation with the judgments of those around him, and, finally, the concretized image of the dead man in his coffin. The linguistic play and flights of fancy that introduce us to his perspective decay in the face of absence to the point where he even fails to recall the end of the dream within which he cryptically associates the image of Father Flynn with sin. The movement of the story toward death is the movement toward the paralysis of reality. Father Flynn dead in his coffin, forever leaving an empty space for the chalice “idle on his breast,” the broken symbol of forbearance and communion; the protagonist mute in his chair; Nannie frozen and asleep; the Aunt capable only of painful platitudes. Only Eliza plows forward, but her dialog is feeble and groping. She misuses words, makes idle associations and and speaks with the dialect and parlance of an uneducated commoner in contrast to her brother’s erstwhile (and the protagonists burgeoning) erudition. What is “missing” in regards to Flynn leaves a hole in the discourse of the story, a gap that calls to mind the disassociation between signification and causation—image and reality—that informs the protagonist’s musings throughout the story. These gaps in the discourse are most clearly presented in the vague pronouncements of Old Cotter, who menaces the protagonist with empty prejudice and unformed conclusions, leaving Joyce to goad us, along with the protagonist, into “extract[ing] meaning from his unfinished sentences.” But extracting meaning from partial signs is the young boy’s primary occupation in the text, from the signification of the uniformity of the lighting in Father Flynn’s window in the first paragraph to the mystery of the invisible chalice resting on his chest at the end. It is not just that the boy is searching for what is missing in Flynn’s narrative, or even that the reader is left to do the same, but that the movement of signification below the calcified weight of the unresolved events that make up the plot of “The Sisters” provides a counterforce to the helplessness that freezes the total work in place. That Flynn is affiliated with the Catholic Church, which takes as its social foundation the relationship between mystery and symbolism, is no accident. The protagonist mentions that Father Flynn “showed [him] how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the church which [he] had always regarded as the simplest acts.” The primary “institutions” mentioned here and later imbued with narrative significance are those of the eucharist and the confessional, concerned, respectively, with the weight of symbolism and the economy of secrecy. The ritual of the eucharist enacts the transference of the image to reality. It is the purest example of the mind’s power of signification. It is also pure mystery, a gap in human knowledge bequeathed to certain individuals by a power beyond their capability to truly understand or transmit. While the Eucharistic ritual is openly communal, the confessional’s social function is to transmit the isolation of the individual into a meaningful action. In giving voice to sin, the confessional oversees the transfer of the reality of the act to the transparent sign of contrition. The priest’s role is to act as conduit for the transference of an internal struggle (i.e., guilt) into a social act. The point is not to absolve the act of sin, but to receive in place of the transgression a reliable mechanism for generalizing it. The transference generates a kind of symbolic currency. The silent, still, receptive nature of the Catholic Mass, in which the community gathers to submit themselves to what they literally do not understand (at the time of this story all Catholic services were given in Latin) masks a deep undercurrent of movement, transference, and exchange. The third italicized word in the opening paragraph of “The Sisters” is simony, the sin of selling spiritual favors or benefits. Within the act of simony, the spiritual economies of the Catholic institution are literalized and made quantifiable by the interference of temporal symbolism. In some way simony marks and makes bare the incompatibility of two competing institutions of social regulation. While there is little evidence within the story that Father Flynn is a simoniac, the locus of the protagonist’s dream brings paralysis, Father Flynn, simony, and the movement of signification into relief. Within the dream, Father Flynn’s attempts at confession are silenced, which could indicate the mortal nature of the sin of simony, for which no confession would be adequate; coupled with the dropped chalice, however, it becomes clear that the narrative’s focus is more on Flynn’s communicative isolation than on the nature of what may or may not have been his particular transgressions. The “paralysis” that afflicts the priest is as much social as physical. Whether or not the spiritual dimension may be added to his sickness is almost irrelevant. If the sin in question represents an illicit movement between the spiritual and the temporal that betrays, among other things, the prominence of the Mass and the confessional as social currencies, then what we see in the case of Father Flynn is the result of the decay of this movement. Simony is paralysis in that it delegitimizes privileged means of social movement. What caused the decay is the missing piece of the gnomon, but that is sleight of hand. The nature of “missing” is itself the aim of the narrative. Father Flynn’s position as a tarnished religious figure functionally brought low by his inability to imbue the eucharist and the confessional with their symbolic mystery has decayed the social reality of those around him. All communication in “The Sisters” is stilted and unfinished. The pall of the broken priest serves as stand in for all paralysis, all decay, all death, all sin, all isolation. What is missing from the gnomon is an image of the whole. | ||
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packrat386
United States5077 Posts
I particularly liked the explanation of the sense of mystery in the catholic church. Much of my family is catholic and I've experienced firsthand the way in which the service revolves around mystery and tradition. In particular it is telling that a central part of the mass is the "Mystery of Faith" in which as you said the community commits themselves to that which they aren't meant to understand. Given the centrality of the catholic church in Irish life at this time I think a story focusing on acceptance of mystery and unfinished business strikes at the heart of the Irish identity. | ||
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Whole
United States6046 Posts
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xarchaosx
United States89 Posts
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Paljas
Germany6926 Posts
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Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21247 Posts
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Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21247 Posts
On May 12 2013 10:32 xarchaosx wrote: So far, I have read through the first 3 short stories, and have enjoyed the subtle complexities to each of them. But I have no real clue what 'the encounter' was about, the sudden change of pace at the end was odd. I am excited to see what others have thought about it and maybe help me grasp what Joyce was trying to portray in that story On a basic plot level, it's two boys who ditch school and end up running into an old man. The old man talks to the boys about various topics, and it's implied that when he excuses himself, he's masturbating. There's no explicit textual evidence to support it, beyond maybe the line "I say... He's a queer old josser!" At this point in history, the word "queer" had already begun to take on some of its modern, sexual implications. The old man returns, and "He seemed to have forgotten his recent liberalism." He starts talking about corporal punishment, etc., a marked departure from his seemingly kind and understanding earlier demeanor. The boys extricate themselves and the story ends. On a more thematic level, all the stories in Dubliners deal with the same general set of issues, and this one is no exception. Think about concepts like paralysis (a very central idea to the understanding of Dubliners), escape/confinement, disappointment, etc. For example, the boys longed for a day of adventure and seeing exciting new sights, but are instead only met with disappointment as they get into a somewhat disturbing encounter. The boys (and Irish citizens as a whole) feel trapped by various factors like family (as seen in Eveline), social insitutions (school in this story), religion (Araby and this one also), etc., and are unable to escape. There is a strong distinction drawn between the narrator and Mahony, highlighting a difference in them. The old man says, to the narrator: "Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. Now," he added, pointing to Mahony who was regarding us with open eyes, "he is different; he goes in for games." Giving the idea that the old man's life is what's in the future for the narrator unless something changes, since they are both painting as thinking, introverted individuals who are unable to take action to change their situation. This idea recurs very strongly in the later story "A Little Cloud." A pretty basic and straightforward explanation of "An Encounter," and there's certainly much more than I've outlined here. Hope this helps. | ||
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farvacola
United States18869 Posts
On May 13 2013 04:58 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: wait wtf we have an irc? what network, quakenet? Yep, go through quakenet. For the IRC newbies, just go to http://webchat.quakenet.org/, choose a name, and head to channel #TLBC. We won't be able to get very in depth but it should provide us a nice chance to get a conversation going  | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
On May 13 2013 05:11 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: On a basic plot level, it's two boys who ditch school and end up running into an old man. The old man talks to the boys about various topics, and it's implied that when he excuses himself, he's masturbating. There's no explicit textual evidence to support it, beyond maybe the line "I say... He's a queer old josser!" At this point in history, the word "queer" had already begun to take on some of its modern, sexual implications. Well, wow, I totally missed that. I take it that the use of "queer" in The Sisters carries a similar implication, then? (Will you guys be on IRC in ~2 hrs?) | ||
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Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21247 Posts
On May 13 2013 07:32 babylon wrote: Well, wow, I totally missed that. I take it that the use of "queer" in The Sisters carries a similar implication, then? That's how I took it, yes. We're on IRC right now, IDK about in 2 hours. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
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Paljas
Germany6926 Posts
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farvacola
United States18869 Posts
Also, our IRC meeting will take place this Saturday at 10:30 PST, so note the change and try and make it if you missed last week! | ||
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wUndertUnge
United States1126 Posts
Recommendation: for the next book, could we pick a more contemporary novel that isn't so English Major canon? The Magus by John Fowles is supposed to be amaze-balls. Another recommendation: TeamSpeak for meets? | ||
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