Structured Encounters With the Discursive

Structured encounters with the discursive nature of experience in James Joyce' "Araby" and "An Encounter"

In both the structural frameworks of James Joyce's short stories "An Encounter" and "Araby," the narrators of the tale are taken out of the rhythms of their ordinary, daily, lived experiences. These two protagonists enter diffuse experiences, namely acts of literal and figurative 'horseplay' and a fair. Through the act of wandering into strange places they engage in such disruptive events that profoundly change their natures, levels of consciousness, and perceptions of realities and themselves. Despite the wildness these short stories chronicle, both are highly structured. Even though both stories are intensely sensual, and put the protagonist through a dizzying array of experiences, both stories begin with order, proceed into different forms disorder in play and fair-like environments, and finally cumulate into a final, resolving, order that leaves the adolescent protagonists wiser than they were before.

These life-changing events take the form of seeing individuals, either new types of people, or everyday people in 'new lights' In "An Encounter," the protagonist experiences an encounter with an individual the protagonist would not otherwise know within the daily circle and modalities of that person's life. "Araby" is a fair -- and a fair is a carnival of different sights, experiences, smells, and various encounters, the last of which is a pure woman seen in disreputable circumstances. While at "Araby," the young boy sees a woman he has idealized, and is shocked to see her in a more common and base fashion than he envisioned. Thus, "Araby" indicates how moments essentially out of time and routine can be life-transforming, through seasonal, temporal events like a fair. Fairs are discursive spaces, in that one can wander through them. Likewise, the aimless playing in the street of "encountering" someone becomes an education in character, rather than a purposeless, aimless wandering through stimulating yet disconnected experiences and meetings.

Even the first sentence in the words of the simpler and younger protagonist of "An Encounter" begins with a kind of ominous reference to the "Wild West." The orderly world of childhood is contrasted with the disorganized impulses of the book she loves. A "spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one." (1) Soon, in confirmation of this point-of-view of the danger of play, order in the form of an encounter enters into the world of the young children.

"I'm surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff!" So says Father Butler. (1) The protagonist is ashamed with an almost furtive, sexual intensity, and hides the books about the Wild West. "In the morning I was first comer to the bridge, as I lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ash pit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came, and hurried along the canal bank." (2) However, despite this shame, the young narrator is once again taken up into the confusion and joy of playacting, with wildness, even bullying some younger boys, despite his eventual prodding to cease and desist, to his friend Mooney. After the horseplay, he and his companion Mooney are left bereft of joy and "the sun went in behind some clouds and left us to our jaded thoughts and the crumbs of our provisions." (4) The boys soon encounter another man, who, like Father Butler, is learned, but whom takes a liberal view of sexuality and promotes the value of a diverse array of reading materials. The protagonist feels dimly awakened by this encounter with an individual, and more importantly experiences a refreshing attitude he has never encountered before, and is not likely to encounter again in his daily, routine existence. He is offered another path between that of Catholicism and the wild boisterous and occasionally cruel play of Mooney, and the order that he returns to is infused with a new, more positive consciousness and sense of his place in the world.

"Araby," likewise takes an orderly protagonist into a wild world, in this case of an Irish county fair. It begins with order, and faith, a place where a priest has just died. "The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room ... He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister." (1) The protagonist idolizes the woman, "morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood." The orderly, chaste priest is contrasted with the sensual, wild impulses the woman brings up in the protagonist. He describes how her "image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of laborers, the shrill litanies of shop- boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks ... " (1)