James Joyce's Painful Case

Notes

Notes Chapter 1. Introduction 1. As he witnesses the artfully cultivated devotional atmosphere surrounding the mystery of the Eucharist during morning Mass at All Hallows Church, Westland Row, the same phrase occurs to that bemused skeptic, Leopold Bloom (U 5.391). It is originally Ovid’s (Metamorphoses 9.711). 2. During the weeks before beginning this story (June–July 1905), Joyce was finishing the manuscript of Stephen Hero, chapters 24–26. He had Stephen Daedalus reviewing the plague of Catholicism . . . [which] obscured the sun. Contempt of [the body] human nature, weakness, nervous tremblings, fear of day and joy, distrust of man and life, hemiplegia of the will, beset the body burdened and disaffected in its members by its black tyrannous lice. . . . He, at least . . . would live his own life according to what he recognized as the voice of a new humanity, active, unafraid and unashamed. (194) These might well have been Mr. Duffy’s thoughts when he was Stephen’s age. Chapter 2. The Dublin-Trieste Cradle 1. In an uncharacteristic error, Richard Ellmann reports it “rewritten” by May 8 (JJII 207). 2. As we shall see below, Ellmann’s footnote shows that he does not recognize the significance of the letter on the constable’s collar. 3. The best account of the process by which Dubliners was written and published is Hans Walter Gabler’s introduction to the Norton Critical Edition of Dubliners (2006). 4. Jana Giles discusses Joyce’s revisions from a creative writer’s point of view, which complements the genealogical and intertextual purposes of this study. 5. Turgenev’s “Diary of a Superfluous Man” (March 22) and Moore’s “Home Sickness” utilize the same device very effectively. 6. “Hal Kilbride” reappears in Finnegans Wake (576.06), representing another Mr. Death for ladies who should have known better, King Henry VIII. 7. In his long letter of July 12, Joyce indicates this prospect with an allusion to Harriet Shelley’s suicide in Hyde Park in 1816: “I . . . do not desire any such ending for our loveaffair as a douche in the Serpentine” (Letters II: 96) that recurs in “A Painful Case” as Mr. Duffy contemplates Mrs. Sinico’s death as he travels the Phoenix Park “Serpentine” walk. 8. In no draft is there any account of the unauthorized removal of Mrs. Sinico’s body from the tracks to the platform. 9. Mr. Duffy’s fear of alcohol—the lubricant of Mrs. Sinico’s decline—reflects another aspect of Joyce’s anxiety at the time he was writing “A Painful Case”: his own proclivities in the same direction, inherited from his father, frequently angered Nora and Stanislaus (JJII 209–15). 10. Mary Lowe-Evans, in a blunt feminist body-slam, indicts not only this pair for Mrs. Sinico’s death, but every male even remotely connected to the accident. Unaccountably , James Watt escapes the wreck. 11. Sunset in early November comes around 4:30 p.m.; Mr. Duffy’s departure for the bar “as the light failed” (D 116.3), therefore occurs about three hours later. 12. By contrast with Moore, an estimable writer who must have crossed his mind as he wrote these sentences, Joyce handled such facts accurately and their symbolic superstructure inimitably. 13. In popular folk tradition, the soul’s presence slowly diminishes during the thirty days following decease. Thus Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears within the month of his murder and Irish pious tradition requires a “month’s mind” memorial Mass. 14. The Irish Rosicrucians and Theosophists were local variants on the Anglo-American Spiritualist movement. “A Painful Case” antecedes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s belated enthusiasm for this fad. 15. Besides Myers, Joyce might also have read Schopenhauer’s “Essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith” (P&P 1: 225–309). This widely influential essay examines various paranormal phenomena, concluding that they can be attributed to what would subsequently be called psychological causes. 16. To provide for her habit, Mrs. Sinico was evidently visiting one of the several offlicenses along Merrion Road. Three were within a half mile of her home, and a further three within a mile. Since most public houses were either exclusively male or restricted the admission of unaccompanied females, Mrs. Sinico, by a combination of personal choice and social constraint, drinks alone. 17. On this point Bloom is unreliable. Had Mrs. Sinico been considered a suicide, she would not have been buried in Glasnevin. Moreover, as we read in “Ithaca,” she was “accidentally killed” (U 17.947). 18. The Mozart...