Why I ❤️ James Joyce's "Dubliners"
The Books We ❤️ Club welcomes Dr. Kathleen Waller of The Matterhorn
Kate Waller has a special place in my heart, one of my earliest supporters and a dear friend who generously gives out equal measures of warmth and astonishing knowledge in her own newsletter,
.She has a podcast, is the author of two intense serial novels—A Hong Kong Story, and An Interpreter in Vienna (both available to read for free at the links)—and is currently working on bringing Matterhorn U. to life by building on her already impressive collection of posts centered on intertextuality in fiction.
I am delighted to present her article “Why I ❤️ James Joyce’s Dubliners” the first edition of the The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy—as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.
You can read Dubliners free on Project Gutenberg.
We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas about Dubliners in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.
(And if you’d like to feature your favorite book in a future edition, DM me.)
The next edition of The Books We ❤️ Club will feature
and her take on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.Why I ❤️ James Joyce's Dubliners
by
ofMr Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder… He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.
--“A Painful Case,” Dubliners, James Joyce
It can be a painful and enlightening experience to realize that there are no answers in life. A chasm in the brain is left in the wake of explosion, waiting to be filled with either the complexities of the universe – swirling and questioning toward some kind of truth and beauty, however painful or satisfying – or some blocker, an opaque negation, a filler-of-a-fib we tell ourselves.
Literature both teaches us this mantra as well as giving us possibilities, ways to live. Fiction especially forces us to think, to reflect, and to be comfortable with the ambiguities and paradoxes that life creates. Transported to the parallel universes of fiction - new worlds, new perspectives - we can play with ideas and discover both who we are and how to live.
I was always a believer in this mindset: that there are rarely black and white answers or single conclusions. That one has to find one’s own way and even then, the path is constantly shifting and bifurcating. But it’s one thing to allow ambiguities and another to embrace it as the actual thing we are striving for.
This is what happened to me in an encounter with James Joyce. Not Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, all of which I have been thoroughly perplexed by while still enjoying them immensely and all of which likely could have led to this same non-conclusion.
Instead, my transformational encounter was with Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of loosely joined short stories culminating in the novella The Dead (of which there is an excellent John Huston film adaptation, 1987).
Dubliners is both about Dublin and not. It’s about being an insider and outsider, about tradition and change. About exile and paralysis. About family and strangers. About religion and philosophy. In short, it is about reconciling those paradoxes of life and moving into a letting go of certainty.
Joyce wrote this collection starting in his early twenties with the full publication in 1914 when he was living in Trieste. This book contains seemingly simple stories framed as a deconstructed bildungsroman: coming of age stories organized as those of childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. However, the characters, anecdotes, and places (both of the city streets and its interiors) tell further stories through the multiplicity of layers we can delightfully navigate and ponder as readers.
Let’s start with something potentially more familiar. Have you ever noticed how a Robert Frost poem can nearly always be read in at least two distinct ways? Perhaps highlighting at once the inherent evil and goodness of humanity, or illustrating we are both at the mercy of fate and open to complete free will.
Take the ending from “Out, Out—" for example:
And they, since they / were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
A boy dies in an accident involving a wild “buzz saw.” We are asked to question if the death of the boy matters at all. Of course it matters, but the return to daily life may either be celebrated as a way to go on and not dwell on tragedy or as the shallowness of others’ empathies, who lack the will to pause long enough to reflect on the stolen years and experiences as well as the sadness of his loved ones.
How can a great piece of literature be so vague? How can it fail to give us a road map of thought to be better people and create a better world? How can it fall short of explaining to us the way something works?
But of course, modern art and literature ask us to embrace just that: the ambiguity and nuances of truth, the unfixed concept of beauty.
Poststructuralists helped us understand the process of breaking down the barriers of oppositions and embracing the nuances that deconstructed dichotomies can produce for us in theories of deconstruction. I had studied these concepts at school and embraced philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, but it had remained in the abstract, in the mental space of a university campus perhaps or the bulb of youthful discovery, until I began teaching James Joyce’s Dubliners.
I found myself doing my student teaching in Paris at the age of 22, nearly the same age as Joyce when he arrived there for medical school (which he wouldn’t finish). It was there, at the Lycée International, that I first encountered these stories with Scott, one of my mentor teachers, and his class of lively senior students.
Each story lesson became a kind of Socratic Seminar with focused questions related to style, character, or themes. These were highly engaged students, so each question – even if about stylistic features – became a lively debate.
In discussing the ensuing stories and considering focus areas, Scott and I realized we differed greatly in our interpretations of “Eveline,” the story of adolescence where Eveline recalls the strange death of her mother, reflects on living with the “violence” of her father and taking care of two young siblings, and looks out onto the street as she considers the paralysis in Dublin, or in modern life. With fatigue at this life, she ponders her choices whilst breathing in “dusty cretonne,” as if the particles in the domestic space are suffocating her.
But Eveline does have a choice. Frank, a sailor, has convinced her to come to Buenos Aires with him, secretly escaping the repetition of her days. But does he offer her freedom in a new land, an exciting adventure, or is it a further trap of domesticity and alienation? They barely know each other, and yet, he is so insistent on her departure with him, speaking in brief exclamations: “Come!” and “Eveline! Evvy!” Eveline concludes, just in time perhaps, that “he would drown her.” She feels as if she is being taken prisoner:
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them….
She also concludes that she neither loves him nor really knows him.
The story might be read just as Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Should Eveline take the road less traveled by, despite the lack of love for Frank? Would it make a positive difference or a tragic one? Perhaps, instead, this experience opens up nineteen-year-old Eveline to the possibilities that are out there. It need not be this one. Or, a way to live in Dublin, her home with a mix of sad and beautiful memories.
The answer is, of course, unclear. But the revelation for me was in being able to sit with both extremely different solutions without choosing. This is what my mentor Scott and I demonstrated for the students through a modelled debate.
Joyce said he wrote this volume of stories because “Dublin seemed to [him] the center of paralysis.” He claims to write in a “style of scrupulous meanness.” One might even consider a kind of self-loathing through the treatment of the place of his origin.
But the book is also filled with love for Dublin and those who inhabit it, despite the tensions. How else could he write such a beautiful book? The melancholic nature of many scenes, the missed chances and early deaths – these elements perhaps only heighten our awareness that there is something magical in this homeplace for Joyce, something that as an exile for most of his adult life, he perhaps simultaneously longed for.
The stories show influences of foreignness in Dublin, which seems to have intrigued Joyce from a young age. The “Italians” make several appearances, characters represent nations in “After the Race,” and “Eastern enchantment” is at the center of “Araby.” It is in the bazaar in “Araby” that the child narrator finds himself disoriented by the strangeness of new cultures and the thoughts of what money can buy:
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
Is this not Joyce as an expatriate, wondering what has taken him away from home? Perhaps this is my projection, for I am in my eighteenth year of life in foreign countries.
Over the years, I have found students respond exceptionally well to these stories and take comfort in the strange, ambiguous nature of the text. A wonderful group of students in Hong Kong were moved by the tale of unrequited love and missed chances in “A Painful Case,” thereby naming their rock band after it. Others in several locations created pastiche to reflect their own complex relationships with the cities they called home, often in anticipation of a near departure for university in a foreign land.
The culminating novella of this collection, The Dead, brings together many of the themes of the earlier stories. The protagonist, Gabriel, is often likened to Joyce but also has religious symbolic significance as the archangel sent to announce God’s will to humanity.
Through the Epiphany gathering of extended family and friends, we allow human weakness to exist in an accepting and loving community. An old relative who lacks musical ability is encouraged to play for the party. An alcoholic man who is a burden for his elderly mother is also shown to be kind-hearted and even wise at times. A secret of the past is eventually accepted with humility rather than spurned through jealousy.
There are further unclarities about Joyce’s feelings toward religion, speaking Irish and the National cause, and working as a writer. These are investigated through different characters’ perspectives, like dichotomies portrayed in many other fictions.
The way Joyce is able to infuse his writing with such strength of love, disdain, joy, jealousy, fear, and hope – all working in conjunction – makes the experience of reading this collection a life-changing experience. It feels like something other-worldly, as if Joyce has connected us to the universe beyond, collapsing even the distinguishing features between life and death.
His ending depicts Gabriel looking out into falling snow through “generous tears” as he considers the real meaning of life in an epiphany:
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.
Change is invisible. Sure, we can see things that happen to us – the way our homes or families or jobs shift, if we reach certain pedestals or milestones. We can also share parts of our identities in visible ways. But the way we experience the world is an internal mystery, one that literature helps us to investigate.
It was interesting to read your treatment of Dubliners for me at this precise time, because I've been reading Barthes recently. He draws a distinction between work and a text, in an essay entitled "From work to text". He says that a work is something that can be displayed, while a text is something that can be demonstrated, by being a process, a movement of discourse. I think your treatment here, and the modelled debates you mention, demonstrates how aptly that distinction of Barthes applies to Dubliners. Like several others here, you've inspired me to revisit the collection.
Beautiful analysis, Kate — I could feel your ❤️for these stories so strongly. “Araby” has been a foundational text for me since first reading it in high school, its fascinating mix of longing and loathing resonated so much with this angsty teen in the ‘90s.
Now I’m inspired to revisit the rest of the collection, perfect selections as we take our first steps into autumn! 💙