Chuck Woolery

James Joyce is no Chuck Woolery in the love connection department ... Or maybe he is. According to the infallible Wikipedia, "Of the roughly 22,000 couples who met on the show, twenty-nine were eventually married and eight became engaged."

Why did I just bring up an '80s dating show? I just saw an advertisement for it while I was flipping through TV channels. No, I don't own a time traveling DeLorean; it was on GSN. I felt it would be a good idea to include a bizarre opening in this blog post, so mistake or not, I'm running with it. The other option was LL Cool J's song "Mama Said Knock You Out." Seems like a win-win situation to me, but I determined that Chuck Woolery needed some attention in this blog post.

Let's get the Love Connection connection out of the way first. I thought the fact that works from the two authors we recently looked at use similar themes of isolation and broken relationships to get their points across was noteworthy. "Araby," "Eveline," "A Painful Case," and "The Dead" all seem to end in disappointment and isolation for the main characters who are trying to find a connection. Joyce presents a scenario in each of these stories where the main character seems to be detached for one reason or another and they try to establish a connection with another, but they wind up alone and dejected. We also see Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" and "Interpreter of Maladies" end on similar notes. This repeated striking out more or less mirrors the tv show's success rate. I didn't enjoy Joyce's stories as much as Lahiri's primarily due to my preference for the writing style, but I found Joyce's stories to be just as interesting as Lahiri's.

With talk about Love Connection out of the way, I think I'll move on to other stuff I noticed. I was kind of unsure what to make of "Araby" before I read the essay about it. Some of the Orientalism stuff in the story stuck out, but I didn't completely get how critical Orientalism was to Irish identity at the time and some of the references Joyce makes to writers, thinkers, and personalities of the time were missed. However, the story and essay effectively demonstrate attitudes of the Irish toward British colonization/imperialism.

I thought "The Dead" was an intriguing story about the dinner party guests and ultimately about the conflicts in Irish society. Isolation and the search for control or identity are very apparent in this story. There's a lot going on in the story so I'm just going to make quick note of three things I noticed in the story.

Gabriel feels above, yet subordinate to the party hosts and other guests. He doesn't really seem comfortable with anyone from the moment he steps in the door and interacts with the servant Lily while she takes his coat and boots. When dealing with his peers he seems out of place. He's not sure to define the audience for his speech and he's also called a traitor against Ireland because he writes harmless book reviews for a pro-British newspaper. This scene where he's basically called a traitor also exposes his affinity for continental Europe over his homeland. All this adds up to create an image of a man who doesn't feel like he has a place in Ireland that really suits him.

On page 179, Gabriel's aunts try to track down Mr. Browne so he can come in from the cold. I thought the first two lines of dialog spoken about Mr. Browne by Mary Jane and Aunt Kate reflect a cautious acceptance of certain people in the community. The women essentially say, "Brown is out there. He's everywhere." Considering the fact that most, if not all, of the other party guests are Catholic, this not only demonstrates that he's always around the house, but Protestants in general are everywhere in Irish Catholic communities and it's impossible to get away from them. English influence is seeping into all corners of Irish society.

In addition to expressing dissatisfaction with English presence in Irish life, Aunt Kate complains about the Catholic church's faults. On page 169, Joyce writes a scene in which Aunt Kate questions the wisdom of the Catholic church and the Pope after the Pope banned women from singing in church choirs. This can be seen as one woman complaining about the fact she can't sing in church anymore, but I see it more as a reflection of Irish society at large and how unpopular decisions made by Irish Catholic authorities, or any authority figure, can result in discontent in the most enthusiastic supporters.