How to read words
Alec Charles, Dean of Arts at the University of Winchester, author of Underwords
‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.’
That apparently straightforward sentence opens James Joyce’s first masterpiece ‘The Dead’ and, I’d like to suggest, offers rich material for a modest case study in the value of close reading.
‘The Dead’ is the final story of Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection completed in 1905 but not published until 1915. It tells the tale of Gabriel Conroy, who, with his wife Gretta, attends a Christmas party at the home of his maternal aunts, the moribund Misses Morkan. The Conroys’ own lives and marriage are barely more animated. Gabriel measures time in ‘mortal hours’ and recognises the fact of ‘their dull existence together’; coming in from the cold, Gretta seems ‘perished alive’.
As Gabriel discovers towards the end of the story, his wife is haunted by the memory — more vital than their marriage itself — of her first love, Michael Furey, who had died at the age of seventeen. Michael and Gabriel (both, of course, named after archangels) are rivals for Gretta’s affections; and Michael’s memory harries Gabriel like a Fury, an ‘impalpable and vindictive being’. Yet, as the narrative approaches its conclusion, its tone shifts, as Gabriel (that angel of revelation and annunciation) experiences a moment of soul-swooning epiphany which, in witnessing the dissolution of the material world, transcends Michael’s symbolic supremacy. Thus Joyce’s story ends in a literal ecstasy, but one unlike that which its protagonist had earlier envisaged for his evening, a most melancholy consummation.
We may, nevertheless, see the story’s entire trajectory anticipated in its very first sentence. Its author was at once the panoramic architect and the painstaking caretaker of his own work, and we might usefully take similar care and pains in the closeness of our readings of it.
And so, to reiterate: ‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.’
Lily is busy greeting guests as they arrive at the Morkans’ party. Perhaps the first thing we notice about Joyce’s opening line is his incongruous use of the term ‘literally’. Pedants will point out that Lily was not literally run off her feet; more rigorous pedants will recall that the third meaning of ‘literally’ offered by the OED relates to the use of a ‘metaphorical or hyperbolical expression’ and that the first example cited of this usage dates back to 1769. Joyce’s typically knowing use of the word offers an ironic demonstration of the divergent senses of this contronym.
‘Literally’ also echoes the name ‘Lily’ and this echo underpins the way in which, like a line of Anglo-Saxon verse, the sentence forges a fine structure of rhythmic balance and alliteration/assonance. Its final word — ‘feet’ — perhaps also emphasizes the importance of poetical metre in Joyce’s contrivance. The first half of the sentence may be read as dactyl-dactyl-trochee, the second half as iamb-anapaest-anapaest. It is notable that the latter represents a precise reversal of the former.
The de-stressing, dying fall of the first half of this opening sentence (stressed > unstressed) meets the emphatically upbeat metre of the second half (unstressed > stressed) to form what we might imagine as a rhythmic valley (sloping down and then up again). This is the valley of death which the story charts, the valley of the shadow of death (of the remorseless influence of the dead upon the living). The caretaker’s daughter hereby becomes Lily of the Valley, that most funereal of flowers, a portent of death; but the trajectory of the valley may also indicate Gabriel’s narrative’s eventual upturn through the curve of redemption/resurrection, a theme increasingly prominent in Joyce’s later works.
This sentence’s metrical reversal anticipates the lexical and ontological inversions of the story’s final line as the snow, ‘falling faintly’ and ‘faintly falling’, blurs the distinction between the living and the dead. Joyce liked to presage a work’s last line in its first, both here and elsewhere. Thus the first word of Joyce’s great novel Ulysses (‘Stately’) is echoed (shortened and backwards) by its last (‘Yes’); and thus the end of Joyce’s final, cyclical work Finnegans Wake articulates with its opening words to complete a single sentence.
My new book, Underwords: Re-reading the Subtexts of Modernity, explores what we may gain from such practices of close reading. One might concede that James Joyce is a pretty easy target for such interpretations (and, though it doesn’t deploy this particular example from Dubliners, the book certainly exploits other examples of Joyce’s penchant for semantic over-determination). Yet equally fertile polysemy is evident across a broad range of cultural phenomena: from Virgil’s anagrams, Christ’s ‘petrus’ pun and the bawdy quibbles of metaphysical poets to Roland Barthes’s analysis of a plate of steak and chips and Terry Eagleton’s observation that a notice as banal as the imperative that ‘dogs must be carried on the escalator’ might oblige non-dog-owners to acquire a pooch if they wish to avoid the stairs. (A sign at an institution at which I once worked similarly announced that ‘we appreciate your support in smoking in designated areas’. As I’d quit some years earlier, I had to apologise that I was unable to oblige.)
The book itself engages with a range of resonant expressions and images, from Shakespeare and Yeats’s elaborate plays upon the word ‘still’ through Joyce’s ‘mememormee’ and Geoffrey Hill’s ‘moldywarp’ to Sylvia Plath’s ‘cauldron of morning’ and President Trump’s late night cup of ‘covfefe’ (one of many revealing parapraxes which contribute to our understanding of Donald John as the mendacious Don John and lecherous Don Juan we know and loathe him to be). Along the way it encounters Virginia Woolf’s shoes, Philip Larkin’s postmen, Beckett’s Chaplinesque mendicants and Chaplin’s own Chaplinesque hat, and applies similar techniques of close reading to Michelangelo’s Adam, Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window.
During the twentieth century, the overwhelming complexity and challenge of Modernist art called out for interpretative rigour and risk. It is the contention of this new book that the hermeneutic strategies which evolved in response to the works of avant-garde artists like Joyce might fruitfully be applied to such influential contemporary texts as, for example, the tweets of Donald Trump, a figure we may consider a very different kind of artist indeed. Now more than ever, in the era of post-truth politics and fake news, an unprecedented degree of forensic scrutiny seems essential — and indeed is practised with increasing ingenuity and impact by online cohorts of citizen scrutineers.
The ways in which we read words and images should never, of course, become prescriptive, but should continue to promote and underpin semantic diversity and cultural difference. How we read, then, may productively be informed by others’ readings and strategies of reading, but must, most importantly, always and ultimately be in our own autonomous ways. Acts of interpretation can take creative risks, promoting leaps of the memory and imagination which expose new semantic opportunities. Reading literally/literarily can be figurative, subversive and redolent with the possibility of radical alterities. No reading is final or definitive. Every sentence is an opening. There is, in short, an ‘or’ in every word.
