Araby:
The title holds the key to the meaning of Joyce's story. Araby is a
romantic term for the Middle East, but there is no such country. The
word was
popular throughout the nineteenth century -- used to express the
romantic view of the east that had been popular since Napoleon's
triumph
over Egypt. And, of course, the story is about Romantic Irony, for
the unnamed boy has a romantic view of the world.
Joyce finished "Araby" in October of 1905: the eleventh in composition of the stories that would become Dubliners.
The story is about Orientation: notice how we derive that word from the Orient, from the East, originally meaning that, to orient yourself means to know in which direction the sun rises. The boy in "Araby" is disoriented, but will know the true compass of the world at the end of his journey -- a traditional form in literature (the German term Bildungsroman is so commonly used that it often appears in English dictionaries).
North
Richmond Street:
Although there is no explicit mention of it in the story, we know that
it takes place on May 19, 1894 and the boy is 12 years old. In 1894
little Jimmy Joyce was 12, and lived at 17 North Richmond Street; the
Joyce family lived there from 1854 to 1896. Furthermore,
there was a "Grand Oriental Fete" in Dublin that ran from May 14-19,
1894. The theme song of the actual fair illustrates the romantic view of
the Orient held by many Europeans at the time:
"I'll sing thee songs of Araby,being blind:
And takes of fair Cashmere,
Wild tales to cheat thee of a sign,
Or charm thee to a tear.
And dreams of delight shall on thee break,
And rainbow visions rise,
And my soul shall strive to wake
Sweet wonder in thine eyes ......
Through those twin lakes, when wonder wages,
My raptured song shall sink,
And as the diver dives for pearls,
Bring tears, bright tears to their brink,
And rainbow visions rise,
And all my soul shall strive to wake,
Sweet wonder in thine eyes ....
To cheat thee of a sign,
Or charm thee to a tear!"
(words by W.G. Wills; music by Frederick Clay)
The American English term for this sense of "blind" -- "dead end" -- would work as well for Joyce's purposes, although blind works better for the story's closure. T.S. Eliot once said: "The world was made for Joyce's convenience," meaning that Joyce didn't have to invent or manufacture symbols; they were lying around in the streets of Dublin waiting for him to pick them up.
set the boys free:
Joyce uses this neat phrase to suggest that religion has imprisoned the
boys.
uninhabited ....
detached:
The street becomes Joyce's presentation of the Irish soul, uninhabited
and detached, with the houses personified, and arguably more alive
than the
residents.
brown:
Certainly the most frequently used color in Dubliners,
we note how quickly Joyce has been able to set a nearly hopeless and
discouraged mood. In Stephen Hero, part of the first draft
of the book that became
A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, Joyce writes:
"... one of those
brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis."
a priest, had died:
As the opening paragraph has prepared us both for a story of
particulars as well as for an allegory, the priest carries several
messages. Joyce, who hated Roman Catholicism, implies that the Church
(represented by the priest) is dead -- the Church
as the former tenant of the House that is Ireland.
musty .. waste .. littered
.. useless..:
If you make a list of just the adjectives in "Araby" you will be
struck by the overwhelming drabness and dullness of the setting Joyce
has created. Here in the opening paragraphs, Joyce's technique is not
subtle, and he forces even the most optimistic (or oblivious) reader
to take note of the lifelessness that surrounds the boy.
The Abbot, by Walter
Scott, The Devout
Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq:
Joyce always has a purpose in Dubliners, and the
selection of these books is not casual and is used to best advantage.
The Abbot, written in 1820, was about Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1587). The novel presented her life in a sincerely religious and romantic fashion, in contrast to the usual picture of her as a "harlot queen" in history. The presence of this romantic/religious/sexual complex is central to Joyce's story, as the boy confuses and conflates Romantic Love, Religious Love and Materialist Love. As the story proceeds, we find that he deceives himself about the sexual, spiritual, and the financial.
The Devout Communicant could refer to any one of three works with this title. The one by the English Franciscan Friar Pacificus Baker (1695-1774) is noted for its lush, pious language and could have influenced the boy's couching his sexual feelings for the girl in pious images. William York Tindall, one of the pioneers of Joyce studies in the United States, held that the work Joyce had in mind was one by Abednego Sellar, as the author's name reinforces the materialistic themes of "Araby." Joyce's anti-clerical views also support this choice, as Abednego was a Protestant clergyman -- as was James Ford, the author of a third book by this title in print at the time. More important than specifically identifying which work Joyce had in mind here is the fact of the influence of the devoutly pious language of any of these works on the young boy's vocabulary and outlook.
The Memoirs of Vidocq, written by Francois-Jules Vidocq and published in 1829, was a popular 19th century novel about a Parisian Police Commissioner who was also a thief, and was thus able to hide his crimes (at one point in the novel, he escapes capture by dressing as a nun). Joyce's use of the book here supports the theme of deception and dishonesty in the story. But just as the reader is simultaneously aware of the meaning of the mention of these novels, and that the boy does not understand these meanings, so the theme of deception merely strengthens the sense that the boy is deceived about himself.
liked the last because its
leaves were yellow:
In this paragraph we get the first glimpses of the boy's romantic, and
naive view of life. Joyce plays on our attention to allegorical
and symbolic details, for after the first paragraph we quickly realize
that the narrator is a young boy who isn't using figurative language
self-consciously. And yet the figurative meaning is where we find
Joyce's telling of the story.
.
wild garden .... central apple
tree:
An obvious reference to the Garden of Eden, and "Araby" is certainly about
a young man's fall from grace. Later, we'll note just how many times the
word "fall" actually occurs in the story, particularly toward the end.
Joyce's adding the rusty bicycle
pump here shows that the reference to Eden is clearly After the Fall;
Joyce sets the confused and unhealthy mixture of religion and sex with the
priest's (thoroughly Freudian) rusty bicycle pump. This phallic pump is
one of the treasures in Joyce's work.
a very charitable
priest:
The frequent hypocrisy of religion is a familiar theme in Joyce's work.
Here the
sweet, almost admiring, description hides the disconcerting question: if
the priest
was so charitable, why did he have such a lot
of money when he died? -- "all" suggests a lot of money, as does
the idea of amounts
that might be left to institutions). And what, after all,
is so charitable about leaving furniture to your sister; the only thing
less charitable would be to have had it thrown away. Of course, as
mentioned earlier, this is the sort of recognition reserved for the
reader,
rather than the narrator, at least at this point in the story.
The "unreliable" or "unknowing" narrator is a common literary device, invented perhaps by Edgar Allan Poe, and exploited so well by Dostoyevsky in the 19th century; it is extremely common in 20th century fiction. Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier is a brilliant example of a technique like that used by Joyce in "Araby": as readers we quickly realize we know more about what is going on than does the narrator.
sombre:
The third paragraph presents a picture of the dreariness of Dublin; note
the increasingly gruesome sequence of descriptions: sombre houses,
feeble lanterns, silent street, dark muddy lanes, dark dripping gardens,
odours from the ashpits, etc.
shadow:
Note the repetition of "shadow" (three times) in this paragraph
("chiasmus," or the repetition of a single image, is a Joycean technique
we
will see often in Dubliners). The people of
Dublin are not living, but ghosts; the boys, who are very much
alive, are surrounded by shades of people. When we read that the boys,
who
are prominent in the first three stories of Dubliners,
"played till our bodies
glowed,"
we know that they are still alive, and their youth and glow tell us that
their souls
have not yet been smothered by Dublin (although, of course, by the end of
each story efforts have been made to tame and even break them).
ran the gantlet:
This is an archaic spelling of "gauntlet". Joyce obviously wanted the
association with a medieval world of jousts and holy quests, an
association reenforced and developed in later points in the story and
foreshadowed in this paragraph as well by the use of
"stables.... horses
...harness.
The word gantlet is one of the many Scandinavian words that came into English during the Viking conquests: the practice of "running the gauntlet" involved running between two rows of men who struck the malefactor with sticks.
the areas:
A reference to the areas below the sidewalk level, in front of many
Dublin houses (and New York City brownstones as well). Today it is
perhaps most
familiar to Joyceans because of its role in Ulysses, in
the "Ithaca" episode (chapter ), in which Leopold Bloom has left
home without his key and must climb
over the railing and drop down into the area in order to gain access
to his house.
Mangan's sister :
Joyce could count on readers making the connection with the popular, but
sentimental and romantic 19th century Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan
(1803-1849). Mangan was himself fond of writing about "Araby," and even
though he knew no Arabic he claimed that some of his poems were
translations from Arabic. Joyce's use of "Mangan" is one of the strongest
supports for the theme of romanticism in the story, while at the same time
it serves to strengthen previous instances of hypocrisy and false
sentiment.
by the railings :
Here too, Joyce could count on Irish readers making a conscious or
unconscious connection with the railings in front of the Catholic Church.
Since the boy stands by the railing, the image of Mangan's sister becomes
one of the Virgin Mary (an image that will be played on and expanded a
few
pages later). The girl is, in his mind, the object of religious
veneration;
the boy does not recognize, and perhaps has repressed under religious
influence,
that he is sexually attracted to her. That recognition will come at the
end of the story, and is the cause of the boy's anguished tears.
soft rope of her
hair:
Appropriately, the young girl's last name (her
first name is never given) is Mangan, which comes from the
Gaelic word meaning abundant hair.
watching:
The young boy is, in effect, a peeping tom. At the same time the color
brown appears
again, a
color associated with the drabness of Dublin that is already affecting
the girl.
accompanied
me:
The major themes of Romantic Love, Religious Love, and Materialist Love
are combined wonderfully in this paragraph (as they will be again and
again
in the development of the story). The boy goes on a routine shopping trip
with his aunt, but in his mind
he turns it into a sacred adventure in the manner of a medieval quest for
the Holy Grail.
come-all-you:
These were street songs that were sung not only on the
streets but in pubs; they dealt with current popular events and heroes.
Jeremiah O'Donovan
(1831-1915) was a revolutionary who advocated the use
of violence in the struggle against British rule (his nickname was
"Dynamite").
Her name sprang to my
lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not
understand:
When the boy thinks of the girl he does so in religious
terms; note how the religious undertone is established by words associated
with religion, like "image", "litanies", "chalice", "adoration", etc. As
readers we again feel we know more than the narrator himself, for in this
paragraph, even as the boy repeatedly confesses to things he doesn't
understand, we have a deeper sense of all that the he doesn't understand
about himself and his situation.
wires:
The boy's confusion about love and sexuality is conveyed brilliantly here.
His choice of language is maudlin and even ridiculous, as when he
here defeats the destroys the mood of the fingers on the harp by calling
the
strings "wires". Joyce's control of language is particularly clear in
sentences like these, in which we recognize the young, confused voice
of the boy.
One evening:
Note how Joyce moves from one significant scene to another without
providing transitional paragraphs; the narrative does not try to represent
continuous time. A 19th century (i.e. pre-Modernist) would likely have
spelled out specific passages of time, but Joyce moves from point to point
without doing this -- note how the beginnings of the previous paragraphs,
and the next, fail to indicate the passage of time.
We don't know how many days or weeks have transpired during "Araby"; it is not important, as it would be to a 19th century writer. The pre-modernist sought verisimilitude by providing specific details about weather, clothing, food, views, houses, etc.; the modernist is not particularly interested in this. The modernist moves from one intense emotional moment to another, and of course this is one of the features that makes a modernist work more difficult than, for example, a Victorian novel.
into the back
drawing-room:
This paragraph presents the classic masturbatory situation for a young
boy: he is left alone in the house on a rainy evening. But his religious
training has so suppressed his sexual feelings that his
"senses seemed to
desire to veil themselves" (note the religious term -- veil --
associated
with nuns taking orders) and,
"feeling that I was about to
slip
from
them" (slip, obviously, into sexual activity) "
I pressed the palms of my
hands together until they trembled" (this apparently is a substitute
for
pressing his palms around his penis) and,
"murmuring"
(again, an
association with murmuring prayers in church)
"'O love! O
love!' many times."
The ejaculation here is a confused mixture of the religious and the sexual,
with the religious totally hiding the sexual in the mind/body of this
Dublin Irish Catholic boy.
she spoke to me:
Here is a good example of an important modernist technique: "Show, don't
tell". The boy is
stunned and confounded because she speaks to him; instead of stating that
the boy is stunned, the prose itself becomes stunned, i.e., fragmented.
This technique is used extensively in Joyce's Ulysses to
indicate
Leopold Bloom's states of feeling.
there would be a
retreat:
Joyce continues the religious strand of the story here, as the retreat
triumphs over the girl's desire; the twirling of the bracelets nicely
hints at the nervous sexual energy that is also suppressed by the
religious
obligation.
fighting
for their caps:
What is
being suggested here is the biblical scene of the Roman soldiers deciding
a fight over the possession of Christ's clothes by throwing dice. The
crucifixion image is furthered by the image of
spikes
(in Christ's hands
and feet) and the recollection of the picture of Mary bowing at the foot
of the cross.
light from the lamp:
Here Joyce continues the religiosity of the
passage of suggesting both a halo and a light streaming from heaven.
falling,
lit up the hand upon the railing:
This sentence strikingly melds the boys confused feelings of
religiosity and sensuality. Note particularly the use once more of
"railing" to suggest a church, surrounded by the words "falling" and
"fell" -- a suggestion of
the fall in the Garden of Eden that we have seen earlier and that will be
used numerous times throughout the story to suggest the boy's fall from
innocence. Note also the mixture of religious and sexual imagery
("white border of a
petticoat");
a combination that will reappear with the
girl from now on.
`It's well for you,':
The expression carries overtones of envy and bitterness which the boy
seems not to notice, so wrapped up in his own fantasy is he.
I will bring you
something.:
This is the foundation of the climax of the story; the boy
has made a sacred vow which he will be unable to fulfill. Again, the
quest of a medieval knight is suggested, even as the language demonstrates
again the boy's maudlin view of the situation.
laid waste my waking
and sleeping thoughts:
The romantic quest has taken precedence over everyday reality for the boy,
and is
destroying his ability to function. There is a hint of a new
understanding here, as the boy seems critical of his past; at the same
time
he seems to condemn his own feelings, which he still juxtaposes with
the serious
work of life. He will be
pulled down to earth at the end of the story. Joyce again makes use of
words suggesting the romantic enchantment of the Orient.
Freemason
affair:
Freemasonry, primarily a Protestant organization, is feared and
mistrusted by the Roman Catholics of this time and place. The Aunt, by
the way, is mistaken: the bazaar is a benefit for a Roman Catholic
Hospital. (Her error may be caused by the fact that a few years earlier
there was a bazaar sponsored by the Masons.)
I left the house in bad
humour:
Joyce communicates beautifully the confused turbulence of the boy's
feelings; we know he is upset, and that he knows he is upset, yet until
now he has externalized
all his anguish, speaking of the mood of the house, the
unpleasantness of the air and the deceitfulness of his
heart (as if it were
an object outside himself). Here he first speaks of an "I" in anguish,
and we sense from the repetition of "I" in the next paragraph that a
realization is coming.
brown-clad figure:
This is the third time in the story the word "brown" appears, and we have
an echo
of the earlier image of the girl as a religious
figure (bathed in lamplight, but note that the familiar railing has
disappeared!)
as well as a sexual one ("the border below the dress").
Mrs Mercer:
Joyce selects this name to continue the imagery and theme
of the mercantile and the mercenary, in the story. This effect is further
supported by making her the widow of a pawnbroker, as well as the fact
that she collects used stamps to sell for money to be given to the church.
Again, money is being associated with religion, as it was in the
paragraph in which the boy's shopping trip with his aunt is presented as
a religious quest. The ultimate irony at the conclusion of the story is
that what the boy thought of as a holy quest, to get a gift for the girl,
was actually a sordid mercantile affair based on the sexual rather than
the spiritual.
this night of Our
Lord:
The time is Saturday evening, and the Saturday evening church service
is dedicated to veneration of the Virgin Mary (in this story, the girl).
I could interpret these
signs:
As mentioned before, the modernist works by suggestion: by showing rather
than
telling. Instead of saying that the uncle has had too much to drink, the
reader is left to deduce this along with the boy as he interprets "these
signs" (i.e. the uncle talking to himself and clumsy handling of the hall
coat stand). But Joyce also uses this technique to show how the boy has
begun to interpret signs correctly, and this foreshadows his
final interpretation of his trip to Araby.
The Arab's Farewell to his
Steed:
"The Arab's Farewell to his Steed," by Caroline Norton (1808-77), was so
popular that Joyce could count on the association that the reader of
Araby would (consciously or unconsciously) make with the story he is
reading: the Arab boy sells for gold coins the thing that he loves the
most in the world, his horse. However, as the horse is being led away the
boy changes his mind and rushes after the man to return to money and
reclaim his love. The final stanza reads:
Who said that I had given thee up? Who said that thou wast sold?
'T is false! 't is false! my Arab steed! I fling them back their gold!
Thus - thus, I leap upon thy back, and scatter the distant plains!
Away! who overtakes us now shall claim thee for his pains.
(A further irony here, that contributes to the theme of dishonesty and deception, concerns the author of the poem. Caroline Norton had an affair with the British Home Secretary to Ireland, Lord Melbourne, and her husband in a sense "sold her" to that diplomat by his silent complicity in the arrangement for his own professional gain.)
a florin:
A florin (at the time equal to two shillings, or twenty-four old
pence) was a considerable
amount of money for this boy; he is going to spend it foolishly.
The florin originated in Florence during the Renaissance and had a
likeness of the Virgin Mary on one side and that of St. John the Baptist
on the other. Not only does this historical fact subtly support the
spiritual/financial theme of the story, but the late nineteenth-century
florin the boy carries has the image of the British Queen Victoria on one
side and the legend on the other: "by the grace of God, defender of the
faith." The odor of colonialism is pervasive here, as the Irish
Catholic must carry around a coin proclaiming the Queen as defender of
the British (Protestant) Church of England and as ruler over Ireland.
onward among
ruinous houses:
In many medieval tales, the knight errant journeys through a
wasteland in his search for the Holy Grail. T. S. Eliot
makes distinctive use of this and other aspects of the Grail legend
in his poem The Waste Land.
s
a special
train:
The boy is on quite a long journey for one his age: the fair is on the
other side of Dublin, a distance of about two miles. The paragraph is full
of indications that this is a special journey for him; that it ends with
his seeing the lighted dial
supports our expectation of the boy's coming realization (enlightenment?).
magical name:
Joyce spells out the mystical nature of the final goal of this quest.
a shilling:
The boy's determination and urgency causes him to be extremely rash in
spending a shilling when he could certainly have found a sixpenny entrance.
like that which
pervades a church:
Here it seems that Joyce doesn't quite trust his reader to make the
connection that the
interior of the bazaar is being compared to a church (e.g. "stalls",
"darkness")
and goes on to make the comparison explicit. But it is a church "after the
service," and so we're not sure what to expect; the mention of
a curtain
confirms the mystery.
Café
Chantant:
A French coffee house where entertainment is provided --
not exactly a high-class sort of establishment.
counting money:
The men counting money, in what is effectively a church, certainly
recalls Christ throwing the money changers out of the temple in
Matthew 21:12-13.
Note also the reappearance of the familiar term in "fall of the coins,"
which continues to suggest that the story is about the boy's fall.
a salver:
The plate on which sits the chalice that holds the wine for the mass;
the term comes from the fact that the plate served as a
savior for spilled wine. Here, it provides a particularly stark
image of the mixing of money and religion.
Remembering
with difficulty :
The brief scene is the turning point of the story, as everything goes
downhill for the boy from here. First, this special place he
has come to turns out to be enemy territory for the young Irishman, as the
British are running this bazaar. Note further that this brief snippet of
conversation is commonplace, ordinary, even vulgar in tone: the British
are vulgar, Ireland is vulgar (we have seen this in the character of the
boy's uncle and Mrs. Mercer), and the boy is vulgar in the sense that his
quest was not the spiritual journey he thought it was. Joyce further
stresses the theme of deception (including self-deception) in the story,
by having
the woman deny the accusers three times, thus recalling Peter's denial of
his association with Christ. (see
Matthew 26:69-75, as well as
Mark 14:66-72; Luke 22:54-62, and
John 18:16-27).
Given the significance of accent in Joyce's story, the account in Matthew is particularly relevant in that one of the accusers says to Peter, at verse 73, "Surely thou art also one of them, for thy speech betrayeth thee."
I knew my stay
was useless:
This scene is of the type that Joyce termed an epiphany. By that, he
meant a showing forth of mystical meaning or revelation in a seemingly
ordinary event or scrap of conversation. The Joycean epiphany, no matter
how seemingly insignificant the actual details, results in an alogical,
intuitive grasp of reality: a fragment of conversation or narrative
description reveals -- illuminates -- the soul or essence of a person or
event. (The term Epiphany comes from the Biblical scene is which the
Christ Child is revealed to the Magi, traditionally celebrated on January
6th.)
I saw myself:
The boy is totally defeated: his quest has failed and he has not achieved
his aim, which was to buy a present for the girl. But society has
defeated him
too, in the
form of British condescension toward the Irish. His own rashness has left
him with too little money for the purchase of a gift, even if one were
available, but most of all his own ego and self-deception have defeated
him in allowing him to think that his quest was a spiritual one.
A final accounting of the boy's financial standing proves ironic: he began with a florin (two shillings, i.e., 24 pence). The round trip ticket to the fare cost four pence in 1894. He spent one shilling (12 pence to enter the fair), he thus has eight pence left (the two and six in his pocket), which is all he would have had to spend for a present in any case.
Perhaps the mundane sexual overtones of the woman's flirtation with her accusers allows him to realize that the bazaar is a place of sexuality and materialism rather than spirituality. He realizes his own vanity, i.e., the futility of life in Dublin, his own worthlessness, his own foolishness, his unprofitable use of time, and the ridiculous high opinion he has of himself. He sees himself as the reader has seen him for some time, and he realizes that there is no Araby in Ireland.