Assignment for 9/21 - Joyce

General thoughts:

“Grace” begins with the reader dropped into the action. The detailed descriptions are made vague because we, as readers, have no context for them. Such writing leads to a sense of universality, as if this is a situation that happens in dozens of pubs every week, and we are reading this particular story by chance.

For almost two pages of prose, there are no proper names, adding to the feelings of being adrift without a real narrative anchor outlined above. This contrasts with the rest of the story, which focuses on names and the histories of the people who belong to them. There are a lot of names in this short story, and they are repeated often. Characters are never mentioned by their first names by the narrator. Tom Kernan, our unfortunate hero, is the one who is most often called by his first name by his friends. (The least religious of them all, think of the allusion to Doubting Thomas in the resurrection story.) His friends’ names have built-in meanings, as well. Mr Power, Mr Cunning-ham, Mr M’-Coy. Name meanings can never be truly prescriptive, but if meaning can be found, we should look.

One of the many things that Joyce does very well is dialogue. He has an ear that lets him write people in a way that leaves them distinct, and is able to balance conversations between more than two people, something that is hard to do well.

Grace, as pointed to in the title of the story, is a recurring theme throughout. There are parallels between grace and the saga of Mr Kernan’s silk hat, which has almost as active a role in the story as he does. There is a description of him that says, “He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster. (258, emphasis mine.) When the story begins, the hat is seen away from its owner, “rolled a few yards away.” (255) It is described as “a dinged silk hat” when brought upstairs by one of the gentlemen who carried Mr Kernan up. (255) By the end of the story, when Mr Kernan goes to church with his friends, “His hat, which had been rehabilitated by his wife, rested upon his knees... he held the brim of his hat lightly, but firmly, with the other hand.” (273) His hat is a part of him. Perhaps it embodies his sense of dignity, or hope.

Sentence-specific wallowing:

Joyce varies his sentence length throughout a passage. Given that he introduces a character before he gives their backstory, his writing is usually paratactic rather than cumulative, since we already know where they are at the present moment. He is filling in the gaps, not building to an assessment of their characters. The description of Mrs Kernan is a case in point.

There is a pattern of sentences arranged in the negative. “Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding...” “In her days of courtship, Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure...” “The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties...” This pattern creates a sense on the one hand of judicious measuring, and on the other, of detachment. Pattern 18 out of Sullivan appears in the first example, with past participles. “Not long before, she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband...” (259, emphasis mine.) Some of the negations in these sentences would seem to be prime candidates for paired constructions, (Patterns 16, 16a) but they remain unresolved. This leaves the sentence off-balance, and contributes to the sense of detachment that weaves through Mrs Kernan’s description.

“In her days of courtship, Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm.” (And there’s that hat again, with “gracefully” modifiying it, to boot.)

This compound-complex sentence is near-dizzying in its attempts to impart information. It is only of the only paragraphs in Joyce that graze the hypotactic, but it is not as much cumulative as it is in the running style. These are still pieces of information presented with the syntactical democracy of parataxis, but they are loose, following one another, though not truly building on each other. It is description for its own sake, without an agenda beyond providing more information about a character.