Reenacting the Fall of Adam and Eve with his siblings, a young James Joyce played the part of the devil, “wriggling around on the floor with a long tail made of a rolled-up towel.” In her posthumous biography James Joyce: A Life, Gabrielle Carey grants that sin was one of Joyce’s lifelong obsessions. The young author himself admitted that a “special odor of corruption” surrounds his early stories in Dubliners, but Carey justifies the stories’ “scrupulous meanness” on the grounds that Joyce “is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentiment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.”
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