Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue

Irish Studies, Syracuse University Press

by Vicki Mahaffey (Editor)

Enigmatic, vivid, and terse, James Joyce’s Dubliners continues both to puzzle and to compel its readers. This collection of essays by thirty contributors from seven countries presents a revolutionary view of Joyce’s technique and draws out its surprisingly contemporary implications by beginning with a single unusual premise: that meaning in Joyce’s fiction is a product of engaged interaction between two or more people. Meaning is not dispensed by the author; rather, it is actively negotiated between involved and curious readers through the medium of a shared text. Here, pairs of experts on Joyce’s work produce meaning beyond the text by arguing over it, challenging one another through it, and illuminating it with relevant facts about language, history, and culture. The result is not an authoritative interpretation of Joyce’s collection of stories but an animated set of dialogues about Dubliners designed to draw the reader into its lively discussions.

Contributors include: Derek Attridge, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Maud Ellmann, Anne Fogarty, Andrew Gibson, Carol Loeb Shloss, Joseph Valente

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Bob R Bogle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having re-read Ulysses enough times, one realizes eventually that the story-telling essentially ends upon completion of the Scylla and Charybdis episode about a third of the way through the book. Everything that follows is, by and particularly large, elaboration and embellishment of what has been revealed in that first third of the volume. Joyce signals this critical fracture through that tome in no uncertain terms in the very next episode, Wandering Rocks, in which the camera of his narrative perspective, or his narrative eye, zooms wildly between panoptical vision of the entire city of Dublin and the microscopic scrutiny of very brief moments in the lives of many of its minor citizens, caught suspended in small snapshots that, more often than not, are not especially dramatic or of direct importance to the story.

James Joyce's anthology called Dubliners, which concerns itself with life in his hometown of childhood and early adulthood, can also be re-read several times before one begins to realize that it is less an anthology of short stories than it is a coherent novel whose protagonist ― and antagonist ― happens to be the town of Dublin itself. Although the parallel goes unmentioned in Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue, much as in the Wandering Rocks episode, the individual character lives portrayed in the story snapshots of Dubliners serve as small vignettes that only collectively synergize to unveil a portrait of the town as a unified whole.

The premise, or you could say the conceit, of Vicki Mahaffey's assemblage of essays is to thrust together two Joyce scholars, often possessing archly different opinions and points of view, and to compel each unlikely (unlucky?) pair to collaborate in writing an essay about the fifteen short stories found in Dubliners so that all are addressed, cover to cover. Naturally the book produced by so many conflicting voices is going to be uneven in approach, tone and success. It's unlikely such a book can ever be deserving of five-star reviews, but this book is very good. Although a long book that sometimes threatens to grow tedious and overburdened, its overall triumph is more surprising and therefore more impressive than we might have hoped for. I'm always looking for fresh insights into Joyce and his art and craft and plenty are delivered here, and even more that are not spelled out are sure to be provoked in every careful reader of both this book and its source from Joyce. That is to say, having read these essays, it's a certainty that how you read Dubliners afterward will be impacted, and so far as I'm concerned, that's the chief reason ― maybe the only reason ― for creating a book such as this one in the first place.

Sometimes, although not too often, the literary jargon is layered on thickly enough that it threatens to become (or it actually does become) an exercise in self-mockery, which is a common enough experience when reading this kind of book. I've found that the age of the professor (usually that's who writes essays like these) tends to be inversely proportional to the amount of gobbledygook he or she allows to pile up in publications, and I can often with a small smile pass over it as a temptation of youth which has gone, for the moment, unresisted. But the small amount of that sort of thing found here won't discourage any potential reader who picks up this volume, however. After all, to read Joyce, or to read about Joyce, one must possess a stern spirit. This book is not for the newcomer to Dubliners but rather will be most appreciated by she or he who is already quite familiar with that text and all its contents. The most important results of this work are, I think, to uncover a whole host of inter- and intra-textuality contained within Dubliners which I, at least, had not encountered or considered before, and more importantly (to me), to shed more light on Joyce's authorial intentions in writing these stories, whatsoever your opinion of the significance and relevance of authorial intent may be when seeking meaning in a fictional text.

[Vivian Valvano]

Publishing a review of this in IRISH LITERARY SUPPLEMENT so I cannot say anything here.