Thoughts on Joyce’s “Araby”

February 6, 2010

The language! On his deathbed, Jack Spicer’s last words were “My vocabulary did this to me!” I think Spicer meant vocabulary in the broadest sense, the way that those who possess (and obsess) over language are inhabited by it, the way it makes us radiant and burns us, the way language is always incommensurate with our ability to wholly make sense of the whole enterprise of experiencing and creating it. Language is the world… we make it and it does us in.

The third paragraph of “Araby” is a perfect exemplar of what I love about Joyce’s facility with the language (and one of the best paragraphs of any short story ever written):

“When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.”

This paragraph has it all—the poetry, the elegance, the burgeoning impact of each bodily sense—heightened all the more in contrasts with the bleak opening paragraph with the “brown imperturbable faces” on the “blind” street. I would sacrifice just about anything to be capable of paragraphs like that… and that’s a truth that fills me with excitement and despair.

Joyce writes “…her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” Is this any less true of language for devoted readers and writers?

***

“Araby” is a prototypical story of epiphany, an adolescent boy experiencing the sharp and blunt edges of love and, through that experience, the same qualities of “the world.” I feel this story. I’ve bled this story. Hasn’t everyone, at least when it comes to experiencing love? We each live our stories most keenly… one-upsmanship of experience is a fool’s game. But I wonder if someone who’s never experienced serious poverty can appreciate the awe and humiliation that the boy in “Araby” feels to quite the same degree as someone who has?

I ask because, to me, the epiphany here isn’t as much one of the feelings and reality of love, but that the outside world—even where its representatives are capable of understanding– really doesn’t care. It’s the narrator’s first significant experience of the phenomenon that he and his inner world are just a tiny—mostly un- or mis-perceived by others—part of the world in which he must find his way. It’s heartbreaking to discover this in the form of misunderstood or unrequited or impossible love, but it adds a whole new dimension to the experience when its wrapped up with the degradation and humiliation of poverty.

***

Religious symbolism (and confusion) run through this story like a spreading cancer. The boy lives in the house where Father Flynn died, a house still musty and littered with the priest’s papers.  Mangan’s Sister and the object of the boy’s intense affections is in a convent and thus essentially belongs to God. The boy desires the girl in suitably physical way, but he also feels adoration for her that is the thing of religious adulation and angels.

And, of course, the rather heavy-handed symbolism of the crusade or the quest, as manifested in another dream sequence, trying to safely convey a chalice through “a throng of foes,” which fits in perfectly with the title and theme of “Araby,” a name evoking a romantic land of myth. The boy’s attempt to find a suitable gift is itself a quest that is nearly stymied by religion when his attempt to get to the bazaar is nearly thwarted by the necessities of “this night of our Lord.”

Tags: books, dubliners, james joyce, motleyread, reading