"Dubliners" by James Joyce

 

James Joyce 1882-1941

For several weeks, we've been tracing the development and influence of naturalism, a literary movement that broke with the conventions of Victorian prose style. Naturalism is a crucial link between nineteenth century prose and the development of modernism that defined literature in the twentieth century. Naturalist prose introduced a more streamlined writing style and explored taboo themes and portrayed people, their motivations, behavior and the environment in which they exist in a more objective and realistic way.

First, we looked at Irish author George Moore's novel Esther Waters, a book that took a frank, unflinching look at the life of a single, illiterate mother in nineteenth century London. Moore questioned entrenched cultural beliefs about poverty, morality, religion and the social and economic hardships faced by the poor. We also explored Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, a rags-to-riches story (and vice versa) that openly questioned the American dream of economic and social mobility that equates ambition with virtue and poverty with moral failing.

Then we backtracked to explore A Sportsman's Sketches, a collection of short stories by Russian author Ivan Turgenev, a book that explored the harsh realities of life for Russian peasants during the waning days of Russia's feudal landowning system. After that, we traced the naturalist influence to another of George Moore's works, The Untilled Field (1903), another collection of short stories about life in Ireland about twenty years before independence that was directly influenced by Turgenev's book. In this work, Moore's stories show us a nation searching for its identity as the Catholic church's intrusive influence on the everyday lives of Irish peasants, deeply rooted economic problems and widespread emigration to America threatened Ireland's future.

Now we come to another collection of stories that follow the naturalist thread in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914), a book that helped to secure Joyce's reputation as one of the world's most accomplished and influential authors while putting Ireland on the world cultural map. George Moore set the table for the emergence of a unique, distinctly Irish literary voice which turned out to be that of James Joyce. His work helped pave the way for modernism, a stylistic tide that spilled well beyond Ireland's geographical and cultural borders to influence world literature. Not bad for a guy who struggled for a decade to even get his stories published.

Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce

The mere mention of his name puts fear in the hearts of undergraduates, but don't worry; Dubliners is the most readable of James Joyce's works, although his prose is densely packed with meaning more implied than stated. By withholding information through the literary device of gnomon, the parts that are missing tell the real story. As a result, these stories break with narrative tradition by not resolving dramatically. He doesn't tell you what to think of the characters he draws, but relies on your ability to draw your own conclusions. Joyce would further shed conventions as his stream-of-consciousness narrative style became more pronounced in the novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. a brilliant but notoriously difficult and inscrutable work that still confounds even the most adventurous of readers. Nine out of ten people who claim to have read it are trying to impress and/or seduce you. (Just for the record, I haven't read it. I glimpsed a few pages once and became a little dizzy for a day or so, but I'm okay now.)

Whereas Turgenev's Sketches depicted the Russian peasantry as oppressed by an inherently unjust feudal system and Moore's book targeted the Catholic church's stranglehold on the mind and soul of the Irish peasant and explored the roots and consequences of Ireland's cultural identity crisis, Joyce concentrates on the day-to-day life of those in the urban Irish middle class. Many of the same forces are at work in Dubliners, but the conflicts are played out in psychological terms as each story gives us a view of the world from the main character's limited but revealing perspective. Joyce's protagonists wrestle with existential problems like inertia, crises of conscience, mental illness, alcoholism, family dysfunction and abuse, political conflicts, social ambition, piety, marriage and death--a veritable laundry list of issues dealt with in the next hundred years of fiction.

Dubliners contains thirteen unrelated stories, but taken linearly, these stories span the major stages of life from childhood to old age.  Each major character undergoes an epiphany about themselves and their circumstances, Sometimes these personal revelations are realistic, sometimes misguided, but always profound. I could write an essay about each of the stories, but here I'll limit myself to an overview of some of the stories and their themes.

Right from the get go, there's something distinctive about Joyce's words, as though his stories were pieces of sculpture. In Dubliners, fiction, like sculpture, is a subtractive medium, and we are to make sense of what the author hasn't taken away.. In "The Sisters", the passing of a mentally ill priest gives a young boy who was close to him his first experience of death and family and friends speak only indirectly about the man's troubles. Two boys encounter an odd. possibly perverted old man while playing hookey from school in "The Encounter", which deals with childhood friendships. Gnomon is consistently at work. We're as much in the dark about what befell the dying priest as the young boy, although as readers, we pick up on clues that he would miss; something sinister is implied in a way that has greater impact than explicitly stating it.

Young, idealistic love is the subject of "Araby", in which a teenage boy experiences the painful self consciousness of infatuation in a culture of sexual repression. His trip to a fair to buy her a gift ends in frustration and he returns home empty handed. The depth of his disappointment is in proportion to his unrealistic idea of love. This is the first of several foiled journeys that bring characters back full circle when they try to leave or change their circumstances.

In "Eveline", a young woman desperately seeking to escape her abusive father by marrying a sailor and sailing for Buenos Aires lacks the courage to follow through. Joyce draws our attention to descriptive details of her home and her possessions which give clues to her history and inner struggles.  In "A Little Cloud", unrealized dreams of a literary life haunt Little Chandler after dining with a friend who is a successful writer. He returns to his home in a foul mood, reminded of the shackles placed on him by his wife and child. Chandler's responses to his environment--in this case, drinking a bit too much in the presence of his former friend and being driven to the brink of brutality by his infant son's cries--tell us more than any explicit account of his state of mind. His fate, it would seem, was sealed by decisions he made long ago.

Three stories deal with social ambition. "The Race" is about a young man eager to impress his new, rich friends from school and to be successful in business. In "A Mother", Mrs. Kearny alienates those around her by being pushy as she zealously advocates for a promised performance fee at a charity variety show on her daughter's behalf. The proprietor in "The Boarding House" and her daughter craftily manipulate a lodger into marriage. It's interesting to note that he protagonists of these stories are, not surprisingly, the least inclined to struggle with the moral implications of their actions, and so we gain perhaps a little less insight into their thoughts and feelings.

Joyce's well chosen words evoke a nausea-free pathos that makes potentially melodramatic situations poignant rather than pathetic. Death, grief and guilt are dealt with squarely in "A Painful Case" when a circumspect middle aged man rebuffs a married woman's advances and is stricken with remorse when he learns of her pitiful, alcohol-fueled demise a few years later. His efforts to try to do the right thing result in doing a far greater injury. "Counterparts" depicts a scrivener's demise from drink and the resultant domestic abuse frankly and directly. He is a man paralyzed by his habits that endanger his job, his finances and his family. Anyone raised as an Irish Catholic, practicing or otherwise, can recognize the heavy burden of living with the moral implications of even well intentioned actions gone wrong, and no one portrays the psychological clash of intention versus consequences mixed with grief and alcoholism in quite the way Joyce does.

Three stories deal with community life, specifically the uncertainty and insecurity that arises when people see themselves in relation to those around them and whose actions fall well short of their ideals and beliefs. "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" deals most directly with the struggle for Irish independence as a small group of men campaigning for an upcoming election find themselves lacking in the looming shadow of deceased Nationalist leader Charles Parnell. "Grace" finds a group of middle class men giving lip service to the merits of temperance and spiritual values in the most agreeable, superficial and often erroneous ways. During a spiritual retreat intended to renew their commitment to spiritual values, even the priest reinforces their limited vision of themselves and their responsibilities. "The Dead", a novella-length story, is the most famous piece from this collection due to numerous adaptations for film and the stage. At a Christmas party (celebrating, in fact, the Feast of the Epiphany--get it?), Gabriel is painfully self conscious, so concerned with how others see him that after hearing his wife tell him the story of a former lover who died young, he considers whether dying young before having the chance to accrue more misdeeds and blunders is better than growing old.

This was a difficult work to put in a nutshell, but reading it is pure pleasure. Joyce's work has been analyzed to the hilt by many folks far more qualified that I am. There's no shortage of material about Joyce's works out there. If this book speaks to you, there are plenty of resources out there.

Next time, we'll conclude our series about naturalism by looking at Thérèse Raquin, the 1867 novel by naturalist granddaddy Émile Zola.

Download Dubliners from Project Gutenberg