realized throughout the story. What’s of immediate interest here, though, is how the priest got that way.
He’s had a stroke, not his first, and it has left him paralyzed. “Paralysis” is a word that fascinates the
young boy, quite apart from its meaning; he yokes it with “simony” and “gnomon” in a triad of words to
obsess over. For us, however, it’s the notion of paralysis—and stroke—that intrigues.
p. 214Anyone who has ever had to watch a loved one deteriorate after a massive stroke will no doubt
look askance at the very idea of such frustration and misery being in some way intriguing, fascinating, or
picturesque, and quite rightly. But as we’ve seen time and again, what we feel in real life and what we feel
in our reading lives can be quite different. In this instance, our interest is not in the deterioration of the old
priest but in what his condition is telling us about him, about the boy, about the story at large, and about
Joyce’s collection, Dubliners, in which it is the first piece. The boy has witnessed James, the priest, begin
the slow decline after earlier strokes (his clothing covered with bits of tobacco and ash, his movement
awkward, his speech affected). But it’s the paralysis after the recent, massive stroke that commands the
boy’s attention. Within the story, the paralysis shows up in several ways, not least of them a sort of
madness that set in at the time the priest was relieved of his parish over some incident involving an
acolyte. All references to the event are sidelong and somewhat secretive, with shame a distinct
component of James’s and his sisters’ responses. Whether the matter involved sexual impropriety or
something to do with the litany we never learn, only that James was found in the confessional laughing
softly and talking to himself. That he spent his last years a virtual recluse in a back room of his sisters’
house indicates the degree to which emotional or mental paralysis had already set in before his stroke.
From this little story the condition of paralysis grows into one of Joyce’s great themes: Dublin is a city in
which the inhabitants are paralyzed by the strictures laid upon them by church, state, and convention. We
see it throughout Dubliners —a girl who cannot let go of the railing to board a ship with her lover; men
who know the right thing to do but fail because their bad habits limit their ability to act in their own best
interest; a man confined to bed after a drunken fall inp. 215a public-house rest room; political activists
who fail to act after the death of their great leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, some ten years earlier. It
shows up again and again in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Ulysses and even in
Finnegans Wake (1939). Of course, most maladies in most short stories, or even novels, are not quite
so productive of meaning. For Joyce, however, paralysis—physical, moral, social, spiritual, intellectual,
political—informs his whole career.
Until the twentieth century, disease was mysterious. Folks began to comprehend the germ theory of
disease in the nineteenth century, of course, after Louis Pasteur, but until they could do something about
it, until the age of inoculation, illness remained frightening and mysterious. People sickened and died,
often with no discernible preamble. You went out in the rain, three days later you had pneumonia; ergo,
rain and chills cause pneumonia. That still occurs, of course. If you’re like me, you were told over and
over again as a child to button your coat or put on a hat lest you catch your death of cold. We’ve never
really accepted microbes into our lives. Even knowing how disease is transmitted, we remain largely
superstitious. And since illness is so much a part of life, so too is it a part of literature.
There are certain principles governing the use of disease in works of literature:
- Not all diseases are created equal. Prior to modern sanitation and enclosed water systems in the
twentieth century, cholera was nearly as common as, much more aggressive than, and more devastating
than tuberculosis (which was generally called consumption). Yet cholera doesn’t come close to TB in its
frequency of literary occurrence. Why? Image mostly. Cholera has ap. 216bad reputation, and there’s
almost nothing the best public relations firm in the world could do to improve it. It’s ugly, horrible. Death
by cholera is unsightly, painful, smelly, and violent. In that same period of the late nineteenth century,