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3. Lighted Squares
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❦ 69 3 Lighted Squares Framing “Araby” K ATHRYN CONR AD AND MARK OSTEEN Our essay began as two discrete perspectives on the story “Araby.” Mark’s focus was initially trained on the imagery of light and darkness, and Katie’s on the concept of vanity introduced in the final lines. Each writer wrote his or her own draft separately and then read the other writer’s contribution. In an early correspondence, Mark suggested that the accounts be integrated as two observers “watching and making notes on the same set of scenes. We could do this by setting them off with actual frames on the page. The idea would be to create a sense of binocular vision, thereby demonstrating the ideas about multiple frames and competing visions discussed in the essay(s).” Mark interspersed Katie’s reflections into his essay, and then Katie revised and commented further on Mark’s essay. The framed insertions comprise an array of responses: in some cases, Katie expands upon Mark’s interpretation; in others, she qualifies or disagrees with it; in others, she proposes a different vision or focus entirely. The strategy yields a result appropriate for the essay’s visual theme: one critic reads the story as a self-reflexive commentary on readerly vision, while a second critic reframes the first critic’s commentary in light of her vision of the text. The effect, we hope, is of frames or panes sliding across one another, sometimes converging in a single view, sometimes superimposing two views upon each other, sometimes presenting two different perspectives. Rarely have the critical terms “intervention” and “revision” seemed more apt! In the last double-framed paragraph, the two sets of eyes finally converge— almost. Indeed, the conclusion argues that such a truly binocular vision never occurs, that critical responses, even responses created in tandem such as ours 70 ❦ K AT H R Y N C ON R A D A N D M A R K O S T E E N were, never display—and should not display—convergence, but instead generate the kind of superimpositions and multiple visions that we find in the critical history of “Dubliners” and indeed throughout this volume of essays. Joyce’s Dubliners opens with a scene of watching, as the unnamed narrator of “The Sisters” studies a “lighted square of window,” seeking a sign of Father Flynn’s condition (D, 9). Gazing at the window night by night, he repeats the word paralysis softly to himself, as if the combination of word and vision produces a paralytic condition in the boy. Similar self-referential visual episodes—in which a character gazes into or through a mirror or window— reappear with remarkable frequency in Dubliners; in almost every case, the watcher’s vision freezes a dynamic process into a static scene.1 Dubliners is filled with frames: windows, mirrors, photos, and portraits.2 Mirror scenes often appear—as in “Clay”—when characters’ self-satisfaction veils their self-delusion. Window scenes, in contrast, stage characters’ feelings of longing or imprisonment, producing what film critics call internal frames, where a figure appears to be trapped in a box. And when characters gaze through windows at dusk, as they so often do in Dubliners, they invariably see both inwardly and outwardly, looking both backward into the past and forward into the future. Inner and outer visions merge to produce double exposures or superimpositions. It is fitting that most of these double visions occur at twilight—the time of two lights—when a person looking out a window can, in fact, see him- or herself superimposed upon the outside world. In Dubliners windows become pictures become mirrors. These visual phenomena are perhaps most evident in “Araby,” which even a cursory reading reveals to be a tale of watching. The boy narrator’s complex 1. Peter de Voogd has recently remarked that the opening scene of “The Sisters” (a young man looks into a window, envisioning a dead older man), coupled with the final tableau in “The Dead” (an older man looks out a window, imagining a dead youth), frames the entire volume (2000, 42). 2. Laurent Milesi has noted the prevalence of mirrors in Dubliners, of “windows and (barred) perspectives, as well as an insistence on gazing,” and likewise links the first and last stories in the collection through motifs of mirrored gazes (1997, 91). [18.223.125.219] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 13:41 GMT) Lighted Squares ❦ 71 framing of Mangan’s sister epitomizes a process...