Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue

5. “After the Race” and the Problem of Belonging

❦ 108 5 “After the Race” and the Problem of Belonging MICHAEL PATRICK GILLESPIE AND DAVID WEIR Our collaboration proceeded smoothly once we realized how complementary our approaches to the story were. That is to say, we divided our interests between separate examinations of the external history of the story in relation to Joyce’s narrative career and an internal analysis of the workings of the story itself. After working individually, we exchanged our essays for comment, made revisions to combine the two essays into one, and submitted it. The whole experience was a wonderful break from the usually solitary pursuit of academic scholarship. After the Race” was the third Dubliners story in order of the collection’s composition, appearing in its earliest version in the December 17, 1904, issue of the Irish Homestead. Perhaps because it was one of the first pieces in the volume, written while the unifying thematic principles of the work were still forming, Joyce was uncertain about the place of the story in the collection. At first, in 1905, the order of the “stories of adolescence” was to be “The Boarding House,” “After the Race,” and “Eveline,” the exact reverse of the published order (with “Two Gallants,” the fourth “adolescent ” story, inserted between “After the Race” and “The Boarding House” [Letters II, 111]). Joyce had also pronounced reservations about the story’s literary merit. He expressed these views at least twice. In an August 1906 letter written from Rome to his brother Stanislaus in Trieste, he articulates a desire to rewrite the story, and less than three months later, in another letter “After the Race” and the Problem of Belonging ❦ 109 to Stanislaus, Joyce singled out “After the Race” and “A Painful Case” as “the two worst stories in the collection” (ibid., 151, 189). After that, Joyce provides no further evidence of disquiet over either story, and he included them both in the final version of Dubliners. As is so often the case with extratextual information, Joyce’s comments in this correspondence raise vexing interpretive problems even as they make his creative attitude, at least at the time he wrote the letters, more explicit. The most significant question facing the contemporary reader seems relatively straightforward. What difference does any artist’s point of view make in terms of our enjoyment of his or her work? If, for example, someone discovered a letter by Mozart decrying “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” as banal, derivative, and repetitious, should that curb audience enthusiasm for the piece? Or suppose researchers learned that Pablo Picasso felt that his approach to painting was fundamentally dishonest. Would that make his Guernica any less powerful? While the answer to each question is no, that response does not resolve the issue of what interpretive value the information we have on Joyce’s attitudes toward his “worst” stories holds. Aesthetic reactions are too strong and too personal and the interaction between artist and audience too complex to allow readings to be prescribed by authorial intentionality. At the same time, we do not feel comfortable simply ignoring these views. Certainly, Joyce’s attitude toward “After the Race” and “A Painful Case” offers readers useful hints into what he felt his stories should accomplish. The vigor with which he resisted attempts in 1906 by Grant Richards and then five years later by George Roberts to censor other pieces indicates that Joyce was clearly pleased with the remainder of the collection and would not agree to anything that might jeopardize its integrity. As a result, identifying the features that distinguish these two works from the others might also point toward the dominant aims of the collection. Of course, knowing an artist’s goals does not preclude readers from interpreting a work in any fashion they wish, but an awareness of the creative standards that Joyce set for himself in his writing offers useful interpretive parameters for readers as they begin to build a reading. Specifically, in the case of “After the Race” extratextuality functions as a release from prescriptive readings that have grown out of the history of Joyce’s collection of short stories. Since Ezra Pound began singing Joyce’s praises 110 ❦ M IC H A E L PAT R IC K G I L L E SPI E A N D DAV I D W E I R more than ninety years ago, readers have developed the habit of approaching his work with hushed reverence. In this...