Dubliners by James Joyce (spoilers)
Posted: 22 Nov 2015, 19:53
"Dubliners" by James Joyce (spoilers)
"Dubliners" is a collection of fifteen short stories set in the Dublin Ireland of more than one hundred years ago. The characters are middle and working class folks whose portrayals include no titanic conflicts between flamboyant personalities, no passionate, troubled exchanges between ambivalent lovers, or courageous resolve in the face of mortal perils. The only physical conflict in the entire collection is an arm wrestling match in a pub. The tensions and ambiguities of the human experience, however, are masterfully rendered in language that suggests more than it baldly states, that creates tensions perhaps only obliquely resolved.
If one looks for a unifying theme in a short story collection, I would have to say for almost all of these stories, it is the theme of circumscribed lives. For the characters who inhabit this setting of place and time limitations seem imposed by circumstances. The young boy in love with the neighbor girl who has promised to bring her back something from 'Araby', an exotically named bazaar, must wait upon money for admission from an absent minded parent figure until it is almost too late, and his mission becomes hopeless. A large, robust, man mis-employed, it seems, chafes at his subjection to the petty tyranny of his supervisor and longs for the temporary liberation of five o'clock and drinking with his comrades. A young woman suffering under the thumb of a critical and over-demanding father suffers the agony of indecision as she waits to board a ship with her fiancee', a fine, enterprising young man who could be her salvation from an empty, subservient existence.
Somewhere I read, "We attract our lives." How true for the Dubliners of this fine collection of stories. The reader cannot help but empathize with the frustrations and disappointments of characters who find themselves trapped by lives they cannot help but lead. At the same time how clear it is that for the adult characters, at least, they must lead such lives, because they are the way they are. In the very ironically titled "Two Gallants", for example, two idlers in their early thirties conspire, in a way that is not clear in the story because it does not really matter, to manipulate a former sexual conquest of one of them into a "loan." The petty dishonor seems at first hardly worthy of literary treatment, but the real substance of the narrative is the barely conscious longings of the one who waits to hear of his partner's success or failure. He is only thirty one, but paunchy and prematurely gray with no prospects and dependent upon his equally idle and dissolute companions to stand him drinks. Though he scarce realizes it, he depends on such company also for his very identity. He secretly longs for real love with a woman, for children, a job, and a modestly productive life. Of course it cannot be. Joyce does not tell us this. We see it in the subtle unfolding, in the masterfully rendered moments between the two conspirators when they hint by pause and gesture at their own barely realized honorable reservations. That they despise themselves and one another just a little Joyce only implies leaving the judgment to the reader.
For the reader who is a student of how and why a story "works" I can think of no other fiction that so invites and rewards critical attention. For the writing of this review I returned again and again to the text and found there every time subtleties that I had missed. Each story stands on its own, each with a beginning a middles and an end. These are not "slices of life" that some how in total comprise a story At the same time there is a subtle unity of theme that I have only feebly explored in this discussion.
It's hard to judge what kind of reader might be attracted to this collection. If you're a fan of tight plots and gripping action, perhaps it doesn't sound like your kind of book. I would say , give " Dubliners" try any way.
"Dubliners" is a collection of fifteen short stories set in the Dublin Ireland of more than one hundred years ago. The characters are middle and working class folks whose portrayals include no titanic conflicts between flamboyant personalities, no passionate, troubled exchanges between ambivalent lovers, or courageous resolve in the face of mortal perils. The only physical conflict in the entire collection is an arm wrestling match in a pub. The tensions and ambiguities of the human experience, however, are masterfully rendered in language that suggests more than it baldly states, that creates tensions perhaps only obliquely resolved.
If one looks for a unifying theme in a short story collection, I would have to say for almost all of these stories, it is the theme of circumscribed lives. For the characters who inhabit this setting of place and time limitations seem imposed by circumstances. The young boy in love with the neighbor girl who has promised to bring her back something from 'Araby', an exotically named bazaar, must wait upon money for admission from an absent minded parent figure until it is almost too late, and his mission becomes hopeless. A large, robust, man mis-employed, it seems, chafes at his subjection to the petty tyranny of his supervisor and longs for the temporary liberation of five o'clock and drinking with his comrades. A young woman suffering under the thumb of a critical and over-demanding father suffers the agony of indecision as she waits to board a ship with her fiancee', a fine, enterprising young man who could be her salvation from an empty, subservient existence.
Somewhere I read, "We attract our lives." How true for the Dubliners of this fine collection of stories. The reader cannot help but empathize with the frustrations and disappointments of characters who find themselves trapped by lives they cannot help but lead. At the same time how clear it is that for the adult characters, at least, they must lead such lives, because they are the way they are. In the very ironically titled "Two Gallants", for example, two idlers in their early thirties conspire, in a way that is not clear in the story because it does not really matter, to manipulate a former sexual conquest of one of them into a "loan." The petty dishonor seems at first hardly worthy of literary treatment, but the real substance of the narrative is the barely conscious longings of the one who waits to hear of his partner's success or failure. He is only thirty one, but paunchy and prematurely gray with no prospects and dependent upon his equally idle and dissolute companions to stand him drinks. Though he scarce realizes it, he depends on such company also for his very identity. He secretly longs for real love with a woman, for children, a job, and a modestly productive life. Of course it cannot be. Joyce does not tell us this. We see it in the subtle unfolding, in the masterfully rendered moments between the two conspirators when they hint by pause and gesture at their own barely realized honorable reservations. That they despise themselves and one another just a little Joyce only implies leaving the judgment to the reader.
For the reader who is a student of how and why a story "works" I can think of no other fiction that so invites and rewards critical attention. For the writing of this review I returned again and again to the text and found there every time subtleties that I had missed. Each story stands on its own, each with a beginning a middles and an end. These are not "slices of life" that some how in total comprise a story At the same time there is a subtle unity of theme that I have only feebly explored in this discussion.
It's hard to judge what kind of reader might be attracted to this collection. If you're a fan of tight plots and gripping action, perhaps it doesn't sound like your kind of book. I would say , give " Dubliners" try any way.