1 - James Joyce

Summary

‘our sad want of signs’: Imperceptible Gestures in Ibsen and Joyce

He heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night, during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek.

Mrs. Sinico's gesture breaches an unspoken decorum, between her and Duffy, which rigorously occludes non-verbal expression. The moment precipitates the end of the friendship; he does not visit her for a week, before they agree, at his instigation, to break off all contact. Duffy is ever careful to give nothing away, and his abhorrence of ‘physical or mental disorder’ (p. 120) singles out unwarranted intrusions of non-verbal utterance; uneasily codified, physical expression is prudently tidied away, and he expects Mrs. Sinico tactfully to follow suit. He keeps bodily gestures at arm's length, and this permits him to disengage at will from the tensions and crises of the body, from which he ends up living ‘at a little distance’ (p. 120), as though it belonged to someone else. This enclosed ambit of self-spectatorship – he is constantly observing himself from a vantage point, casting a cold eye on his own gestures – requires the scaling down of potential uncertainties and latently active innuendos, leaving narrow margins for possible cross-purposes and perplexed intentions.