James Joyce had a devil of a time getting Dubliners published. Begun in 1904, the collection would not see the light of day until 1914. The delay was caused largely by objections from publishers and printers: objections to certain words (especially a handful of instances of the word “bloody”), to an insulting reference to Queen Victoria, and even to whole stories — among these is “Two Gallants.”

This post briefly looks at “Two Gallants,” explores why Joyce thought it crucial to Dubliners, and suggests the story speaks to themes that are treated more elaborately in Finnegans Wake.

Joyce fiercely defended this story. When the publisher Grant Richards objected to it, Joyce told him that he would be willing to sacrifice five other stories in Dubliners if he could keep “Two Gallants.”

At first glance, not much happens in “Two Gallants,” which makes it par for the course in Dubliners. Two young men (who are decidedly ungallant) walk through the streets, talking crassly of women. One man, Corley, is doing most of the talking, while Lenehan agreeably listens. Corley explains how he used to go out spending money on women, getting in return only venereal disease. But now he has been seeing a girl who works as a “slavey” (a female domestic servant) for a rich family on Bagot street, and this girl, who he swears is “a bit gone on [him],” has stolen cigars for him from her employer. “There’s nothing to touch a good slavey,” he assures Lenehan. [When he adds, “Take my tip for it,” I can’t help but mentally add a Wakean “Tip.”]

The two are up to something. Lenehan asks Corley if he’ll be able to “pull it off all right,” and wonders if the girl is “game for that.” We’re not told what the referent of “it” and “that” is. Lenehan watches from a distance while Corley meets this girl and goes off with her. He is then left to wander the streets of Dublin, and his path is described in great detail by Joyce. If you plot his route on a map of the city, you see he goes in a circle, and this is an apt summary of his life: going nowhere fast.

As Lenehan gets something to eat, his thoughts turn to his spiritual paralysis. He imagines Corley talking to the girl, his “voice in deep energetic gallantries,” and he further imagines the “leer of the young woman’s mouth.”

This vision made him feel keenly his own poverty of purse and spirit. He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the tail, of shifts and intrigues. He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never get a good job? Would he never have a home of his own? He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to. He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls. He knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls too. Experience had embittered his heart against the world. But all hope had not left him. He felt better after having eaten than he had felt before, less weary of his life, less vanquished in spirit. He might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready.

Later, after he’s met with some friends and then left them to resume wandering, Lenehan sees Corley and the girl. Following them, he watches as the girl enters a house on Bagot street and re-emerges. At the conclusion of the story, he meets up with Corley, asking if the scheme was a success. In response, “with a grave gesture [Corley] extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.”

The implication is that the girl has stolen from her employer or that Corley has in some way swindled her out of this money.

It’s fitting that Corley — in his monologues about his conversations with others — “aspirated the first letter of his name after the manner of Florentines.” That is to say, he pronounces the C in his name like an H. He calls himself Horley or Whore-ly. Corley is a whore. His relationships with women are entirely transactional. He spends money on some in exchange for sex; he seduces this new girl in exchange for stolen goods.

This world of transactional relationships is what Lenehan is bemoaning. Considering the “worth” of his friends, Lenehan’s mind cannot help but conceive of people in terms of value. He yearns for an authentic relationship with another person, but he is trapped in a world where all relationships are commodified, all are entangled in a zero-sum world of gain and loss, where everything (even people) can be reduced to a monetary value. Even his hopes for a domestic life depend on his meeting a girl with a “little of the ready” (money).

His lost, wandering state is captured by the song Silent, O Moyle, which he and Corley hear a harpist playing on the street. When Lenehan is alone, the song stays with him, suggesting that it speaks to his condition:

The air which the harpist had played began to control his movements. His softly padded feet played the melody while his fingers swept a scale of variations idly along the railings after each group of notes.

The lyrics to the song, penned by Thomas Moore in the early nineteenth century, concern the Irish legend of Fionnuala, a daughter of Lir who was transformed into a swan and condemned to wander the world until the dawn of Christianity in Ireland. Spoken by Fionnuala herself, the lyrics describe a lost wanderer hoping for freedom from her sorry state. They nicely reflect Lenehan’s state:

Silent, oh Moyle, be the roar of thy water,
Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose,
While, murmuring mournfully, Lir’s lonely daughter
Tells to the night-star her tale of woes.
When shall the swan, her death-note singing,
Sleep, with wings in darkness furl’d?
When will heav’n, its sweet bell ringing,
Call my spirit from this stormy world?

Sadly, oh Moyle, to thy winter-wave weeping,
Fate bids me languish long ages away;
Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping,
Still doth the pure light its dawning delay.
When will that day-star, mildly springing,
Warm our isle with peace and love?
When will heav’n, its sweet bell ringing,
Call my spirit to the fields above?

Here is a rendition of this song by Mary O’Hara.

Fionnuala waits for Christianity, while Lenehan inhabits a world filled with perversions of Christian symbols: the girl they meet is dressed in blue and white (like the Virgin), Lenehan repeatedly utters “That takes the biscuit” (recalling the Eucharist), Lenehan is called a “disciple” of Corley (like the followers of Christ), and Corley holds out the coin like a Eucharistic wafer — or like the figurative sun for which Fionnuala waits (the “day-star” of the lyrics, which will banish the darkness of the world in which she wanders). It is as if Lenehan’s fallen world inverts the signs of redemption in the Fionnuala legend.

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The transactional world of “Two Gallants” is the fallen world of Finnegans Wake, one that is obsessed with gain and loss. Recall that the Fall in Finnegans Wake is symbolically ushered in by one man asking another for money (the Cad asking HCE the time or for a “dime”). “Play[ing] cash cash” (I.1) in the world of history — squeezing out a livelihood, or “sneez[ing] out a likelihood” (I.1) — we are all, to varying degrees, enmeshed in a Shaunish world of gain and loss, “sysentangled” in a “cash system” (I.6) where gain for one means loss for another. This is our typical, egoic, fallen way of viewing our experience.

A key paragraph of Finnegans Wake beginning on page 81 — which I discuss here — describes a brother battle in which the halves of HCE — early versions of Shaun and Shem who arguably reflect Corley and Lenehan — fight over money and who owes whom.

A central feature of the fallen world is a concern over debt, over what one can get from others.

Finnegans Wake extends the transactional world of Dubliners into a symbolic fallen world, one where the universe (a unified HCE) has broken into oppositional “selves” who greedily war with each other. As I suggest in my post linked above, Finnegans Wake points to a way out of this wandering state of loss: learning to reconceive the idea of possession/ownership, which entails eroding the barriers between people and building authentic relationships, not ones mediated by capitalist notions of value. “All hope had not left” Lenehan, we are told, and perhaps it should not leave us either.