Suspicious Readings of Joyce's "Dubliners"

14. Setting Critical Accounts Aright in “Grace”

Chapter  Setting Critical Accounts Aright in “Grace” “Grace,” as is well known, was at one time intended to be the last of the Dubliners stories, the capstone of the collection. Critics have therefore tended to read it for its plenary function of completing and summing up the significance of the preceding tales. In that tradition, I would like to press the story’s significance beyond the book’s confines,and argue that“Grace”functions— perhaps less by design than by historical convergence—to dramatize what would become a crucial ethical issue in the politics and aesthetics of Modernism . Although Ezra Pound learned social credit theory only in the s, and articulated his rage at usura even later, in the s, thinking of artistic form and production in economic terms informed Modernist ideology from its beginning . Writing “Grace” in , I will argue, Joyce produces an early adumbration of these modernistic concerns, by converting the theme of usury into a rhetorical and narrative project without abandoning its social referent. My reading will rely on a speculation that the “silence, circumlocution, and ideological evasions ” () Kershner finds central to the story are even more profound and significant than we have supposed because they function as a defense against rhetorical usury and at the expense of defrauding the story’s creditors. In reading the story in this way, I follow a direction announced by Fritz Senn in , when he wrote of “Grace”:“It becomes an obligation for readers and critics who will in fact set right the various accounts presented in the story and, first of all, not be taken in by mere glibness or assurance” (). Before decoding these self-reflexive economic tropes, I need to delineate the source and the substance of my speculation that Tom Kernan did not fall down the lavatory steps, as everyone (including Molly Bloom) supposes. Instead , I infer that he was deliberately pushed down by the “muscle” or enforcer of his moneylender, Mr. Harford.1 Although the narrator of “Grace” tells us that Kernan “lay curled up at the foot of the stairs down which he had fallen” (), the cause of Kernan’s fall nags at various figures throughout the story, and Tom Kernan never gives a straight answer about what happened to him. It is the young man in the cycling suit2 who answers Mr. Power’s question, “How did you get yourself into this mess?” by volunteering “The gentleman fell down the stairs” (). The pub’s manager and the constable inspect the stairs and “agreed that the gentleman must have missed his footing” (). When Mr. Power a second time “asked him to tell how the accident had happened” Tom Kernan pleads he can’t speak—“I ‘an’t, ‘an, he answered, ‘y ‘ongue is hurt” (). At Kernan ’s home, Mr. Power explicitly exonerates himself to Mrs. Kernan—“Mr Power was careful to explain to her that he was not responsible, that he had come on the scene by the merest accident” (), and when Mrs. Kernan asks “Who was he with to-night, I’d like to know?” () Mr. Power shakes his head and says nothing. Earlier the pub’s manager had established that Mr. Kernan was drinking with two men: —Was he by himself? asked the manager. —No, sir. There was two gentlemen with him. —And where are they? No one knew. () But Tom Kernan himself brings up “Those other two fellows I was with—” when he later thanks Mr. Power during his friends’ bedside visit. —Who were you with? asked Mr. Cunningham. —A chap. I don’t know his name. Damn it now, what’s his name? Little chap with sandy hair . . . —And who else? —Harford. —Hm, said Mr Cunningham. () The narrator now decodes the “Hm” that makes the company fall silent by noting that “the monosyllable had a moral intention” (). Inscribed in the “Hm” is Harford’s identity as one who had “begun life as an obscure financier by lending small sums of money to workmen at usurious interest” (). The narrator goes on to describe how in partnership with Mr. Goldberg of the Liffey Loan Bank, Harford had become an urban “gombeen man” whose victims excoriate him with an associative anti-Semitism only too familiar from the later poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot: Though he had never embraced more than the Jewish ethical code his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of him bitterly as an Irish Jew and an illiterate and saw...