Analysis: An Encounter
By James Joyce, 1914
Note: An audio version of this analysis is also available.
In teasing the analysis of An Encounter (by James Joyce, Dubliners, 1914), I’ve taken to calling it the Stephen King of James Joyce stories. School boys skip school to go on their first great adventure and find something disturbing waiting for them at journey’s end. All the motifs of a proto-Stephen-King are there and bring to mind The Body, the story on which the movie Stand by Me was based.
This, however, is not Stephen King.
Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that [Joe Dillon] had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true.
Joe Dillon is the older boy who introduces our narrator and friends to Old West war-play and dime novels, of which the narrator is most fond of the detective stories. Some of these books have literary aspirations, he says, but even so, they’re kept hidden. Some of his love for these tales of adventure is chilled when the teacher catches Joe’s little brother Leo with one of the books. Still, that hunger remains, and finally the narrator, Leo, and a boy named Mahony decide to skip school for one day and find adventure for themselves away from home.
It’s important that Joe, the boy who introduced the group to the fantasy of being men of adventure, himself becomes a priest, and you’ll find plenty of suggested symbolism in that choice. Without saying any of those ideas are wrong, I want to focus on what this means for the narrative. It acts as a counterpoint to the teacher’s tirade at finding Leo’s book. The boy behind it all becomes a religious leader, and while that might not be the highest calling as far as Joyce is concerned, it is in the eyes of that Catholic schoolteacher. It suggests that raucous play, popular literature, and dreams of wild adventure are a natural part of childhood, no matter what the classroom authority believes.
When the day comes, Leo Dillon doesn’t show, and our narrator and Mahony set off alone on their adventure. After they’ve harassed some kids and moved on, the children call after them, “Swaddlers!” supposing they were Protestants. The ignorance people have in regard to their own beliefs in a theme with Joyce. In the Dead, a good portion of the conversation focuses on an order of monks the party guests say have the custom of sleeping in their coffins, which wasn’t true. Here, the insult is nearly two centuries old, and began circa the 1730’s when Irish Catholics heard Methodist John Cennick preach on the infant Christ wrapped in swaddling-clothes, which is a Biblical reference. His audience thought he made it up.
Now the boy see the world and feel the influence of school and home fade away. After taking a ferry, they buy a little lunch before continuing on. They never make their destination, however. The Pigeon House served many functions over the years. During the building of the Great South Wall, it served as lodging for the workers. Later, it became a restaurant and hotel. Then it was a military fort and finally a facility for processing sewage and generating power. Joyce said in a letter than the theme of the stories in Dubliners was the paralysis that overtakes a city, and the stories follow chronological periods in a person’s life with this one particularly focused on youth. The Pigeon House becomes a symbol of a fall from former glory. Their failure to even reach this goal becomes its own symbol. However, we cannot fully understand the paralysis suggested in the story until the journey reaches its climax.
People see suggestions of pederasty in The Sisters. I don’t, but my approach to these stories is fairly simple and narrative-centered. If there is any author where that’s a dangerous approach, it’s Joyce. I trust the experts in they’re educated insights. My only intention here is to tell you what I see and what I think we can gain from it. What might be hidden in The Sisters is plain as day in An Encounter.
“I say…He's a queer old josser!”
They meet a creepy old man. Mahony wanders off, more out of boredom and immaturity than anything, it seems, but while the narrator can’t raise his eyes to see for himself, Mahony reacts to something the man does, off on his own, at the edge of the field. My take is he’s taking a piss out in the open, and I say this because his actions shock Mahony. Yet, I don’t think he’s stepped aside to touch himself sexually in anyway. I say this because Mahony reacts by calling him a queer old josser, and josser is slang for a masturbator. It would be too on the nose.
The man starts off by asking about their sweethearts and fawning over the idea of being a boy again. These boys are out fantasizing about being men, and this man is fantasizing about being a boy. I think this is the heart of the paralysis in this story. The call to adventure is natural, but their choice to act on it has put them in a precarious position. The man has his own fantasies which threaten their safety and his freedom. It’s a perverted version of the conversation in The Dead where the singers of the past are venerated as if no one can sing anymore. It’s a failure to live in the present. The boys, living in the future, put themselves at risk. The man, living in the past, becomes perverted and stands on the edge of crime and ruin.
The creepiness climaxes with him talking about how boys need a spanking. The narrator finally gets away and calls to Mahony.
He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.
Mahony is repeatedly shown as the less mature of the two, and I think this is the meaning behind the narrator despising him. The narrator stays within reach of danger far too long. He is a child trying to convince himself he belongs in the world of men. He doesn’t trust his own discomfort telling him to run. Mahony represents that childishness he hates but that now rushes back to save him.
But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.
The narrator had come for an adventure, eagerly anticipating the uprooting events that we seek to avoid at home where routine is the rule of the day. I suspect he was so afraid of running away from adventure that he failed to trust his own instincts. He’s paralyzed by the fear of being unprepared for adulthood.
As a writer, I note that Joyce is mimicking the flow of the very adventure stories his characters read in secret, and truly, once they left home, they could have discovered anything. What Joyce wanted them to discover, and to uncover for us, was Dublin. This familiarity of form left the story feeling empty on my first reading. Two boys go on an adventure and meet a creepy old man. The end. While some stories leave you with the feeling that there’s more than what you first see, An Encounter had me thinking I’d seen all there was. On repeat readings, I found meaning, and I wonder if the initial shallowness was a fault of my reading or just the nature of the form and its many permutations over the years. I saw another hero’s journey, and that’s all I saw.
Strikingly, there’s less of an obvious plot in The Sisters, and maybe that’s part of what suggested a deeper meaning. But no, I think it’s more about the questions the stories ask in the beginning. The Sisters give us a character mystery. The initial mystery of this story is will they go off and have an adventure? I think it boils down to the question the beginning of the story asks.
This also has me wondering how the end relates to the beginning. The old man makes me think of the teacher, but there’s no relationship between them. No, the parallel is between the old man and Joe Dillon, an older boy who plays rough with the younger boys, introduces them to fantasies of adventure, and then studies to be a priest. One side shows us the distinct change from childishness to maturity. The other shows us the end of maturity, looking back with longing for his boyhood.
The story’s question that is answered in the end then comes from the opening paragraphs about Joe Dillon. I just couldn’t see it.
We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one.
This line introduces the problem that results in his delayed escape in the end. The difference is clarity. The Sisters is easy to spot, at least in the 1914 version. I could only see this one in hindsight.
Also see:
Audio: Analysis: An Encounter, 1914