proposal paper

The Narration of Reading in Joyce's "The Sisters" "An Encounter," and "Araby" Author(s): David W. Robinson Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 29, No. 4, Twentieth-Century Fiction (WINTER 1987), pp. 377-396 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754837 Accessed: 20-07-2016 19:31 UTC

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David W. Robinson

The Narration of Reading in Joyce's 'The Sisters/'

"An Encounter/' and "Araby"

James Joyce's narrators tend to dissolve into the language from which they are made: instead of speakers who relate stories to us in transparent language, we have language which relates to us transparent speakers, language whose fertility of meaning is never clearly delimited by an authority inferable from within the text.1 We must improvise rules of evidence ad hoc because the text de- clines to provide us with rules. Even Joyce's earlier narratives resist purely naturalistic readings, displaying instead the performance of narrative acts so inconsistent and self-contradictory as to conjure doubts about how such a narrative could be narrated at all.2 How

can a narrative impossible to narrate be possible to read? What happens in such an "impossible" reading?

The initial, first-person narratives of Dubliners, "The Sisters," "An Encounter" and "Araby," pose these questions by subverting the naturalistic hierarchy of unifying structure (plot, character, narrative stance) over the language "used," instead pitting one against the other, allowing the weird vibration of individual words to punctuate the narrative's coherence.3 Taken as a group, these three stories construct a metanarrative, an interpretive Bildungs- roman showing growth from interpretive naivete toward self-con- scious interpretation. Parallels emerge among the activities of the reader, the characters, and the narrators: like the boy narrators, we improve with practice at reading the signs we encounter. But the stories' critique of narrative thematization (i.e., the reader's active matching of meaning to textual features) goes further than this, for even the metanarrative dissipates into the arbitrariness of its en- abling conventions. The text authorizes interpretation only to de- authorize it later on, maintaining its own autonomy by insisting on the autonomy of the critical commentary it generates. The freedom of these texts from assignable meaning results in a series of failing attempts to impose meaning nonetheless, creating, in Jacques Derrida's terms, "an infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the

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David W. Robinson . 378

supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the thing itself, of immediate presence, of originary perception/ M Such chains surely can be seen within the texts under consideration, but it should be remembered that our assertion of this as fact supplements these without halting them. We move through an infinite regress of interpretations (our own and those made by the characters) whose end would be a complete ac- counting for the signs offered by the text. The explicitness of this deferral of understanding recommends that critics and other readers focus on the processes of meaning formation, while adopting a highly provisional model for "meaning." By using authorial/narratorial blindness as a prominent method, Joyce inscribes what Derrida sees as the problematic of all reading into a narrative structure that makes the difficulty of this reading (and our responsibility for it) impossible to ignore. Further, the perceived failings of the narrators to control their texts point emphatically to the parallel failures by readers. "Reading," Derrida says, "must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying struc- ture that critical reading should produce. "s The readings I propose here will exploit moments in these stories that demand the assign- ment of a clear meaning that, when applied, proves later to be the ghost of a meaning, as "when, having thought that we heard a key turn, it is finally clear to us that the key had no door, and was sup- ported only by its sound as a key."6

Gnomons

Any description of "The Sisters" must take into account the tension between the narrator as producer of language and as product of language, a drama that in Dubliners is played out as a problem of interpretation. The boy in each of the opening three stories attempts to interpret the raw facts of his experience; the narrator interprets the same facts from a superior stance and also explains the boy's behavior; the reader evaluates the interpreters and the things they try to interpret. At each of these levels, Joyce fosters the illusion of a locatable reality (to which the meaning of the story is anchored) only long enough to dislocate it within our experience of the lan- guage, with the result that "The Sisters" runs over with puzzles demanding someone's explication. All of the story's interpretive efforts fail: the meanings, as supplied by the busy minds of the characters, remain incomplete. The story even closes with such a

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Narration of Reading in Joyce . 379

failure when the boy, whose narrating self has been providing com- mentary, falls into baffled silence, leaving us the job. Yet the text's clearest calls for interpretation, as in that final scene, can turn out to be what Hugh Kenner has labeled "reader traps/'7 Critics too numerous to list have attempted to fill the story's closing silence with everything from metaphysical to medical explanations of the priest's demise and, in so doing, have, I think, stepped squarely into a trap. The closing silence is not meant to be filled up, once and for all, with our own noise; rather, the silence indicates a failure on the boy's part to perceive or create significance.8

The growth, decline, and fall of our attempts to form interpretive hypotheses may be traced in this story, and the succeeding ones, by applying the multiple senses of the word gnomon. Various critics have discussed the way Dubliners incorporates the geometric meaning of "the word gnomon in the Euclid" (Dubliners, 9),9 defined as a parallel- ogram from one corner of which a similar parallelogram has been removed, or in other words, a parallelogram missing a piece. 10 The fin- ger-pointing quality of the resulting figure is shared by a more famil- iar meaning of the word, the indicator on a sundial; and in general, Joyce commentators have recognized that a gnomon signifies by means of a missing part, a crucial incompleteness. Just as important is the word's original meaning, "one who knows," or an interpreter. Gnomons, significant absences, are thus to be found both in the prod- ucts of interpretation (in signs) and in the fictive subjects motivated to "interpret these signs" in response to their own sense of lack (a lack present in Joyce's much later punning on gnomon and no man. ! l The idea of interpretation recalls at every turn the difficulty present in any situation requiring interpretation: that an interpretation, no matter how definitive and pragmatically reliable, remains always a creation separate from that to which it is addressed. Rather than replacing an enigma with a certainty, it may add another enigma. The reader's predicament when faced with gnomonic structures both frames and reproduces the experiences of the characters in the story, who are so prominently engaged with interpretive questions.

The boy's first act in "The Sisters" is to try to read an absence, the lack of candles in the old priest's room. (He fails.) Through the rest of the narrative, he tries repeatedly to discover meaning in the gnomonic silences of the people around him, as when he tries to infer the meaning of Cotter's fragmentary speech, which somehow con- cerns the priest, but is marred by ellipses and confusing halts:

No, I wouldn't say he was exactly . . . but there was something queer . . . there was something uncanny about him. I'll tell you my opinion. . . . (Dubliners, 9-10)

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David W. Robinson . 380

And again:

I have my own theory about it, he said. I think it was one of those . . . peculiar cases. . . . But it's hard to say. . . . (Dubliners, IO)12

Cotter's speech is also remarkable for its frequent negations, his first and favorite word being "no," together with statements such as "I wouldn't like children of mine [. . .] to have too much to say to a man like that," and "My idea is: let a young lad run about and play with young lads his own age and not be ... Am I right, Jack?" (Dubliners, 10). These are semantic gnomons, saying nothing though presenting the appearance of speech. The net effect is so confusing that the boy's aunt twice asks Cotter what he means (Dubliners, 10, 11), and it is no wonder that the boy must puzzle his "head to ex- tract meaning from his unfinished sentences" (Dubliners, 11). He also looks for meaning in his lack of grief: "I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death. I wondered at this" (Dub- liners, 12). The interpretive activity which began with the priest's informal catechism continues to absorb the boy's energies after his teacher's death, and even because of it. Father Flynn has become a gnomon for the boy (all that remains of him is a hollow, but sig- nificant, shell), and now he functions also as a gnomon, an indicator, for the reader, pointing at a connection between the need to inter- pret and the recognition of absence. Flynn is an absent interpreter, a double gnomon (and dead, a no-man), leading the present inter- preter, the reader, to consider the meaning of a priest's absence and to examine the motivation behind his or her own attempt to impose a meaning. The boy, in between, reproduces the same desire and puzzlement, while being, like the priest, a provocation to the reader.

The story concludes with another barrage of partial information of which the boy tries, without success, to make sense. Like the words "Derevaun Seraun" (Dubliners, 40) in "Eveline," this story's closing dialogue has so resisted definitive interpretation that it can only be deliberately obscure. This sort of ending makes a gnomon of the story as a whole, its meaning being its missing portion. This ultimate lack is figured in the many physical absences that inhabit the same closing section of the narrative: the silence in the room, the empty fireplace, the empty chalice (originally a cross- but the symbolic emptiness of a cross is less palpable), l3 and the dead priest in the middle of it all. At the same time the language of Flynn's two sisters, like Cotter's language, takes on a gnomonic slant. The

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Narration of Reading in Joyce . 381

ellipses return: "Did he ... peacefully? she asked" (Dubliners, 15), and absent from that sentence is the final absence, death, so that one gnomon is again contained by another. While Nanny hardly speaks at all, Eliza and the boy's aunt, like Cotter, speak a language of negations, no fewer than ten on page 16 alone. They are innocent enough, except in the aggregate:

-Ah, there's no friends like the old friends, she said, when all is said and done, no friends that a body can trust.

-Indeed, that's true, said my aunt. And I'm sure now that he's gone to his eternal reward he won't forget you and all your kindness to him.

-Ah, poor James! said Eliza. He was no great trouble to us. You wouldn't hear him in the house any more than now. (Dubliners, 16)

And so on. These are touches that only the reader can be expected to notice- surely not a boy of twelve or so. Although the boy's at- tention is strained to the limit, he appears unable to conclude more from Eliza's account than that something mysterious and unpleasant -something vicious- is in the air. His final comments still fail to interpret the facts fully: "She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him" (Dubliners, 18). The narrator's "I knew" fleetingly promises an explanation, but he ends by restating what we already knew.

The reader, of course, faces a similar difficulty. But more than merely confronting the same mysteries as the boy, we must also contend with signs in the text that have nothing to do with its thematic unity, its narrative coherence, or the psychology of its characters. The reader succeeds in making sense of this text only by repressing awareness of what the verbid texture of the story threatens to signify: like the boy, the reader is caught between lan- guage as representation of unitary meaning and language as ran- domly signifying, as generative of its own codes. The purely verbal ambiguities begin with the mention of Cotter's boring stories: "When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery" (Dubliners, 10). This passage insists on thrusting forward a number of hair-raising, and inappropriate, interpretations based on the meanings and sounds of the words. Most obviously, "faints and worms" suggest at once their most common meanings: lapses into unconsciousness and small, elon- gated animals. As Fritz Senn has pointed out, these are terms from

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David W. Robinson . 382

distillery jargon, and Joyce even lends a defining hand by revealing where Cotter has been employed.14 But none of this internal and external exegesis saves one from briefly placing Cotter's reported words in a context prepared already by the narrative: we know that the priest is ill with his third stroke (hence "faints") and that he is near death (hence "worms," and one might argue that this is where the priest's death is announced, not in the following statement by the boy's uncle). The text offers an official interpretation while making it impossible for us merely to believe in it. The vague sug- gestion that Cotter is possessed of some arcane knowledge about death (he has stories to tell about faints and worms) lingers long enough to trouble us through several more lines. Cotter, as might now be expected, is the person who originally learned of the death and brought the news of it to the family: "Mr. Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house" (Dubliners, 10). This state- ment brings with it more interpretive static: Who was passing? By what house? Passing? Death, or at least death words, seem to be leaking in everywhere: How do we know where to stop seeing them and get on with the business of the story? An escape to higher ground seems impossible.15

The misleading words often produce false clues about the plot development. The title of the story leads to such a mistake when, after three sisterless opening pages, two women finally appear: "Two poor women and a telegram boy were reading the card pinned on the crape. I also approached and read" (Dubliners, 12). For all that a first-time reader knows, these are the sisters, and even in retrospect, once the whole story has been read, "two poor women" seems an apt description for the real sisters. While this minor con- fusion arises and dissipates, a further bit of mirroring occurs be- tween the narrating boy and the "telegram boy" (and what is a telegram boy, after all, but a boy carrying a message?). Why is this boy here, except to complete a local pattern? The passage, "it was the boy's fault" (Dubliners, 17, where the culpable boy must be an acolyte, though the way he is mentioned makes him sound like the boy who narrates), behaves in much the same way, and so does the scene at the end of the story where gloominess yields to gothic romance, and a ghost story struggles to assert itself: "A silence took possession of the little room[. . . .] And what was it? said my aunt. I heard something. ..." (Dubliners, 17). Fritz Senn notes this and finds the reason for it in a pun:

The story often comes near to naming, or implies, but does not directly name the spirit, or the ghost (at one moment in the story it seems as if the party of mourners were afraid of

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Narration of Reading in Joyce . 383

Father Flynn's reappearance as a ghost[. . . ..]) The guests are offered spirits in the form of sherry.16

In sum, these textual currents tend to provoke an unusual degree of self-consciousness in the reader, to the extent that the author's intended meaning, conceived of as something fixed and ideally re- coverable, ceases to be an interesting question in itself. Instead, authority and intention manifest themselves in a strategy of dis- equilibrium, the corollary of which is, of course, a careful balancing of ambiguities at any point where we would expect to see an intent made clear. The guidance of the narrator, implied at the outset of the story, is gradually withdrawn until, by the end, its comforting presence is exposed as an illusion that has obscured a bottomless uncertainty. Here and in the next two stories, problems of interpre- tation absorb the boy, who resides in the text, and the reader, who attempts to preside over it, while for both it threatens at every moment to collapse from an excess of potential meanings.

Traps

We find an older, more adventurous boy and what appears to be a more skilled narrator in "An Encounter. " But as my critique of the narrator in the first story shows, the significance of the narra- tive stance seems tied to the forces in the text working counter to it. Among these forces are the thematic continuities with the sur- rounding stories: the missing presence (again) of a priest, the long- ing for faraway, romantic places as glimpsed through literature, the tendency of the boy to step self-consciously into roles, the gnomonic overtones at crucial points in the text. More subversively, the semantic playfulness of "The Sisters" continues and accelerates.

"An Encounter" shares with "The Sisters" an emphasis on the interpretation of utterances and the filling of gaps, particularly spiritual ones. The most recognized example of this is the old man's verbal seduction of the boy, a sexual trap baited with oblique and empty speech. Yet the narrative structure of the story has its own difficulties, and the reader must deal with its contrary seductions, which first manifest themselves in puns, the same kind of trivial verbal irregularity that hampers attempts to fit "The Sisters" within a stable hierarchy of central and peripheral themes. The normal procedure of readers to ignore resolutely these demonstrable patterns can be explained as a repression (i.e., a motivated refusal to construe the narrative using all evident aspects of it), albeit a repression sanctioned by narrative convention (this being precisely the point). In "An Encounter," one of the boys develops a "vocation

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David W. Robinson . 384

for the priesthood" (Dubliners, 19); literally, a calling, a speaking. In "The Sisters," the action took place during a "vacation time" (Dubliners, 9) which tended to manifest itself in spiritual or spatial terms: the priest was vacant in several senses, and the vacancy of silence pervaded that story like the vacancy of death. A reader possessed of a good memory hears one word in two contexts with two different spellings, creating a resolution in terms of punning metaphor. Among the other words reverberating from one story to another is idle, a homophone of idol and interesting on that count if no other. "The Sisters" began with the word prominently em- ployed ("He had often said to me: / am not long for this world, and I had thought his words idle," Dubliners, 9) and ended with it ("I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast," Dubliners, 18). The second use, describing a chalice, has entered a chain of meanings anchored to emptiness: the chalice the priest had once dropped (a smashed idol/idle) "contained nothing" (Dubliners, 17). In "An Encounter" we hear of "Leo the idler" (Dubliners, 19), whose brother Joe subsequently becomes a priest.17 Although these verbal resonances appear to be in harmony with the general themes of the stories, it would be hasty to view them as subservient: means such as these can easily turn against the themes they appear to support.18

Predictably, difficulties of interpretation hold the attention of the narrating boy, who explicitly speculates about problematic intrica- cies of language, and ultimately of style. Failed interpretive acts follow one another in quick succession when the boys arrive at the Liffey and watch the discharging of a ship:

Some bystander said that she was a Norwegian vessel. I went to the stern and tried to decipher the legend upon it but, failing to do so, I came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some confused notion. . . . The sailors' eyes were blue and grey and even black. (Dubliners, 23)

The boy is unable to read the "legend" on the ship because it is written in a foreign language, but in these stories even one's native language is hard to understand, the difference being of degree only. Next he inspects the sailors' eyes in order to test "some confused notion" assigning green eyes to sailors (though, typically, the notion itself is hidden by an ellipsis). This belief that green eyes are, in effect, a symbol of the exotic, particularly sailors or sailing, probably results from the kind of childish reading described earlier

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Narration of Reading in Joyce . 385

in the story (another kind of "legend") and thematically links the story to the exotic lands evoked in 'The Sisters" and "Araby." Unsurprisingly, the significance of green eyes is spurious (green eyes are a false symbol), and the boy admits his error when confront- ed with physical evidence.

But for the reader, the story is scarcely a piece of physical reality. Confronted not with raw sensory data but with a text, we cannot help noticing that the false symbol the boy abandons, green eyes or the color green, begins to take on a linguistic life all its own, and for a time we are responsible for interpreting it, saddled, as it were, with a cast-off symbol of the boy's. This phenomenon begins on the next page:

I chewed one of those green stems on which girls tell fortunes. [An interpretive act, incidentally.]

He [the old man] was shabbily dressed in a suit of greenish- black.

I thought he was looking for something in the grass. [And yet another.] (Dubliners, 24)

And it is not irresponsible (in reading Joyce) to think of a green stone when we hear that 'The sun went behind some clouds and left

us to our jaded thoughts" (Dubliners, 24). What a reader should do with all of this is unclear; it seems that Joyce is taunting us with "symbols" already proved to be nonsignifying. We are placed in the position of having to pick our way through false symbols while looking for real ones, an experience not so different from the boy's experience of life. And before this lesson has had time to sink in, the false symbol (randomly, it would seem) turns real again, as the boy beholds the void of his own ignorance, and the desire of another, in green eyes (adventure at last!) and a twitching forehead (Dublin- ers, 27). 19 Not the growing suspicions about the man's intentions but the shock of this relocated symbol, now invested with a real significance by the boy, marks the point where he perceives his own danger and learns also how to cope with it, as his next actions prove:

I waited till his monologue paused again. Then I stood up abruptly. Lest I should betray my agitation I delayed a few moments pretending to fix my shoe properly and then, saying that I was obliged to go, I bade him good-day. I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles. (Dubliners, 27-28)

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David W. Robinson . 386

Compared with this performance, the boys' earlier agreement to hide their identities with aliases (presumably from any roving con- federates of Father Butler) was indeed a "paltry stratagem" (Dub- liners, 28), though it prefigured the more complex encounters with linguistic irregularities that follow. By the end of the story, the nameless boy is creating his identity in response to arbitrary mean- ings around him, while the reader is analogously aware of his or her function as an interpreter.

The reader's burden of responsibility is most evident when the activity of the text takes place on a level invisible to the characters, yet confusingly intertwined with their concerns. One such case begins with a reader trap inviting us to surmise that the pederast is blind and ends with a refutation of this suspicion. When the boys first observe the old man, his behavior suggests blindness:

He came along by the bank slowly. He walked with one hand upon his hip and in the other hand he held a stick with which he tapped the turf lightly. [. . .] He walked towards us very slow- ly, always tapping the ground with his stick, so slowly that I thought he was looking for something in the grass. (Dub- liners, 24)

Suddenly we learn that the stranger is not blind, for the narrator not only speculates that he is looking for something, but also men- tions that the man "glanced up at us quickly" (Dubliners, 24); so the trap is a relatively mild one, just enough to make us uneasy. (What is he doing?) But now a surprising thing happens: the narra- tive arrangement of the man's speech into paraphrased and quoted sections resurrects the uncertainty in what appears to be a purely mischievous way. The narrator gives a lengthy paraphrase before we hear any of the man's actual words, and the first ones out of his mouth (for the reader) are, "Ah, I can see" {Dubliners, 25)- a reader un-trap, conferring certainty where none was really lacking, while more immediately pointing to itself as written, as narrative, a set of conventions (including typographical ones) and not a photograph- ic report of material facts. The narrator's awareness surely cannot include awareness of this if he is to retain any cohesion as a dis- tanced and meticulous mediator of his own earlier experience; rather, the narrator begins to dissolve into nonanthropomorphic forces of control which divest him of reality and authority.

More than "The Sisters," this story has prompted us to see through and around its own narrative conventions, with their pre- tense of simple, available, referential meaning, provided in a neatly wrapped package by a coherent narrator. In "Araby," which seems

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Narration of Reading in Joyce . 387

more than the first two stories to be told by a clearly distanced, personified narrator, the text increasingly challenges our concep- tions of narrative voice, first by planting further interpretive enig- mas, and finally by turning the category of "narrator" inside out.

Symbols

Of the three opening stories in Dubliners, "Araby" presents by far the clearest framing of narrated events within the controlling view- point of a definite narrator. Here, finally, is a narrator whose relation to his early self can be confidently gauged and whose interpretation of the past has some claim to authoritativeness- or so it seems. A fairly consistent level of ironic detachment helps us locate the narrator, who then serves as a model for what we might think about the young boy's adolescent passion. Like the other two stories, "Araby" is largely about interpretation- reading- whether of the written word or of signs encountered or acted out in society. As readers we are offered a chance to read these signs more skillfully than does the narrator himself.

As the last story of the opening triad, " Araby" unites the preced- ing focuses of desire (for the exotic, for the mysterious, for meaning, for truth) in the culminating symbol of sexual desire, Mangan's sister, who becomes the occasion or site, finally, of the boy's imagin- ative "writing"; that is, he responds to her unattainability as an object of desire by directing his energies toward a replica of her within his imagination. This is part of a logical movement from childhood to adolescence, with interest in the oposite sex displacing more childish games; but naturalism is superseded by the insistent gnomonic references in the opening pages and beyond. As the first paragraph of "The Sisters" described a "lighted square of window" (Dubliners, 9), so "Araby" begins with a series of physical objects delineating flawed rectangles and empty cubes which become asso- ciated with the earlier themes of physical and mental paralysis:

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives with- in them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. (Dubliners, 29)

Words both as sounds and ideas tie this paragraph to passages in the preceding stories. The blindness mentioned in the first sentence

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David W. Robinson . 388

is of course not the physiological variety, but the word is strikingly situated, and by the paragraph's end the inanimate houses on this inanimate street will be credited with human minds and human

faces. "Blind" is a word straining against its context, furthering a series of references to physical debility (paralysis) and, in "An Encounter, " to blindness in particular. The layout of the street, so carefully described, consists of a row of houses on either side, form- ing a rectangle, so that the vacant house at the end, "detaiched from its neighbors in a square ground," serves as the removed portion of a gnomonic parallelogram whose flawed remainder will be the setting of the story. The house in which the boy lives contains a vacant back room on the first floor, and a number of "high cold empty rooms" (Dubliners, 33) on the second, which are not only abandoned, but were formerly inhabited by a now-dead priest (again) whose absence the boy seems eager to fill. The boy is already trapped in a network of associations that link blindness, paralysis, vacancy, silence, and death, all variations of an absence that he attempts to remedy, first by reading the dead priest's books (cf. "The Sisters"), next by joining his friends playing outside in a deathlike world of dark winter cold ("Our shouts echoed in the silent street," Dubliners, 30; cf. "An Encounter"), and finally by pursuing the girl.

The description of this girl identifies her with the gnomons just described (the empty house, the silent street, the missing priest). The passage, "She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light of a half-opened door" (Dubliners, 30), bears a curiously geometric stamp, as though we are seeing "defined" a certain class of "fig- ure." The rectangle of light from the door (part of a larger, partly dark rectangle) and the shadowed silhouette of the girl within that light are both geometrically gnomonic, while a different sense of the word explains the behavior of the others when they see her:

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. (Dubliners, 30)

Mangan's sister indicates whether or not the evening's play is finished. Not only is she gnomonic in this sense, but so too are the boys, in other senses: they interpret the sign she gives them, doing so from within shadows of their own, and they carry as part of their identity the re-signation resulting from the action being forced on them.

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The narrating boy's relationship to Mangan's sister consists wholly of distanced re-presentation of her. As soon as he begins watching the girl from the window, he begins also to blind himself to any real perception of her, substituting an "image": "Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance" (Dub- liners, 31), including any place more substantial than his imagina- tion. That floating word "blind" recurs when he looks through a window with drawn blinds, separating himself as much as possible from the girl he is nominally observing: "One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house[

ful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves" (Dubliners, 31). The boy is, of course, reenacting the priest's "death" to the material world upon the taking of his vows, and in reading Dubliners it is hard to miss the point that such a death is more than metaphorical. Imaginative activity, whether on the part of the boy or the reader, never accomplishes what it ostensibly sets out to do. Since substitutions follow substitutions without any con- clusion but death, the pursuit of final meanings and sublime images is also a desire to escape the contingency of life, that is, to die. The pursuit of such meanings is, however, the most urgently alive activi- ty in these stories, although the methods used in searching out meanings are the same ones that delude so many of the book's characters. In order to adore his own blessed virgin, the boy must withdraw from the world of the senses and contemplate an image that substitutes itself for fleshly desire without wholly obscuring its origin. The boy wills his own blindness, which in the context of these stories means that he has entered a metonymy beginning with desire for meaning and ending only with death. Somewhere along this chain the reader, too, can be found, trapped, like the boy, by its necessities. But not trapped in an overall paralysis like the boy, whose world is crowded with the dead and whose fellow citizens are

hardly alive. Readers can live to read another day, writers to write; the boy, as a fictional character, is fixed, even when the story in- volves him in a struggle to read his own experience.20

Balancing the symbolic afflatus of the story's first half, the second half chronicles the steady collapse of the boy's imaginative infla- tions (which have blinded him to some rather urgent interpretive necessities) as they are pricked on hard-edged reality. Each narrated event is in some way a disappointment, beginning with the rude awakening from reverie that greets the boy in Mrs. Mercer. The boy plummets from an evocation of the Virgin Mary, celebrated priestlike as he walks about in the upper rooms of the house singing, to a monstrous parody of youth, beauty, and holiness: "She was an

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old garrulous woman, a pawnbroker's widow, who collected used stamps for some pious purpose" {Dubliners, 33). The boy next waits impatiently until his uncle arrives- drunk. When he finally procures the money and prepares to leave, the uncle is on the verge of reciting The Arab's Farewell to His Steed, a debasement of everything the boy associates with the word "Araby." The train that takes him to the bazaar is "deserted" (Dubliners, 34)- a fitting state of affairs for any real Araby. Once he arrives, his haste forces him to squander money on an expensive entrance. And once inside, he finds not a center of exotic life, but a tremendous gnomon: "Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recog- nised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service" (Dubliners, 34).

The irony of the story's conclusion is that the boy completely fails, until the very last, to interpret accurately the relation, and distance, between his desires and physical reality. He fails, in effect, to interpret himself, even though perfectly competent to interpret other signs, as when his uncle enters the house: "At nine o'clock I heard my uncle's latchkey in the halldoor. I heard him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. / could interpret these signs'* (Dubliners, 33; my emphasis). The interpretation itself, that the uncle is drunk, remains unstated, suggesting that the boy's evident attention to his surroundings cloaks a continued reluctance to confront sordid reality head on, at least insofar as he is personally affected (for this effect is what he would like to deny). The one reality he cannot ignore, and the one he could most easily have "interpreted" had he wished to, is money, specifically the lack of it- four pence left at the story's end (deducting return train fair) with which to buy a gift. Money turns out to be the one potent signifier in the simoniacal society the boy has tried from the beginning to evade. As an arbi- trarily fixed symbol, it stands for the power of society to determine meaning (hence value) with unchallengeable force, and thus reflects the boy's paralysis in a world of action which, once recognized, so completely negates individual meanings that the boy sees himself drained altogether of reality. Just as the money in his pocket will buy him nothing, the thirdhand romantic narratives that constitute his view of the world will do nothing to recoup the lack that he senses, and without those narratives, he is himself as much a blank spot as Mangan's sister (like her, he is nameless) or, for that matter, as Father Flynn. Hence: "Gazing up into the darkness / saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger" (Dubliners, 35; my emphasis). Looking at the darkness that is himself, he is "driven" from within by desire, "de-

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Narration of Reading in Joyce • 391

rided" from without by alien signifier chains such as money. The empty vision comes to him in a dark, silent hall like the blind, dark, cold, silent street at the story's beginning and the silent, empty houses. The boy appears to have gone nowhere, to be trapped in the same web of deadness as before, having won at most an equivocal awareness of his condition. If the boy recognizes the banality of his predicament in the epiphanic conversation at the story's end, we recognize the boy's continued lack of self-knowledge (and by implication, our own similar lack as readers) in his final rethematiz- ing of the events in the story.

The boy's ambiguous deflation occurs precisely where a close reading of the opening symbol structures leads one to think it would. Setting aside for a moment the dense gnomonic references I have already discussed, no reader can escape noticing the odd pattern that presents itself as the narrator describes the garden:

The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very chari- table priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister. {Dubliners, 29)

Without a doubt we are handed the Garden of Eden in this passage; the problem is, what should we do with it? Thematically, the Eden allegory fits, since the story depicts the boy's fall into sexual aware- ness. There is even the brief moment when Mangan's sister acts like (though not much like) a temptress on pages 31-32. Yet Eden and the Fall seem excessively potent symbols, too rich in associa- tions to be used in such an offhand way. One wishes that a stronger thread of allegory could be followed through the rest of the story.

But it cannot be, I believe, and the fact that it cannot sends me back to the passage just quoted, which contains the datum that the boy found, under one of those vaguely Edenic bushes, "the late tenant's rusty bicycle pump."21 This surely is the last straw: the temptation to allegorize the pump into, at the very least, a snake, is irresistible, but also ridiculous. Rusty or not, this pump is too far- fetched a symbol to be taken seriously. Who would care to claim that this is no ordinary bicycle pump, but that it is really (on some allegorical plane) Satan himself, the great tempter, disguised as a bicycle pump? Yet the symbol is also obviously there. In an attempt to arbitrate between critics who would read "Araby" naturalisti- cally and those who habitually pursue symbols, Bernard Benstock once said of the pump that "even Freudian analysts have avoided concrete conjecturing on that suspicious object" and dismisses it as

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David W. Robinson . 392

nothing more than a naturalistic detail.22 Benstock is not far from right (indeed, no critic would want to be stuck with such a symbol), but it may be unwise to pigeonhole the detail into an ostensibly neutral category.23 The pump is not a very good symbol, but it does have a definite impact on the reader who notices it with alarm while trying to make sense of the other Edenic resonances. The pump, being of Joycean manufacture, deflates the allegorical afflatus which the combined hints about Eden have conjured in the mind of the reader. First we are invited to form an abstractable meaning; then we are mocked by the absurdity of what we have created. The dual meanings of gnomon have reached their fullest development by the end of " Araby," where the explicit meaning introduced in "The Sisters" (a geometric figure defined by lack) has become a general, implicit background for the action, and the originally implicit mean- ing (an interpreter, a knower) has assumed a dominant role, defining the functions of boy, narrator, and reader with considerable power.

The stance of the narrating "voice" in the remaining twelve stories in Dubliners, a fluctuating omniscience which judges or withholds judgment irregularly, may be understood through the object lesson of the first three stories- that even the simplest kind of narration is grounded on an imposture, which exposes itself in the course of any sufficiently complex work. The first-person narrative mode is ex- hausted and destroyed by the end of "Araby," turned inside out after beginning in "The Sisters" as a mere hint, the mannerisms of the speaking voice, and developing into a fully articulated stance of detached yet interested irony. The fictiveness of the narrator, once established, prepares the reader for the ensuing, even more dis- ingenuous stories. In these, and in his later books, Joyce throws us at the mercy of the language by subverting every hint of authorial or narratorial intention. Yet the fertility of the language constantly implies deliberate arrangement, and the text, besides, is not a natural, found object- somebody wrote it. The special flavor of Joyce's work comes from the frustration that attends every effort to construe specific intentions, that is, meanings, which half appear wherever one looks. The texts are always booby-trapped. In view of this, the interpretive hypotheses we base on Joyce's language ought, ideally, to collapse rather quickly back into the protean possibilities of words, instead of assuming a permanence the text itself never claims.

Stetson University De Land, Florida

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Notes

1. Competence in a language is indeed homologous to comprehension of a narra- tive text. Hélène Cixous suggests this in connection with "The Sisters," where the narrator confronts early the problem of languages (Greek and Latin- paralysis, gnomon, simony) which exceed his control: "It is impossible for the narrator to constitute himself as an imaginary unity by gaining assurance from a language which escapes mastery, especially since the signifiers from a foreign tongue only make his voice echo; they cannot be used, sound objects without signification, even if they do appear in the same semantic field of the culture" ("Joyce: The R(use) of Writing," in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], p. 26).

2. Two representative critics who have attempted to define a narrator or nar- rators in the early Dubliners stories are Joseph M. Garrison, Jr., and Homer O. Brown. In "Dubliners: Portraits of the Artist as a Narrator," Novel 8 (1975): 226- 40, Garrison tries to identify a fixed narrative center for each of the first three stories and sees his chance in the theme of increasing maturity they enact (226). Brown, in his study, James Joyce's Early Fiction: The Biography of a Form (Cleve- land: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), assumes like Garrison the a priori procedural necessity of a narrator, thus predetermining the ways in which subsequent narrative evidence can be read (13). Narration, however, might also be viewed as a virtual position in a discourse, which is partially inferred from the supposedly subordinate materials constituting the narrative.

3. Joyce s aim of undercutting the authority of his narrators explains why, strictly speaking, there are three narrators in the first three stories, one for each. Although they appear to be the same narrator at different ages, the reader is never allowed the comfort- which could easily have been built into the stories- of actually knowing they are one person. Each story insists on being read in isolation, as a unique narrative act, even as the possibility of narration is questioned.

4. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 157.

5. Ibid., 158. I use this passage here to account for the relation between reader and narrative persona, even though the reference is to that between reader and author, because the two relations are largely indistinguishable. The term "author" as commonly used confuses the distinction between a historical figure who wrote and a critical construct that intends. This latter, as construct, is no more real than a narrative persona, and we may apply the critiques appropriate to one to the other as well. Dubliners, like Joyce's later texts, implies no "author" in the sense of meaning-dictator, meaning-source.

6. Cixous, 19. Another useful comparison to my treatment of Dubliners is Wolf- gang I ser' s reading of Ulysses, in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). According to Iser, the density of detail in Ulysses guarantees that any particular reading will be incomplete; as the reader reads, "he finds that the every- day life of Dublin is, so to speak, continually breaking its banks, and the resultant flood of detail induces the reader to try and build his own dams of meaning- though these in turn are inevitably broken down" (199). In my reading I attempt to extend the kind of dynamism Iser describes to other textual levels, including the verbal surface, the apprehension of which is prior to and in tension with I ser' s horizons of thematic organization.

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David W. Robinson . 394

7. Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1978), 102-04.

8. A major trap has awaited those who scrutinize the pages of "The Sisters" for signs of pederasty, beginning with George Roberts, one of Joyce's almost-pub- lishers; see the letter to Stanislaus Joyce dated 20 August 1912 in Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols. (New York: Viking, 1966), 2:305. Marilyn French has read Cotter's elliptical speech as an example of "masking language" aimed at repressing the sexual thoughts pervading the atmosphere of the story (see her "Missing Pieces in Joyce's Dubliners" Twentieth-Century Lit- erature 24 [1978]: 443-72), while Edward Brandabur perceives an ironic religious significance, with the priest seducing the boy "away from the enthusiasms of child- hood" {A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce's Early Work [Urbana: Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 1971], 41), which agrees with the reason stated in the story for the elders' unease about the friendship. Brandabur goes too far, however, in enter- taining even the possibility of active sexual perversion and feels he must say that "there is little evidence that Joyce wants [the priest and boy] to be thought of as engaging in overt sexuality" (Brandabur, 42). The innuendo in the story supporting Brandabur's suspicions (and any reader's) is intended only for the reader's eyes and does not become part of the plot itself.

9. Quotations from James Joyce' s Dubliners are from Dubliners: Text, Criticism, Notes, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (New York: Viking, 1969), and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

10. Critical studies devoted to Joyce's use of the gnomon include those by Gerhard Friedrich, "The Gnomonic Clue to Joyce's Dubliners" Modern Language Notes 72 (1957): 421-24 (a seminal article); Thomas E. Connally, "Joyce's The Sisters': A Pennyworth of Snuff," College English 27 (1965): 189-95; David R. Fabian, "Joyce's The Sisters': Gnomon, Gnomonic, Gnome," Studies in Short Fiction 5 (1968): 187-89; Brandabur, A Scrupulous Meanness; Kenneth B. Newell, "The Sin of Knowledge in Joyce's The Sisters,'" Ball State University Forum 20.3 (1979): 44-53; Robert Adams Day, "Joyce's Gnomons, Lenehan, and the Persistence of an Image," Novel 14 (1980): 5-19; Phillip Herring, "Structure and Meaning in Joyce's The Sisters,' " in The Seventh of Joyce, ed. Bernard Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 131-44; James Leigh, "The Gnomonic Principle in Dubliners," Lámar Journal of the Humanities 9 (1983): 35-40; and B. L. Reid, "Gnomon and Order in Joyce's Portrait," Sewanee Review 92 (1984): 397-420. Also useful are the more general studies by Cixous, "Joyce: The R(use) of Writing"; Brewster Ghiselin, "The Unity of Joyce's Dubliners," Accent 16 (1956): 75-88, 196-213; S. L. Goldberg, James Joyce (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962), 36-46; Thomas F. Staley, "A Beginning: Signification, Story, and Discourse in Joyce's The Sisters,'" Genre 12 (1979): 533-49; and Jean-Michel Rabaté, "Silence in Dubliners," in James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed. Colin MacCabe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 45-72.

11. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1939), 374. í¿. in tnis essay all ellipses not Joyce s own are bracketed, tor reasons that will

become apparent. 13. See Joyce, "An Early Version of The Sisters,' " in Dubliners: Text, Criticism,

Notes, ed. Scholes and Litz, 249. 14. Fritz Senn, " 'He Was Too Scrupulous Always': Joyce's The Sisters,' "James

Joyce Quarterly 2 (1965): 69. Senn also notes here that "faints" are "impure spirits." 15. Among the chains of meaning circulating in this text are the etymological

potentials lying behind the words of Cotter's first speech: "No, I wouldn't say he was exactly . . . but there was something queer . . . there was something uncanny

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Narration of Reading in Joyce • 395

about him" {Dubliners, 10). The word queer conceals a spatial, geometric metaphor, being related to the German quer, meaning transverse or crosswise (Walter William Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language [Oxford: Clarendon, 1882], s.v. "queer"). For a discussion of Joyce's knowledge of Skeat, see Stephen Whittaker, "Joyce and Skeat," James Joyce Quarterly 24 (1987): 177-92. This calls to mind the closing description of the priest, with its famous pun: "He was too scrupulous always, she [Eliza] said. The duties of the priesthood was too much for him. And then his life was, you might say, crossed" {Dubliners, 17). Elizabeth had just said that "there was something queer coming over him latterly" {Dubliners, 16). Uncanny leads to further unexpected connections when its history is traced, through the verb "can," to "Lat[in] noscere (for gno scere), and [Greek] yi-yvu-oxu)." (Skeat, s.v. "can"). Hence gnomon again. Besides these examples, there are the peculiar collocations of potentially suggestive words throughout the story: "fire, smoking," "fire, nearly smothered," "gold of a great bank" {Dubliners, 9, 12, 14), and others. The legitimate contexts of these passages will startle the reader who now reexamines the story.

16. Senn, 72. 17. See Senn for the earliest discussion of these words and others as free signifier s;

see also Cixous, 25. 18. Another example of an arrant signifier chain is the one involving gas on p. 22.

This one runs: "air in my head" (i.e., a melody), "have some gas with the birds" (i.e., some fun), and finally "Bunsen Burner" (i.e., Father Butler). The context suggests a pneuma-tic interpretation, since the boys are on the way to Pigeon House. There has been preparation for this through a pun involving Father Butler's earlier words about "some wretched scribbler that writes these things for a drink" {Dubliners, 20), i.e., for spirits. See Senn on "spirits" of various sorts in "The Sisters."

19. Thus, concermng the function of the color green, I am not fully m agreement with the approaches taken either by Scholes and Litz in the notes to their edition of Dubliners, 466, or by A. M. Leatherwood, in "Joyce's Mythic Method: Structure and Unity in 'An Encounter,'" Studies in English Literature 13 (1976): 71-78. Both of these commentaries try more than is warranted to specify statically the meaning of the green motif in this story. The unstable movement of the color green through several definite phases of meaning sheds more light on Joyce's intentions than any one of those states could. Cixous, in her book, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell (New York: David Lewis, 1972), 389-93, is closer to Joyce when she describes the symbolization of green as a product of the boy's own de- veloping interiority. Cixous says elsewhere that Joyce's writing

is an extraordinarily free game, which should shatter any habits of reading, which should be continually shaking the reader up, and thus committing this reader to a double apprenticeship: the necessary one which is reading- writing a text whose plurality explodes the painstakingly polished surface: and the one which is, in the very practice of a reading not condemned to linearity, an incessant questioning of the codes which appear to function normally but which are sometimes suddenly rendered invalid, and then the next moment are revalidated. ("Joyce: The R(use) of Writing," 19)

20. In discussing the relative competence of reader and boy in "The Sisters," Herring agrees that "the potential advantage lies with the reader," but I differ with his more general claim that the parallelism between the boy and reader is in a position to make determinate judgments about the meaning of the story.

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Herring's ground of privileged meaning is the text, "for the words of the text, regardless of slippery etymologies, do not change, while the boy narrator must deal with shifting impressions based on incomplete information about a forbidden subject" (142). I have been arguing that the text does shift for the reader, whose experiences are not qualitatively different from the boy's except in their open- endedness. Herring's concrete and unchanging "text" effectively refers to a reader's hypothesis about a text, the product of selection among the possible semantic and syntactic patterns within it.

21. Cixous comments on the "un-Edenic apple tree" and sees in the bicycle pump another variation of the pneuma theme begun in "The Sisters" (Exile, 388).

22. Bernard Benstock, "Arabesques: Third Position of Concord," James Joyce Quarterly 5 (1967): 36.

23. Joyce was sufficiently amused by the bathos of bicycle pumps to reuse the same emblem in Ulysses, this time to dis-inflate George Russell's spiritualism (Cixous, Exile, 388). When AE appears in "Circe" as Mananaun MacLir, "His right hand holds a bicycle pump" which he wields ceremoniously (Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al., 3 vols. [New York: Garland 19841, 15:2265 [vol. 3, p. 1105]).

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