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| Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig,1915 Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas |
Darkness in literature:
James Joyce's Araby
In this short story, a young man's night-time journey to a deserted bazaar marks the end of carefree childhood
Chris Power
Thursday 20 December 2012 10.35 GMT
James Joyce's short story Araby shows us a Dubliner stumbling over the boggy ground of adolescence. Joyce dimly lights this psychic landscape, and hems it on all sides with a bleak darkness. When the story begins, childhood's summer has passed and the dwindling days of winter have arrived: "The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns."
The boy lives with his uncle and aunt in a cul-de-sac – a "blind" street, with which Joyce suggests an idyllic ignorance of the wider world – and is in love with the sister of his friend Mangan. Being adolescent, and educated by Christian Brothers, the boy's feelings of attraction are confusing, bedevilling and painful:
"My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) … I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."
When Mangan's sister finally notices the boy, she shines from the surrounding darkness: "The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing." She says she can't go to the Araby bazaar, and the boy promises that if he does then he'll bring her something back. He asks his uncle if he can go the following Saturday. That day his uncle is late home, and it is after nine before the boy departs to cross the dark city. That he sets out at a time unsuitable for children is significant, as the journey will lead the boy from childhood into adulthood. This Joyce characterises as a transition from perennial hope to perennial disappointment.
I was 16 when I first read Araby, and in the autumn of that year I got into what was, at that point, the worst trouble I'd ever been in. The police called my parents, and my parents, in a fury, tracked me down and ordered me home. I was a slow train and a long walk away, and over the course of that endless, anxious journey, night fell. Ever since, I always think of it when I read about the boy travelling to Araby in the "deserted train" that "crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river". Both journeys led from a carefree childhood into a graver space: towards, in Hugh Kenner's description of Araby, "an echoing and empty humiliation". In symbolic terms, neither journey would have been well served by daylight.
When the boy reaches his destination, most of the stalls are closed and "the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service." Here, on the darkening floor of the shabby bazaar, Joyce's story becomes a requiem. The boy sees a young woman flirting with two men, and the sexual atmosphere of their exchange confuses him. When the woman grudgingly serves him he tells her he doesn't want anything. As he leaves the bazaar, empty-handed but possessed of a new and bitter knowledge, he hears a voice "call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark."
We are present at the passing of the narrator's childhood, its lights dwindling around him. "Gazing up into the darkness," he tells us: "I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Here, at the story's end, we find ourselves thrown back to its beginning, which carries the presentiment of death in its "dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits".
In an evening the narrator has moved from an innocent boy playing in the last light of childhood, to an anguished young man who has come to realise that maturity is not the realisation of childhood's promise, but its loss. This is an archetypal Joycean epiphany, one of those often small but definitive moments, after which life is never quite the same again. It is so often described as a literary effect that we forget how accurately it can depict the way we experience change, as is true for me in the case of that autumn night 20 years ago. To some extent this is a result of the way we shape our memories, editing as we go as well as simply forgetting vast quantities of detail. Just like the narrator of Araby, a grown man remembering a single night with a mixture of scorn and tenderness, what we come to look back on is a sequence of these significant moments; a thin rail of light tracing our path across a shadowy expanse.
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