This is Deeper Stories, and I’m Thaddeus Thomas. If you enjoy this podcast, visit me at thaddeusthomas.com and gain access to my entire library at books.thaddeusthomas.com. Today, we continue our analysis of the stories in Dubliners.
I enjoy Carl Jung more as an idea than a reality, and that attitude reflects my issues with literary analysis as well. Imagine the Judge from Blood Meridian, jotting down all the wonders of the world in his little notebook to claim ownership over them, writing down unique discoveries only to destroy the original so only his interpretation remains. It may not be fair, but I get that feeling with Jung categorizing the unconscious and with many critics analyzing literature. It takes something expansive and makes it small, definite, and easy to control. The color brown symbolizes the drabness of Dublin and the empty house, lost dreams. It all sounds like Jung prescribing archetypes and letting all the wonder out of the balloon of possibility.
It’s not fair of me. I know. It’s an emotional reaction.
I’ve talked before about how I want to approach the analysis of literature, and that is pulling out the themes and meaning of the text and then discussing how the symbolism bolsters that meaning. Outside of that frame work, assigning meaning to symbols feels prescriptive instead of descriptive. Look back at our study of Virginia Woolf’s story, A Haunted House. Both analyses I listened to focused on the eternal nature of love as the story’s theme, and I’m not saying they were wrong. That’s as good an approach to the story as any, but they never demonstrated a reasoning for that meaning within the narrative. They see the two ghostly lovers, and that MUST be the meaning. It simply is. Now, you may entirely disagree with my conclusions, but you’ll know how I got there.
Speaking of A Haunted House, whenever possible, I include an audio of the stories. The Librivox for these stories has been wonderful, so I’ve gone with that. One day, I’ll need to start recording them, myself, but I’m delaying that as much as possible. As far as textual readings, I include the text as posts hear on my site, but there’s another option. Web-based books for everything we analyze here can be found in the Deeper Stories Library, as long as we’re analyzing something in the public domain. It’s a really good reading experience, if you’re going to read online, and so I encourage you to visit books.thaddeusthomas.com and see for yourself.
But what about Araby?
Last time I broke Araby down into a structure that began with the boys’ “othering” play in their neighborhood; continued with the trip to the market, where the narrator imagines he’s protecting the treasure of the girl’s name from a throng of enemies, as if she were the Chalice of Christ; and ended with boy’s delayed departure and disappointed arrival to the Araby. In between the play and the market place, the girl is introduced:
Or if Mangan's sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan's steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.
Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. 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.
Key symbolic moments that jump out at me:
I kept her brown figure always in my eye
her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood
I hinted earlier that the repeated use of the word “brown” is seen as part of the disparaging way Joyce depicts Dublin. Later, Joyce will write:
I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.
Mangan’s sister is dressed in brown. The houses on their street “gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.”
And that’s it.
In the whole of the story, the word “brown” is used three times, once for the houses, and twice for the girl over whom the narrator is infatuated.
An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
The house at the end of the street is empty, but the other houses are aware of the “decent lives within them.” Decent lives.
We know so much about Joyce, I believe there’s a tendency to assign his displeasure to every story attribute. The word brown here is a choice. The house on the end of the street, the dead end, the blind street, is the only detached house, and it stands empty. These things are symbolic but also real (excluding it standing empty. I don’t know about that.) It’s a red-brick house that stands alone at the end of the street, separate from the brown-brick terraces on either side of the road—and the terraces face each other directly, looking very much as if the buildings are staring at each other. Reality can hold meaning, but this description is true-to-life.
This brings me back to the object of our narrator’s affection. If she wore brown because the renters on the street dressed in the colors they could afford, and if this was historically accurate, it’s still a choice to repeat the word. I’m going to reject the “dull” or “drab” interpretation, however. No, I’m going to suggest that the repeated use of the word connects the girl to the houses in which they live. She is a part of this world, but when she stops to address him, she asks about the Araby, something suggestive of another world entirely.
At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said she would love to go.
"And why can't you?" I asked.
While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.
"It's well for you," she said.
"If I go," I said, "I will bring you something."
This is a story of the the things that hold us back, and the illusory nature of the things we desire. The girl is held back by the religious retreat. The boy is held back from the Araby by his uncle’s thoughtlessness. He’s held back from the girl by his own youth and inexperience. The Araby isn’t what he dreamed it would be, which can suggest…
Last time I said:
What this vanity is, we’re not explicitly told, but I don’t see this as a realization about the nature of his relationship with the girl. He was infatuated, paralyzed by his own youthful fear, unable to approach, and this bazaar became his way to interact and win her favor. With that frustrated, his hopes are dashed. This isn’t an adult insight into the shallowness of his desire but a confrontation with the indifference of home and the misrepresented nature of the broader world.
Nor is he now regretting his neglect of his studies. He is, however, seeing his own impotence and the disappointing reality of the bazaar he’d built up so much in his mind. He’d once imagined himself as the guardian of his true love’s name, carrying it faithfully through a throng of foes, but all he finds are indifferent English teenagers. Everything else is cut off from him, and there’s nothing left but to go home.
“I don’t see this as a realization about the nature of his relationship with the girl.” Yet, now, I’ve said that this is a story about the things which hold us back and the illusory nature of that which we desire. This is true of the Araby, and we, as readers, understand the truth as it applies to his infatuation. We’ve been through that stage of life, and we know this realization he has now in part he will soon have in whole.
In the last analysis, I mentioned the symbolism of the cross in the section where he talks to the girl while the other boys gamble. It would tie in to the religious nature of the event that holds the girl back, but if it’s there, it is cloaked in the youthful love of the movement. Those details may suggest angelic motifs, but our narrator is entirely enraptured with her beauty. This is a sublime moment, set on the stairs of the terraces where Joyce lived in his youth. The importance of this moment to me isn’t the possible religious symbolism but the way the girl is elevated in his eyes, much as is the Araby, both temporarily covered in a fading halo.
The resonance of the story isn’t in its symbolism but in the emotions captured as the boy wrestles with his infatuation, impatience, and disappointment. Readers identify with this moment in his life, and if you’re looking to understand the meaning of the work, begin there.
Araby, by James Joyce: Digging Deeper