I was very pleased to see Louisa pointing out, at the start of Jennifer Levine’s imagined dialogue (trialogue?) that “Ivy Day” reads like a play, since this is more or less exactly what I wrote in my last blog post, except much better-articulated and fleshed out. That said, I don’t think it follows that we need to find some triumphant climax in Hynes’ performance – significance, perhaps, but not the emotional validation Jock tries to find in it throughout the essay. Jock seems to assume that “Men talk. I suppose you could add: men wait,”(277) is inherently incomplete – that there must be some purpose to it – but isn’t, say, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot an entire play that can be (over)simplified to “men wait”?

Jock’s rejection of Louisa’s suggestion that the response to Hynes’ performance could be read as awkward – that these people “aren’t particularly moved, but feel they should be”(284) – also bothered me, especially since he gets the last word on that particular topic when he suggests that it would reduce the story to “an exposé”(285). The implication here is that Jock’s emotional response to the story – what he sees as Joyce’s acceptance of the power of the common cliché – would be cheapened by this stiltedness. I, on the other hand, don’t think it follows that saying that these men want to be moved but aren’t is a condemnation of them, or shallow irony, or anything like that. That said, I don’t know quite how to interpret the moment, either – I’d like to discuss it in class.