James Joyce "Araby"

James Joyce (1882-1941)

Joyce, or James Augustine Aloysius Joyce to give him his full and somewhat preposterous moniker, was one of the pioneering figures of modernism. He was born at Rathgar in Dublin to a Catholic family and received a Jesuit education at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere Colleges. Subsequently he studied philosophy and languages at University College, Dublin. The linguistic experimentation hinted at in Ulysses (1922) and fully explored in Finnegans Wake (1939) seems to have derived from this early interest in and talent for language study. His childhood is documented excitingly and with an often-jaded view of Irish upbringing in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-5) and its draft version Stephen Hero (1944). At this time is seemed likely that he would become a priest (something of the fear and intrigue he felt towards this is clear in the first story of Dubliners (1914)).

However, by 1902, his love for literature, negative feelings about his native country (nationalism was at its fiercest) and distaste for the narrowness of Irish Catholic dogma had drawn him away from Ireland and he had renounced his Catholicism. Nonetheless, in his fiction he portrayed only Ireland and specifically Dublin from the distance provided by continental Europe and there is a consistent religious theme. Joyce lived in Paris during 1902 in a state of poverty which he would seldom leave and after returning for the death of his mother he remained away from Ireland permanently. His partner, Nora Barnacle, accompanied him (they finally married in 1931) and he began to teach in the Berlitz school. His first published work was a respectable first collection of poems, Chamber Music (1907). However, it was his volume of short stories that began a long and difficult relationship with publishing houses and the law. Some of its content, language included, caused difficulties in its publication and it took the better part of a decade for Dubliners to emerge, during which Joyce made his final visit to Ireland in 1912. Yeats had been an early supporter or his work, but now Ezra Pound joined with his enthusiastic review of the stories in "The Egoist".

A less happy period occurred as Joyce attempted to find his footing in the theatre with the play Exiles that was published in 1918 and performed in the same year in Munich to little success. Greater praise by far had followed the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man in 1916 after it had been serialised between 1914 and 1915 in "The Egoist". This was a largely autobiographical work and one which still has its plaudits. Joyce's finest hour was still to come though. He had gained an award from the Royal Literary Fund in 1915 on the recommendation of Yeats and Pound and further supplemented his meagre income with a grant from the civil list. Though still troubled by poverty and worsening eyesight due to glaucoma he wrote Ulysses, his most famous and substantial work, during these years and it was published in Paris on his fortieth birthday, 2nd February 1922. This incredible feat of diverse literary styles and innovation in the novel form was hailed by his Modernist contemporaries such as T S Eliot as a work of genius. It was not admired by all, however, and Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein were among its critics. It took another fourteen years for the novel to be published in the United Kingdom, by which time he had published a rather less controversial second volume of poetry, Pomes Penyeach (1927).

Joyce's final revolutionary work and most bizarre offering was Finnegans Wake, published in 1939. It portrays a character who, because never fully awake and trapped in a dream world, it not constrained by the limitations of normal consciousness. Written in a lexicon almost entirely its own, it being a sensual and playful mixture and corruption of English and other languages, the novel was and is a stranger and harder read than the (still hardly accessible) Ulysses. Both novels, however, served to change the face of the novel almost totally, and few authors since can claim to be unaware or uninfluenced by them at least in spirit. Joyce pioneered the 'stream-of-consciousness' form, particularly in the last book of Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake as a whole. He died, still in self-imposed exile, in 1941. Characteristically arrogant and amusing was his comment to an interviewer: "The only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works".

LISTEN TO "ARABY": 

 

AN AWARD WINNING FILM ADAPTATION OF JAMES JOYCE'S SHORT STORY "ARABY." TRAILER

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Araby

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Araby Criticism

Here is a  close reading of "Araby."

"Araby" Study Questions Before Reading -- Title:  the title of this story is a proper noun: it refers to a real festival which came to Dublin in 1894, when Joyce was twelve years old. -- Style:  "Araby" has a long and descriptive introduction before this boy takes action. Be patient in your reading; you are about to enter the emotional world of a sensitive young boy. After the 1st Reading:  1. The setting & the language: The story reads slowly because1) not much happens in the first six paragraphs(the first action being Mangan's sister's talking to the boy: "At last she spoke to me"), and the real action does not take place until paragraph [25]: "I held a florin tightly in my hand..." and 2) the boy narrator feels a lot more than what he expresses outwards in his speech to others or action. Find some descriptive passages, try to find out how images and the other figurative speech are used, and what their connotations are.  It would be the best if you can find the passages by yourselves, if not, the following are some examples: Read the first two paragraphs carefully and see what kind of environment the boy is in. What can the following details mean? The house which is "blind," or in a dead end of the street, the other houses "with brown imperturbable faces"; the musty room, the dead priest with his three books; the rusty bicycle pump; the apple tree and the garbage odors. These images seem to be unrelated to the plot, but they define the boy's environment as well as the story's atmosphere.) 2. The characters ·                     children vs. authorities:-- In the third paragraph, the boy describes the wild games they play after school and out on the street. Do you have any similar experience of playing in a group of kids, maybe with some "rough tribes" as your "enemies"? (A city child nowadays does not have the freedom to run around after school freely and beyond bounds, because it is considered unsafe (or unworthwhile) to do so. How about your childhood?) ·                     -- Who are the authority figures in the story? The dead priest? The uncle and aunt? Or Mangan's sister? Do they serve any roles in offering guidance to the boy? ·                     the boy's infatuation with Mangan's sister:-- In paragraphs 3-6, we get to see that the boy secretly loves an older girl who is Mangan's sister.  How does he describe his feelings for her?  ·                     -- Why does the image and name of Mangan's sister appear in the boy's mind and his fervent prayer in the noisiest moments? Why does the boy feel as if he went on a crusade (quest) for the girl? Have you ever had such a passionate sentiment for any event or person? "These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires." (par 6)[In the priest's room]"I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: "O love! O love!" many times." (par 7) ·                     Mangan's sister:  ·                     -- Most of Mangan's sister's words are presented in the boy's narration (but not in direct quotations). How much do we really know about her? What kind of "character" do you think Mangan's sister is? A round character? A flat character? A substitute for something else? A character serving as a symbol? Pay close attention to how Mangan's sister is presented in the 3d and the 10th paragraphs. What major color and images are associated with her? Which parts of her body are described?-- Why do you think she suggests that the boy go to Araby? Does she really care if he makes it or not? if he does it or not? 3. The plot & external elements The boy's changes: As explained above, Mangan's sister initiates the boy's desire for action (going to Araby) in paragraph 7, but the action itself takes place only in paragraph 25. In between, the boy is emotionally concentrated on the quest while he finds daily routine to be "child's play," and his childhood companions distant from him. a. -- From the third paragraph, we see the narrator, a child, plays with his friends, but this is the last time he talks about this group of kids as "we." How would you characterize his subsequent changes? Does he grow older and wiser? b. -- What stops him from going till very late on Saturday evening?-- What kind of conflict/contrast does the boy experience in the story between himself and his environment, or between him and the adults (aunt, uncle and Mrs Mercer) ? c. -- When he finally gets to Araby, why does he not buy anything at the fair? d. -- What does the ending mean?  "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Further Questions or After the 2nd Reading: 4. Language: Religious images vs. images of money What kind of sentiment does the boy have in his love for the girl?  Look at paragraphs 4-6 (e.g. the similes/metaphors used: "I bore my chalice"; "my body was like a harp" and his fervent prayer) and paragraph 13.   5. The trip to Araby (the bazaar) How is the bazaar presented at the end of the story (e.g. the dialogue between the woman and men, the image of darkness)?  What does this description, again, tell us about the boy's world? Examine the role money plays in the trip to the bazaar (paragraph 25 and 32). Theme Why do you think the boy loves the girl so much, or, to put it in another way, in such a devout way?  What do you make of the ending?  How do you explain the word "vanity"? Does the boy know where his vanity comes from? The story is an initiation story, meaning that the boy experienced growth, or a rite of passage, from one stage of his life (e.g. childhood) to another (young adulthood).   What do you think the boy has learned? 7. Point of View Describe the narrator or point of view in this story.  Is this narrator   a young teenage boy or is he an older man remembering an important incident when he was younger? Extension: ü    What do you think about the boy's love for Mangan's sister? Have you experienced puppy love or momentary infatuation before?  How is your experience different from or similar to the boy's?  ü    How would the story be told differently if the narrative perspective were that of Mangan's sister? ü    Joyce mentioned in several letters that he chose Dublin as the setting for Dubliners because for him the city seemed to be the center of paralysis. Where  does the sense of paralysis come  from in the story?

For Further Studies Joyce's Dublin