James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” is very painful

I am reading Dubliners, one story a morning. In order. This is maybe my 10th time reading it all the way through – although I pull out different individual stories to read sometimes. It’s a daunting experience. Especially when you remember James Joyce was 22, 23, 24, when he wrote these devastating brilliant stories filled with so much insight into the human condition.

I just … what … who … why …

In a beautiful essay on “The Dead”, Mary Gordon closes out with:

The vagueness of the flickering shades subsides. Gabriel sees the snow on ‘the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns,’ those singular sharp things asserting, inexorably, their individuality, their separateness from their fellows. But the snow that is falling generally falls on them all alike and muffles their sharpness, their distinctness. ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’

Consider the daring of Joyce’s final repetitions and reversals: ‘falling faintly, faintly falling’ — a triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement. How can any of us come up to it? Only, perhaps, humbly, indifferently, in its honor and its name, to try.

And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.”

That’s what I’m talking about.

There was an eruption of response to Dubliners, outrage, anger, Joyce was lambasted for … telling the truth, basically … etc. – poor George Bernard Shaw, I don’t think he ever recovered. Years later, when the Ulysses scandal was going on and books were being seized at custom houses across the world, Joyce said to his wife, “I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.”

Yesterday morning I read “A Painful Case”.

Now, “The Dead” is emblazoned in my brain: all the events, all the characters, I know entire sections by heart. But “A Painful Case” is equally as devastating – although I somehow manage to always block it out. It’s not “in me” for some reason. There are some similarities to The Dead although – crucially – it doesn’t have anything like those final four paragraphs in “The Dead” – where Joyce turns the microscope of his eye into a telescope, lifting up above the landscape, floating over the world, looking down on it all, on us all. “A Painful Case” stays on the ground and maybe that’s why it’s so unbelievably, well, painful.

It has thrown me off. I was deeply unnerved by it. I’m still not quite back to normal.

The story seems a simple one. Mr. James Duffy – a bachelor, and a practical sedate man, whose life unfolds in a calm way with no dramatic events – has a love affair with a married woman. Eventually, he ends it. He feels he did the right thing. He is placid and complacent about the choices he made in life. They seem to him to be the right ones.

Then Joyce – that early-20-something man – writes: “Four years passed.”

Brutal. (And it occurs to me that the reason the story is so shattering – and complex – is because of those three small words “Four years passed.” If it had been “two weeks passed” you wouldn’t get the ambiguity, the MORAL ambiguity which spills over and fills the whole entire world by the end of “A Painful Case.” I’ll say more on this in a bit.)

One night, Duffy picks up a newspaper and reads an article about a woman who was hit by a train the night before and was killed. Turns out, it was his former love. He also learns that his former lover had gone off the rails after their romance. She became a drunk and a floozy, staying out all night in low-life drinking establishments – and she was a married woman with a child – scandalous in 1890s Dublin.

Because of that brutal “four years passed,” your brain struggles to reassure itself: “He didn’t do this to her by ending the romance. He didn’t force her to become an alcoholic and get hit by a train. It’s not a direct correlation. We are all responsible for who we are in the world and how we respond to things.”

Well, yes, that’s all very nice and very mature. I’m so happy for you if you are able to manage that.

But I can’t. And neither can Mr. Duffy, although he tries.

Because think about it: If it had been “two weeks passed,” then Joyce would have been making a clear connection, A to B. Romance ended. Woman throws herself in front of a train soon after. This is the stuff of melodrama. And it could be effective. It has been effective. Man realizes he has contributed to the misery of another human, is crushed. But “A Painful Case” is more difficult. Four years is a long time. Presumably, everyone has moved on enough, and life has gone on enough, that Mr. Duffy could conceivably reassure himself that “Oh my, how sad what happened to her, but it doesn’t have to do with me.” But that’s not what happens.

Suddenly, there’s this passage. Again, remember, Joyce is like 24 years old writing this. Some things cannot be sufficiently explained.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realized that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease.

A pause to take note of the simplicity of his language. Nothing fancy. “He began to feel ill at ease.”

Reading it yesterday morning, circa 7:30 am, I, too, began to feel ill at ease.

Joyce goes on:

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.

You have to be honest as a writer. So many people want inspiration, affirmation, Sunday School lessons. they want characters they can “relate” to – they want characters who make the right choices, or at least have the right responses to their choices. It’s fine if you want this. It’s fine if you don’t particularly want to read a story that makes you so uneasy (even though I think you are wrong.) But the thing about the story is – and all of his stories – is that they are airtight. You cannot wiggle out of them. You can try as you might, but you cannot escape them. This is one of the reasons why people resist him. His vision is too strong, and he is so good at setting it all up. I am unable to resist him.

After that passage comes:

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 semed 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.

JESUS, Jimmy. You’re 24.

I’ve read the story many times but I always manage to block it out. It flattens me.