Fragments of A Painful Case and Paper Pills

Fragments of "A Painful Case" and "Paper Pills"

Although James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson situate their subjects in very different milieux (Joyce's in Dublin; Anderson's in Winesburg, Ohio), two of their subjects speak the same language of idiosyncrasy. In Joyce's "A Painful Case," Mr. Duffy keeps on his desk "a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet" (Joyce 103). In Anderson's "Paper Pills," Dr. Reefy records his thoughts on "scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away" (Anderson 36). These scribbled bits of subjectivity offer insight into the constituions of Anderson's doctor and Joyce's painful case.

Living "in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen" (Joyce 103), Mr. Duffy provides an example of the unwittingly mechanized individual. Mr. Duffy attempts "to preserve an interior life of introspection against the overwhelming and machine-like activities of city life" (134) but he resembles nothing so much as a well-oiled machine. Duffy tries to live self-contained in the gap between nature and culture, when these terms are defined so that "we can see the infant's relation to the mother as somehow 'natural' and the post-Oedipal child as one who is in the process of assuming a position within the cultural order as a whole" (Eagleton 156). Associating with "neither companions nor friends, church nor creed" (Joyce 105), Duffy removes himself from familial and societal ties and from "his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances" (104). The first threat to...

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...uded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again" (37). In this cycle of univocity and fragmentation, even the twisted apples have their day in the sun. As opposed to Duffy's ordered collage, Reefy's confounding lack of order -- in a different twist of Modernist irony -- assure his wholeness and his health.

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood. "Paper Pills." Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. John H. Ferres. New York:Viking Penguin, 1977. 35-8.

Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Joyce, James. "A Painful Case." Dubliners . New York: Penguin, 1993. 103-14.

---. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking Penguin, 1977.