The remora fish, one of a group of warm water fishes of the family Echeneidae, is characterized by an oval sucking disk on the top of its head. With this disk, the remora is able to attach itself to larger fish, sea turtles, and even small boats. It thus gets around effortlessly and feeds on scraps of prey discarded by its nautical host and on crustacean parasites with whom it shares the piggyback ride. This leech-like behaviour is not entirely parasitic, however. Ancient seafarers believed that remoras and other types of "pilot fish" had the ability to keep ships on course. Marine biologists theorize that these fish, when attached to or swimming alongside, say, a shark, act as pilots or guides. The shark and its pilot fish, including remoras, are often used in primary school as a paradigmatic illustration of symbiosis: the "association of two different organisms which live attached to each other, or one as tenant of the other, and contribute to each other's support."(1)
At first glance, it would appear that the relationship between Lenehan and Corley in Joyce's "Two Gallants" is nothing other than parasitic. We know that "Most people considered Lenehan a leech ... [who] had a brave manner of coming up to a party ... in a bar and of holding himself nimbly at the borders of the company until he was included in a round" (D 50). Hanging out with Corley, he is an enthusiastic sycophant, though not without a modicum of shameful self-awareness. We read that "To save himself he had the habit of leaving his flattery open to the interpretation of raillery" (D 52). Hence Lenehans's slightly mocking refrain when listening to Corley's tales of his exploits with women: "That takes the biscuit!" (D 50); "That takes the solitary, unique, and, if I may so call it, recherche biscuit!" (D 50); "that emphatically takes the biscuit" (D 51). It is, as Garry Leonard has trenchantly observed, as if Lenehan is "rewarding a dog for a well-executed trick."(2) Nonetheless, Lenehan lives vicariously through Corley and "suffered all the pangs and thrills of his friend's situation as well as those of his own" (D 59). We can presume that Lenehan will share in the spoils of Corley's latest caper, the small gold coin that the latter reveals to his "disciple" at the story's conclusion. Without Corley, or at least without other willing hosts, Lenehan's spirits dip and his self-esteem flags. In the Refreshment Bar, he is ill at ease and visualizing Corley's amorous adventure "made him feel keenly his own poverty of purse and spirit" (D 57). He dreams of settling down "in some snug corner" of his own "if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready" (D 58)--in other words, someone else he could live off of.
Corley is obviously the bigger fish in this relationship. He is the shark. It is Corley who gets women; it is Corley who wheedles gold coins from slaveys (or, more likely, from slaveys' employers) by virtue of his seductive power over the young servants. Although he clearly desires Lenehan's company and flattery, it is Corley who sets the pace and the course. As the two descend the hill of Rutland Square at the story's inception, Lenehan "walked on the verge of the path and was at times obliged to step in the road, owing to his companion's rudeness" (D 49). A few minutes later, when Lenehan questions his companion's ability to pull off the upcoming "ticklish job," we read that Corley "swung his head to and fro as if to toss aside an insistent insect" (D 53). Whether his gait and mannerisms would appear so jaunty without Lenehan by his side is questionable, however, for his movements are often responses to Lenehan's "piloting." In reply to one of the rhetorical biscuits tossed to him by his pal, "Corley's stride acknowledged the compliment. The swing of his burly body made his friend execute a few light steps from the path to the roadway and back again" (D 51). Shark and remora.
Their relationship is not so simple, however. Although Lenehan's sycophancy seems to represent one pole in what can be construed as a two-way, symbiotic relationship with Corley, the roles of shark and remora begin to coalesce if we examine more closely the friends' rapport and their places in the broader society around them. "Two Gallants"? Whose perspective is this? Clearly not the narrator's nor the reader's, for the two ne'er-do-wells in Joyce's tale are hardly fine gentlemen, noble ladies' men or men of fashion. It is probably not Corley's perspective either, for although he may see himself as gallant, he undoubtedly views Lenehan as the hanger-on that he is--one who can only imagine living Corley's life of seemingly endless amorous adventure. This point of view, that there are two gallants in the tale, is most likely Lenehan's, for although he seems to live in Corley's shadow, he too has "walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls" (D 58) and he too aspires to find a "good, simpled-minded girl" of his own "with a little of the ready." Like Corley, Lenehan too can talk seductively, cadging drinks with "a vast stock of stories, limericks, and riddles" (D 50), including epic tales of Corley's putative exploits, no doubt. Lenehan is, in other social contexts, himself a shark, surrounded by schools of remoras--but a shark in the sense of that term's figurative definition: "a worthless and impecunious person who gains a precarious living by sponging on others, by executing disreputable commissions, cheating at play and petty swindling: a parasite."(3) Two gallants, two sharks, symbiotically linked within a more extensive social chain of sycophantic gestures and relationships.
"Executing disreputable commissions." Although cited in the figurative definition for a shark, this trait lies at the etymological heart of sycophancy as well, for the latter term derives from the Greek sykophantia, the trade or occupation of an informer.(4) Lenehan's flattery of Corley places him in the commonly understood role of sycophant--that is, of a servile self-seeking flatterer--but Corley himself, who "was often to be seen walking with policemen in plain clothes, talking earnestly" (D 51) seems to be a stool pigeon, a sycophant in the classic sense whom the police tolerate and probably even remunerate in exchange for his surreptitious guidance. Moreover, Corley's seductive flattery of the slavey, though not precisely sycophancy, can be viewed along the same lines--that is, as a "mean or servile flattery" based on disreputable or at least questionable motives, for which Corley's women, or at least the most recent one, seem willing to pay.
We might construe this interplay of low-life wheedling in Joyce's "Two Gallants," this chain of symbiotic sycophancy as a kind of allegory for the phenomenology of seeking oneself through one's being-for-others--that is, being-for-others as that dimension of human reality through which one's Self exists "outside," as an object for others. Since Hegel, many have examined this existential phenomenon, this two-way street of being. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, sums up the relationship as follows: "By virtue of consciousness the Other is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my being from me and the one who causes 'there to be' a being which is my being."(5) The Other takes from me, while giving me in return my very existence as self-aware consciousness. It is a transaction that I cannot refuse for there is nothing less than my very freedom as consciousness at stake. Of course, I can willingly play this game, play up this symbiotic relationship on which my existence is propped, through sycophancy and flatterous seduction. To quote Sartre again: "By seduction [that is, by risking assumption of my object-state completely for the Other] I aim at constituting myself as a fullness of being and at making myself recognized as such."(6)
This idea is not new, not even in respect to "Two Gallants." Garry Leonard, drawing on Lacanian theory in his excellent book on Dubliners, remarks that "one experiences one's subjectivity only by becoming an object for someone else"(7) and that in "Two Gallants," "Joyce seems to be at pains to show that one's primary desire is to know who one is, but only as long as this knowledge corroborates what one already imagines oneself to be."(8) Thus our flattery of others, as Lenehan and Corley so well illustrate, is aimed primarily at constituting ourselves as the figures we aim to be and only secondarily at promoting the self-esteem of those others. To accomplish this existential initiative, we mortgage a degree of our subjectivity in exchange for some kind of objective recognition. We live off of others as we allow them to live off of us. All sycophancy is symbiotic on the existential plane, but the rewards of this sycophancy are often no more gratifying than those cadged by Lenehan. The sense of self one derives from others is dependent on those others, free consciousnesses themselves who can (and do) withdraw, at any moment, their support for that being which we aim to be and ceaselessly reconstitute us in new situations--a kind of existential deconstruction of self at the hands of others, with no purely authentic being to fall back on. In Corley's words, none of us are truly "up to the dodge" when it comes to realizing our being under the gaze of others. Lenehan and Corley, Lenehan and his drinking buddies, Corley and the slavey, the slavey and her employer, Lenehan and the woman of his dreams with "a little of the ready"--all act out the fundamental existential game of pursuing one's own being through being-for-others, of winning back the stolen aspects of one's self that others appropriate in the same stroke with which others create these ontological dimensions. At the same time and by our very upsurge in the world as consciousness, we influence and support these same phenomenological aspects of others' existence, all believing ourselves to be gallant in the eyes of others, except in those moments of authentic vision in which, as Lenehan might put it, we "feel keenly [our] own poverty of ... spirit," when we tire of "pulling the devil by the tail" in continually recurring existential "shifts and intrigues" (D 57).
Remora and shark, sycophancy and symbiosis. I'd like to introduce one more level of complication to this metaphoric structure, one that signals perhaps the evolution of Joyce's "Two Gallants" into their 21st century counterparts. In doing a Google search for information on the remora fish, I stumbled across a site on which another kind of shark swam. In an entry dated August 18, 2003, a fellow named Jon posted some tips on exceeding the speed limit on a U.S. superhighway, specifically the New Jersey Turnpike, without getting caught and ticketed by the police.(9) The surest approach to pulling off this "ticklish job" is simply to drive within a cluster of other speeding vehicles, the drivers of which will invariably all brake sharply down to the legal limit when passing a parked state patrolman. However, Jon goes on, there are times when "you'll want to speed without the benefit of a traffic cloud." Don't, he warns, but then continues: "If you're going to speed on an empty road, you need a remora fish. A good remora fish is a car that the cops would rather pull over than you[rs]." Examples of "good remora fish" are: (1) "any car with a whale tail spoiler that looks like it was made from an erector set"; (2) "any car that's expensive and everyone knows it" (BMWs, Porsches, for example) and (3) a kind of subset of number two, "SUVs. SUVs are overpriced and cost a fortune to fill at the pump," says Jon. "Therefore the drivers can easily pay the tickets. Cops know this. Hummers are almost guaranteed to get tickets just by existing." Humvees as the remora fish par excellence of the 21st century superhighway? Jon seems to have turned the traditional shark/remora dichotomy on its head, for the glamour role in this highway symbiosis is, at least in his mind, now played by the remora. A touch of resentment perhaps on the part of a traveller who, we presume, drives a less flashy vehicle, something more humble. Recall the touch of raillery that colours Lenehan's flattery of Corley and the plate of grocer's peas and ginger beer that Lenehan orders in the Refreshment Bar while awaiting the return of his flashier friend with the misappropriated gold coin. Recall also Corley's undercover relationship with the police, his sykophantia, an arrangement which undoubtedly earns him a free pass or two for minor civil infractions for which other Dubliners would certainly have to pay. To get a free ride in this world, whether in 1904 Dublin or 2004 New Jersey, it is important to lie low and not call too much attention to oneself, to "hold oneself nimbly on the borders of the company" as Lenehan does to get drinks, and to flatter both the sharks and the remoras--to be, in fact, both shark and remora interchangeably, as the situation dictates, through careful investment of one's subjectivity in being-for-others. The benefits, though hardly gallant, are symbiotically mutual and may even amount to a bit of gold in the end--for what it's worth.
(c) Jim LeBlanc, 2006