2. An Encounter {Childhood} Flashcards
Genre
“An Encounter” is a short story in Joyce’s story collection Dubliners that belongs to the modernist genre.
The modernist elements in “An Encounter” include the young narrator’s disaffected tone, the uncomfortable pedophilic content, and the unresolved ending.
Lack of conventional resolution: he does not mature into the type of heroic character that would appear in pre-modernist stories. The narrator does not come of age in an empowered way, but in a disempowered one, experiencing a classic Joycean “epiphany” that he will never have the types of romantic adventures he craves and is trapped in his mundane, repetitive life in Dublin.
In this way, the story also belongs to the genre of naturalism. Naturalist literature sought to communicate to readers the pessimistic notion that oppressed people will never be able to escape their circumstances. With this story, Joyce suggests that, for middle- and lower-class people in Dublin in the early 20th century, disappointment was all they could expect.
dramatic methods
Mood
As a youthful adventure story, the mood of “An Encounter” shifts quite a bit depending on where the “hero” is in his journey. At the start of Mahony and the narrator’s big day of skipping school, for example, the mood is optimistic.
The mood changes significantly as the two boys find themselves unable to achieve their goal of making it to the Pigeon House and end up stuck in an uncomfortable situation with a pedophilic old man instead. At this point in the story the mood becomes anxious and heavy.
Herring stated “the author need not fear censorship because libelous thoughts are in the reader’s mind, not in the text”. Joyce charactises the man mainly through dialogue and litte action. by not making anything explicit Joyce prods us to fill in the blanks.
The story ends on a bleak note, as readers know that the narrator has not broken free from his mundane Dublin life, but must return to it, unlikely to try to break free or adventure out into the world again.
Dramatic Methods
Tone
The tone of “An Encounter” is simultaneously proper and childlike. Through the tone, Joyce communicates that the narrator is an educated and intelligent child, but a child nonetheless.
Dramatic Methods
Style
The writing style of “An Encounter” is closely tied to the fact that the story is told from the first-person perspective of a child who is bored with his routine Dublin life.
While there are a few moments in which Joyce has the narrator use figurative language (such as imagery and metaphor) to capture his inner experience, his prose is primarily plain and unadorned, reflecting his lack of spark, representing boredom and the dullness of his environment.
Mahony (lively) and the narrator’s (dull) juxtaposed styles highlights the fact that the narrator does not have the kind of youthful vigor his friend Mahony has. His dull language matches the dull life he wishes to free himself from (and is ultimately unable to by the end of the story).
Setting
“An Encounter” is set in Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century. At this time in Ireland’s history, the Irish Nationalist movement was pushing for freedom from England’s colonial rule. Many Irish people believed that the widespread poverty and sense of alienation that they experienced was due to England’s ongoing exploitation of Ireland’s people and land.
This conflict also had a religious component—most people in Ireland were Catholic, and England had a pro-Protestant bias.
Joyce alludes to the conflict between Ireland and England at a few points in the story. When the narrator’s Irish Catholic school teacher Father Butler refers to “National Schools” with disdain, for example, he is communicating his frustration with the multi-denominational schools the English were founding in Ireland. While starting multi-denominational schools may not seem offensive in a different context, this was one of the strategies England employed in order to assert its colonial influence in Ireland and challenge the power of the Catholic Church-backed Nationalist movement.
tldr: National Schools was an English strategy to challenge catholic power in Ireland. Secularism bad in this context.
In another moment, a group of “ragged” children call the narrator and his friend Mahony “swaddlers,” a pejorative term for Protestants. This moment hints at how pervasive the conflict is—even though they do not understand the complexities of geopolitical conflict, these young children know that to call a proud Irish person a Protestant is an extremely offensive act.
tldr: swaddler is a derigative term for Protestant, adjacent to anti-national in Ireland.
Theme: The Hero’s Journey and Disappointment
Joyce models the narrator’s adventure across Dublin on the stereotypical hero’s journey. “An Encounter” follows many typical adventure-story tropes: the narrator breaks from his boring routine and ventures from what he knows into the unknown, mirroring the stories of adventure and exploration he likely would have read in Wild West stories, the “American detective stories” he likes, and in epics like The Odyssey.
Throughout “An Encounter,” Joyce provides a trail of hints that the narrator’s expectations for his journey are much too high.
As Mahony comes running, the narrator realizes that even after their unsuccessful day, Mahony has a bit of a heroic instinct that the narrator himself lacks. Adventures aren’t what he imagined, and he is not the hero he hoped he might be.
Theme: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Coming of Age
The male figures—the aggressive older boy Joe Dillon; the strict and haughty Father Butler at the narrator’s Jesuit-run school; and the strange old man whom the narrator and his friend Mahony encounter while playing hooky from school—each provide different, and often confusing, models of masculinity and sexuality to the young male narrator of the story.
The narrator’s confusion at the visions of masculinity and sexuality that Joyce presents in “An Encounter” reveal how repressive attitudes about sexuality can make navigating coming of age as a young man difficult and even dangerous.
Textual details draw parallels between Joe and Father Butler: Mahony calls Father Butler “Bunsen Burner” for his quickness to anger, suggesting that within the order of the Church, there is plenty of room for the kind of aggression that Joe demonstrated during his war games. But while Joe’s example inspired “unruliness” in all the boys who looked up to him, Father Butler’s rage only compels compliance
tldr: Christianity uses conventional male aggression in authoritative figures.
The strange old man takes “wild” masculine sexuality to the extreme—in his case, it manifests as deviant masculine sexuality—and he most thoroughly confuses the narrator.
Joyce gives the reader the impression that the narrator wants to impress the old man and might possibly see him as a model of the kind of “studious” masculinity that the young boys were afraid to let show in front of someone like Joe.
The lack of any positive male role models in the story also more broadly implies that Ireland itself lacks any such role models—that the country is suffering a crisis of thwarted, misdirected, and even perverted masculinity.
Theme: Routine and Repetition
Descriptions of routine and repetition characterize the beginning of “An Encounter.”
Even though the “Indian battles” mimic real adventure, the narrator makes clear that they are just another part of his dull routine by using language like “every night” and “never” to emphasize how rote the games are.
Leo’s attempts to translate Latin in front of the class is just another instance of repetition
But even while the narrator and Mahony are on their adventure across Dublin, images of routine and repetition abound, gradually increasing as the story goes on.
The first hint of others’ routines comes when the narrator watches a “docile” horse carrying businesspeople up a hill in a cart. The horse is sometimes an image of wildness in Wild West stories. But this horse is placid and tame, sharing its daily routine with the businesspeople although the narrator hardly registers it.
Although the strange old man deviates from acceptable sexual attitudes, the narrator senses that he, too, relies on repetition and has a routine.
Herring stated that “Questing characters in Dubliners are frequently assaulted by something I call a “tyranny of triteness,” and the narrator here is assaulted by a world of triteness.
Theme: Religion, Colonisation and Power
By foregrounding the boys’ fascination with Native Americans and their fights for freedom, and by subtly including other instances of the manifestations of English colonial rule, “An Encounter” emphasizes colonization’s impact on Joyce’s characters and explores the complex and shifting social and cultural hierarchies in Ireland between Catholic and Protestant, rich and poor, and Irish and colonial English characters.
Colonisation
Joe Dillon’s fascination with the Wild West draws parallels between Native Americans and the Irish as people subject to colonization. His desire to play as a Native American, not a cowboy, in his cowboys-and-Indians games shows his allegiance with a group of people who are under colonial rule, just as the Irish themselves are.
the detail that Joe’s version of Native Americans always win, suggests that despite the long history of failed Irish rebellions, there are still Irish people who are fierce enough to lead and to break from the status quo against their oppressors.
At the same time, the fact that Joe’s victories are in a pretend game might be taken as suggesting that, in fact, the idea of such leaders is itself a fantasy.
Religion
When Joe decides to join the priesthood, the significance of his decision is complex. The Catholic Irish had long been at the forefront of attempts at rebellion against the Protestant English.
However, at the end of the 19th century, the Catholic Church turned its back on Charles Stuart Parnell, Ireland’s greatest diplomatic hope at attaining independence, after it was revealed that Parnell was engaged in an extra-marital affair.
Many Irish people felt the Church had betrayed both Parnell and the Irish Nationalist cause, which makes Joe’s decision to join the Church ambiguous, particularly in light of the way Joyce portrays the only other holy man in the story: the narrator’s teacher, Father Butler.
Father Butler’s rebuke of Leo Butler at school touches on numerous hierarchical beliefs about Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and represents how those beliefs get passed down through generations.
First, Father Butler criticizes Leo Dillon and the class at large for reading Wild West stories instead of the Roman History he assigned, suggesting that the stories are beneath them as “educated” boys in the Jesuit system and maintaining order.
Furthermore, the reading Father Butler assigns, the Roman History, glorifies an empire—albeit the Roman Empire—and carries complex connotations about the place of the Catholic Church in Ireland: while the Catholic Church tends to side against the English politically, its connection to Roman imperial history makes it yet another force that enacts colonial power over Irish people.
In the time of Irish Nationalism, the fact that the boys learn Latin in school but not their own dying Irish language also makes the Church’s position in Irish independence ambiguous.
As a part of Butler’s public shaming of Leo, he also tells the boys that they are better than the boys in the National School, a British-established school designed to educate Catholics and Protestants together and a school which the Irish Catholic hierarchy thought was a force of cultural suppression. However, by reaffirming this hierarchy, Father Butler deepens the divisions between young Catholics and Protestants. Overall, Father Butler encourages conformity with the status quo, attempting to quash the beginnings of the same kind of rebellious spirit that Joe Dillon has and that, the story suggests, Ireland needs for its independence.
Power
The narrator and Mahony’s encounter with the “ragged troop” of boys and girls further reveals how prominent the cultural and class divisions between Irish-aligned Catholics and English-aligned Protestants are, even to the youngest people in Dublin.
The children assume that since Mahony and the narrator are wealthier, and cricket fans, they must be English-aligned Protestants, highlighting how religious divisions also reflect class divisions in Dublin—though not necessarily the cultural hierarchy. The conflict between young children reveals how stuck Dublin is in its conflict. Even small children have a grasp of the hierarchies at play in their daily lives and continue sowing division among themselves.
Theme: Paralysis and Decay
Joyce believed that Catholic and English political interests vying for control of Ireland and the Irish people had left the country in a state of “paralysis” leading to an overall cultural decay. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, England’s subjugation of Ireland left it an impoverished country financially and culturally: its native language was dying, and it had endured famine and economic decline with little aid.
The details that Joyce includes about the narrator’s Dublin surroundings further point to the cultural, social, and economic decay that Joyce perceived in Modern Ireland.
Even the background of the boy’s hoped-for destination, the Pigeon House, supports the idea that Dublin is in decline. Once an Irish port, then an English military fort, and finally a sewage and power plant, the Pigeon House has gone from a symbol of Ireland’s connection to the wider world, to a symbol of England’s military oppression of Ireland, to a plant that literally processes waste and rot.
tldr: pigeon house turned port to sewage and power plant: symbol of decay and decline and colonial oppression.
Finally, the strange old man’s appearance—his shabby suit, his “good” accent but perverted speech, and his mouth of decaying yellow teeth—invite the reader to draw parallels between the man and the wider culture. His body and his morals are all in a state of decay, and he seems trapped in his own routine, making the younger boys suffer for it. Meanwhile, the fact that the old man, who admires famous Irish writers, is himself perverted suggests that the culture itself has become similarly corrupted.
tldr: strange pedo man has upper class accent and high cultural knowledge but imagery of decay in his discription and his dialogue, action suggest he is corrupted representing that Irish culture itself is corrupted/misconstrued.
Symbol: The Wild West
The focus on the Wild West at the beginning of “An Encounter” frames the narrator’s ambivalence towards adventure and masculinity.
While Joe Dillon seems to embody the violent, athletic, individualist masculinity that the stories about the Wild West celebrate. However in contrast, the narrator wants adventure and escape from his daily life, he doesn’t want the violence and chaos that seem to come with it.
While indigenous people in the United States had largely lost their battle against colonizing forces by the late 19th century, Joe’s fighting spirit suggests that Irish people might still have a chance to resist their English oppressors—making his choice to go into the priesthood even more complex, since Joyce considered the Catholic Church another force that subjugated Irish people.
Nonetheless, Joe’s repeated triumph as the Native American in their pretend war games suggests an effort to rewrite history, in which the colonized people, such as the Irish, win. That these victories are only pretend, though, also suggests the degree to which Irish independence was also something of a fantasy at the time.
tldr: its fantasy and repetitive suggesting not only paralysis but that irish victory is only pretend.
Symbol: The Pigeon House
The Pigeon House started out as a lodging house for workers building Dublin’s Great South Wall, then became a restaurant and hotel for travelers arriving in Dublin Bay. After the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Pigeon House became a military fort for Anglo-Irish forces, before finally undergoing its final transformation into a sewage processing facility and power generating station.
The Pigeon House’s transformation from a port to a sewage processing and power plant after a period of military takeover echoes Joyce’s ideas about English colonization’s impact on Ireland.
House a symbol for adventure, like the green eyes he hoped to find in the foreign sailors around him, and if he had actually completed his journey, he would have been greeted with a symbol of Irish decay: literal sewage.
However, the Pigeon House was also an electrical power plant. Considered in a positive light, the Pigeon House is also associated with light, and its name is associated with the Holy Spirit, which often appears as a dove in its physical form. These aspects of the Pigeon House invite the reader to wonder whether there might be hope for greater Irish renewal despite the narrator’s personal failure and disappointment in his adventure.
tldr: may symbolise light in the end of the tunnel.
