James Joyce’s Encounter with Sexual Harassment

Abstract: James Joyce’s short story, “An Encounter,” depicts the lives of two boys on a day when they skip school and are confronted by a sexual predator. In published manuscripts and correspondence, Joyce and his brother Stanislaus claimed that the events in the story were based upon their “actual personal experience,” and they would write about their memories of the predatory man. If the fictionalized encounter represents the nature of the real one, then the children were victim-survivors of a form of non-contact sexual abuse. Today we would describe this abuse as an act of sexual harassment and the exploitation of children. The Joyce brothers’ claim is rarely acknowledged in scholarship or footnotes to critical editions of Dubliners . This essay argues that their experience must be brought into the central discourse of the text, for “An Encounter” tells us a story about Joyce and his time as well as a story about us and our time. Joyce’s troubled efforts to get the story published and the varied reception of his claim of having met the predator himself share relevant connections to the way that we assess and respond to the testimonies of victim-survivors today, including the authenticity and significance of those testimonies. His experience also prompts scholars to consider how ethically to approach fictionalized representations of sexual harassment in literature, such as the one depicted in “An Encounter.” Joyce’s short story is not a testimony but a creative rendering of a biographical event. With this challenging context in mind, the essay provides methodologies for researching and teaching “An Encounter,” while also developing an ethics for placing the story alongside Joyce’s biography.