Episode 229: "Best of" Series, "Araby" by James Joyce, Ep. 11

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 229: “Best of” Series – “Araby” by James Joyce (Revisited from Ep. 11)
Originally Aired: June 18, 2024
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins (Thomas Banks referenced, not present)

---

Episode Overview

In this “Best of” episode, Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins dive deep into James Joyce’s short story "Araby," exploring its layers of meaning, rich symbolism, and the profound experience of reading great literature well. Framing the discussion with their signature blend of literary analysis, personal anecdotes, and wit, Angelina and Cindy unpack the story’s exploration of longing, disillusionment, Irish identity, the relationship between romance and religion, and the influence of social and economic realities. The hosts model the art of “slow reading”—discerning the layers of imagery and theme line by line—showing how classic literature rewards attentive, skillful engagement.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why "Araby" and Short Stories Matter

• The episode launches a summer series on short stories and essays, with Joyce’s “Araby” chosen for its brevity, density, and literary depth.
• Short stories are highlighted for their “super condensed” nature: “Every word, every line, especially a story like Araby… nothing is throwaway.” (Angelina, 15:00)
• Both hosts admit they prefer Joyce as a short story writer (in Dubliners) to his more daunting novels (esp. "Ulysses").

2. Context: Literary Form, Irishness, and Joyce’s Concerns

• Joyce’s stories often operate around “epiphany;” “characters are going to come to some insight, that flashing moment of epiphany.” (Angelina 19:07)
• The episode draws parallels between Joyce’s Irish context and literary contemporaries (like Yeats, Flannery O’Connor), discussing the Irish tradition of story as entwined with both myth and stark reality.
• Araby’s 1894 bazaar was a real event in Dublin—“advertised as a grand Oriental fête”—which Angelina connects to the story’s fascination with the exotic and unattainable.

3. Line-by-Line Analysis of "Araby"

• Setting as Symbol:
  • The story opens and closes in literal and figurative darkness, with “North Richmond street, being blind…” setting up themes of limitation, blindness, and seeking.
    • “So literally…he’s living on a dead end street, a dead end street with an abandoned house at the end...” (Angelina, 26:15)
• Significance of Books Left by the Dead Priest:
  • Three books—romance, religious devotion, and detective story—reveal the protagonist’s internal quest: Romantic longing, searching for spiritual truth, and the drive to uncover reality.
    • “Romanticism, religious devotion, and the detective...The detective is the one who exposes the truth.” (Angelina, 30:33)
• Mangan’s Sister as Image of Idealized Love/Ireland/Religion:
  • Not named, referred only as “Mangan’s sister”—a gesture towards courtly love (Dante and Beatrice) and the tradition of associating Ireland with the feminine beloved (via poet James Clarence Mangan).
    • “She’s described as bathed in light…This is Dante and Beatrice.” (Angelina, 40:59)
  • Cindy: “I love that about Joyce…there’s something Irish about storytelling—they can’t stop themselves from singing…”
• Courtly Love & Divine Longing:
  • The boy’s feelings for Mangan’s sister are analyzed as a mixture of romantic, religious, and national (Ireland) longing, all ultimately thwarted by reality.
  • Angelic or “haloed” images of Mangan’s sister, the “quest” to Araby, and references to liturgical rituals merge throughout the boy’s internal narrative.
• The Role of Money, Commerce, and Disillusionment:
  • The intrusion of commerce (pawnbroker’s widow, money for entrance, English shopkeepers) is tracked as the anti-romantic force that “jerks him out of the romance.”
    • “It keeps coming back to money. That money is somehow disillusioning and undermining the role of the church.” (Angelina, 64:15)
  • The English shopkeepers at the bazaar symbolize, for the Irish narrator, the impossibility of a pure or transcendent Irish experience under colonization.
• Epiphany & Disillusionment:
  • The famous ending—“I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger”—sums up the disillusionment with courtly ideals, commercial realities, and the conflation of religious/romantic/national longing.
    • “He’s tying together all these desires—romantic love, the courtly love tradition, Ireland, the church—and he feels let down by all of it, but blames himself.” (Angelina, 70:45)
  • Cindy: “It’s such a personal ending for all of us… Anybody who has sought after something that their imagination imagined to be different than what it really was… then their eyes are opened and you have that moment of… anguish and anger.”

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Reading and Literature:

• “Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet.” – St. Porphyrios (Angelina’s commonplace quote, 5:48)
• “All of the reading processes are just super condensed [in short stories]… You can almost go line by line to watch this thing explode.” (Angelina, 15:00)

On Joyce and Style:

• “Ulysses… was famous for being completely drawn out, as drawn out as far as you can go… It uses that famous—some people say invented—stream of consciousness… you don’t see that here [in Araby].” (Cindy, 16:32)

On Symbolism in "Araby":

• “He’s describing this… poor neighborhood in Dublin… North Richmond Street, being blind… you’ve got this picture that he’s living on a dead end street… If that’s not a picture of how he felt about Ireland…” (Angelina, 26:14)
• “It was always the longing of the soul for God… It’s not me you want, it’s God…” (Angelina, on courtly love/Dante and Beatrice, 45:44)
• “It’s all dark. He’s walking down the middle in the dark. 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. Oh, the symbolism of that!” (Angelina, 69:43)
• “He gazes up into the darkness… I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger… He’s blaming himself.” (70:49)

On Universal Experience:

• “All of us have had those experiences of working something up in our minds and getting horribly disillusioned by it. And the pain that comes with that. And the fact that he turns the pain inward—‘I was such an idiot’—we’ve all been there.” (Angelina, 73:38)
• Cindy: “I think it’s just such a personal ending for all of us... For anybody who has sought after something that their imagination imagined to be different than what it really was. And then their eyes are open.”

On Ireland and Identity:

• “He’s trying to elevate Ireland… but he can’t, and… he can’t because… it’s the English that are going to have to give this to him.” (Angelina, 71:21)

---

Important Thematic Timestamps

• [13:47] – What is a short story? The form and power of short fiction.
• [15:00] – Why "Araby" makes an ideal study: condensed, symbolic, tightly written.
• [19:07] – Joyce’s use of epiphany and his Irish context.
• [26:06] – Opening lines of "Araby": “blind street”—setting and motif of blindness/sight.
• [29:47] – Significance of the three books left by the dead priest.
• [35:04–37:44] – Who is Mangan’s sister? Courtly love, romantic tradition, Irish nationalism.
• [42:43] – The vigil and quest: religious and romantic longing merged.
• [49:00] – The quest to Araby as a transcendent mission; reality intrudes.
• [56:09] – Disillusionment: barriers, permission, the role of money & family.
• [61:18] – Delay, economic reality, and the anti-romance of the bazaar.
• [64:03] – Araby’s empty hall, “silence like that which pervades a church after a service.”
• [69:43] – The final revelation: darkness, failure, self-blame.
• [73:38] – The universal experience of disillusionment, connecting to Emily Dickinson’s poem.
• [78:01] – Is the quest itself vain, or only its object?
• [81:51] – Blindness, sight, and the figure of the blind writer/prophet.

---

Flow and Tone

Angelina and Cindy balance rigorous literary analysis with relatable humor and warmth, sharing personal stories and modeling authentic, sometimes unscripted inquiry. The tone is intellectual but accessible—inviting listeners into the mysteries of literature without academic intimidation or presumption.

---

Conclusion & Takeaways

• “Araby” is revealed as a tightly constructed meditation on romantic, religious, and national longing, and the human experience of coming face-to-face with disillusionment.
• The story’s density rewards close, repeated readings.
• Readers are encouraged to join the ongoing discussion—“raising the questions is what needs to happen… those are the exact questions we’re supposed to ask when we’re disillusioned.”

---

Listener Engagement

• The hosts invite discussion in their online community—“I’d love to know what y’all think of the ending… There’s some sort of disillusionment, but… what is exactly? Is he disillusioned by the girl, the object, himself, or the world?”
• Next week’s episode will analyze G.K. Chesterton’s essay “A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls.”

---

This summary reflects the depth, structure, and spirit of Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins’s reading: searching, playful, insightful—a conversation for anyone who wants to read well and think richly about stories, tradition, and the inner life.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast. This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to episode 11 of the Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins. We are so glad that you're joining us to launch off our short story essay series for the summer. We're both, we're both really pumped about these short stories and especially about this first one that we're going to be doing. But before we get to that, Cindy, hi. Welcome. How's the summer going?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, it's going great. I'm going to the pool every once in a while and just sitting on the float and just soaking up the relaxation. That's a happy, fun place for me. So I'm enjoying that very much. What about you? Are you guys doing anything fun?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, well, I mean, we're still not fully moved into our new place because, you know, we weddinged and honeymooned in the middle of the move. So we're trying to get things back together. But no, it's a good summer. We're having fun. And Mr. Banks is an excellent cook. So I'm getting really spoiled that somebody's making like, he says things. I don't know if I should say all these things on the air, but I'm going to anyway. He says that cooking relaxes him and if he's feeling stressed out, cooking just sort of calms him down and puts him in his happy place. And I said, well, eating does that for me. So this is perfect. I'm having, I'm having to learn to let him cook for me.

[Cindy Rollins]

I need to talk to my husband because laying in the pool is my happy place and it does not include cooking. At all. But he is good at, like, should I bring home dinner? Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, no. So last night, he made me this fabulous dinner while I sat down and read Araby and researched a few things and took notes. And then he brought me the food, and I was like, this is my dream life.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow, that. That sounds wonderful.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then he sat down and talked to me about Arabia while he was cooking. I would get excited and I would yell things into the kitchen. Oh, and I think, this is what's happening. And he. And he'd say back, oh, that's very insightful, Ms. Stanford. Oh, you've got it, Ms. Stanford. You're unraveling this story. So, yeah, it was fantastic. It was my dream moment. Other people are like, moaning, that sounds so boring. But, you know, hey, the life of a literature teacher, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. And it reminds me of something. All work and no play makes Jack a doll boy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. And no, he did not take me to the bazaar. And I'm very disappointed.

[Cindy Rollins]

Uh. Oh, it would have helped the insights of the story.

[Angelina Stanford]

It would have. It would have.

[Cindy Rollins]

We did go to the farmer's market, so.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes, we've been doing that, too. I don't know. I don't even know the word for what I feel. I feel bourgeois bohemian, I guess, that I go to the farmer's market and we come home and we cook it.

[Cindy Rollins]

All the hip people go, it's so fun.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes. And I definitely counted among their numbers.

[Cindy Rollins]

We're legit. We're legit. We're legit.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Now that we've made everyone hungry and wanting to go to the pool, I guess we. We should mention. Well, let me, Let me. Let's get a little business out of the way. So, first of all, I just want to remind you that we do have a [e-mail] theliterarylife and this is a place for people who want to support our podcast. And one of the exclusive bonus features for our fellow patrons is that my husband, Thomas Banks, has been reading the selections, and those files are available over on the Patreon. So the eight short stories and essays that we're going to be covering through July and August, he has read those for us. And so you have your own personal audio files of those over at the Patreon as a thank you to. To those who are supporting this endeavor.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, we really appreciate that. And we want to make sure we give you content also.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, we are very committed to giving you lots and lots of content. This was actually a really fun project. For he and I to work on recording these. We had a good time.

[Cindy Rollins]

I've enjoyed them so far myself.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. Well, Cindy, should we share our commonplace quotes?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. Is it that time? It is that time. Do you have one?

[Angelina Stanford]

I have one. It's super short and it's one of my favorite quotes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, what is it?

[Angelina Stanford]

Here we go. Here we go. And I think it's very apropos to the story too. Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet. And that is said by St. Porphyrios of Casa Caleb. Yeah, I butchered that. It's a bunch of vowels where there should be some noun. There's a bunch of consonants where there should be some vowels.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I've been reading aloud Lycurgus and Plutarch, so I understand the feeling of butchering words.

[Angelina Stanford]

So anyway, yeah, that's one of my favorite quotes. Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet. I'm going to leave it. I'm not going to.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. We're not going to talk about the imagination or anything. Okay, we will leave it. Alright. My quote is from somebody. I quote a lot. This is from Esther de Waal, but I just thought it went along with this chapter also. This is a quote from her book to pause on the threshold. And she says, a ritual for letting a son or daughter go free, handing them over under the protection of God is not something that we naturally include as part of growing up today in the West. Yet we are here reminded of one of the most important steps of all, of the transitions in life. Moving from the confines of the family into freedom and maturity. And I just picked that because this story is a little bit about, you know, someone looking for freedom and maturity. And also just as parents, how, as a parent of nine and I'm now trying to let go of my ninth child, I'm trying to let go.

[Angelina Stanford]

But you think you'd be good at that by now, Cindy?

[Cindy Rollins]

I actually am better at it, much better at it than I was. But it still leaves a lump inside of you, even when outwardly you get better at it. And I know that's a common experience among mothers and fathers.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's one of those ironies, isn't it, that parenting is the kind of job that if you do it well, it has an expiration date. Right. The whole point is you're trying to train these people to not need you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right? Exactly. Yes. And not having to raise your grandchildren is like one of the signs that you succeed at it. But it's hard it's hard when you've given your life to that and then to do your job means to let go. And I think that goes throughout life on so many levels. Just like this story that we're going to talk about has so many levels that it's almost. I mean it's just very, very finely layered.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh my gosh, yes. So many different things are coming together and I cannot wait to unpack that. But before we do, isn't there something kind of exciting you want to tell us about?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. I am so excited because we are going to have a back to school conference online. And there's a lot of reasons why we're going to do this, but the main reason is that I was talking to a friend of mine named Adrienne Fries and Adrian had some amazing ideas about the medievals and memorization and narration and how all of these things just come together in this perfect harmony of thought between historical way of looking at education. And then we have Charlotte Mason coming along and how does this all work in modern times? And so we decided we were going to have a conference August 26th, 27th, 28th and 29th. I think my page disappeared on me. So I'm now scrambling around. But that we will have information on that up very soon. Hopefully by the time you're listening to this, you'll have a. You can go to either angelina stanford or cindyrollins.net angelina stanford.com and find out more about it. But this is going to be a four day event. Each day is going to have its own emphasis. On Monday we're going to. The emphasis is going to be really a Charlotte Mason intensive. This is going to be giving out some incredible information from Adrienne about Charlotte Mason and about what it means to be truly educated. Wonderful, wonderful material. She keeps showing me her slides and I just have to be very careful. I just want to steal all her stuff. If I do, I will give her credit. And then on the second day we are going to have a morning time immersion. I'm going to do some morning time stuff. On the third day we have another exciting person. We are going to have Tom Banks giving us a poetry lesson on the third day. And I'm truly also very excited about that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm pretty excited about that too.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's going to be just Monday and Wednesday are going to be fantastic even if you don't count you or me. And hopefully we'll do our fair share in this endeavor also. And then on Thursday, Angelina is going to do some talk to us about literature so this is back to school for parents, mom, dad, helping us to become motivated, helping us to continue that repairing of the ruins and getting our philosophy straight as we head into the new school year.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, and it's so important because there are so many competing voices telling us where we should be spending our time and our energy in this education process. There are not that many voices calling for spending your time in the humanities. No, in poetry and stories and language. We're hearing stem, we're hearing math. There's Max. Max is also really upset that the humanities are getting short shifted.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, he got really upset when he heard that. He is the podcast dog. Sorry, I didn't know he was going to do that. We must have gotten a package.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yay, books. But yeah, so I absolutely think going into this school year, it's going to be really great for us all to be reminded of just how important for the nurture of our minds and our souls and our hearts to be immersed in stories and language and to just really be able to move forward in the school year with that kind of motivation and zeal and encouragement. It always helps me to reorient to a vision before I do anything. Without a vision, my people will perish. That is me. I've got to know why I'm doing what I'm doing. Or come those long, hard days, something gets cut. We live in that place of reality where people are tired and sick and burn out and things get cut. And so when you're tempted to cut poetry or to say, why am I spending all this time reading poems or reading fairy tales or doing morning time when my children should be doing science experiments, it's going to be so important to have those voices reminding us that this has always been part of historical education, has always been a central part of the nurturing of a child.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen. Amen. And even now, we see a lot of people online talking about, what should I buy, what should I buy, what should I buy? And really, I think when you hear these talks, you're going to feel like what you buy is not nearly as important because you can use almost anything you've already bought to apply these principles. And you won't feel like you have to buy something else.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's not about buying the right. I mean, goodness, between Google Books and Project Gutenberg, you could easily never purchase another book and get a fine education.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen. So now we are going to be talking for the next few weeks about essays, but also today, short stories. So what in the world is a short story?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I'M glad we're gonna. I'm glad we're gonna. We're gonna look at that first. You know, understanding the form of something you read is really essential to unpacking it. So the short story is a form that kind of comes on later in the scene, after the epic, after the drama, after the lyric poem, the satire. You be. Short stories pop up. And the thing about a short story is that it's going to have all the same essential elements of a novel, right? It's going to have plot, character, setting, it's going to have archetypes and symbols, it's going to have motifs and themes and images. It's going to have a purpose, but it's going to be super condensed because it's short. This is one of the reasons why I love to teach short stories when you're trying to teach somebody how to read, because all of the reading processes are just super condensed. Also, you can see the beginning and end at the same time. And it's the kind of thing that lends itself well to rereading many times to look for new things. And so, for example, when you're reading a novel, any well constructed story is going to tell you at the beginning the essential things you need to know to make sense of the story. It's going to introduce the central conflicts and the tensions, the recurring motifs and ideas. It's going to set up everything you need to know that typically is going to happen in a novel in the first chapter, maybe the first couple of chapters, or as I like to say, if it's a Victorian novel, the first hundred pages, right? The first hundred pages of a Victorian novel, you still haven't even met all the main characters, so they've got their own rules. But a short story is going to do the same thing. And so very often in a short story, the first sentence, first paragraph, first couple paragraphs is going to tell you right at the beginning what you need to know. And I was just absolutely tickled to see how tightly Joyce constructs this story. And it's operating on so many levels. So the thing about a short story, if it's well done, every sentence is going to be so meaningful. Nothing in a short story is throwaway. You can't necessarily say that about a novel. A novel becomes a beast and it can be hard to wield it and rein everything in. And so not everything is going to be just, you know, super pregnant with meaning, like a short story is, or a poem. So every word, every line, especially a story like Araby, which is so short. I hope it was the kind of story that when you got to the end, you said what? And then just immediately started it back over. So Araby is going to reward us by looking at this very thoughtfully and carefully and we can almost go line by line to watch this thing explode. But I know that you were really excited about this and when I mentioned to you that I wanted to do a joy start story, we both kind of had the same thing that we both are maybe not crazy about his novels, but like him, a short story writer. So you have some experiences there. Tell me about that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I was just thinking what you said about how the short story is very tightly drawn and it's not drawn out. When Ulysses, his novel is famous for being completely drawn out, as drawn out as far as you can go, really. He used that famous, in fact, some people say invented the idea of stream of consciousness in Ulysses. And yet you don't see that here. You see, you do see the thoughts inside the head, but you don't have this running stream of uncontrolled thinking that you do in Ulysses. So when I read Ulysses, I read it because it was considered at the time the top, the number one book of the 20th century. I thought, well, I should read that. And I did read it. And I do think I will go back and read it again because I think I missed a lot. It's a kind of book that you do miss a lot. It's hard to get, but it's also very tedious to read. It does not draw. It's not Gone with the Wind. You don't feel like, oh, I can't wait to turn the page. You're just like, I have no idea

[Angelina Stanford]

what universally considered to be a very difficult book book.

[Cindy Rollins]

And yet he did some things in that book that I think are worth trying to understand. Maybe not for everybody. If you don't have a lot of time. I probably wouldn't waste it on Ulysses. But later I thought, well, maybe I don't get choice. And I went back and I got one of the Dubliners, which is a book of short stories, which we find

[Angelina Stanford]

Araby in the Dubliners, the first thing he published 1914.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I loved the Dubliners. Now I had the added benefit of having a copy that was used by apparently a college freshman, I'm going to say college freshman, which added to my delight because they have the most delightful notes throughout. Half the book doesn't have the notes. They didn't get through the whole book. But I so enjoyed the stories where they had Underlined and made notes and said things, and I'll probably share a few of those along the way. But, yeah, so that added to my joy in reading these short stories. But I think Joyce, he's very Irish. He's an Irish writer. He did. He was very innovative in his writing. But these short stories, none of them are very long. They're all very tightly written and just are extraordinarily brilliant.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the levels. The levels that he's operating on, the deeper I went into the story, the more geeked out I got. We had the best time just me geeking out over the story and then, you know, running my ideas by Thomas and him saying, no, you're right on, you're right on. And, you know, that's my idea of a really exciting night around here. I never. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

[Cindy Rollins]

I know. I just. And he has. He does have some humor in here also, so that here and there he drops a little sarcastic line of humor.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very much so. And, well, I've never read Ulysses because, frankly, I'm terrified by it. Right. So modern literature is not really my thing to begin with. And I'm utterly terrified of Ulysses. I have read his other book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I read that a very, very long time ago. He wrote this a year after Dubliners came out. It's very autobiographical, as is this story. And I think it helped me, I think, because I had this sense of Joyce as someone who's struggling with what it means to be Irish, what it means to be Catholic, all of those things. You see that in this story as well. But he ties it together with a few other things, which just absolutely blew my mind. So one of the things that Joyce does in all of the stories of the Dubliners, he is definitely exploring Irish nationalism. So with his contemporaries, like Yeats, this would be right around the time of the Easter rebellion, which was the teachers revolution in Ireland, which I love that the teachers and the poets are the people who revolted in Ireland. And that was around the same time. So he's dealing with a lot of these sort of things. You know, what does it mean to be Irish? Wrestling with his face, wrestling with a lot of these things. And so he structured his stories around the idea of an epiphany. In this sense, he's very much like Flannery o'. Connor. So characters are going to go through some sort of journey, you know, journey of the heart, journey of the soul, whatever you want to call it, spiritual pilgrimage. They're going and they're going to come to some insight. They're going to have that flashing moment of epiphany. All of the stories in the Dubliners are centered on that, and we see that in this story as well. But I know that you were really excited about this story. And so before I start jumping in and going line by line and telling you all the brilliant things that I think are happening here, I'm really so. Cindy and I did not talk about this ahead of time. She told me she was really excited, and I was very much dying to know what you saw. So tell me now, because I'm all ears. I really want to know, what did you connect with in this story?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, what you were saying about the Irishness of the story. We think of CS Lewis, we think of Yeats, we get this. You just start asking yourself, who are Irish people? I don't know if any of you read Angela's Ashes, but it gives you that whole dark Irish picture of life, as if they have to drink and they have to be sad and dark, but they also have to tell the story. They can't stop themselves from singing. They can't stop themselves from writing. It's just something Irish about storytelling. I think they're so. I love that about Joyce.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, yeah, the Celts are the oldest storytellers. That was an essential part of their culture going way, way back.

[Cindy Rollins]

And yet they have this, like, they're gonna look reality in the eye. They may have to cover it over with, you know, some. Some. Some myth, but they're also going to look it straight in the eye. And I think that, that, that's. I find that very compelling. I find that sort of storytelling fascinating. Like Flannery o'. Connor. Very, very like her. Very dark in some ways.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that brave sort of, I'm gonna look ugly reality in the face, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Like, I'm not gonna pretend this doesn't exist in this dark way. But also, like Flannery o', Connor, there's this also, this little bit of. Well, once we've looked at it, we're just gonna, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna take a drink and we're gonna soldier on. And, you know, a lot of people, when they talk about Araby, they talk about it being a coming of age story, and yet. And I do think it is obviously a coming of age story, but it's so much more than that. It's so much more than a coming of age story. It's an experience that every single one of us face many, many times in life. Where Our imagination comes squealing up to reality, and maybe we're a little bit disillusioned by it, you know?

[Angelina Stanford]

And you're absolutely right that there's a disillusionment in this story. And I think what is interesting to me, and perhaps that this is the essential Irishness, is that it does look at its disillusionment in the face, but it does so without this sort of crushing despair.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Right, right, Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's not like, oh, the world is a disillusioned, horrible place. Now let's go kill ourselves. It doesn't feel like that, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, it does not feel like that. And I think if it did, we probably wouldn't be reading it because it would just be too hard to read. So. So right away, we have this whole word araby, that is this kind of exotic word. And I think that's the point of it. It's supposed to sound exotic. What is? You know, araby? That's a really strange word. And it's. It's. It's just. It's the name of the. Of the bazaar that he.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And so it's based on a real bazaar that. So when James Joyce was the age of the narrator, that that actual bazaar came to Dublin May 14th to 19th, 1894, it was called Araby in Dublin, and it was advertised as a grand Oriental fete. So you can imagine that this would have loomed very large in the imagination of poor boys.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. This is the Orient. All the riches of the Orient are coming.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. It makes me think, at the time, I took my son. I used to take my oldest son to the orthodontist, and we had to drive two hours, and my son Christopher, who was little at the time, like, three, kept saying, I want to go. I want to go. And I took him to the OR one week I took him, and he. We got there, and we're sitting there, and he goes, is this the orthodontist? And I said, well, yeah, what did you think it was? And he said, I thought it was gonna be like Six Flags. So he had a little moment, an Araby moment in his life at that point, too. But. But there is this exotic imagination going on around this. This bizarre.

[Angelina Stanford]

So if we. If we look at the very first line. Let's go ahead and jump in. Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, let's go.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that you talked about the darkness of the story, because one of the things I noticed is that the story both begins and ends in literal darkness.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. That's in your face. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. It's very in your face. The light and dark is very in your face. If you're looking for something to track as you're reading, just start looking for light and dark images. And you see what. What are the things that feel dark and what are the things that feel light? And does that change at any point in the story? So we're told. So he's describing this. This neighborhood, this poor neighborhood in Dublin. And it's. And he starts right off North Richmond street, being blind, okay? So we pause right there. Being blind means it's a dead end street. So literally, you've got this picture that he's living on a dead end street, A dead end street with an abandoned house at the end, right? Like, if that's not a picture of how he felt about Ireland, how a lot of people felt about Ireland, I'm in this dead end, right? There's no getting beyond this poverty, this life. There's the double meaning too, that it's blind.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so he uses blind twice.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, he does. Absolutely he does. And so he's.

[Cindy Rollins]

He's.

[Angelina Stanford]

By telling us right at the beginning, this is a blind. There's a blindness here he is setting up the whole story. Then will our character move from blindness to sight? And if he does, what will he see?

[Cindy Rollins]

Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

And if we know that he's structuring the stories on the epiphany, we know that absolutely this is all intentional. He's going to move this character towards some moment of sight or in sight, right? So you've got the dead end street with all of the implications that would mean for us, right? We have a dead in life, a dead in existence, dead end job. It means all the same things. We got this abandoned house on the end, then, second paragraph, right? We find out the former tenant of the house was a priest. So we got. Now, now we got a dead Catholic priest, okay? So Joyce's issues with Ireland and Catholicism, front and center, first two paragraphs.

[Cindy Rollins]

And my freshman says, that's depressing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Dead priest. That's depressing. But the dead priest is continuing to influence and leave things behind, right? And so. And you have the sense over and over how you can't shake these essential Irishness things, right? You can't. He really ducks about that too. In a portrait of the artist of a young man, you know, not being able to shake that Catholicism, even though maybe he's rejecting sort of the religious aspects of it, it's still such an essential part, it still speaks to him. So we've got the dead priest in the back of the house. Now he finds three books the dead priest has left behind.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And as we've said a few times on this show, if a book is mentioned by name, it's important. So this is. This is where. I mean, we're talking the second paragraph right here. Joyce is going to tell us what the story's about. Okay, look at this. So what are the three books? The Abbot by Sir Walter Scott. So that's a romance. We've got a romantic story, Romanticism, which we will develop that a whole lot in the story. The second book is the Devout Communicant. That is a religious devotional. Okay, so we've got romanticism and religious devotion. The third book, the Memoirs of Vidocq, is one of the very, very first detective stories from the French. He was actually a real life criminal turned detective. This is his life story. And so look at these three things. Romanticism, religious devotion, and the detective. Now, what do you think those three things have in common? Why are they together?

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, the romanticism. I'm sorry, I got touched. I had read about Vidoc before, and my brain was trying to figure out where I just saw Vidocq before. So romanticism, religious. Religious devotion. Devotion and a detective story. So tell us, Angelina.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so I think. Well, first of all, he's combining romanticism and religious devotion throughout the entire story. And I'm going to show you how he does that. But the detective is the one who exposes the truth, right? So he, the narrator, is going to be on this search for the truth about romanticism, devotion. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

How do they all fit together?

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Cindy Rollins]

The religion and the detective.

[Angelina Stanford]

So the detective is the one who will unravel the mystery. The detective is the one who will reveal the truth.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, well, that. That's. I didn't get that because I was actually, every time I read that, I thought, where have I heard this vdok? And I finally remembered. But I.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I had to look it up. I had to look it up. Tom, of course, knew. He knew Tom. He knows everything. He knew everything.

[Cindy Rollins]

I just recently read a French book, a book by a French author, and it was a detective novel. And this came up. VDOT kept coming up, but I couldn't remember that till just now. And I can't remember the name of the book, but I clearly remember it was like the black something, but I can't remember.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, okay, okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

Sorry.

[Angelina Stanford]

But if we're learning the skill of reading then, though, that's the kind of question you want to stop and ask why these three books?

[Cindy Rollins]

Why do we have these three books?

[Angelina Stanford]

And they're named. Right? They're specifically named.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he likes the last one best.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's the detective that he's most. He's most drawn to. Then you got.

[Cindy Rollins]

And the leaves were yellow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

I just think that's not black. That's not brown. That's not dark. That's a little lighter.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. It could possibly be a light image.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Maybe. I mean, it's weird because.

[Angelina Stanford]

Or it's an old decaying image.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, it is. Yellow does not. Leaves being yellow does not mean bright new sunshiny either.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So it's ambiguous and I think intentionally ambiguous. Right. But there's something different about this book that stands out for him. Then you've got the wild garden in the house with the central apple tree. That was such a Garden of Eden image to me. Right. And the priest's rusty bicycle pump and all of the images there. Then next paragraph.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wait, wait, wait.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, go ahead.

[Cindy Rollins]

I just thought this. The last line in this paragraph was so funny. He's been a very charitable priest. In his will, he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.

[Angelina Stanford]

I also thought that was funny, and I could see it going kind of a couple of different ways and knowing how to interpret it. Like, was it a tongue in cheek sort of criticism of the priest? Should he not have left his money to institutions? Should he have given it to the poor? Is that the sin? Or is it a humorous nod that he did do something good? I wasn't sure how to read that.

[Cindy Rollins]

I actually took it as he did the wrong thing. He was so generous that he left his furniture to his sister as kind of a rebuke that he. When he gave his money to the institutions, he was being. He really wasn't being generous because, you know, he could have given his money to his sister, which would have helped her. All right. But he left his furniture. I thought it was a tongue in cheek kind of snide.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. That was one way I thought it could be read. Okay. And considering the way he's going to attack money and through the rest of the story, it does make sense.

[Cindy Rollins]

And the word institutions is not a positive word.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it's not. It's not. It's almost like it was a philosophical charity as opposed to the real charity to give his sister, if that makes sense.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, like.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, like. Like our tendency to. To keep our hands clean.

[Cindy Rollins]

Just.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just give to organizations instead of actually helping the People around us.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So now we, now we've gone two paragraphs into this and we already see three different levels. Three different levels of things happening here. Well, four, if you look at the autobiographical elements too. Now we know that it's winter. So setting, always very important, winter. I mean, come on, you've got. It's going to be dark, it's going to be cold, it's going to be bleak, it's going to be death. This is, these are, these are, these are all dark images. The cold air stings us. But what is it that glows? It's the bodies of the children. Right. So there's a. There's a sort of a life in the children, a romanticism, an innocence as something there that's missing from the adults.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

The career of our play brought us through the dark, muddy lanes. Right. And so he's talking about running around and all of this, all of these descriptions. Super romantic, super romantic description. And then he sees Mangan's sister. Now, before I tell you what I think is going on with there, I want to know what you think of Mangan's sister, her role in the story, who she is, what's going on with her?

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. Boy, I just was not prepared for that question.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I'm so sorry.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm just so bad today. I have my own, like, things and I'm like, okay, Mangan's sister. What the heck is she doing there?

[Angelina Stanford]

No, no, that's fine. That's fine. I'm so sorry. No, no, see, always unscripted.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, that's okay. We're okay. Because I'm sure some of you are like, duh, Mangan's sister. And the rest are like, I'm glad she doesn't know. I don't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, the first thing we should recognize is that she's not named.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, yes, I mean, I know she is kind of a romantic figure too, because she's the wife and I guess she would represent an ideal of womanhood. I mean. Yes, yes, that I think.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, and did you pick up on any kind of Dante Beatrice thing that he's.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, no, I did not.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so the story of Dante and Beatrice, of course, is that as a boy, Dante, Beatrice never speaks to her, becomes completely devoted to the idea of her. They marry other people. He stays completely devoted to her, turns her into a character in his book as the, as the symbol not only of romantic love, but divine love who ushers him into paradise in the Divine Comedy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Beatrice tells him. So Beatrice tells him in the Book, your love for me has only ever been a picture of divine love. Right. So you have all of this courtly love language. So worshiping this sort of unattainable woman, which Dante does with Beatrice, was all part of the courtly love tradition. It all pointed to the longing of the soul for God. It was all part of the reason why courtly love, by definition can't be consummated is because it's all. It's really just a picture of this sort of divine love. So this is all happening. He's having this divine experience. But I don't want to get ahead of myself.

[Cindy Rollins]

And Yeats does that a lot, too. I don't know if that's very Irish. He always has his Leda, his someone who, even though Leda is not an example of someone who is chaste.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so. So she's not named. She doesn't even speak until the second half of the story. She's just this image, and she's described as bathed in light. So where everything else is dark, she's bathed in life. It's almost this halo experience.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But we'll look at that in a second. First, I want to deal with the name Mangan's sister. Right. So if the author is not naming the girl, but is naming the guy, that's significant because who is Mangan? Well, it turns out that Mangan is James Clarence Mangan, an Irish Romantic poet, one of James Joyce's favorite poets.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

So she's definitely a romantic figure. She's being even named, associated with this romantic poet.

[Cindy Rollins]

And that's really good because I just assumed it was just a name. And you did not. That's the difference.

[Angelina Stanford]

So his most famous poem, Mangan, is a poem called you Ready for this Dark Rosaleen? In which he personifies Ireland as a beautiful woman for whom the poet yearns. So you see, we're bringing together the Romanticism, the divine experience of the church that we know he's struggling with. And I will show you more how Mengen's sister becomes this divine figure for him and then also tying that up with Ireland.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So all three of these things are going to continue to go through the whole story. The poem itself, which I read a little while ago, is very romantic. It's got all the courtly language. And the narrator of the poem is on a quest to worship his woman, Ireland.

[Cindy Rollins]

Maybe Tom could read that poem and put it up on the Patreon.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's a great idea. I had him read it to me this morning when I When I was writing my notes, I said to him, hey, can you look up a Mangan poem for me? And he did, and he read it to me. So that's a great idea. We can have him do that. So again, you know, when we're tempted to say things like, well, you can make a story mean anything you want, that's not really true. The author's always telling us how to read the story. And so something like the names of these books and the names of these characters so we could see, even if we didn't know who Mangan was, that the sister represents some kind of romantic.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, he kind of has clues in there for the. Even me.

[Angelina Stanford]

But of course, to somebody, to an Irish person in 1914 reading this, they would totally get the Mangan reference. That would have been like if somebody said Brad Pitt or you know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

In any of the popular actors we have, we repeat, this is a celebrity that would totally have known him. And he's, he's such an Irish poet, I mean, drank himself to death, very moody. Like he's just, you know, so he's got all that kind of dark Irish romanticism. And he was Joyce's favorite. Okay, so we know that she's associated with romanticism and I'm going to show you that she's also associated with divine love and religious experience. And we also know because of the Mangan reference, she's going to be associated with Ireland. So all of these longings here are going to be put together.

[Cindy Rollins]

So the romantic embodiment of Ireland.

[Angelina Stanford]

Pretty much. So she's waiting for us. Her figure defined by the light from the half open door. Okay, so again, she's always. She's the one thing that's lit up. She's the light. Right. In all of this darkness, he stood by the railings looking at her. Okay. That's an extremely worshipful image. The railing at church. This is where you go to get married, but this is also where you go for communion. This is also where a knight would have his vigil. And I was okay, so then her dress swung as she moved her body. The soft rubbed of her hair tossed from side to side. Now what we have in that sentence is it is slightly sexual, but mostly it's romantic. Yes, yes, he's still a boy. It's, it's that slight kind of sexual awakening, but it's still mostly romantic.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. I think that's a clue there that he is turning from the romantic to the sexual.

[Angelina Stanford]

In his mind, he's definitely at that trans.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, he's noticing her hair, he's noticing that she swings her body.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, Right. So he's. As soon as he said he stood by the railings, I thought, oh, this is a knight on a vigil. Right. So part of what the knight would do before he goes on a quest for his lady is he's gonna stay up 24 hours at the altar at the railing, and it be there with his sword and everything. This is how he prepares for the quest. So as I'm thinking that just by the fact that he stood by the railings, which, of course, is the same staircase.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. It's not the actual church ring.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. But it's. But. But it becomes clearer later, much more clearer that he's having this, you know, divine feeling about it all. So as I'm thinking, oh, this sounds like a vigil. What's the next sentence? Every morning, I lay on the floor in the front parlor watching her door. That is a night on a vigil. That is the night laying there waiting for the lady to send him on the quest. So we've got this romantic language, this questing language, the courtly love thing, but it's also connected to this divine love, Right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And I was thrown by the fact that my freshman put creep.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, no, he's being so romantic.

[Cindy Rollins]

I know, but she's seen it from a modern viewpoint.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is very much like Chaucer's Knight and the Knight's Tale. Every day he.

[Cindy Rollins]

I didn't agree with her, but I definitely.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's a modern way to read it. That's a modern way to read. He's being creepy and stalkerish. Okay. So he watches her and then runs after her whenever. Whenever he sees her, but he actually talk to her. So this is all like he's just caught up in an idea.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And what she represents. I had never spoken to her except for a few casual words. And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood. This is. This is Dante and Beatrice. Now, in the next paragraph, her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. Okay, so here we get a sense of several things. That he's a questing knight, and he's overcoming obstacles to his love, but he's staying true to the love even in the places that are hostile to this love. And what are the things that he says are hostile to this love he feels to this romantic feeling? Because he lists them in this paragraph. So what are the things that are the enemy to this divine love he

[Cindy Rollins]

feels the streets, the men, the Drunken men, the bargaining women, the curses, the litanies of the shop boys, the market,

[Angelina Stanford]

the shop boys, the bargaining women. Look at how that's a picture of what's going to happen at the end of the story. That is what's going to happen.

[Cindy Rollins]

There's the bizarre.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep. So it's capitalism, it's money. It's that the kind. You know, the whole. Well, the crassness. The crassness of it. Yes. That. That jars with the romantic idea he has about all this. They're singing o' Donovan Rosa, which was a popular ballad to free Ireland. So it's kind of a revolutionary song. So we got some Irish revolutionary songs of the ballad about the troubles in our native lands. Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

And then he has chalice here.

[Angelina Stanford]

There you go. There you go. That's right. So. So here's. It's all coming together now, these noises. And now we're basically reading this line by line. That is how tightly compacted the story is underlining. Realize I had the whole thing underlined like it's just every, every, every word. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me. I imagine that I bore my chalice safely through the song of foes. Now he's. So now it's. It's a. It's a quest for the Holy Grail. The quest is for the Holy Grail. Now, only the pure of heart can get the Holy Grail, right? Now, a knight's quest is always a quest of the soul. It always ends with the knight learning something about himself at the end. And interestingly, quests for the Holy Grail almost always end in failure. So they fail to achieve the Holy Grail, but they learn something about themselves and why they failed. Yes, so we have that set up there, too. Her name sprang to my lips and moments at strange prayers. Okay, so he's making it much clearer that now there's a divine element here as well, that the religion and the romantic love in Ireland, it's all somehow mixed together, this longing that he has. So courtly love would have been this longing to have some transcendent experience through romantic love. That's what Beatrice tells Dante, that this, your love for me has always been a picture of divine love. It's not me you want, it's God, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So those things are always connected together in the courtly love tradition. And so here, you know, this love. I mean, look. Look at this language here. Okay? Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often Full of tears. I could not tell it why at times, a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. Right. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not. If I spoke to her, how could I tell her of my confused adoration? So he's having this intense experience, and it's going to become more clear in the next paragraph that it's a religious experience that he's having. But first this line. But my body was like a harp, and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. What a line. But this is very medieval. This is a very medieval, romantic idea that you quest. A quest is always done in the service of a lady.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right? Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so she's behind all of that now. Next sentence. One evening, I went into the back drawing room in which the priest had died. So he goes into the priest's room. It's dark and it's quiet. And what happens there? All my senses seem to desire to veil themselves and feeling that I was about to slip from them. So he's having a transcendent experience. Literally, he's transcending his senses in this dark room where the priest died. Okay. And what does he do? I press the palms of my hands together. That's a prayer. Murmuring, o love, oh, love. Many times. That is medieval ecstasy. That is the medieval experience of ecstasy in the worship of God. So it's. It's always that very, very fine line.

[Cindy Rollins]

You know, he goes to the priest, essentially, and the priest is representing the religious element, and he's saying, oh, love. Oh, love. And this is ecstasy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. So the longing that he's feeling for this girl is operating on many levels. It's the feelings of a romantic love, but it's a feeling of romantic love that is not rooted in any kind of reality. And it's transcendent and it's divine because she's always in this halo of light. But also, it sort of represents Ireland because of the Mangan reference and, of course, the fact that he's put together that the revolutionary Irish songs is one of the things that is stamping out this love. Right. So revolution is the enemy, then, to this worshipful adoration of Ireland.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he's having that oh, love, oh, love. And again, you know, he doesn't even know her name. It's. It's in love with love. He's just experiencing this transcendent moment of love.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

At last, she spoke to me and she addressed the first words to me. I Was so confused, I did not know what to answer. That's right. Because now he's gonna have to have

[Cindy Rollins]

a real conversation with her and it's out of nowhere. He can't place her words.

[Angelina Stanford]

She asked me if I was going to Arabi. I forgot whether I answered yes or no.

[Cindy Rollins]

So

[Angelina Stanford]

I think the fact that they introduced the quest, which is go to Araby. Immediately after he has this transcendent experience of praying in the dead priest room. Now Araby becomes the thing that this is how I'm gonna fulfill this desire for this transcendent moment. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm going to go get the. Whatever the object and bring it back to her.

[Angelina Stanford]

I will go and get the Holy Grail. I will succeed in pleasing this woman. I will have this glorious transcendent experience. Mm. Of course he doesn't.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is what he's hoping for, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So it. Yes, it's very. Right. It's alright.

[Angelina Stanford]

So now if we weren't sure that she represented divine experience, transcendent religious experience. Now we find out she goes to a convent.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, she's gonna go to the convent. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. He's standing alone at the railings again, right. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head toward me. This is like a lady holding the lance of the night. You know, she's doing the accolade on him. And when they kneel and she does the accolade where she puts the sword on either side.

[Cindy Rollins]

Before she won the quest, Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and falling, lit up the hand upon. So she's bathed in light, all of her. It fell over one side of her dress, caught the white border of a petticoat. Just visible as she stood at ease. So she's in this halo of light and then she says this weird mysterious thing. It's. Well, for you. Like what does that even mean? It's something out of a medieval story. It's the sort of thing in a medieval story that meant the lady was telling you she returned your affections. But it's also an ambiguous thing. But you know, it's just. It's just. It's a weird thing for her to say, which I think fits the whole idea of how he doesn't. Yeah. This is not a real human interaction. This is a boy full of imagination and love and longing. So if I go, I said, I'll bring you something. So now she's. He's on a quest for this lady. Right. Who may or may not be an angel as far as he's concerned. Right. I mean, and if that's confusing to our listeners, I mean, this is. This is Dante's language about Beatrice.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is. This. Dante has no sexual love for Beatrice at all. It's all. He's married to someone else, she's married to someone else. She's just this image of divine love, his muse, that carries him on. You see that with a lot of poets, they'll have that idea. It's a very, very romantic idea.

[Cindy Rollins]

So then, no, I can't help but asking, is it a Christian idea? Because I think that the Bible talks about marriage being a picture of Christ in the church. And when, with this idea of courtly love, it almost seems like, to me, as romantic as it is, it's almost like a bypassing. It's almost like saying marriage is like an ordeal. Let's say, use the traditional word. Marriage is an ordeal. So it can't fulfill us, this romantic ideal that we have. So we're gonna make this. Create this other ideal. But Christ is saying, no, marriage is an ordeal. And it's really hard, but it is what it is. Where you need to find Christ through Christ represents. Marriage is a picture of Christ in the church. Courtly love isn't really a picture of Christ in the church.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that's a great point.

[Cindy Rollins]

So that's why theological. Not.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love it. No, I love it. Let's. Let's. So let's think about this. So medieval romances do not end in marriage. Courtly loves. Marriage, okay? The love is unattainable. It's not consummated by definition. So it's definitely. It's a picture of unfulfilled longing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So it's not a picture of Christ in the church. It's much more. It's a picture of your longing for God that can't be fulfilled in this earth. Now, there's all kinds of questions about whether or not the courtly love tradition really existed or if it was only a literary device. I tend to believe it was only a literary device. And there's plenty of medieval authors who question it. Plenty. The anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer. I mean, there's the Knight's Tale, and he's all devoted to this Platonic ideal of this woman, this courtly love. And then that's followed by, like, you know, 14 bawdy stories about, you know, not having such a Platonic love of a woman. And Chaucer is arguing that both of those are wrong. Neither of these are the right picture of the relationship between men and women. And he, in his story, the Franklin's Tale, offers his ideal of that which is a love of two human beings who are each mutually submitting to the other's needs and desires, each putting the other one first, each dying to the. For the other. And that's the picture of the ideal marriage in Chaucer. So I think that's legitimate. I think that's legitimate. And perhaps that's part of the reason why he's so disillusioned at the end of the story. That's not even in the romantic tradition. It's not a sustainable thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

No. And I guess the reason I bring that up is because I think there is this. I don't know, it's like stumbling block, this idea of courtly love, that you can have some love other than your. Your marriage. If you're going to find Christ and you're. You're gonna have to find it in your marriage in some way. Not, not the Christ. Many people, you know that. I'm not trying to glorify marriage either, but I'm just saying, you're talking about

[Angelina Stanford]

when it comes to male, female relationships.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. Overall, big, big picture. Not, not individual people that are having, you know, serious problems in their relationships. But I just see the danger and the courtly love idea that, that someone would say, oh, I have this courtly love for this person, and this is my. This is my religious and my romantic love. But Christ says our religious and romantic love are the same as our sexual love in a way that are. That we are. Our marriages are actually pictures of Christ as love for the church. And that includes the very human sides of our marriages.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I completely agree with that. That was one of the reasons why I brought up the idea that. So scholars debate whether or not that was really something people believed in the Middle Ages or if it was just a literary device.

[Cindy Rollins]

But we see it over and over again.

[Angelina Stanford]

We definitely do. And it is an influential idea. And we see it even in modern romances stories.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And I'm glad we have it here. I just, It's.

[Angelina Stanford]

It shows up in a romance novel in like, he's the reformed rake, He's a terrible man, but he falls in love with the woman. And his love, the romantic love, redeems him. You see that? And that's not true. That never happens.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Man who falls in love is still a bad man. Now he's just messing up someone else's Life too.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right, right. Okay. So I just want to make sure nobody goes after some false courtly love.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, and, but you see, he's. He's gonna be disillusioned by that, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

He is gonna be disillusioned. We are gonna get to that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Everything that he's so. He's. He's conflagrated all these ideas. Ireland, romantic love, divine love for God. He's gonna be disillusioned by us. All gonna fall apart. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

And so if she is the embodiment of Ireland, then what at the end? We need to talk about that.

[Angelina Stanford]

What happens?

[Cindy Rollins]

What happens?

[Angelina Stanford]

Agreed. Okay. So now he's so caught up in the idea of the quest that even the very words araby sound magical to him. But immediately after getting so this is high romance. She's bathed in life. It is well for you. She says he accepts the quest. This is the highest point of romance in the story. The very next sentence you begin to see the romance fall apart. Right. What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening? Okay, so he's got to go to school.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's the first thing that's ruining this romantic life, Right. He has to deal with this aunt and uncle. He has to get permission. Okay, so how much does this undercut the nightly romance that he has to get permission from his parents to go

[Cindy Rollins]

and they don't understand at all. They think it might be some freemason affair. So they're skeptical. They think it's weird. And what does he want?

[Angelina Stanford]

Freemason. Meaning because Catholics were forbidden to be Freemasons. Meaning is it a Protestant thing? So is this in some way soul? Like, I guess a modern version of that? Like, you know, a Christian kid wants to go to a movie and we want to know what's it rated? I'm gonna look it up. I want to make sure you're not going to some soul corrupting event.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. So they turned it all into just reality. Here's a kid, he wants to go somewhere and it now it's just an ugly child. I have to ask my aunt's permission. I have to go through all the hoops I normally have to go through just to do something.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep. He's going to school and he doesn't want to do it. And so the master is rebuking him and saying, I hope you're not beginning to be idle. And so it's the reality immediately when he accepts the quest, he's up against reality and it's undermining Him.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

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. Now, this is important for understanding his mindset of what he thinks he's going to experience when he goes to this bazaar. He thinks he's going to experience being ushered into some new reality and he can put his whole life behind him. Nothing is important now except this quest.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And then we have this whole new scene come up which is kind of agonizing as someone, you know, if you've ever waited for someone.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes, but that's the thing, too. Okay, so we. Again. Again, we're seeing how the quest is thwarted. So he asks permission and his uncle gives it, but he's fussing in the hallway looking for the hat brush. Okay, so. What an unromantic detail. The uncle is standing there. And what happens? Because the uncle is standing there, he cannot lie at the window. So the uncle is thwarting the quest twice. The uncle's gonna thwart the quest. So reality is getting in the way of it all. And the air was piteously raw. And already my heart misgave me. It's already starting to fall apart instantly. Then. Yes, the interminable waiting. And. And so he's waiting. He's waiting. It's his memory of her which is sustaining him. And the idea of her being bathed in life and her hand on the railing. But then. So he's trying to have that romanticism sustained by the memory of her. But then he comes downstairs and again, this is why I think money is a motif that's running through here. That money is one of the things that is. Keeps jerking him out of the romance of it all. Because it's not just any woman. It's a pawnbroker's widow, Right? She's a merchant. She's somebody who, you know, they buy jewels off of desperate broke people who need money and they don't give them very much money in return. I mean, a pawnbroker, that's not the most respectable business in any novel. I mean, read any Victorian novel. This is, you know, this is not. This is. This would be shady, you know, like a loan shark kind of thing. Like she's profiting off of the poverty and hard times of other people. And she used to collect stamps for some pious purpose. So again, just like we saw with the reference to the priest, something about piety and money. And it's all. It's all mixed up Together. Right. So he's having to listen to tedious gossip. His uncle doesn't show up. Finally she leaves. He's panicking.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Then does the uncle. Do you think the uncle's drunk when he comes back?

[Cindy Rollins]

I would suggest that he was, yes. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because he's talking to him.

[Cindy Rollins]

I could interpret these signs. He definitely is drunk. And that's very Irish thing to be. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he's drunk and he has forgotten.

[Cindy Rollins]

He had forgotten. He wasn't really paying attention anyway when he asked him. And then he forgot it wasn't important to him and he forgot.

[Angelina Stanford]

But the aunt convinces him to go and give him some money. So he goes and this is going to be the culmination of his quest. I thought it was fascinating that he described the money as a florin. So you've got that kind of Italian idea that Dante. Dante's Florentine. I mean, it is technically what a two shilling piece was called. But he.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, it was.

[Angelina Stanford]

But that. James Joyce used that word when in the next paragraph he's gonna use the word shilling. I thought was. Was interesting, you know, he. A florin. That's a romantic name for money.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Right, right. For us.

[Angelina Stanford]

The sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey. So he's back on his quest and it's like the saddest little quest. Right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's the only person. He's gonna show up 10 minutes before the thing closes and he pays to get in.

[Cindy Rollins]

And everything in me is like, don't. It's.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know, I know. It's so sad. He's in this deserted carriage. He's all alone.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. He goes and he sees this sign

[Angelina Stanford]

which displays the magical name. He can't find the discount interest to get in. He's afraid. Afraid it's gonna like. I feel all this anxiety.

[Cindy Rollins]

I know it really, the whole thing, waiting on the uncle is very vivid. And then going and having it just be from bad to worse, everything.

[Angelina Stanford]

And also just being this kid and having these grand ideas and feeling like your parents don't understand and they're thwarting what this, you know, everything.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Everything is working against you. And you're still gonna push on through all of this.

[Angelina Stanford]

And this is the, like the most important moment in this kid's life as far as he sees it. And the uncle didn't even remember.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right? Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he goes in and again, now we've got all the dark imagery, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, Back to dark. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because It's. It's closed. All.

[Cindy Rollins]

Nearly all the stalls are closed.

[Angelina Stanford]

The greater part of the hall was in darkness. Now, look at this. I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. So whatever transcendent moment he was hoping would happen.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's already being deflated because of the things over and. And he's associated this kind of darkness and this kind of disillusioned silence with church.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he's timidly walking in. There's a few people still around, and there's a guy counting money on a salver. Now, that a salver is also the plate that they would have put the communion wafer on. So I keep feeling like there's this connection with money and religion in this story and that the money is somehow disillusioning and undermining the role of the church. And maybe this is part of why church can't be this transcendent thing for him because of money, it just keeps coming back to money. Now, this causes him to forget his quest. Right. Remembering with difficulty why I came. So then he goes over to the stall and he starts looking at the little porcelain vases and flower tea sets. I mean, he's basically. He's looking at some little. Some knickknacks.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So his big transcendent quest is he's looking at knickknacks to buy this girl. And what do you think happens when he hears this exchange? Why do you think what he hears right there is the final blow to his disillusionment?

[Cindy Rollins]

I do not know. Because there's a lie. I don't. Yeah. I don't know why. Because I got caught up in the fact that he went to this bazaar and he bought this little figure. He wanted to buy this little figurine. And for me, that was just a very visual moment because I had. Actually, in second grade, our school had a bazaar, and I had bought this glass figurine at the thing. And I was just. It just. It was like I was there in second grade in the back of the school, buying this figurine that I kept for years and years. And it kind of meant something to me, and I don't know why. Okay. Because it's a young lady, and she's. She's. I don't know. Jelena, you're gonna have to tell me.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, the first time I read it, I got to the end and I said, what? What is it? Why is it that conversation that causes it all to unravel? So what I think is happening Is slowly as he walks through the magical place that he expects he's going to have this.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, well, they do have English. They do have English accents.

[Angelina Stanford]

They have English accents.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. So I didn't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

So the thing is closed. So it's like a succession of things. It's. It's. First of all, instantly he walks in, it has not lived up to what he hoped. It's closed, it's empty, it's dark, Right? I mean, that's whatever it could have offered him with its full glory. He's not seeing the full glory of it, right? So that's. That's disillusionment. So much so that he forgets why he came, right? And then he's called to his. Back to his task. And then he said. So here's what I think is happening is he's listening to this girl have this cheap little flirtation with these guys.

[Cindy Rollins]

And there's. And it's not exotic at all. They're English accents. So negative accents to him. They're not like Spanish accents or. Yes, yeah, They're. They're very. It's not the Orient enemy that somebody he would consider, not somebody he liked.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So I think as he. As soon as he enters it, everything he sees is cheap and fails to live up to this romantic desire, he had to have a transcendent moment. Everything's cheap. And then that's the little mindless. It's like it's just a mindless flirtation and it makes his desire feel cheap.

[Cindy Rollins]

And is he going to buy from the English? This the Holy Grail for the.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's good for Ireland. Oh, that's very good. Considering the England. Ireland tension there is he going.

[Cindy Rollins]

So suddenly, it's not anything but what it is. It's sorted. It's.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's like a giant garage.

[Cindy Rollins]

It can't be the romantic ideal. Yeah. He'd have to buy. How could he get the Holy Grail from the English? That would not go with the story at all. So I just feel like that definitely brings him to the place of.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the lady comes over and says,

[Cindy Rollins]

not a romantic story, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

She says, do you want to buy something? But she's not encouraging. She doesn't actually want to deal with him. This little, you know, this little poor Irish boy. Do you almost like. Do you. Do you. Can I help you? You know, you've ever been in a store where this stuff is way overpriced, I couldn't possibly afford anything. And they give you that. Can I help you? That's really A you should move on because don't waste my. Can't afford this.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

The tone in 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. So she's in the dark too, yeah. Murmured, no, thank you. Then she goes back to her flirting and just keeps glancing over his shoulder. He lingers. Although 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. So it's all dark. He's walking down the middle in the dark. 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. Oh, the symbolism of that. Symbolism of that.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was completely dark.

[Angelina Stanford]

The upper part of the hall was now completely dark. He's standing there in the dark and he gazes up into the darkness. But he sees. So we asked, what is he gonna see? If it's a movement from blindness to sight, what's he gonna see? I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity. And my eyes burned with anguish, anger. Now he doesn't super explain the end. No, he's leaving it out. But he. But we know that he has tied together all of these desires. The romantic love and the courtly love tradition, Ireland, the church. And he feels let down by all of it, but blames himself. And that's where the Holy Grail quest idea comes in. Because when you would fail in the Holy Grail and in the quest of the Holy Grail, if you failed, it was because you were not pure of heart. There was something wrong with you. And so he's blaming himself.

[Cindy Rollins]

He. Yeah, the vanity of it came from within.

[Angelina Stanford]

But we don't know what happens after. Right? And what does. And I. And I like the question of what does this mean in terms of Ireland? He, at the beginning of the story, he feels like Ireland's this dead end street. He's trying to elevate Ireland. We saw that in Mangan's poem, the idea of Ireland as the beloved lady that you're questing for. So he's trying to elevate it, but he goes in and he can't. And you're right, he can't because it's the English. It's the English that are going to have to give this to him.

[Cindy Rollins]

And so he sees himself as unable to save Ireland in this silly way that he had thought he could.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

I mean, to me, okay. Apart from all those deep meaning, I think it's just such a personal ending for all of us.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

For the courtly love. For anybody. Anybody who maybe has pretended to have a modern courtly love. Or anybody who has sought after something that their imagination imagined to be different than what it really was. And then they. And then their eyes are open and you have that moment of vanity. Vanity. You feel it. You feel like you. You've given your heart and your mind to something vain. You're. You're awakened to it, and you feel that anguish and anger. And you do. You feel anguished at yourself and angry at yourself by your own vanity. So, I mean, to me, that was a very personal ending for all human beings who have experienced that moment in time. The. The Ms. Bates moment, maybe from Emma, where she realizes that she's just a silly old woman.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And. Absolutely. And that is what art does. I mean, it might be specifically about James Joyce struggling with these things, but it is always about more than that, too. Right. That's what makes art transcendent. All of us have had these experience of working something up in our minds and getting horribly disillusioned by it. And the pain that comes with that. And the fact that he turns the pain inward. I was such an idiot. We've all been there. That's exactly what happens. That I was such an idiot. I kept thinking about this Emily Dickinson poem. I just looked it up because I was pretty sure if I quoted it from memory, I'd mess it up. But I was pretty close. So here's one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems. And I kept thinking about that while reading this story. It dropped so low in my regard. I heard it hit the ground and go to pieces on the stones at the bottom of my mind. Yet blamed the fate that fractured less than I reviled myself for entertaining plated wares upon my silver shelf.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow. I have not heard that, or I didn't remember hearing it.

[Angelina Stanford]

So you know that. That really human feeling when something. Something falls. Some ideal you have, some person, something. Some institution. When it fails you when it falls. And you're so angry at yourself for being a fool.

[Cindy Rollins]

I believe this. This. This imagine an imaginary entity was something it wasn't. And now that I see it's so obvious, I can't even believe it. And I'm mad at myself. I'm mad at myself.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I also think that that gives us insight into. Into Joyce's feelings about the Catholic church, too, and his religious upbringing. You get that a lot in his novel.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, he's. He's. He's angry with himself for having been, you know, possibly suckered into it, and he feels disillusioned by all of it. I've never thought of Joyce as a revolutionary writer.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, he. I think he's revolutionary in that he was overturning forms he was making.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. No, I meant like Ireland forever. Revolution.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

The English kind of thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. I mean, I guess there was no way to be Irish and not have some form of revolutionary ideas in your head.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm sure that's true.

[Cindy Rollins]

But, you know, I don't know how revolutionary he was. I mean, during that time, I can't imagine. I can only imagine how painful it must have been to be Irish and, you know, be pressured to be, you know, a revolutionary.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. I love this story. I'm so glad we did this story.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I really enjoyed it also. I think you could read it on so many levels. My level, your level, and other levels.

[Angelina Stanford]

First time I read it, I didn't look all this stuff up. The first time I read it 30 years ago, I just thought it was a great story about a kid having gone through some disillusionment.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's the kind of story that gives you more. The more you. You ask of it. But it is opera. I think you can enjoy it without knowing all of those things. But I think we can go back to and see. Okay, so the narrator most related to the detective novel story. And it's another way to look at that quest. Right. I mean, Dorothy Sayers says the detective novel is the questing knight of the medieval romance.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so the fact that he's identifying with this guy. I'm gonna seek out the hidden things. I'm gonna get that truth. And he does get that truth at the end. And it's painful. It's a painful truth, is the truth.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's nothing about the girl. It's about the quest, isn't it that his quest is vain. It's about himself. He is vain. He is not able to complete the quest.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I think watching the shop girl flirt with the two boys makes him see his previous interactions with Ming and sister differently. Like, maybe it wasn't all fraught with this deep meaning like I thought it was. Maybe she was just being polite, light, you know?

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

She's just making chit chat with me about the bazaar. She's not actually my heavenly angel sending me on A quest for the Holy Grail.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But just. What a. What. What a deeply poignant human experience, though. Right? We've. I mean, all of us, everybody listening right now. Anybody who reads this story has had that experience probably many times.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

A feeling like what an idiot I am. I can't believe I fell for that. I can't believe I thought that our

[Cindy Rollins]

imagination has built something up and it hasn't been able to, or we haven't been able to live up to it.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, one of the things I found myself asking at the end of the book, I actually raised this with Thomas this morning, and he said he wasn't sure either. When you get to the book, is he. At the end of the story, is Joyce saying the quest itself was faulty, or is he saying the object of the quest was faulty?

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't think he's saying the object of the quest, the girl, was faulty. Maybe he was. Maybe this. No.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so I guess we have to ask the question, then. What's the object of the quest? So if the object of the quest, in my mind is that he was trying to have some transcendent moment, like he did in that room where he's praying and he's feeling all this intense emotion. Oh, love. Oh, love. Oh, love. And when you feel that everything's right with the world.

[Cindy Rollins]

So

[Angelina Stanford]

one of the ways I'm sort of reading it is that it's not that the desire to transcend your senses and have an experience of God and to feel like the universe is good and true and makes sense and is bigger than you, that. That's not necessarily wrong, but it was wrong to look for it there in the marketplace. I just. I can't quite wrap my head about around it. And maybe some of our listeners are going to be able to help me put it all together. I'd be really curious what you guys think of that, because I just feel like the way the money and the church. Like there's something tawdry in the bazaar.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which. Which won't let him have that. Like, that's not the place where you can find that. And maybe Joyce never knows where that place is. Maybe that's just something that's going through all his stories. Where can you. Because he. Joyce himself, is a Romantic, and he likes the Romantic poets. And when I googled James Joyce and Dante, a ton of stuff came up. So I don't know that I'm ready to say he thinks that idea is wrong. But, you know, where are we going to find. How do we express that longing. So you said, you know, you have to look for that in a real relationship with Christ. Okay, I agree with that. So what are the obstacles? That's why I thought it was so interesting that immediately there are obstacles to that romantic feeling he's feeling. And the marketplace keeps coming up. So money and poverty and the oppression of one class by another, the sort of seedy economics, you know, that's something that's undermining my, you know, buy that feeling.

[Cindy Rollins]

Maybe that comes into it. Yeah, you're right. Maybe the quest itself is not tawdry, but the. But the desire of the quest is not tawdry, but the quest itself is misplaced.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And I think you might be onto something there with the idea that he thinks he can buy it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. How could he have thought he could go to this place and buy these great things? And. And I think too, there's this issue of it's not wrong for him to care deeply about something that was good. It's good for him to care, but it's vanity for him to think that he can bring about something bigger than what it really is. Maybe.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, okay. Yeah. And then if. So, if you apply that to Ireland and poverty, because the story he's on this dead end street with this abandoned house and poverty in the Irish, that's always an issue in these stories. No, he can't buy his way out of that. Right. He can't. I think you're absolutely right with the English accent being that. So, you know, his desire to elevate Ireland comes smack up against economics and the English at the end of the story.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And I think that that might be his choice, saying, here, here I had all these hopes to save Ireland, and all I have to offer is this tawdry gift that I have, maybe that I write and that I make money writing, and I think I'm going to change people. But really, really, it's all vanity. I can't change anything. Maybe.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, I can't help thinking too, that this story is about being blind and coming to a place where you can see. And Joyce. Tom was reading me this article this morning about Joyce's lifelong eye problems. He was essentially blind for most of his life. He had to have someone help him walk around. So, I mean, I just guess I'm kind of fascinated with the same thing. You know, John Milton's blind, Homer's blind. Just the blind prophet, poet thing is so interesting to me that he's literally struggling with his eyesight and writing all of these stories. About not being able to see.

[Cindy Rollins]

And what we'll do is on the day this releases, which is the 16th of July, we can put up a post on the Literary Life discussion group and people where people can comment on. Yes, because we might have some other people that have. Maybe Kelly Cumby or Mary Jo Tate.

[Angelina Stanford]

We have some awesome readers in this group. And I'd love to know what y' all think of the ending. I think we can all agree there's some sort of disillusionment, but I think

[Cindy Rollins]

on the one level we understand it, we all get it, right? It's obvious this is what happened. And then there's another level where, you know, what is exactly? Is he disillusioned by what is vain? Is it the girl herself? Is it the idea that he could actually obtain her love through this cheap object that he'd have to buy from these English people? Or the tawdriness of the whole bazaar? I mean, it is called Araby. It is called Araby.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I think that I keep thinking about, okay, so he went to this bazaar in 1894. In 1984, I went to the World's Fair. It was in New Orleans. And I relate to some of the stuff in this story because I remember going through the exhibits for the Orient, and I bought a bunch of those things, and I still have them to this day. And just feeling like I had been this small town Southern girl. I had been. I had walked into the riches of the Orient, right? But now I look back on those things and it's just. It's just touristy souvenirs. Like, I didn't really go into the riches of the Orient, you know, but I had definitely romanticized it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, if you ever go through the Smoky Mountains and you're driving through this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful scenery of woods and waterfalls, mountains and rocks and flowing streams, you come to a little town called Pigeon Forge. And it couldn't be cheesier or more tawdry than it is. And it just almost. It's such a juxtaposition between this scenery and this place. This bizarre, bizarre and bizarre place of. It's hard to reconcile for me. I'm. I'm such a. When I go to Pigeon Forge, I'm in such a philosophical disharmony. I can't. I can't relax and enjoy myself.

[Angelina Stanford]

I feel like, as an American, there's a lot of stuff in this story I can really relate to. You know, I joke about how only in America did we recreate all of the wonders of the world on the Las Vegas Strip, you know, come and experience the ruins of ancient Greek in air conditioning and an all you can eat buffet. Like that's so American.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And is there a time and a place to just say, hey, we're going, we're going to this cheesy place and we're gonna have fun and a time and a place to say this is really cheesy. And is it okay to just have a good time, you know, at Myrtle Beach?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, maybe that has to do with your expectations. Right? So don't expect to have a transcendent moment with God in Vegas.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But you might get good food and good shows.

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know we have some listeners in Vegas who are going to totally be like, there's a lot of good stuff in Vegas. I know. And maybe there's a great church where you can have a transcendent moment with God. But I'm just thinking, you know, the Las Vegas Strip might not be that place.

[Cindy Rollins]

There's a lot of cheesy stuff in our world that calls us to buy it, buy it, buy it. And if you just even look around your house, you know, I've had to downsize a lot in the last few years. And I always think it's so important to move because besides the fit place, you know, you should the whole Wendell Berry place thing. But when you move as an American, you're just confronted with your own folly. You're just confronted with how many stupid things you spent your money on.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it's in Howard's Inn. Oh, what's the quote? I have to look it up where he's talking about the Schlegel sisters moving and about the way that ancient and medieval people related to their homes and their lands and versus the way modern people were. And he basically says something like, we're a civilization of luggage.

[Cindy Rollins]

Ah, yes, we are just packing things

[Angelina Stanford]

and moving it from place to place.

[Cindy Rollins]

And we're a civilization of storage units. Our huge house is bigger than houses throughout history and we all have storage units because we can't keep all our

[Angelina Stanford]

stuff and we can't get rid of it because we have some kind of emotional attachment to it. So I think we can definitely see the same kind of thing in this story, right? Like these things we have bought that we can't get rid of because we've infused it with some huge meaning.

[Cindy Rollins]

And then there's that article going around the Internet, your parent, your kids don't want your stuff. It's. It's like to older people that Are downsizing. Your kids don't want your stuff. You know, our stuff has such a short self shelf life that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Except for books.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Because I definitely want books.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh yeah. But, but even with books, like I was talking to you about this earlier, I don't want. There's a. I'm happy putting books on my Kindle because now I know that what are the very best books. I'll keep the very best books. I'll give the very best books to my children. I've given hundreds and hundreds of books to my children. I will continue. I don't want to keep books that my children are not going to want. I only want to keep the very best. So you can actually have too many books. You can have too many books that are meaningless to you or to your family.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I agree with that. I think that's why we have to think in terms of building a library. Right. What we want to preserve and pass on. That's a very deliberate choice.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. So we. So there are books that are great to get from the library or books to put on your Kindle because you don't really care what happens to them. You just. You want to read, you want to glean and then you want to move on with your life. You don't want to be encumbered by carrying around this book that you just need to read for the moment. And then there are other books that you're going to carry around, no matter if they're in five pieces, that you're never going to get rid of them.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I really enjoyed this. I really enjoyed this discussion.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I think it was a great discussion. I think our listeners will have a lot to add to it.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm really interested in what, what you guys have to say. Really interesting. You know, you love when they've. So there's two things going on at the ending. One, he's left it somewhat open to interpretation, but at the other end it's not because it's a flaw. He has absolutely wrapped up everything that he started at the beginning. Right. All the threads come together. It's a complete work and we feel satisfied with the ending. But to try to figure out what it all means and the significance of it. And, and where exactly does the blame lie? In the disillusion, perhaps. Raising the questions is what needs to happen. I mean, those are the exact questions we're supposed to ask when we're disillusioned. Right? Is it me? Is it them? Am I asking the wrong questions? Is my desire good? But I put it in the Wrong place. We've all had that. We've all loved the wrong people.

[Cindy Rollins]

And as Yates says, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. I can't help but think of that whenever I think of the Irish attitude towards things. You see that this intensity that isn't always good. But then the other side of that, the passionlessness, is not good either. Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm also thinking of that other Yeats poem, Adam's Curse, where he. This is where he's expressing his love to this woman who's gonna reject him. And. And he says, I strove to love you in the old ways, but it's not enough. I think about that line a lot, you know, And I think that there's an echo of that in this story, too, because the medieval quest, the old. Like, he's trying to do this in the old way, and it's not working. It's not enough.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. In the end, it's futile.

[Angelina Stanford]

I just can't wait to hear what you guys have to say about this story. I'm really looking forward to it, so thanks for this. So next time, we will look at G.K. chesterton's essay, the Defense of the Penny Dreadful. I am really excited about that.

[Cindy Rollins]

That'll be great. And you won't be able to put me on the spot and say, what?

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, no, you're the Chesterton girl. I'm gonna sit back and let you do your thing there.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I learned a lot of from that. I'm like, duh. Every time you say something, I'm like, well, that's easy. I just don't see it.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it was funny because actually, Thomas and I were talking about that last night, because he says that, too. He says, I read these stories. It would never occur to me that they're in there. But then when you say them, I think, oh, obviously. And I think that's the key to good literary analysis. Right. Like, you're not just pulling stuff up from nowhere, like, you're naming. I'm just helping to name the things that everyone saw and just, you know, didn't notice that they saw.

[Cindy Rollins]

And you're not saying weird stuff that we're like, I'm not sure about that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, right, right.

[Cindy Rollins]

That would be. That's what I think were. Is worrisome about some literary criticism.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, right. And so it's not true that you can just make a book, say anything you want. Like, I felt that there was that kind of courtly love vibe, but then I looked up things. You know, you get the Mangan name. You get the book, the Sir Walter Scott novel. He's making it very clear.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

There are lots of road signs along the quest of the story that this is how we're supposed to be reading that. And so when he leaves the ending somewhat open, that's intentional, too.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. It makes me think as. As. As looking at writers. You know, obviously this was intentional all the way through. Obviously. He had this courtly outline of the quest and he used that throughout. He did a very good job. I mean, every. I mean, there's so many layers to that story, the colors, the light, the dark, that, you know, you just think, did he write one word that he didn't intend to write or that wasn't purposeful? It's hard to imagine being that purposeful. But you do get the feeling that's why he's a great writer.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. It's very difficult to be a good short story writer. You really have to pare down and be really intense about it.

[Cindy Rollins]

So, yeah, wrap it up here.

[Angelina Stanford]

We have really gone on and on, and I hope you guys are enjoying the conversation. I know that I have. And so be sure to check us out on itunes. Subscribe Rate Review please. You can check out our [e-mail] literarylife. We also have our website, the Literary Life. If you want to support us or learn more about what we got going on, you can check us out on Facebook where we've got reading schedules and all that good stuff for you. So next week we'll be back with G.K. chesterton's essay, a Defense of Penny Dreadfuls. I'm really looking forward to that. So until next time, we will leave you with our poet reading poetry. So enjoy. Bye Bye guys.

[Cindy Rollins]

By.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook page discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks. Huxley hall by John Betjeman in the Garden City Cafe with its murals on the wall before a talk on sex and civics. I meditated on the fall deep depression settled on me under that electric glare, while outside the lightsome poplars flanked the rose beds in the square, while outside the carefree children sported in the summer haze and released their inhibitions in a hundred different ways. She who eats her greasy crumpets snuggled in her ingle nook of some birch enshrouded homestead dropping butter on her book. Can she know the deep depression of this bright hygienic hell? And her husband, stout free thinker, can he share in it as well? Not the folk museum's charting of man's progress out of slime can release me from the painful seeming accident of time. Barry smashes Shirley's dolly. Shirley's eyes are crossed with hate. Comrades plot a comrade's downfall in the interests of the state. Not my vegetarian dinner, not my lime juice minus gin can quite shake the faint conviction that we may be born in sin.