Fluent Essays

Assignment format Literary Criticism 1. Bibliography informationWriter:Book name: Wooden Eyes:Publisher: Year: Page: 2. Summary: 3. Quotes/Questions/Notes: Question: a_little_cloud_sunset_boulevar.pdf clouded_friendship_a_note_on_a.pdf james_joyces_a_little_cloud_an.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our databases. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated AS IS and AS AVAILABLE and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. ‘A Little Cloud’: Sunset Boulevard Author: Gerald Doherty Date: 2004 From: Dubliners’ Dozen: The Games Narrators Play Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Reprint In: Short Story Criticism(Vol. 231. ) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 4,444 words Full Text: [(essay date 2004) In the following essay, Doherty examines the role that metaphor plays in the title and throughout the story “A Little Cloud.”] But discourse plays other types of metaphorical game, one of the most fascinating is that of prediction. Situated at the start of a narrative, chains of metaphor prefigure future events that, as yet, have no clear contours. Like stagy, operatic overtures, dense image formations foreshadow a sequence of happenings that will later take place. Because the reader is kept in the dark as to what scene(s) the prefigurement points (she has to wait till the end of the story), she is initiated into a narrative secret without realizing an initiation took place. As such, metaphor ensures that she is subliminally prepared for the action, and that no great surprises occur.1 “ A Little Cloud” enacts a particularly subtle and teasing initiatory rite. It is also the sole Dubliners story with an unambiguously figurative title, already pointing to certain metaphorical mysteries concealed in the narrative. Because the story contains only one literal allusion to clouds (Gallagher’s thick clouds of cigar smoke [71]), much ink has been spilt on the connotations of the title itself. Is it a biblical marker, an obscure Celtic pun, or some more esoteric reference?2 A simple unpacking of the metaphor helps a little: in occluding sunlight, “a little cloud” creates dark, unpredictable spells that make clear vision difficult. What was once brilliant and glitzy becomes dull and befuddled (Chandler’s vision of Gallagher behaves in exactly this way). The main motivation for such a strikingly anomalous title, however, may lie in the role metaphor plays in the story itself. In no other story has it such a crucial thematic, structural, and predictive force. A complex chain of three extended metaphors stand as portentous sentinels at the start of the story—the three sun metaphors, in systematic recession, that set the narrative rolling. First, a radiant, all-encompassing sunlight, then its rapid waning, followed by the final “panorama of sunset,” signalling the onset of night (64-67). Prophetic image constellations, these are virtual allegories of the vicissitudes of the two central human encounters that follow: between Chandler and Gallagher, and Chandler and Annie. Three powerful solar tropes prefigure the same punctuated decline these encounters later enact: from an initial life-enhancing sunny benevolence, through darkening visions, on to total benightedness. The psychological parallels are almost too patent: Chandler’s initial sunstruck identification with Gallagher (he longs to be Gallagher) moves through complex disidentifications (clouding over and distancing) on to a mutual blindness that virtually terminates the relationship (Chandler’s exchanges with Annie replicate the same cycle).3 But the question remains: why employ metaphors at all especially ones that so ostentatiously exhibit their own hidden riches? Has metaphor more than a simple analogical role? Has it a special connection with identification so that it becomes the figurative prototype of the eclipse of the human relations that follows? In short, why position these conspicuous chain metaphors at the start of the story, as rhetorical overtures to the all-too-human dimmings and blightings to which they function as prelude? The answer exposes the link between metaphor and the identification process itself. Predicated on classic metaphorical transfers—substitution based on similarity—identification plays precisely on the sameness (and difference) in self/other relations. As such, metaphor is the rhetorical analogue of the desire to be like (and unlike) the other. Diana Fuss puts it very well: “Metaphor, however, is not simply one approach among many to the problem of identification. To the extent that identification is a desire to be like or as the other, to the extent, in other words, that identification is fundamentally a question of resemblance and replacement, metaphor provides the most direct point of entry into the internal workings of a complex cultural and psychical process.”4 Just as rhetorical structures undergird psychical ones (“The unconscious is structured like a language,” as Lacan observes), so too the structure of metaphor undergirds that of identification. Detached from its signifying context as a purely linguistic operator, metaphor becomes reattached to the psychical one, known as identification. As with identification, its typical trajectory ranges from those illuminating projections that initially light up their objects, to those dim eclipses of meaning when metaphor dies. “A Little Cloud” brilliantly exploits this particular progress. A kind of thematic and structural overture, metaphor rhetoricizes the complex drama of identification between Chandler and Gallagher. Solar metaphors signpost the devious downward spiral—the rank overcloudings of the human relations that follow. Rapid celestial wanings prefigure those all-too-human terrestrial ones, which pass from glittering recognitions, through confused misrecognitions, to those dark occlusions that make real recognitions impossible. Indeed the metaphorical model points up an implacable psychological truth: all identifications are, in the end, failed identifications, invaded by those very disintegrations they are designed to ward off.5 As such, they model the disintegration of the Chandler/Gallagher affair. Before turning to that, however, I shall first track the solar subplot that mirrors the vicissitudes of the main plot itself. 1 Three distinct solar metaphors punctuate Chandler’s progress—from the moment he gazes out of his King’s Inn office window, on through his Henrietta Street walk to meet Gallagher, down to his Grattan Bridge crossing that lands him in Corless’s bar. With a loud, inflated salvo, the text also heralds its own solar hero (Gallagher)—“the brilliant figure on the London Press” (64). As Chandler contemplates the scene from his office window, the sun (what Derrida calls “the father of all figures”)6 not only sheds light on all objects, but idealizes and glamorizes their attributes: the “glow of a late autumn sunset” casts a “shower of kindly gold dust” on all that it touches (64).7 Aestheticized, cosmeticized, objects appear more radiantly lambent and lovable than they actually are. Indeed the three discreet objects—“untidy nurses,” “decrepit old men,” and “screaming children” (64)—seem calculatedly chosen for their absence of glamour to spotlight the sun’s power to transfigure them. A split-vision effect—at once brilliant and drab—envelops these unalluring figures in the soft afternoon glow that transforms them. Chandler’s initial fervent identification with Gallagher, as we shall see, replicates this split-vision effect: it too cosmeticizes its object, shedding a radiant “gold dust” on what turns out to be a less than scintillating or golden-boy figure. The second link in the metaphorical chain mobilizes the first stirrings of decline and disintegration, as the disidentification process sets in. Stripping off the veils of illusion the first put in place, it reveals the grim, unsightly features that lie underneath. As Chandler walks “swiftly” down Henrietta Street, the “golden sunset” wanes and the air “grow[s] sharp” (66). As idealizing projections dissolve, Dublin’s grubby reality—unadorned, unenhanced—intrudes: “A horde of grimy children populated the street. They stood or ran in the roadway or crawled up the steps before the gaping doors or squatted like mice upon the thresholds … He picked his way deftly through all that minute vermin-like life” (66). What are the implications of this dense and disturbing description? Shattering shared modes of identification, the sunlight loses its power to enhance. Fastidiously sidestepping this dissonant spectacle, Chandler at once absorbs and rejects it.8 In rhetorical terms, a sequence of similes, which makes difference explicit, exposes the jarring reality the “golden” sun metaphor concealed.9 The comparison of children to “vermin” and “mice,” in addition, involves a radical devaluation of human worth and esteem. Likewise the “gaunt spectral mansions” (read slums) in which “the old nobility of Dublin” once “roistered” come under the same radical law of devaluation: their glamorous past merely spotlights their present decline. Stripped of its power to transform, the “golden dust” now shows up as mere dirt and grime. Chandler’s initial glamorizing of Gallagher comes under the same implacable law: as new unpalatable truths about Gallagher come to the fore, he too is devalued, and the relationship suffers eclipse.10 The third sunset trope is the strangest, most uncanny of all. Exterior to the story’s narrative frame, it seems to pop into Chandler’s mind, as his own idiosyncratic creation. As he crosses Grattan Bridge, and as proof of his poetic vocation, he invents a single spectacular trope, though, like the reader, he too is unsure of “what idea he wished to express” (67). Indeed its harsh social realism contravenes the Celtic Twilight mythology he espouses as poet.11 In a quirky anthropomorphization, the “poor stunted houses” on the lower quays of the Liffey transmogrify into “tramps, huddled together along the river-banks.” Shoddy detailings intensify the effect: “stupified by the panorama of sunset,” their old coats enveloped in “dust and soot,” the tramps await the coming of night before they “shake themselves” free, and “begone” (67). What exactly motivates the choice of this trope? To what subsequent psychological metamorphoses does it seem to allude? What narrative function does it fulfill? While the trope’s own increasing “befuddlement” mirrors Chandler’s befuddled musings about becoming a poet and absconding to London, it also prefigures the increasingly “stupified” fate of his glamorizings of Gallagher. As the golden luster abruptly goes out, he too, like the tramps, “shakes himself” free, and decamps, becoming the benighted outcast the trope seems to prefigure. To sum up, allegorizing the doomed fate of identification, this three-stage concatenation configures the stages of Chandler’s pub encounter with Gallagher: from an initial idealization that grossly inflates (the classic misrecognition phenomenon), through painful unmaskings that debunk and expose, to those dark obfuscations that eclipse the relationship. Systematically remodelling its figures, metaphor too enacts a parallel progress: from a self-enhancing trope that lights up all it touches, through similes that reveal grim undersides, to the “blind” trope that plunges all into darkness. In the end, the lights go down on Chandler just as surely as in those vivid sunset vignettes that are their prognosticators. 2 Identification, as Freud conceives it, is based on the desire to put “oneself in the same situation” as the admired object … the ego “enrich(es) itself with the properties of the object,” which it introjects into itself.12 Superior ego-ideals thus have their roots in admired personality traits—looks, clothes, voice, distinguished achievement. In the absence of reality checks, such projections tend to burgeon and flourish. As a consequence of Gallagher’s protracted absence in London (eight years), Chandler’s projections suffer a similar fate: they too blossom without hindrance or check. Intercalated between the sunset vignettes, two major flashbacks show Chandler’s free-floating projections in action. Shedding their own “kindly gold dust,” Chandler’s initial fantasies glamorize virtually all Gallagher’s traits: “his travelled air, his well-cut tweed suit, and fearless accent” (64).13 No negative shadow, as yet, beclouds Gallagher’s image. His outstanding “talents” that left him “unspoiled” (a crucial element in Chandler’s misrecognition), as well as his generous “heart”—all convince Chandler that Gallagher is the ideal person to know (“It was something to have a friend like that” [64]). Like the radiant sun trope itself, Gallagher sheds his radiance on all whom he meets. But of course identification is always ambivalent: expressions of admiration, as Freud notes, may just as easily “turn into a wish for someone’s removal.”14 The rival may become all “the more detested for being admired”;15 (Chandler’s dramatic reversals of attitude, however, still lie in the future). The second flashback (66-67) insinuates precisely those initial hints of ambivalence the first one represses, though Chandler resolutely attributes all doubts about Gallagher to others (“People used to say that Ignatius Gallagher was wild” [66]). Though Chandler was convinced from the start of his friend’s “future greatness” (66), others, it appears, were not so sure: his heavy drinking, as well as his “shady … money transaction” in Dublin, they imply, precipitated his hasty exit to London (66-67). But Gallagher’s charisma still remains intact: Chandler’s admiration even extends to his expertise in wriggling out of “tight corners,” despite the mean-spirited misgivings of others. That inexpressible “something” about Gallagher that impresses Chandler “in spite of” himself permits maximum idealization to coexist alongside a subliminal unsettling skepticism. Gallagher’s magnetic mirror still returns Chandler’s ego-ideal—the magnified dream-figure he aspires to become. 3 Entering Corless’s bar triggers the first phase of Chandler’s disidentification, the first reality check on his fantasies for over eight years. As in the “waning” sunset vignette, here too simile is the paradigmatic trope: it makes explicit precisely the sameness and difference that metaphoric alignments obscure. Though Gallagher appears much the same, he looks subtly different. The immediate effect is to deconstruct Chandler’s idealized fantasies. Inducing a mild hallucinatory panic, the multiple light refractions of the “many red and green wine-glasses” intensify his sense that people “were observing him curiously” (68), paranoically undermining his social defences. The real point of this derangement, however, is the declouding catharsis that follows. Upon Chandler’s recognition that his initial impression was an illusion—“nobody had turned to look at him”—the “real” Gallagher emerges out of the glamorized mists in which Chandler enshrouds him, large as life, threateningly macho in poise—“back against the counter and his feet planted far apart” (68).16 Brutally collapsing the first of Chandler’s cherished illusions about him—that, cocoonlike, he exists in a time warp beyond change or decay—Gallagher himself accelerates the disidentification, exposing its first grubby detail. That Gallagher can change—that his hair grows thin on top—he dramatically reveals by lifting his hat, though Chandler, still spellbound, disavows the direct evidence of his senses: “Little Chandler shook his head as a denial” (69). Thereafter, Chandler himself takes up the challenge, exposing the “naked” Gallagher in the same manner Gallagher unwittingly instigated. How does this devaluation process proceed? Explicit exposures of difference (the simile paradigm), each more radical than its predecessor, shift from the trivial to the consequential, the bland to the harshly conflictual. Each initially locates Chandler in a position of lack or deficiency vis-à-vis Gallagher. While the latter drinks whiskey neat, Chandler dilutes his (“You don’t know what’s good for you, my boy”): because Chandler has not “changed an atom,” he needs to “knock about a bit” more: and because he is “pious,” he recoils from the sexual escapades Gallagher enjoys (“Not for a pious chap like you, Tommy” [69-70]). Such systematic deflation precipitates Chandler’s first major insight—the first stripping of the veil of illusion. As simile insinuates those elements metaphoric fusion concealed, the mirror returns a crude disfiguring image. From being the most admired, Gallagher becomes the most detested of objects. As “disillusionment” grows (70), the same numinous traits that once glamorized Gallagher now dim and dissolve: his “fearless accent” no longer attracts: his “new gaudy manner” is no match for his “old travelled air”: in short, Gallagher is essentially “vulgar” (70). Chandler’s “envy” at this crucial point (he “looked at his friend enviously” [70]) confirms Freud’s basic insight about ambivalence: to exalt is to diminish: to look up to someone is already to put him down: in order to usurp his place, one must annihilate him as such. As difference now becomes explicit, a new heightened ambivalence fuels Chandler’s pique and resentment. Each further exposure of difference sharpens the unmitigated hostility between the two men. To intensify Chandler’s unease, Gallagher goads him with exotic sex stories, which show up Chandler as a “dull” stay-at-home (70). Hypocritically congratulating Chandler on his marriage yet refusing to share its “delights” by visiting his home crudely puts down the class of entertainment Chandler might offer (nothing like Berlin or Paris). As the hated rival becomes all the more hated for once having been loved, the aggressive wish to usurp Gallagher’s place inflames Chandler’s rancour. How does this usurpation work? Sharply assertive self-vindications demolish the already ruined house of identification. Precisely because Chandler’s hostility is not overtly verbalized, it flows unimpeded to its logical end. Now positing himself as superior (Gallagher is his “inferior in birth and education”), he downgrades Gallagher in order to upgrade himself, and usurp Gallagher’s place. By vigorously “assert[ing] his manhood,” the hated rival no longer looms large, blocking the way. The sole obstacle—his “unfortunate timidity” (73)—paradoxically sabotages Gallagher’s last superior trait—his “fearless” social aggression. While Gallagher’s unbridled brashness permits him to “patroniz[e] him” and Ireland, it permits Chandler to condemn him for doing so (73). By maximizing the gap between him and his friend—taking his critical distance—Chandler unmasks Gallagher’s motives. 4 The inexorable decline into darkness— ... Purchase answer to see full attachment