Ambiguity of Initiation in the Childhood Triptych of James Joyce’s Dubliners

The second story of Dubliners, written in 1905, describes the everyday life of a group of children and accounts of "a day's miching" (D 12) from school that two of them plan and perform. After having wandered the whole day through Dublin, the two boys involved, the narrator/protagonist and his mate Mahony, encounter an old man, who begins to speak them, first about girls, and, after having performed an action that the narrative does not expound (probably a masturbatory act) about physical punishments. The narration ends in the moment in which the protagonist calls back his friend in order to escape from the disturbing presence of the pervert. Even if the plot and the action in this narrative are surely more elaborate and complex than those of the previous story, the sum of critical contributions about "An Encounter" is poorer, if compared to the others two parts of the childhood triptych.
The two main paths usually followed to interpret this story are the one that studies the historical nature of some textual references, linked with the theme of British Imperialism over the Irish ‘colony’, and the one centered on the psychological reading of "An Encounter", which usually deals with the theme of perversion and homosexuality. Such analyses are equally interesting, well-founded and justified, and the fact that such heterogeneous interpretations may coexist within the same short text demonstrates the worth of this underestimated story. As the first branch of criticism highlights, moreover, it is important to notice how the initial references to the Wild West games of the young Dubliners set the story in a sort of primitive and indigenous background. This setting represents Joyce’s consideration of Ireland as a country in need of "civilisation" (LI 64) and in a certain way validates some of the anthropological references to pre-modern culture that this analysis will propose.
Nonetheless, even if the number of studies is not as vast as in the case of "The Sisters", some inconsistencies and ambiguities between the possible interpretations are still noticeable. For example, the figure of the pervert is associated, in two different but equally reasonable articles, either to the rational and sensitive protagonist (Degnam 1989) and to the more rude and violent Mahony, the other boy who takes part to the adventure (Feshbach 1965, 86-87). The character encountered in this story, as the one of the priest in the previous tale, represents a complex figure, textually crafted with an accumulation of references and symbolic meanings that this study will try to explore.
In particular, Joyce seems to have rendered this character using different allusions to Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and to the shamanic representation of the god Odin. A contact between these two different figures may be found in the archetypal figure of the shaman, as this analysis will try to explain, a figure that is remarkably connected with an idea of initiatory election (Eliade 1958, 2), which seems thus the one used in this narrative to represent the personal development of the protagonist. Before analysing this aspect, however, it is worth considering how the theme of initiation is present and presented in the first part of the story, where the setting is described and the wanderings of the two boys are narrated.