The narrated and its negatives: the nonnarrated and the disnarrated in Joyce's Dubliners - The Short Story: Theory and Practice

Style, Fall, 1993 by Harold F. Mosher, Jr.

Joyce's expression, more often than not, is swollen to the limit of the reader's endurance positively by metaphor, puns, portmanteau words, neologisms, and so forth and negatively by cliches, hackneyed language, and repetition. But, as we all know, this swelling in the expression is not necessarily a padding resulting in a lack of significant meaning. Indeed, this apparent empty prolixity is a subtle way of conveying implicit information of plot, character, and theme.

However, I wish to deal here with the contrary move in Dubliners: strategies of implication like not naming or delaying the names of characters or objects, eliding words in dialogue, referring to but not reporting words characters must have said, not identifying antecedents for pronouns, leaving referents vague in characters' thoughts and speech, suppressing the thoughts of characters whose thoughts are otherwise revealed (Gerard Genette's "paralipsis" in Figures III 212), and entirely omitting the narration of acts that must have happened (Genette's "ellipsis" in Figures III 128). Most of these techniques would qualify as Gerald Prince's "nonnarrated": "something is not told (at least for a while)" (2). On the other hand, what the characters do not say or do not do would seem to be a variety of Prince's "disnarrated".--"the events that do not happen" (2)--and one may notice in Dubliners many examples of words that are not expressed but could/should have been, acts that could/should have been performed but are not, states that could/should have existed but do not, and objects that could/should have been produced but are not. The nonnarrated and the disnarrated, their varieties and their functions are, then, my subjects as well as, on occasion, the "nonnarratable," that which according to Prince, "cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating" (1).

One of the most frequently occurring varieties of the nonnarrated in Dubliners is what Stephanie Bronson calls the "unnamed": characters and qualities that are not given individual names (1). Of these, people in groups or undeveloped individuals filling minor roles like the "whining match-sellers" of "Counterparts" (Bronson 1) and Old Jack's son in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" are obvious candidates for what Seymour Chatman calls "walk-ons" or "extras," rather elements of the setting than characters (Story and Discourse 139). In the classical realistic novel, convention discourages the individual naming of such types: that is, they are nonnarratable. Similarly, sometimes objects are not named as in Old Jack's rather ambiguous reply to a question apparently about Mr. Tierney's payment to the canvassers: "it isn't but he has it, anyway" (121). The first "it" may mean "business," the second "money," but one cannot be sure. Or objects may be referred to by what almost amounts to code language as in Mr. Henchy's allusion to Tierney's secret whiskey cache as his "tricky little black bottle" (123). Even some relatively important characters are not given proper names: Mangan's sister in "Araby," the boys (and later narrators) of the first three stories, and the "queer old josser" of "An Encounter" (Bronson 2, 6, 8). In this latter story, the protagonist even falsifies his name to Smith to avoid the attachment of shame to his name. Still other characters' names are delayed: Parnell in "Ivy Day," Father Flynn, Nannie, and Eliza in "The Sisters" (Bronson 2, 5), Corley and Lenehan in "Two Gallants," and Kernan in "Grace." If we agree with Philippe Hamon that names in many ways have the potential to characterize, individualize a fictional person ("Pour un statut" 147-50), the lack of a name or its delay may well generalize a person as in the cases of the two "gallants." The term is understood ironically, of course, as it becomes evident by the two men's actions, words, and appearances: they represent a bully and a leech, types of the very lack of gallantry. In the case of Kernan in "Grace," the type is even more evidently that of a drunk. The reverse movement of being identified by name and then "losing" that name occurs in the latter stages of "Counterparts" where Farrington is called simply "the man" (Bronson 2). Such nonnarrating may function for the sake of suspense, mystery, characterization, or development of theme or all of these as in the case of the nonnaming in "Two Gallants" of Corley's girl friend, whose real purpose is hidden by a lack of identification, which, like Gabriel's name, might have been revealing, and who is reduced to an object or an institution (prostitution? banking?) in part by her lack of an individualizing name.

Beyond the nonnaming or delayed naming of characters and objects, Dubliners extends the practice to less tangible existents. Bronson notices that the diseases that cause the general paralysis in the world of Dubliners are not named. Although such is the case generally--the priest's "paralysis" (9) in "The Sisters" and Eveline's mother's "illness" (40) are not specific names for diseases--one disease (at least we have come to know it as such) that is occasionally named is drunkenness: Maria hopes that Joe will not come in "drunk" (100), and Farrington complains that "he had not even got drunk" (97). Usually, however, mention of the word is circumvented as when Kernan in "Grace" is told that he was "peloothered" (160) or when we learn that Mrs. Sinico in "A Painful Case" became "intemperate in her habits" and was "in the habit of going out at night to buy spirits" (115). In "Clay" the characters' deceptions and self-deceptions are dramatized by the text's not naming tangible and intangible existents. Although the title identifies the object that Maria chooses in the game, we might consider the title as apart from the text, beyond it, as Genette argues in Seuils (7, 54). In the text itself the clay is only identified as "a soft wet substance" and referred to as "it" (105). Even less specific are the allusions to absences in Maria's life: her lack of (and perhaps desire for) a husband and a family. In the laundry when Lizzie Fleming says that Maria is sure to get the ring at the game, Maria confusedly expresses no desire for the "ring or man either" (101), but she becomes flustered possibly to the point of forgetting her plum cake when the "colonel-looking" man in the tram speaks to her and when she thinks afterwards how easy it is "to know a gentleman even when he has a drop taken" (103). Similarly, she refuses to live with Joe's family (100) but obviously feels the lack of a family and a man, if we can judge by her singing twice the same verse of "I Dreamt that I Dwelt" about family ("a high ancestral name") and a beloved (106).