Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet...Today is the feast of Epiphany, the last day of the traditional Christmas season; the day also when the Misses Morkan held that grand affair, their annual dance, in James Joyce's "The Dead."
c. colloq. Used to indicate that some (freq. conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.The first instance it gives of this sense of the word "literally" is 1769--and it gives plenty of obviously non-ironic uses subsequent to that. So, sure--we can say that the word has come to mean--for a very large number of English speakers--"take this is the strongest admissible sense" and we can also say that we have very clear evidence that Joyce habitually used the word in that sense.
Now one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’).
Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go-off but the music of Mercadante's Huguenots, Meyerbeer's Seven Last Words on the Cross and Mozart's Twelfth Mass he simply revelled in, the Gloria in that being, to his mind, the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat.And there is no literal cocked hat, of course.
(a) to run (a person) off his (also her) feet (or legs) : to overwork or harass (a person) to the point of exhaustion (originally spec. through running)posted by yoink at 12:40 PM on January 6
So Lily is not, yet, "literally" "off her feet" (i.e., so exhausted that she is lying down)--but then she could "literally" be "so exhausted" that she will need to lie down.
Complications, complications.
Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go-off but the music of Mercadante's Huguenots, Meyerbeer's Seven Last Words on the Cross and Mozart's Twelfth Mass he simply revelled in, the Gloria in that being, to his mind, the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat.In his mind being the operative phrase here.
That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household, for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils' concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve's, and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker's daughter, did housemaid's work for them. Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout.This is not the way "the caretaker's daughter" would describe the imposing ladies she serves. Nor is reminiscing about the way Mary Jane looked thirty years ago something available to the consciousness of this "slim, growing girl" as she is described later. The only time we seem, to me, to dip into free indirect "Lily world" is in the closing sentence of the second paragraph:
They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.posted by yoink at 1:11 PM on January 6
Aunt Kate drew Gabriel aside hurriedly and whispered into his ear:posted by yoink at 1:14 PM on January 6
"Slip down, Gabriel, like a good fellow and see if he's all right, and don't let him up if he's screwed. I'm sure he's screwed. I'm sure he is."
To wonder what "literally" may mean is the fear of the Word and the beginning of reading. Whatever Lily was literally (Lily?) she was not literally run off her feet. She was (surely?) figuratively run off her feet, but according to a banal figure. And the figure is hers, the idiom: "literally" reflects not what the narrator would say (who is he?) but what Lily would say: "I am literally run off my feet." And sure enough, the paragraph goes on to designate the shabby crew who attend that party as the ladies and the gentlemen, which would be Lily's idiom likewise. Joyce is at his subtle game of specifying what pretensions to elegance are afoot on this occasion, and he does so with great economy by presenting a caretaker's daughter (Americans say 'the janitor's girl') cast for this evening as hall maid, and coping amid inconvenient facilities with too many simultaneous arrivals....posted by twirlip at 1:20 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]
So that first sentence was written, as it were, from Lily's point of view, and though it looks like "objective" narration it is tinged with her idiom. It is Lily, not the austere author, whose habit it is to say "literally" when "figuratively" is meant, and the author is less recounting the front-hall doings than paraphrasing a recounting of hers.
This is a small instance of a general truth about Joyce's method, that his fictions tend not to have a detached narrator, though they seem to have. His words are in such delicate equilibrium, like the components of a sensitive piece of apparatus, that they detect the gravitational field of the nearest person. One reason the quiet little stories in Dubliners continue to fascinate is that the narrative point of view unobtrusively fluctuates. The illusion of dispassionate portrayal seems attended by an iridescence difficult to account for until we notice one person's sense of things inconspicuously giving place to another's. The grammar of twelve of the stories is that of third-person narrative, imparting a deceptive look of impersonal truth. The diction frequently tells a different tale.
Gabriel's eyes, irritated by the floor, which glittered with beeswax under the heavy chandelier, wandered to the wall above the piano. A picture of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet hung there and beside it was a picture of the two murdered princes in the Tower which Aunt Julia had worked in red, blue and brown wools when she was a girl. Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught for one year. His mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat of purple tabinet, with little foxes' heads upon it, lined with brown satin and having round mulberry buttons.Imagine yourself in this room: You could be standing across the room from Gabriel and see the action of the first sentence and a half. But you'd have to be inside his head to know the rest. The way Joyce shifts the distance and perspective of his narrator throughout the story is often seamless and always subtle. But I think it's also deliberate and clear.
There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.Stroke and blind: words with multiple meanings and usages. "The Sisters" goes on to ostentatiously introduce three other multivalent words: paralysis, simony, and gnomon. There's also the word crossed in the first sentence of Ulysses. This is a game Joyce likes to play, especially at the start of his stories: he makes you do a little mental double-take in order to confirm which usage is intended. It's like a subtle hook to grab your attention. I think a deliberate misuse of literally in "The Dead" follows this pattern.
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free.
While Gabriel and Miss Daly exchanged plates of goose and plates of ham and spiced beef Lily went from guest to guest with a dish of hot floury potatoes wrapped in a white napkin. This was Mary Jane's idea and she had also suggested apple sauce for the goose but Aunt Kate had said that plain roast goose without any apple sauce had always been good enough for her and she hoped she might never eat worse. Mary Jane waited on her pupils and saw that they got the best slices and Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia opened and carried across from the piano bottles of stout and ale for the gentlemen and bottles of minerals for the ladies.First sentence reads like your normal third --- but take a look at that second sentence. Is this a conversation that's happening now? No, because the preparations have already been made. This one sentence is a little mimi-flashback to a conversation among these women which happened days or weeks ago, to which none of the guests have been privvy. And then third sentence and we're back in the room. He's mostly using free indirect quotation there, as opposed to narration, but I think the purpose is the same --- it's a way of interjecting a little bit of the flavor of somebody's language into the story, giving you a sniff of their personality the way you might get a sniff of perfume as your brushed past them. The story curves for a second around their tongue and moves on.
—O, Mr Conroy, said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming.posted by cobra libre at 2:21 PM on January 6
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Great book, though--and a terrific film.
posted by yoink at 9:29 AM on January 6