[In 2013, I wrote this essay on Dubliners for the online magazine Zeitnah, where it appeared in German, with the English at the end. As I was unable to find the article with a few internet searches, I thought I’d post it here, too, to make it more “findable”.]

Street Light: Casting and Breaking a Spell in Dubliners

In "A Little Cloud," the middle story of the fifteen stories in James Joyce's Dubliners, Little Chandler gazes out his office window in anticipation of meeting his old friend Gallaher later in the evening:

The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures—on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. (italics mine, here and throughout this essay)

The "kindly golden dust" of the "late autumn sunset" transforms what Chandler sees into a compelling and beautiful vision; the "untidy nurses and decrepit old men," even the screaming children, become the source of Chandler's "gentle melancholy." This sentiment is familiar to him; it comes up whenever he "thinks of life." And in general, the stories inDubliners "think of life" and transform the bleak world of its loud, messy, and faded characters into an aesthetic vision; or, to put it more positively, their "shower of kindly golden dust" illuminates the aesthetic possibilities hidden in these people.

The characters in Dubliners often experience such aesthetic illumination themselves, in the form of "reveries." On his way to meet Gallaher, Chandler "pursues" a "revery" of writing a poem about the autumn evening and all the people in it: "He pursued his revery so ardently that he passed his street and had to turn back." This "revery" generated by his "gentle melancholy" is a distraction that has to be interrupted in order for him to get where he wants to go.

Elsewhere in Dubliners, such a "revery" is not "pursued" but "fallen into," as in "The Boarding House," where Polly, the landlady's daughter, "rested the nape of her neck against the cool iron bed-rail and fell into a reverie." The alternate spelling of "reverie" is especially striking since Polly's mother also experiences a "revery" (with a Y) earlier in the same story: "Mrs. Mooney glanced instinctively at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece as soon as she had become aware through her revery that the bells of George's Church had stopped ringing." This "revery" needs to be interrupted from the outside, as Mrs. Mooney will later interrupt Polly's "reverie" by calling her downstairs.

In contrast, when another "revery" appears in "The Sisters" with one of the titular sisters of the newly deceased Father Flynn, it is "broken" by the dreamer herself: "Eliza seemed to have fallen into a deep revery. We waited respectfully for her to break the silence ..." The narrator, his aunt, and the other mourners do not interrupt Eliza's "deep revery"; if its silence will soon have to be broken, they wait for her to do the breaking. And when she does break the silence of her "revery," it is to recall something broken long ago by her brother: "... after a long pause she said slowly: 'It was that chalice he broke ...'" A revery, then, is a distraction one can either "pursue" or "fall into," but it must be broken in order for life to go on, even in the face of death, the ultimate breaking.

Throughout Dubliners, the breaking of reveries is matched by the breaking of the spell of aesthetic illumination. In "Two Gallants," Lenehan wanders Dublin alone while the other "gallant," Corley, is with a young woman: "He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold." Here, the "gaily coloured crowd" mentioned at the beginning of the story no longer "charms" Lenehan; the "untidy" and "decrepit" world aestheticized by Chandler's "gentle melancholy" in "A Little Cloud" merely seems trivial. The spell of Dublin no longer works on Lenehan—and at the same time, the spell of Dubliners itself is broken by syntax, for it is not immediately clear what the coordinator "and" is meant to coordinate. The verb phrase "did not answer" can easily be read as parallel to the verb phrase "was meant," in which case both have "all that" as their subjects. Only later in the sentence, when the "glances" are clearly associated with an invitation to "him" (Lenehan), does it become clear that "and" coordinates "did not answer" with the earlier "found": it is Lenehan who "does not answer." As a "gallant," Lenehan is a reader of the "glances" of young women as invitations, but the charm no longer works on him here—and at the same time, readers of Dubliners have the charm of their literary reverie broken by the sentence's syntactic ambiguity.

This ambiguity arises from the use of a subordinate clause ("that was meant to") in the first element of a coordination; the "and" that introduces the second part of the coordination can then be read as belonging to the subordinate clause rather than the main clause. The same syntactical ambiguity appears in "Araby": "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." Again, "and" can be read as coordinating the verb in the subordinate clause "in which my soul luxuriated" with the following verb, "cast," so that it is the narrator's "soul" that "casts an Eastern enchantment over me." Only with "over me" does this reading of the syntax seem strange; "cast" can then be seen as parallel to "were called," with "the syllables of the word Araby" (and not "my soul") now understood as the subject of "cast." The narrator has to go to the Araby bazaar for its spell and the spell of "Mangan's sister," who mentioned the bazaar to him, to be broken—but this syntactical breaking of the story's own spell anticipates the narrator's later disappointment.

With these syntactical ambiguities, it is possible to read sentences in two different ways (though generally one is clearly the intended reading). But Joyce's consistently sparse use of commas creates syntactical difficulties that lead to an initial impression of grammatical nonsense (or, more generously, typographical errors). Earlier in "Araby," Mangan's sister is introduced in a passage that was the first one where I noticed such difficulties:

When we returned to the street light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan's sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street.

Each of these sentences begins with a subordinate clause and contains no comma marking the end of the subordinate clause and the beginning of the main clause; this is Joyce's consistent practice in such constructions. In the second and third sentences, the main clause begins with "we," so it is immediately clear that a new clause is beginning. But in the first sentence, the main clause begins with "light," and the subordinate clause ends with "street," making it easy to read the two nouns as "street light" (as I did while happily enjoying a Dubliners reverie years ago). "We returned to the street light from the kitchen windows" makes sense on its own—the characters were by the kitchen windows and headed to the street light—but then, a verb without a subject appears: "had filled." If the phrase "street light" has been read as a unit, it can take quite a while to figure out that "light" is not modified by "street" and hence not part of the subordinate clause but the subject of the main clause. By then, the reverie of Dubliners has long since been broken.

In fact, the second sentence above could also be misleading: In "If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid ...," "we hid" could be initially read as part of a relative clause modifying "corner," as in "the corner we hid in" (the relative pronoun being omitted). Since one can't really hide "behind" a corner, the preposition "behind" dispels the possibility of this reading, but the sentence is syntactically less clear than the third sentence (where the presence of "his" in "his tea" makes it clear that what follows is not a relative clause with an omitted relative pronoun). Further syntactic difficulties appear later in the same paragraph:

Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

In the first sentence here, the absence of a comma in main-clause coordination (as is Joyce's practice generally) makes it unclear whether "I stood by the railings looking at her" is parallel to the main clause ("Her brother always teased her") or the subordinate clause ("he obeyed"). This is a syntactic ambiguity like those in "Two Gallants" and later in "Araby." The problem in the second sentence generates grammatical nonsense like that of "street light" earlier in the paragraph: the absence of a comma again makes it unclear whether "the soft rope of her hair" is parallel to "her body" (the direct object in the subordinate clause "she moved") or to "her dress" (the subject of the main clause that begins the sentence). With the first of these two readings ("she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair" as a unit), a verb without a subject again appears: "tossed." As before, it can take a moment to locate a subject for this verb, because the coordinator "and" has to be seen as connecting different elements than one first thought.[1]

Thus, along with ambiguous coordination, Joyce's sparse use of commas breaks the reverie that Dubliners leads its readers to "fall into." The aesthetic effect is undermined by a simple matter of punctuation. This can be seen as an amusing deficit in Joyce's style (as I long considered it), but it can also be interpreted positively: just as the characters' aesthetic illusions are repeatedly "broken," the readers' aesthetic pleasure in these "untidy" and "decrepit" lives has to be broken. In his "revery" in "A Little Cloud," Chandler explicitly looks down at those around him: "For the first time in his life he felt himself superior to the people he passed. For the first time his soul revolted against the dull inelegance of Capel Street." If Chandler's aesthetic illumination of "the people he passed" leads to condescension, the reverie created by Dubliners also risks creating a readerly condescension to the characters in the stories: aren't their lives beautiful despite their "dull inelegance"? The details of Joyce's syntax break the spell of his overall style and call the pleasures of our literary "reverie" into question. Dubliners would not have us be Little Chandler, aestheticizing his condescension; perhaps we should try to be Mr. Doran, the boarder in "The Boarding House" whose affair with Polly sent her into her "reverie": "But what would grammar matter if he really loved her?"

[1] Such difficulties actually appear rather often in Dubliners, and in other forms as well. For example, in "An Encounter," two nouns can be read as objects of a preposition when in fact the second is the subject of the following main clause: "Mahony's big sister was to write an excuse for him and Leo Dillon was to tell his brother to say he was sick." And in "After the Race," the coordinator "for" can be read as a preposition: "A certain pride mingled with his parents' trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play fast and loose for the names of great foreign cities have at least this virtue." (This latter was in fact the second case I ever noticed, after the "street light" sentence.)