Why Read Joyce's Dubliners, Damn you!?

Why read James Joyce?



He never won the Nobel. He only published a collection of stories, three novels, some poems. And for all that, who can read Ulysses but a PhD in mythology or literature? Who can read Finnegan's Wake but the few remaining readers of Gaelic texts? All this blather about him being so great and Ulysses being the greatest novel ever? (Modern Library Top 100). What's really behind it all? I bet his estate is involved. His heirs trying capitalize on his name?

His own country wouldn't let his body be buried on its soil. He must have really sucked right?

Even his story collection took over 5 years to get published. It kept getting started and stopped and rejected and censored by different publishers, until the very last one burned ALL but one of the manuscripts. The one that he was able to sneak away with. The one that eventually got published.

You can download a copy of it here: Dubliners (1914)


So what is all the fuss then? What can we learn from this fossilized writer?

Perhaps looking at some of his work, and his own ideas might help answer the question.



From Dubliners:



-"No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse." -The Sisters

-"She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male." - A Mother

-"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?" -The Dead

"The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you." - The Dead

"When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street."
-Araby

- "There's no friends like the old friends." - The Sisters

-"...and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood." -Araby

-"It was cold autumn weather, but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse; every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow." - A Painful Case

- "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body." -A Painful Case

-"I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires." -Araby

- "He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense." -A Little Cloud

-"He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition." -Eveline

-"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." -The Dead



Whoa! These lines don't just illuminate character, place, plot, voice and story. They MOVE the reader. Talk about your heart-mind connection-the veritable font of creative energy.



MORE! What about his other works:

-"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." ― Ulysses

-"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home." ― Ulysses

-"You can still die when the sun is shining." ― A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man



Just in these passages, and further then in the stories themselves, its easy to see what happened. Isn't it? Joyce's work created experience for the reader. Prior to Joyce, even the best of them like Chekhov, Flaubert, and others, could only get the reader so far into a story. The tale form ruled, and based on oral traditions, created a sense of story-telling in which the reader had certain expectations and knew the boundaries of those stories or tales. Then Joyce comes along and creates a few texts that overturn this whole style. His work creates illuminating experiences-epiphanies, not just in terms of the characters on the page, but for the reader as well.

Think going from print to radio. From Radio to TV. From cable TV to today's technologies. That is what Joyce's work must have felt like for the turn of the century readers. It was disorienting. Not just in content, but in form, in experience, in nature.

He wasn't the only of course. And he didn't do it in isolation, for this was the era of Modernism. Read The Waves by Virginia Woolf to find a comparable experience today.

I've always found it so astonishing that the "progression" of literary styles has become so regressive in the post-modern era. That is, most of the stuff being published and promoted from the 40s onward is clearly in the realist vein. And much of it, though not all, as if Modernism was a blip or an inconvenient detour.

Yet no literary movement has come close to providing reader experience, and depth of field expression, perspective, and artistry as modernism.

But I digress. And if Woolf had spent time writing more stories perhaps we would read a collection. And asking you all to read a novel would be painful. Besides, Dubliners is mostly, if not soley, in the realist vein.


Back to Joyce. What of other quotes about writing, reading, etc….


-"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

-"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." (On Ulysses)

-"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works."

-"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

-"Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead."

-"[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life."



Lofty if not original. His plan for Dubliners was:



"My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to be the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under its four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written in for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness...."

The Modern Word


If this were a reading discussion group we'd have to ask. Did he succeed? If so how? But we are craft of fiction writing group. So we can ask "HOW did he achieve this? What does he mean by scrupulous meanness and why is it important that he did that What does that mean for our own writing, now in the 21st century?"


Web resources for James Joyce's & Dubliners


Concordance of Dubliners

James Joyce Centre

Bloomsday in Photos: Joyce's Dublin


Ok. Enough of the academe from me.



I leave you with two more Joyce quotes. Perhaps we will be tempted to write our own loveliness damn it!



"I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world."

"Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?"