Cosmopoetica

In Joyce’s story “Clay,” Maria is the clay—completely molded by events outside herself. None of Maria’s emotions originate from within herself… each is a reaction to the needs or emotion of someone else: she’d rather not take a gift, but she does; she’s sorry she mentions matters; she is summoned to resolve disputes without being involved in any disputes herself; she’s summoned to sing when she’d rather not; after just a page or two her thought to herself that it was “so much better to be independent” is laughable. And sad. The clay (presumably) she touches during the first “wrong” round of the game is fitting… being consigned to a Joycean convent a very close second place.

Eveline and Maria: what a strange pair. Eveline, too, is lifeless, but by virtue of being numbed to the world around her. Maria is reactive, but in no ultimately meaningful way, a life of minutiae and trivia that she elevates to an anesthetized substitute for passion.

I had to search for “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” to try to figure out the “mistake” Maria made singing it. It turns out to be a telling one: Maria sings the first verse twice, one in which the speaker exists in a state of already existing love, riches and remarkable ancestry, foregoing the second in which she would be singing of ‘”suitors that sought her hand” and active vows of love and faith—a state in which she would not only be wanted, but in which she would have to be an active participant in her own life, something she, like Eveline before her, will never be.

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Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” is structurally interesting— consider Little Chandler and Gallaher as parallel to Corley and Lenehan—and were I back in school writing post-structuralist criticism of the kind understandable only to a small inner-circle of other students of post-structuralist criticism, I could write a good 20 pages on the title alone.

I suspect most readers will find Little Chandler more than a little pathetic. I do too… in part. Chandler’s full of excuses for his failure to follow his ambitions. In the course of the story we can see his own rationalizations for that failure evolve as he tries to temper his jealousy of, and admiration for, Gallaher.

But where this story resonated with me was how much of myself I saw in the character of Little Chandler. I’ve wondered and doubted my poetic aspirations in ways very similar to Chandler:

He wondered whether he could write a poem to express his idea. Perhaps Gallaher might be able to get it into some London paper for him. Could he write something original? He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope.

[...]

There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.

I had children when I was young. It’s not an excuse for my lack of accomplishment, but it is a very relevant part of the context of my own failures. I could wholly identify with the “burden” of obligations entailed by family and children. When Chandler reaches the peak of frustration, I thought to myself “I’ve been there.”

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger

To my enduring shame, I’ve lashed out at my own children in just this way. But I’ve tried to do different. I’ve tried to do better.

Chandler’s internal monologue caused me to think of one of my favorite essays, “Fires” by Ray Carver, where we can see (in retrospect) the existence of a different path, a path that Chandler might still be able to walk. A path that might redeem his pathos. In the essay Carver tells the story of trying to do laundry at a laundromat with his children. He’s waiting and waiting for a dryer to become available, he’s already late, and when one finally does a woman swoops in and takes it. Carver goes on:

…I remember thinking at that moment, amid the feelings of helpless frustration that had me close to tears, that nothing—and brother, I mean nothing—that ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere as close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children. And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.

I’m talking about real influence now. I’m talking about the moon and the tide. But like that it came to me. Like a sharp breeze when the window is thrown open. Up to that point in my life I’d gone along thinking, what exactly, I don’t know, but that things would work out somehow—that everything in my life I’d hoped for or wanted to do, was possible. But at that moment, in the laundromat, I realized that this simply was not true. I realized—what had I been thinking before?—that my life was a small-change thing for the most part, chaotic, and without much light showing through. At that moment I felt—I knew—that the life I was in was vastly different from the lives of the writers I most admired.

The difference between a Chandler and a Carver comes finally in what they do with the voice(s) in their head telling them what they cannot do and what they cannot be. I don’t think Chandler is irredeemable. I sense that he has, obscured by frustration and envy and weariness, the heart of an artist, not just the pretention of being one. When Chandler thinks about his books of poetry, he does so in a way that shows a real love of poetry… and some understanding of one of the most intimate acts possible between two people, directly sharing a work of art one loves:

He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness had always held him back; and so the books had remained on their shelves. At times he repeated lines to himself and this consoled him.

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They call Mrs. Mooney, rather ambiguously, “The Madam.” A term of respect for making something of her shambolic circumstances, but also a none-too-subtle allusion to the fact that she is essentially prostituting her daughter. Polly wants a new life through marriage but is likely actively choosing the same kind of stultifying, empty existence that Eveline chooses through inaction. Unless she is as vapid as Joyce hints at toward the end of story, whether naturally or through being the subject of her mother’s manipulation for so long that she just doesn’t know how to think for herself.

The kind of love at the heart of “Araby” is nowhere in evidence here. Mr. Doran doesn’t seem a bad person, just one who can’t rationalize an enduring affection for Polly, for whom even his physical desire is already waning.

What a bleak picture Joyce has so far painted of relationships of every kind…

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“Two Gallants” didn’t do much for me… feels like a series of symbols in search of a story. So here’s a metrically challenged limerick (seemed like the appropriate form) in honor of the “The Two Gallants” and the two gallants:

In Dublin there wandered two gents
Who’d do anything for a few cents.
With the heat of their loins
They procured a few coins…
Let the symbolic readings commence

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There are a few things that strike me about this story, but I’m going to talk about just two.

First, the punny title. Yes, there’s a race. But isn’t Joyce also commenting on the Irish people and how they always seem to come in last?

Second, money, money, money… and all that comes from having, or more importantly not having, it. The myopia when it comes to your own potential. The constant tension of possible humiliation in the simplest transactions. The envy. The risks that come with the simplest activities that no one else sees.

I’m reminded of the scene in the generally horrible movie The Pursuit of Happyness when the rich CEO, in a hurry and without any cash on his person, asks the main character to borrow $5. To the CEO it’s a simple courtesy. To the person he’s borrowing from it’s his last $5. And more than that, the lender giving up the $5 knows it’s such a trivial sum to the CEO that he’ll likely never think to actually pay it back. So not only does he lose the $5 he desperately needs, but faces the humiliation of having to ask for repayment.

I’m reminded of an editorial I once read (I’m composing this offline so can’t find a link, but Google should reveal all) that was composed entirely in the form of a litany in the form of “being poor is” statements. Things like:

Being poor is hoping your toothache just goes away

Being poor is making excuses to go to the bathroom so your friends won’t hear you ask for the free lunch… or might not notice you aren’t eating at all

Being poor is being angry at your kids when they ask for all the things they see on TV

Being poor is having sheets for curtains

I can add one: being poor is feeling that moment of panic every time you go to the parking lot and for a moment don’t remember where you parked your car… because you know what it’s like to have your car repossessed and even many years later and for no rational reason you fear it’s happened again every single time.

The strain of living with the fear and constantly wearing a disguise lights a fire in some people, spurring them to greater achievement (the romantic and cinematic view), but it breaks most.

This is Jimmy’s existence. Living a life of pretense. Literally gambling away everything he had saved to make even a feeble attempt to break through the barriers of class and poverty… to the very group he wants so desperately to be part of.

At the end of the story: daybreak! But one whose light will reveal, once again and harshly, very different lives for the (foreign) well-to-do and poor, Irish Jimmy.

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A “creature” “burning with anguish and anger.” Wearing a straitjacket. “Passive, like a helpless animal.” Paralysis.

Eveline looks to God for an answer to what shouldn’t be any kind of dilemma but finds none. No surprise, this being Joyce. In fact, religious faith, often characterized by those who possess it as a distinction that elevates man as more than beast, has quite the opposite effect on Eveline:

“She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”

Faith is the ultimate lever-and-pellet system: be faithful and receive the ultimate reward. Eventually. Eveline’s frantic pressing of the lever provides nothing except, perhaps, the hope that she’ll go to that reward someday.

Eveline is disappearing. She’s buried herself. Even when she’s trying to make this once-in-a-lifetime decision she wonders if she can turn back “despite all that Frank’s done for her.” Eveline doesn’t frame the question as one of what she can or should do for herself because she exists increasingly only in the eyes of others and in the work she does for them.

We possess an endless ability to rationalize decisions like Eveline’s. We stay together for the sake of the children. We bury ourselves in smothering relationships because we “made a commitment,” regardless of changes in context and ourselves. We accept financial stability over emotional health and rationalize the sacrifice of ourselves and our potential as a kind of mundane martyrdom. We make decisions in service of the fictions that are our lives, telling our story, which should be the most important story we make, as if it belongs to someone else, as if we are bit players. Until we disappear, ghosts haunting our own ongoing lives. Wraiths.

I don’t know how many opportunities like Eveline’s we get. More often we are left the even harder work of creating such opportunities for ourselves… if we dare. How many times have we passed on these opportunities, perhaps in less dramatic fashion (that’s part of Joyce’s genius, bringing forth the drama of the interior of the mind making this kind choice), perhaps less obvious even to ourselves?

Eveline. The diminutive of Eve. The evil she is tempted by is one of self-erasure and rationalization. Enabling her abusive father and passing the same traits on to her children. Stunted fruit from a withered tree.

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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.”

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Joyce apparently said many times that Dubliners is meant to be more like a novel than a collection of individual stories. At the same time, he also spoke to the process of writing Dubliners as one of gnomon, which Wikipedia summarizes as “the whole of a person revealed by a single part” but which also refers to a parallelogram with two segments (aka a corner) removed. A curious conflict given that the former is about representation and the latter, arguably, about erasure, or what is held back.

This feels different to me than deliberate (or otherwise) ambiguity, even if the resulting effect on trying to “interpret” such stories is very similar. There’s a very clear instance of this erasure in “The Encounter” when the older man walks away after their initial meeting:

“… I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

–I say! Look at what he’s doing!

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes, Mahony exclaimed again:

–I say… He’s a queer old josser!

I don’t need previous experience reading Ulysses to guess that the erasure here is the older man masturbating. This is not just a prudent elision given the time and context of publication, but also leaves open to question the narrator’s understanding. Does he know what’s happening and chooses to ignore it, is he simply otherwise preoccupied, or is he in some way protecting himself because of past experience?

As one part of a larger puzzle, “An Encounter” is significantly more complex than it might be in another context. We have to consider not just the events of the story, but how the story fits into the larger picture Joyce is painting. The most salient question: should we allow the obvious perversion of the older man in the story to color our interpretation of “The Sisters?” There’s ample potential evidence of a story of molestation in the first story, but too many ways to view how it might (or might not) be connected to the second. Joyce could be painting any of a variety of pictures, signaling to the reader to reconsider the first story or making it clear that he can very easily convey such events clearly if he wishes to.

If anything, the boy’s lack of reaction to the man in “An Encounter” makes me think that retrospectively assigning sinister meaning to the first story is a mistake…

***

Joyce gets into the darker heart of obsession and monomania. The way the man spoke as if “magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind … slowly circling round and round in the same orbit.” This is a condition I know. I’ve felt it. Anyone who suffers from chronic depression or bi-polar disorder certainly has.

Such obsessions can focus on many things. In this case, the older man is supremely creepy. The simple line “every boy has a little sweetheart” made me shiver. But there were two moments in “An Encounter” that really shook me, and one of them is tied to the man’s erotic preoccupation. It comes when Joyce so clearly lays out the older man’s obsession:

“… He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world…”

Chilling… yet the “unfolding of an elaborate” mystery precisely describes some of my most important experiences and engagements with the things that matter most to me.

***

The other shivery moment is the end of the story. Regardless of how much experience or knowledge of pedophilia we attribute to the narrator, he knows something is very, very wrong with the older man. The boy may not be mature enough to be a analytical about the aspects of Mahony he dislikes (in the weird world of Joycean narration, in which sometimes the characters sound like themselves and sometimes like some vastly older and more mature version of themselves—and this isn’t in any way limited to just the central character(s) we take to be representative of Joyce himself), but there’s no question in my mind that he not only feels the temptation to abandon Mahony, but actually does. Only belatedly calling out to him.

It’s a kind of immature (I assume, for most people, but not for me) attempt to both do a relatively wicked thing and absolve oneself of responsibility at nearly the same time. He doesn’t wholly leave Mahony to the older man, but neither does he go to him and escape the situation directly either. He leaves Mahony’s fate, for a few minutes at least, in the hands of fate… and than savors the feelings of penitence when fate is, apparently, on the same side as he:

“And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.”

***

I know almost nothing about Joyce as a person. Which is a distinct weakness when conversation turns—as it naturally does with a collection like Dubliners—to questions about autobiographical elements. Lanny raises some interesting questions about Joyce’s own personality, such as how Joyce’s own “bookishness” might have contributed to an anger at institutions that allowed, if not condoned, negative behavior toward him.

This is perfectly reasonable. The problem is I have no idea how autobiographical Dubliners is meant to be, nor which particular elements might be more so than others. Fresh Air broadcast an interesting interview with Woody Allen last year in which he talked about his childhood. Turns out Allen was, in fact, quite an athlete in multiple sports (track & field and baseball), was pretty happy at school, and was usually among the first picked for games. What is commonly attributed as autobiographical, his nerdy bookishness (and his sexual compensation, but that’s another thread altogether) and being such an outsider, isn’t true after all. Or at least not as reliably and predictably as it is usually treated.

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I have to remind myself that Dubliners was intended, as I understand it, to be closer to a novel than a collection of individual stories. It was certainly written to be read as a whole, which can make it problematic to discuss any single story in isolation. Not a lot happens in “The Sisters” in the same way not a lot happens when you hold a key in your hand… but it’s a necessary start to unlocking a door (or a treasure chest) and sometimes a key has interest in and of itself.

***

“The Sisters” isn’t just a setting of the stage, establishing the theme of paralysis, but one of the effects of paralysis: incompleteness. The boy’s education is incomplete as is most of the conversation between old Mr. Cotter and the boy’s uncle… not to mention that as a boy he is himself necessarily incomplete. Reverend Flynn’s faith is incomplete (and insufficient). The sisters’ lives, without the Reverend to take care of, are incomplete.

***

Barbara notes that an early draft of “The Sisters” was actually a poem. I didn’t know that. But the simple clarity and beauty of Joyce’s language—when he chooses to employ it that way!—is one of the aspects of his writing I enjoy most. Listen to Barbara’s reading of the first paragraph. Do you hear the muscular music of Joyce’s prose? Even with the mundane parenthetical aside (“it was vacation time”), the whole paragraph sings, but the latter third is most striking:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

This kind of music is hard to explain. I run into the same kind of trouble I find myself in when trying to explain Jack Gilbert’s poetry, and often end up just thinking (and sometimes saying): I guess you either hear it or you don’t. Or, as Dick Hugo liked to put it, “I’m just lucky I guess.”

***

Joyce is a wellspring from which a wide variety of writers drink. You can trace Joyce’s stylistic DNA through writers as diverse as Faulkner, O’Connor, Hemingway, and Carver.

***

What to make of the religious aspects of the story? As a representative of the Catholic church—of which Joyce was, to put it kindly, not a big fan—Reverend Flynn figures in the story mostly as a grotesque figure in his habits, in his possibly syphilitic demise, and finally in the form of his body, the morbid centerpiece of the story (despite the title).

Mr. Cotter insinuates there might have been more wrong with the Reverend than a simple nervous breakdown or even a loss of faith, but it’s never made clear what wrongs Cotter has in mind. I tend to think it’s merely the suspicions and cynicism of an old man when confronted by the precocious and preternaturally studious and serious young man, a common character for Joyce… but it’s easy to make a case otherwise considering the vision the boy has of Flynn attempting a kind of confession to him and the image of Flynn’s tongue lying on his lower lip. And once going down that path all kinds of hay can be made with things like the ambiguous story of the broken chalice (“…it was the beginning of it … it was the boy’s fault”), the fact that the boy is quite young yet the priest seems to have spent some time schooling him in minutiae of operations of the church and various kinds of sin, and Freudian objects like the “velvet curtains” and “swinging lamps.”

***

Am I the only one who figures Joyce’s opening line to be purposefully allusive to Dante’s Inferno (“Abandon hope ye who enter here”). On the other hand, perhaps speculation about potential priestly pederasty has started to warp my perception.

***

“No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.”

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[CC licensed image by reillyandrew] 

Today begins a motley reading of James Joyce’s Dubliners by a shaggy collective connective group network. Its easy for to join in the fun if you’d like!

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