제19집 제3호 (2012.12)
British and A m erican Fiction
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Richard Bonfiglio
The experience of reading James Joyce’s Dubliners constitutes a veritable
master class in the uncanny as the Joycean reader finds herself constantly shifting
between, on the one hand, the deafening silence of reticence, ellipses, and
repressed sentiments and, on the other, the repetitive description of places,
persons, and thoughts that ought to fall into separate registers of verisimilitude but
which inexplicably blend together as one passes from one story to the next. The
reader cannot help but read uncannily the collection of stories−continually
discovering the repressed heimlich in the unheimlich−either by projecting her own
thoughts and feelings into the fissures and gaps of the text or by drawing
improbable connections between repeated words and phrases. These uncanny
effects of the text are held in tension against Joyce’s self-proclaimed “style of
scrupulous meanness” that grounds the book’s representation of common reality
(qtd. in Ellmann 210). The improbable repetitions and connections that the reader
is apt to draw across the stories deliberately counter the mundane probability of
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Richard Bonfiglio
the events depicted in each individual story. In his essay on “The Uncanny,”
Freud claims that even in stories of common reality the writer “takes advantage,
as it were, of our supposedly surmounted superstitiousness; he deceives us into
thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the
bounds of possibility” (250). Exposing his own acts of literary deception, Joyce
constructs the reality of life in Dublin by continually unmasking the fact that
reality itself exists as a textual construction. As Garry Leonard explains in
Lacanian terms, the “unknown Real beyond the supposedly known reality can only
be perceived by teasing glimpses. . . . It is the process of failing to understand
that constitutes learning” (17). The Joycean reader undergoes an uncanny
education by learning to read every new fictional encounter as a potentially
repressed experience that she has already mistakenly accepted as truth.
Of all the stories in Dubliners, “An Encounter” offers the most concentrated
analysis of what constitutes an uncanny encounter in a fictional narrative. Critics
have debated extensively the nature and meaning of the notion of an “encounter”
in the story, analyzing its significance in relationship to colonial ideology
(Winston), social purity (Kershner, Mullin), psychoanalysis (Leonard, Thurston),
and queer theory (Norris). Each of these readings unmasks the uncanny
resemblance between pedagogy and perversity in the story, drawing attention to a
series of doublings in characters (Father Butler and queer old josser), actions
(corporeal punishment and sexual flagellation), and language (the queer old
josser’s two-part speech about nice young girls and naughty schoolboys).
Although the schoolboy protagonists in the story wish to escape the classroom for
a day, their encounter with the old man, according to these critics, serves as a
type of education by revealing the religious, colonial, political, and sexual
violence repressed in Irish culture. Each of these readings, however, fails to
address the most significant doubling embedded within the autodiegetic narrative:
the schoolboy who encounters the old man and the adult narrator who reports his