(Crider) Crossing the River Liffey

Following his father’s 1891 entry into the Stubb’s Gazette, a monthly business magazine which featured registered bankruptcies, nine year old James Joyce witnessed the beginning of what would be a quick financial decline within his family.  A collector of property taxes, John Joyce provided an affluent life for his household prior to Stubb’s, but mismanagement of finances and a dangerous bout with alcoholism resulted in his dismissal and the family’s transition into poverty.  They were forced to relocate from the well-to-do town of Bray to North Richmond Street on the other side of the River Liffey in Dublin.  Here, young James was first introduced to the seedier side of society, where orphanages were as crowded as the slum tenements, and desperation (in every sense of the word) was as evident as the region’s obsolete sanitation.  James Joyce was no longer on the “respectable” side of the River Liffey.  Still, his experiences with Dublin’s underbelly coughed up the framework for his collection of short stories named after the citizens residing there.  Demonstrative of James Joyce’s devotion to fictional realism, many of the pieces in Dubliners reflect the author’s personal exposure to life beyond the river as a child.  “An Encounter” is such an example.

In “An Encounter,” two boys with hyperactive imaginations skip school in search of adventure akin to the western stories they obsess over.  The primary target for their escape from routine embarks them on a voyage to the Pigeon House, Dublin’s electrical station.  Before they even cross the River Liffey the duo is bombarded by two “raggedy boys,” likely orphans, after chasing a group of girls.  The orphans shout insults, mistaking the boys for Protestants.  This incident probably marks the school kids’ first personal experience with the religious conflict saturating Dublin.  The struggle between Protestants and Catholics was undoubtedly evident to Joyce before he ever crossed the river as well, considering his poems on the subject of Irish Nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell and his run-in with the church.  The boys reach the other bank by ferry and are sooner met by dusk and the stranger folk it carries in than the worry free adventure they expected.  Disturbed by a pacing, crazy old man whose constant bantering clearly displays his perversion, they find that their exciting afternoon has become its own troubled monotony.