Joyce's Story Research Articles

"Waiting for Gabriel": A Review of Epiphany, a One-Act play by Brian Watkins, the American Premiere at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York, 26 May-24 July 2022

"Waiting for Gabriel":A Review of Epiphany, a One-Act play by Brian Watkins, the American Premiere at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York, 26 May-24 July 2022 Richard J. Gerber Samuel Beckett might have been pleased. But Joyce … well, not so much. Like Godot in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Gabriel Conroy is a no-show in Brian Watkins's one-act play Epiphany, a riff on Joyce's short story "The Dead," which had its American premiere at Lincoln Center in New York this past summer. The world premiere was presented by the Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland, back in 2019. As long as Gabriel was not appearing, however, the producers might have spared American audiences this play, as well as the trip across the Atlantic. While Gabriel's non-appearance is one of several clever and intriguing ideas in the play, it is not the only thing missing from this re-visioning of "The Dead." There is no mention of Joyce's story in the publicity or the playbill for Epiphany. And, while the acting is generally adequate, aside from the AWOL Gabriel and a tepid Freddy Malins, none of the characters in this play carry the names, recite the lines, nor retain other attributes of the figures we are all so familiar with in "The Dead." Aunt Kate, for instance, is renamed just "Morkan," and she is the central figure here. None of this matters since audiences are blissfully unaware of Epiphany's connections with "The Dead" anyway; Joyce would probably have been happy with that. The dialogue that has been substituted in this play for his elegiac language can only, ironically, be described in one word: deadly. Most of the conversation in Epiphany consists of solipsistic philosophizing, sophomoric psychologizing, and handwringing blather, especially by Morkan. That all said, it is relevant to recall that "The Dead" has served as inspiration for multiple reputable versions, ranging from a movie to a musical, and even an opera and more. Each of these has had its strong points and points that were less strong. So a brief account of some of the more interesting aspects of Epiphany that are related to "The Dead"—not the story line itself, really, nor the dialogue—might best serve readers of this review. The almost-in-the-round Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater affords the entire audience an opportunity easily to view all the actors as they make their way in and out and around the stage. Many of the characters' lines are spoken simultaneously, however, so, while they can always be seen, they cannot always be heard over one another. The set [End Page 573] is dramatic; a tri-level staircase dominates. Watkins has spoken about the staircase's importance to his play, alluding to heaven and hell as the characters ascend and descend. Snow is falling continuously throughout the play, cast against a black backdrop seen through two large windows at the rear. The snow looked real, so I found myself periodically wondering how much of it was piling up backstage during the course of the show; but it could have been a very good screen. Like Joyce's story, Epiphany has three theatrical movements, although, unlike "The Dead," they all occur during the dinner party; there is no travel to the Gresham Hotel and no final scene there. The opening third of the play has eight guests arriving sequentially, in singles and pairs, with each speculating about the purpose of the gathering and the meaning of "epiphany" as they enter. Morkan has each of the guests surrender his or her cell phone to a lockbox as soon as they arrive; the phones ring on and off, simultaneously, during the show, tempting the guests to retrieve them. Two of the guests are gay black men. One weepy woman is a sort of combined Lily and Mary Jane, welcoming guests and assisting with the service of food and drink. Another particularly annoying and talkative guest is a female journalist, perhaps a stand-in for Molly Ivors; she proceeds to get drunk before dinner is served. Several of the other guests drink too much as well, thereby...

The Potentiality of Paralysis in Joyce’s “Counterparts”

The scrivener presents a curious case—writing the law and bringing it into existence via the material reproduction of legal instruments. Our most famous literary example is Melville's Bartleby, forever immortalized by his listless refusal: "I'd prefer not to." Yet near on fifty years after Melville, Joyce conceived another scrivener, neglected by comparison: Farrington from the Dubliners story, "Counterparts." Though critics have noted how Farrington is shot through with the "hemiplegia or paralysis" Joyce claimed lay in the soul of Dublin, few have considered paralysis as a concept containing the opposite—a catatonic moment of potential, rendered aesthetic by Joyce's story. Drawing on Agamben's conception of potentiality, this paper takes Joyce's scrivener beyond the realist critique of the ennui of the imperial subject to explore how Farrington reveals a double potential: the potential of the paralyzed colonial subject; and the potential of thinking with contemporary critical theory to see paralysis not as an end, foreclosure, or stasis, but an aesthetic rendering of contingency.

Corley's Aspirations and Gumley's Dreams in "Eumaeus"

Aspirations and Gumley's Dreams in 'Eumaeus' examines the narrative function and semiotic implications of John Corley's presence in Ulysses. Synthesizing a wide survey of criticism on Eumaeus, the essay grounds its analysis in Corley's location in Dublin and in his Homeric parallel with Melanthius, the goatherd disloyal to Odysseus. As he enters the novel situated between Dublin's red-light district and the cabman's shelter, Corley's raison d'etre becomes illuminated by several major themes in the episode established by previous criticism: deceptive signification, alienated labor, empty monetary value, and homoeroticism. Through this framework, I argue that may be working as a male prostitute or at least posing as one. The Dublin Castle scandal and Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 provide historical context for male prostitution in the era, and analysis of Joyce's story Two Gallants links to the Ascendancy in the Castle and highlights the significance of his name. The essay uses Michael Riffaterre's theories of literary production to cast Corley as an emblematic name that assists in generating the plot of the episode, and analysis of linguistic and metaphorical aspects of Corley's name further inform his role in the novel. Understanding Corley's aspirations in this light also elucidates Gumley's narrative function and the bond between Bloom and Stephen.

Delivering culturally sensitive, sexual health education in western Kenya: a phenomenological case study

While generic programmes have been created to raise sexual health awareness, these cannot always be applied to communities whose cultures and circumstances make them especially vulnerable to infection. Taking a phenomenological approach, this paper examines the circumstances of the Gusii people of Kisii, Kenya, and examines the specific challenges of providing sexual health education to the community as experienced by an ethnic Gusii woman, Joyce Ombasa. Joyce's story reveals that the Gusii living in and around rural villages have several cultural characteristics that make them susceptible to HIV/AIDS and that render community health education problematic, especially if offered by a female educator of the same ethnicity. Women cannot teach men. Discussions of sex and condom use, and viewing the naked bodies of the opposite sex are taboo. Promiscuity is commonplace and there is a reluctance to use condoms and to undergo HIV testing. Female circumcision persists and there is a high rate of sexual violence, incest and intergenerational sexual intercourse. In addition, government policies and legislation threaten to exacerbate some of the sexually risky behaviours. Bringing HIV education and female empowerment to the rural Gusii requires a culturally sensitive approach, discarding sexual abstinence messages in favour of harm minimisation, including the promotion of condom use, regular HIV testing and the rejection of female circumcision and intergenerational sex. Trust needs to be built through tactics such as adopting a complex and fluid outsider identity and replacing formal sex education with training in income generating skills and casual discussions regarding condoms and sexual health.

Joyce's City: History, Politics, and Life in "Dubliners" by Jack Morgan

Reviewed by: Joyce's City: History, Politics, and Life in "Dubliners" by Jack Morgan David Spurr (bio) JOYCE'S CITY: HISTORY, POLITICS, AND LIFE IN "DUBLINERS," by Jack Morgan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. 186 pp. $60.00. Jack Morgan's elegant and enlightening study of Dubliners is the most recent in what appears to be a historicist turn in the study of James Joyce's early book of short stories. Looking back on the two decades that immediately preceded and followed the turn of the twenty-first century, one is struck by the extent to which the study of Dubliners was dominated by ethical and narratological readings. R. B. Kershner's Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature stressed both the performative nature of Joyce's stories and the extent to which his characters were caught within conflicting sets of discourses and ideologies.1 In 1993, Garry M. Leonard's Reading "Dubliners" Again proposed a psychonalytic perspective which focused on stylistic shifts in the stories.2 The subtitle of Tanja Vesala-Varttala's 1999 study of Dubliners, Ethical Probing of Reading, Narrative, and Textuality speaks for itself.3 Finally, Margot Norris's Suspicious Readings locates those strategies of conflict and occlusion in Joyce's stories that oblige the narrator, and even the reader, to play an interpretive role which frequently includes an ethical dimension.4 In contrast to an earlier generation of formalist readings, what all of these works have in common is the interpretation of an interplay between narrative form and the ethical implications of Joyce's fiction. Such interpretations have their roots in a long tradition; we learn lessons and make judgments about stories based on what we are told or not told about what fictional persons do or not do. What changes through the passing of time are the ethical frameworks of the lessons we draw and the judgments we make. In contrast to this preoccupation with ethical interpretations, [End Page 439] what I am calling the turn toward historicism takes the view that the deepest understanding of Joyce's first published work of fiction is to be found in the dense network of its allusions to the cultural and historical contexts of Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century. In keeping with this view, Frank Shovlin's Journey Westward: Joyce, "Dubliners" and the Literary Revival takes up such apparently marginal subjects as the role of whiskey distilleries in the Irish economy or the survival of Jacobitism into Joyce's day.5 Morgan works in the same way, proposing what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call a "thick description" of a seemingly minor incident or ritual in order to show how its meanings resonate throughout the world Joyce evokes.6 This kind of work has the virtue of bringing new and relevant historical knowledge to bear on Joyce's work. Two different readings of Joyce's story "Clay" offer a striking contrast between the ethical and historicist interpretations outlined above. Norris argues that Maria, the middle-aged, unmarried woman at the center of the story, is a victim of the class and gender ideologies that stigmatize her as an "old maid" (140), even if the narrator fails to acknowledge this designation. When, in the Hallow Eve divination game toward the end of the story, the blindfolded Maria chooses the saucer with "a soft wet substance" (D 105), Norris finds that a trick has been played on her, one which unjustly reaffirms her lowly status as an object of ridicule. In reading the same episode, Morgan is more interested in the nature of the Hallow Eve game as a vestige of pagan Irish folklore. He finds the real issue to be the attempt to reappropriate and sanitize the ritual in the name of bourgeois Catholic values. At the time when the story takes place, the augury game included saucers containing a ring, a prayer book, water, or clay—respectively symbolic of expected marriage, a religious vocation, fertility, and death. Morgan points out that the prayer book must be a late addition to the ancient Celtic practice (94). When Mrs. Donnelly scolds the next-door girls for having imported garden dirt for the death option, her attitude reflects...

An "Unworkable Compound": Ireland and Empire in "Eveline"

James Joyce's "Eveline" poses the question of Ireland's identity within the British Empire in indirect but powerful terms. In its depiction of Eveline's paralyzing suspension between home and world, Joyce's story echoes the contemporary cultural nationalist diagnosis of modern Ireland as an "unworkable compound" of imperial and national affinities. Joyce, however, presents this unworkable compound as a constitutive condition of modern Irish life, not an inauthentic imposition. "Eveline" thus highlights what is distinctive about Joyce's representation of Ireland and empire, as Joyce dramatizes how ordinary Irish people experienced that relationship in all its varied aspects of participation and subordination.

Disordered collarettes and uncovered tables: Negative polarity as a stylistic device in Joyce's “Two Gallants”

Abstract This article examines the use of negative polarity as a stylistic device in James Joyce's short story, “Two Gallants” (1992 [1914]). The article begins with a brief account of various approaches to negative polarity, focusing in particular on theoretical paradigms that favour the pragmatic functions of negative constructions in context. After this theoretical overview, the various approaches are applied to an analysis of Joyce's story, in the course of which it is demonstrated that although negatives are not a salient feature of the text they are nevertheless a significant meaning-making resource worth considering in analyses of literature. In particular the article aims to demonstrate how the linguistic theory of polyphony known as ScaPoLine would be a useful tool for those who wish to understand and describe the various voices that are coded by negatives and the way negative polarity is, accordingly, at times intimately connected to focalisation and narrative perspective.

Ethicism and the Aesthetics of Autobiography: the relational aesthetic of J M Coetzee's Boyhood

Aesthetics has been neglected by theorists and scholars of autobiography, even though in our reading and teaching practices we make aesthetic judgments all the time. The new autobiographies we choose to read are usually those we believe will be ‘good’. What do we mean by ‘good’? Excellence in the purely technical aspects of the writer's craft will not satisfy us. When we begin by discussing aesthetics we often end up by talking about ethics. Wittgenstein once said that ‘aesthetics and ethics are one’. That points to the close connection between these areas of value. British philosopher Berys Gaut defends a thesis he calls ‘ethicism’. Ethicism is the view that morally commendable attitudes manifested by a work of art count towards its aesthetic merit, while ethically reprehensible attitudes count towards its aesthetic demerit. It follows from ethicism that if our ethical attitudes change over time then so will aesthetic standards. This view is tested out by examining the ending of J M Coetzee's memoir, Boyhood. The trajectory of the memoir, especially if read in tandem with Coetzee's second volumeYouth, looks at first glance like Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manwith the hero in flight from the entrapments of family connections and provincial life. But unlike the trajectory of Joyce's story, which heads the hero towards separation from his community and towards spiritual autonomy, Coetzee's ending follows a relational aesthetic that is connected to certain historical shifts that have taken place in the West in the late twentieth century. Overall my analysis is meant to illustrate the merits of ethicism, though I offer what I see as a more psychologically nuanced account of it than Gaut's.

What Will Become of Epiphanies? A Psychoanalytic Reading of James Joyce's “The Dead”

James Joyce's story, “The Dead,” is read in the tension between sameness, circularity, restraint, deadness as against possibilities for change, vitality, passion, and loving intimacy. The author plays two different readings of “The Dead” against each other to generate such tension in life and death struggles. Epiphanies are seen as beckoning us with the possibilities for radical transformation—an impossible illusion—but sufficient to tempt us to struggle against detachment, isolation, and restraint toward moments, of variable length, of intimate connectedness with ourselves and with others.

Huston's and Joyce's “The Dead”

Although much is amplified by John Huston's bold translation of James Joyce's story “The Dead” into film, and much is gained, important depths and subtleties of characterization are lost. A psychoanalytic perspective can help to specify what the story accomplishes that the film cannot.

Rounding up the Usual Suspects: A Response

At issue in many of the papers in this collection on James Joyce is the relationship between policing and pleasure, between regulation and transgression. Thus they inevitably raise the question of and test assumptions about what it is and its relationship to the truth. Starting from a sense of the genre defined by its etymological roots (literally, a writing about prostitutes), Margot Norris pinpoints the ways in which Two Gallants plays across our expectations. Joyce's story becomes a peculiar because it deals with reverse prostitutes, young women who perversely ruin themselves by paying for rather than earning from sex. Yet Two Gallants also rejects the pornographic turn it might have taken, by sticking with Lenehan instead of narrating Corley's seduction of the slavey, and so foregoing the very scene that would typically generate the pornographic effect. Garry Leonard's definition of is rather different. Considering the wider context for Stephen's aesthetic theory, he suggests that in its kinetic demands, and as a Lynch-like adversary, the city itself may be pornographic.' Rather than pervert or distort true human relationships, the implication is, the pornographic is quite literally obscene. It takes us beyond the scene of our own sensuality, beyond the disciplined, self-surveyed, and self-disciplined self of modern life. As if to ensure that he is not misunderstood, Leonard speaks of pornography in the non-pejorative sense. Clearly, definition is a tricky business. Colleen Lamos looks at the literature on flagellation, and Joseph Valente at The Police Gazette. Both show how, in those early twentieth century discourses, the lines between what deemed pornographic and what not could be disconcertingly blurred. The theorized version of this is articulated in the Modernist attack on censorship, which in Valente's words is a return to sender strategy: obscenity not just in but of the eye of the beholder, a defining property of the censorious gaze rather than its object. His essay, like Leonard's, identifies (as a historicized category) with the moment of Modernism. The work of contemporary historians like Lynn Hunt and Robert Darnton, however, which traces an even broader network of relations linking to democracy, print, and the novel, pushes the date of origin back to the eighteenth century in France, with England lagging a little behind. Pornography as a regulatory category, Hunt tells us, was invented in response to the perceived menace of the democratization of culture (12-13). Perhaps what is really being discussed here is the next stage: as a phenomenon of mass consumption. Certainly, that applies to the forms that

Not "Too Much Noise": Joyce's "The Sisters" in Irish Catholic Perspective

famous first story of Joyce's Dubliners is a triumph of technique as discovery.(1) All aspects of The Sisters delineate theme. Imagery, irony, structure, point of view, tone, archetypes, and underlying myths: they unite to delineate a human relationship distorted by inadequate love. Interpreters of the story have tended to take their lead from the three words that preoccupy the boy at the start: paralysis, and simony. Of these, the term most often discussed is gnomon, a parallelogram from which a section is missing. Most discussions of the word emphasize the missing section, often by way of morally criticizing the retired priest whom the boy, the narrator of the story, has been visiting. But a is not its missing section; it is what remains after the section has been removed: an irregular geometrical shape in which all lines have parallels. term gnomon may illuminate the structure of Joyce's story, which is a kind of parallelogram--or, at least, a constellation of parallels or correspondences.(2) These involve structure, imagery, and character. All the suggestive parallels in the story ultimately illuminate the central correspondence between the boy and the priest. This correspondence derives its meaning from a subtle interrelationship of psychology, Catholic liturgical form and theology, scriptural myth, and Irish colloquial idiom--an interrelationship that must be appreciated if the story is to be fully understood. obvious initial parallel is between the priest and the distillery worker, who is talking with the boy's uncle when the boy learns of the priest's death. Cotter and the priest are both old. Both tell stories. priest is a spiritual man by profession and no doubt to some degree personally. So is Cotter, but in a secular sense. He works or worked in a distillery producing 'spirits' and is red-nosed, a drinker (11). Redness is an association shared with the priest, whose surname, Flynn, is Gaelic for 'red.' two men have been rivals for the boy's attention. Formerly, old Cotter's distillery stories had been rather interesting to the boy, who now considers Cotter a tiresome old fool (11). Recently the priest has enjoyed the boy's attention and companionship. Cotter may resent having lost the boy as audience to the priest. For that reason, Cotter's hesitant criticism of the priest and the boy's relationship with him is initially suspect. In retrospect, however, Cotter's criticism seems based on sound intuition. To the boy's uncle he says of the priest, wouldn't say he was exactly . . . but there was queer . . . there was uncanny about him. I'll tell you my opinion. . . . (9-10). Ellipses may indicate pipe-puffing but also the breakdown of language colliding with the conventional respect due a priest and a person recently dead. have my own theory about it,' he said. 'I think it was one of those . . . peculiar cases. . . . But it's hard to say. . . .' and 'What I mean is, . . . it's hard for children. My idea is: let a young man run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be . . .' (10). Other hesitations to speak and awkward, respectful silences recur significantly, as we shall see, at the priest's wake. Cotter never manages to articulate precisely what his objection is. And because we know only that the priest has been paralyzed by strokes, we suspect Cotter of ridiculous bias against paralytics, a bias shared apparently by some Joyce critics who see the physical ailment as symbolic of some moral distortion.(3) Not until the end of the story does the reader discover that something had gone wrong mentally with the priest (18). When Cotter makes his criticism, he may seem to suggest that he thinks the priest is homosexual.(4) It is a suggestion heightened by the lustful connotations of the priest's smile--he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip (13)--but of course the grotesque smile is merely a consequence of physical paralysis. …

James Joyce et Anatole France : l'amour est plus fort que la mort

Joyce wrote that Anatole France had suggested to him the last story of Dubliners, "The Dead". His brother Stanislaus described "The Dead" as a ghost story. The theme of the dead lover who "comes back" to the beloved one seems to have haunted France and is developed in three of the tales in L'Etui de Nacre : « La Messe des ombres », "Leslie Wood" and « L'Aube », where, as in Joyce's story, love proves stronger than death.

Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy and the Use of Music in Contemporary Irish Drama

The late John Huston's recent (1988) film adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead clarifies the prominence of music a~ an imaginative resource in modem Irish literature. The succession of musical events contained within Joyce's story and vividly represented in Huston's film might be taken to summarize ways in which music is repeatedly drawn upon by Irish writers as a means of imagining the past and modifying the present. Joyce's use of music has, to be sure, long been acknowledged and documented, but the role of music in modem Irish literature has been otherwise little explored.' The process by which Joyce accumulates musical imagery in The Dead, for example, wherein the varied musical experiences of the story (opera, salon music, and so on) gradually narrow to the prepotent impact of The Lass of Aughrim, a ballad which explicitly encodes the central concern of Joyce's fiction in this instance, is one which may be related to other, similar processes in Irish fiction and drama after Joyce. Music attains to a structural significance on occasion in contemporary Irish literature, above all, perhaps, in the theatre. In this paper, it may prove useful to consider some ways in which this significance is attained in the work of rwo Irish dramatists who dominate the contemporary theatrical landscape: Brian Friel and Thomas Murphy.

The Encounter in Joyce's "An Encounter"

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

Review: A Russian Looks at America: A Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in 1857, by Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story

Review: <i>A Russian Looks at America: A Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in 1857</i>, by Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story

Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier. A Russian Looks at America! The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in 1857. Translated from the Russian and edited by Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story. Foreword by Henry Steele Commager. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. xli, 272 pp. $15.95.

Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier. A Russian Looks at America! The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in 1857. Translated from the Russian and edited by Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story. Foreword by Henry Steele Commager. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. xli, 272 pp. $15.95.

A Russian Looks At America: The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in 1857. Edited and translated by Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story. Foreword by Henry Steele Commager. Introduction by Arnold Schrier. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. xlii, 272 pp. + 32 pp. plates. $15.95.

A Russian Looks At America: The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in 1857. Edited and translated by Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story. Foreword by Henry Steele Commager. Introduction by Arnold Schrier. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. xlii, 272 pp. + 32 pp. plates. $15.95. - Volume 39 Issue 4

A Russian Looks at America: The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier. Translated and edited by Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Pp. xli, 272.

A Russian Looks at America: The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier. Translated and edited by Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Pp. xli, 272.

The Devil Has a Dublin Accent

The Devil Has a Dublin Accent* Alison White (bio) Nursery rhymes and tales, and the books read in childhood have fired the imaginations of the world's great writers. This is of special interest in the case of James Joyce because his mind, supremely sophisticated though it was, renewed itself ceaselessly in the popular culture: folklore, puns, jokes, cartoons, politics, music-hall, street cries, games, or theater, Punch and Judy, books for children. Joyce's Dubliners, written early in this century, is a book of stories mainly about people as obscure and as odd as the characters of Edward Lear's cartoons, and as prone to folly. Joyce wrote Dubliners in his early twenties while his childhood memories were sharp, as indeed they remained to the end. Perhaps the young author recalled books of fairy tales which came on the market in the 1890's. His family was well-off then, and its many children were well-supplied with toys, books, and free time to browse in the book shops. Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales, 1892, may have drawn his ten-year-old eye. Its tales had long been current orally, as they still are, and some of them had long been in print. Jacobs' first tale, "Teeny-Tiny," was copied word for word out of Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes and Tales, published in 1848. There Halliwell had explained "Teeny-Tiny" as a cante-fable, rhymes surviving in prose. Joyce may easily have heard or read the story. I've never yet met anyone who doesn't know about the teeny tiny woman who leaves her teeny tiny house to go to the teeny tiny graveyard. There she finds a teeny tiny bone for her teeny tiny soup. Later, from her teeny tiny bed she hears a great voice call, "GIVE ME MY BONE!" In Joyce's Dubliners there is a story "Clay," first entitled "Hallow Eve." In it a tiny old maid, Maria, a laundry worker, spends Hallowe'en with a family. There, children blindfold Maria and guide her in a divination game: to choose a ring, for marriage; a prayer book, if she is to enter a convent; water, for crossing the sea. But, Maria touches a dish of clay, the symbol of death. Later, she pathetically sings "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls" from Balfe's Bohemian Girl. . . . A sad tale's best for Hallowe'en. I never read this story without feeling that the leprechaun at Joyce's elbow led him to recall "Teeny-Tiny" and other nursery tales and rhymes as well. For he wrote that Maria "put her tiny dress-boots beside the foot of the bed." She had a "tiny, quavering voice," she "bent her tiny head"; laughing, "her minute body nearly shook itself asunder." The graveyard motif, the dish of clay, further recalls the teeny-tiny woman's ghoulish selection of a soupbone from the churchyard. And another [End Page 139] child's tale of Joyce's youth comes to mind. Maria is like a household brownie. "How can you expect Maria to crack nuts without a nutcracker?" asks her host. Aside from being an indelicate allusion to Maria's profile, where "the tip of her nose nearly touched the tip of her chin," this hints at her elfin faculties. In 1874, eight years before Joyce's birth, there was published Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's Adventures of a Brownie. Brownie had "a very little mind like his little body; but he did the best he could with it." The style is that of Joyce's story, kept ever inside Maria's limited little mind. Maria sat "on the little stool . . . with her toes barely touching the floor." Miss Mulock's Brownie "placed himself on the milking stool, which was so high that his little legs were dangling halfway down." Brownie turns a stone into a cake. It disappears. Maria buys a cake. It disappears. Like Brownie, Maria does domestic magicking. At the laundry she cut the barnbracks so well that you could not see where the knife had been. (Last January in Dublin I cut a barnbrack and, in that sticky mess, no mere mortal could have avoided leaving clumsy...