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

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

(2) I am indebted to the Opies for this information. Joyce also dipped into books of children's games. Many critics, notably Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, and Grace Eckley, have pointed out Joyce's familiarity with Norman Douglas's London Street Games, which he used extensively for Finnegans Wake.

(3) William York Tindall points out that Dubliners opens with "a riddle that seems designed in part to establish the idea of a riddle" (13). Riddles are a recurring theme in Joyce's work. Naturally, he was aware that Penelope recognized Ulysses only when he knew the answer to the fiddle of their bed's construction. Like the Odyssey, Ulysses has its own share of enigmas (M'Intosh, for example), while Finnegans Wake, of course, is riddled with them, being itself probably the world's longest riddle.

(4) In her study of Finnegans Wake, Grace Eckley also makes the connection between children's lore and knowledge.

(5) In the roughly contemporary The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, Ossipon also finds out through a newspaper clipping about the suicide of the woman he has unemotionally abandoned. He reads and re-reads the cutting obsessively, as if looking for the answer to "an impenetrable mystery" which hangs over the "act of madness or despair" (234).

(6) Gallaher expresses similar sentiments on the subject of marriage. "See if I don't play my cards properly," he boasts to Little Chandler. "When I go about a thing, I mean business" ("A Little Cloud" 79).

(7) Another abusive father -- the one in "Eveline" -- also employs mimicry and inversion when he dresses up in his wife's bonnet to make the children laugh.

(8) Nancy Morrow stresses the fact that while games are finite, and have a definite endpoint, play is infinite. The game might end, but the play goes on (6). This quality of playfulness might account for the open-endedness of Joyce's fiction, and of many twentieth-century novels (Morrow 168).

(9) Liberation is a stated goal, in fact. Joyce wrote to Grant Richards that he regarded Dubliners as "the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country" (Letters 1: 63).

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Rabelais and His World. Helene Iswolsky, trans. Cambridge: M.I.T., 1968.

Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent. New York: Signet Classic, 1983.

Eckley, Grace. Children's Lore in Finnegans Wake. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1985.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Signet Classic, 1991.

--. Letters of James Joyce. Stuart Gilbert, ed. Volume 1. New York: Viking, 1966.

Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games. The Play of Desire in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.

Opie, Iona and Peter. Children's Games in Street and Playground. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.

Rose, Danis, and John O'Hanlon. "Norman Douglas' London Street Games Guess Where." A Finnegans Wake Circular. 1.4 (1986): 85-92.