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Rasik Shah mused on Great stuff, Chandra, Muareen, Champa, Ruth and Manish. How come there is only one male name there? Anyway here is something on the origin of the bazaar named "Araby". From Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce, 1959 edition, page 40: "The bazaar Araby came to Dublin on May 14-19, 1894. The boy fixed his mind with accustomed intensity upon the bazaar, and won his uncle's (his father's?) consent to go. But his uncle did not return with money until it was too late, and then said, "The people are in bed and after their first sleep now." The boy went anyway, and by the time he arrived, the bazaar was virtually over; the lights were going out, the merriment had ceased. There is perhaps then a particular irony when in a Portrait a schoolmate accuses Stephen of not being the sort to go to bazaars. Joyce, like Stephen, seems in some moods to have encouraged other people to regard him as a very virtuous boy." Regardless of religious or other symbolism, primarily it is a love story, of enchantment, leading to disenchantment, defeated by adverse circumstance. The only other relevant biographical details I have found are: The Joyce family did live at 17 North Richmond Street, into which they moved late into 1894. The Grand Oriental Fete, Araby in Dublin had held forth earlier that year. The Christian Brothers School on the corner of Richmond Place and North Richmond Street, had been attended by James and Stanislaus for a while before their impecunious father secured admission, without fees, to Jesuits'Belvedere College. The surname "Mangan" had special resonance for Joyce, because of his enthusiasm for the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan. In a speech Joyce made in Trieste, "Joyce saw in Mangan's writings an intense concept of love, centered on 'the moon white pearl of his soul, Ameen.' The next two sentence project the essence of the story 'Araby' - "Music and odours and lights are spread about her, and he could search the dews and the sands that he might set another glory near her face. A scenery and a world have grown up about her face, as they will about any face which the eyes have regarded with love." I do not find any "epiphany" in this story. At the end, the boy is "driven and derided by vanity" and suffers "anguish and anger". The boy experience love frustrated, the charm of the story being in the images used to tell the story. A writer's question to Champa, and
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