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Hello everybody If the thoughts I share here seem to have little with the points raised by Jay, Kiri, Rasik, Roopesh, Bet, etc it is because I have been reading the introduction by Terence Brown to my copy of Dubliners. When I started reading Dubliners the only thing I knew about Joyce was that he is a complex writer to read and understand. When we all came together in this group, and started with Dubliners I wanted to approach the stories with a prestine mind, unsoiled by ideas expressed by other master analysts. I was aware of the fact that many things might escape me but at that point it did not matter. It was also a kind of a challenge to see what I make out of the stories, and to compare it with what others, who do know Joyce, have in fact said. Finally I had convinced myself that what matters to me is how the story speaks to ME and not to some X,Y or Z. Much later after our venturing into Dubliners I bought a copy of the penguin edition, and have read here and there about what Brown had to say. After reading the introduction, I am glad of the procedure I adopted, because if I had started with this book, I would not have thought at all about the stories, and would instead have travelled the way paved by Brown. Still, it is very interesting to read what Brown has to say, and what I want to share with you is part of what I understand of Brown's discussions of the words simony. Father Flynn in The Sisters (where the word simony is used for the first time in Dubliners) stands for the malaise which has afflicted the Irish society. Brown writes: "That Father Flynn suffres a debilitating condition which some critics have even identified with that general paralysis of the insane which characterizes the terminal stage of syphilitic infection, in a story which begins with a brooding on the words 'simony' and 'paralysis' (whatever we make of 'gnomon') seems in the light of the letter - see below - to invest him with central symbolic significance in the text as a whole...." The letter was written by Joyce to Grant Richards in which he said, "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order..." Jay, you wrote: This is what I think Joyce meant by "simony"------ literally selling the spiritual for monetary reward------ but extended here (as he does with "Paralysis") to a much larger dimension. But does not the word signify just the opposite? The notes in my book say the following: "Simony: In Roman Catholic Church law, the selling or giving in exchange of a temporal thing for a spiritual thing, such as the buying of a blessing, the purchase of ecclesiastical favour, or of pardons..." Not having much of idea of the working of the church I understand this was the method by which a person could take care of the bad deeds he did. It is similar to the burmese officer thinking of atoning for his wrong doings by building pagodas in "The Burmese Days" by George Orwell. Only the officer dies before he could build the pagoda. It is also similar to the customs in our religion where we can make a vow - of paying some money to a temple, or buying a gold chain to the idol in a temple, etc and compensate for any thing bad we have done. In The Sisters when the boy says at the beginning of the story (of Dubliners) "..Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It has alwys sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism...." he is indicating that Father Flynn instructed him about the workings of the Church, about simony. In a sense the Father was telling him that he "could" sink morally but there are ways in which he could escape the consequences and seek pardon. There was no need to go after the spiritual values in life, because they could be bought. On gnomon, Brown says above - whatever we make of gnomon - . Here I do not understand what Brown means. Gnomon is the part of the parent parallelogram which is left over when a parallelogram (formed using one of the corners of the parent parellelogram) is deleted from it. If the boy was reading Euclid's treatise on geometry, he would have read, perhaps, something on the gnomons. This just means to me that Father Flynn instructed the boy in things apart from those of Church. Does anybody understand the statement of Brown when he says: "whatever we make of the word gnomon"? Chandra |
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