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Dublinersby James Joyce |
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ArabyAn Outline CommentaryBob Williams - © 1999'The Sisters' and 'An Encounter' are about the same length. 'Araby' is roughly a hundred lines shorter than these. There is a progression in the three stories. The boy in 'The Sisters' is a passive witness, limited in his capacity to act by the weight of the adults about him. The boy of 'An Encounter' rebels against this oppression but his reward is the menace of a bizarre and abnormal adult. The boy in 'Araby' strives both to act and to realize an actual affective relationship but suffers frustration, a thwarting that results both from the burden of adult control and his own recognition of the falseness of his aims.In short, 'Araby' is busy and crowded with people although these come and go in a breath. The first mentioned character, the dead priest, lingers more than most. He was the former tenant of the house that the boy now lives in with his aunt and uncle. The priest left behind books that influence the boy and a rusty bicycle pump. The latter is found in a backyard that contains an apple tree, a suggestion of an edenic world in a story laden with spiritual and churchly trappings. The bicycle pump, says Tindall, commenting on its appearance in the Circe section of Ulysses, "probably means spiritual inflation." There are equally strong references to the mercantile. We learn, for example, that the priest left his money to charitable institutions and left to his sisters his furniture. The three books seem strange ones for a priest: a novel by Scott, memoirs of Vidocq and a devotional treatise. The latter may be an orthodox, if mediocre, work or it may be the work of an anti-Catholic writer whose last name is Seller, a fitting name for this story where the mercantile theme is so strong. The background of the boys who are the central figures of these first three stories is interestingly similar although different in the details. The boy of 'An Encounter' has no background except as a student but all the boys, whatever their differences in background, are much alike. The opening paragraph is very different from the openings of the first two stories. These tell us almost immediately that the stories are both personal narratives. In 'Araby,' however, the first paragraph gives us no clue of this and is expert, mature and polished with an arresting and poetic image as its climax: "The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.Ó This is a different way to accomplish what Joyce did with his discussion of Joe Dillon's priestly aspirations in 'An Encounter.' There is a complex temporality involved. In the one time is the accomplished writer who gives houses imperturbable faces and in another time is the immature narrator. Except for two minor characters, Mangan and Mrs Mercer, nobody has a name in this story. With a device that was used in 'The Sisters,' again in 'Eveline' and yet again in the first "us" of Finnegans Wake, Joyce begins a story with a pronoun for which only the context provides the antecedent. Children play boisterous games in the winter evening until their bodies glow. (The Grand Oriental Fête, however, was held in May of 1894.) The children, as in 'Eveline,' hide from authority in the person here of the boy's uncle or Mangan's sister. The boy is smitten with the latter. He watches out for her so that he can arrange seemingly accidental meetings. They have exchanged trivialities but have never really spoken. He describes her figure as "brown," the same word with which the writer of the opening paragraph describes the houses of North Richmond Street. (Ellmann: James Joyce, page 136: "James and Margaret got up at midnight [on the night after the burial presumably] to see their mother's ghost, and Margaret thought she saw her in the brown habit in which she was buried.") The boy's passion survives the ugliness of those he encounters while on errands with his aunt and rises to an almost unbearable pitch of intensity when he retires to the drawing room to indulge his feelings. It is significant that he remembers that it was in this room that the priest died. This mingling of love and death associations is ominous. After this emotional indulgence he is almost speechless when Mangan's sister speaks to him. She speaks to him about Araby. He promises to bring her a gift from this bazaar. She will miss the bazaar because of a retreat that she must attend. That she is exploiting his infatuation is obvious but unstressed. His pledge disrupts his life as he becomes obsessed with his quest. His schoolmaster reproaches him for his sudden remissness and hopes that he is not becoming idle (cf. "lazy idle little schemers" of A Portrait and Ulysses). His aunt wonders at his attending the bazaar and, misled by its name, hopes it is not some Freemason affair. He nags his uncle and his uncle answers him curtly. The uncle, however, fails to return at the usual time on the crucial night and the boy seeks refuge in a room where, his forehead against the cool glass, he watches children play and thinks about Mangan's brown-clad sister. When he comes down to have tea, he finds a visitor, Mrs Mercer. Her name is very mercantile and this is underlined by the fact that she is a pawnbroker's widow. She too waits for the uncle but, when eight o'clock comes, she, fearful of the ill effects of the night air, can wait no longer. His aunt tells him to forget about the bazaar and it is another hour before his uncle returns home. He has been drinking. Joyce A-Z observes "the boy's frustration and the uncle's lack of concern neatly contextualize the dual importance and unimportance of Araby." The uncle digresses tipsily and even becomes involved with a recitation of The Arab's Farewell to His Steed before he gives the boy money and releases him. The Arab's Farewell to His Steed forms a story link with 'Eveline' of a very curious and intricate kind. The author of this sentimental recitation verse was Caroline Norton. Her husband sought to divorce her for her relationship with Lord Melbourne. The priest whose picture was on the wall in 'Eveline' is, according to Eveline's father, now in Melbourne. Unless we assume coincidence, a poor assumption with so careful a writer as Joyce, this constitutes a subterranean connection between the two stories. It may be one of the connections that Joyce challenged Stanislaus to find. If this link seems farfetched, remember that the same author brought us Finnegans Wake where such elaborate associations are a commonplace. An easier link is the railing where Mangan's sister stands as she talks to the boy. This railing, the iron railing to which Eveline clings and the railing along which Lenehan runs his hands in 'Two Gallants' are all related. The boy's journey is slow and surreal as the porter turns away passengers from the carriage reserved for the bazaar, a carriage whose sole passenger is the boy. He arrives at the bazaar. It is almost ten and, pressed for time, he pays a shilling admission rather than waste time looking for the sixpence turnstile. He thus has a shilling left from what his uncle gave him and, as we learn later, two pennies. Most of the stalls are closed. Some booth attendants remain, counting money. The boy compares the closing fair to a church after services. Numbed by frustration and disappointment, he has almost forgotten why he has come. He looks at some wares, overhears a banal conversation and refuses the ungraciously offered attentions of a clerk. In the banal conversation the young woman, the rude clerk, denies three times the assertion of the two young men. All speak with English accents and the thrice-repeated denial recalls that of St Peter. In this banal exchange is a core of eroticism and, according to Phillip H. Herring, the boy discovers that his own quest has sexual implications, a major discovery for the boy and a defeat of his idealism. He moves slowly away as other attendants, represented only by their voices, begin to put out the lights. He sees himself "as a creature driven and derided by vanity." His eyes burn "with anguish and anger." Vanity, with its connotations of conceit, seems an odd word but it has other meanings of emptiness and futility. In the dual time scheme of 'Araby,' this description may be contributed by the older self of the narrator. We may also see in 'vanity,' especially appropriate at a bazaar, a reference to Vanity Fair. Araby: Characters (*mentioned)
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