James Joyce - Grace - Literature review Example

James Joyce: Grace

James Joyce's Dubliners depicts mainly the lower middle-class: journalists, clerks, and shop keepers either hardly clinging to decency or falling from former richness. Not unpredictably, then, in numerous stories both writer and characters are greatly concerned with economic issues. Initially intended to be the last in Dubliners, Grace reprises themes established previously in the book: confusion between financial and spiritual reparation, Irish economic paralysis, involvement with their oppression, willingness to recognize substitutes for real sovereignty and an impoverishing weakness for drink.

"Grace" happens to, or occurs around, the hapless Tom Kernan, deriving its plot from his ruinous love of drink, but ultimately framing him as object and not subject. The narrative combines the unadorned speech of the public house crowd with the lyrical touch of Joyce's other, poetic narrator, and includes inspired attempts at both etymology and theology. The story opens after Kernan has fallen down a flight of stairs and is told with a neutral but detailed perception:

Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless. He lay curled up at the foot of the stairs down which he had fallen. They succeeded in turning him over. His hat had rolled a few yards away and his clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards. (150)

The style is simple, the vocabulary plain, and the narration remains this way while several witnesses grasp at what has happened. After their speech, the tone changes when the poetic narrator interrupts to note that "the ring of onlookers distended and closed again elastically" and that a "dark medal of blood had formed itself near the man's head on the tessellated floor." (151) This use of metaphor and an elevated word choice sets one paragraph apart, but then the ornate voice recedes and the simply descriptive one returns as "an immense constable" approaches. When the text reports that the "manager at once began to narrate what he knew," (151) it suggests the matter of the story as the source of the plain voice found throughout the previous page, a reflexive revelation that the manager, or someone like him, has been speaking all along.

This use of perspective as an imperfect lens for the reader, a refined form of the borrowed voice technique, persists as the constable tries to discover the fallen man's name and address. Mr. Power moves out of the crowd and addresses the victim as "Tom," then helps him into a coach. Once inside, the fallen man unnecessarily introduces himself to Mr. Power through the handicap of his bitten tongue: '"y na'e is Kernan."

In this way, the beginning of "Grace" has structure, which contains a pub patron as narrator-host. (153) Only after this point does the narration begin to refer to Mr. Kernan by his name, having kept him anonymous to the reader as he was to the crowd at the public house, and with his name comes the whole of his character. Mr. Kernan is formally described as "a commercial traveller of the old school" who has fallen on hard times (153) Mr. Power is "a much younger man" whose "inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man." (154) The contrast not only compels Mr. Power to help, but leads him to think that he can best rescue Mr. Kernan by narrating a fiction about a religious retreat.

As Mr. Power, Mr. Cunningham and Mr. M'Coy arrive a few nights later, the coming free play of language is signaled as the poetic narrator describes Mr. Kernan's condition: Mr Kernan's tongue, the occasional stinging pain of which had made him somewhat irritable during the day, became more polite. (156) Use of the literal meaning of "tongue" introduces a brief, punctuating metaphor, illustrating a deftness with words that exceeds the demonstrated abilities of any character in the room. Mr. Cunningham is introduced as a collection of popular belief and friendly conviction.

Mr. Cunningham was the very man for such a case. He was an elder colleague of Mr. Power. His own domestic life was not very happy. People had great sympathy with him for it was known that he had married an unpresentable woman who was an incurable drunkard. Everyone had respect for poor Martin Cunningham. He was a thoroughly sensible man, influential and intelligent. He was well informed. His friends bowed to his opinions and considered that his face was like Shakespeare's. (157)

Each statement has the quality of being simultaneously subjective and inarguable, combining the virtues of character familiarity and narrative authority while saying very little of substance. As Mrs. Kernan withdraws, she is described using the same method:

Her beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost. (158)

These three sentences sound like Mrs. Kernan's own account of her spiritual limitations, without apology and perhaps unaware of the humorous overtones.

In the dialogue that follows, the narrator becomes an infiltrator, a present observer pointing out and enhancing the unintended comic errors in the words and meanings of the men in Mr. Kernan's bedroom. This figure has evolved out of the borrowed voice in the public house and may be described as the poetic narrator acting impishly. This narrator notes that Mr. M'Coy had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements for The Irish Times and for The Freeman's Journal, a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the Sub-Sheriff and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. His new office made him professionally interested in Mr. Kernan's case. (158)

The catalogue of previous jobs builds an impression of M'Coy as anything but professional, giving the final sentence of the passage a hollow elevation that heightens the comic association between Mr. Kernan's fall and the office of the City Coroner. M'Coy must think of himself as a medical expert, as he offers the term "mucus" as a substitute for "phlegm" and suggests with certainty:

— Yes, yes, said Mr. M'Coy, that's the thorax (159)

Mr. Cunningham's "Hm," ("when Mr. Cunningham made that remark people were silent") (159) leads to another comic catalogue in the description of a Mr. Hartford. After listing several criminal enterprises in which he had been involved in the most euphemistic terms ("an obscure financier"), the narrator offers this conclusion:

Though he had never embraced more than the Jewish ethical code his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of him bitterly as an Irish Jew and an illiterate and saw divine disapproval of usury made manifest through the person of his idiot son. At other times they remembered his good points. (159)

Again, the rhetoric builds in phrase after phrase, arguing a single point excessively, then turning and making a brief comment humorous in its contrast. Cliche and slang terms add to the comic atmosphere by suggesting that the characters actually have little to say to each other except "all's well that ends well" (159, 160) and "true bill" (160) but will invent new and circuitous ways of saying anything that comes to mind.

An anecdote about police recruits leads to further complaints about "these yahoos coming up here," but Mr. Cunningham resolves the issue with "you get some bad ones and you get some good ones." (161) After Mrs. Kernan arrives with bottles of stout, an irony apparently lost on her as well as her guests, Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Power casually begin to discuss the retreat they have planned for Thursday night. When Mr. Kernan resists any involvement in the conversation and projects "an air of calm enmity," (163) the subject changes to the Jesuits and the language becomes further removed from the actual knowledge and experience of the speakers:

— I haven't such a bad opinion of the Jesuits, he said, intervening at length. They're an educated order. I believe they mean well too.

— They're the grandest order in the Church, Tom, said Mr Cunningham, with enthusiasm. The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope.

—There's no mistake about it, said Mr M'Coy, if you want a thing well done and no flies about it you go to a Jesuit. (163)

Joyce's combination of misapprehension and awe, of reverent and colloquial speech, create a fine comic scene beyond the understanding of its players. Mr. Cunningham explains that he must be right about the Jesuits because he has "been in the world all this time and seen most sides of it." (164) Father Tom Burke is praised as a "born orator" for condensing the differences between Catholic and Protestant into the phrase "we worship at different altars but our belief is the same."

— Struck me as very well put.

— There's a good deal in that, said Mr Power. There used always be crowds of Protestants in the chapel when Father Tom was preaching. (165-6)

Mrs. Kernan interrupts to announce another guest, Mr Fogarty, who is described by the narrator:

He had opened a small shop on Glasnevin Road where, he flattered himself, his manners would ingratiate him with the housewives of the district. He bore himself with a certain grace, complimented little children and spoke with a neat enunciation. He was not without culture. (166)

The second and third sentences of this passage are examples of the narrator borrowing a character's voice to describe him with a certain personal authenticity. The second is a brief list of what Mr. Fogarty might consider his best qualities, while the third shows his modesty as he tries to praise himself by disproving a negative.

However, the first sentence contains an example of the impish narrator in the qualification of Mr. Fogarty's plans. Read without the phrase "he flattered himself," the first sentence sounds very much like the second and third, full of the character's good thoughts about himself but voiced as if spoken from without. The additional phrase does not make the sentence objective; it makes the tone of the entire sentence sarcastic while still locating its source outside of the shopkeeper himself, indicating the work of the impish narrator.

Mr. Fogarty's gift of a small bottle of whiskey "enlivened the conversation," (167) which turns to mistranslated "papal mottoes," actually forgeries (Lux upon Lux and Crux upon Crux), the penny-a-week school ("None of your modern trumpery. . . ."), and papal infallibility ("Not one of them, not the biggest drunkard, not the most . . . out-and-out ruffian, not one of them ever preached ex cathedra a word of false doctrine. Now isn't that an astonishing thing?" 168). When Mrs. Kernan enters, Mr. Power informs her that "we're going to make your man here a good holy pious and God-fearing Roman Catholic" (170) and it seems that Mr. Kernan has agreed to the idea of the retreat. His one remaining objection becomes a source of humor for the company:

— No, damn it all, said Mr. Kernan sensibly, I draw the line there. I'll do the job right enough. I'll do the retreat business and confession, and ... all that business. But...no candles! No, damn it all, I bar the candles!

He shook his head with farcical gravity.

Everyone laughed heartily.

— There's a nice Catholic for you! said his wife. (171)

The story closes in the "transept of the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street" (172) as the participants in the retreat take their seats and assess the crowd. The tone of narration has shifted again, to a polite and formal voice of innocent witness that reports little more than the names attached to familiar faces and the style of clothing that they wear. The effect of this voice is a kind of dull warmth, of comfort with the setting if not with the impending action, creating for the reader a sense of Mr. Kernan's experience of the event.

Father Purdon's sermon consists of an excerpt from the Gospel of St. Luke and his interpretation of its meaning for "those whose lot it was to lead the life of the world and who yet wished to lead that life not in the manner of worldlings." (173) Most of the speech is transmitted to the reader indirectly, as a narrated record of what the priest says to the assembly and not as a strict account of his words. The phrasing is borrowed from the priest's own voice while he is referred to in the third-person by the interceding narrator:

He told his hearers that he was there that evening for no terrifying, no extravagant purpose; but as a man of the world speaking to his fellow-men. He came to speak to business men and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience. (174)

Rather than allowing Father Purdon to speak for himself, the narrator has created a simulation of being in the church during the sermon. Instead of allowing the reader to hear what the priest says, the narrator shows the reader what it is like to hear it. By borrowing the priest's voice, the narrator creates an authentic replica of the sermon in a narrated form. As the story ends, the narrator, by placing this replica between the priest and the reader, usurps the role of the priest and forces the reader onto the bench next to Mr. Kernan.