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  • Clocks and Time in “Araby”
  • Richard J. Gerber (bio)

“Araby” is a drama of time, a drama of lost time.

—Marcel Brion1

Heywood Ehrlich and Steven J. Doloff have drawn our attention to the particular significance of the “ten minutes to ten” time that the young boy sees on a clock as he approaches the bazaar at the ending of Joyce’s short story “Araby,” written in 1905 and first published in 1914. Ehrlich interprets the time as a cipher in which letters may be substituted for the numbers; he suggests that “ten minutes to ten” can be read as a double cipher for the tenth letter of the alphabet—that is, the author’s initials, JJ.2 Doloff has observed that the large hand of the clock overtakes and passes the small hand at “ten minutes to ten,” symbolizing the boy’s passage from childhood into adulthood and reflecting the imagery of his having to pay a shilling admission fee to walk through a clocklike, rotating turnstile when he could not find a child’s sixpenny entrance into the bazaar.3

Ehrlich’s and Doloff’s interpretations may be perceived by some readers; however, the boy of the story is unaware of them. The clock’s time, as interpreted by Ehrlich and Doloff, has covert significance that supports the story’s composition and themes, but a broader understanding of the meaning of the time to the boy results in a new interpretation of this element of the story, allowing for a fuller appreciation of Joyce’s likely intent.

Patricia Hutchins begins the forward of her charming portrait of James Joyce’s Dublin with the following revealing anecdote:

Dublin children are always playing the game of asking “the right time please,” for every street clock has its own idea of the speed of [End Page 274] the earth round the sun. One can leave home at the hour by Mooney’s pub, find Trinity College going its sedate pace, contradicted by the opposing views of the Irish Times and the Ballast Office,—“that piece of Dublin street furniture” under which James Joyce and J. F. Byrne discussed aesthetics,—and yet arrive in front of the G.P.O. five minutes before departure …4

The “Araby” boy’s probable knowledge of this “game,” in addition to his impatience and concern about arriving at the bazaar before it closes, may partially explain his acute awareness of the time and his anxious preoccupation with looking at clocks. While it was still “early,” he sat “staring at the clock for some time” and “its ticking began to irritate” him (D 23). Later, his evening meal “was prolonged beyond an hour,” and “it was after eight o’clock” when Mrs. Mercer left the house. “At nine o’clock [the boy] heard [his] uncle’s latchkey in the halldoor” (24). Finally, in front of the large building that houses Araby, he “saw by the lighted dial of a clock that it was ten minutes to ten” (25). This is precisely what Ezra Pound meant when he described “Araby” as “much better than a ‘story,’ it is a vivid waiting.”5

As noted previously, Hutchins demonstrates that the children of Joyce’s Dublin knew that the times shown on the city’s public clocks differed from one clock to another, and they turned that fact into a guessing game. However, adult Dubliners of Joyce’s era also understood why those differences were more than just the object of a child’s game, and the reason had nothing to do with misreadings, poor mechanics, or inaccurate settings.

For over forty years, between 1874 and 1914, before the international standard of time was universally accepted in Ireland, the time on the public clocks in Dublin was set by two separate systems. The first was the older, long-dominant Dunsink Time System, commonly referred to as Dublin Mean, Irish or “local” time, which was calibrated by a telegraph line from the Dunsink Observatory located about four miles northwest of the center of the city. The second was a new Royal Dublin Society (RDS) Time System, otherwise known as Greenwich Mean or English time, controlled by electrical signals from the...

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