Dubliners in this edition
Dead-ends in Dublin
Each portrait in Joyce’s Dubliners is of a person either trapped by the customs and social structure of Dublin (A Little Cloud, Clay, After the Race, Boarding House) or struggling with his (rarely her) imagination to visualize a more satisfactory life (Araby, Dead, Grace). In all cases the result is less than satisfactory, and several characters realize that leaving Dublin is essential to finding a different life (Eveline, A Little Cloud, Dead). However, a number have been so beaten down by their lives that they can no longer even visualize anything different (Counterparts) and may flee almost is terror if an alternative is offered (Eveline, A Painful Case). Interwoven in the stories is a comic awareness that Dubliners’ own choices create their problems which they are powerless to resolve, as in After the Race, Two Gallants, Ivy Day in the Committee Room and Dead. Joyce makes clear that a person without imagination, a willingness to cope with disorder and a thirst for adventure, especially abroad, will never escape the thralls of Dublin.
Melancholy colors most of these short stories, even when vigorous dialog by interesting characters engaged in daily events is the focus. There is a feeling that nothing substantial will change, that Irish traditions, beliefs and religion rigidly mold the characters’ lives and decisions. However Joyce’s ability to capture his characters’ native vitality and sense that life even in its narrow framework can be partially enjoyed makes his stories more than just sad tales. His male characters may not understand that their inclination to drunkenness is an evidence of their subliminal awareness of the unsatisfactory narrowness of their lives, just as the anger of his females may be directed at the men as the most obvious cause of their own limited lives. Rarely does a character realize the central role of the Catholic Church in creating this bubbling discontent, although it is humorously depicted by Joyce in “Grace” when his characters are eager to defend every incomprehensible Papal decision due to Papal infallibility, a concept that was strongly rejected by a German and an Irish cardinal when first proposed. In a final ironic twist, the Pope himself, to end the controversy, declares his infallibility, whereupon the German cardinal leaves the church, while the Irish cardinal immediately declares that, yes, the Pope is infallible, and he now agrees and accepts this doctrine.
In a nutshell, this is the problem of Joyce’s characters--their reason may know something isn’t reasonable, but their emotional response is to adjust themselves to the situation rather than working for any true change. In the sad case of the Irish martyrs for freedom from British rule, even their sacrifices can be swept aside by thoughts of the financial benefit from a visit by the English king. With his portraits of a broad selection of lower-class and aspiring middle-class Irish, Joyce finds the same limitations in all of them, as if their history had so conditioned them that no one could escape its influence as long as they lived in a country that continued to prize its tragic history as a model for behavior. In a sense this early version of the influence of history and myth upon a people is a foreshadowing of what Joyce will later do with the myth of Ulysses that underlies his great novel.
According to Harry Levin in his Preface to Dubliners, Joyce said the collection of stories is arranged as a “series of chapters in the moral history of his community, and the episodes are arranged in careful progression from childhood to maturity, broadening from private to public scope” (17) Indeed, the narrator in the early stories is either a young man or the focus is on juvenile experiences, starting with “Sisters” where the boy resents being called a child as he tries to understand the unorthodox position of his favorite Catholic priest. In a very short story Joyce encapsulates many complexities of youth: the role and meaning of religion, adult behavior and the longing for home as respite from worldly burdens. What Joyce called “epiphanies” is a good descriptor of each story that seems like a glimpse through a torn curtain into a world at a critical moment. The reader is allowed to see how the characters respond to a situation, and certain important details are given along with allusions to events outside the specific incident, which allow the reader’s mind to expand into undescribed parts of that world. Specific realistic details create a strong sense of the environment without the tedious catalogs of details that a lesser writer employs. In this way, with the reader more actively involved in the creation of the story’s environment, Joyce’s short story has more life and vitality.
In particular “Araby,” in very few words, captures a young boy’s adolescent longing for a neighborhood girl and his romantic attempt to delight her by attending a bazaar that she cannot visit. His hopes are dashed by his indifferent uncle who returns too late to give him money, so that the bazaar is closing when he arrives, and his dreams of regaling the girl with his exploits comes to nothing, as indeed do most of the dreams of Joyce’s Dubliners.
With elegant, incisive prose Joyce gives the reader insight into the impoverished lives of these simple working people. Apparently one reason the collection was originally rejected for publication was because characters could be linked to living Dubliners, but none of the stories seems like a simple naturalistic description of real people. Every portrait is sharpened to bring out an individual’s specific characteristics, mostly by brief descriptions of what the character does or says. Although there may be an ironic tinge to some of these descriptions of Irish behavior, there is little to no interior monolog or psychological explanation (except in The Dead, when the main character is modeled on Joyce himself); rather the reader must intuit the interior thoughts that result in specific acts.
The final short story, “The Dead,” focuses on the annual ball given by two elderly women who epitomize the Irish celebration of tradition, one of the chief causes for the inability of the Irish to accept change and modernization. Their annual Christmas celebration, with its tempting traditional foods, spirited singing and dancing, along with drinking (sometimes to excess), creates a comfortable feeling of conviviality and comradeship, which thinly veneers underlying antagonisms. One is that between the Catholic majority at the party and the lone Protestant, Mr. Browne, who behaves somewhat offensively (“He had assumed a very low Dublin accent so that the young ladies, with one instinct, received his speech in silence,” 199) and seems ignorant of Catholic practices (monks who sleep in their coffins), but nonetheless he is irrepressibly himself despite genteel expressions of Catholic distaste. Another is that caused by the Irish super-patriot, Molly Ivors, a fellow student of Gabriel Conroy (the main character in this story), who chides and mocks Gabriel (“She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit’s eyes,” 207) because he favors traveling to the Continent and keeping up his “foreign languages” rather than going to the desolate Aran Islands and working on his Irish. “Well,” said Gabriel, “if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language” (205) ... “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (206). However, this is an argument he cannot win, because underlying the belief that Irish traditions are as valuable as those of other countries is an Irish insecurity about these very traditions and an inability to discuss them in a rational manner.
Gabriel, who has attended these gatherings for many years, has reached a stage in his life when he is discovering the incongruity between his needs and those of his relatives. He wants to include in his after-dinner speech some sophisticated references to the poetry of Robert Browning, a Scottish poet, but upon reflection decides that these “two ignorant old women” (209), his aunts, and the rest of the gathering won’t appreciate such cultural remarks (“their grade of culture differed from him... They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them,” 195). Looking ridiculous, even if it means denying his own values and ideas, is to be avoided, as his mother “was very sensible of the dignity of family life” (203). In order for him to fit into the convivial atmosphere he opts instead to hypocritically praise Irish hospitality, even while slyly noting, “Some would say, perhaps, that with us it is rather a failing than anything to be boasted of” (220). The evening draws to its inevitable close, and despite its deficiencies, Gabriel feels an awakened tenderness toward his wife, whom he sees standing in a romantic attitude listening to a plaintive Irish melody. Walking to the carriage with her, “Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory” (231), and he begins to fantasize about his love for her, remembering one of his declarations of love as “Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?” (232). He revels in his possession of her, their “moments of ecstasy” (232) and his “arms were trembling with desire to seize her” (233), but he wants her to reciprocate that desire, “He must see some ardour in her eyes first. He longed to be master of her strange mood” (235). He fantasizes that “her thoughts had been running with his,” so he asks her, egoistically saying, “I think I know what is the matter” (236). When she reveals that she has been thinking about a young man from her youth, a tender pure love, who had come to say good-bye to her and stood in the rain although he was already ill with consumption, who wouldn’t go home “But he said he did not want to live” (240), Gabriel realizes that not only his public but also his private life is not authentic. “She had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow” (238). He had never known such a love, had never known his wife nor even himself, and now he realizes that “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. ...His own identity was fading out into a gray impalpable world: the solid world itself, which those dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling” (242). The final image of the story is that of snow falling softly and deadeningly over all of Ireland, placing a cold blanket over the dead and the non-living. As a great storyteller, Joyce does not spell out for the reader what Gabriel will do next, but the implicit assumption is that he now realizes he must learn to live differently, which will only be outside of Ireland. There is no future for him in a country that has no present but only a past.
The world of Joyce’s Dublin is long gone, although it lives on in these insightful stories. Irish devotion to their traditions and culture still endures, but now, perhaps ironically, Joyce’s own visions of Ireland have become part of the cultural dialectic, opening that culture to a deeper understanding of itself and its values.