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Preface and Acknowledgments When one of his admirers approached James Joyce on a Zurich street and asked to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses, its proprietor declined the offer, saying “It did lots of other things too” (JJII 110). His reply (perhaps inflected by the Matthean verse, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off” [5: 30]), might have counted among its inventory of “other things,” the denouement of his odd flirtation with Marthe Fleischman during which he “explored the coldest and hottest parts of a woman’s body” (JJII 451). His remark might also be regarded as pertinent to one of the creations of which he was not proud, the short story of his literary apprenticeship, “After the Race.” Estimating it one of his “worst” efforts (Letters II: 189), he intended to revisit it (Letters II: 151), but apart from some minor changes, left this orphan of his fabulous family to its lowly critical fate. In the light of the extraordinary literary achievements of his later career , and even between the covers of Dubliners, “After the Race” is an apparently minimal work. It has received the least critical attention of all his fiction. This neglect is not unduly troubling to a reader of my years and reticence: there is, indeed, much to be gained from a concentrated study of its genesis and design. One of the first glimmers of the same imagination, the same method, and the same vision that illuminates A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, its deceptive simplicity and relative aesthetic inferiority are no grounds for critical condescension: none of us is ahead of the proud artificer of even this apprentice work. The scant notice it has garnered affords a unique opportunity for an original reading of a Joycean text that takes us to the surprises that are the trademarks of a master craftsman. This book is a sequel to my similar treatment—in James Joyce’s Painful Case—of Joyce’s other (eponymous) literary embarrassment. It is similarly a synthesis and enlargement of the critical exegesis done thus far by the “Joyce industry.” xvi · Preface and Acknowledgments As an exposé of Joyce’s method and vision, it provides for the beginner, a preview, even in its dawning, of the wondrous Joycean firmament. Joyce’s Dubliners is an artistic “take” on the society of his birth by a gifted but guarded native son. It is not the mere social reportage for which it is frequently taken. Similarly, the battle-weary clichés about the “paralysis” and “hemiplegia,” the putative themes of Dubliners, have performed their duty and exhausted their watch. They helped sell the book to a publisher, an unsuspecting public, and three generations of professional readers. In the period between the fall of Parnell and the Easter Rising (1891–1916), filleted of political backbone, there was, by contrast with this popular misperception of the period, an emboldening of the public will for radical change.1 As the pressure for political reform—minimally Home Rule and a final resolution of the Land Question—waned, behind it came many factions clamoring for public attention: cultural revivalists, language boosters, Irish Irelanders, Catholic irredentists, and secular Europeanizers . Meanwhile, the old enemy, emigration, evacuated much of the potential energy that might pursue impulses for economic advancement and political change. To train the spotlight, then, on the more precise “historical moment” providing the occasion of Joyce’s “After the Race,” this book will begin with the recollection of the events between its author’s return from Paris (March 1903) and his departure for Europe (October 1904), the timeframe of most of his Dubliners stories and, of course, Ulysses. The major public issue during these nineteen months was a continuous and increasingly strident protest against British cultural, economic, and political imperialism . A development of the clubs celebrating the centennial of the 1798 Rebellion, the anti-Boer War movement, and the Robert Emmet commemorative committees, these movements morphed into the irreconcilable Sinn Féin party in 1905. The formidable targets of Arthur Griffith’s activism were the hidebound Unionists and the nonstop talk show engaging the Irish Party at Westminster. The signal value of an attentive historical approach, will, in this instance, become immediately apparent when it emerges that the major subjects of 1 Patrick Maume’s The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891–1918, is the authoritative account of the labyrinthine politics of the period; and Joseph O’Brien’s “Dear, Dirty Dublin...

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