James Joyce Reading Group discussion

"It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us."

What a clever opening for this story!

Yes, a weird story, a great telling of this particular tale. The things that struck me as I read it again was the whole opening section that displays this exotica for the wild life of Indians (BTW: I am half Apache and half Irish on my father's side, half Chickasaw and half Irish on my mother's side).

It seems like a really interesting choice. There are elements of racism...all sorts of cultural misunderstandings, which I believe is all thematically linked to the encounter with the old man. In particular, the way that Father Butler criticizes the "literature" the boys are reading (the history of Rome is far more important than the history of "heathens"). The narrator mentions Mahony's use of slang...(a cultural construct) and makes a point to, in some way, identify all of the passer bys in terms of their cultural identities (the jew, the tramload of business people, the workers, etc.). There is also the "cultural misconception" achieved by, at first, the "ragged girls" the boys chase (while masquerading as Indians) and then "the ragged boys" that come to their aid "....thinking that we were Protestants because Mahony, who was dark complexioned, wore the silver badge of the cricket club in his cap".

And the "encounter"! The rhythms and repetitions while he describes first the old man's inquiry into the boy's relationships with girls and then the whipping monologue. Amazing writing....you can feel the bile rising as Dostoevsky would say.

Back to the theme of trust (that we touched on in other posts), it was interesting to see this second story of the collection end with the two friends coming to a resolve where their friendship is somehow strengthened by the event (at least for the narrator). Does this "double edged" ending predict the end of The Dead?

The final sentence, "And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little" (referring to Mahony) seals the epiphany.

So, what is the story about? Is it a story about misunderstandings? Is "the encounter" merely there to serve as a vehicle for the narrator to develop a truer friendship than one based on cultural misunderstandings (playing cowboys and indians)? Is this about the righting of a perspective on how friendships should be built?

If so, "the encounter" is a brilliant device to acheive that end. And it reads almost gleefully inappropriate, especially when you consider Joyce's "intended" audience (Ireland).

Re: the Indian lore...JJ's fleeting refs. to American culture in his writing has always amused me, because I have this naive mindset that other countries didn't have much of a thought about the US in Joyce's time. (I think also of the ex-patrieate street preacher who shows up out of nowhere in Ulysses' Oxen Of The Sun) Are there more examples of this in other foreign authors' works?

that question totally vexes me.

to clarify...can anyone cite other examples of a non-U.S. fictional author writing about America (preferably not of the past 50 years or so?)

well, the time frame may not fit, but what about kafka's Amerika?

I think the story, An Encounter is about the art of story-telling, itself.
The author has taken a relatively small incident and turned it into a rather perplexing narrative. You have boys at play, school, skipping
school, a pleasant day, things to see, and then a weird unexpected
event, all in just a few pages: Joyce never wastes any ink on anything but the essentials.

Two other things I find noteworthy in this story: there is the line:

"I liked better some American detective stories which were
traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful
girls."

I like the adjectives "unkempt fierce and beautiful" the first two have an odd relationship to the third. Also to my thinking this is
the first statement from the author - through a character - of one
of the most fundamental and ubiquitous themes in his Art: girls!
As in "girls, demure and romping" from Portrait;
And "those lovely seaside girls" in Ulysses;
And the "dirly dirls" of Finnegans Wake.

There is also this line (about half a page below the first):

"The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched scribbler that writes these things for a drink."

There are a couple of interesting points here: "wretched" is a very important word in Portrait; but even more interesting is the word
"scribbler". In most editions of Dubliners you find the word "fellow" instead. To understand the discrepancy is to dig into the story of the Penguin (restored, by Robert Scholes,1968) edition.
What makes the word "scribbler" most interesting is that a "quick" scribbler reappears as a persona in Finnegans Wake.

Good points. On the complexity of a small event - Joyce was I guess always headed for a stream of consciousness thing. At first I used to think Dubliners and Portrait were far different than Ulysses or Wake but the seeds of the later two are all throughout the first two. The introspection into the simplest 'encounter' is already becoming the blend of experiences of the individual (personal bias, personal preference, etc) laid out in yes the simple terms wasting little ink in a way that makes you not take note of how much interior introspection you are getting in the story. It is (one) of his styles that makes him unique even if you can't at first put your finger on it. Later in Ulysses and Wake he really puts the reader in the drivers seat sometimes shaking him or her up with so much personal context they are disoriented. In Wake he is exploring putting our subconscious as well as our conscious into the mix. He's a whole bag of tricks.