Enchantment: A Questionable Index of Love in “Araby”

In James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” the callow narrator acts on his adoration for a girl he hardly knows, only to realize at the end how blind he has been to the reality of his circumstances. The nameless boy is infatuated with Mangan’s sister, whose influence is such that she clouds his vision of reality. The word “Araby” holds no significance for him until he hears his beloved utter it, at which point the allure of the unknown is conflated with the image of Mangan’s sister, who is simply sublime in the eyes of the youth. The narrator’s eyes “were often full of tears and at times a flood from [his] heart seemed to pour itself out into [his] bosom” (Joyce 22). He is inundated with fatuous emotions that flummox him and make him rashly conclude that he is in love.

What most attracts the narrator to Mangan’s sister is her superlative physical beauty, which compels the young boy to apotheosize her. “Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds.” This muted image of fertility and sexuality can be traced back to Greek mythology, where there are many hieros gamos, or holy marriages, between sky gods and earth goddesses (e.g. the union of Zeus and Hera, and Cronus and Rhea). The rain represents a deification of the masculine and the earth is the incarnation of the feminine. The narrator is so enchanted by Mangan’s sister that he pays no heed to the negative consequences of his obsession with her. When he begins to do poorly in school, he fails to consider her as an albatross, and adopts a perfunctory attitude to something he once enjoyed; he “had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between [him] and [his] desire, seemed to [him] child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play” (23). The boy loses control of his senses, which “seemed to desire to veil themselves” (22). He looks through the eye of his imagination rather than through an objective eye. It is only when he gains physical distance from the object of his thoughts that he is able to free himself from the reign of his imagination.

The boy has little patience for the vicissitudes of reality and is repulsed by the merchants he sees on Saturday evenings in the marketplace. He imagines that he is an intrepid adventurer carrying a sacred “chalice” and wandering amidst an inferior crowd of “drunken men,” “bargaining women,” “laborers,” “shop boys,” and “street singers,” who are his “foes” (22). Yet he does not register that his dream of winning the affection of Mangan’s sister is predicated on commerce; he wants to buy her a gift at the bazaar, he wants to buy her love. As the boy navigates his way to the station, “the sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to [him] the purpose of [his] journey” (25). Only when he arrives at the bazaar and sees that there is no suitable gift does he conclude that the foundation upon which he had hoped to build a relationship with Mangan’s sister is tenuous and unstable. In Caroline Norton’s poem, The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed, which the narrator’s uncle starts to recite, an Arab sells his beloved horse and then changes his mind, returning the gold for his horse (“The Arab’s Farewell to His Horse”). The narrator of “Araby” returns the two pennies[1] to his pocket, not because he realizes that no ware can sufficiently express his love for Mangan’s sister but because he questions his motive for coming to the bazaar. He invokes an image of “the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to [the salesgirl’s] stall” (26) which calls to mind the horse stable mentioned at the beginning of the story as well as the “shop boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks” (22). Guards themselves are not valuable – it is what they are guarding that is of value. At the bazaar, the “guards” are conspicuously guarding nothing. Where there is supposed to be substance, there is instead a dark vacuum, which drains the narrator of hope.

In “Araby,” light has a more sinister quality than darkness. Descriptions of Mangan’s sister always involve light illuminating her white figure and she is idealized by the youthful narrator to such an extent that she seems like a divine vision rather than an actual person. While she is reduced to a beautiful simulacrum of an idea, the objects in “Araby” are anthropomorphized; houses “gaze at one another with brown imperturbable faces,” (20) the train “crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river,” (25) and “the high cold empty gloomy rooms liberated me” (24). Whereas the boy and his friends cast shadows as they gambol outdoors, Mangan’s sister is never accompanied by a shadow. Indeed, light seems to radiate from her and it is precisely this alterity that draws the narrator to her as a moth is drawn to a flame. Light insidiously distorts reality by casting an illusory veil over the eyes of those who fall under its enchantment. Rather than lighting up houses, the streetlamps on North Richmond Street illuminate the “everchanging violet sky” in their vertical ascent (21). The emphasis is placed on phantasmagoria rather than something concrete and tangible like the denizens of the street. The boy’s introduction to the fair is marked by “the lighted dial of a clock” and at the bazaar, the words Café Chantant are writ in colored lamps (25). In these instances, light is associated with mutability and transience, and has the power to occlude reality and bring forth an unreality.

The magical quality of light heightens the allure of Mangan’s sister, Araby, and the exotic and unknown. In Nikolai Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” (1835) two men are deceived by two women on the Avenue that is notorious for its gas lamps that shroud everything in illusions. One of the men is a young artist who pursues a bewitching woman, whom he considers a pure aesthetic inspiration. Later, he finds out that she is a prostitute and his despair at having found out such a disturbing truth drives him to use opium to sustain his idealized vision of the girl in his mind. In contrast, the much younger protagonist of “Araby” does not attempt to further ensconce himself in a dream world once he finds out that reality does not live up to his imagination. Undeluded and ashamed, he gives up his quest to win the heart of Mangan’s sister, for such an enterprise is ill-fated. Enshrouded in the darkness, he “saw [himself] as a creature driven and derided by vanity: and [his] eyes burned with anguish and anger” (26). Joyce’s language ironically suggests that when the boy has a clear vision of reality, his eyes are burned. This emotional conflagration is triggered when he makes his way to “the centre of the bazaar” (25). There is “a central apple tree” in the “wild garden” behind the narrator’s house, and just as the tree symbolizes knowledge (if we compare it to the Tree in the Garden of Eden), the sights at the nexus of the bazaar disillusion the narrator, awakening him from his dream. The bazaar the boy attends is clearly incongruous with the vision of Araby he had conjured up in his mind. He feels unwelcome and dissatisfied; the “fall of the coins [on a salver]” (25) is nothing like the harmonious music plucked on a harp or even the quaint “music from the buckled harness” (21).

The palaver between the young lady at the bazaar and the two British gentlemen is an apposite characterization of our protagonist’s situation: he has been living a “fib.” His senses were anesthetized, not by opium or spirits, but by his vivid imagination and the illusion-inducing light. The narrator imbibes Mangan’s sister’s expectations for “a splendid bazaar” (22) and when he discovers how wrong her vision is and how misguided he was in blindly adopting her belief, he perceives that his emotional attachment to her can lead to no bright futurity. It does not lead anywhere at all.

Bibliography

Gogol, Nikolai. The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil. Trans. David Magarshak. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. Ed. Margot Norris. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 2006.

“The Arab’s Farewell to His Horse.” PoeticPortal.net. 8 Feb. 2010 <http://www.poeticportal.net/content/view/1308/29.&gt;

[1] In addition to the two pennies, there are other notable instances of twosomes in “Araby,” namely the “two men counting money,” the “two young gentlemen” flirting with the salesgirl, and, of course, the double vision of the narrator, which is ascribed to both the boy and the mature man reflecting on his past (Joyce 25). In his essay, ‘“Araby’ in Context: The ‘Splendid Bazaar,’ Irish Orientalism, and James Clarence Mangan,” Heyward Ehrlich dilates on the significance of the time at which the narrator arrives at the bazaar. He writes that the importance of “ten minutes to ten” (9:50 P.M.) lies in its evocation of “magical numbers in the tradition of Arabic ciphers.” In accordance with this system, the number “ten” serves as a substitute for the tenth letter of the alphabet, “J.” Two “tens” signify “JJ,” the initials of James Joyce. Ehrlich further notes that the hour and minute hands at “ten minutes to ten” are superimposed. He summarily foregrounds the hypostasis of twain elements by writing, “At this moment, the two tens as words, the two tens as numbers, the two clock hands as visual indicators, and the two “J” ’s as letters are all ciphers for the doubled, mirrored signature of Joyce” (Dubliners 282).

Review of HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

Just as the methods of civilization are as unequivocally manifest as the power of nature, so in humans there can be a capacity for restraint that is just as immanent as the impulses toward avarice and aggression. Societies reinforce the restraints they sanction in numerous ways, but when such external supports are eliminated, civilized men easily regress towards an atavistic primitivism. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s journey up the Congo introduces him to the foreign world of unbridled nature and into the nature of humans. It is a trip backward in time, to a primordial phase in social development, as well as a journey within, to what lies obscured under the veneer in civilized men. Marlow learns that although humankind has ostensibly moved far beyond its primeval origins, human beings revert to the primitive when they are removed from their cultural milieu and are no longer subjected to various sanctions.

When Marlow journeys to Africa, he departs a familiar setting and arrives in a world which becomes progressively more foreign and tenebrous. However, Marlow is not disconcerted by Africa but by the actions of his fellow Europeans, which he thought would make sense (“For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts” (Conrad 79)), and when they do not, he feels that he is losing touch with the real world. He is prepared for the natives, but not prepared for the spectacle of a French man-of-war “firing into a continent” where “there wasn’t even a shed” (79). Also, he had not expected the barbarous profiteering and exploitation of the natives he finds in the Congo. In an African setting European mores have mutated into something inane; and Marlow identifies with the natives, who are likewise languishing from the unfamiliarity and unintelligibility of the fractious world into which they have been conveyed. The dissolution of civilized morals is best evinced by the station’s manager and his uncle, the chieftain of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition. The manager has attained his station of authority even though he has no wisdom, no intellect, no gumption, and no managerial instincts. What he has is “triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions” (89). While those around him sicken and expire, he is never unwell. His clout originates from his animal health and his depravity, from the fact that he is one of the vacuous men. The manager’s uncle is equally unscrupulous. The members of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition are “sordid buccaneers” whose desire “to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land” has “no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe” (101).

The journey to the Central Station heightens Marlow’s sense of the disarray into which the Europeans have fallen and the disorder they have instigated. Marlow meets a white man flanked by an armed escort, who claims that he is “looking after the upkeep of the road” (87). The discovery of a negro with a bullet hole in his forehead three miles yonder makes a mockery of this statement. Marlow ponders if the cadaver is to be considered “a permanent improvement” (87). The frailty of civilization and its liability to disintegrate are on full display at the Central Station. The steamer Marlow has come to command has been carelessly fractured, and it is impossible to procure the rivets needed for its repair. A copious supply of rivets was scattered about in the first station where they idly lay without being used; but all that can be acquired from that station is a spate of flimsy wares to be bargained for ivory. When a hut full of the wares conflagrates, a man tells Marlow that everyone is acting excellently, as he ladles river water into a pail with a porous bottom. Marlow had received a similar assurance about everyone’s behavior when the steamer was sunk. There is a brickmaker who, lacking a crucial ingredient, has not been able to make bricks. Finally, there are the plotting agents (“the pilgrims”) who make a “philanthropic pretense” and a “show of work” (93) while being guided exclusively by rapacity and never lifting a finger effectually.

Review of ALL THE PRETTY HORSES by Cormac McCarthy

When characters are forced to confront the vagaries and consummate powers of nature, they are galvanized by an elegiac yen to repeat the entrenched patterns and plots of the past. The present is essentially an illimitable process of repetition. In All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, as John Grady Cole gradually starts to realize the frailty and hypocrisy of his life, he attempts to return to the imagined innocence of the consecrated cowboy of the mythic past, only to find out that such a return is unfeasible.

John Grady’s life on his family’s Texas ranch is a romantic fiction, a façade barely concealing the falseness at its core. From the outset, John Grady is an idealist who believes in an imagined code of justice and honor in a universe founded upon iniquity and immorality. Like the peasants in Alfonsa’s parable who try to sell things no one wants, John Grady embraces the values of a myth that obscures the true nature of the world. He does not realize that the falsity of the sacrosanct cowboy is tantamount to the broken pieces of machinery the peasants collect from the roads. The peasants’ belief in a myth (that all things of the industrialized world have value) yoked with an abysmal ignorance of the true nature of that world both fortifies them and dooms them. Duena Alfonsa advises our protagonist to view the world sans ignorance and sentiments, however alluring they may be. What John Grady and Rawlins encounter in Mexico is similar to what they left behind in Texas – cowboys, horses and grullos, ranches and haciendas. Mexico illumines the phoniness of the American myth. Like the young Alfonsa, Alejandra and John Grady both view the world through a rosy filter, from the privileged stations of their social status, insulated in their ranches where the descendants of the people their ancestors conquered and whose land they purloined are now servants and pariahs. Alejandra and John Grady are like the peasants of the countryside who cling to bolts and “wornout part[s] of a machine that no one could even know the use of” (McCarthy 231). In their fragile paradises, neither of them realizes that what may appear innocuous or true may be unsound and defective; an illusion. Alejandra ultimately recognizes the futility of refusing to choose “between the dream and the reality.”

After his odyssey in Mexico and his conversations with Duena Alfonsa, John Grady concludes that the individual is alone in a callous world. He must forsake his blind belief in a mythic construct that conceals the true nature of the universe as well as the knowledge of his rightful place in it. By the end of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady starts to see the inanity of the myths into which he has poured his faith, as he becomes imprisoned after the knife fight and feels a child’s anguish surfacing within him “but it brought with it such pain that he stopped it cold and began at once his new life and the living of it breath to breath” (203). Duena Alfonsa tells John Grady that to discern what is true from what is convenient to believe is to abandon all the myths of one’s culture, and to lead a solitary life, countering hopeless bitterness with courage.