January 7th
The theme of isolation permeates “A Painful Case” as James Duffy, a middle aged man, lives a monotonous, solitary life. His days always follow the same schedule, and he does not interact with any friends or family. His only pleasure is in going to the opera, where he meets Mrs. Sinico. From this point, Joyce unravels another love story that inevitably winds up being a failure. What I found most interesting was Joyce’s allusion to the Arthurian tale of the love affair between Tristan and Iseult. According to the legend, they were both beautiful people involved in a romantic relationship. Joyce juxtaposes the middle-aged, non-physical relationship of Duffy and Sinico with the youthful, passionate relationship of Tristan and Iseult. As is typical of Joyce’s other stories, the ending always comes with an epiphany. In the case of James Duffy, his epiphany comes with the death of Mrs. Sinico. Once she is gone from his life, he finally sees how lonely he is. He realizes that he has been lonely all along, lacking true friends to spend his time with. James Duffy lacks the confidence to reach out to people. After all, it was by mere luck that he finally found the courage to ask out Mrs. Sinico (he kept running into her). Though he is isolated and will probably remain isolated, it is by his own doing. Duffy probably will never be content in life because his ways will never change. Isolated and unhappy his whole life, he never sought to improve his conditions – either because he lacked the courage or the knowledge of what to do. He was always lonely, but now he was “alone” and would remain that way (96). Duffy is the paradigm of the paralyzed character because he cannot do anything to change his dissatisfaction. In a sense, could Joyce be voicing the opinion of the masses in from a political perspective?
I thought about that final question a bit while I was reading. I think there are definitely bits and pieces of social commentary throughout the story, but I struggled to find a cohesive viewpoint. In the beginning, he notes that he stay out of the city in fear of the "gilded youth" (88) of Dublin. Joyce can either mean that Duffy thinks he is inferior to the youth, which does not make sense in light of the rest of the narrative, or this could be more of a snarky comment by the narrator. Either way, this does not seem to fit with Joyce's overarching critiques of Dublin.
ReplyDeleteThe arguments that are the most obviously political come when Duffy argues that Dublin will go through "no social revolution" (90) for centuries, presumably because of the "obtuse middle class." (90) Initially I took these comments at face value, and the fell in line with Joyce's key argument: Dubliners are stuck and thus falling behind the rest of the world. However, as Henry and Andrew mentioned in class, this also could just be Duffy's way of covering up for his own shortcomings in the local socialist party. With all this in mind, I struggle to believe that Joyce is really making a political argument at all.
The overt political commentary comes in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," but there certainly is at least one political point being made, perhaps of a more general nature: Nietzschean philosophizing and seclusion, a subconscious self-denial of participation in the "feast of life," gets Dublin nowhere.
ReplyDeleteJaime makes legitimate points in looking at the text, but I think his final conclusion hits the mark: there really is no cogent political argument in this story. There might just be the aforesaid warning.