Power play: games in Joyce's "Dubliners."

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Mamta Chaudhry-Fryer

By contrast, the story that follows marks Mr Duffy's exclusion from the joie de vivre that comes naturally to children (as the gentleman on the tram tells Maria, "it was only right that the youngsters should enjoy themselves while they were young"). In "A Painful Case," Mr Duffy withdraws from communal life and enjoyment, choosing to live "as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen" (107), even living "at a little distance from his body" (108). His life is severely compartmentalized. Mrs Sinico is threatening because she transgresses those sharp lines of demarcation (she "emotionalised his mental life"), and Mr Duffy refuses to play along. Ironically, she is killed in a train accident "while attempting to cross the line" (114).

Her death turns into an elaborate charade of deflecting the blame from all the parties involved, and the newspaper report is marked by caution and concealment. Like the boy in "The Sisters," Mr Duffy tries to excavate knowledge from what is left unsaid. The newspaper cutting becomes a clue to the puzzle of his existence, and he pores over it, trying to make meaning of Mrs Sinico's death and his own life.(5) They are meaningless precisely because, while upholding the lonely "rectitude of his life," he has ignored the possibility of a second life, which transgresses the limits of the quotidian. If he is "outcast from life's feast" (118), he is also outcast from the festive and carnivalesque spirit that allows people to know "the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance" (Bakhtin 9).

Both children and adults use games as a way to knowledge and to power. If power is not fixed but shifting, then the adults "simultaneously undergo and exercise" it (Foucault 98). They, too, rebel against authority, whether religious, political, social, or economic.

In "After the Race," a historical auto race (the fourth Gordon Bennett Cup Race) serves as a frame for the capitalist power play of nations, a contest within a contest. The car race itself is reminiscent of chasing cats and brandishing catapults on a more glorified level. While the race is elevated, the struggle for nationalist superiority is reduced to a card game, both with their winners and losers. At daybreak, fuzzy with excitement and fatigue, Jimmy finally comes to the realization that it is "a terrible game" (44).

The two gallants of the next story also mount a terrible game. Echoing "Araby," a quest once again juxtaposes the serious business of life with child's play. One of the gallants, Lenehan, is

a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and

riddles. He was insensitive to all kinds of discourtesy. No one knew

how he achieved the stern task of living, but his name was vaguely

associated with racing tissues. (46)

The stern task is also a sport for Lenehan, who sees the whole enterprise of his companion's cadging money in terms of a hunting game, stalking the quarry and coming away with a trophy. "Is she game for that?" Lenehan asks Corley (48). However uncertain the outcome may be, the two gallants prefer to prey on women, inverting social norms and subverting social niceties that expect men to provide for women. That, says Lenehan contemptuously, is "a mug's game" (49).