Published in 1914, this is the first major work by James Joyce (1882-1941).

And it's another post that has lingered. A little like The Bee Sting... Both times I hesitated to write anything, because I didn't have sufficient time to digest and process work that was really good (albeit in very different ways).

I read Dubliners (a collection of 15 short stories) over Christmas and New Year (three months ago, then). It was another book that I tackled in the company of Henry Eliot's book group, and the timing was very fitting. The last and longest story, The Dead, is set at a Twelfth Night party.

I was still in Kuching at that point. Life was busy. But my audio-version (brilliantly read by Chris O'Dowd) filled my ears with Irish voices and atmosphere. The dialogue, even when conveyed in indirect speech, is FANTASTIC. Joyce has such an ear, and this quality is really enhanced by the audio-version.

Consumed that way, the stories were particularly powerful. They're very varied. Some are instantly accessible, and terribly poignant. For others (particularly the political allegories), I needed a bit of help from our mentor.



My previous Joyce experience is scant, and it all goes back to the autumn of 2023. We were in Trieste, which is Joyce country, and concurrently I read A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I admired it, but noted in that post that I felt "somewhat inexpert reading it". This was again the case, although Dubliners is the more accessible of the two books.

It's set in Dublin (obviously): "I always write about Dublin," Eliot quotes Joyce as saying, "because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world."

Reproduced here is an interesting letter from Joyce, dated May 1906: "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order."

Paralysis... An idea to come back to.

But it was a struggle to get Dubliners published, as is summarized here: "Joyce first submitted it (without The Dead [the final story]) in 1905, when he was only 23 years old. In 1907, only 25 years old, he finished The Dead [the last story and a kind of coda] and still no publisher wanted to take it on... Publishers were frightened of what they were reading and frightened of what would happen if they had their names attached to the published edition. The stories were too familiar (in some cases so familiar the publishers feared they might instigate a law suit for libel)."

And here's that letter again, with Joyce asserting: "I cannot alter what I have written. All these objections of which the printer is now the mouthpiece arose in my mind when I was writing the book, both as to the themes of the stories and their manner of treatment. Had I listened to them I would not have written the book. I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people."

Even once published, Dubliners was not initially a commercial success (it sold just a few hundred copies in its first year).



***

Don't look here for a detailed dissection of these stories. Good places to start for anyone requiring that are:

-- Oliver Tearle's introduction page, which includes links to analyses of the individual stories;
-- The Mookes and the Gripes blog (ditto); and
-- a detailed essay on Nasrullah Mambrol's Literariness, with background and summaries.

But here's a quick rundown of the contents, grouped according to those categories Joyce mentioned.

Childhood

1. The Sisters: The death of a priest, and a boy's recollections of his friendship with this rather ambivalent person. It's a great introduction to the modernist art of not saying things... There are gaps, evasions, and suppressions, leaving us very much in charge of filling in the meaning ourselves. David G. Wright homes in on the inconclusive ending of this first piece: "By placing this story at the beginning of the collection and giving it such a cryptic conclusion, Joyce prevents readers from glibly expecting explicitness and closure in the stories to follow. The ending of The Sisters not only accentuates the uncertainties of its own story, but anticipates uncertainties which still lie ahead."

2. The Encounter: Another rather creepy story, in which some boys at play meet a very strange character, who has a distinctly prurient style of speech, and a troubling fixation with chastising boys... The other element to this story, as Sheila O'Malley pinpoints, is the dissatisfaction it expresses: "In order to live a full and free life, one MUST leave Ireland." And certainly, the narrator contemplates his love of Wild West stories, and muses: "I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad." It's certainly sad that the little adventure described here culminates in meeting this "queer old josser", as Mahony describes him.

3. Araby: A young boy relates his frustrated quest to buy his neighbour's sister a present from the bazaar of the title. It's a tale of difficulties and disappointed hopes.

Joyce said that these first three stories were all drawn from his own childhood. For Anne Michels, all these children "are confronted with the stark reality of the paralysis of the adults that should be providing them guidance... They are looking for guidance from those who cannot even provide it for themselves."


Trieste, 2023. Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners while living in this city

Adolescence

4. Eveline: A girl who is dominated by an abusive father, for whom she housekeeps, now that her mother is dead, meets Frank, a sailor. He offers her the chance of a new life with him, "in a distant unknown country". Before her is "the pitiful vision of her mother's life... that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness". And yet she can't bring herself to follow Frank. Frozen, and unable to forge a new path in life, she turns away, and lets Frank board the ship alone. I took this story at face value, and it's moving just read that way. But Henry Eliot pointed out that Joyce is offering us an allegory of Irish paralysis here -- showing us a nation that clings to the dead and hopeless past, and refuses to reach out to a new existence.

5. After the Race: Comfortably off Jimmy Doyle and an international group of friends spend the evening after a big car race meandering around Dublin, talking, getting drunk, and playing cards. One of the party, an Englishman, ends up winning... Another allegory? Mambrol notes that the background for the story came from an interview conducted with French racing driver Henri Fournier in 1903: "The information that came from Fournier would allow Joyce to contrast the international perspectives of the men who participated in this emerging sport with the insistent provincialism of the citizens of Dublin... After the Race portrays Jimmy’s emotional entrapment, or paralysis, in a tone of chilling finality that belies his material security... Thus, if the wealthy Jimmy Doyle embodies the hopes for social acceptance of an affluent Irish Catholic upper-middle class, the success of that prospect remains uncertain."

6. Two Gallants: Initially, I found this fairly bewildering... According to Eliot, the printer initially didn't want to publish it, as he found it tawdry, but Joyce championed it, calling it "one of the most important stories in the book". It features two highly unlikeable men: One (a womanizer of the misogynistic sort) is arranging to meet a servant he wants to chat up with the aim of extracting money from her; the other ("a leech") is planning to marry "some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready". But it's not just about men taking advantage of women; it also contrasts the exploitative presence of the British, who wring gain from every situation, and the apathy of the Irish. Eliot quotes Jeri Johnson's introduction to one of the many editions of Dubliners: "Joyce thickens the historical comment by interlarding the story with precise references to streets and buildings which bear the names of those who, particularly in the period of the Protestant Ascendancy’s greatest strength [this was the Anglo-Irish landed gentry class], not only 'oppressed' Ireland but were rewarded for doing so."


A map of the Two Gallants' route. Just one of many on that site. Dublin calls...

7. The Boarding House: Here our focus is on Mrs Mooney, who left her violent husband to set up an apparently successful lodging house. She is angling to trap one of her boarders (Bob Doran) into marrying her daughter, Polly. For Mambrol, "The story’s events reflect in miniature a critique of the broader sexual and marital tensions of Irish life... As the reader glimpses details of the lives of Mrs. Mooney, Polly, and Bob Doran, it becomes evident that none of the characters has any real options to exercise. Rather, the weight of social convention immediately overwhelms the opportunity for choice, ensuring that every decision made by every character is a foregone conclusion from the opening lines to the end."

Michels sums up this section: "These are perhaps the most frightening stories in Dubliners, because these young adults just close their eyes to the reality of what they have become. They are setting themselves up for a lifetime of paralysis, and making the same mistakes that their parents before them had made -- which are presumably the same mistakes that they will push their own children into when the time comes. These stories seem to be Joyce's fear for the future of Ireland. He hopes that Ireland realizes what it has become, that it would rather be a comfortable monster than break free of the pitiful existence in which it is trapped."


"In Joyce’s days the Stella Polare cafe was a popular place with the Berlitz staff [Joyce's colleagues]. Between 1907 and 1908 it was here that Joyce read to his brother the stories he had completed and some chapters of the Portrait". The inscription says that coffee, to be good, must be black as night, sweet as love, and hot as hell"

Maturity

8. A Little Cloud: This story features two men, "Little Chandler" and Gallaher, meeting after a long period of separation. Gallaher, with "his travelled air, his well-cut tweed suit, and fearless accent", fancies himself as a man of the world. The two men's conversation makes Little Chandler uneasy. On the one hand, he's judgemental. His friend seems a little vulgar. Gaudy, even... On the other, he's definitely envious of Gallaher. How did he do it, when he was Little Chandler's inferior both in birth and education? It was his own "unfortunate timidity" that had stood in his way, he concludes... And Gallaher's remarks about marriage -- there's no way he'll put his "head in the sack" unless he finds someone rich -- strike another dissonant chord with Little Chandler, newly married and a father. When he goes home, he feels he is immediately consumed by domestic duties; his wife seems conventional, and his domestic environment cheap. "A dull resentment against his life awoke within him... Was it too late for him to try to live bravely like Gallagher?" The child starts to cry, and he feels more trapped than ever: "It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life." He yells at the child, who cries harder, terrified. His wife takes the baby, and stares at him with hatred; Little Chandler is enveloped by shame and remorse. And there the curtain falls... A devastating story... And again, Joyce underlines: "There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin."

9. Counterparts: Another story about a struggling man, who's a little too fond of the drink... Farrington is shown up by his boss at work, and by an Englishman in the pub: "He was full of smouldering anger and revengefulness. He felt humiliated and discontented... He cursed everything." And then he goes home, and takes it all out on his little son... Horribly believable... Another very powerful story.

10. Clay: Here we meet Maria. She's a selfless, good, but fundamentally lonely person, who is somehow tinged by death. At the Hallowe'en party she attends, they play the "saucer game", which involves placing saucers on a table, each containing an item that foretells the future when a blindfolded person reaches out to touch it (a ring for a wedding, for example, or water for a trip across the sea, or a prayer-book for a vocation as a priest or nun -- or clay for a death within the year...) Poor Maria cops "a soft wet substance" (which, given the title and the guests' reaction, we figure must be clay...) "There was a pause for a few seconds; and then a great deal of scuffling and whispering... Maria understood that it was wrong that time and so she had to do it over again: and this time she got the prayer-book." When she later sings I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls, she leaves out the second verse about a woman being wooed by suitors. No-one mentions the apparent error. Shivers...

11. A Painful Case: Mr Duffy, a man not entirely comfortable with himself, gets talking to a woman at a concert, one Mrs Sinico, wife of a sea captain. They meet again at other concerts, and set up further rendezvous. But Duffy insists on being asked to the house, where Captain Sinico assumes he has come to woo his daughter: "He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her." She seems to be in love with Duffy. But he backs off... Four years pass. And then he learns of her death. She was tragically knocked down by a train. When her husband gives evidence at the inquest, he testifies that two years ago, Mrs Sinico had started to drink, and so the coroner absolves everyone of blame. Duffy is initially repulsed: "Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous." But as he continues to think it over, he starts to feel ill at ease. Should he have acted differently? He realizes how lonely she must have been, and how lonely he will be: "One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame... He felt that he was alone."

Michels sums up this section like this: "The people in these stories are experiencing an intense loneliness, cut off from the world around them, but are too paralyzed to seek real camaraderie from their fellow Dubliners."


The rest of the photos in this post depict Trieste

Public Life

12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room: I definitely needed a bit of help with this one... The day referred to in its title (which is 6 October) commemorates Irish nationalist Charles Steward Parnell. It's the most overtly political of the stories, and I'm going to quote Mambrol again, as he's across the detail in a way I absolutely wasn't: "The story centers on a number of professional campaign workers of various political loyalties who have, for reasons of expediency, accepted employment from 'Tricky Dicky' Tierney (a candidate for local office). They are canvassing various parts of the ward to solicit votes for him. At the end of the day, these men gather in Wicklow Street at the Royal Exchange Ward office of the Nationalist ticket. There, they drink stout and express cynical opinions relating to the current municipal elections, the political process, and the various politicians whom they have encountered." We're offered an "impression of human failure, weakness, and self-delusion as the dominant features in their lives". Despite all the negativity, however, they're all inspired by the memory of Parnell after Joe Hynes recites his poem about the death of their hero. For Mambrol, their enthusiasm for a somewhat inferior poem suggests something of a distortion in their sense of the political past. I don't know, though... There is something stirring about it... And Mambrol does concede: "The undeniable sincerity of Hynes’s recitation and of the verses themselves are in stark contrast to the apathy and the hypocrisy of the present day."

13. A Mother: This one describes the staging of a patriotic music recital. At its centre is Mrs Kearney, who vigorously champions her daughter's rights as a performer, but ends up jeopardizing the young woman's future prospects altogether. Martin F. Kearney examines how interpretations of his namesake's role have changed over time, and suggests she was modelled on Anne Devlin, the hero of the failed 1803 Dublin uprising, and therefore "continues the thematic thread of failed nationalistic enterprises".

14. Grace: Like Counterparts, this one takes a look at the effects of alcohol, and puts religion under the microscope into the bargain. One Kernan, a commercial traveller, falls down unconscious in the pub one night. He's rescued, and his friends persuade him to go with them to a Catholic retreat. "We'll make a new man of him," one of them promises his wife. This was another that I didn't know quite what to make of. I wondered whether our commercial traveller had actually undergone some actual transformation as he learns about the necessity to keep accounts with God (surely a fair enough way of putting it), or whether the story is instead Joyce's swipe at complacency and the watering down of religion. Sheila O'Malley definitely argues for the latter: "Grace? You have got to be kidding me. With these idiots? They mean well, but they're ignorant. Joyce’s anger at the Catholic Church is behind all of this -- but, like the master he already is (at 23 years of age) -- he doesn't ever state his anger outright. It's implied... Misinformation passed on, things misquoted, totally untrue stories passed on as true... The thing with Joyce is, and this is key: take NOTHING at face value. You’ll miss the whole point... If [for Joyce] you are seeking 'grace', the last place you will find it is in the Catholic Church. Ireland hated him for this. He was not forgiven." OK, well, that sounds quite convincing...



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Coda

15. The Dead: Which is just brilliant. And needs a whole section to itself...

This story is set on the day of the Epiphany (6 January), and we're at the Misses Morkan's annual dance, which "was always a great affair". Gabriel Conroy (often understood to be a reflection of Joyce himself) is the central character. He's educated (he teaches, and writes book reviews for the press); he's a little condescending, a little pernickety; but he CAN, unlike most of the other characters, be jolted into seeing things differently.

The first part of the story relates the event. It's very funny at times. (Joyce often has a wonderfully comic turn of phrase. When Aunt Kate, for example, observes that the awful Mr Browne seems to be everywhere, Mary Jane agrees that he's very attentive. "'He has been laid on here like the gas,' said Aunt Kate in the same tone, 'all during the Christmas.'") And yet, into a relatively small number of fast-moving pages, Joyce squeezes so many important themes:

-- The atmosphere of a party; the worry that some guest will turn up "screwed"; the embarrassment caused by that same Mr Browne; the little anxieties of the hostesses; the food...

-- The changing times. "Goloshes, Julia! ... Goodness me, don't you know what goloshes are?" But new-fangled goloshes aren't the half of it. "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you," complains Lily, the housemaid, who obviously has some back-story that is making her miserable. And Gabriel is uncertain about society's direction, too. As he says in his speech: "Sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day."

-- How to be Irish (a la Miss Ivors or in the style of Gabriel?). She lambastes him for writing for The Daily Express ("I didn't think you were a West Briton"), and for choosing holiday destinations outside Ireland ("and why do you go to France and Belgium... instead of visiting your own land?"), and for not speaking Irish. Pushed too far, he finally bursts out: "O, to tell you the truth... I'm sick of my own country, sick of it!"



The second part of the story involves Gabriel's wife, Gretta. She has already been foreshadowed as standing apart: "There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something." In this second section, we learn more about her.

Gretta has been really moved by a song she'd heard that evening: The Lass of Aughrim. It used to be sung by someone she knew in Galway many years ago. Michael Furey was his name. Gabriel is instantly jealous. But there's nothing to be jealous of. Michael is dead. He died at the age of 17; he used to have a job at the gasworks.

Gabriel is utterly discomfited by this information. He feels Gretta is comparing him to this dead person, and finding him wanting. Then she explains: "I think he died for me." They were great friends, but she was about to be sent to convent school, and because he was ill, she wasn't allowed to see him. The night before she's due to leave, he visits her, standing at the end of the garden, shivering. He tells her he does not want to live, and a week later, he was dead.

Death has already been stalking the pages... The Misses Morkan are aging, after all. How soon will it be before everyone is back at their house for a funeral? And here are a few sentences from the close:

"One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live...

"The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling...

"It had begun to snow again... Snow was general all over Ireland... It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

How very, very beautiful...


I feel as though Joyce constructs his sentences with this kind of finesse...

***

Dubliners famously revolves around paralysis and epiphanies. I've noted quite a few examples of the former. What about the latter? Gabriel's is the most striking. Some would say it's the only real epiphany in that it genuinely does lead to a changed mindset.

But Michels does a great job of winkling out the nature of the other epiphanies:

"[Joyce] believed that the people of Ireland had the capacity, but lacked the true desire, to come to a realization about their situation... Physically, emotionally and sexually, the people of his Dubliners could do no more than float through a life that barely scratched the surface of what they could truly experience... However, Joyce planted in each individual story the possibility of awakening... It is the individuals of Ireland that he hopes, or more accurately wishes, can save his country. He holds out little hope that the larger movements of Irish Nationalism will end the paralysis."

Often the epiphany comes in the form of a negative realization. The children in the first section, for example, realize that the adults in their lives are pretty flaky. The adults, on the other hand, are confronted with lives that they are not in control of, but this moment of clarity does not affect their actions: "Joyce couldn't simply allow each of his characters to realize their problems and come out victorious. Life doesn't work like that, and Ireland didn't work like that. The only way to show how close the people of Dublin could be to a true epiphany was to show how close they could be while still ignoring the awful truth."

The reader's epiphany involves coming to terms with the frightening reality "that people as a whole are not willing to break away from the norm, no matter how terrible it is".

Michels quotes another letter from Joyce, written during his long struggle for publication: "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass."

Interesting, both as a declaration of intent, and as a startling demonstration of self-belief... (Surely, one solid reason I never became a famous academic, and will probably never become a famous novelist either, is that I utterly lack that kind of unshakeable self-belief...)

Joyce, Michels continues, was initially deemed apolitical because he rejected nationalism. Critics focused on his style, rather than the motivation behind his jibes at the government, the church, and academia. And yet there's a clear political project here: "It is now clear that Joyce's collection of short stories is not only a history of the city of Dublin, but also a wish for its salvation. Joyce was advocating deliverance, not only from the oppression of England, but from the paralyzing effects of the oppression from within Ireland itself."



***

One more note, which is about the Isle of Man... It's mentioned in two of the stories:

In The Boarding House, Mrs Mooney's establishment "had a floating population made up of tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally, artistes from the music-halls".

And in A Little Cloud, we have this exchange:

Gallaher says: "'You’d want to knock about a bit in the world. Have you never been anywhere even for a trip?'
"'I’ve been to the Isle of Man,' said Little Chandler.
"Ignatius Gallaher laughed.
"'The Isle of Man!' he said. 'Go to London or Paris: Paris, for choice. That’d do you good.'"

Of course, I followed this up (how could I not?), and found an article by Simon Collister that charts the references to the Island throughout Joyce's oeuvre. It's in Ulysses that his interest really takes off. There we have the House of Key(e)s; the Three Legs of Man; and ideas about home rule. In Finnegans Wake, "we find once more the Isle of Man, its history and political status littered throughout", clearly indicating that Joyce knew the Island "in immense detail".

Collister elaborates here: "Joyce knew the Isle of Man and was certainly aware of the two colonies' shared history and culture... When asked in later life if he would ever return to Ireland from self-imposed exile to accept a national honour, he replied that the Isle of Man was as close as he would ever get.

"It is possible that Joyce saw the Island as representing a desired shared future for the two countries -- with greater independence for Ireland achieved through home rule, a key theme in Joyce’s upbringing and adult life. Home rule was seen as a progressive, 'third-way' solution for Irish independence avoiding more extreme nationalism. His family were staunch followers of Charles Stewart Parnell, a moderate Irish nationalist leader and primary mover for Irish home rule."

OK, so one day I'm going to have to at least tackle Ulysses...

And I very much feel that a trip to Ireland is in order. It has been way too long...