Shortly after Tue, 3 Feb 1998 13:50:32 -0500 (EST), these words appeared on my screen, a message from the Joyce Discussion List.:

>How is Flynn a gnomon? 

In "The  Sisters" the major gnomon, I believe, is the boy. But to follow this, you need to be sure you understand what a gnomon is.

In ancient times the Gnomon was a symbolic figure.  We can trace it back. Euclid (3rd century BC), as Sir Thomas Heath speculates in his commentary on Euclid's Elements, was the first to expand the word to apply to any parallelogram, not just a square.  Aristotle (4th century BC) applies it to the geometry of squares. The Pythagoreans (6th century BC) used the term in the context of number theory.  The Pythia at the Oracle at Delphi (circa 1400 BC) knew the term in relationship to prophecy.   Originally, the word comes from the style of a sundial with its attendant shadow forming an L. 

In every ancient instance that I can find, and here I'm quoting Heath quoting Boechk [Philolaos des Pythagoreers Lehren, p. 141), "the connexion between the gnomon and the square to which it is added was regarded as symbolical of union and agreement ... Philolaus used the idea to explain the knowledge of things, making the knowing embrace and grasp the known as the gnomon does the square." And so, in "The Sisters," we should see how Joyce treats union and how he treats agreement.

"The Sisters" begins with the window.  From the street below, the boy studies the darkened blind, seeking what is missing. (Information in those two words is strangely prescient: say them quickly and they are nearly indistinguishable from "dark and blind"-- words that could describe the priest's dark career, and his inner blindness.) 

The window is not the only square or rectangle into which the boy looks for meaning. At the wake, the boy, Eliza and Nanny sit in strange silence in the little room downstairs--another empty square.  The two women sip sherry, which boy refuses out of  respect for the silence, or awe for the dead or just nerves.   No one spoke.  And they all look at the empty fireplace.  A third square with something missing.

In the coffin, another rectangular space, he does not found a body of the description that the sisters have given.  Instead the boy he sees the priest's cavernous nostrils--which may remind us of those conversations about the catacombs, imponderable volumes, mazes with defeated heroes in them that fascinated the boy, though he did not understand why. He feels it all, like the dying of the priest, to be strange.  Now he is the only one who sees that the priest looks truculent.

When did they ever have union?  Clearly once, in the boy's dream. And there, he realizes, they were in a strange land. Contrast this with Eliza's cliched comment at the wake: He's gone to a better world.  Is it that Persia?  That region was pleasant and vicious There the priest is smiling, and the boy begins to smile, too.  This is union, in a foreign place.  Here the boy does not find it improper that the priest would confess to him. He understands and acts to absolve the simoniac of his sin.   Their smiles are smiles of agreement as their roles are reversed.

The dream begins as the boy in his bed tries to extract meaning from Old Cotter's unfinished sentences and slides into a dream that admits Father Flynn's gray face.  This may be nearly coterminous with the priest's death--the end of his sentence. We understand that it is not so much the boy who reaches toward the Priest, but the unfulfilled Priest who has been grasping all along for the boy. And we wonder what is it that wants to be known, that sends those compensatory summonses to the priest's consciousness?

It is the boy in him.  The boy whose growth was arrested when he joined the priesthood.  And, though he does not admit it consciously, the boy shares this rebellion with him--at least in his dream. In dream the boy is the gnomon, because he does embrace that figure and complete it.  Which is why, when the priest has died, neither the boy nor the day is in a mourning mood.  Of course consciously the boy does not understand.  He finds it strange at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom. But this discovery, essential to every person, is what the story is about.  The boy has been freed from something by the priest's death, something that he is still too young to bring to consciousness. His dreams are changing, though. And perhaps unlike the priest, he will not be confined to incompleted boxes.

The story ends with a recounting of how they looked for the missing Father Flynn.  They look "high up and low down" (which suggests the looking with which the story starts) and then go to the chapel.  They can't find him in the chapel.

So then they get the key, and put it in the lock.  Visualize it, it is an L held sideways: 

Then they find him, "sitting up by himself "  Well, that's L-ish, especially if the light falls on his thighs and upper body, as it most likely would have.  And he's in his confession box, but normally there would be someone on the other side, but that person is missing.   And so is Father Flynn's gravity in this important spiritual office. He sits there in a liquidity of uneasy L's: "laughing-like softly to himself".

The penultimate paragraph moves the L into "truculent" and on that scathing, defiant note, pauses while everyone waits for a sound, which remains missing.  And then the boy hears Eliza continue the litany of missing pieces: "Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself...."  

Abruptly the story ends in massive understatement of Eliza's summary where there are no L 's at all; she has never understood the missing piece.  All she knows is that "...there was something gone wrong with him...." And she stops, just like that, with ellipsis, with meaning left out.  And so does the story. 

If there is an epiphany, it has to be ours.

                                                             -- Ed Germain