The Encounter in Joyce's "An Encounter"

Abstract

Just as Ernest Jones used ancient and Frenaissance works like Oedipus and Hamlet to validate the twentieth-cent Lry insights of Sigmund Freud, so also might Jones have used James Joyce's brilliant short story, An Encounter. For An Encounter, although it was written before Joyce read Freud,' is, in its subtlest images, gestures, and speeches, perhaps Joyce's most thoroughly Freudian work. The story of two ostensibly ordinary young boys playing hooky from grade school, An Encounter ends with its young narratorprotagonist rather surprisingly confessing that he has always despised ... a his hooky-playing pal, Mahony. Answering the question why the narrator so despises Mahony becomes the key critical task to understanding the story and to appreciating its Freudian essence. That a reasonably sensitive, intelligent, and imaginative person such as the narrator would naturally despise . .. a the rather callous, crude, and cruel Mahony-who bullies smaller children, is cruel to animals, and is rude to older people-is certainly part of the answer. However, Joyce's story suggests a considerably more complex and universal answer: that the narrator's despising Mahony a little is an unconscious, symbolic confession of the age-old antipathy (an antipathy deriving from a mixture of repulsion and attraction, of contempt and envy) that the man of thought feels for the man of action; the man of imagination for the man of common sense; the man of conscience for the man of instinct; the civilized man for the primitive man. Thus, in An Encounter, the major conflict is between the values represented by the narrator and those represented by Mahony, and, at its essence, the