Araby Criticism

randomzm · October 3, 2008, 9:44am

Blind streets and seeing houses: Araby’s dim glass revisited.(Special “Dubliners” Number).Margot Norris. Studies in Short Fiction 32.n3 (Summer 1995): pp309(10). (4978 words)

Abstract:

James Joyce’s “Araby” uses poetic language to both illustrate and compensate for the emptiness and longing in the young boy’s life. In addition to the language, the boy and the houses in his neighborhood reflect a desire for an ideal world and a fascination with people in the community. The homes offer an opportunity for the boy to observe their inner activity and with their partially open blinds or windows seem to encourage his voyeurism.

Joyce’s “Araby” not only draws attention to its conspicuous poetic language: it performatively offers the beauty of its art as compensation to the thematized frustrations of the story. The little boy whose heart is broken by a city “hostile to romance,” transmutes his grief into a romance of language. Joyce, whose Dubliners stories tend to bear rhetorical titles, makes of “Araby” a rhetorical bazaar that outstrips in poetic exoticism the extravagant promise of the empty, and sterile commercial confection that so disappoints the child. In an early essay on Dubliners, Frank O’Connor writes of “Araby,” "This is using words as they had not been used before in English, except by, Pater – not to describe an experience, but so far as possible to duplicate it. Not even perhaps to duplicate it so much as to replace it by a combination of images – a rhetorician’s dream, if you like, but Joyce was a student of rhetoric: (20). I construe this gesture of stylistic virtuosity, less as an exercise in aestheticism than as a self-critical performance. The story’s narrative performance of offering art as balm to heal the anguish of a modern city’s paralysis enacts the quintessential Modernistic practice repeated in Eliot’s “Waste Land” of turning to poetry for modern spiritual redemption. But by evoking literary, traditions consonant with its chivalric preoccupations and temper, “Araby” intertextualizes itself with diverse nineteenth century medievalisms(1) whose archaic and mannered aestheticism Modernism generally abjures. To resolve this paradox of “Araby’s” incongruent Romantic appeal – a problem that Portrait criticism also confronts and resolves as stylistic imitation, parody, or ironic pastiche – I intend to treat the story’s peculiar language as a multi-valenced textual performance: a self-incriminating narration whose rhetorical aims the text encapsulates and subjects to an immanent critique. This critique anticipates the later social criticism of aestheticism by Herbert Marcuse, and particularly his concept of “affirmative culture” – a notion recently, used by Peter Buerger to criticize the self-contradiction in which Modernism implicates art – “art thus stabilizes the very, social conditions against which it protests” (7). But I will argue that “Araby” critiques affirmative culture rather than abets it, and that the story destabilizes its own compensatory, gesture by emptying its own rhetoric to restore it to the idiomatic, “marketplace” sense of “rhetoric” as a figure for elaborate but insubstantial speech. “Araby” the story, the ornate but empty narration, doubles “Araby,” the ornate but empty bazaar. “If I go . . . I will bring you something” (32), the boy promises Mangan’s sister, but he returns empty-handed – except for the story of their double, encapsulated, frustration. “Araby,” the story, offers readers a similar rhetorical empty-handedness.

I plan to track the story’s compensatory strategy – its production of artful language to supplement unsatisfied desire – through a set of ontological operations by, which the narrative consciousness attempts to constitute itself as a subject. “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity,” (35). The story’s closing moral turns on itself by concluding with a parabolic maneuver, by having the narrative consciousness turn itself into an allegorical figure, “a symbol of” something, as Gabriel Conroy, might put it. The boy has been transformed by his own narrative voice into a figure of fable, of the mirrored emptiness that is Vanitas. “Araby” therefore doubles its thematic preoccupation with the chivalric quest implicit in its famous trope of the imperiled Grail (“I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes” [31]) by further formally cloaking itself in the allegorical and parabolic rhetoric of chivalric literature. The question is whether the closing self-allegorization constitutes an epiphany(2) – a moment of illuminated enlightenment or transcendent anagnorisis – or whether the parabolic gesture enfolds other philosophical maneuvers within the story that offer knowledge and insight as reversible or retractable: the ocular voyeurism that turns upon itself as a “gaze;” the antonomasia of romance and desire that ricochets as a self-naming of its own failure; mythification oscillating with demythification. The reader confronts a variety of hermeneutical options at the end of the story – ranging from “straight” acceptance of the boy’s self-estimation, to sympathy with the idealist’s victimization by vulgar philistinism, to critique of the narrator’s exploitations of the juvenile experience by turning it into an aestheticized social parable.

The curious figure of the reflective darkness (“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself”) of an extinguished dream (“the light was out”), suggests that this story will be illuminated by blindness, and that the boy who finds emptiness in “Araby,” the figure of romance, is in turn found empty, a personification rather than a person, by the story. This strange locution at the story’s end, that has the darkened gallery of “Araby” appear to “see” the boy in a way that lets him see himself, as though it were a dark mirror catching him in its eye, recapitulates the strange topopoeia of the story’s opening, where streets are personified as “blind” and houses as “seeing.” This topographia frames the narration in a way that sets it up for a chiasmus: the story that opens with the <code>real’ estate of North Richmond Street closes with its antipode of the</code>unreal’ estate of “Araby” – but only after the two places have, as it were, traded places. What makes the crossing over possible is that “Araby,” the name of a longing for romance displaced onto a mythologized Oriental geography, suppresses the mediation of commerce and conceals the operations by which the fantasy of an exoticized and seductive East is a commercial fabrication produced by that realm the boy finds “most hostile to romance” – the marketplace. Commerce produces not only the trinkets and commodities the boy does not want, the vases and tea sets he spurns, and the parcels he bears like an irksome cross while shopping with his aunt every Saturday night. Commerce also produces fantasy and magic through language, “The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me” (32). The narration of “Araby” is presumably neither a commodity, or a charity, like the ambiguously configured bazaar in the story.(3) But it resorts to the same power of language, the power to aestheticize and glamorize what is common and mean (“the magical name”), that the operation of advertising borrows from poetry. The narrative voice of “Araby,” with its gift for personification, could easily be that of Little Chandler, or rather “T. Malone Chandler,” as he Celticizes himself –

As he crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the

lower quays and pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to

him a band of tramps, huddled together along the river-banks,

their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the

panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night to bid

them arise, shake themselves and begone. He wondered whether

he could write a poem to express his idea. (73)

The “Celtic note” of wistful sadness to which Chandler calculates to aspire (“The English critics, perhaps, would recognise him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone” [74]) can also be heard in the lapses into pathetic fallacy in “Araby” (“the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns” [30]).

But the personifications of place in “Araby” transcend Little Chandler’s affectations because of the complex temperamental and moral intersubjectivities the narration establishes between the boy and places of his habitation and imagination. North Richmond Street is introduced as blind, mute (“a quiet street”), with emptiness inside (“An uninhabited house . . . stood at the blind end” [29]) – a proleptic figure of the boy at the end of the story. Much like the story with its confession of solipsistic interiority, the houses on North Richmond Street engage in both sober introspection (“conscious of decent lives within them”) and discreet censoriousness (“gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces”). The story’s solipsism and insularity is figured by the opening topography of North Richmond Street as “blind,” as a cul de sac and dead end from which escape is baffled. The slippage of meaning that leads that figure of the “blind” from spatial to ocular closure, links the street, and its houses with their virtual hermetic seals, to the larger thematics of closed economies in which exchange, and communication, is doomed to recirculation. The boy’s house – while not clearly identical with the uninhabited house at the end of the blind street – is figured as an enclosure of negativity, of death, waste rooms, waste papers, waste people and waste lives. The sealed rooms – “musty from having been long enclosed” – circulate as little air as the rusty bicycle pump abandoned in the garden. They in turn mirror that figure of closed economy: Mrs Mercer, the pawnbroker’s widow, who extends her late husband’s business of recycling used goods to her philanthropy (“collected used stamps for some pious purpose” [33]), and to her communication (“I had to endure the gossip”). Herself constructed like a closed system, Mrs Mercer, not surprisingly, feels herself endangered by fresh air (“the night air was bad for her”). The story’s allusions to baffled pneumatic circulation itself circulates verbal bafflements, like an impaired pentecostal pneuma or wind, from other Dubliners stories (“one of them new-fangled carriages . . . them with the rheumatic wheels” [17]).

The slippage of “blind” continues to recirculate through the narration’s tropological system. The narration describes the boy’s voyeurism of Mangan’s sister by slipping further meaning off the protective screen that is called a “blind,” onto its meaning as an ocular shelter used by hunters to conceal or camouflage them from their prey (“The blind was pulled down . . . so that I could not be seen” [30]). This figurative transformation of the boy’s house into a version of a duck or deer <code>blind’ is quite congruent with the boy’s subsequent activity of essentially</code>stalking’ the girl, who is described as a “brown figure,” a deer (or dear):

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her

door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so

that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my

heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I

kept her brown figure always in my eve and, when we came near

the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and

passed her. (30)

Visually, the boy’s voyeurism enacts a curious visual encapsulation that we might miss were it not for the introductory image of the <code>seeing’ houses. The nearly closed blind, with its slit for peeping, functions like an eyelid closed but for a slit – transforming the front parlor into an eye that harbors the peeping boy. The boy’s own ocular gesture – “I kept her brown figure always in my eye” – is thus doubled, as the</code>seeing’ house keeps the boy in its eye. This strange figuration has complex ontological implications since an eye cannot see itself (except as mirrored or reflected, that is, as some other eye would see it). The boy in his hunter’s “blind” thus looks out from a blind spot, what Jacques Lacan has termed a “scotoma.” The implication of the boy doing his seeing from the site of his blind spot, is that he cannot see himself, cannot see himself as a voyeur or a stalker, for example, since he sees himself only as a worshiper or a lover. Unlike Stephen, whose peeping at girls or women may have earned him the threat of ocular extinction – “the eagles will come and pull out his eyes” (8) – this boy’s eyes merely burn in anguish and anger at seeing his own solipsism.

My evocation of predatory images of the hunter emerging from a <code>blind’ to stalk his prey are intended to impugn the boy not for malignancy – since he clearly intends the girl no harm – but for the unwitting or blind psychological oppression that obsessives, including obsessive lovers, may inflict on their objects of desire. My intention is to complicate idealistic readings of the love story of “Araby” – “Palpably” and poignantly a story of adolescent love,</code>Araby’ rises to this still larger representation, of subjective dicision under the clash between the idealist’s discriminating ardor and adverse insuperable circumstance" (Beck 106) – by exploring the maimed discourse produced by the boy’s scotoma, his inability to see himself as the girl, for instance, might see him. Mangan’s sister, whose name is both familiar and seductive to the narrator – “yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood” (30) – is nonetheless antonomastically displaced onto the rowdy boy who is her brother, and the rowdy poet (“between the drunkard and opium-eater” [CW 76]), who serves as her eponym.(4) Mangan’s sister has difficulty in the story extricating herself as a person or a subject from the boy’s image or imago of her because the narrative voice, like the boy, imagines itself as safe in its blind – able to peep and catch fleeting and fragmentary glimpses of her without having to imagine her as peeping back, and catching the voyeuristic boy, and the voyeuristic narration, in her own `gaze.’ Indeed, her world of peers organizes itself into such a peerage of boys peering at the girl from the shadows, as she peers for them in vain – “Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadows, peer up and down the street” (30).

As much as imagined "symbol of" something as Gretta Conroy on the stair, Mangan's sister is to the boy mute, blind, and empty, a cut-up fetish apprehended chiefly in metonymic parts as a rope of hair, a silver bracelet, a white curve of neck, an illuminated hand, a white border of petticoat. Her brown figure, like the somber brown houses on her street, is never interiorized or furnished with the thought and feeling that would make her come to life. The narration (like the boy) never stops to wonder whether the girl knows that she is followed even morning, or to contemplate how her knowledge -- ensured by the boy's passing her to let her know he has been walking behind her -- makes her feel. Does she suspect she is being watched through the slit in the blind? Does she recognize herself as an object of obsession -- like Reggie Wylie, who may have stopped riding his bicycle in front of Gerty, MacDowell's garden to escape her infatuation? Or does the boy's strange behavior plan, music on her body, as hers does on his? These questions -- which might have encompassed the function of her `gaze,' her looking back and keeping the boy, and his narration, in her own eye -- are never raised by a narration whose blind spots and solipsisms mirror the closed psychic system of the boy.

The subjectivity of the girl can be imagined at all, even if only extratextually, because she speaks. When Mangan’s sister speaks, her speech is like a startling irruption in the boy’s fantasy, and in the narration. He had dreamed of how it might be if he spoke to her – “I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration” (31) – but he did not dream that she would speak to him. Her subjectivity, her feelings, never enter into his fevered imaginings. Thus it is startling when she does speak directly to him, the more so because in her inaugural speech, she announces to him her desire. Indeed, she gives her desire a name – “Araby . . . It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go” (31). In naming Araby as her desire, Mangan’s sister appears to be speaking the extratextual fullness of her own name, as though she explicated and amplified her own magical name by endowing it with the interiority of her own desire. Joyce described James Clarence Mangan as a tabulist of Araby – “The lore of many lands goes with him always, eastern tales and memory of curiously printed medieval books which have rapt him out of his time” (CW 77) – with spiritual kinship to the fictional girl who bears his name. Mangan’s sister, then, may be as much a romantic as the boy, although her desire is so thoroughly ingested and internalized by him that it becomes utterly expropriated from her. His gesture in embracing her desire and its name exoticizes her image – “The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me” (32) – without leading him to her interiority, her feeling and intentions in calling to him the magical name.

Neither the boy, nor the narrative voice, wonders about her overture, which, unexplained, nonetheless issues a series of hermeneutical prods to the reader’s speculation. Is the girl’s convent retreat – like Stephen’s in Portrait – scheduled to preempt and suppress sexual feeling in pubescent girls? Does the girl, whose silver bracelet betokens small vanities, resent (“It’s well for you, she said” [32]) the Church displacing her dreams and scenes of romantic opulence and exotic splendor with impending puritanical strictures and punitive threats? Knowing that one of the neighborhood boys has been watching and following her, does she determine to initiate a conversation that she knows will serve as a romantic provocation? And what happens when the story ends? Does the boy return without a gift, without a romantic story to tell her, without a reciprocal speech of desire – or any speech? Will she neurotically attach herself to the memory of his unrenewed childish devotion as Gerty MacDowell does to Reggie Wylie (“He called her little one in a strangely husky voice and snatched a half kiss [the first!]” [13.203]), or as Gretta Conroy does to Michael Furey? This speculative retrieval of the girl’s subjectivity and interiority rips the narration open, and would let fresh and stirring hermeneutical air circulate through our reading of the story’s suffocating idealism if the text would let us escape its solipsistic enclosures. But as it is, the interiority of Mangan’s sister is consigned to the fate of the brown houses on her street – destined to be furnished, perhaps during her convent retreats, with the leavings of dead priests (“He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister” [29]). Judging from what we know of his houses – that some of the “waste rooms . . . littered with old useless papers” were no more than giant wastepaper baskets – his gift seems a depressing and moribund legacy for any sister.

Yet the story, does contain some apertures that would allow circulation along <code>flaring’ routes (“We walked through the flaring streets” [31]). Children’s play, and the marketplace are the two such open social systems that could allow, bodies, activities, communication, and culture to circulate. The streets come alive with the noise in the street that is Stephen’s Blakean god, when the Christian Brothers’ School sets the boys free, or when the drunken men, bargaining women, cursing laborers, and nasal street singers teem over the shopping district on Saturday night. But the boy’s temperament and ideology repeatedly repudiate these active social spaces, and his repulsion by the quotidian, by mass or crowd activities like children’s play or the teeming marketplace figured as a “throng of foes” (31), assimilates the boy’s values to High Modernist ideology – the Arnoldian recoil from mass culture that surfaces in the aestheticist elitisms of Eliot and Pound. Critics too, consequently, tend to embrace these repudiations of the quotidien as the enemy of romance, without attending their possible interrogation or critique by the text. The boy attracted to the Orientalism of “Araby,” fails to recognize in the Dublin street life the colorful gestures and music of an indigenous bazaar, more spontaneous in its diverse cultural productions (“the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa,(5) or a ballad about the troubles in our native land” [31]) than the francophonic affectations of the staged commercial simulacrum, the Cafe Chantant (Gifford cites the Baedeker description of Paris coffeehouses as “a cut below the music halls” [48]) he finds in “Araby,” closed, its only music the fall of coins on the salver to announce its mercenary character. But the boy is clearly attuned to a different music, perhaps the lure of the uncited but silently glossed Magic Flute of Mozart which is, unquestionably,</code>some Freemason affair’ (“I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night. My aunt was surprised and hoped it was not some Freemason affair” [32]). The opera, with its Eastern occultism, its romantic quest, and trial by gauntlet of spirits, could serve as an analogue for the boy’s imagination, for the “dreams of delight” promised by the theme song (“I’ll sing thee songs of Araby”) of the historical “Grand Oriental Fete” held to benefit the Jervis Street Hospital in May of 1894. We are left to imagine what songs were sounded, as the boy “went from room to room singing” (33) through the “cold empty gloomy rooms” of his house, on the afternoon of the bazaar.

The boy and narrator display far greater ambivalence toward the liberative potential of children’s play, although the boy eventually repudiates that too, once he falls under the spell of eastern enchantment. The theme of romance is introduced circuitously, along the detour of old books and old gardens, as a slip along the verbal gloss of leaves, from yellow book leaves to green plant leaves, makes possible the transition from the musty, hermetically sealed house to the verdant garden and its mysteriously alive environs. Narratively, the yellow leaves of the dead priest’s chivalric books leave their pages to drink in rain that lets them come to life again as "the dark dripping gardens redolent with living odours and resonant with the living music of live creatures – “the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness” (30). The narrator replaces, in the suppler and more scrupulous prose of this lovely description, the florid and histrionic sentiment elided when the narration cuts short the uncle’s impending recitation of Caroline Norton’s The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed (“The stranger hath thy bridle-rein, thy master hath his gold; – Fleet-limbed and beautiful, farewell! – thou’rt sold, my steed, thou’art sold!” [Gifford 47]). The children’s play in the minter evenings is explicitly described as an exposure to fresh air, as a stimulus to circulation – “the cold air stung us and we played will our bodies glowed” (30). Conflict contributes to that stimulation – “we ran the gantle of the rough tribes from the cottages” (30) – both in neighborhood play in the marketplace where the boy and his aunt run a gauntlet again, “I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes” (31). This “mimic warfare,” as it is called in “An Encounter” takes on the medievalistic colorations of the Crusades, with the gauntlet of “rough tribes” of (presumably) low-bred children from the working-class cottages representing some sort of infidels. But the boy’s chivalric fascination with Mangan’s sister strips the meaning of gauntlet, back to gantlet, to its archaic armorial form as a mail or metal glove, a rigid but protective barrier to touch or human contact. Thus the boy’s adoration is figured in the solipsism implicit in the prayerful gesture – “I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! many times” (3l) – that has him touch and speak to himself rather than to his beloved. Invoking the Grail legend a number of years before Eliot in “The Waste Land,” the boy’s romantic pilgrimage ends in a dark and silent hall likened to “a church after a service” – not unlike Eliot’s ruined Chapel Perilous, “There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home” (1. 389).

Is the story or narration of “Araby” the very thing the boy was actually seeking: not a gift for the girl but a gift of idealism and spiritual healing for himself – a modernist poetry as Grail to redeem the paralytic philistinism of a moribund European capital? Does the narrator compensate the boy that is his disenchanted self, for having found the dream of romance empty, by rebuilding it in the form of a quest narrative in which he is re-aestheticized and re-idealized, the sensitive young man transformed into knight errant? Where does such a project leave Mangan’s sister, except as a set of synecdochic (“Araby”) and metonymic images? What did the boy become, or what other identities implicitly cohabit his function as a poetic storyteller? Is he a romantical academic like Gabriel Conroy, or an intellectual celibate, like Mr Duffy, or a poet manque like Little Chandler, or a priest? If “Araby” has become another version of the dead priest’s chivalric books with their yellow leaves, an archaic and decadent aestheticism that will inspire other idealistic young boys – our own students, perhaps – to indulge their nostalgia for the solipsistic self-absorptions of first-love – then is it not itself a sort of dead priest’s leavings? Each of these functions replicates the closed circuit of communication and exchange that thematizes the spiritual paralysis in this story less as a figure of motor cessation than as a pneuma of stale and trapped air. The boy’s closing confession of vanity, which the narrative urges us to disbelieve, becomes the final rhetorical gesture of empty doubling: the creation of a moral fable with a specious moral.

(1) See R. B. Kershner’s extensive discussion of the dead priest’s discarded books – especially Sir Walter Scott’s The Abbot – and their curious gloss on the adventures of the boy in “Araby.” "Scott’s novel is peculiarly double-voiced; the ideology of nineteenth-century realism and Evangelical admonishment coexists uneasily with romantic ideology, so that Child Roland emerges as a figure both farcical and heroic, both chastened and victorious. The boy of `Araby,’ unfortunately, is trapped in a very different sort of narrative, where the idealism that is Roland’s saving grace is exactly the quality responsible for the Irish boy’s failure’ (54).

(2) Warren Beck, who delicately, explores "Araby" as an adolescent love story, traces its movement "through self determining events to self-realization in a Joycean epiphany" (96) although he argues that the boy does not yet appreciate what he learns. "In `Araby' the box, has been frustrated by externality, in the guises of the tardy drunken uncle and a slow train, but he is more lastingly grieved by discovery of a universal ineradicable flaw, the gap between idealization and its confined operation. This also is epiphany, but at first sight almost too appalling for him" (109).

(3) The most detailed account of the 1894 Whitsuntide Araby bazaar to benefit the Catholic Jervis Street Hospital can be found in Donald Torchiana’s Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners (56-60). But the charity function of the bazaar is elided in the story – suggesting that neither of the children, the boy or Mangan’s sister, nor the boy’s aunt (she “hoped it was not some Freemason affair” [32]) or uncle, are aware of this purpose. As a result, the thematic, symbolic, and ironic possibilities of “charity” as the boy’s destination or purpose are difficult to determine, even in the context of a full extratextual history – which includes disreputable exploitations (“a number of people who ought to be respectable, with roulette tables, which they ran for the benefit, not of the hospital but of their own pockets”
[quoted from the Irish Times by Torchiana 57]
).

(4) Gifford quotes two stanzas from one of James Clarence Mangan’s most popular poems, “Dark Rosaleen.” This poem’s rhetoric of solipsistic address, that negates the interlocutory function of the woman who figurates the poet’s inspiration, could serve as a model for the boy’s adoration in “Araby.”

(5) The “come-all-you” about O’Donovan Rossa that the boy consigns to the throng of foes who threaten his chalice, might figure another `breath of fresh air,’ a topical and improvized art designed for spontaneous and mass circulation, to stand in contrast to archaic chilvalric books of the sort that shape the boy’s imagination and the narrator’s rhetoric. The images and lore associated with Donovan – including dynamite (he was known as “Dynamite Rossa”) and the circulation of exile (he was imprisoned, exiled to the United States, but returned to Ireland in 1891) – also make him a foil to the entrapped figures of the story.

Works Consulted

Beck, Warren. Joyce’s Dubliners: Substance, Vision, and Art. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1969.

Buerger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.

Joyce, James. The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1989.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1967.

Kershner, R. B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Lacan, Jacques. “Of the Gaze as Object Petit a.” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978.

O’Connor, Frank. “Work in Progress.” In Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners. Ed. Peter K. Garrett. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice, 1968.

Torchiana, Donald T. Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners. Boston: Allen, 1986.

Named Works: Dubliners (Short fiction collection) Criticism and interpretation; Araby (Short fiction) Criticism and interpretation

Source Citation:Norris, Margot. “Blind streets and seeing houses: Araby’s dim glass revisited.” Studies in Short Fiction 32.n3 (Summer 1995): 309(10). General OneFile. Gale. CLAY COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD. 3 Oct. 2008
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Araby Criticism

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