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❦ 125 6 En Garde “Two Gallants” MARILYN REIZBAUM AND MAUD ELLMANN The essay that we have contributed to this volume maps the process of our composition in its structure. We began by discussing our general thoughts about the story over distances. We then each wrote a ten-page reflection of those thoughts and based on these reflections determined how we might integrate them. The result coordinates the categories of our mutual assessments: “Heedless Music,” “A Crock of Gold,” “Triangular Exchange.” Our introduction gives some sense of our initial discussion—for example, our concurrence on the nastiness of the story, the dominance of the two senses of sight and sound, the simony of the sexual play. In order to arrive at these categories, we not only discussed strategy, but each wrote a preliminary integrative essay. Then we each took a turn at revising it into the essay we have, first Marilyn, and finally Maud. Overall, it seems that our styles more than our thoughts about the story have been altered.1 1. Here is an example of one of the first thoughts we sacrificed in the collaboration: Maud— Waking on a Sunday morning with a mild hangover, after a magnificent dinner cooked by my multitalented friend Peter de Bolla—expert on eighteenth-century cultural history, ace keyboard artist, world-class chef, wine-buff extraordinaire—I intended to get started on the present essay, which was already grossly overdue, but was up to little more than Googling “Two Gallants” on the Internet. The first hit yielded the following anecdote: 126 ❦ M A R I LY N R E I Z B AU M A N D M AU D E L L M A N N Two Gallants” has always been one of our favorite stories, even though it is arguably the nastiest story in Dubliners. What is the source of its appeal? Like adolescence—of which the two gallants are somewhat geriatric specimens—the story is unremittingly mean; like adolescence, it is also scrappy and ingenious. As Jean-Michel Rabaté and others have observed, there is something magnetic about the story’s silences that makes us long to be nearer to them and to look upon their deadly work (see Rabaté 1982, 45–72). This effect, however, is largely retroactive, since it is the enigmatic gold coin at the end that casts a veil of mystery over the whole. While the story leads us by the nose to this anticipated conclusion, it is not the silences that mesmerize us but the noise. Sight, always accompanied by blindness, is critical to the action of the story, but sound is crucial to its sense: the vernacular bluster of the two gallants, the musical interlude of the harp, the “palaver” of the narrative itself, and the trumpeted announcement of the gold coin in Rod was sharing his pot with another ski bum, who said, “You should check out Two Gallants.” “The James Joyce short story?” Rod had read Dubliners and a few other stories , but, when he thought of Joyce, he was reminded of a whore who called her occasional hook-up “Emo Boy” because, in her words, he cried a lot and his favorite book was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “No, man. The band. They’re a two-piece. Their new album is called What The Toll Tells. It’s got that punk-fuck-you attitude. . . .” Emo Boy is the last epithet one would think of applying to either of Joyce’s two gallants . Corley is robotically emotionless—his stiff gait and rolling head are reminiscent of a marionette—while Lenehan’s emotional repertoire has been reduced to minor fluctuations of self-pity. Indeed, the gallants’ emotional bankruptcy goes deeper than the fuck-you attitude of punk, which is a form of blasphemy that reaffirms the sentimental values it repudiates; as T. S. Eliot declares, no one can possibly blaspheme unless he “profoundly believes in that which he profanes.” Corley, by contrast, believes in nothing but money and machismo, the shibboleths of Dublin’s homosocial pub culture. Equally emotionless is the narrator, with the exception of a couple of set pieces—the lyrical opening paragraph and the evocation of the Irish harp— which advertise themselves as “good writing” and make a striking contrast to the coldness of the reportage. These moments of lyricism con the reader, much as Corley’s blandishments con the slavey, by disguising the narrator’s machinations. Willing victims of this “gay Lothario” of a...

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