Dubliners - "Two Gallants" (Story 6 of 15)

[Chris OConnor]

Dubliners - "Two Gallants" (Story 6 of 15)

Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences.

[DWill]

Perhaps we can see the merry crowd of "After the Race" as somewhat redeemable compared to these two prize specimens, Lenehan and Corley. What could Joyce have intended in giving us such a portrait of seediness and even depravity? Is this a social critique, an indictment of a whole class of people too typical of Dublin and a diagnosis of the city's ills?

You can see why Joyce must have been hated by almost anyone aware of the mirror he had held up to Ireland's major city. Also, on a purely literary basis the stories must have mystified or repelled. We're now quite used to gritty realism in fiction, but this apparently wasn't the case in Joyce's era, when Victorian sensibilities still ruled and fiction would need to show some moral purpose, even serious fiction like that of Dickens and George Meredith.

[President Camacho]

At least he seems like he's done something awful in the end. I guess that makes the tragedy a little worse.

[DWill]

At least he seems like he's done something awful in the end. I guess that makes the tragedy a little worse.

I think you're right that there's at least a glimmer of humanity in Corley, if the reason that he doesn't exult over his victory is that he knows what a complete cad he has been. Anyone who isn't truly a sociopath will have to work at being a bastard; human sympathies have to be resisted in order carry out plans to exploit and ruin others. Corley's motive is his reputation, keeping up his self-image as the biggest lothario, the biggest biscuit-taker, in the city. He'll need to do things that even he finds it hard to do in order to stay on top and be rewarded with sycophantic behavior from people like Lenehan.

For his part, Lenehan's glimmer of humanity comes when he gives in to his depression while in the eatery wolfing down his plate of peas. He sees himself accurately as a 31-year-old loser with no future, but he has no idea how to break out of his meaningless and pathetic existence.

[Saffron]

I have to say I had a hard time following this story. I could tell that the girl was going to be taken advantage of in someway - I assumed sexually, but could not really figure out the gold coin at the end. I have poked around a bit and now see with help that the woman has been swindled or convinced to steal.

[DWill]

The deal is kept hushed by the two men. Corley has already had sex with the woman, so it's a matter of upping the ante to prove that he still has what it takes. I assumed the girl requested money from someone else and gave it to Corley. So Corley gets to use the girl again, plus gets paid for it in a kind of reverse of prostitution. The enigma is his reaction to his victory at the end.

[geo]

This is a story about human depravity. Corley has already convinced this "fine decent tart" to have sex with him, telling Lenehan that "she's a bit gone on me." So now he's trying to take the relationship to the next level which for him means to take advantage of her even more. He truly is a cad.

Joyce doesn't disclose the nature of this planned conquest until the very end, so the secret provides much of the tension in the story. I was confused too, since he'd already had sex with her. The building the "slavey" enters is her place of employment and where she lives as well. The editor of my Penguin edition says the fact that she enters through one door and exits from another is puzzling. Apparently she has already stolen the coin and is merely getting it from her belongings to give to Corley. The gold coin is a sovereign (worth about a pound) which was a considerable sum of money for the characters in the story, probably about one fourth to one eight of the slavey's annual wage. Maybe she didn't steal the coin, maybe it was her savings as unlikely as this may be. I don't think Joyce spells it out either way. My notes say it was probably stolen.

There's a lot of slang in the story. As we discussed on another thread, this is Joyce's "empathetic narrative" technique for taking us into the heads of the characters. We get a sense of how the character thinks by seeing his slang terms. This story is more about Lenehan than Corley. We get a real sense of his utter futility and hopelessness as a man in his early thirties with no prospects. He's content in this story to live vicariously through Corley's exploits. While waiting for Corley, he goes into a "poor-looking shop" and orders a plate of peas and a bottle of ginger beer and thinks so highly of the meal that he makes a note of the shop mentally. The footnote in my Penguin edition describes this meal as "one of the most dismal in all of literature."

By the way, Lenehan will make an appearance in ULYSSES along with a few other characters from DUBLINERS.

[DWill]

Joyce's ear is very finely attuned to the speech of these mainly lower-class Dubliners (Joyce was a linguist, after all). He reports the slang that Corley and Lenehan use in order to make them real to us, and they are. But he goes farther than this, though not in the stories up to this point, I believe. In the tenth story, "Clay," he uses an innovation whereby the third-person narrator picks up the speech patterns of the characters, though he isn't quoting them. One critic calls this the "Uncle Charles Principle." This is explained in the stuff I first posted a while back.

"The modernist is a revolutionary not only in content but in style. Although Joyce's major innovations in style come in his more mature works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, his style in Dubliners is marked by two distinct elements new to English prose: the narrated monologue and patterned repetition of images (chiasmus).

There are a number of terms for narrated monologue: free indirect discourse, empathetic narrative, stylistic inflection, or, in Hugh Kenner's phrase, the "Uncle Charles Principle" (see Kenner [1978], ch. 2). These are all ways of indicating that the prose style changes depending upon the nature of the character that the narration is about; another way of putting it is to say that the fictional character begins to make authorial choices, that the character "infects" the prose style of the writer.

As an example from Dubliners, let us look at the first sentence of "The Dead":

"Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."

Now, a precise stylist would want to change this to "figuratively run off her feet." But the use of literally in this context is one that uneducated people, such as the housemaid Lily, frequently employ. What has happened here is that Lily, the character being written about, has, shall we say, literally taken the pen from the author and begun to use expressions that would come naturally to her; in other words, she has infected the author's style with her own personality. To continue, the third sentence of this opening paragraph reads:

"It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also, ... "

The expression "well for her" is the kind of language a Dubliner of her economic and social caste would use; here, it becomes part of the author's style. Indeed, we can see that the authorial voice of the nineteenth-century writer, which was that of the distinct character of the writer, has become multilingual rather than monolingual. This becomes evident at the opening of the second paragraph:

"It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia's choir, any of Kate's pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane's pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat."

Now, this is no longer Lily's voice. The topic has shifted to the opinions of middle-class Dubliners, the typical party guests at this event, and so they have grabbed the pen of the author and are using their own Dublin speech in the choice of words and in the rhythms of the sentences. Hugh Kenner uses the phrase "Uncle Charles Principle" to describe this technique, because one critic attacked Joyce for the opening page of Part Two of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Joyce had written:

"Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse...."

The critic objected to the use of the archaic word "repaired" instead of the more contemporary "went," but Joyce's point is that this is precisely the word Uncle Charles would use. Uncle Charles has the pen in hand."

By the way, did you notice both Corley and Lenehan several times noting how the moon and sky looked? That seemed an odd detail for these two. The only thought that occurs to me is that these two knockabouts, who usually go about their lives like dogs with noses to the ground, do have some dim sense of a broader plane of existence. it might be rather puzzling to them.

[geo]

By the way, did you notice both Corley and Lenehan several times noting how the moon and sky looked? That seemed an odd detail for these two. The only thought that occurs to me is that these two knockabouts, who usually go about their lives like dogs with noses to the ground, do have some dim sense of a broader plane of existence. it might be rather puzzling to them.

That's a good point. I'm suddenly reminded of a poem about a guy walking a dog on a leash. The dog is naturally focused on what's on the ground, the guy is looking up towards the heaven. I'll see if I can dig that one up.

I noticed an oddity in the very first paragraph.

THE grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur.

Normally, you don't want to repeat a word in the same sentence or even in the same vicinity, but in this one paragraph Joyce repeats at least four words. "Warm" is used three times. He uses "grey warm" early on and "warm grey" later. What's he doing here?

[DWill]

That's a good example of Joyce sort of drawing the camera lens back, making something quite pretty of all the people, taken in aggregate, to contrast with the ugliness of the story we've just heard. But I'm not sure why he does it. The patterned repetition is called chiasmus, for what that is worth. Joyce was quite fond of it.