"Dubliners" and the Art of Losing (1995)

A viaries aside, there are no nightingales in North America. Perhaps you didn't know that, it never having occurred to you to itemize your homeland's non-beings. In fact, I can think of only one country about which such a statement is commonly made. Everybody knows that there are no snakes in Ireland. We know this because Irish have told us a story about it, story being that there used to be snakes galore until someone, St. Patrick, chased them out. It is a story about an absence, made possible by assumption that such an absence must have resulted from an act of subtraction. That something is there means that someone took it away. Doubtless snakes are missed much, but other absences are another matter. Take official map of Ireland, a map that oddly includes a piece of someplace else. To contemplate a country thus represented is to take into account a part of it that is there, because -- you will be told-it was taken away. This habit of noticing something missing and hypothesizing about how it got away seems to built into Irish character, at least in works of James Joyce. In Ulysses Citizen considers an expanse of plains and sees an absence of trees, therefore a sign of (English) deforestation (U 268). Leopold Bloom explains what he considers exiguous physiques of native women as resulting from Ireland's sunlessness (U 521), tenebrosity that Stephen in turn calls an Egypt's plague of divine withdrawal (U 322). Ergo, Irish womankind has ceased to fill out properly because sun has ceased to shine on her -- as it has, by contrast, on voluptuously Mediterranean Molly. Stephen has been raised to think of his country as a kingdom without -- therefore deprived of -- its rightful (uncrowned) king, who is now dead -- therefore murdered: when Mr Casey alludes to an incident 'before chief died, Mr Dedalus corrects him: Before he was killed, you mean (P 36). As Mr Dedalus's antagonist, Mrs Riordan, when she and her fellow Catholics seek out their island's center of spiritual authority they must settle pro-cathedral -- literally for [absent] cathedral, translated approximately as not a Dublin is only major Catholic city without a Catholic cathedral. It used to have one, but it was taken away. Not being mad, I don't wish to become involved in assessing merits of such perceptions. Enough to remark that there is this habit of mind, to which Joyce is attuned. How did crow become black and hoarse? It was once fair and melodious, but (in Ovid's account) was deprived of its beauty by an angry god. How did women come to be genitally what Bloom calls them, the cloven sex, distinguished by absence, presence? Rabelais's version encourages us to thing of them as men, mutilated. Come to that, how did sexes come into separate existence at all? Plato's Aristophanes imagines an original rotund androgynous ideal cut into halves by yet another angry god. You will find variations on these and other creation-subtractions stories, including one about Patrick and snakes, distributed throughout Finnegans Wake. They attest to Joyce's continuing participation in what he elsewhere shows to be Irish habit of looking hard at what isn't there. The reliability of this approach as a detector of truth is re regrettably equivocal. Yes, on one hand it can, like Sherlock Holmes's attention to non-barking dog, sharpen perception to clues otherwise overlooked: Citizen is essentially right about deforestation. On other hand, it can mistakenly posit things that were never there: same Citizen is wrong that Bloom's failure to buy drinks amounts to his withholding shares in a windfall. Parnell wasn't really a king, and he wasn't exactly killed. Just how to take what isn't there has long been recognized as a major issue of Joyce interpretation, most famously addressed by Hugh Kenner in his exposition of what he calls Joyce's rhetoric of silence. …