Digging Deeper: Picturing "An Encounter"
Understanding the story's journey
Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes.
—James Joyce, “An Encounter”
A “Digging Deeper” Episode of Deeper Stories
An Encounter presents us with a taste of Dublin along the wharf. This is the adventure of boyhood, only a few miles from home and yet a world away, and as you take a closer look at the city involved, like with Joyce’s narrator, “the geography which had been scantily dosed.. [will take] substance.”
We were to meet at ten in the morning on the Canal Bridge… We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House…In the morning I was firstcomer to the bridge as I lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank… I sat up on the coping of the bridge… and watching the docile horses pulling a tramload of business people up the hill. All the branches of the tall trees which lined the mall were gay with little light green leaves and the sunlight slanted through them on to the water. The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.
Note: some of the orange marking is lost along The Warf Road but I’ll trust the reader to extrapolate.
The narrator waits for Mahony at the Newcomen bridge. I’ve marked what may be the narrator’s approach in red but all we know for sure is he came along the canal road.
When I had been sitting there for five or ten minutes I saw Mahony's grey suit approaching. He came up the hill, smiling, and clambered up beside me on the bridge…
They cross the Royal Canal via the Newcomen bridge.
Image credit: By Javilara001 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road.
Vitriol Works: a fertilizer company, mostly likely, which used sulfuric acid, otherwise known as oil of vitriol. The East Wall Road is the current name of what was The Warf Road in Joyce’s time and it runs atop the wall built along the River Tolka to prevent flooding.
Image Source: Wikimedia
They follow it along the coast.
When we came to the Smoothing Iron we arranged a siege; but it was a failure because you must have at least three.
A forge stood on that spot, and the land retained the name “Smoothing Iron” even after the forge was gone. According to this 1931 entry in The Irish Times, the smith would brag it produced iron that was “the smoothest in the world”, and thus received its name.
We came then near the [Liffey River]. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines… It was noon when we reached the quay and as all the labourers seemed to be eating their lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping beside the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin's commerce—the barges signaled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay.
At the Liffey River they catch a ferry. Link: Some historic pictures of the ferry. It’s a smaller vessel, carrying people only, and this trip includes only five passengers, including the boys.
When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers' shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live. We could find no dairy and so we went into a huckster's shop and bought a bottle of raspberry lemonade each.
Their goal is the Pigeon House, which I discuss in the main analysis.
It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the Pigeon House. We had to be home before four o'clock lest our adventure should be discovered. Mahony looked regretfully at his catapult and I had to suggest going home by train before he regained any cheerfulness.
Images Source: ESB Archives
They had a long leg of their journey still ahead of them and decided, instead, to take the train back.
Image source: joyceproject.com
There were originally big guns stationed at the end of the sea wall, but that wasn’t the Pigeon House. It’s located about halfway along the wall.
Image Source: Library of Congress
I wonder if in their minds, the Pigeon House retained the mythic quality of its military days, and if that fantasy would have been lost had they reached their intended end. They had a mind for adventure and dreams of the wild west and detective stories. They pursued a fortress and would have found a…
I was going to say “sewage processing and power generating facility”, but it didn’t become a generating station until 1902-3. It remained a fort until the late 19th century. By the time Joyce wrote the story, Pigeon House was in its first years as a power station. Our fictional adventurers had set out to see a city landmark on the brink of transition, much like the old west of the stories no longer really existed except in stories. The journey of our dreams is the adventure of a previous generation, and we are tourists among the spectacle of their decay.
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