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Those of you who read Rasik's msg completely, like me more than once, may like to read what is in my copy of Dubliners. "In a BBC broadcast talk of 1954, Stanislaus Joyce denied categorically that his brother had intended, as an earlier critic had argued, that Maria in "Clay" should be both a witch and a figure of the Virgin Mary as well as her own diminutive self. "I am in a position", Stanislaus Joyce insisted, "to state definitely that my brother had no such subtleties in mind when he wrote the story." Dubliners has therefore endured a considerable amount of rather mechanical symbol hunting as if the surface of the text, with its realistic detail and subtleties of dialogue and socio/cultural allusion, can be disregarded in pursuit of some definitive interpretation rooted in a symbology which the ingenious critic has identified. It is as damage done to those finely woven textures that constitute the work's finesse, that these exercises in misguided scholarly acumen give most offence. For it is not that Dubliners does not possess a complex structure and a detailed symbolism, for all the realism it also achieves, but that such readings direct attention away from a full encounter with the individual story itself to a reductive account of some altogether simpler narrative which is a poor substitute for the true Joycean experience." I think this needs no comment when we think of what we/I have been doing in the past months wrt Dubliners! :-( Having said that, Rasik, I don't understand the part about "Maria as Halloween" in the part reproduced below. Maria as Virgin Mary is clear - the loving, caring Madonna. But Maria, the witch? Chandra |
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