A Cookie the Size of Ireland

I'd like to give a cookie to past-me for writing down ideas about James Joyce and Dubliners (1914). I'm still interested in these ideas, and so I am sharing them here. Joyce writes more about mothers in his later texts, but he is deeply concerned with mentorship, legacy, and cultural inheritance in Dubliners as well. What sort of mentors does a country or culture need as a whole? How does a country work as a child, adolescent, and fully independent adult? How do our individual guides and nurturers function in this role?

I'm gonna give me a cookie and find out!

A large portion of our identities are formed by the rituals we consciously and unconsciously participate in. Northrop Frye asserts in The Archetypes of Literature that “the crises of existence, from birth to death get rituals attached to them” and that a culture’s rituals “can be seen by an observer, but is largely concealed from the participators themselves” (698). James Joyce--both an inculcated participant and a distant observer of Irish culture--referred to these crises in his own work through his “epiphanies.” Although Joyce doesn’t invoke this term until his later work, critics apply his understanding of epiphanies to Dubliners, examining characters paralyzed by what seems to be an illuminating moment; these epiphanies may also be seen as representations of rituals.

Liminal is a word many of us are familiar with. But in discussing literature, we often use “liminal” to describe a physical place or a time. The threshold of a door. Twilight. Midnight in between the border of two countries. The art of being between and betwixt. Although literary critics often discuss liminality, we talk about it as a physical marker for a character’s development. The original definition for liminality, and the definition still in use by anthropologists, is that liminality is not physical at all but rather a phase in a larger ritual. Because rituals are so embedded within our culture, they appear in our art and our texts. In 1909--just a year after Dubliners was published, Arnold van Gennep published his most famous work, Rites of Passage, which remains highly influential today (since 2012, over 395 books and articles have cited van Gennep’s text). Van Gennep outlines initiation rites and their different uses in this text to illustrate the universality of rituals’ formulas. One of the most significant part of this text, though, is van Gennep’s creation of the word “liminal.”

According to van Gennep, a rite of passage is a ceremony or series of ceremonies that transition an individual or subgroup of a community from one social situation to the next. Examples include weddings, initiation into religious sects, and social puberty (which I will get back to). A rite of passage has three subsets: rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation. Rites of separation, which van Gennep also refers to as pre-liminal rites, cut the novice off from his or her previous world (sometimes literally). Rites of transition, liminal rites, are the rites that teach the participant about a culture’s social norms. Rites of incorporation, post-liminal rites reintroduce the individual back into society with their new status. One of the most common rituals in the U.S. is the ritual of Santa Claus coming on Christmas Eve. A child finds out Santa isn’t real and experiences the metaphorical death of childhood in which she loses the belief in magic. She is now no longer a child, but not yet an adult. She is in the liminal phase. Her parents then transition her by explaining Santa is the spirit of generosity and love. Finally she is incorporated into the adult world by being allowed to participate in perpetuating the myth of Santa. This is just one of the many rites of passage we go through in the United States. The child in this example is the novice, or the individual being transitioned. Her parents are the sponsors. A sponsor is supposed to confer cultural knowledge upon the novice. That is, the sponsor is supposed to teach the novice how their society expects adults to behave and think, teaches the social customs and norms.

I mentioned social puberty before. Van Gennep asserts that our cultural understanding of puberty (declaring boys and girls to be transformed into men and women) is rarely consistent with physiological puberty. Social puberty then is when our cultural understanding of a group shifts so we begin to see the group as approaching adulthood. This can be marked from middle school dances to bar mitzvahs to betrothals and so forth. The transition to adulthood is not determined by the physical, but rather by the social. And so now we return to my original point: the anthropological understanding of liminality is ritual-based and the inability of those rituals to complete plays a significant role in Dubliners. To re-use the example of Santa Claus, the rite of passage would have been remained incomplete if the girl’s parents had refused to acknowledge the non-existence of Santa Claus, leaving her with doubt and no answers. In this case, the girl would be unable to re-incorporate into adult society because she would not have the necessary knowledge and therefore would remain in liminality .

The inability to transition into social adulthood is present in the early stories of Dubliners, underlying the paralysis of his adolescent stories--”An Encounter,” “Araby,” and “Eveline.” The tension caused by this frustration manifests in these stories through the epiphanic moment as the frustrated social puberty ritual. The phase between the asexual world and the sexual world is the liminal phase. The liminal phase is the point between the metaphorical death of the previous state, before the metaphorical rebirth into 20th-century Irish society as a heterosexual adult. Now I will continue to refer to the goal sexual state as being heterosexual because in 20th century Ireland that was the only real choice. In these stories, each of the protagonists is confronted with a sexual encounter that forces them to leave their previous state of existence; the stories wrestle with their respective struggles to enter the next phase, to enter the adult world of sexuality, and their discomfort in the liminal state. Lacking proper sponsors, the young adults are unable to learn how to be functioning adults in western society and end the stories paralyzed.

In the story, “An Encounter,” three young boys--Leo Dillon, Mahony, and the narrator--decide to skip school to go on his adventure. On the day of the quest, Leo does not show up and the other two boys go on without him (it may be noted that as Leo’s familial role models strongly encourage an asexual initiation into the priesthood, Leo is unsuitable from the beginning to join the other two boys on this adventure). As they head out of town, Mahony and the narrator encounter another group of children: a group of young girls. The narrator observes as Mahoney chases the girls with his “unloaded catapult,” intervening when Mahony is faced with a counterattack from two boys (22). As the rites of separation have only just begun, the boys are still in their asexual state: the catapult--the phallic symbol of the scene--is “unloaded” and therefore not a true threat to the girls. The “two ragged boys” enter the fight out of chivalry rather than any romantic or sexual competition. While the overarching scene is laden with political and religious meaning, the scene—despite portraying males fighting over females—is sexually innocent; the narrator leaves behind this asexual state, though, as they move forward.

The boys cross the Liffey River marking their first true separation: a geographical gap. After disembarking, the boys end lounging in a field in seclusion. A bit later, the narrator notices that a man is approaching. During this moment, the narrator is “chew[ing] one of those green stems on which girls tell fortunes.” The future and its ambiguity seems tied to the man’s arrival; pushing the future closer, the man’s entrance marks the beginning of the rites of transition.

Within moments of joining the boys, the man remarks that “the happiest time of one’s life was undoubtedly one’s schoolboy days and that he would give anything to be young again” (25).

The disparity between their positions is made abundantly clear: the boys are still novices and asexual while the man has left those days behind and is no longer preliminal.

He continues to talk to the boys about appropriate and inappropriate literature. This exchange recalls an earlier scene in the story in which Father Butler reprimanded Leo Dillon for indulging in boys’ magazines. The man takes on an authoritative role, one similar to Father Butler. With Catholicism as the core for the majority of early twentieth-century Irish rituals (communion, marriage, mass), the priest represented the ultimate sponsor. However, he represented a non-sexual sponsor, unable to guide Irish citizens into a heterosexual postliminal state. It follows then that with the priest—the epitome of Irish Catholic society—unable to act as the boys’ sponsor that there is a dearth of suitable role models for mainstream society in Ireland. Consequently, the narrator in “Encounter” attempts to form a bond with the stranger so that the stranger might be a guide. As he continues to lecture, the narrator worries about disappointing him (“I was afraid the man would think I was as stupid as Mahoney”) making clear the possibility of a novice-sponsor relationship (25).

As the story continues, it becomes increasingly apparent that the man is an unsuitable sponsor. The conversation turns to childhood sweethearts and whether the two boys have any; as the man presses them for answers, the narrator notices that it seems as though the man “was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit” (26). The man has the script of the ritual memorized, however he is not truly a member of the heterosexual society the boys wish to enter. Instead he “orbits” about it, perpetually marginalized, perpetually stagnate.

The man tries to behave as a mentor (“at times he lowered his voice and spoke mysteriously as if he were telling us something secret”), but ultimately fails (26). He briefly abandons the boys to masturbate in the corner of a field at which Mahony simultaneously proclaims and dismisses him as a “queer old josser!” (26) As Victory Pomeranz notes, Mahony is established from the beginning of the story as a character well-versed in slang; it can be presumed, then, that in this instance Mahony is using the slang definition of “josser” (a “degraded” man) and the boys are aware--at least somewhat--of the man’s marginalized sexuality (Pomeranz 441).

The man, indulging in his sexuality outside the city within the frays of a field, has not been incorporated into mainstream Irish society and, subsequently, cannot be a true sponsor for the narrator The man continues, however, to try to play the role of authoritative sponsor and begins to lecture the narrator about whipping. Prompted by Mahony’s physicality, the man begins repeating himself over and over about wanting to whip little boys. It is important to note here that Arnold van Gennep references several rites of separation that incorporate whipping. One of the references harkens back to the American Indians, whom the boys mimicked in the story’s beginning and to the schoolmaster’s use of corporal punishment on the boys. Discussing several different Australian and American Indian tribes, van Gennep observes, “in [the Ko’tikili’s] ceremony whipping is clearly first a rite of separation, then a rite of incorporation. The same use of whipping is to be found in the initiation rites of the Navaho, which are almost identical to those described above” (78). It seems then that man is attempting to further the rite of separation to begin incorporating the narrator into his own sexual world.

Instead of being reincorporated into Dublin society with adult sexual identities, the narrator assumes a false identity for his false mentor. He orders Mahony “[i]n case he asks us for our names, I said, let you be Murphy and I’ll be Smith” (26). This false initiation not only represents the failing to reincorporate into society, but it symbolizes the narrator’s refusal to be inducted into the man’s marginalized culture. The narrator has separated himself from society, and remains isolated and guide-less.

At the story’s end, we do not see the narrator return to town. He waits upon the hill and waits for Mahony to join him. The narrator’s separation from everything--town, school, the man, even Mahony--is glaring in this last scene. The ritual overall has failed, and the narrator is left stagnated in the liminal phase, severed by the rites of separation without being reinitiated. He has left his childhood geographically speaking and the man’s discussion about whipping dissolves the narrator’s ties to his asexual state mentally (albeit not physically). While he has entered the liminal state, the emphasis seems to be placed more heavily upon his leaving the asexual world. The boy’s status is one of complete isolation: he is no longer of the “unloaded” world, not a part of the mainstream adult sexuality of Dublin, and not a part of the marginalized sexuality of Ireland.

The absence of proper guides serves as the greatest reason for the failure of all three social puberty rituals. In each story, the unsuitability of available guides and the noticeable absence of proper guides emphasizes the effects Dublin society is having upon the rising generation. From the narrator in “An Encounter” whose guides include a priest and a pederast, the narrator in “Araby” whose mentors include an alcoholic uncle and dead poets, and Eveline whose sponsors include her deceased mother and her abusive father, none of the protagonists have a satisfactory sponsor to help them initiate into an adult society. By blocking their access to open sexualities, the society stunts their growths and blocks their attempts to enter the postliminal state.

While Eveline represents the direst consequence of being excluded from society, none of the stories have happy endings: the protagonists are paralyzed and thus trapped in liminality. It seems that if the protagonists had access to satisfactory sponsors, the ritual would have been successful: the narrator in “Encounter” could have remained in the asexual state until the appropriate time, the narrator in “Araby” could have understood the responsibilities and expectations of adult sexuality, and Eveline could have claimed an individual status within the world. Instead they all “orbit” back home, mimicking the trajectories they do have: the pederast, the childless uncle, the tragic mother in their journeys homeward.

So in light reading Dubliners with an anthropologist’s gaze, Joyce’s politics in Dubliners take on a new depth. The lack of sponsors is the greatest cause for their protagonists’ liminality. In 1908, the memory of Charles Parnell was still fresh to the Irish and to Joyce. Parnell had had the ability to lead Ireland to freedom; he was their first leader to have a shot of creating an Irish nation. Because of sexual politics, Parnell was banished. The Catholic Church played a large role in Parnell’s decline--something that Joyce was aware of. I’d like to suggest that the failed rituals in Dubliners act as an indicator to Joyce’s own politics: that Ireland lacked leaders to act as proper sponsors and now they were only left with the impotent Church and the young upcoming generation. Although these anxieties are made more explicit in his later stories, I think we see the root of these fears here. Just as the rituals failed because of unsatisfactory sponsors, Joyce may be asserting that Ireland’s attempts for nationhood will fail because of a lack of suitable leaders. Perhaps Joyce is suggesting that without the necessary sponsors, Ireland is doomed to the liminal state: not quite a colony, not quite a nation.

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