An Encounter

Dublin itself could be considered a character in most Joyce works, and “An Encounter” is a perfect example. It is possible that the story could work in a different setting, but it would likely end up as a completely different story. The city as it existed in the early 1900s permeates every aspect of the narrator’s life, from the language he uses to the food he eats to the people he meets. Joyce throws out placenames like the Pigeon House, the Smoothing Iron, and Ringsend as though all the world should recognize them immediately. The reader doesn’t need more information than this, though. Alongside these references are colorful details of city streets and shop windows, currant buns, and shabby suits. Dublin comes alive in each story of the collection.

Joyce never much cared if his writing was perfectly understood. His novel Finnegans Wake is so filled with slang, allusions, inside jokes, and specific details as to be virtually unintelligible to modern readers—and many of his contemporary readers, too. In Dubliners, Joyce was determined to present the city and its inhabitants as they really were, as they really spoke and acted, and didn’t concern himself with whether the reader would catch every meaning and reference. “An Encounter” isn’t nearly as difficult to parse as Finnegans Wake, but it does feature a fair amount of vernacular.

Censorship and propriety concerns famously kept Dubliners from being published for close to a decade. Both the publisher and the printer were worried that they could be found liable in obscenity lawsuits if the stories weren’t edited considerably. Surprisingly, the story where an old man seems to be masturbating in front of two young boys was not one of those at issue. This is likely thanks to Joyce’s deft employment of ambiguity in “An Encounter.” The reader doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, so there’s a bit of plausible deniability in the obscenity within the scene. Even the discussions about sweethearts and whipping don’t really include many details, and the character mentioning these things is an antagonist. Joyce was a big fan of portraying things as they really were, but that doesn’t mean he felt the need to spell everything out for the reader.