FlashFiction.Net

This final entry in the Monomyth looks at James Joyce's "Araby" and how the monomyth works to both structure the story and provide its meaning.

◊

Here's the plot, in short. A boy living in the wasteland of Dublin gets a vision of the sister of his friend Mangan. He develops a young crush, that manifests itself in his watching her from his window, in imagining himself as a knight bringing her a chalice. Finally, they talk and she brings up the idea that she'd like to go to Araby, a bazaar coming to town. He promises her he will bring her something. The desire for Mangan's sister now becomes the desire to get her something from Araby. But the world throws things in his way. Schoolwork, the need for money, his uncle's forgetfulness and drunkenness—these conspire to make him late in arriving at Araby. He has to go through the expensive gate, wasting most of his money. It's dark and nearly closed. He overhears a flirtatious conversation that perhaps takes away the uniqueness of his own such talk with Mangan's sister. The desire declines. He pretends to be interested in some wares—knowing he cannot buy them—to make the interest appear real. The lights go out. He looks into the darkness and sees himself as a creature, driven by vanity, and his eyes burn with anguish and anger.

◊

Here's the plot summarized using the Monomyth structure: This boy ventures forth from his wasted world of Dublin into the region of supernatural wonder connected to Araby: the fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory—his coming to understand the true nature of his desire—is won: the boy comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power of this deeper understanding of the nature of love, its origin in a primal lust, its sublimation to the forms society creates to contain it, the waste that exists at the center of youthful desires and the way the world itself wastes the romantic possibilities of its would-be Grail heroes.

◊

Separation can be thought of in this way: "Without this happening, the character doesn't get a story." In Joyce's story, separation occurs when the girl mentions the idea of going to Araby. Joyce follows that moment with this passage:

What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night. My aunt was surprised and hoped it was not some Freemason affair. I answered few questions in class. I watched my master's face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.

◊

The language mirrors that of the Monomyth, with Araby calling the boy to that world of enchantment. He chafes against the old patterns. The chaos of his thoughts mirrors the chaos of this new world. Separation creates a new desire and against this desire, the initiatory obstacles arise to thwart the desire's fulfillment. In this story, the everyday world throws its tasks at the boy. The chaos of initiation illuminates the character's lack of complete understanding: here, the boy does not recognize the child's play he himself is involved in. He does not comprehend the desire that pushes him onward. He sees it as a pure thing pitted against the corruption of the world.

◊

But what does he wish to do should he have Mangan's sister? What does he want with her body? These drives the boy has yet to understand or confront. Separation ensures that a character and reader will be carried deeper into the heart of the story because the structure forces both to confront a new world—to leave the ho-hum of everyday existence and embark and to discover new patterns of being and fresh structuring principles for a different kind of existence.

◊

At the end of Joyce's story, the boy crosses the threshold, enters that crisis at the center of Self, that dark chamber of the heart:

I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man. I found myself in a big hall girdled at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. I walked into the centre of the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. Before a curtain, over which the words Cafe Chantant were written in coloured lamps, two men were counting money on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins.

◊

The silence, the darkness, the fall of coins—all these come between the boy and his desire for Araby to be an enlightened, pure place in which he will discover the embodiment of his desire for Mangan's sister. The world forces upon the boy a hard reality—the truth of that desire that carried him to this point. It's initiation into the world as it is; it's the courage to accept the mysterious forces of Fate that confine our existence and those equally unknown forces of choice and free will that free us from those boundaries. The boy has chosen to take on his world and here, at the end, it appears the banality and triviality of the world has won.

◊

But the return—with its focus on hard-earned higher knowledge—makes the ultimate victory the character's—and ours, for we have vicariously survived the initiation of death, ordeals, annihilation, dismemberment, trials, ritual and symbolic deaths. Here's the boy, the boy who wanted more than anything to bring something back to the love of his young life, coming to the end of his ordeal in the chaos of Araby:

Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:

"No, thank you."

The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.

I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

◊

The story ends with the transformation of chaos into a revelation, a kind of truth typically given to a people by its prophets, heroes, and holy ones. In a very real sense, the character returns with a truer revelation of the structuring, life-giving, and life-sustaining principles of a culture. That knowledge—that movement from blindness to vision—takes a tremendous amount of courage to face. The boy's Self—once predicated on the vision of himself as an idealized knight, a pure thing in a wasted world—destroys itself to make room for the truer version of Self. Vanity—the abundance of ego—has doomed him, the way it has doomed the countless young people before him, the countless ones after him. The need to rise above the world has led, ironically, to his own corruption, a sinfulness that matches the very corruption he sought to escape.

◊

"Araby" tells the simple story of a boy with a crush who goes to a flea market to buy his crush a trinket but fails. The depth of the story comes partially from the power of the Monomyth: the separation that ensures characters confront the most pressing issues of their being, the initiation that ensures characters will have to act to earn their victory and their return back to a world without chaos, the return that ensures that knowledge—a truer revelation of Self and the world—makes the burning anguish worth it. The world confronted by the boy in "Araby" has the supernatural wonder necessary to evoke the power of all those stories told in the past—a wonder Joyce achieves through the use of religious imagery, Grail and Wasteland allusions, the patterns of light and dark, blindness and seeing.