James Joyce

James Joyce-A Brief Biography James Joyce is one of the most significant writers of modern times. He was born on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children. He was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College and at Belvedere College before going on to University College, Dubliln, then located on St Stephen’s Green, where he studied modern languages. Joyce went to Paris after graduation, and was recalled to Dublin by his mother’s fatal illness, then returned to the Continent in 1904 to teach English at Trieste and then at Zurich. He took with him Nora Barnacle, an educated girl with no interest in literature and the two lived in devoted companionship until Joyce’s death, though they were not married until In 1920 Joyce settled in Paris, where he lived until December 1940, when the war forced him to take refuge in Switzerland; he died in Zurich a few weeks later. Joyce wrote only and always about Dublin despite his almost life-long exile from his native Ireland. The Dublin of his experience and imagination was the setting of all his major works, which include Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Brief Introduction to “Araby” “Araby” is the third of the fifteen stories published in Dubliners which paints a portrait of life in Dublin, Ireland, at the turn of the twentieth century. The stories in this collection are arranged in an order reflecting the development of a child into a grown man. The first three stories are told from the point of view of a young boy, the next three from the point of view of an adolescent, and so on. “Araby” is the last story of the first set, and is told from the perspective of a boy just on the verge of adolescence. The story takes its title from a real festival which came to Dublin in 1894 when Joyce was twelve years old. 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. In this story, the unnamed boy has a romantic view of the world. He has a crush on a girl and goes to the Arabian bazaar to buy something for her. After a frustrating delay he arrives in the market very late, only to find that it is an ordinary and commercial place, without any mythical power. In the end, he is totally disillusioned, his innocent dream and noble quest crashed in front of the real world.

Question 1 Try to draw a mental picture of the North Richmond Street and the houses.

Answer 1 The description of North Richmond Street resembles a the scene in the church: that of an altar — the two- storey house standing at the blind end where the priest used to live — which is lined up by two rows of people — the two rows of houses along each side of the street facing each other.

Question 2 Please find the adjectives used to describe the dead priest’s room, the books, and the garden. What message do these images convey?

Answer 2 musty air, old useless papers, curled and damp pages, yellow leaves, straggling bushes, rusty bicycle-pump The room is long uninhabited, thus the air is “musty”. The garden is a mirror image of Eden; it is “wild” and deserted, with “straggling” bushes. These images strongly suggest the loss of faith and its consequence. The books and papers that the priest used to read are “old” with “curled and damp pages”, “yellow leaves”. Ironically, some books have sexual undertones, which indicate the hypocrisy of faith. The bicycle-pump, usually a symbol of male sex, is “rusty”, and thus impotent. All these images convey the idea that faith is lost, what prevails is bleakness and paralysis.

Question 3 Mangan’s sister is introduced as standing in the light. What is significant about this detail?

Answer 3 Against the dark background, this girl stands out as an image of whiteness, and an image of light. To the young boy, she is a symbol of hope, and inspiration, out of the enveloping darkness.

Question 4 Find the verbs used to describe the boy’s action. Can you identify with the boy’s feeling towards the girl? Please explain with your past experience.

Answer 4 Seeing her through the blinds, his heart “leaped”. He “ran” to the hall, “seized” his books and “followed” her. He followed her till near the point at which their ways diverged, then he “quickened” his pace and “passed” her. The boy is very nervous and timid. He wants to be near the girl desperately but dare not speak at all.

Question 5 In the boy’s imagination, is the girl merely a female figure? Or does the boy confuse his romantic feelings with his religious feelings? Please explain.

Answer 5 Previously the girl is portrayed as an image of purity and light, the exact image of Virgin Mary. Now the boy cherishes the love for her as a chalice and her name is on his lips of prayer. Obviously the boy is confusing his religious feelings with his crush for this girl. She is both beauty and holy, so his tender sentiments are mingled with or confused by a sense of worship and awe.

Question 6 Please read paragraphs 5 and 6 carefully. To present the boy’s surge of emotions, what does the writer say about the boy’s lips, eyes, bosom, body, hands and senses? Can you identify with the boy’s passion?

Answer 6 His feelings are so strong and uncontrollable that the girl’s name will “spring” to his lips, his eyes are often “full of tears” and his bosom is overwhelmed with a “flood” of emotion. He feels his body is like a “harp” while her words and gestures are like fingers playing on it. While listening to the rain drizzling in darkness, he feels that his senses seem to “desire to veil themselves” and, feeling that he is about to slip from them, he presses the palms of his hands together until they tremble, murmuring: "O love! O love!" many times.

Question 7 How is the girl portrayed?

Answer 7 Again she is portrayed as an image of light and softness. She wears a silver bracelet; her neck is white; her dress has a white border of a petticoat. The light in which she stands plays up her softness and purity.

Question 8 How does paragraph 16 depict the boy as being indulged in his own world of fantasy?

Answer 8 The boy tries to shut himself off from the outside world. He shuts his ears to his friends’ “weakened” and “indistinct” cries down in the street; and he sees nothing but “the brown-clad figure cast by” his “imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress”. In a word, he is blind in his love, totally lost in it.

Question 9 What is significant about the fact that the boy lives with his uncle and aunt, not with his parents?

Answer 9 The fact that the boy lives with relatives strengthens his sense of loneliness. He is living in a world of his own, and nobody seems to understand him. The uncle does not realize how much agony his negligence causes in the boy who is counting the seconds to wait for his return and get the money for the trip to Araby.

Question 10 Why does Joyce include the scene in which a young lady is talking and laughing with two young men? What effect does this have on the boy?

Answer 10 The talk is a dramatic contrast and anticlimax to the boy’s big expectations. It totally dissipates the boy’s romantic feelings about Araby, which turns out to be nothing but a market, vulgar and trivial.

Question 11 How does the boy feel in the end of the story?

Answer 11 The boy feels disillusioned with the reality and very angry with himself. He sees himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”. He is left in the darkness, in anger and agony.

General Question 1 In the opening paragraph, the street is described as “blind”; and in the end, the boy begins to “see” himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”. How is the metaphor “blindness” thematically relevant?

Answer 1 The boy is blind in his fantasy and fervor about the girl and Araby, in a desolate and drab setting of Dublin. He imagines himself seeking light and truth in a world of darkness, but only to be disillusioned in the end, to feel the pains of growing. The boy’s journey to Araby registers his transformation from blindness to (in)sight. In the end, his eyes are opened to the adult world. Besides this, the boy’s relatives and friends’ being blind to the boy’s loneliness, sensitivity, and suffering, the girl’s being blind to his secret worship, all serve to add to the weight and heaviness the boy must have felt in growing up.

General question 2 In the story, Joyce creates a dull and drab background for the boy’s quest for beauty and romance, embodied in both the girl and Araby. How does Joyce relate the girl and the bazaar togeher besides the fact that the boy intends to buy something for the girl in the bazaar?

Answer 2 Both the girl and Araby are given religious dimension. The girl is portrayed as an image of light and purity, very much in the image of Virgin Mary. For the boy, the girl’s name comes in strange prayers and praises. Araby is heavily associated with the mysteries and miracles of the East, which are expected to be essentially different from the spiritual paralysis and religious hypocrisy in Dublin. So the boy’s romantic love and religious love are subtly and inextricably intertwined.

General question 3 Joyce is famous for creating characters who undergo an epiphany — a sudden moment of insight. Do you see similarities between the epiphany in this story and that in Porter’s story “The Grave”?

Answer 3 The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek word “epiphaneia” which means appearance, manifestation. “Epiphany” is usually a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something. Similar epiphany occur in the two stories. The main character either opens his eyes (the boy’s seeing himself “as a creature driven and derided by vanity”) or has a vision (Miranda’s seeing her brother Paul standing in the sunlight “turning the silver dove over and over in his hands”). For the boy, his previous state is blindness and ignorance; for Miranda, her previous state is long repressed memory of the childhood. So although the boy’s realization is a result of a trip to a bazaar, Miranda’s comes after twenty years and a life in a foreign country, the epiphany they experience is similar, in which it is sudden and illuminating, a mark of initiation, from innocence to experience.

A Website of James Joyce