"THAT ROSICRUCIAN THERE" : JOYCEの'THE SISTERS'推敲の問題

抄録

At the beginning of 1904, James Joyce wrote off in one day an autobiographical story-essay, 'A Portrait of the Artist,' and entered into his literary career as a creative writer. This was rejected by the editor of Dana, which occasioned him to write an extended draft of the portrait, Stephen Hero. In the latter half of that year, he wrote for the Irish Homestead three short-stories which were later to be incorporated in revised form in Dubliners. 'The Sisters,' the first of the three for the Homestead, had been rewritten and revised at least three times during the next twelve months before the final Dubliners version took on the shape. It is imperative and vitally important to examine the remarkable differences between the first Homestead version and the final version, for they will reveal how Joyce started his career as an artist and how he came to maturity as a writer in so short a time. We may not be sure what made him develop so rapidly, but the question is not why but how he developed his art. As his letter shows, Joyce had from the start a definite programme "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city" through a series of stories in Dubliners. This theory may seem naturalistic at first, but the process of revisions of 'The Sisters' was the process to add symbolic details to the simple naturalistic story narrated directly by an innocent boy-narrator. It is symbolic, not 'vivisective' as the hero of Stephen Hero would have us believe. The boy in the final version is not an observer but is more involved in the incident than the boy in the first version. Joyce selected the incident of the priest's death to bring about the unique effect of the paralysed soul of the city, and not vice versa. He anticipated that the effect would decide the whole tone of the stories that would come after it. Indeed, there is no difference of the sequences of the story between the two versions: both are consisted of four consecutive parts. It will be almost enough, however, to compare the 'introductory' parts of the drafts to know the difference of the depth and breadth between them. The opening passages of the first draft are completely rewritten and re-organized in many drastic and also in many subtle and complicated ways: the incident itself, vaguely hinted at in the Homestead version, is clearly defined in the Dubliners version-the word "paralysis" is given a vivid imaginative function with its full implication of social as well as religious hemiplegia of the city. In the first draft, the incident, the narrator's relation to it, and the disease of the dying and demented priest, though implicitly narrated, are never allusive nor suggestive of anything, while in the final draft, it is the whole implication of the death of the priest and its relation to the involved boy that matters. The boy's relation to the outer world, apparently cut off through an open hostility to the grown-ups, is barely maintained by a closer relationship with the corrupted priest as an allegorical incarnation of the "maleficent and sinful being." This renewed attraction-repulsion relationship makes it necessary to add an entirely new paragraph to the final draft, where the ordinary relation between the priest and the boy is significantly reversed: the priest desires to confess something and the boy smiles feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin. This paragraph reminds us of the passages in the Portrait where the young Stephen with his enfeebled mind sees in the darkened bedroom "pale strange faces" of the dead. But in spite of many similarities, the essential difference is clear: the young Stephen is not yet aware of the fact that the sinner can recede into some pleasant region; even a small transgression of his fellow students can rouse in him a faint sickness of awe,

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