[In the essay below, Dettmar contends the textual clues in the stories of The Dubliners are “Joyce's means of reinforcing the story's hermeneutics, and pulling us, kicking and screaming, into a text with which we would prefer to keep a purely professional relationship.”]

One of Joyce's strategies for unsettling our reading habits in “The Sisters” is the liberal use of that detective fiction stock-in-trade, the red herring. False clues proliferate throughout the story, at least one per page, and seemingly in proportion as we look for them. As Hugh Kenner writes, “Joyce delights in leaving us … queer things we may misinterpret, as if to keep alive in us an awareness traditional fiction is at pains to lull, the awareness that we are interpreting.”¹ A short list would begin with the story's puzzling title; thereafter Joyce throws out curious words, phrases, objects—signs apparently in need of interpretation, signs to which we critics have been only too willing to apply our ingenuity:

“paralysis, gnomon, and simony”;

“faints and worms”;

“that Rosicrucian”;

“let him box his corner”;

“Umbrellas Re-Covered”;

“stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte”;

the boy's dream, the ending of which he cannot remember;

the “heavy odour in the room—the flowers”;

“the empty fireplace”;

the breviary “fallen to the floor”;

“And then his life was, you might say, crossed”;

the “chalice that he broke”;

“they say it was the boy's fault”

Every one of these textual cruxes has elicited its own critical commentary; literary critics, when confronted with such a hoard of virgin signs, have a field day. The title, for example, has sent critics off in many different directions trying to explain the apparent discrepancy between the importance accorded the sisters in the title and their relatively minor role in the story. Edward Brandabur, for instance, resolves the problem by asserting that “the title, ‘The Sisters,’ refers not only to Nannie and Eliza, but to an effeminate relationship between the priest and his disciple.”² While clever in its way, such an explanation in no way enriches our experience of the story; Brandabur constructs a story parallel to the text we're given, a story that spells out a good deal that “The Sisters” leaves unstated. In the end, we cannot help but feel that he is reading an altogether different story from the rather impoverished one Joyce wrote.

The story's most famous puzzle is no doubt the three mysteriously linked words paralysis, gnomon, and simony, that the boy intones in the first paragraph. Colin MacCabe writes that in the final version of “The Sisters,” “the theme of paralysis is introduced and this word together with ‘gnomon’ and ‘simony’ provides a collection of signifiers which are not determined in their meaning by the text. … The reader is introduced to a set of signifiers for which there is no interpretation except strangeness and an undefined evil. The opening of the final version of the story displays a certain excess of the power of signification (the production of a surplus meaning).”³ Many elaborate structures have been devised to explain the thread that connects these three magical words; entire readings of the story, and indeed of the volume, have subsequently been built around this hieratic trinity. And yet their relationship is stated explicitly right there on the page, and it seems strangely appropriate that a man named Herring should be the one to point it out to us: “No logic binds these three italicized words together—only the strangeness of their sounds in the boy's ear.”⁴ These “clews” are related to one another only as signifiers, not as signifieds; in and of themselves they provide the reader no means of escaping the flat realistic surface of the text.

Phillip Herring's is a scrupulously mean reading, an interpretation that bears in mind Joyce's conviction that “he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard” (L [Letters] 2:134)—whatever he has seen and heard and read. For the red herrings in “The Sisters” are just that—what the French call faux amis; rather than providing us with a means of transcending the spare surface of the story, these “reader traps”⁵ are instead Joyce's means of reinforcing the story's hermeneutics, and pulling us, kicking and screaming, into a text with which we would prefer to keep a purely professional relationship.

The most common response for critics when they come across a red herring unaware is of course to make a symbol of it. And “The Sisters” certainly has its share of ostensible symbols, the most glaring of which would be the chalice that Father Flynn has dropped. Over the years the “symbol” of the chalice has been understood in a number of ways, as standing for the Church, the phallus (male or female), the Grail, and so forth. And yet surely the demise of Father Flynn is meant in part as an allegory of the dangers of overinterpretation that any reader of the story must heed. The chalice itself, as Eliza remarks, was of no real importance—“they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean” (D [Dubliners] 17). But Eliza herself, as her locutions show, is not quite so sure (“they say …”); and indeed the incident of the dropped chalice is made the centerpiece of her narrative of the Father's final “insanity” (“That affected his mind, she said. After that he began to mope by himself, talking to no one and wandering around by himself” [D 17]). Of course, we do not know how the incident was interpreted by the priest; but we can see quite plainly that those close to him took the breaking of the chalice, in retrospect at least, as an omen, the chalice itself having been invested by them with too much symbolic importance.

Homer Brown surely has this episode in mind when he writes that “at least part of the symbolism of Dubliners has to do with the failure or inadequacy of the symbol”;⁶ the chalice in “The Sisters” is as self-evident a symbol as any reader could hope for, but when its significance is examined, it becomes an antisymbolic object, a “symbol” that alerts us to the dangers of reading symbolically. Again, Brown remarks that “in a sense, the symbolism of these stories consists in the failure of the symbolic, the emptiness of the symbol”;⁷ the chalice is an object so overinvested with meaning that it deconstructs as a symbol and returns to the realm of pure realistic detail, what Barthes calls “the sumptuous rank of the signifier.” In the same way, the Catholic Church itself is seen in Dubliners as a dangerously overvalued symbol, which is liable at any time to crash. The chalice “contained nothing”; as a result, it is immediately filled with the needs and desires of the characters, and is made a receptacle for all that menaces them.

If this style of reading—the reader as detective—tends unjustifiably to turn objects into symbols, it simultaneously turns characters into the figures of allegory. Tindall sees the figure of the Irish “Poor Old Woman” (the Shan Van Vocht) behind Maria of “Clay,” the slavey of “Two Gallants,” and Mrs. and Kathleen Kearney of “A Mother”; but of “The Sisters” he complains: “Why are there two of them? I should find it easier if there were only one. A poor old woman (the traditional figure) could serve as an image of Ireland. …”⁸ I should find it easier! We should all find Joyce's texts easier would they simply obey the call of our desires; but they resist us, and so we tailor them to the shape of our need as best we can. It's not always a good fit. As Garry Leonard writes, “Readers do not mind disagreeing on the particulars because all agree she [Maria] means something—and that is the main thing—that she mean something. … And so Maria's tiny shoulders have supported various interpretations that substitute what she ‘means’ for what critics lack.”⁹

The sort of red herring with which Joyce taunts us in “The Sisters” is a recurring structural feature of Dubliners. The second paragraph of “Araby” is similarly littered with these false clues—The Abbot, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq—and again Herring has resisted the temptation to read these details “symbolically”: “the titles probably have just enough relevance to encourage readers to inflate them with meaning. (After all, Joyce supplied the pump.) There is no indication that the boy has read them, especially since he views them as physical objects, preferring the one with yellow leaves.”¹⁰ Sometimes, even in Literature, objects are just objects; and for readers trained to read texts as storehouses of symbols, such a scrupulously mean reading requires extreme discipline:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

After all, Freud himself is said to have remarked: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Anyone who has taught Dubliners knows that students approach these texts as puzzles; in their estimation, the main task in reading is to figure out what the ending “means.” Of course, this is only a slightly less sophisticated version of what Joyce's critics have done from the start. Reviewing the French translation of Dubliners in 1926, Jacques Chenevière was one of the first critics to praise Joyce for resisting simple conclusions: “a French novelist—a logician and always, in spite of himself, a moralist even when he considers himself unimpressionable—would begin and end the narrative precisely at the point when even the mysterious would be explicit. Joyce, however, only conducts the reader with a weak hand from which, however, one does not escape. He rarely informs us and does not conclude. … Sometimes this fog bothers us, accustomed as we are to life, translated literally and appearing logical. How dare art guide us so little and yet remain master of us!” (Deming 1:71). Most early critics, however, were not as sympathetic to Joyce's interest in, as John Cage expresses it, “keeping things mysterious.”¹¹ The majority of critics have seen in the conclusion of “The Sisters,” for instance, a moment of terrible, and perhaps incommunicable, insight for the young narrator. In Suzanne Ferguson's reading the story ends in an epiphany for the reader, in which she, in a flash of insight, synthesizes the various “clues” set out in the story and realizes that Father Flynn is guilty of a subtle form of simony.

If we are honest, however, for many of us the story ends not in epiphany but in utter muddle. At least part of our confusion stems from Joyce's refusal to state his moral; one contemporary reviewer complained that “his outlook is self-centred, absorbed in itself rather; he ends his sketch abruptly time after time, satisfied with what he has done, brushing aside any intention of explaining what is set down or supplementing what is omitted” (Deming 1:61-62). Joyce's refusal to “conclude” is understood by this early reader as self-absorption, and it provokes the critic's venom; but at least contemporary reviewers were in a position to see that Joyce had indeed refused to conclude. We are now so used to the institutionalized readings of these stories—“The Dead” is probably the prime example—that we can no longer even sense their wildness. William Empson's irritated remarks about the inconclusive nature of Ulysses are at least as appropriate as a description of Dubliners: “The difficulty about Ulysses,” he writes, “as is obvious if you read the extremely various opinions of critics, is that, whereas most novels tell you what the author expects you to feel, this one not only refuses to tell you the end of the story, it also refuses to tell you what the author thinks would have been a good end to the story.”¹²

If we turn to a poststructuralist critic like MacCabe, however, we can see how Joyce's refusal to conclude in these stories has recently been transvalued—what was described as arrogant convention flaunting in the contemporary reviews is now felt to be an integral component of his genius: “The text works paratactically, simply placing one event after another, with no ability to draw conclusions from this placing. … The movement of the text is not that of making clear a reference already defined and understood; of fixing the sense of an expression. Instead the text dissolves the simple scenes of Dublin as a city, as a context within which people live their lives, and replaces it with the very text of paralysis.”¹³ The close of “The Sisters” is precisely this “text of paralysis”; the narrative trails off in ellipses as Eliza begins to repeat yet again the story she has “written” to explain her brother's death, and Joyce resolutely refuses to come in at the end, even in the person of his narrator, in order to give us any guidance. A postmodern ending is a matter neither of appearance nor of grammar—it has to do, finally, with avoiding “the sense of an ending” (Kermode). Think, for instance, of the ending of the first part of Molloy: “Molloy could stay, where he happened to be.”¹⁴ Beckett gives us proper grammar, and even a kind of narrative closure, and yet suggests the influence of chance operation, creating an unsettling sense that nothing has been concluded. The postmodern ending is a conclusion (“termination”) that reaches no conclusion (“inference”).

At the close of “The Sisters” the narrator appears to us frozen—puzzled and paralyzed—and we cannot help but ape his response. Not only do we remain unenlightened; we cannot even decide who, if anyone, in the story has seen the light. But some sort of enlightenment—either for the character, or for the reader—is the traditional goal of a reading of the Dubliners story. That famous moment of enlightenment is what Joyce criticism, (mis)taking its clue from Joyce himself, has dubbed the epiphany. Zack Bowen points out, with reference to “The Sisters,” that “the question of who is having the epiphany is a central issue of the story”:

If the epiphany belongs to the Flynn sisters, then the statement “So, then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him” (D 18) constitutes the truth of the story. The priest's laughter is indeed madness. Few of us, however, subscribe to this. The question is really whether the priest, the boy, or both have an epiphany. … We are left to our own conclusions about whether the insight was about a senile and decadent way of life which the sisters merely confirmed. Even if that is the substance of the epiphany which presumably we share with the boy, we are still not sure if the priest is a seer of eternal truth or merely a disoriented and demented old man. At any rate, for the purpose of the present discussion, we have at once to ask ourselves where the eternal verities might lie in the case. The answer is that they depend upon the beholder: the sisters' perception is different from Father Flynn's, the boy's, or the readers', who may in themselves differ. Each of us fashions his own truth and sees it as the unalterable law of God.¹⁵

It is of course extremely difficult to maintain that “The Sisters” ends in an epiphany—as Bowen wants to do—if readers cannot agree on who has had the epiphany, or of what it might consist. Indeed, even the most cursory glance at the wide variety of readings of “The Sisters” over the years will suggest at once that we must not only question whether any of the characters have an epiphany, but even doubt that readers share any universal understanding of the mystery of “The Sisters,” which Donald Torchiana calls “the most controversial piece in Dubliners.”¹⁶ Sherlock Holmes, at the end of his cases, relates the logical process by which he came upon his epiphany—the solution to the crime; but, as we have seen, the boy in “The Sisters” enjoys no such triumph.

Epiphany is Joyce's paleonym that just won't die. Our critical tradition has long privileged authors' pronouncements on their own works over the commentary of any rank “outsider,” and the word epiphany from Joyce's pen has stuck stubbornly to Dubliners (even though, as we shall see, he never used the term to describe his short stories). In fact, his earliest impulse was to describe the method of Dubliners using the metaphor not of epiphany, but of epiclesis; in the oldest surviving reference to his story collection, he calls them “a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper” (L 1:55). The difference between the two terms, in brief—reverting to the nomenclature of chapter 3—is this: an epiphany evidences one's ultimate mastery of a situation, while epiclesis is instead the moment of submission to mystery.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, epiclesis is the priest's invocation of the Holy Ghost to transmute the elements of the Lord's Supper, a feature of the Mass that had been dropped by the Roman Church before the medieval period. In the Divine Liturgy of Saint Chrysostom, the priest intones these words in a low voice: “Moreover we offer unto Thee this reasonable and unbloody sacrifice: and beseech thee and pray and supplicate; send down Thy Holy Ghost upon us, and on these proposed gifts.”¹⁷ The difference between the Greek and Latin Church on this point is not without consequence. In the Eastern view, the efficacy of the sacrament depends upon God's response to the prayer of his priest; but in the Roman Catholic service, the elements are transformed as a direct result of the priest's reciting the words of institution—and the aspect of divine intervention is easily forgotten.¹⁸ Thus when Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait [P] figures himself as “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of ever-living life” (P 221), his words suggest that he will be able to effect that transubstantiation himself, without divine assistance. The reasons for Stephen's error are made patently clear in the text: earlier, during his interview with the director of Belvedere College—in response to whose luscious evocation of the power of the priest of God Stephen fashions his own vision of the priest of art—Stephen had heard the heretical suggestion that the priest has “the power, the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come down upon the altar and take the form of bread and wine” (P 158). The director has substituted pure selfish power for the moment of epiclesis—mastery for mystery; and Stephen's repetition of the gesture later suggests its attractiveness to him. But epiclesis is the tacit admission that neither the priest, nor certainly the artist, has such powers—it's a gesture of self-abnegation that neither the director of the college nor his rebellious disciple is capable of.

The method of epiclesis is the method of mystery courted and invoked, evoked. When he had been at work on Dubliners for about ten months, Joyce wrote in a 4 April 1905 letter to Stanislaus that “The Sisters” called to his mind the Eastern Orthodox mass: “While I was attending the Greek mass here [Trieste] last Sunday it seemed to me that my story “The Sisters” was rather remarkable.” Joyce doesn't bother to spell out the connection between “The Sisters” and the Mass; the letter, however, goes on to describe the distinctive elements of the Greek service: “The Greek mass is strange. The altar is not visible but at times the priest opens the gates and shows himself. He opens and shuts them about six times. For the Gospel he comes out of a side gate and comes down into the chapel and reads out of a book. For the elevation he does the same. At the end when he has blessed the people he shuts the gates …” (L 2:86). Admittedly, the connection here is tenuous: but the act of elevation, in the Orthodox service, is accompanied by the priest's reading of the epiclesis. Thus, one of the elements of the Greek Mass that seems to have captured Joyce's imagination—and reminded him of his own short fiction—is the Eastern Church's act of invocation.¹⁹

In his memoir My Brother's Keeper, Stanislaus Joyce records a conversation in which Joyce again makes use of the metaphor of the Eucharist to talk about the method of Dubliners: “‘Don't you think,’ said he reflectively, choosing his words without haste, ‘there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has permanent artistic life of its own … ?’”²⁰ If Stanislaus has been as careful in his recording as he says his brother was in his conversation, Joyce here focuses in not simply on the Eucharist itself, but on the mystery of the Eucharist; and once again, that particular mystery has a name: epiclesis. The method of the epiphany, however, especially the “curtain” epiphany that an entire generation of readers has found the perfect ending to these stories, is a means for dispelling mystery, for resolving unbearable tensions—providing a facile closure to that which in reality cannot be neatly tied up. The stories of Dubliners are, as we will explore shortly, militantly anti-epiphanic. The whole notion of manifestation or self-revelation is severely undercut in tale after tale; and even the comfortable critical commonplace that the reader, at least, is enlightened is finally an illusion difficult to maintain. No one, I am persuaded, realizes the full import of these stories upon a first reading; our illumination, if indeed we experience any, is not a sudden “Eureka!” but a soft, gradual, hard-won appreciation.

The epiphany has become one of Joyce criticism's most effective methods for mastering the discomforting, uncompromising qualities of these texts—to close them off, to impose closure where in fact none inheres; it is, in other words, a way to fight off the intense disquiet caused by Joyce's “scrupulous meanness.”²¹ Joyce would find no little irony in this situation, for the epiphanic method, as first practiced in his notebook of Epiphanies, was a resolutely decontextualizing, disorienting, discomforting technique. As MacCabe writes, Joyce's “earliest prose writings, the Epiphanies, lack any appeal to reality which would define what the writing produces. The conversations and situations which make up these brief ten- or twelve-line sketches, lack any accompanying explanation or context. In place of a discourse which attempts to place and situate everything, we have discourses which are determined in their situation by the reader.”²² Thus in spite of their original spirit, the name epiphany has become one of the Joyce industry's tactics for dealing with these willful and unruly texts—subjugating them in the name of Joyce the Father, Joyce the Creator.

More has been written about the epiphany than any other stratagem in the Joycean text; and no doubt due to the short, lyric quality of Joyce's stories, epiphany is discussed more often in connection with Dubliners than with any other of Joyce's writings. Morris Beja, who has written a study called Epiphany in the Modern Novel, writes elsewhere that “probably no other motif has so pervaded critical discussions of both the volume as a whole and its individual stories”;²³ and in a note he goes on to list more than a dozen influential critical investigations of the epiphanies in Dubliners. As many have pointed out, Joyce himself never used the word epiphany in reference to Dubliners, nor are any of the forty surviving Epiphanies housed at Buffalo and Cornell made use of in the stories. But while none of Joyce's early sketches were incorporated wholesale into the text of Dubliners, subsequent critics have nevertheless found Joyce's term a durable one, and the moment of “manifestation or revelation” it describes central to what Stephen Dedalus would call the quidditas of these texts; and teachers and critics have found in Joyce's metaphor a powerful heuristic device.²⁴

One primary difficulty with using epiphany as a term for criticism, however, is that it has accrued a fairly wide range of meanings, depending on the purposes of the critic. This is, after all, the process by which the term first entered the vocabulary of literary criticism, Joyce putting his own spin on a word brought from Greek into ecclesiastical English in the fourteenth century. In English, “Epiphany” originally referred to a feast day, “the festival commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the person of the Magi; observed on January 6th, the 12th day after Christmas” (OED). Given this heritage, it is no doubt ironic that “The Dead” takes place on Twelfth Night, the Feast of Epiphany; this is a point to which we shall have to return. But Joyce's redefinition stripped epiphany of its festive and religious, if not its mysterious, connotations. In a famous passage in Stephen Hero, [SH] we are told that the term as Stephen used it “meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (SH 211). It is perhaps not insignificant that Joyce's only explicit treatment of the doctrine of the epiphany is found in a text kept unpublished during his lifetime; like the Homeric titles for the chapters of Ulysses, which in spite of Joyce's removing them from the text critics insist on restoring to the novel, the epiphany is largely a way of writing, rather than a way of reading. Joyce, in rewriting Stephen Hero as A Portrait, omitted Stephen's now-famous disquisition on the epiphany; we might, for the novelty of it, assume for the time being that he knew what he was doing.

Joyce's brief discussion suggests two different sorts of epiphany, according to whether emphasis is placed on the object or event—the occasion—of the epiphany, or instead on an observer's emotional (or “spiritual,” as Joyce has it) response to that instigating episode. Hence Joyce's epiphanies, as Scholes and Litz write, “were mainly of two kinds … they recorded ‘memorable phases’ of the young artist's own mind, or instances of ‘vulgarity of speech or of gesture’ in the world around him. In practice this resulted in two quite different styles of epiphany: prose poems in which a mental phase of the artist was narrated, and dramatic notations of vulgarity.”²⁵ With respect to the archetypal epiphany, the appearance of Christ to the Magi, a Joycean rendering of the scene could conceivably capture two distinct epiphanies (and were the nativity a Dubliners story, both would likely be included): the first, an “objective,” dramatic epiphany, focusing on the infant Christ, the scene in the manger; and a second, “subjective,” psychological epiphany, focusing on the response of one Magus to the child. What is common to both styles of epiphany is the breaking forth of the mysterious through the dull veneer of the everyday; its emblem is the divine Christ in a Bethlehem stable, what Yeats called “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.”

The concluding page of “Araby” makes a convenient testing ground for any discussion of Joycean epiphany in Dubliners, for there we are ostensibly presented two epiphanies, one of each type, in rather close proximity.²⁶ The first is a dramatic epiphany, very similar in style and content to the specimen Stephen records just previous to the passage from Stephen Hero cited above.²⁷ The snatch of conversation reported in “Araby” runs this way:

At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listed vaguely to their conversation.

—O, I never said such a thing!

—O, but you did!

—O, but I didn't!

—Didn't she say that?

—Yes. I heard her.

—O, there's a … fib!

(D 35)

If this is indeed an epiphany—and no critic seems to have argued that it's not—then we might pause for a moment to consider both its message and its audience: what does this epiphany mean, and to whom is it meant to speak?

Critics almost universally agree on the meaning of the epiphany: Bowen for instance writes that “In ‘Araby’ presumably the boy's epiphany of the absurdity in going to the fair and in his aggrandizement of Mangan's sister is brought home by the shallowness of the conversation in the confessional-gift stand at the fair.”²⁸ In fact, however, we cannot be certain what the scene has meant to the boy—how he has interpreted or read it. Joyce, through his narrator, refuses to establish a position (explicitly at least) outside the boy, a still point in the text from which we might take our bearings. In this regard, Joyce's procedure is in marked contrast to Virginia Woolf's. She is nearly as famous for her focus on the “moment of being” as Joyce is for the epiphany; yet Woolf confirms Lily Briscoe's epiphany at the conclusion of To the Lighthouse in a way that Joyce scrupulously avoids: “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”²⁹

Woolf's third-person narrative gives a certain objective distance on the scene narrated, and we are given no reason to doubt the narrative's assertion. Joyce however gives us no comforting voice from beyond the text; all we have is the boy's own words—in his retrospective narration of the incident. With that as the only concrete evidence, we're forced to conclude that he hasn't learned his lesson. The same problem that arises here has been the focus of intense debate in A Portrait; perhaps because of its deceptive simplicity, however, or perhaps because of Joyce's offhand description of its style as “scrupulously mean,” “Araby” has not been subjected to the kind of close stylistic scrutiny that A Portrait has come in for. It will prove worthwhile therefore to digress for just a bit, to consider what Wayne Booth has called the “problem of distance” in Joycean narration, especially as it is manifest in A Portrait.

Booth, in his comments on A Portrait, declares that as a result of Joyce's “refining himself out of existence,” “we must conclude that many of the refinements he intended in his finished Portrait are, for most of us, permanently lost. Even if we were now to do our homework like dutiful students, even if we were to study all of Joyce's work, even if we were to spend the lifetime that Joyce playfully said his novels demanded, presumably we should never come to as rich, as refined, and as varied a conception of the quality of Stephen's last days in Ireland as Joyce had in mind.”³⁰ According to Booth, Joyce in A Portrait has afforded us no firm ground for judgment; any decision as to whether Stephen's more remarkable rhetorical flights are to be taken seriously or ironically can finally be based only on a reader's personal predilection, since the text gives us no context for such a judgment (Booth himself uses material from Stephen Hero in an attempt to clear up this ambiguity).

Writing almost twenty years later, Hugh Kenner, although not responding to Booth by name, does implicitly challenge his conclusions about A Portrait. In his book Ulysses, Kenner argues that while the author takes no explicit moral position regarding his character, his judgments are to be found motivating the style: “Stephen's way of experiencing and judging may seem so thoroughly to pervade the Portrait that there is no way he can be appraised: whatever he says or does seems utterly reasonable. A written style, however: that is something to appraise, once we become aware of it; and the Portrait makes us highly aware of the style by the unusual device, much extended and complicated in Ulysses, of changing the style continually.”³¹ The argument here hinges on Joyce's use of free indirect discourse—what Kenner in another book needlessly dubs the “Uncle Charles Principle.”³² If we hold Joyce responsible for word choice and syntax throughout A Portrait—“But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face”—we call this (as Wyndham Lewis did) simply bad writing; but according to the tenets of free indirect discourse, we are to understand that the narrative has been subtly (or not so subtly) colored by the consciousness it narrates. So that when presenting Stephen's Uncle Charles, the narrative borrows some of the phrasing that Charles would no doubt use himself; and when describing the would-be artist as a young man, the prose takes on a slightly precious quality that we come to associate with Stephen. In particular, Kenner zeros in on Stephen's frequently overdone alliteration, and his penchant for the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, as tip-offs that we're to be suspicious of Stephen's writing, or rather of the seeming objectivity of the third-person narrative that shapes itself to the contours of his mind and spirit.

In the first three stories of Dubliners, the problems of narrative distance are considerably simpler than in A Portrait; all use the relatively common convention of the story of youth written in maturity. Since the boy protagonists in the first three stories are at most young adolescents, we cannot believe them to have written these narratives at the time the incidents occurred, as we are to believe the close of A Portrait to have been written by the postgraduate Stephen. In A Portrait, the age of the protagonist seems to approach the age of the writer almost asymptotically, Tristram Shandy-like, so that by the close we are told of incidents “just as they happen.” The final sentence, the final diary entry, is of course about nothing more than its own writing, and we can imagine Stephen's penning that entry as the completion of the manuscript of A Portrait. Conversely, while we might wish to characterize the prose style of the “stories of childhood” as immature, they are most certainly not written by adolescents; rather, we are to imagine these tales written by their protagonists grown into men who, for their own narrative purposes, pepper their texts with some of the verbal infelicities of their youthful minds (such as, for example, the confusion on the part of the narrator of “The Sisters” between “reflection” and “refraction” in the story's first paragraph).

The closing page of “Araby” contains a very clear “dramatic” epiphany, one in which most critics have found the story's “moral,” the lesson that our protagonist is intended to learn. As a result the boy presumably experiences psychological epiphany; but his response to the conversation overheard at the gift stall is so hyperbolic as to seem almost a non sequitur: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (D 35). The boy sends his gaze into the darkness at the top of the hall, and in that darkness his mind's eye sees “reflected” “a creature driven and derided by vanity.” Has he then, like Lily Briscoe, “had his vision”?

The critical consensus is that he has indeed. Clearly, the boy represents himself as having been possessed of a terrible insight; and yet the form, or better the style, of his confession betrays its ostensible revelation. Many commentators have called the boy's self-evaluation too harsh; but it is much more than that. Like Saul of Tarsus, who goes from thinking himself God's anointed to believing himself chief among all sinners, the boy in “Araby” can conceive of himself only in melodramatic black or white—either chivalric knight in service of his lady fair or, when that illusion is forcibly wrested from him, the blackest of sinners. This is a pattern we see played out in other of the stories, most notably “The Dead”; Gabriel Conroy fluctuates wildly between expansive good humor and believing himself “a ludicrous figure, acting as pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist” (D 220). As Yeats's Michael Robartes says in another context, “there's no human life at the full or the dark”; and yet Gabriel and the “devout communicant” of “Araby” both carefully avoid having to negotiate that perilous intermediate gray area called life.

This brings us back to the question: What possible criteria do we have for judging the efficacy of the boy's insight at Araby? His revelation might be evaluated in the same way we would a religious conversion, for the language of the closing page is the language of a young man who believes himself to have been spiritually transformed. If in fact he has been transformed, we may reasonably ask whether a new spirit dwells within him, and whether that new spirit has resulted in a new quality of life. For we may state as a working principle that there is no epiphany without efficacy; “Every good tree,” the Lord declared, “bringeth forth good fruit” (Matt. 7:16-17). It makes no sense to speak of a character's having an epiphany in spite of all evidence to the contrary, just because we readers have seen what she has and believe that we have seen the light. The genuine experience of epiphany cannot remain without effect, in either life or art. Of those to whom more has been revealed, more shall be expected; as Eliot puts it in “Gerontion,” “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

According to the argument put forward by Beja, however, all such considerations are beside the point. What we think about a given character's epiphany is irrelevant; “What matters is what a given character feels about an epiphany or the revelation it provides. An epiphany need not, after all, be ‘objectively’ accurate; as I have argued elsewhere, an epiphany is in its very conception and description a subjective phenomenon. So whether Mr. Duffy and the boy at the end of ‘Araby’ are ‘correct’ is much less relevant than how they feel about what they have learned.” Following Beja's rubric, then, it is possible to experience an epiphany that is wholly delusional—so that he can say that “even Eveline” has her epiphany “before she represses all awareness.”³³ Surely this distorts the term epiphany beyond all usefulness. To begin with, the text proffers absolutely no support for the idea that Eveline has reached any kind of higher self-awareness; indeed, it unrelentingly exposes her process of rationalization. Frank, for instance, who has been seen as a life preserver, is transformed into a millstone once Eveline realizes she cannot leave with him: “All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them; he would drown her” (D 41). But even if Beja is right—even if Eveline does have a penultimate flash of insight—her ultimate action is to take no action, effectively nullifying any epiphany we might wish to find in her tale. An epiphany is, as Beja insists, by its very nature intensely personal—but that does not mean that it is not available to evaluation by outside criteria.

This is the argument that Bowen makes. “Epiphanies may be false,” he writes, “because the meaning of experience, when transformed by either the artists' perception or the perception of less gifted characters may in fact be self-delusion.”³⁴ It is this false epiphany that I am calling epiphony. Although the experience of epiphany is always ultimately subjective, the validity—the efficacy—of a character's epiphany is available to scrutiny. Two possible avenues for verification are available to us: confirmation from the narrative itself (as in the passage of To the Lighthouse discussed above) or the subsequent “life” of the character. But Joyce consistently refuses explicit narrative comment on the ostensible epiphany's efficacy; nor do the stories present any “postconversion” life by which we might judge.

The narrator of “Araby,” though, is the story's protagonist at an advanced age. The text of “Araby” is a product of what Ulysses calls “the retrospective arrangement”: “No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself” (U [Ulysses,] 337). Does the text that the protagonist of “Araby” chooses to write give us any reason to believe that he's outgrown this youthful vanity? The boy's closing remark—his artfully rendered epiphony—calls attention to itself for its highly wrought, exquisite style. In his discussion of A Portrait mentioned above, Kenner has identified alliteration and chiasmus as two of the early warning signs that we're reading the free indirect discourse of an immature artist, and not surprisingly, perhaps, we find both symptoms here. The paired adjectives in the first clause—“driven and derided by vanity”—fabricate an urgent momentum out of all proportion to the motive event; those of the second clause, too—“my eyes burned with anguish and anger”—are chosen on the basis of sound, not sense. This is not the prose of a humbled man, a man whose vain romanticism has been painfully torn from him.

There have been foreshadowings of this decorative, slightly precious style throughout the story: “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”; “I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood”; “Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds” (D 30, 31). When used to transform—to elevate, to “poeticize”—a landscape, such purple (or “ever-changing violet”) prose is harmless enough, if somewhat wearying in the long run. Indeed, one of the “paper-covered books” the boy finds in “the waste room behind the kitchen,” Walter Scott's The Abbot, could serve him as a (turgid) stylistic model: “It was upon the evening of a sultry summer's day when the sun was half-sunk behind the distant western mountains of Liddesdale, that the Lady took her solitary walk on the battlements of a range of buildings, which formed the front of the castle, where a flat roof of flag-stones presented a broad and convenient promenade. The level surface of the lake, undisturbed except by the occasional dipping of a teal-duck or coot, was gilded with the beams of the setting luminary, and reflected, as if in a golden mirror, the hills amongst which it lay enbosomed.”³⁵

However, the truth, Ezra Pound was to insist, makes its own style.³⁶ While the florid scenic descriptions of a novel like The Abbot or a short story like “Araby”—wrought in what Pound liked to call “licherary langwidg”—transform a landscape, they can only falsify the self-presentation of a writing subject. Stripped of its lush, romantic atmosphere, we can imagine “Araby” ending with another, more economical, self-exposure: “—I suddenly realized how vain I was.” To make such a spare confession, however, is clearly not to the narrator's taste. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes declared simply “Vanity of vanities—all is vanity”; but such a scrupulously mean disclosure is not enough for the boy. Like the Apostle Paul, who is not satisfied to confess himself a sinner but declares instead that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am chief” (1 Tim. 1:15), our protagonist is not content simply to condemn his vanity, but must do it in the most self-important, most theatrical—the most vain—manner imaginable.

In a well-known letter to Grant Richards, Joyce said that he wanted to give the Irish people—those few who would read Dubliners—“one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass” (L 1:64). Such a project is, of course, fraught with danger; writers who set out to change their readers are more often than not ignored, and while some of Joyce's contemporaries may have come to see Dublin, and themselves, in a very different light after reading Dubliners, most doubtless remained unshaken. So too, most of his characters at the end of their tales seem unchanged; but then Joyce never promised that his characters would have that “one good look” he promised his readers. Indeed this is the final epiphany of the most powerful stories in Dubliners: our realization, as readers, that the characters have not had their epiphany. Believing that they have transcended, believing themselves finally to be free, characters like the narrator of “Araby” and Gabriel Conroy pathetically verify their prison—this is perhaps the most bitter paralysis in all of Dubliners.

It was this quality of Chekhov's plays, the carefully constructed dramatic illusion of freedom which tragically confirms the characters' slavery, that impressed Joyce. In conversation with Arthur Power he remarked that “As the play ends, for a moment you think that his characters have awakened from their illusions, but as the curtain comes down you realize that they will soon be building new ones to forget the old” (CJJ [Conversations with James Joyce] 58). This is precisely the situation of Joyce's Dubliners: the moment of epiphany, Stephen Dædalus warns in Stephen Hero, is “the most delicate and evanescent of moments,” and while it comes to many in Dubliners, it is accepted by none. For as Stephen says, “it [is] for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care,” and in Dubliners Joyce has done just that; the actual and would-be “men of letters” who experience these epiphanies in the stories, however—the boys in “The Sisters,” “An Encounter” and “Araby,” Little Chandler, James Duffy, and Gabriel Conroy—cannot restrict themselves to Joyce's “style of scrupulous meanness,” and instead (mis)shape that delicate moment to their own ends. With the exception of the narrator of “The Sisters,” they operate without Joyce's conviction, expressed to Grant Richards, that “he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard” (L 2:134).

While we have come to think it characteristic of the Dubliners story, the closing tableau in which the protagonist appears to experience a moment of self-realization actually occurs in fewer than half. Most of the characters self-evidently end the stories the same way they began them—blithely unaware of any serious problem. In what was originally to have been the volume's closing story, “Grace,” for instance, none of the characters, least of all the exegete Father Purdon, learns a thing; in fact, his message is commended to Mr. Kernan's attention by his friends precisely because it requires nothing of its hearers.

In half a dozen of the stories, however, the endings are much more problematic, the tone more complex, the style more opaque; the characters here do seem to hover on the brink of some deeper self-awareness.³⁷ But the closing epiphonies in these stories, while not quite the “cracked lookingglass of a servant” that Stephen speaks of in Ulysses, are distorted and distorting mirrors of words, words of the characters' own choosing, in which they get back the flattering reflections they wish to see. Stephen's “reflection” on language in chapter 4 of A Portrait seems almost an ironic commentary on this trait: “Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?” (P 166-67). Like Stephen, the boy of “Araby” is in love with “the rhythmic rise and fall” of a “supple periodic prose”—this love, finally, being more real to him than his breathless romantic passion for Mangan's sister, or the vanity he claims to have rooted out from deep within his soul. This flattering portrait, rendered in prose from his own pen, is infinitely preferable to him—to all of the paralytic Dubliners—than having “one good look at themselves” in Joyce's “nicely polished looking-glass.” Thus, there are at least two contradictory ways to read the last sentence of “Araby.” It begins, “Looking up into the darkness, I saw myself. …” At first blush, we might think the boy is telling us that the blackness at the top of the tent forcibly brought home to him the blackness in his own soul. But instead, his language suggests the gesture of looking at oneself in a mirror, a leitmotif throughout Dubliners.³⁸ The boy pretends that the void, the darkness is a mirror; but we know that if he sees anything at all in that darkness, it can only be a figure projected from his own imagination. Thus the dramatic conclusion of his story is a foregone one, an epigram he's been carrying around for some time and trying to find an occasion to use.

Indeed, while Joyce thought of the stories as looking glasses held up to the reader, the characters in those stories look not into a mirror but into the genial illusions of their own making. Eveline in the end throws Frank over, for “he would drown her,” she convinces herself, and although hers was a hard life, “now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life”; Maria doesn't want “any ring or man either,” she assures us with eyes that “sparkled with disappointed shyness,” and has no desire to go live with the Donnellys, having “become accustomed to the life of the laundry”; Bob Doran overcomes his cold feet (and his embarrassment at Polly's vulgar locutions “I seen” and “If I had've known”) by asking himself a hard-nosed, commonsensical question: “But what would grammar matter if he really loved her?”

We see much the same dynamic in the ending of “An Encounter.” The young narrator replaces the mystery with which “The Sisters” closes with mere mystification. At least one critic of the story has seen through the false bravado of that story's closing epiphony; Herring writes, “The last line—‘And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little’—contains no ellipses [as does ‘The Sisters’], but as a final statement it is certainly elliptical in meaning, and supports the general theme of deception. It is a good example of Joyce's uncertainty principle at work in closure, for readers are invited back into the story on a wild goose chase for evidence that will help them understand what masquerades as an epiphanic moment. But the closural incongruity seems downright flippant, for ‘An Encounter’ is not about how superior the protagonist feels to Mahoney, but about how necessary to youth is the bold spirit of adventure that the young ‘Indian’ personifies.”³⁹ “An Encounter” ends not in epiphany but in rhetorical flourish; this writer, even if he has not learned anything of lasting importance about himself from his experience on the bank of the Dodder, has at least learned how to bully his reader into believing he's pointed his story's moral. But it's only trompe-l'oeil.

Compared to the peculiar endings of the first three stories, the closing section of “A Little Cloud”—set off by Joyce from the body of the story with a row of dots—sounds rather flat. Although this too is the tale of a would-be artist (“He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul” [D 73]), it is told not by T. Malone Chandler, but rather subtly ventriloquized by him through free indirect discourse. In all the later stories, the narrative situation is similarly complicated by Joyce's use of free indirect discourse—Flaubert's style indirect libre, in which “the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances are then merged.”⁴⁰

But the resolute flatness of the close of “A Little Cloud” by no means authenticates Little Chandler's moment of self-awareness. Nowhere in the course of the story do we witness Chandler taking responsibility for his own situation; instead he blames his dissatisfaction on fate (“He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune”), his home town (“You could do nothing in Dublin”), his fellow man (“He would never be popular: he saw that. He could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds”), and finally, in the closing scene, his frustration is transferred onto his wife and child—“He was a prisoner for life” (D 71, 73, 74, 84). Yet while he obstinately kicks against the pricks that “oppress” him, the fault lies with him. Though married, Little Chandler has, like Mr. Duffy, the instincts of the celibate; and his celibacy poisons not just his marriage relation, but all his human relationships: “He turned often from his tiresome writing to gaze out of the office window. The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures—on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad” (D 71). Little Chandler's self-pity is so pervasive that it is in the end a kind of paralysis, transforming all of experience into further evidence of his victimization.

Dubliners's next self-styled man of letters, Mr. James Duffy, makes a similar, though more conscious, decision to beat a retreat from life. Perhaps Mr. Duffy's case is especially “painful” precisely because a genuine realization of the true poverty of his life is so very close to the surface. But it is never allowed to break through; his repeated protest, for instance, that “he had been outcast from life's feast” takes his very real status as an outsider and translates it, via the logic of the victim, into something that's been done to him rather than something he's chosen for himself. The story begins by telling us rather pretentiously, in prose that bears the stylistic stamp we will come to recognize as Duffy's own, that “Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen” (D 107); his isolation is a choice for which, however, in the last analysis, he refuses to take responsibility.

Throughout “A Painful Case,” Mr. Duffy's eyes are fixed unwaveringly ahead of him: his gaze is never directed inward. He is not merely an outcast, but in fact a voyeur at life's feast; rather than joining in, he looks out his windows, lives “at a little distance from his body,” looks down on the “venal and furtive loves” in Phoenix Park. Instead of looking at himself, he sees himself—flatteringly portrayed—in his autobiographical prose: “He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense” (D 108).⁴¹

Duffy's egotism is such that even in his moment of most intense and private pain, seemingly on the verge of admitting a fault in himself, he again retreats into a rôle: “One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame” (D 117). Yes, one human being had seemed to love him; but what was the cost for him of having denied that love? Neither he nor the reader can ever know what the consequences of that rejection were for Emily Sinico; and although she's dead, Mr. Duffy is, ostensibly at least, still alive. Bowen points out that “A close reading reveals that Mrs. Sinico did not begin to drink for a year and a half after Duffy terminated their relationship. Duffy merely assumes that he is the cause of her death. It may very well be the case that Duffy's ego has erroneously prompted him to think that he had condemned Mrs. Sinico to death.”⁴² Duffy thus seems to have been driven to his musings as a result of faulty arithmetic; even pure mathematical reasoning, it would appear, can be colored by the reckoner's needs and desires. But while Duffy's equation is wrong, the insight it prompts is right; his is indeed a painful case, for we see him not only in his moment of illumination, but also as he chooses to ignore the light and continue to walk in darkness: “He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him” (D 117). As Joyce said of Chekhov's characters, we realize that as the curtain comes down, Mr. Duffy will soon be building new illusions to forget the old.

Finally we must consider, if only briefly, the most hotly contested of all the epiphanies in Dubliners, Gabriel Conroy's final vision in “The Dead.” For many that famous final tableau has become, through repeated exposure, almost invisible, and yet critical etiquette dictates that I quote it here:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

(D 223-24)

The skill involved in writing a passage like this one has so far as I know never been called into question; even T. S. Eliot, ordinarily chary of his praise of his contemporaries, called “The Dead” “one of the finest short stories in the language.”⁴³ But we may be excused a measure of skepticism about the authenticity of the transformation to which it pretends when we reach “The Dead” after reading the fourteen stories that precede it, stories in which false epiphanies—epiphonies—have repeatedly been foisted upon us as the real thing. Even before Gabriel's final “vision,” we have reason to question his veracity, for he has “had” two other epiphanies—as a result of his encounters with Lily and Miss Ivors—and those rebuffs, now that he's safely in his room at the Gresham, haven't phased him a bit. After his patronizing and vulgar treatment of Lily, for instance, Gabriel's “self-awareness” is limited to a blush: “Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake” (D 178; emphasis added). As a result of his embarrassment, Gabriel forces a coin on Lily, as if he could buy a clean conscience, and goes on his way.

These minor episodes, however, are merely preparation for the lush outpouring that closes the story.⁴⁴ The dangerous merging of decorative scenic description with the soul's anguished cry that we witnessed in “Araby” is again played out here, although in a more complex and treacherous way; indeed, it is difficult in this final paragraph to tell where ego ends and world begins. Many commentators, of course, have pointed to precisely this blurring of the boundaries of the self as a healthy sign of Gabriel's imminent renewal; he has come to realize his relatively small place in the larger, cosmic order, they argue, and in this renunciation of ego Gabriel has won (and demonstrated) his salvation.

“Isn't it pretty to think so?”—as Brett was overheard to say to Jake. As with the other epiphonies we've examined, our suspicions, which arise on the level of plot, are confirmed in the prose style of Gabriel's vision. Once again we must assume Gabriel responsible, courtesy of free indirect discourse, for the “supple periodic prose” in which his closing vision is presented; and once again Zack Bowen, who has so regularly seen the emptiness at the heart of these epiphanies, has registered the falsity of that presentation: “Gabriel, in order to characterize his own lack of feeling, presents a picture of beauty which belies the very characterization he attempts to develop. … He breathes the life of his imagination into the portraits of both Furey and himself, because his dual role as artist, the creator eternal and perishable buffoon, is reflected in the majesty of his vision and in its slightly overripe language. The final truth is indeed magnificent, but rather than the revelation of Gabriel the reviewer-turned-poet, it is the far subtler vision of Joyce the writer.”⁴⁵ The “slightly overripe language” of which Bowen speaks is in fact quite similar to some of the free indirect discourse surrounding Stephen in A Portrait. Kenner's remarks on Stephen's penchant for chiasmus, for instance, provide a fitting commentary on the closing paragraph of “The Dead,” as well: “Shortly before he enters the University he has a period of conspicuous indulgence in chiasmus: ‘The towels with which they smacked their bodies were heavy with cold seawater; and drenched with cold brine was their matted hair.’ Subject₁ was [predicate]: and [similar predicate] was likewise Subject_2. In celebrating its rituals of finality, chiasmus leaves after-vibrations of sententiousness by which the young man does not seem to be troubled. ‘There's English for you,’ part of his mind is saying, and his fondness, at this period, for this figure … affects his very perceptions with a certain staginess. …”⁴⁶ The closing pages of “The Dead” are the last Joyce wrote before beginning the process of transforming the clumsy prose of Stephen Hero into the cunningly stylized writing of A Portrait; we should not be surprised to see him, then, playing the same stops that Kenner has pointed out so clearly in A Portrait in this, the earlier text.

While many critics want to see Gabriel's transfiguration in his moving evocation of the snow, in fact his epiphony occurs a few pages earlier: “He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead” (D 220). This is the characteristic gesture of all those Dubliners (like the boy in “An Encounter” and “Araby,” Little Chandler, and James Duffy) who have been blessed—or is it cursed?—with an extra measure of self-awareness and sensitivity. Mirror, window, and darkness dominate the last scene of “The Dead”; Gabriel consciously turns away from the mirror, and away from the light—eschewing that “one good look,” eschewing self-awareness, eschewing enlightenment. In this moment of truth, Gabriel covers his nakedness with a rhetoric not much better than the sort he has used to dress up his after-dinner speech. We have already seen him to be a man more concerned with style than with honesty; and surely Gabriel is to be more strictly judged as a result of his greater awareness. If Mr. Farrington in “Counterparts” fails ever to see the light, there's surely no surprise in that; but for Gabriel, for James Duffy, for the boy in “Araby,” there seems at least to have been a chance: “Joyce's insight,” Bowen writes, “is that Gabriel is in fact forming a rationalization and at the same time a work of art about that rationalization. In short, while the epiphanies of Dubliners are only as accurate as the characters from whom they emanate, the process itself has an artistic integrity which goes far beyond the truth or falsity of the revelations themselves.”⁴⁷

Dubliners contains no psychological epiphanies for its protagonists—not even for Gabriel Conroy. Finally, epiphanies are equally a characteristic of Joyce's texts and an experience of their readers; we see epiphanies because we need to see epiphanies—the characters are enlightened because we need them to be. This is not the way the stories have traditionally been read. Harry Levin's James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, the first book-length study of Joyce's work (1941), early on fixed the relationship between one interpretation of the epiphany—the epiphany as the story's “punch line”⁴⁸—and the plot dynamics of Dubliners. The closing epiphany, according to this reading, is roughly equivalent to the moral of the story, which the epiphany enacts rather than pronounces—and enacts in a way that the protagonists, or at least the artist protagonists, of the volume themselves recognize. By the time William York Tindall comes to discuss Dubliners in his Reader's Guide (1959), his assessment of the importance of the epiphany in Dubliners is a statement of critical orthodoxy: “The moral center of Dubliners … is not paralysis alone but the revelation of paralysis to its victims. Coming to awareness or self-realization marks the climax of these stories or of most at least. … The little boy of ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Araby’. … comes to such knowledge; the coming to awareness of Little Chandler and James Duffy is far bitterer and more terrible because longer delayed; and the self-realization of Gabriel, the bitterest and most comprehensive of all, is not only the point and climax of ‘The Dead’ but of Dubliners.”⁴⁹

It is this understanding of the epiphany in Dubliners—the character's coming to awful self-knowledge—which constitutes the most widely disseminated understanding of the text, the reading that most college students carry away from their literature courses. Among a more recent generation of Joyceans, Morris Beja has become the most forceful spokesperson for this reading of the stories: “At the end of ‘The Dead,’” he writes, “Gabriel achieves epiphany; other characters in Dubliners stories come to similar revelations as well (the narrator of ‘An Encounter’ and the narrator of ‘Araby,’ for example, or Little Chandler in ‘A Little Cloud,’ or notably Mr. Duffy in ‘A Painful Case’—or even Eveline, before she represses all awareness).” Beja concludes his piece by asserting that “Gabriel Conroy and several characters within the volume, then, have had in the end that ‘one good look at themselves.’”⁵⁰

The dynamics of these texts, however, is not so easily contained. As Bowen points out regarding the epiphany at the close of “The Sisters,” each of us involved in interpretation—in the case of “The Sisters,” the boy, the sisters, Father Flynn, the reader—“fashions his own truth and sees it as the unalterable law of God.”⁵¹ The epiphony that closes many of the Dubliners stories, rather than a Grimm's fairy tale moral, is a relativity phenomenon, governed by what Herring calls “Joyce's uncertainty principle”; our interpretation is ineluctably slanted by the position from which we regard the text, and by the glasses through which we are constrained by gender, race, class, religion, and theoretical allegiances to read it. The readings of Levin, Tindall, and Beja—names that stand in here as proper-noun synecdoches for an entire critical tradition—are mediated by rose-colored glasses, the result inevitably being rose-colored glosses. In their desire for narrative closure, for the “happy ending”—a desire which burns within all of us, a desire of which Joyce was fully aware, and exploited for his own fictive purposes—critics are sometimes led into passionate misreadings, readings which mistake pseudo-epiphanies (epiphonies) for “the real thing.” The fact that a text is written in a style of scrupulous meanness does not insure that it will be read in such a manner.

The word “misreadings,” of course, grossly overstates the situation; we might instead refer to these interpretations as mistyreadings, in honor of the “generous tears” that fill our eyes, as they do the eyes of Gabriel Conroy and Joe Donnelly at crucial moments in their stories, and prevent our seeing things quite distinctly. Who among us, on a first reading, did not wish—indeed, did not passionately believe—that Eveline would run off with Frank to Buenos Aires? Ah yes, we're all too sophisticated now to be taken in by that ruse; we've read the story many times, and read the readings of the story, and now see plain as day from the first paragraph the ghostly written traces of Eveline's paralysis. But what was that first reading like?

The New Criticism, of course, has not encouraged us to look at the changing shape of our responses to these texts. As Jane Tompkins points out, Wimsatt and Beardsley's 1946 essay “The Affective Fallacy,” one of the central documents of the New Criticism, rules out a reader-oriented criticism: “The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results. … It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of a poem and ends in impressionism and relativism.”⁵² According to New Critical dogma, texts are verbal icons, to be apprehended in a timeless moment—taken in whole. In fact, this understanding of artistic experience is implicit in Stephen Dedalus's comments in the fifth chapter of A Portrait: “The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space” (P 212; emphasis added). Such a model effectively proscribes a reader-response analysis; yet the Dubliners stories are so process-oriented that any reading that does not take into account the way our experience of the stories changes over time cannot satisfactorily account for the way these texts work.

Our first readings of these texts must always be mistyreadings, for read innocently this is the response they provoke in us. But reading Dubliners, or any of Joyce's texts, is not a one-time act, but an ongoing process. To criticize an earlier generation of critics for falling for the “reader traps” in Dubliners is cheap sport; their sometimes credulous first wrestlings with these texts, which provide the foundation upon which a newer generation of readers has ungratefully built, are neither more nor less than carefully articulated records of their seductions by the text, a seduction which we too have undergone but have learned not to acknowledge.⁵³ Reading Dubliners is a dialectical process; our first reading is a product of seduction, while later rereadings employ cool intellection. But the second term of this interpretive dialectic does not obliterate the first; mistyreading, too, is a necessary stage in a fuller understanding of these stories. The reader, like the man of genius in Stephen's formulation, makes no mistakes: “His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery” (U 156).

Mistyreadings: for Joe Donnelly's tears at the end of “Clay” provide the perfect example of the kind of distortion that can result when Joyce successfully taps into our hidden narrative agendas. Tindall like Levin before him argues that “Clay” ends with an epiphany for Joe; he believes that after Maria has finished her rendition of “I Dreamt That I Dwelt,” with its significant “mistake,” “Joe detects the meaning of her omission. ‘Very much moved’ by it, he calls for the missing corkscrew (one of many lost or misplaced things in the story) and presumably for another bottle in which to drown his understanding.”⁵⁴ The corkscrew is not lost: but misty-eyed and “screwed” himself, Joe cannot see what is plainly in front of his face. Indeed, though he is about to have yet another drink, it would be a mistake to think that Joe's understanding is not already drowned.

Although Tindall reiterates just three words from the last paragraph of the story, they are the three crucial words, though not for the reason he thinks. Here they are again, recontextualized: “But no one tried to show her her mistake; and when she had ended her song Joe was very much moved. He said that there was no time like the long ago and no music for him like poor old Balfe, whatever other people might say; and his eyes filled up so much with tears that he could not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell him where the corkscrew was” (D 106; emphasis added). The prose of this last paragraph testifies against the idea of Joe's sudden awakening on at least three levels. The first is the level of plot. Joe, like the “colonel-looking gentleman” on the tram, is well into his cups at this point; we have watched him drinking throughout the story, trying at each refill to force Maria to drink with him, although she chooses other means to forget her troubles. As readers we realize—as Maria herself must—how easily a gentleman is moved to tears “when he has a drop taken,” and view Joe's effusions with a certain skepticism. The second damnation is contained in Joe's encomium: readers steeped in Joyce's writing—again not necessarily first readers, but rereaders, readers who have slogged through both “The Sisters” and “The Dead”—cannot mistake the disdain with which Joyce records Joe's praise of the moribund: “He said that there was no time like the long ago and no music for him like poor old Balfe, whatever other people might say. …” A character who utters such sentiments in one of Joyce's texts has not had his epiphany.

The third stroke comes in the phrase that Tindall quotes—“very much moved.” When read in the larger context of the story this description is meant to tip us off to what is—and is not—happening here. The word “very” occurs no fewer than sixteen times in the seven pages of “Clay,” and is always associated with the prose of Maria's desire—the free indirect discourse shaped by Maria's mind. “Very” is one of “Maria's words,” like “nice” and “little”; the first sentence of the text's description of Maria, for instance, reads: “Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin” (D 99; emphasis added). The locution “very much moved” suggests that something insincere, something automatic and falsifying is happening in the narrative. That something is that Maria, influencing the free indirect discourse of the closing paragraph, is misrepresenting Joe's sloppy, intoxicated sentimentality as genuine sympathy for Maria's unspoken plight. It is not.

At the end of “Clay,” Joe is about as far from epiphany as one can easily imagine. Tindall's interpretation is too credulous; but that is certainly no accident, for it is a reading that Maria herself would “very much” appreciate. In Margot Norris's words, “narrative speech in ‘Clay’ is, for the most part, uttered in the language of Maria's desire; it is Maria's desire speaking.”⁵⁵ In Joyce's hands, this free indirect discourse is even more insidious, more subversive of narrative certainty, than the use of a limited narrator by a writer like Faulkner; for in “Clay” and a handful of other stories in Dubliners, the narrative is colored by an unreliable non-narrator—one who not only has a vested interest in the outcome of the story, but additionally refuses to acknowledge her hand in it. In Tindall's reading of “Clay” Maria's discourse of desire has intersected the critic's interpretive predilections, and he has as a result been seduced; “In the end,” Norris writes, “the reader of ‘Clay’ is read by the text.”⁵⁶

“Clay” is an extremely seductive story, but finally no more so than any number of others in Dubliners. The stories all demonstrate dramatically the connivance of interpretation with desire; the texts cooperate with their narrators' (or protagonists') desires; we then read the stories through the lenses of our desires. For it is only through the desire of Joyce's characters, subtly manifest in the texts they would have liked to have written, that our own desire—our interpretive desire—can be seduced into the light of day, or into cold print. The man who reviewed Dubliners for the Times Literary Supplement, for instance, in what is overall a perceptive and sensitive review, nevertheless proceeds within a fairly small space to mistyread significant aspects of three of the stories: “The author, Mr. James Joyce, is not concerned with all Dubliners, but almost exclusively with those of them who would be submerged if the tide of material difficulties were to rise a little higher. … One of them—a capable washerwoman—falls an easy prey to a rogue in a tramcar and is cozened out of the little present she was taking to her family. Another—a trusted cashier—has so ordered a blameless life that he drives to drink and suicide the only person in the world with whom he was in sympathy. A third—an amiable man of letters—learns at the moment he feels most drawn to his wife that her heart was given once and for all to a boy long dead” (Deming 1:60). My argument is that these are not “wrong” readings of these stories, or at least not stupidly incorrect readings; these are the wrong readings that Joyce—that Maria, James Duffy, and Gabriel Conroy—have set out for us. We must fall prey to the critical protocols that can account for such essential early misreadings; this is exactly as it should be.⁵⁷ Maria wants us to believe her plumcake stolen, rather than having to take responsibility for having forgotten it; Duffy desperately needs to believe himself the cause of Mrs. Sinico's tragic death, to have meant something to someone; and Gabriel's melodramatic imagination insists that if his wife's heart was once pledged to another, it was therefore “given once and for all,” and never belonged to him.

It should come as no surprise that this happens, to Tindall, or to the TLS reviewer, or to ourselves—for we have been set up. In the stories of Dubliners we read the text of narrative desire; this is the characteristic use to which Joyce puts his free indirect discourse. Norris writes that Joyce's purpose in “Clay” is “to dramatize the powerful workings of desire in human discourse and human lives”;⁵⁸ and that drama is played out not only on the page, but also in the reader. Our mistyreadings, then, are not simply the product of a willfully perverse writer, nor yet the careless errors of ignorant readers, but instead the result of an intricate pas de deux in which, when we discover our “errors,” we simultaneously find that Joyce has anticipated and cunningly prepared them. The stories of Dubliners are Rorschach inkblots wherein we read the text of our desire in the course of (mis)reading the book of ourselves.

Dubliners is a text that implicates us in the deadly work of paralysis, and reveals to us our own paralysis. A “superiority complex” is either a contributing cause or a symptom of paralysis in many characters in Dubliners (for instance the boy in “An Encounter”—“I was going to reply indignantly that we were not National School boys to be whipped, as he called it” [D 27]); and yet we think their problems do not touch us, and therein we too are paralyzed. The standard reading of the Dubliners stories—that the protagonists of “An Encounter,” “Araby,” “A Painful Case,” “A Little Cloud,” and “The Dead” all reach a new level of self-awareness by story's end—is powerful evidence of the narrative of desire that runs all through Joyce criticism. When examined closely, however, the texts simply do not support such a reading; these are not stories with happy endings, but stories that resist our desire for closure, for interpretation, for Meaning. Dubliners, beginning with “The Sisters,” whispers: Give up the flattering project of interpretation; give in to the mystery which is life.

The stories of Dubliners turn us not toward certitude, but toward the void; and while we like to believe ourselves above Joyce's “poor fledglings,” Joyce's texts reveal us to be as willfully blind, as “driven and derided by vanity,” as any of his characters. Like the sisters in the opening story, we need to believe the paralysis extrinsic to our world. Who, after reading this text, can say “I am a Dubliner”? We are quick to point a finger from our superior position and pronounce Corley a paralytic, or Duffy a paralytic. Garry Leonard makes this point early on in his recent book on Dubliners: “Rarely in fiction do characters suffer as exquisitely for the benefit of readers as they do in Dubliners, and I propose that readers explore their kinship with the characters' moral paralysis rather than self-righteously suggest various cures for it.”⁵⁹ In an interview, Kathy Acker has talked about this phenomenon as characteristic of one class of texts: “What the reader wants—what the reader's trained to want I should say—is to be at a distance and say, Look at those weird people over there!” Acker goes on to insist, though, that “I never wanted to say that ‘over there’”; neither, I am arguing, did Joyce.⁶⁰ What these texts force us to confront is that Dubliners is not a dramatic tableau, but a mirror—and that we, like all of Joyce's Dubliners, steadfastly refuse that one good look at ourselves in his nicely polished looking glass. This response was for Jonathan Swift the defining characteristic of satire. He writes in the preface to The Battle of the Books: “Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind of Reception it meets with in the World, and that so very few are offended with it.”⁶¹

Notes

1. Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 77.

2. Edward Brandabur, A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce's Early Work (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971), 42.

3. Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 34.

4. Phillip Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 10.

5. Clive Hart uses this term in rather a different sense in his discussion of the “Wandering Rocks” episode in Clive Hart and David Hayman, eds., James Joyce's “Ulysses”: Critical Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1974).

6. Homer Obed Brown, James Joyce's Early Fiction: The Biography of a Form (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1972), 40.

7. Ibid., 48.

8. Tindall, Reader's Guide to James Joyce, 15.

9. Garry M. Leonard, Reading “Dubliners” Again: A Lacanian Perspective (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1993), 203, 204.

10. Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle, 28. I certainly do not mean to suggest that a careful reading of the popular literature with which Joyce litters his texts, such as Brandy Kershner has performed in Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature, is without value. But Kershner is quite clear about what the value of such a source study is; the titles are not symbols or clues that will magically unlock the mysterious texture of the stories.

11. Cage, Conversing with Cage, 208.

12. William Empson, “The Theme of Ulysses,” Kenyon Review 18 (Winter 1956): 36.

13. MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 29.

14. Beckett, Molloy, 91.

15. Zack Bowen, “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New Approach,” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981-82): 106-7.

16. Donald T. Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce's “Dubliners” (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 18.

17. “Liturgy of S. Chrysostom,” in Liturgies Eastern and Western, ed. F. E. Brightman, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1896), 1:375.

18. Although since Vatican II (1962-65), an epiclesis has been added to the canon of the Roman Catholic Mass.

19. Thus, clearly, I read this letter rather differently than does Richard Ellmann, who comments that while living in Trieste Joyce “often went to the Greek Orthodox Church to compare its ritual, which he considered amateurish, with the Roman” (JJ 195).

    Furthermore, in the Orthodox service the elements of the Eucharist are hidden, but the priest at intervals rends the veil and reveals himself. Joyce's description of the Mass was of course written long before the memorable words he put into the mouth of Stephen Dedalus, in which Stephen likens the artist to the God of creation, who remains “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (P 215). Joyce's fascination with the Greek priest who reveals himself, rather than the Roman priest who conceals himself, suggests a certain distance from Stephen's artist-creator fantasy that I'd like to explore further in chapter 5.

20. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1958), 116.

21. While critics have expended considerable time and ink puzzling over exactly what Joyce meant by “a style of scrupulous meanness,” the fact is that we will never know with any certainty. In the face of that uncertainty, I am inclined to believe that “scrupulous meanness” refers to the surface stylistic poverty of most of the volume's narrative—the most noticeable characteristic for Dubliners's first generation of readers. For example, Gerald Gould, writing in the New Statesman: “He has plenty of humour, but it is always the humour of the fact, not of the comment. He dares to let people speak for themselves with the awkward meticulousness, the persistent incompetent repetition, of actual human intercourse. If you have never realised before how direly our daily conversation needs editing, you will realise it from Mr. Joyce's pages. One very powerful story, called ‘Grace,’ consists chiefly of lengthy talk so banal, so true to life, that one can scarcely endure it—though one can still less leave off reading it” (Deming 1:63). Or, more pithily, Ezra Pound: “I can lay down a good piece of French writing and pick up a piece of writing by Mr. Joyce without feeling as if my head were being stuffed through a cushion” (Deming 1:66).

22. MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 28.

23. Morris Beja, “One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners,” in Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays, ed. Richard F. Peterson, Alan M. Cohn, and Edmund L. Epstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1983), 3.

24. Scholes and Litz write in their edition of Dubliners that “critics have applied the notion of epiphany to that moment in a Dubliners story when some sort of revelation takes place. … ‘Epiphany’ thus comes to mean a moment of revelation or insight such as usually climaxes a Dubliners story” (D 255).

25. D, 254. Stanislaus Joyce seems to have had only this second type of epiphany in mind in his well-known description of the epiphanies: “Another experimental form which his literary urge took … consisted in the noting of what he called ‘epiphanies’—manifestations or revelations. Jim always had a contempt for secrecy, and these notes were in the beginning ironical observations of slips, and little errors and gestures—mere straws in the wind—by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal” (S. Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, 134).

26. Tindall suggests that this pairing of epiphanies is Joyce's usual procedure in Dubliners: “In most of these stories, there are two epiphanies, similar but not identical: one for the reader, the other for the hero or victim” (Tindall, Reader' Guide to James Joyce, 28).

27. This is the epiphany Stephen records there:

    The Young Lady—(drawling discretely) … O, yes … I was … at the … cha … pel …

    The Young Gentleman—(inaudibly) … I … (again inaudibly) … I …

    The Young Lady—(softly) … O … but you're … ve … ry … wick … ed … (SH 211)

28. Bowen, “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept,” 107.

29. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1955), 310.

30. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2d ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), 335-36.

31. Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 6.

32. See Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978). I'm the first to admit that Kenner's ear for Joyce's voices is better than anyone's in the business; my objection is to his predilection needlessly to coin new terms for time-honored phenomena. What he calls the Uncle Charles Principle—suggesting, along the way, that Joyce created it—differs in no way from the style indirect libre that Flaubert was exploiting in the mid-nineteenth century.

33. Beja, “One Good Look at Themselves,” 10, 9.

34. Bowen, “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept,” 106.

35. Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1887), 14-15.

36. In a letter to R. W. D. Rouse, 30 December 1934 (Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige [New York: New Directions, 1971], 263).

37. Setting aside “The Sisters,” about which critics are almost evenly divided, only five of the stories are consistently understood as closing with the protagonist's epiphany—“An Encounter,” “Araby,” “A Little Cloud,” “A Painful Case,” and “The Dead.” These are also, perhaps not coincidentally, all stories which critics have identified as especially autobiographical. For those who find epiphany in these endings, this fact no doubt suggests that Joyce wished to work out his own salvation through these autobiographical characters, and through them assert his superiority to the rest of the Dubliners; I would instead argue that critics' identification of these characters with their author has colored their readings, and that we hesitate to criticize the boy in “Araby,” or Gabriel, because to damn them would seem to be to damn their creator as well.

38. Though the instances are too numerous to discuss in any detail here, Joyce systematically undermines the traditional symbolic equation of the mirror with self-awareness throughout Dubliners. Two representative examples, from “The Boarding House”: at the story's close, Polly Mooney looks into her mirror but doesn't see herself; she simply touches up her mask: “Polly sat for a little time on the side of the bed, crying. Then she dried her eyes and went over to the looking-glass. She dipped the end of the towel in the water-jug and refreshed her eyes with the cool water. She looked at herself in profile and readjusted a hairpin above her ear” (D 68). So too Mrs. Mooney: “Nearly the half-hour! She stood up and surveyed herself in the pier-glass. The decisive expression of her great florid face satisfied her …” (D 65). Vicki Mahaffey has examined Joyce's use of this topos in Ulysses; see Reauthorizing Joyce, 104-14.

39. Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle, 24-25.

40. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), 174.

41. While critics are fond of citing Duffy's odd habit, none seems to have noticed that the sentence following this one is a perfect example of that habit: “He never gave alms to beggars and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.” That the narrative itself so closely conforms to Duffy's own compositional predilections lends further credence to the idea that he is, in some sense, the author of this “adventureless tale,” or at least the unacknowledged shaper of its style.

42. Bowen, “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept,” 107.

43. T. S. Eliot, “A Message to the Fish,” in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York: Vanguard, 1963), 468.

44. “Lush” seems to have been a term of abuse for Joyce. Ellmann tells the story of Joyce's hearing some of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover read aloud: “Joyce asked Stuart Gilbert to read him some pages from it. He listened carefully, then pronounced only one word: ‘Lush’” (JJ 615n).

45. Bowen, “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept,” 109-10.

46. Kenner, Ulysses, 7.

47. Bowen, “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept,” 110.

48. Margot Norris reports that her students inevitably come to class having “figured out” that “clay” equals “death”—“as though this constituted some sort of punch line, some sort of illumination that makes sense of an otherwise meaningless joke” (Margot Norris, Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992], 121). My reading of “Clay”—indeed, all of Dubliners—is indebted in more ways than citation can indicate to Norris's discussion; her chapter on “Clay” painstakingly elaborates the mechanics of Maria's “desirous edition” of the text of “Clay,” and should be consulted in its entirety for the light it sheds not only on “Clay,” but on the dynamics of narrative desire that informs all of Dubliners.

49. Tindall, Reader's Guide to James Joyce, 4-5. As I have noted above, Tindall's claim that self-realization constitutes the climax of “most” of Dubliners's stories is an exaggeration, since only six of the fifteen stories have been read as ending in the protagonist's self-realization with any consistency.

50. Beja, “One Good Look at Themselves,” 9, 13.

51. Bowen, “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept,” 107.

52. Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), ix.

53. Norris, although more honest than most, herself falls into this trap, making it clear that she has not been seduced: “‘Clay’ is a ‘deceptively’ simple little story by design: its narrative self-deception attempts, and fails, to mislead the reader” (Norris, Joyce's Web, 120).

54. Tindall, Reader's Guide to James Joyce, 31.

55. Norris, Joyce's Web, 123.

56. Ibid., 125.

57. Thus in this instance I disagree completely with the position Kenner puts forth in The Mechanic Muse. Using the analogy of the Dublin Corporation men who are paid to “watch holes”—presumably so that no one will fall into them—Kenner writes: “No other body of fiction so resembles a city in necessitating such guides and such watchmen. Nor does any other body of fiction so resemble a city in containing such holes into which the naive may fall, or such loose stones over which they may stumble” (82). My argument, again, is that we're meant to stumble, to tumble—indeed, it's good for us; Kenner, one of the best of Joyce's “guides and watchmen,” cannot seem to appreciate this point.

58. Norris, Joyce's Web, 120.

59. Leonard, Reading “Dubliners” Again, 6.

60. Kathy Acker, “Devoured by Myths: An Interview with Sylvère Lotringer,” in Hannibal Lecter, My Father (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 15.

61. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub with Other Early Works 1696-1707, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 140.