| "Araby" | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Short story by James Joyce | |||
| Country | Ireland | ||
| Language | English | ||
| Genre(s) | Short story | ||
| Publication | |||
| Published in | Dubliners | ||
| Publication type | Collection | ||
| Media type | Print (Hardback) | ||
| Publication date | 1914 | ||
| Chronology | |||
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"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners . The story traces a young boy's infatuation with his friend's sister.
Through first-person narration, the reader is immersed at the start of the story in the drab life that people live on North Richmond Street, which seems to be illuminated only by the verve and imagination of the children who, despite the growing darkness that comes during the winter months, insist on playing "until [their] bodies glowed". Even though the conditions of this neighbourhood leave much to be desired, the children's play is infused with their almost magical way of perceiving the world, which the narrator dutifully conveys to the reader:
Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. [1]
But though these boys "career" around the neighbourhood in a very childlike way, they are also aware of and interested in the adult world, as represented by their spying on the narrator's uncle as he comes home from work and, more importantly, on Mangan's sister, whose dress "swung as she moved" and whose "soft rope of hair tossed from side to side". These boys are on the brink of sexual awareness and, awed by the mystery of another sex, are hungry for knowledge.
On one rainy evening, the boy secludes himself in a soundless, dark drawing-room and gives his feelings for her full release: "I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! many times." This scene is the culmination of the narrator's increasingly romantic idealization of Mangan's sister. By the time he actually speaks to her, he has built up such an unrealistic idea of her that he can barely put sentences together: "When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me if I was going to Araby. I forget whether I answered yes or no." But the narrator recovers splendidly: when Mangan's sister dolefully states that she will not be able to go to Araby, he gallantly offers to bring something back for her.
The narrator now cannot wait to go to the Araby bazaar and procure for his beloved some grand gift that will endear him to her. And though his aunt frets, hoping that it is not "some Freemason affair", and though his uncle, perhaps intoxicated, perhaps stingy, arrives so late from work and equivocates so much that he almost keeps the narrator from being able to go, the intrepid yet frustrated narrator heads out of the house, tightly clenching a florin, in spite of the late hour, toward the bazaar.
But the Araby market turns out not to be the fantastic place he had hoped it would be. It is late; most of the stalls are closed. The only sound is "the fall of the coins" as men count their money. Worst of all, however, is the vision of sexuality—of his future—that he receives when he stops at one of the few remaining open stalls. The young woman minding the stall is engaged in a conversation with two young men. Though he is potentially a customer, she only grudgingly and briefly waits on him before returning to her frivolous conversation. His idealized vision of Araby is destroyed, along with his idealized vision of Mangan's sister—and of love:"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
"Araby" touches on a great number of themes:
These themes build on one another entirely through the thoughts of the young boy, who is portrayed by the first-person narrator, who writes from memory.
"Araby" contains themes and characteristics common to Joyce in general and Dubliners in particular. Like "Eveline", "Araby" involves a character going on a journey that ends in futility. The boy lives with his aunt and uncle, like the boy in "The Sisters". The boy's uncle appears to be a prototype of Simon Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. William York Tindall, noting the story's religious allusions, and finding in its ending the suggestion of an emptying church, sees the boy's journey to Araby as a futile quest for Ireland's Church. [3] Another critic, expanding on the idea, has argued that Joyce drew upon the Church's iconography to depict Mangan's sister and its liturgy to render the bazaar's closing, and that the story should be read as a parody of the Eucharist akin to "The Sisters". [4]
In "The Structure of 'Araby'", Jerome Mandel notes the shared plot archetypes between "Araby" and traditional medieval romantic literature, positing that Joyce deliberately "structured with rigorous precision upon a paradigm of medieval romance". [5]
Among later writers influenced by "Araby" was John Updike, whose oft-anthologized short story "A&P" is a 1960s American reimagining of Joyce's tale of a young man, lately the wiser for his frustrating infatuation with a beautiful but inaccessible girl. Her allure has excited him into confusing his emergent sexual impulses for those of honor and chivalry, and brought about disillusionment and a loss of innocence. [6]
Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement." According to the writer Declan Kiberd, "before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
John Stanislaus Joyce was the father of writer James Joyce, and a well known Dublin man about town. The son of James and Ellen Joyce, John Joyce grew up in Cork, where his mother's family, which claimed kinship to "Liberator" Daniel O'Connell, was quite prominent.
James Clarence Mangan, born James Mangan, was an Irish poet. He freely translated works from German, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and Irish, with his translations of Goethe gaining special interest. Starting around 1840, and with increasing frequency after the Great Famine began, he wrote patriotic poems, such as A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century. Mangan was troubled, eccentric, and an alcoholic. He died early from cholera, amid the continuing dire conditions of the Famine. After his death, Mangan was hailed as Ireland's first national poet and admired by writers such as James Joyce and William Butler Yeats.
"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is by far the longest story in the collection and, at 15,952 words, is almost long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss, as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.
"Seven Drunken Nights" is a humorous Irish folk song most famously performed by The Dubliners. It is a variation of the English/Scottish folk song "Our Goodman". It tells the story of a gullible drunkard returning night after night to see new evidence of his wife's lover, only to be taken in by increasingly implausible explanations.
"Eveline" is a short story by the Irish writer James Joyce. It was first published in 1904 by the journal Irish Homestead and later featured in his 1914 collection of short stories Dubliners. It tells the story of Eveline, a teenager who plans to leave Dublin for Argentina with her "lover".
"A Little Cloud" is a short story by James Joyce, first published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. It contrasts the life of the protagonist, Little Chandler, a Dubliner who remained in the city and married, with the life of his old friend Ignatius Gallaher, who had left Ireland to find success and excitement as a journalist and bachelor in London.
"The Sisters" is a short story by James Joyce, the first of a series of short stories called Dubliners. Originally published in the Irish Homestead on 13 August 1904, "The Sisters" was Joyce's first published work of fiction. Joyce later revised the story and had it, along with the rest of the series, published in book form in 1914. The story details a boy's connection with a local priest, in the context of the priest's death and reputation.
"An Encounter" is a short story by James Joyce. It is second in a collection of Joyce's short stories called Dubliners. In the story, two young boys experience an eerie encounter with a strange, old man. It deals with themes such as routine and wanderlust.
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"A Painful Case" is a short story by Irish author James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. The story details a platonic affair between an isolated man and a married woman, the breaking off of the affair, and its aftermath.
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"A Mother" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. The story centers around a mother who secures a role for her daughter in a series of concerts.
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Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. The term has a more specialized sense as a literary device distinct to modernist fiction. Author James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero (1904–1906), an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself." Stephen's epiphanies are moments of heightened poetic perception in the trivial aspects of everyday Dublin life, non-religious and non-mystical in nature. They become the basis of Stephen's theory of aesthetic perception as well as his writing. In similar terms, Joyce experimented with epiphany throughout his career, from the short stories he wrote between 1898 and 1904 which were central to his early work, to his late novel Finnegans Wake (1939). Scholars used Joyce's term to describe a common feature of the modernist novel, with authors as varied as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Katherine Mansfield all featuring these sudden moments of vision as an aspect of the contemporary mind. Joycean or modernist epiphany has its roots in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially the Wordsworthian "spots of time," as well as the sudden spiritual insights that formed the basis of traditional spiritual autobiography. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains the rise of epiphany in modernist art as a reaction against the rise of a “commercial-industrial-capitalist society” during the early twentieth century.
Araby is an independent short film directed by Dennis Courtney, starring Van Hughes. It was adapted from the short story "Araby" by James Joyce, which was included in his short works collection Dubliners.
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Araby public domain audiobook at LibriVox 
