Abstract
The aim of this article is to show that waiting in Dubliners is a cognitive state in its own right, and that it assumes different forms. While in “Two Gallants,” Lenehan’s rambling movements and thoughts prove the act of waiting to be a mode of cognitive apprehension of time through space, the young woman’s apprehension of her environment in “Eveline” is saturated by a past which paralyses her. Finally, the apprehension of space and time in “Araby” is entirely transformed by the boy’s intense longing for his friend’s sister, and his feeling of frustration caused by his incapacity to act is replaced with complex scenarios where waiting is acted, or rather staged, in fictional compensation.
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Notes
- 1.
Nebeneinander (i.e. next to one another) concerns space and the arts of the visible, like sculpture or painting. Nacheinander (i.e. after one another) is related to time and characterizes the arts of the invisible, like music or poetry.
- 2.
Emphasis mine.
- 3.
The locution “take one’s stand” is particularly revealing here: “[w]hen he reached the corner of Merrion Street he took his stand in the shadow of a lamp…” (D 59). It is as though Lenehan adopted a stance he had been given. His position, his immobility have already been programmed.
- 4.
“What he saw then was like an apparition: she was seated in the middle of the bench all alone or, at any rate, he could see no one, dazzled as he was by this vision […] she raised her head. She wore a wide straw hat with pink ribbons which fluttered in the wind, behind her […]. She was in the act of embroidering something […]. As she remained in the same attitude…” (Flaubert 2003, 6, emphasis mine).
Bibliography
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Flaubert, Gustave. L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), ed. Pierre-Marc de Biasi. Paris: Classiques de Poche, 2002.
———. The Sentimental Education, Trans. Adrianne Tooke. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2003.
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Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
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Morillot, C. (2018). Spatialized Thought: Waiting as Cognitive State in Dubliners . In: Belluc, S., Bénéjam, V. (eds) Cognitive Joyce. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71994-8_7
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