Joyce offers a clear look at things with his story “Araby” from his collection Dubliners. Although the lesson is a painful one, the boy narrator of the story has achieved a small yet decisive epiphany about life. His eyes have been opened. Apparently Joyce suffered from eye problems almost all his life (glaucoma, iritis) and his image is only made complete with the iconic rounded eyeglasses he wore. Thus it is quite appropriate that seeing be a major theme in this story. It begins by saying that the street the narrator lived on was “blind” yet “the other houses of the street . . . gazed at one other”. If we are to assume that the “uninhabited house of two storeys” is the narrator’s, then the suggestion is that he is blind to whatever it is the other houses of the street can see, which is each other. His house is “detached from its neighbors” and so it is important that the beginning of his epiphany starts when he visits Mangan’s sister up the block. He is no longer at the “blind end”. He is beginning to see.
The narrator’s relationship with Mangan’s sister is voyeuristic. They exchange a few words but mostly he watches her from the railings of her porch, or from the floor in his front parlour. Joyce writes, “The blind was pulled down . . . so that I could not be seen.” — a foreshadowing of the kind of playfulness with language that will later become his trademark. Note that the mild ecstasy the boy experiences with Mangan’s sister is at a distance, and while “blind”. As soon as he begins to see in a new way, it is necessarily painful, like an eye operation (Joyce had many).
The night of the bazaar the boy sits staring at the clock before retreating to the “upper part of the house” where he “looked over at the dark house where she lived.” And then, “seeing nothing but . . .” the specific images impressed on his mind, which are the images of her neck, her hand, and her legs — all sensual parts of a girl’s body. At this point he is still indulging in imagery but his pubescent calling will drive him to action. Note the suspense Joyce creates while we wait with the boy for his uncle who is out drinking. This superb mastery of suspense is used in almost all of the stories in Dubliners. I remember waiting for my father to come home when I was about 13, so I could ask to go to a girl’s birthday party. He finally arrived and I asked (I was intimidated by my father then), to which he said no, and I was crushed.
Finally heading to the bazaar the boy remarks that “the sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey.” This sharply contrasts with the desertedness of the bazaar that he will soon encounter. Also, it is important to note that the boy is going to the bazaar with an objective, a responsibility he has given himself, namely to bring back something for Mangan’s sister, the object of his adoration. He is not just going to have fun and enjoy himself, and he is not going with friends but alone. He is like a solitary deacon set out on a journey to fulfill a promise he made. Once inside the bazaar the boy finds emptiness and silence. The final sentence is a brilliant fusion of themes and images: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” It is the first time the narrator “sees himself” and his eyes burn. It is a painful awakening.
Joyce’s collection of stories, first published in 1914.
What, exactly, is this awakening? What has the narrator come to “see” or realize? The key to this is Joyce’s religious imagery. Let’s go back and take a look: the former tenant of this “blind” house was a priest. This quietly brilliant line is crucial to the depth of meaning within this story. The narrator’s family have inherited a blind religious faith, just as one inherits poor eyesight. The ghost of the priest is still present, with his old paperbacks still strewn around the back drawing-room: among them a romance novel and a religious text. Religion was passed on (especially in Joyce’s time and country) to generation after generation, and it was a rite of passage for someone whose eyes were opened to see that it is a sham. Araby, then, becomes a symbol for the Church — mysterious, like some far off Eastern land, full of sights and sounds, yet ultimately transparent and unredeeming.
The boy is at the age where his religious inheritance and his instinctive sexuality begin to merge, and the result is a “confused adoration.” The religious imagery continues: the “central apple tree” behind the house suggests a kind of tree of knowledge; when we first encounter Mangan’s sister the boys are in shadow and she is “defined by the light from the half-opened door;” Mangan’s sister (without a name because the word “sister” suggests a nun) has a divine, angelic quality about her in every description. “The soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side” is almost reminiscent of church bells. Joyce continues with words like “litanies,” “chalice,” “prayers,” and “harp,” the latter a more heavenly than Church-like symbol. When the boy consummates his “confused adoration” for Mangan’s sister, it is done in the room where the priest died and he “pressed the palms of my hands together” as if in prayer. Finally, Mangan’s sister reveals that she has a retreat in her convent. This fact makes her even more pure and more desirable. The “fall of coins” the boy hears at the bazaar recall the 40 pieces of silver Judas Iscariot received for betraying Jesus. And indeed the boy feels completely betrayed. Finally, the English girl denies three times something she said, just as Peter denied knowing Jesus three times before the cock crowed.
So much of the experience of going to mass is visual. You are seated in the pews and your attention is directed forwards. It is much like going to the movies; once in a while you turn and regard the person next to you, perhaps forgetting for a moment that they are even there, and then you return your gaze to the action in front of you. The priest in his ornate robe, the lifting of the gold chalice, the stained-glass windows, the recitation of hymns and prayers, the incense — all stimulating to the senses, but mostly visual. In the end, the boy in “Araby” has abandoned all his budding sexual fervor into a religious setting and been denied any real substantiation at all.
Notebook in the Rain 