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The narrator seeks to help her when she collapses but she runs away as he approaches. Gustave Flaubert, “Un Coeur simple” (in Trois Contes, 1877).
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CICLO de FORMAÇÃO em LINGUAS INGLESA e ESPANHOLA IFRN-Cang/2a DIREC – DIA 4 do NOV. 2020 às 20H “On the Omnibus” by Jack B Yeats Bruce S. G. Stewart PhD (Trinity College, Dublin) Reader at Ulster University (emeritus) / Prof. da UFRN
Out hunting one day, the sportsman of the title witnesses a meeting between a peasant girl and the servant of a nearby estate-owner. Apparently they have been lovers but now the valet tells her that he cannot marry her in view of his position before leaving her in tears. The narrator seeks to help her when she collapses but she runs away as he approaches.
Felicité, the daughter of poor people, is jilted by a young man when he marries a rich widow to avoid conscription. She spends her life working for the Mme Aubain. Childless herself, she suffers the loss of her own beloved niece and nephew (the boy dies of cholera). She becomes religious and forms an attachment to the parrot Loulou which a relative has given out of pity. Outliving all her charges, she dies in bed with the stuffed remains of the parrot nearby. In her last moments she see the Holy Spirit (Paraclete) floating overhead and welcoming her to Heaven but the reader knows it is only the parrot on the edge of her field of vision. (Or is it?)
The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. […] The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. — Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Gustave Flaubert, letter to Mme de Chantepie (18 March, 1857): Borrowed Words: Joyce and Flaubert ‘ Madame Bovary has nothing of the truth in it. It is a totally fictitious story. The illusion of truth - if there is one - comes from the book’s impersonality. It is a one of my principles that a writer should not be his own theme. An artist must be in his work like God in creation - invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen’. ( Selected Letters , ed. Francis Steegmuller, London: Hamish Hamilton 1954 , p. 186 .) ( A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [Corrected Edition], ed. Scholes & Anderson, London: J. Cape 1964 , p. 21 .)
In late spring of 1904 George (“AE”) Russell, a leading cultural figure, invited James Joyce – then 22 years of age - to write some stories for The Irish Homestead, a newspaper aimed at farmers. Russell asked for something ‘simple’ and ‘lively’ and suited to ‘the common understanding’, but Joyce had other ideas. About this time, he began to tell friends that he intended to expose the ‘spiritual paralysis’ at the heart of Irish life in the stories (or “epiclets”), taking Dublin as ‘the centre of paralysis’. “The Sisters”, appeared on 13 August 1904 and two stories more followed it that year - “Eveline” ( 10 Sept. 1904 ) and “After the Race” ( 17 Dec. 1904 ). But when Joyce, in January 1905 , Joyce sent “Clay” back to Dublin from Pola [now in Romania], the Homestead editor of the Homestead rejected it as distasteful. This was the first of many such rejections that Joyce was to experience at the hands of publishers before Dubliners was finally issued by Grant Richards in 1914. Joyce’s Dubliners Biographical information in these slides is available on the RICORSO Irish Studies website at www.ricorso.net.
Joyce’s intentions in Dubliners Letter to Grant Richards (23 June 1906) ‘[...] I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.’ Letter to Stanislaus Joyce (19 July 1905) ‘The Dublin papers will object to my stories as to a caricature of Dublin life. Do you think there is any truth in this? At times the spirit directing my pen seems to me so plainly mischievous that I am almost prepared to let the Dublin critics have their way. [… D]o not think I consider contemporary Irish writing anything but ill-written, morally obtuse, formless caricature.’ ( Letters of James Joyce , Vol. 1, 1966, pp.63-64.) ( Letters of James Joyce , Vol. II, 1966, p.216.) Letter to Grant Richards (5 May 1906) ‘My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. [...] I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.’ ( Letters of James Joyce , Vol. 2, 1966, p.134.)
Extracts from “Eveline” (1) She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? […] What would they say of her in the Stores* when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on her,* especially whenever there were people listening. […] But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married - she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that [which] had given her the Palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her,* like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her, Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down some-where in the country. *the Stores [ varejo ] – shop where she works; ‘an edge’ – harshness, aggression; ‘gone for her’ – attacked her “… people would treat her with respect …”
Extracts from “Eveline” (2) She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Aires, where he had a home waiting for her. How well she remembered the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. He was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her outside the Stores every evening and see her home. […] First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the different services. He had sailed through the Straits of Magellan and he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Aires, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her father had found out the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.
Joyce as Frank: The Double Narrative of Eveline When he wrote “Eveline” in August 1904, he had already met Nora Barnacle with whom he would leave on the night-boat on 8 October 1904. They had first gone out together on 16 June 1906 – a date he later made famous in Ulysses. Nora found life abroad extremely difficult being unable to understand the languages around her. In letters to his brother Joyce called her ‘one of those plants which cannot be safely transplanted’ and wrote, ‘I do not know what strange morose creature she will bring forth after all her tears [...]’ when she was pregnant in 1908. ( Letters , II, 1966, pp. 83, 97.) In the revised version of the story, Joyce emphasised the danger of Eveline’s position. Frank says he has ‘landed on his feet’ in Buenos Ayres and tells Eveline stories about ‘the terrible Patagonians’ ― strangely like Othello courting Desdemona in Shakespeare’s play. Is Frank really a successful emigrant returning home ‘to the old country’ on a visit, as he says? Has he already ‘bought the ticket’ to South America, as he told her? … Eveline’s boyfriend Frank is quite like the young Joyce – most obviously in his choice of yachting shoes and a peaked cap (see next slide). The resemblance may run deeper. In London en route to the teaching post he hoped to fill in Zurich, Joyce left Nora alone on a park bench for some hours while he visited the writer Arthur Symons. Later he told his brother that he had considered abandoning her there. “Eveline”----an illustration by Robin Jacques ‘And the cannibals that each other eat […] and men whose heads do grow be neath their shoulders.’ ( Othello , Act. 1, Sc. 3.)
“She would go away with him by the night-boat to … Buenos Aires, where he had a home waiting …” Albert Dock, Liverpool – Eveline’s immediate destination Numerous Irishmen did make the journey to Buenos Aires and one — Arthur Griffith (bottom left) — ran a newspaper there called The Southern Star. He later founded the Irish revolutionary Party Sinn Fein. Argentine was a ‘get-rich’ destination for many young men in that period … Arthur Griffin (1871- USS Imperator (1911) Buenos Aires (Argentina)
The irony of the story is rather obvious and literary. It plays with the traditional Victorian theme of a girl torn between love and duty who sacrifice happiness at the call of home and religion. Of course, Eveline’s decision is not heroic and if she stays, it is only out of fear of what lies ahead. Eveline is hardly in love. Marriage, for her, means that “people would treat her with respect then”—a shallow idea that no one can admire. Her feelings for Frank, too are far from passionate: “First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him.” Like is a weak form of love, and it proves insufficient to supply the courage necessary to board a ship with Frank. When he boards along, “her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.” No overpowering passion is leading her on and even the sense of duty that holds her back is half-hearted. Whether she looks forwards or backwards, fear is her dominant emotion. The “spiritual paralysis” of which Joyce identified as the dominant failing of his protagonists in the Dubliners stories is perhaps most simply portrayed in “Eveline”. Using his famous technique method of “epiphany”, he surgically reveals the inner weakness that prevents the motherless girl from ever having a life of her own. —Adapted from Charles Peake, James Joyce: The Artist and the Citizen ( 1977 ), pp. 22 - 23. The standard reading of “Eveline” emphasizes her lack of any real love for Frank and her ultimate lack of courage when facing the challenge of leaving home with a caring young man.
In other words, she is the kind of victim who cannot escape because each choice she makes is the wrong one. This is what Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak calls “ abjection” in a feminist-postcolonial context.^1 Does she simply lack the courage to escape, as many critics think? In fact her fears are very real and her possible fate at his hands might be tragic. Imagine her in a Magdalene Laundry, for instance. (These were institutions for unmarried mothers and prostitutes.) At the end of her story, “Eveline” she is a prime example of the condition which Joyce called “spiritual paralysis”: her inability to move is physical as well as psychological. In this she is not unique. She is like both Felicité in Flaubert and the nameless peasant girl in Turgenev. In fact, she may be the most representative example of the type in modern literature. …. But if we focus on the very real risk that Eveline faces of being stranded by a heartless sailor who simply wants to use her for his own pleasure, or else exploit her as a pimp, then we can see that Joyce’s story attributes a form of double-entrapment to her in her character as a female and dependent: she is damned if she goes and damned if she doesn’t. A “Magdalene Laundry” circa 1910. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Macmillan 1988), pp.271-313.
The following 5 pages contain remarks arising in our discussion of Dubliners and Joyce’s writings after the presentation of the paper in hand. Here we looked at the curious question of inverted commas as well as wider issues of ‘indirect style’ and ‘interior monologue’, modernist technique, experimentation, and the literary effect. Let me take this opportunity to thank Professor Eron da Silva and all those at IFRN- Cang/ 2 a.DIREC, staff and students for their kind attention and their wonderful support. —Bruce Stewart Univ. of Ulster (UK) / DLLEM-UFRN (Natal)
The following pages offer some extra thoughts which arose from our Q & A discussion after the presentation of the “formal” part of my lecture. We talked about Joyce’s originality as a writer, especially his use of a form of writing that takes us into the mind of the character by means a disguised form of indirect speech – a technique that French novelists and critics call style moyen indirect. Later, Joyce would put this strategy at the centre of great novel Ulysses (1922) where we seem to be lodged in the mind of one character or another – usually Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom – and to see the world the way they see it. One of the features of Joycean writing that made it possible for him to devise this new way of writing – which some consider his greatest contribution to literature – was his rejection of the normal use of ‘inverted commas’ (or ‘quote marks’) to indicate the words spoken by a character. Once you stop using these, the difference between speech and description tends to evaporate and the two merge into a single form literary writing. This may be regarded as a refinement of the modern novel in its long journey away from sheer reportage or simple narrative drama of the “He said, ..” and “She said, …’ kind. The following pages should make it clear what is involved in this removal of the ‘inverted commas’ and illustrate the stages of his subsequent development. I have taken pages from Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist (1916) and Ulysses (1922) to make the point.
In a typical passage you will read phrases and sentences which register their perceptions of the world around them in a form of language which is entirely characteristic of each – but rendered on the page as narrative prose, not as monologue or spoken monologue This is in fact an ‘interior monologue such as most of us have going on inside our heads from morning to night – and through the night sometimes as well.
