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.

But Maria's problems are not the only ones not named outright. If the man on the tram becomes sentimental because of drink, so does Joe. At the end of the story after Maria's song, we are told that "Joe was very much moved" supposedly because "there was no time like the long ago and no music for him like poor old Balfe" (106). His eyes fill with tears, and the reader in the absence of other directions may make what Roland Barthes calls the post hoc fallacy of reading, believing that the tears are a result of the song. But here, probably the process of metonymy is a better guide for revealing the true, but unwritten, cause of Joe's maudlin tears: in the next sentence we learn that Joe's tears prevent him from seeing the corkscrew. This association suggests that Joe's problem is drink though it is not named in this context. However, previous clues allow the reader to supply the missing term: Maria has mentioned his drunkenness (100), and during the evening Joe has proposed stout twice (104) and wine (105). The reader must write what the text leaves unwritten either because of a self-imposed limitation on point of view (access only to Maria's mind is granted) or because of the characters' and the narrator' s not naming psychological problems. In this respect the text's strategy of not naming, its withholding of words, its defection from a conventional responsibility to tell all, may actually be seen as a strategy of economy imitating defects in the characters' perceptions or their policy of covering up by not naming what is wrong.

The nonnarrated in Dubliners exceeds considerably the absence of the expression of names of persons and objects: it extends to the omitted, incomplete, and delayed narrating of actions, reporting of words and ideas, and description of states. The responsibility for most of these omissions and delays may be assigned to the characters in the form of what they say, think, or write. An instance of the nonnarrated by what Prince calls "repression" (2) is the boy's inability to remember the end of his dream in "The Sisters," a dream that takes place in a "strange," "faraway" land (13-14), "a pleasant and vicious region" (11). What may be read as a potentially sexual topos is not written as such explicitly by the text, but such an identification accounts for what the adults have on their minds in the beginning of the story when they comment on the boy's relation to the priest. There, too, the adults make no explicit comments. What for them is unmentionable and for the boy unmemorable both create a sense of mystery and guilt and also mirror the incompleteness of the relation, between the boy and the priest and the incompleteness of the priest's career.(1) Already in the first story of the collection, aborted remembering (forgetting) is associated with death, as it is in the last story.

A more conscious repression occurs in "A Mother," where Mrs. Kearney is alarmed by "the look of things" but says "nothing" (140), remains "silent" (141). In this case it is not difficult for the reader to supply Mrs. Kearney's missing thought about her daughter's not being paid her fee for her performance at the concert. In Genette's terminology this "paralipsis," the suppression of information that would or could normally be made available to the reader according to the conventions established by the narrative, is repeated by the narrator's not reporting the thoughts of Mr. Holohan and Mr. Fitzpatrick about their intentions regarding Mrs. Kearney and her daughter. Although this omission constitutes a true paralipsis as far as Mr. Holohan is concerned--his feelings are revealed at the end of the story--and only a potential paralipsis in Mr. Fitzpatrick's case--his thoughts are not conveyed in the story but the convention of the omniscient narrator would allow it--the story could just as well have avoided the paralipsis by establishing a focalizing center in Mrs. Kearney alone. Her view of an implacable, unthinking "Committee," whose unheard decisions are made without communicating with her, contributes to a sense of inevitability and futility in this story.