The Sheila Variations

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'A Painful Case' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the eleventh story in the collection: "A Painful Case".

We're more than halfway through Dubliners now, and in this story - In reading "A Painful Case", I can feel the approach of "The Dead" for the first time, from the other end of the collection. We're moving towards it. The stories get more and more sophisticated - as we get deeper in. "A Painful Case" is just that - painful - to me, it's the most painful so far of the collection. (But again, we haven't gotten to The Dead yet - but it's like Joyce is working up to it. I can feel it.) The spectre of loneliness that becomes so acute, so transcendent and universal in "The Dead" is begun here. Well, it was begun earlier in the collection too - I'm thinking of "Eveline", in particular - maybe "Araby". These are also stories of isolation, thwarted desire ... but again, with "A Painful Case", Joyce slices deeper, he opens his meaning wider - to a more universal place. He's beginning to make himself clear (actually, he's been clear all along ... it's just that he has concealed it from us, luring us into the maze of Dublin further and further - until he thinks we're ready for what will be revealed in "The Dead"). That's the seductive thing about Dubliners - and why it's important (for the first time) to read the stories in order. You read "Eveline" (excerpt here), and it's a story of a girl who has a chance to get out of Ireland, to be married, to grow up, to be free. To see the world, see new things, strike out on an adventure ... never to return. And she refuses the opportunity. You get the sense (in a muted way - Joyce doesn't hit the nail right on the head like he does in "A Painful Case") that in turning her back on this particular love - Frank - who wants her to marry him and move to Argentina- in saying "No" to him - she is choosing the course of the rest of her life. There will not be 100 other opportunities to get married. Hope is low. She knows she is choosing alone-ness by refusing him. The story would be quite different if you felt that, oh well - that one didn't work out - but surely she'll be a happily married woman sooner rather than later! Joyce doesn't let us off the hook. In "A Painful Case", he is even more overt than in "Eveline".

Mr. James Duffy is a clerk in a bank. He lives in a suburb of Dublin - one he has chosen on purpose because it is not as grubby and mean as other suburbs. He lives an orderly life of solitude. Joyce goes to great pains to tell us how his room is set up - its neatness, its spareness. He has a bookshelf where the books are organized by weight (I would have such a hard time with that, seeing as I have 5000 books - how would I find anything??) He has a full collection of Wordsworth's poems on the bottom shelf (heaviest book) - and he has the Maynooth Catechism on the top shelf (lightest book). I can't back up my theory but, hmmm, literature is the heaviest (meaning: most substantial) and the catechism is so light it has to be on the top shelf? Joyce is tricky. In 2 pages, Joyce sets up Mr. Duffy's life - so that the transformation by the end is devastating. He, like Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist moves out of unknowingness, unconsciousness - into consciousness - and it is not always a pleasant rite of passage. It is like, in the tragedy, Mr. Duffy becomes alive - for the first time - but being alive means being aware of your own loneliness. If only one could stay unconscious! Joyce doesn't just indict Ireland here - but the whole human race. The lives of quiet desperation. Why must life be so damn sad. (It's quite Irish of him to think that way.)

Mr. Duffy does the same thing every day. Goes to work. Has lunch at a pub. Comes home. Goes for long walks on the outskirts of the city (he seems to think Dublin is a pit of vice ... wants to avoid temptation.) He has no friends. His family lives a ways out of Dublin, and he visits them on holidays or when one of them dies. Occasionally he goes to the opera - and that is his only "vice". You don't get the sense (like in 'A Little Cloud' - excerpt here) that Mr. Duffy pulses with unhappiness of thwarted longings. You don't feel like Mr. Duffy aches to escape, like so many of the other Dubliners Joyce has introduced us to. Mr. Duffy moves through life, doing what is most comfortable - living life on a narrow path, never questioning or yearning for more.

Then he meets Mrs. Sinico. She is a married woman with a nearly grown daughter. Her husband is a sea captain who is never home. They meet at the Rotunda - and Mrs. Sinico strikes up a conversation with Mr. Duffy, spontaneously. Duffy finds himself chatting with her, and noticing, in particular, her eyes - how the iris is, their color, the movement of them, the expression. Joyce never says "He is attracted to Mrs. Sinico" (yeah, because he's a good writer, Sheila, okay??) - but he doesn't have to spell it out. He is drawn to this woman. He runs into her again. He asks if she would like to go for a walk. They start to meet up, on occasion, and go for long walks together. Her husband doesn't mind - in fact he endorses these meetings, thinking that Mr. Duffy is interested in asking his daughter's hand for marriage. The long walks which stand in for dates is reminiscent of Joyce's own courtship of Nora Barnacle in 1904. Dublin back then was similar to, oh, Saudi Arabia. Men and women did not meet out. There was no culture of dating. In order to be alone with Nora, Joyce had to walk with her - and so that's what they did. For 4 months until, one day, they decided to run away together. Which they did, to Europe ... and they were pretty much (with only a couple months here and there) never apart from one another ever again. But it all began with long meandering (mostly silent) walks through Dublin.

One day, Mrs. Sinico invites him to her house. Her husband is off on one of his frequent journeys. They sit by the fire. Mr. Duffy begins to feel things bubbling up ... not just lust, but a sense that he is with a kindred spirit. A woman he could share himself with, a woman who would admire him, revere him ... someone he could read to, share intellectual things with ... a whole soul-connection thing happens as they sit there together. Joyce is brilliant here - he tells us just what we need to know - while leaving much unsaid). Like "Clay" (excerpt here), the narration is from Mr. Duffy's point of view - we only know what he knows ... yet Joyce also employs some distance from Mr. Duffy - it's third-person, but limited. We do not know what Mrs. Sinico thinks or feels. She is a married woman. What is she doing? Who is she? We don't know because Mr. Duffy does not know. But suddenly, as they sit there by the fire, she impulsively reaches out, grabs his hand, and presses it against her cheek.

This is such an openly passionate gesture that Mr. Duffy is shocked, and recoils. Is this a Madonna/Whore thing? Maybe partly. As long as she can be his fantasy companion, the perfect listener and partner ... he can love her. But the second she becomes a real woman with real needs, he shies away. Mr. Duffy escapes - and avoids her for a week. He is disturbed. Finally, he asks to meet with her - and he breaks things off. She seems to take it fine - but then when he walks her to the train she starts trembling so violently that he thinks she might pass out. He sees her off.

Then come the chilling words: 'Four years passed.'

Joyce is making sure of things here. He is digging the grave. Mr. Duffy's life is changeless - there is something in him that cannot be touched (at least not at this point). We're moving towards an image of death here ... and once mortality enters the picture - hers and his - everything changes. This story is not so much about Ireland - as about all of us. There have been times of my life when - if a biographer was writing a book about me - he would have to say, "Two years passed." Times when nothing of any importance happens. But ... if we were always aware of the approach of death ... wouldn't we behave differently? Wouldn't we NEVER give a biographer an opportunity to write, "Four years passed"?? That is the human dilemma. The human condition.

Oh, and just a bit of Joycean internal symbolism here: colors are very important to Joyce. They mean everything. He brings this to full fruition in Ulysses - where every section can be categorized according to color (if you know what you're looking for). To Joyce, green always means one thing. Blue always has the same meaning. And to Joyce - brown is the color of death. Decay. Any time anything is brown in Joyce - prick up your ears. Look for death. It's THERE. For example, in 'Clay' - where Maria unknowingly picks clay during a Halloween game, signifying her impending death - Maria goes out to the party - and her raincoat is brown. She is happy for it, because the rain is coming down ... but the fact that it is brown should be important to any serious reader. If it were a green raincoat, there would be some hope perhaps. Or a blue one. But brown? No way. Anyway, 'A Painful Case' is full of brown. Brown is everywhere. In his room - his beer he drinks - his face is even brown.

So. 4 years pass. And one day, during his lunch, Mr. Duffy is reading the newspaper and he comes across an article about an inquest that just went on at the coroner's office in Dublin. A woman had been hit and killed by a train. Had she jumped in front of it on purpose? Was the train at fault? How fast was the train going? Etc. Joyce employs a brilliant device - harking back to the letter-writing novels of the 19th century ... and also predicting the post-modern style of books: we read the whole newspaper article. We don't get Mr. Duffy's response to it - not at first ... we know he has read something upsetting, we can tell in his behavior ... and then we read the whole article. An investigation has gone on about the woman who died. She is, of course, Mrs. Sinico. It is apparent, although no ruling was made, that it was a suicide. In the last 2 years, her behavior had become "intemperate", causing much concern to her family. She would go out at night in search of drink. Her daughter was much worried about her, and what would happen to her.

Mr. Duffy reads this sad sad tale - and basically his whole life falls apart. He goes through every response imaginable. He is stunned. Then comes anger and disgust - that he had considered giving his heart to such a ridiculous woman, a drunkard, a loser. Had he thought she worthy of him? Thank GOD he had the presence of mind to turn her away! But then, of course, other things start to happen to him. He begins to feel sad for her, how sad she must have been, how difficult her life must have been - long separations from her husband ... Once he realizes how lonely SHE must have been - he, for the first time, realizes his own loneliness. His suffering is acute. Because he knows, now, he will be alone forever. That was his chance. For human connection, for souls meeting. It's over. It will never return.

It's a devastating story, truly sophisticated in its structure - a mini-masterpiece.

Here's an excerpt. Normally I avoid posting an excerpt which is either the climax or the ending of a story/book. But in this case, I'm going to make an exception - because it's so important to understand the development of Joyce as a writer and creator. What he is doing here - as he describes Mr. Duffy's thought process in the wake of reading the newspaper article - is predicting the genius sweep of Ulysses. The germ of it is here. The sureness of his prose, the freedom with which he follows Mr. Duffy's ups and downs, the precise observations about the human soul ... it's all here. Joyce was 23, 24 years old when he wrote this. How is that possible?

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "A Painful Case".

Mr. Duffy raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the cheerless evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from time to time a light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end! The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred. The threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter won over to conceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked his stomach. Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous. His soul's companion! He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman. Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared. But that she could have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her? He remembered her outburst of that night and interpreted it in a harsher sense than he had ever done. He had no difficulty now in approving of the course he had taken.

As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched his. The shock which had first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves. He put on his overcoat and hat quickly and went out. The cold air met him on the threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch.

The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were five or six working-men in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman's estate in County Kildare. They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked, spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with their heavy boots. Mr. Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at them, without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and he called for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. his life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory - if anyone remembered him.

It was after nine o'clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. he stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.

When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from love's feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.

He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

EXCERPTS FROM 'DUBLINERS'
The Sisters
An Encounter
Araby
Eveline
After the Race
Two Gallants
The Boarding House
A Little Cloud
Counterparts
Clay

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