Dubliners

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For the Irish folk band, see The Dubliners. For people from Dublin, Ireland, see Dublin § Demographics.

Dubliners
LC Class
PR6019.O9 D8 1991
TextDubliners at Wikisource

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914.[1] It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

The stories were written when

British rule of Ireland, was responsible for a collective paralysis.[2] He conceived of Dubliners as a "nicely polished looking-glass"[3] held up to the Irish and a "first step towards [their] spiritual liberation".[4]

Joyce's concept of epiphany[5] is exemplified in the moment a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. The first three stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, while the subsequent stories are written in the third person and deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people, in line with Joyce's division of the collection into "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life".[6] Many of the characters in Dubliners later appeared in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses.[7]

Publication history

Between 1905, when Joyce first sent a manuscript to a publisher, and 1914, when the book was finally published (on June 15), Joyce submitted the book 18 times to a total of 15 publishers. The London house of

copy.[8]

The stories

  • "The Sisters" – After the priest Father Flynn dies, a young boy who was close to him hears some less-than-flattering stories about the father.
  • "An Encounter" – Two schoolboys playing truant encounter a perverted, middle-aged man.
  • "Araby" – A boy falls in love with the sister of his friend, but fails in his quest to buy her a worthy gift from the Araby Bazaar.
  • "Eveline" – A young woman weighs her decision to flee Ireland with a sailor.
  • "After the Race" – College student Jimmy Doyle tries to fit in with his wealthy friends.
  • "Two Gallants" – Lenehan wanders around Dublin to kill time while waiting to hear if his friend, Corley, was able to con a maid out of some money.
  • "The Boarding House" – Mrs Mooney successfully manoeuvres her daughter Polly into an upwardly mobile marriage with her lodger Mr Doran.
  • "A Little Cloud" – Little Chandler's dinner with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher, who left home to become a journalist in London, casts fresh light on his own failed literary dreams.
  • "Counterparts" – Farrington, a lumbering alcoholic scrivener, takes out his frustration in pubs and on his son Tom.
  • "
    Magdalene laundry, celebrates Halloween with a man she cared for
    as a child and his family.
  • "A Painful Case" – Mr Duffy rebuffs the advances of his friend Mrs Sinico, and, four years later, discovers he condemned her to loneliness and death.
  • "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" – Several paid canvassers for a minor politician discuss the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell.
  • "
    accompanist
    at a series of poorly planned concerts, but her efforts backfire.
  • "
    Catholic retreat
    to help him reform.
  • "The Dead" – After a holiday party thrown by his aunts and cousin, Gabriel Conroy's wife, Gretta, tells him about a boyfriend from her youth, and he has an epiphany about life and death and human connection. (At 15–16,000 words, this story has been classified as a novella.)

A Joyce critic has examined the significance of each title.[9]

Style

Besides first-person and third-person

free indirect discourse and shifts in narrative point of view. The collection progresses chronologically, beginning with stories of youth and progressing in age to culminate in "The Dead".[10] Throughout, Joyce can be said to maintain "invisibility", to use his own term for authorial effacement.[11] He wrote the stories "in a style of scrupulous meanness", withholding comment on what is "seen and heard".[12] Dubliners can beseen as a preface to the two novels that will follow,[13] and like them it "seeks a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be interference".[14]

Joyce's modernist style entailed using dashes for dialogue rather than quotation marks.[15] He asked that they be used in the printed text, but was refused.[16] Dubliners was the only work by Joyce to use quotation marks, but dashes are now substituted in all critical and most popular editions.[17]

The impersonal narration doesn't mean that Joyce is undetectable in Dubliners. There are autobiographical elements and possible versions of Joyce had he not left Dublin.[18] The Dublin he remembers is recreated in the specific geographic details, including road names, buildings, and businesses. Joyce freely admitted that his characters and places were closely based on reality. (Because of these details, at least one potential publisher, Maunsel and Company, rejected the book for fear of libel lawsuits.)[19] Ezra Pound argued that, with the necessary changes, "these stories could be retold of any town", that Joyce "gives us things as they are... for any city", by "getting at the universal element beneath" particulars.[20]

Joyce referred to the collection as "a series of epicleti", alluding to the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.[21] He is said to have "often agreed... that 'imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered'".[22] But he used the eucharist as a metaphor, characterizing the artist as "a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life".[23]

The concept of “epiphany,” defined in Stephen Hero as “a sudden spiritual manifestation,” has been adapted as a narrative device in five stories in Dubliners, in the form of a character’s self-realization at the end of the narrative. One critic has suggested that the concept is the basis of an overall narrative strategy, “the commonplace things of Dublin [becoming] embodiments or symbols . . . of paralysis.”[24] A later critic, avoiding the term “epiphany,” but apparently not the concept, has examined in considerable detail how “church and state manifest themselves in Dubliners” as agents of paralysis.[25] There are numerous such “manifestations.”[26]

What immediately distinguishes the stories from Joyce's later works is their apparent simplicity and transparency. Some critics have been led into drawing facile conclusions. The stories have been pigeonholed, seen as realist or naturalist, or instead labeled symbolist.[27][28] The term "epiphany" has been taken as synonymous with symbol.[29] Critical analysis of elements of stories or stories in their entirety has been problematic. Dubliners may have occasioned more conflicting interpretations than any other modern literary work.[30]

It's been said that Dubliners is unique, defying any form of classification, and perhaps no interpretation can ever be conclusive. The only certainty is that it's a "masterpiece" in its own right and "a significant stepping-stone . . . into the modernist structure of Joyce's mature work".[31]

Media adaptations

References

  1. ^ Osteen, Mark (22 June 1995). "A Splendid Bazaar: The Shopper Guide to the New Dubliners". Studies in Short Fiction.
  2. ISBN 0192111795
    . Retrieved 16 February 2024. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.
  3. ^ Gilbert, Stuart (1957). Letters of James Joyce. New York: The Viking Press. pp. 63–64. Retrieved 21 February 2024. 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.
  4. ^ Gilbert 1957, pp. 62–63: I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation in my country
  5. ^ Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 216. Retrieved 1 March 2024. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.
  6. ^ Ellmann, Richard (1966). Letters of James Joyce Volume II. London: Faber and Faber. p. 134. Retrieved 16 February 2024.
  7. The University of Western Ontario. Archived from the original
    on 1 November 2005.
  8. ^ Jeri Johnson, "Composition and Publication History", in James Joyce, Dubliners (Oxford University Press, 2000).
  9. ISBN 0813109493
    . Retrieved 29 February 2024.
  10. ^ Atherton 1966, p. 44.
  11. ^ Joyce, James (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. B. W. Huebsch. p. 252. Retrieved 18 February 2024. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak… The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
  12. ^ Ellmann, Richard (1966). Letters of James Joyce Volume II. London: Faber and Faber. p. 135. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  13. ^ Tindall, William York (1959). A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. London: Thames and Hudson. pp. 12–13. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  14. ISBN 0195031032
    . Retrieved 16 February 2024.
  15. ISBN 978-90-420-3901-8
    . Retrieved 19 February 2024.
  16. ^ Atherton 1966, p. 48.
  17. ^ Bonapfel 2014, pp. 81, 85.
  18. ^ Tindall 1959, pp. 6–7.
  19. ^ Atherton 1966, pp. 29–30.
  20. ^ Pound, Ezra (1935). “Dubliners and Mr James Joyce," Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber. p. 401. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  21. ^ Atherton 1966, p. 34.
  22. ISBN 0195033817
    . Retrieved 19 February 2024.
  23. ^ Joyce, James (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B. W. Huebsch. p. 260. Retrieved 19 February 2024.
  24. ^ Tindall 1959, p. 12.
  25. ^ Williams, Trevor L. (1998). “No Cheer for ‘the Gratefully Oppressed’: Ideology in Joyce’s Dubliners.” ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners. p. 91. Retrieved 5 March 2024.
  26. ^ Williams 1998, pp. 87–109.
  27. ^ Tindall 1959, pp. 8–10.
  28. ISBN 9780813182797
    . Retrieved 6 March 2024.
  29. ^ Tindall 1959, pp. 10–12.
  30. ^ Basic 1998, pp. 13–14.
  31. ^ Basic 1998, p. 36.
  32. ^ "PlayographyIreland – Dublin One". irishplayography.com.
  33. ISBN 9780815631484
    .
  34. ^ "Rea reads The Dead on RTÉ Radio". RTÉ Ten. Raidió Teilifís Éireann. 2 April 2012. Retrieved 2 April 2012.
  35. ^ "New film to mark 'Dubliners' centenary". Irish Times.
  36. ^ "Album Review: Hibsen, The Stern Task of Living". Hot Press.

Further reading

General
  • Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1959, revised edition 1983.
  • Burgess, Anthony. Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965); also published as Re Joyce.
  • Burgess, Anthony. Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)
Dubliners

External links

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