Before Daybreak: "After the Race" and the Origins of Joyce's Art

7: The Infernal

7 The Infernal Filled though it is with verifiable “street furniture,” “After the Race” is moored above infernal fires. Consider this familiar Irish folktale: “Jemmy Doyle in the Fairy Palace” My father was once coming down Scollagh Gap on a dark night, and all at once he saw, right before him, the lights coming from ever so many windows of a castle, and heard the shouts and laughing of people within. The door was wide open, and in he walked; and there on the spot where he had often drunk a tumbler of bad beer, he found himself in a big hall, and saw the king and queen of the fairies sitting at the head of a long table, and hundreds of people, all grandly dressed, eating and drinking. The clothes they had on them were of an old fashion, and there was nothing to be seen but rich silk dresses, and pearls, and diamonds on the gentlemen and ladies, and rich hangings on the walls, and lamps blazing. The queen, as soon as she saw my father, cried out, “Welcome, Mr. Doyle; make room there for Mr. Doyle, and let him have the best at the table. Hand Mr. Doyle a tumbler of punch, that will be strong and sweet. Sit down, Mr. Doyle, and make yourself welcome.” So he sat down, and took the tumbler, and just as he was going to taste it, his eye fell on the man next him, and he was an old neighbour that was dead twenty years. Says the old neighbour, “For your life, don’t touch bit nor sup.” The smell was very nice, but he was frightened by what the dead neighbour said, and he began to notice how ghastly some of the fine people looked when they thought he was not minding them. The Infernal · 227 So his health was drunk, and he was pressed by the queen to fall to, but had the sense to take the neighbour’s advice, and he only spilled the drink down between his coat and waistcoat. At last the queen called for a song, and one of the guests sang a very indecent one in Irish. He often repeated a verse of it for us, but we didn’t know the sense. At last he got sleepy, and recollected nothing more only the rubbing of his legs against the bushes in the knoc (field of gorse) above our place in Cromogue; and we found him asleep next morning in the haggard, with a scent of punch from his mouth. He told us that we would get his knee-buckles on the path at the upper end of the knoc, and there, sure enough, they were found. Heaven be his bed!1 This story is a fine example of motif F211 in Stith Thompson’s MotifIndex of Folk-Literature: “Fairyland under a hollow knoll (mound, hill, sídh),” of which there are many variants in Celtic literature and modern Irish and British folk and fairy lore.2 It is a counterpart to motif F212, “Fairyland under water,” which, again, makes many appearances in the written and oral culture. The Celtic Otherworld is imagined as either faoi thalamh [under ground] or faoi thoinn [under sea], and accessible by entering a cave or bruidhean, or by fairy horse or boat (MacKillop, s.v. “Otherworld”). The structural, verbal, and dramatic similarities between this fairy tale and the third scene (and some elements in the second) of “After the Race” argue that the relationship between the folk figure and the literary character is more than coincidence. The fairy tale involves the enthralling of the naive traveler Jemmy Doyle, during the course of a night journey through unfamiliar territory, by the lights of an opulent and exotic abode. By the station gate stands the ticket-collector who evidently recognizes Jimmy (who would have taken this train to his Trinity College classes). His familiar greeting, “Fine night, sir!” (D 47.13), would therefore be unremarkable were it not precisely situated between the two counterpart exclamations, Rivière’s “It’s Farley!” and Villona’s “It is beautiful!” (D 47.4, 23). One effect of the contrast between the formally expressed exclamations of this Québécois and Hungarian and the old man’s metaplasmic Hibernicism is the intimation of the ethnic bond between Jimmy and this servile spokesman for the native oral tradition.3 228 · Before Daybreak...