Pride, Covetousness, and Hypocrisy: James Joyce's Gnomonologies from "Grace" to "The Sisters"

Abstract:"[G]nomon," one of the three italicized words James Joyce substituted for "Providence" in rewriting "The Sisters" as the introductory chapter of Dubliners, has engrossed readers with its implications for probing his artistic intentions, practices, and experiments. Expanding on the term's definition in geometry, interpretations of "gnomon" have informed approaches to his epicleti with highlights of thematic embodiments, textual gaps, and structural arrangements. Parallelism on an intertextual level, however, remains an underexplored perspective. Explanations of the enigmas in "The Sisters," I argue, are encrypted within the textual hiatuses in "Grace." Upon replenishment of the narrative gaps in both stories, it becomes clear that Thomas Kernan and Father Purdon mirror the boy-narrator and Father Flynn in the unfolding of their simoniac schemes. Moments that disclose consciousness point to "pride" and "covetousness," two capital sins in Catholic doctrines, as the roots of their moral-spiritual paralysis and make the hypocrisy in their instrumental appropriation of religion explicit. The absent corner of gnomon represents not only the consciousness-revealing textual apertures but also the inner voids Dubliners with a paralytic conscience scheme to mask. With "The Sisters" and "Grace" offering projections of Joyce's most prototypical specimens, "gnomon" fits into the italicized triad as a trope for the vantage points required to perceive "paralysis," "simony," and "Providence" through the anamorphosis of his "nicely polished looking-glass."