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attempt to recruit him to the pressgang and remains critical of
the flatulent Dubliners in the newspaper office, but on the
other hand it is he who proposes a round of drinks, and in so
doing aligns himself with the alcoholic disappointments. His
Parable of the Plums is similarly intricate. In a positive sense, it
functions as a seditiously destabilizing force to counteract
empty rhetoric, as exemplified by MacHugh’s recitation of
Taylor’s speech: instead of embracing the remote past and
cultural purism, the Parable centers on the here and now,
reconstructs a realistic picture of the paralytic Irish status quo
out of incorporated discourses, and thus achieves the
production of truth as expected of an intellectual.
12
Despite
his awareness of the pervasively Irish paralysis and his effort to
reject the lure of empty rhetoric, Stephen is nevertheless as
trapped as the other Dubliners in bitterness, failure, and
unfulfillment, and the Parable, uncomprehended, inclines
toward empty talk. Seeing Stephen’s statement in “Circe,” “I
must kill the priest and the king” (Joyce, 1986: 481), as “a
young man’s assertion,” Andrew Gibson comments: “The
older Joyce got, the more aware he became of the ironical
limits to such a project” (2006: 40). The “ironical limits”
emerge because Stephen is ensnared in the idealism that
12
The Parable depicts two elderly and abject Dublin women who save up
money to see the views of the city from the top of Nelson’s pillar, where
they spot the roofs of different churches, peer up at the statue of Admiral
Lord Nelson, consume brawn, bread, and plums, and spit the plumstones
out between the railings. Squandering their hard-earned money in
beholding the churches and paying homage to the imperial ruler—the
Italian and English masters in Stephen’s terminology—these Dublin women
enact the willing servants of two masters dominating Ireland, and thus
epitomize the paralysis prevalent among the Irish. So paralytic are they that
the plumstones, which could germinate, flourish, and fruit if properly
planted, are spit out indifferently in the barren cityscape, wasted and
bearing no fruit. This realistic delineation of the paralytic Irish status quo
functions therefore as the counter-discourse to those nostalgic discourses in
“Aeolus,” particularly that on Moses and the Promised Land.