Missed Encounters

Abstract:Our essay explores the implications of the missed encounter in Dubliners, and how this leitmotif corresponds to what Marilyn French describes as the “missing pieces” of Joyce’s stories. In the story “An Encounter,” the title is misleading in that each encounter is thwarted or foreclosed, often by the absence of the party to be met. What is missing most of all are women: only a glimpse of ragged girls testifies to the existence of a second sex in Dublin. Rather than encountering women, the miching schoolboys run into a creepy “josser” who magnetizes the narrator with a violent pedophilic monologue. Prior to their run-in with this shady character, the boys find themselves confronted on the ferry by “a little Jew with a bag,” whose fleeting appearance remains a mystery. Our essay centers on these two strangers and their disappointed bridges to the boys, arguing that the josser and the Jew are both outsiders who unsettle gender and racial categories. In conclusion, we compare “An Encounter” with the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses, both of which present a missed erotic encounter between youth and maturity.