Dubliners

James Joyce, 1914

On a first reading, Joyce’s stories seem to end with strange abruptness, as if halfway through the story the man got tired and decided to tell no more. Understanding why Joyce chose to end his stories exactly where ended them is an exercise in narrative dissection, and illuminates not just Joyce’s motives as a chronicler of the human condition, but also some of the basic structural elements that form the backbone of the story genre.

The Sisters is a wispy little tale of a defrocked priest and his relation to a boy I take to be young Joyce. The boy narrates the story, and in some ways the tale is the story of how the boy comes to terms with the priest’s death, though the epiphany, when it comes, is both the priest’s realization that faith has failed, and the boy’s realization of the social and psychological distortions that accompanied that failure. None of this is stated: the priest’s breakdown is related by one of his spinster sister’s, who may or may not be aware of how it relates to a crisis of faith, and the boy’s reaction to the news is never revealed. “She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened, but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.” But this act of knowing has something willful about it: it is an affirmation of the facts, over the superstitious listening of the aunt, who knows that the priest is dead but is still checked from speaking honestly by some deep impulse towards caution, and impulse so deep it extends throughout her life and on into the very heart of death. And we know that boy, young, inexperienced, and naïve as he is, sees this, for this is where he stops the tale: “Eliza resumed: ---Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself…so then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…..” End of story. What more need be said? Just as the priest recognized religion as an elaborate compromise with the basic emptiness of worldly existence, so the boy has understood that the aunts have compromised with some core honesty, and are thus reduced to speaking in whispers and holding to forms they no longer believe in but are powerless to change.

Most of the other stories follow the same mold: they sketch a tale, inevitably set in turn of the century Dublin, in precise and transparent language, and end at the moment of epiphany, which often seems the middle of the story. An Encounter is about two young boys who skip school and meet a pederast. Araby is about first love, missed opportunity, self-respect, and the dynamics of power. The idea that we choose our own form of suffering is the ostensible content of Eveline, which chronicles the tale of young woman who balks at eloping with her lover, in spite of the fact that holding the course at home entails certain doom. Two Gallants, which Joyce apparently felt to be one of the best stories in the collection, recounts the petty depredations of two penniless young men as they dream of respectability and stability while preying on a young servant woman for money. It reveals the dehumanizing dimensions of urban poverty, and the corrupting influences of Dublin. The Boarding House is about a tyrannical beancounter of a woman who has driven her husband to drink and dupes a poor chap into marrying her dowry-less, unsophisticated, and drab young daughter. Both A Little Cloud and Counterparts illuminate the connection between domestic violence and professional dissatisfaction, while Clay tells the story of a women whose life has been squandered in the relentless attempt to meet other people’s expectations. A Painful Case details the solitude, despair, and subsequent alcoholism of a woman whose attempts to connect with a fellow citizen shatter on the man’s basic boorishness. Ivy Day in the Committee Room is a political tale, or a tale about Dublin style politics, at least, and perhaps the story I least understand in the collection. The talented but petty Ms. Kearney, whose insistence on “getting her own” leads to her humdrum marriage, her social marginalization, and eventually the ruin of her daughter’s artistic career, is the subject of A Mother. Grace is a strange story about a drunk whose friends attempt to rehabilitate him by dragging him to a church retreat. In the process, the spiritual bankruptcy of the advice givers, both in the circle of friends and in the church, becomes apparent.

The final story, The Dead, is fowl of altogether another feather. Not only is it much longer than any of the preceding stories, it enters a kind of interiority that the sheer brevity of its predecessors can’t allow. Gabriel is the first fully rounded character in Dubliner’s, we see him not just at the moment of epiphany, but before and after as well, context which richens and refines the awakening. As with the other stories, however, the Dead is ultimately an indictment on Irish culture, its characters are sleepwalkers, compromisers, boors, rejects, and failures. There is a hint of nobility that runs through all this humanity, there is a sense that at root is something good, ‘the magnificent hospitality of the Irish’ as evidenced in the lavishness of the aunts, Gretta’s passion and sensitivity, Garbiel’s basic decency and competence. But all are corrupted, either by having settled or having chosen the wrong path or having spent too damn much time in Ireland. The recurring image of the snow suggests Ireland is ripe to be buried.

Dubliners is the third book by Joyce that I have read, having begun with Portrait and then moved directly to the monster that is Ulysses. Though an argument could made that the works of Joyce are best read in the order in which they were produced, the advantage of coming to the lucidity of the stories last is they immediately and profoundly open up the more obscure later works. They illuminate not just Joyce’s power as a storyteller, but also the limits of what Joyce could achieve within a conventional narrative framework. As Frank Conner notes, it is telling that Joyce never again wrote a short story. The move into the interior that we see at the very end of Dubliners, the emotional, symbolic, and psychological richness of The Dead, would prove too tempting, and Joyce would limit himself from then on to the sprawling, open forms of his last works as he sought to set down on paper the words that would ‘forge the conscience of his race’.