Dubliners – James Joyce, 1914 ★★★★★

The Stuff of Life

Short-story collections come in all types. Some are hodgepodges, some genre exercises, some focus on specific characters. Then there are the stories of Dubliners, connected by both a setting and something less a theme than a tone.

Call it a concept album in prose.

That is one of the amazing things about Dubliners, how James Joyce crafts a unified tone poem while the stories themselves traverse all kinds of territory. Not geographic territory – it’s all happening in Dublin – but territory of the soul.

You get comedy, tragedy, politics, religion, alcoholism, show business, family issues. However outcomes differ and casts change, the tone stays constant, of candid, battered appreciation for the stuff of life:

He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to. He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls. He knew what those friends were worth; he knew the girls too. Experience had embittered his heart against the world. (“Two Gallants”)

Or this:

He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him. (“A Little Cloud”)

Not all the stories are sad, but even lighter pieces reverberate with feelings of quiet loss. You may not share Joyce’s own bleak view of mankind and its place in the cosmos, but while reading Dubliners, I felt at times an eavesdropper. I sense I’m not alone.

There are other short-story collections that do this sort of tonal thing. Most famously perhaps from my American viewpoint is Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 with a very tonally united and otherwise disparate set of stories. But it’s a hard trick to pull off. Dubliners succeeds so well at it I wonder at how it became nearly all the short fiction we ever got from Joyce, who won most of his fame elsewhere.

The first thing you notice about Dubliners is the voice. It sidles up at you, unobtrusively, a quiet murmur set against darkness all around. “Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly.” Action here is almost non-existent, just a kid looking at a house, but emotions run deep.

“The Sisters” is about a boy’s early brush with death, written from the perspective of the youngster. That connects “The Sisters” with the next two stories, also first-person tales involving young males: “An Encounter,” where a boy of nine or ten plays hooky from school; and “Araby” where a pre-teen falls in love.

James Joyce at age six, in 1888, about the same age as the unnamed protagonist in Dubliners' first story "The Sisters." Joyce's first-person, anonymous narration there and in "An Encounter" and "Araby" suggest elements of autobiography. Image from https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/james-joyce-s-life

Are they the same boy? Hard to say. Joyce gives us few names. Even the love object in “Araby” is known just as “Mangan’s sister.” These stories are skeletal in construction and short in length, but Joyce pulls you into them all the same with his eerie blend of mood and detail, fed through an individual’s particular sensibilities:

The room through the lace end of the blind was suffused with dusky golden light amid which the candles looked like pale thin flames. He had been coffined. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman’s mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all on one side. (“The Sisters”)

Eventually Joyce moves away from the first-person narration and onto other stages of life. Age progression isn’t uniform. Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of our last story, “The Dead,” is younger than some featured players earlier in the book. Class-wise, we do get more of a climb from the impoverished, fallen priest we see dead in “The Sisters” to Conroy the well-heeled academic, but the progression isn’t uniform there, either. Yet the stories in Dubliners seem to connect anyway, feeding off each other’s moods and ideas.

Take “An Encounter.” Not much of a story on its own. A boy and a friend from school wander through a bad section of Dublin, meet a sketchy middle-age man, and run home. But set between the more homebound confines of “The Sisters” and another longer journey through Dublin in “Araby,” it becomes pregnant with meaning and associations it would not carry alone. We see in “Encounter’s” grizzled pervert a reflection of the fallen priest’s collapsed condition in “Sisters” and a suggestion of what love might have in store for our young but already disappointed protagonist in “Araby.”

Similar conversations exist between stories elsewhere in the book. A pathetic con is played out in “Two Gallants,” followed immediately by a more successful one in “The Boarding House.” But these two stories are much different in other ways. “Counterparts” depicts a roundelay of cruelty involving an unhappily-married man, while the next, “Clay,” is a similarly domestic but gentler story of an Eleanor-Rigby-type spinster who nurses wounds she doesn’t even know she has:

Lizzie Fleming said Maria was sure to get the ring and, though Fleming had said that for so many Hallow Eves, Maria had to laugh and say she didn’t want any ring or man either; and when she laughed her grey-green eyes sparkled with disappointed shyness and the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin. (“Clay”)

“Eveline,” fourth of Dubliners’ 15 stories, is the first told from a woman’s perspective, a teenager who contemplates running away from a miserable family. “Escape! She must escape...He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live.” Flight is a constant motif in Dubliners, escaping the city’s confines to a bigger world outside. The book’s very title is a giveaway, though; these folks are trapped.

Earlier on, in “An Encounter,” our protagonist tells us of his desire “for real adventures” and his realization “they must be sought abroad.” Or as the clerkish protagonist in “A Little Cloud” realizes: “You could do nothing in Dublin.”

Hardly the tourist-bureau line, to be sure. But Dublin plays up Joyce big today. You can join a tour group and stand at North Richmond Street of “Araby” fame or walk its downtown with the schemers of “Two Gallants.” Joyce’s love for his city always comes through, if snarkily.

North Richmond Street, Dublin, 1946. When I made a pilgrimage to this spot in 2001, it looked very much the same, even those spikes on the fence-tops Joyce mentions Mangan's sister clutching at in "Araby." Today it's probably a giant car wash or KFC. Image from http://www.whatwasthere.com/photoWall.aspx?p=818

Joyce himself didn’t just talk the talk about needing to leave, though. He abandoned Dublin in early adulthood and made his home and career on the Continent. As a writer, though, he never really escaped.

The year of Dubliners’ publication, Ireland was still a British colony, something which was beginning to change and would explode two years later with Dublin’s Easter Rising. Joyce’s own attitude regarding Irish independence is hard to gauge from Dubliners alone.

“Ivy Day In The Committee Room” pays unironic tribute to the memory of Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell – “He was the only man that could keep that bag of cats in order,” a group of otherwise disparate canvassers agree – but there is also some chaffing. In “The Dead,” a spiky Erin go Bragh-type gets under the skin of Gabriel Conroy. “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” he blurts at her. 

Joyce spends an entire story just having at Dublin and the Irish, “After The Race.” Like “The Sisters” and “Eveline,” it was originally published a decade before the rest of Dubliners, and is an outlier in the collection with its more overt allegorical approach.

Jimmy Doyle is taking part in a Dublin auto race with three men of different nationalities, a Frenchman, a Canadian, and a Hungarian. Dublin, we are told, “wore the mask of a capital,” not a subtle jab there. Nor is Doyle’s experience, where he is taken advantage of by pretty much everyone (including a Brit) and left rubbing his head, his own attempt at speechifying for Ireland a muddled embarrassment.

By the time of the Irish Rebellion in 1916, Joyce had settled in Zürich, Switzerland. He once explained his focus on Dublin as the center of all his fiction: "I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce.

The humor in Dubliners is persistent if easily-missed. Often it is served with an edge: the sly digs at plain Maria’s hapless appearance in “Clay;” the overly hearty enjoyment of a simple dish of peas which both mocks and humanizes Lenehan in “Two Gallants;” the quiet paranoia that runs rife through the title setting in “Ivy Day In The Committee Room.”

Humor emerges at the center of only one story, “A Mother,” which introduces us to Mrs. Kearney, a stage mother from hell whose impossible standards in life and love make her a fly in her own tangled web. Tonally, a bitter conclusion makes it of a piece with the rest of the book, yet Joyce is writing here for laughs:

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”)

There is also much humor in the various treatments of Catholicism we get, particularly in the penultimate story “Grace.” Joyce was not a believer, but he doesn’t mock belief here so much as play up the foibles of various characters around the altar of faith. Ambiguity is another major element of this book, and in “Grace” we see the drunk protagonist Mr. Kernan not as the lost cause like “Counterparts’” alcoholic clerk, but a man with a loving wife and well-meaning friends who might find his way to sobriety at last. [He doesn’t, but you have to read Joyce’s later novel Ulysses to find this out.]

As the stories of Dubliners continue, they grow longer in length. Not uniformly, but noticeably. “The Sisters” weighs in at just over 3,000 words, while “Grace” clocks in at over 7,500 words. All this is a build-up to Dubliners’ one stab at longer fiction, and its most revered stand-alone story, “The Dead,” which is a short novella.

Angelica Huston as Gretta contemplates her lost love while Donal McCann's Gabriel Conroy looks on in a 1987 film version of "The Dead." Image from https://www.timeout.com/london/film/the-dead.

As it begins, “The Dead” seems a deeper-dish treatment of the small human dramas unfolding across the book. We witness a family gathering, held just after Christmas in a snowy Dublin suburb by three aging women, two sisters and their niece. Gabriel Conroy is to give the big dinner speech, and feeling rather nervous about it.

Joyce introduces various players here with the same care he bestowed on his other characters elsewhere in the book, though the mood this time is gentler, warmer, almost comfortable. But not quite. Gabriel’s attention remains fixed throughout on his wife, a source of some disquiet as he reflects upon difficulties he had over her with his late mother:

A shadow passed over his face as he remembered her sullen opposition to his marriage. Some slighting phrases she had used still rankled in his memory; she had once spoken of Gretta as being country cute and that was not true of Gretta at all. (“The Dead”)

As the night goes on, we get pulled into various arguments. Gabriel gets razzed by the patriot, who notes his writing for a Protestant newspaper and calls him an “West Briton.” A soft-headed drunkard takes hard the gentle raillery of a Protestant companion just trying to keep him sober. A parlor maid fumes about some unhappy romantic episode. The aging sisters hosting the affair seem to enjoy themselves anyway, and so does Gabriel, in the main. His speech is a success, anyway.

Then he goes back to his hotel room with Gretta, and “The Dead” brings us to an unsettling conclusion. Gabriel learns before he came along, Gretta loved another when she was a girl. That this boy she loved is long dead only makes it worse, as Gabriel finds himself wrestling with a mixture of jealousy, sympathy, and guilt. Most of all, and much like our narrator in “The Sisters,” he feels small:

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 he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. (“The Dead”)

How we are to take this kind of self-revelation is something Joyce never makes clear. Tonally, it’s perfectly in line with how Dubliners has been pinging us again and again with unanswered (unanswerable?) questions about life and love, daring us to make of it what we will.

“The Dead” is no doubt a great story, but it is greater still in the company of the shorter tales it anchors, summing up on a grander scale the underlying sense of and respect for mortality running through the book. “The Dead” ends matters on an appropriately disquieting note, suggesting as strongly as any of the other stories an overarching futility. Yet you get with that in Gabriel’s final ruminations a nobility and dignity that gives the overall rocky journey of Dubliners a kind of hard-won grace.