NUMBER SYMBOLISM AND THE OCCULT IN JAMES JOYCE'S "CLAY"
For James Joyce, words are transformative. Joycean language has the ability to persuade, coax, wheedle, influence, win over, and convince scholars that a singular word amounts to a telescoped message; this is the case, in part, because Joyce’s preferred figure of speech was paronomasia, the unassuming pun, for the simple reason that it facilitates, even exploits, multiple meanings of words in order to produce a humorous or rhetorical effect. We know the pun to be a faithful resident in each of the sketches that make up the Dubliners collection; Joyce, in fact, opens “The Sisters,” the first of the fourteen stories, by writing: “There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke” (9). While such a line underscores the ailing priest’s physical decline (it was a literal stroke), Joyce’s play on the word “stroke” provides an opportunity for readers to link the physical paralysis of the priest with even greater associations, not the least of which is death (the “three strikes and you’re out” idiom, for example, the final tick of the clock suggesting that “time is up,” and so on). My intention here is not to derail readers into a discussion of puns within the Dubliners collection as a whole, but rather to point out the way in which Joyce’s mysteries are regularly delivered, from writer to reader, via the paronomasia formulation.
“The Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun,” Joyce once declared to his friend, Frank Budgen, “it ought to be good enough for me” (qtd. in Menand). In making such a statement, Joyce is referring to the verses in Matthew where Jesus tells Simon Peter, Thou art Peter (an Anglicization of the Greek “Petros”) and upon this rock (“petra”) I will build my church. Such an example illustrates the type of verbal coincidence that is so amusing for Joyce - Peter, Petros, petra - and the ways, in particular, that he is not afraid to cross languages in order to explode narrative possibility. Thinking over the collision of multiple word meanings with multiple languages enables readers to focus on a point overlooked by Joyce scholarship up to this point: namely, the punning potential found in the title of his short story “Clay,” a clear imitation of the French word clé“ (or “key”).
Derek Attridge’s Joyce Effects accurately confirms that “Joyce scatters tempting clues to large symbolic structures throughout the stories of Dubliners,” though it seems to this reader that he overlooks the interpretive possibilities of the title “Clay” when he questions “whether any of these works can be reduced to a symbolic system, or whether, instead, what is being offered is the temptation itself, a demonstration of the desire to invest quotidian reality with deeper significance” (43). While I agree with Attridge that Joyce uses slippery referents and language that “distort[s], displac[es], and occlud[es]” in order to tempt his readers into simplistic symbolic reductions (I am thinking most obviously of The Boarding House here and Fritz Senn’s account of “misdirection” which discusses the ways in which readers are purposefully excluded from the most important details of the narrative and therefore write their own desires into the gaping holes of the story [405]), I do not believe, given its title, that “Clay” can be included in this sweeping category of rhetorical seduction. If we take Joyce’s title as something suggestive of a clue, it is clear that there is a distinct key - a clé“ - to interpreting not only the story as a whole but also the motives and motivations behind Maria, the central protagonist of the story; the pun, in other words, effectively compels readers to reduce the work to a symbolic system in order to discern Joyce’s intended characterization of Maria.
The following discussion thus insists that the key to unlocking the hidden configuration of Joyce’s story lies in numerology, in number associations ranging from the old and new testaments to the Tarot and Kabalistic systems. I will use numerology to offer an intriguing suggestion concerning the contexts and texts that were assuredly in Joyce’s mind while writing “Clay,” proving that while Joyce addresses varying numerological systems, difficult to reject or override in their profusion, he relies most on the axiom of Maria - an ancient alchemical precept for renewal, perfection, and individuation - to stimulate a new characterization of his own Maria. The axiom provides Joyce with a useful and provocative platform from which to launch an assault at not only modern Ireland but also Irish Catholicism in that it was developed by a renown female alchemist known as Maria Prophetissa, a model of what Joyce’s Maria could be if only she were not confined by the limiting gender roles defined for her in the second chapter of Genesis. While it would be tangential to enumerate all of the instances in the text where numbers are in play, it is useful to at least begin by delineating those numerical associations (two, five, and their additive of seven) that specifically emphasize Maria’s position as either woman or Catholic or both in order to show Joyce’s deviation from this standard and his ultimate move toward the obscure and the occult in the final lines of the story.
Joyce begins “Clay” with Maria, a catholic maid at a home for troubled protestant women, reviewing her preparations for the evening’s Hallows Eve festivities. “The kitchen was spick and span,” we are told, “the fire was nice and bright,” and “on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks” (D 99). One could easily emphasize these lines as part of a narrative thread which elucidates the quiet lifestyle - and spotless reputation - of Maria, an unmarried Irish maid. Yet the coordination of word pairs reveals a partiality on Joyce’s part toward doublings, toward the rhetorical enticement of the number two. We are told that “Maria was a very, very small person,” that she had a “very long nose and a very long chin,” that she was “always sent for” and “always succeeded in making peace” (D 99). The evening meal is punctuated with “laughing and joking,” the tea cups are mixed with “milk and sugar,” and Maria is sure that the Donnelly’s party will have plenty of “apples and nuts” (D101, 102). Maria “blush[es] and smile[s]” at the impatient woman slicing her plumcake; she “nods and hems” to the drunkard on the tram, and is thrilled to arrive at the Donnelly home where the children “danced and sang” (D102, 103, 104). When the games begin, Maria “laugh[s] and laugh[s],” and is brought to the table amid “laughing and joking” (D 105). Maria moves her hand “here and there,” she hears “scuffling and whispering,” she recalls that Joe is full of “pleasant talk and reminiscences” and finally settles on the claim that the children are becoming “tired and sleepy” (D 105). While Heleno Godoy accurately identifies some of these patterns as “correlative repetitions” in the text, his argument overlooks the ways in which the coordination of word pairs and the parallel grammatical arrangement of these phrases epitomize a two-by-two relation and thus signal the most prominent duality in the story: namely, the intersection between marriage and religion (71).
Duos shine forth and soar within this story. Maria claims that “the sub-matron and two of the board ladies” overheard the matron of the Dublin by Lamplight laundry garnishing Maria with formal praise (“Maria, you are a veritable peace-maker!” [D99]). Joyce’s focus on the duo here is meant to be read as an intensifier; for rather than describing the scene in terms of the three ladies present, Maria parses the trio into a twosome and a singleton. Joyce gives support to this trajectory lines later when the “women beg[in] to come [into the dining room] by twos” (D 101). What is more, the text twice informs readers of “the two next-door girls”: once when a sampling of nuts is handed around at the Donnelly party and again at the commencement of the Hallows Eve game (D 103, 105). By haunting this story with duos, Joyce characterizes Maria, the unmarried spinster, as a woman paralyzed and unable to determine any identity at all because of her lack either of a place as a legitimized individual or as a legitimized spouse. The explicating problem thus becomes clear to readers: that in a place like Catholic Ireland - which, we can presume from stories like “The Boarding House,” place a particular emphasis on the marriage act - the unmarried Maria stands out, as the idiom has it, as a solitary sore thumb.
Maria is, of course, unaware of her position as an outsider, though, at the Donnelly’s party, two pivotal moments create the strong impression that, within the Dublin of the text, the individual is culturally (if not religiously) ostracized in ways that the couple is not. The first event, as Margot Norris appreciates, begins with the Hallows Eve prank, wherein (at least according to Norris) the Donnelly children are able to “express and gratify their aggression toward Maria” (212). Norris, in her authoritative Narration under a Blindfold: Reading Joyce’s “Clay,” determines:
Maria is subjected to a much more primitive, conventional, universal childish trick, a trick that depends on making the victim mistake a neutral and benign substance (spaghetti, mushroom soup [...]) for a repulsive, usually excretory material (worms, vomit, turds, etc.). The point of the children’s joke is to make prim, “genteel” Maria recoil in shock and disgust at the sensation of touching “excrement” - only to reveal to her, on removal of the blindfold, the harmless garden dirt. (212)
While Norris rightfully promotes the narrative form of self-deception within the story, her contextual explanation of the children’s prank lacks a particular amount of substance. Norris is quick to forewarn readers against the allegorization of Maria (as either Witch or Blessed Virgin, for example), yet she seems to take this too far when she contends that the “clay” is - and always was - nothing but “harmless garden dirt” (212). It seems to me that a little allegorization here could go a long way when we consider that Joyce designed and styled the story around numbers - and around euphemism. We read that Maria “felt a soft wet substance within her fingers,” and I contend that, for Maria’s first choice, she did not choose a “neutral and benign substance,” as Norris maintains, but rather she literally chooses “Number Two” - in Joyce’s terms, a euphemism for clay; in cultural slang, a colloquialism for feces (212). I say this because Maria’s choice of the prayerbook follows in sequential suit, and as one clever student once pointed out to me, Maria does not pause to wash her hands between handling the feces and touching the prayer book. In great Joycean fashion, she thus defiles the prayerbook and publicly rejects the option of entering the convent.
While Joyce requires the number two to prop up his criticism of Catholicism, of the limited options available to women in early twentieth-century Ireland, he is also careful to inform readers of Maria’s predicament by striking a perfect balance and a firm congruence between the numbers two and five within the story. Maria, the faithful Catholic, is alert to God’s declarations made in the second and fifth chapters of Genesis - the second chapter speaking of Eve’s creation as a companion for Adam (“It is not good that the man should be alone”); the fifth, providing the commandment that all God’s children must multiply and replenish the earth. God’s directive merits an impressive status within Maria’s mind - a life in the convent would, paradoxically, preclude Maria from keeping the commandment to multiply, and this perhaps is why she soils the suggestion - and the irreverent Joyce makes use of the numbers two and five as a pairing to again underscore and overdetermine Maria’s single status. Shortly after we read of the “two Board ladies,” we are told that Maria is “very fond of [her] purse because Joe had brought it to her five years before” (D 100). Maria carries “two half-crowns” in the purse, which means “she would have five shillings clear after paying [the] tram fare” (D 100). Two and five, in their simultaneity, also provide fodder for Marvin Magalaner’s conclusion that we read Maria as a representation of Mary, the Blessed Virgin in that five aligns with two in the prayer recited to Mary - “Maria” in Latin - which mimics Gabriel’s greeting to Mary at the annunciation: Hail Mary, full of Grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. The resonances of such a detail are interesting, in part, because readers will recall that this is the moment when Mary must decide whether she will follow God’s will or deny his holy charge. Mary, of course, supplicates to God’s will and becomes pregnant - she literally becomes two - by the grace of God and accepts God’s “fruit” (as opposed to Eve who stole it). Such evidence would suggest that Joyce is, indeed, drawing an analogy between Maria and Mother Mary, yet the irony imbued in the evocation should not be lost on readers: for, while Mary the Blessed Virgin receives God’s fruit with fearful anticipation, the Maria of “Clay” haphazardly abandons her fruit (“the plum cake”) on the train - evidence, still, that she has devoted herself to the idea of marriage and is moving away from the possibility of life in the convent.
Another advantage to compounding two and five in this way is that the significance of the sum of these numbers (seven) may be greater than their individual parts. While attempting to discern the structure of Dubliners, while trying to identify what Joyce once referred to as the “rivet[s] that hold the book together,” William Tindall offers three distinct hypotheses: (1) that the fifteen stories of the collection “proceed from the individual to the general and from youth to an approximation of maturity by degrees”; (2) that because Ulysses is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey, Dubliners must be, too; and (3) that “since Joyce was a Catholic, however heretical, he must have used the seven deadly sins for frame” (7, 8). William Bysshe Stein’s reading of “Counterparts,” in fact, greatly benefits from Tindall’s final assumption when he claims that Farrington “is hopelessly enslaved by all of the seven deadly sins” (30). If the stories in the collection are indeed joined by at least a passing reference to the seven deadly sins, however, it is certainly curious that in the critical literature concerning “Clay”, any discussion of the seven sins is alarmingly absent.
According to the practice of her faith, Maria ought to be eschewing her sins, and by all accounts, the text seems to suggest that she is doing a pretty good job. Striving to be a “veritable peacemaker,” Maria clearly eludes six of the seven vices (wrath, greed, sloth, lust, gluttony, and pride). She “colour[s] with shame and vexation and disappointment” when she discovers that the plumcake has gone missing; and while she “nearly crie[s] at the thought of the loss” and briefly accuses the children of taking the missing cake, never once does she revert to anger or wrath (D 104). Indeed, her very desire - that propulsion to “wan[t] to buy something really nice” for the Donnelly’s party - departs from greed in such a way that while Maria does measure her meager earnings (“how much better it was [...] to have your own money in your pocket”), she is more interested in what her money can provide for others than she is in her own material gain or advancement (D102). Examples illustrate how Maria is anything but slothful (“the kitchen was spick and span; the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers [D 99]), or lustful (“Maria had to laugh and say she didn’t want any ring or man either” [D 101], or gluttonous (“she looked with quaint affection at the diminutive body [...and] in spite of its years she found it a nice tidy little body” [D101], and how the narrative speech of the story takes revenge on pride by revealing her own insecurity concerning her lack of wealth, family, children, attraction, and attention.
While Maria flouts pride at almost every level, pride’s relationship with envy is necessarily complex, and it is here - in the dilemma of being caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of lack and longing - that we see Maria’s singular sin emerge. While readers are by now attuned to studying Clay through the lens of what Norris calls Maria’s “wished-for narrative voice,” it is important that we stop to consider the relation of this narrative voice to envy, the one sin that disturbs Maria’s spiritual soul (209). If we read Maria as one who is envious of the often-married, always socially charming Dubliners around her, it suddenly makes sense why she is “nervous” and “disorganized” with perpetually “bad manners” (Norris 209). What I am getting at here is that Maria is doing far more than simply repressing her desire; her envy forces her to resent others for the role they play in reminding her of her desire, and we see his played out not only in the way she responds to Lizzie Fleming (“Maria had to laugh and say she didn’t want any ring or man either” (D 101)) and the shopclerk (“that made Maria blush and smile at the young lady” (D102)), but also in the way she responds to Joe’s simple request for a song.
I am inclined to agree with Norris’s presumption that the Donnelly family “asks Maria to sing less because her singing gives them pleasure than because the request is an effective way to get rid of her, to hint that she has overstayed her welcome” (213): “At last the children grew tired and sleepy and Joe asked Maria would she not sing some little song before she went” (D 105). Such a statement contains a complexity beyond what might be supposed and results in what is really a perfect storm of events for Maria. Throughout the story, Maria’s awareness of her own spinsterhood has grown; commensurate to this is her envy of those, like Joe and Mrs Donnelly, who are married and enjoy the familiar association of a family (“Often he [Joe] had wanted her to go and live with them; but she would have felt herself in the way” [D 100]). Indeed, Maria’s longing boils over during the children’s game, particularly at its conclusion when Mrs Donnelly quickly relegates Maria to the convent: “Mrs Donnelly said Maria would enter a convent before the year was out because she had got the prayer-book” (D 105). The request for Maria to sing follows Mrs Donnelly’s consignment of Maria to the convent, and Joe’s appeal does nothing more than rub his marriage with Mrs Donnelly in Maria’s unmarried face: We will put the children to bed, Joe seems to be saying, and then Mrs Donnelly and I will remain here, together, while you return home to the laundry. In the strictest sense, the routine that Joe hints at is indeed the hallmark of traditional marriage, and Maria knows that, even if she were to stay, she would only be “in the way” (D 100). Joe’s insult - couched in the appeal for a song - is shrewd enough to foster and therefore sponsor Maria’s envy, and the special correspondence between Joe’s solicitation and his own marriage is enough to spark an awakening in Maria. In such a reading, Maria finally understands the cruelty of the children’s joke; she registers that not only is she an old maid, but that she is also an unwelcome guest at the Donnelly’s party; and, in the words of Thomas Staley, “self-awareness beg[ins] to dawn on Maria” (125).
To depict this awareness, the numerological framework of the story shifts, and Joyce diverges from the Judeo-Christian paradigm so obvious in the textual examples above. He swoops in - in the undelivered inner dialogue between Maria’s desecration of the prayerbook and her reluctant performance of Balfe’s song - and changes his register, suddenly focusing on a string of numerological systems (the Axiom of Maria and the numbers associated with alchemy or Hermeticism) each capable of granting space for Maria’s mutual self-awareness and eventual paralysis. That Joyce would indulge, and force readers to endure, competing numerological systems within the same story shows both his seriousness in this means of expression as well as his attempt to resolve his troubled relationship with religion and the specific Judeo Christian themes mentioned herein. As Enrico Terrinoni indicates in his work Occult Joyce: The Hidden in Ulysses, Joyce’s position towards occult authors and themes (including numerology) was “very eclectic, as if the subject were a kind of amalgam of different traditions all marked by the signature of secrecy” (6). Terrinoni magnifies this thought, likening it to esotericism: “theosophy, mysticism, magic, spiritism, and the so-called occult science in fact blend together to form a cluster of obscure erudition where Joyce eventually finds useful ideas, helpful in building up what looks literally like a cryptic system” (6). This conclusion by Terrinoni, if logically expanded, helps explain why Joyce would establish relationships between such diverse currents of thought and competing numerological systems within the same story: to do so allows him, like the pun of his title, to “conceal obscure significances behind half secret hints,” giving the appearance that he has delivered the last word on the subject at hand (10).
Indeed, there is a familiarity for Joyce in engaging with the axiom of Maria, as this current of thought is something he will turn to later in Finnegans Wake because of its associations personal enlightenment. The axiom’s schema is best summed up by Barbara DiBernard in her insightful study Alchemical Number Symbolism in Finnegans Wake. She writes:
There have been many attempts to explain the use of numbers in the Wake, but no one schema is adequate to account for them. Much of the number symbolism in the Wake is occult, and, specifically, alchemical. The numbers one, two, three, [and] four [...] are used alchemically by Joyce in the texture and structure of the work; they function on both the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. Ultimately they lead to and explain the problem of “circling the square” and they indicate that Joyce meant Finnegans Wake itself to be the solution to this problem and the equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone. (433)
According to DiBernard, it is the axiom of Maria that describes a pattern of transformation and expresses the importance of the numbers one, two, three, and four in alchemy. Here, numbers and patterns balance and align in a way that allows for the cyclical movement of falling apart and coming together on the spiral of evolution. The process is compelling: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth” (Jung 23). All this to say that, in the development of the psyche, one is the original state of unconscious wholeness; two signifies the conflict between opposites; three points to a potential resolution and is, therefore, also the transcendent function; and, finally, the one and the fourth are equivalent, at least according to Jung, to a transformed state of conscious wholeness and peace. Ultimately it is this axiom - after which Joyce must have named the heroine of “Clay” - that debuts in Balfe’s song and is featured in the penultimate paragraph of the story’s unforgettable closing scene, as Maria begins to sing and spirals through the experience of self-discovery.
Maria hears the opening chords of “I Dreamt that I Dwelt,” and, in the process, thinks back over the events of the day. Balfe’s song, a piece heavily predicated on the personal pronoun “I” (“I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,” “I was the hope and the pride,” “I had riches too great to count,” “I also dreamed”) forces Maria to realize her own undifferentiated wholeness (participation mystique). For Maria, the “one” is her own ego awareness, the “I” to whom she refers when she sings Balfe’s romantic love song. But Maria’s recognition is troubled by the children’s prank, by Joe’s request that she sing/leave. Her “inner other” begins to emerge, and, as Jung loved to say, she quickly discovers that she is not the master in her own home. The collision of the game, the request to sing, and the song’s intense focus on individual subject position are enough to compel Maria to come face to face with her shadow. Her “I” develops a distinct shudder - a “blush,” according to the language of the story - and her thoughts begin to belie her unified self. Maria now sees herself as others see her - as an outcast, a solitary individual among the groups of people that populate the story (“the tram was full of people,” we’re told, and Maria “had to sit on the little stool at the end of the car, facing all the people”; when she enters the Donnelly’s home, “everybody” announced, “O, here’s Maria”; “everybody,” except Maria, “had a solution for the mystery” of the plumcake, and so on [D 102, 103; emphasis added]).
This realization is a powerful experience for Maria, and herein we can identify the process of one becoming two. As Maria progresses through the first verse of the song, she becomes aware of the ways that she can actually be at odds with herself, and this, in fact, is contained in what Phillips Davies determines to be one of the more troubling aspects of “Clay.” According to Davies,
If Maria, either consciously or unconsciously, is unable to sing the verse about the “suitors” and “knights,” one might question why she, an employee of a dingy, Protestant-run laundry connected to an asylum for delinquent women, is able to sing of life in “Marble Halls, with vassals and serfs” at her side, a condition as far from the truth of her situation as the host of noble suitors whom she is either unwilling or unable to mention. (153)
Davies resolves the tension by associating the song with the “death theme of the story,” though it seems to me that it is much more accurate to read these expressions as manifestations that contradict the psyche’s strong desire for a “unified I” (153). Regardless of the interpretation here, we can only assume that Maria’s omission of the second stanza of the song, coupled with the fact that the first verse is repeated twice, is Joyce quietly hinting at the experience of duality that comes as one emerges into two.
At this point in the story, there is great potential for Maria. If she could learn to balance the opposites within, the reader thinks, if she could hold the tension between her own self-delusions and the antagonistic shadow of public perception, then she could quickly move toward two becoming three. The evidence to support this transition is ample in the song. To begin with, the song is composed in 3/8 time, a triple meter time signature where each measure contains three quarter note beats. In the first four lines of the first stanza, Maria idealizes three distinct flatteries (marble halls, vassals, and serfs); in the latter four lines, her longings are similar (wealth, majesty, and admiration). Moreover, the chorus contains much higher notes and more embellishments than the first verse. The incongruity is drastic, as the only embellishments contained in the first verse are a few small grace notes. Emblematically, the extreme differences in embellishments and the voice’s range between the two verses symbolize the heights that one must reach, the paths that one must take, in order to attain the third degree.
Yet, as we are aware, Maria never gets there. Not only does she sing the first verse twice (thereby failing to sing the second verse), but she does not even attempt the ascent of the chorus; in alchemical terms, she is not willing to submit herself to the fire, which would facilitate melting or union, and, in failing to do so, denies the process of personal transformation. To quote Thomas Staley:
[Maria] confronts for the first time with open eyes the sham and hypocrisy of her world, the great separation between dream and reality [...] In their paralysis the Donnelly family is deluded into thinking that Maria has forgotten the second verse, but she knows it all too well. The discovery is solely Maria’s; it is she who is aware of her predicament for the first time. Unwittingly, Maria in her journey through the streets of Dublin has completed her unwilling quest and reached an understanding of herself and is for the first time confronted with the terrible emptiness of her life. (126)
Despite Maria’s new understanding, Joyce gives her no alternative. Drawing from the literary and Biblical space assigned to her, Joyce seems to be saying that there is no alternative to give - that within the structures provided, the female will necessarily remain the subordinate, always the number two, always needing to have her existence justified by the patriarchal hand of either husband or Holy Orders. In a final attempt to present the restrictions imposed upon her by her role as woman - created out of Adam’s bone solely for his comfort and procreation in Genesis 2 - Joyce again establishes a correlation between Maria and Mother Mary, the Blessed Virgin, who, through the Holy Spirit, becomes two (she becomes pregnant), yet is precluded from ever becoming three as the trinity already exists without her. The song ends and our Maria achieves no repose; likewise, the story fails to deliver a solution, an alternative, a number four, which, in alchemical or Hermetic terms, is considered union, love, or perfection. Maria fails at the process of transcendence and, in typical Joycean terms, remains paralyzed.
While the song is a place of potential for Maria, the fact that its own numerology resists the number four - that transcendental place where “everything becomes clear” - on almost every level facilitates Joyce’s commentary on Maria’s failure to arrive. Instead, when Joyce must make a provision for the number four, he does so in reference to Maria as a witch. Four times over, we are either told that Maria “ha[s] a very long nose and a very long chin” or that, when she laughs, “the tip of her nose nearly me[ets] the tip of her chin” (D 99, 101, 101, 105). Joyce scholars have long trotted out explanations as to how readers should characterize Maria; Thomas Staley strains to contain it all when he considers that, perhaps, “undue emphasis” has been placed upon the depictions and differentiations of Maria’s character (126). While I think it is far too simplistic to reject Maria as either a Blessed Virgin or a witch (as scholars like Staley and Norris suggest), I do believe that there are other factors in the numerical system that hint at Joyce’s aim in naming and creating Maria - factors that, as far as I am aware, have been grossly overlooked in Joyce scholarship to date. As I see it, readers can typify Maria in three ways: (1) she is either a representation of a failed Mother Mary, as she has no mate or progeny and refuses to commit to God by leaving her “fruit” on the train; (2) she stands in as the Maria Prophetissa of the axiom - the fulfilled individual who has journeyed through self-discovery and emerged with a perfected consciousness; or (3) she is a witch-like character, an aberration of the male Magician in the Tarot and thus doomed to fail at her own attempt to follow the Magician’s path.
In his article “The Other Side of James Joyce,” Marvin Magalaner provides convincing commentary on the correlation between Maria and Mary beginning with the prominence of the name. More than that, though, according to Magalaner, Joe refers to Maria as “Mother,” she is a “peace-maker” and an unmarried virgin who offers barmbracks to fallen women in a way that epitomizes a communion. My own reading of Maria-as-Mary complicates and expands upon the principles Magalaner offers. As stated above, both Maria and Mary are associated with the number five and the number two. In both cases, Maria and Mary are precluded from achieving a higher state, a number three, by the doctrines of modern Ireland and Catholic theology which insist on legitimizing women only through their relations to men or God, as wives or nuns, making them always someone’s complement (there is that number two again) and never complete on their own.
Perhaps more convincing, though, is the correspondence between Joyce’s Maria and the Maria Prophetissa of the axiom - the fulfilled individual who has traveled the path of enlightenment from one to four and emerged with a perfected consciousness. Topologically, this path is typified in the Tarot by the Magician (represented by the number 1), whose path on the Kabalistic tree of life leads from the first to the third sphere. As described above, Maria spends much of the story in the realm of number one, that original state of unconscious wholeness. It is here that Maria fails to recognize that “none of the young men” on the train seems “to notice her” (D 102); instead, she considers the “polite” demeanor of the “colonel-looking gentleman,” and leaves the train with the belief that this gentleman, a drunkard, “was very nice with her” (D 103). Maria’s uncontested psyche allows her to misjudge Mrs Donnelly’s saccharine remark that “it was too good of her [Maria] to bring such a big back of cakes” to the party, and she takes the children’s rote recitation of “Thanks, Maria” to be a sincere expression of gratitude rather than a coerced reply, sing-song in its nature and similar to the cadence Catholic school children would employ to recite the tired and familiar lines of the catechism (D103). As we are by now aware, Maria does gain an understanding of her position as outsider following the perfect trifecta of the game, the request to sing, and the song’s intense focus on individual subject position (the “I”). According to the axiom of Maria, this realization is the process of one becoming two. While we can convincingly conclude that Maria does obtain a measure of self-awareness and understanding in the story, Joyce does not let readers forget that Maria is, above all, a failed character; for while she flirts with becoming three, she is never is able to achieve it. In this system, then, Maria abides at number two, petering out and shutting down before she ever reaches a perfected state of individuation.
Reading Maria as an individual in this way is especially applicable to the critical discourse likening Maria to a witch. Richard Carpenter and Daniel Leary argue, for instance, that Maria’s witch-like characteristics predestine her “to bring discord to those she most desires to share happiness with,” and that, in this way, readers must liken her to Mother Ireland, for “Mother Ireland shows [...]the same vice which is the source of Maria’s witchery -
self-regard, provinciality, and smug respectability” (3, 7). Contributory as these remarks are, they fail to recognize that the witch is actually an aberration of the male Magician in the Tarot. The Magician is skillful, self-confident, a powerful magus with the infinite as a halo floating above his head. The Magician mesmerizes; he draws divine power down from the heavens into his white wand, molds it with energy of thought, and makes it manifest on Earth. The Magician is able to make changes on the non-material level, and, in so doing, represents the path from the first to the third sphere of the Kaballah. If Maria is a witch, she is nothing more than an aberration of the male Magician; for, while he begins in a state of wholeness and is able to complete the axiom, she cannot based on the constrictions of social acceptance in Joyce’s Catholic Ireland, which preclude the female from moving beyond a state of unconscious wholeness, as Jung puts it. In this way, of course Maria will fail on the Magician’s path, as she does not represent the singular will: she is always a Mary figure (or Eve of Genesis 2) residing at two and five. This, then, seems to be the crux: it is the male who splits into two and three, to become four. As the female “other,” the Mary or the Eve, Maria can never progress without marrying or surrendering to God by taking Holy Orders.
Joyce thus turns to numerology - to alchemy, even - to land upon the naming index that could simply and elegantly epitomize the stasis of Maria’s unmarried position. In Maria Prophetissa, I believe that the Maria of Clay finds her muse. Here, at last, is a woman who represents what Maria could be if she were able to complete the axiom. Prophetissa is an actual magician, not a witch; she is credited with transforming sulfur into gold (the physical manifestation, really, of Joyce’s definition of epiphany (the manifestation of the spiritual in the everyday) and takes as her life’s work visions of religion and freedom that would be lost to the ages for centuries.
However, Maria, our witch, is not Maria Prophetissa the Magician, nor is she the Lilith of Genesis 1 - the woman associated with witches, fashioned of “earth” (or clay). Where Maria Prophetissa was able to amplify alchemical theories because of her expert and exemplary work - specializing in stones, like Joyce’s Maria, that are so common that everyone sees them but nobody notices - the Maria of “Clay” is only able to sing one stanza of one simple song before her story ends prematurely. If, as the axiom suggests, one becomes two, two becomes three, three becomes four, and four becomes one, Joyce has our Maria stall out, unequivocally, at number two. Trapped by the parameters of age, sex, and religion, Joyce binds Maria into being a failed Mary, destined to be paralyzed in her existence as “other” to the man she has not met and the God she has not yet committed to. This idea is especially apposite when we consider that Joyce - the wonderfully keen observer and reporter of human behavior - crafts Maria to demonstrate the ways in which Catholic women within early twentieth century Ireland were trapped by their literary and doctrinal place as subordinate. In the case of this story, Joyce lodges these women awkwardly, perilously, at number “two.”
Such a reading is profitable in that, for the first time, it allows readers to bring together the elements of “Clay” scholarship that critics have promenaded around for nearly a century: indeed, Joyce is showcasing Maria as an allegorical representation of Mother Mary, yet a numerical analysis allows us to see the ways that Joyce accentuates her, inseparably and invariably, as a failed Mary. Joyce is parading Maria as a witch, though the numbers in the story show us the ways in which she is a failed witch, unable to travel the path toward transcendence as the male Magician does so easily beside her; in short, Maria is a woman culturally reprehensible because of the unavoidable constrictions of social acceptance put upon her by her gender and Joyce’s Catholic Ireland. Joyce assumed, in writing this story, that a composition built from the symbolic systems of multiple and competing numerological schemes (the axiom of Maria, the numbers associated with Catholicism and with alchemy or Hermeticisim) would steer his audience toward a critique of the limiting gender roles in early twentieth century Ireland if only they could discern the proper interpretive key. The Maria presented in “Clay”/clé“, subordinate and ever solitary, is, for Joyce, but a single case in point.
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