Happy Bloomsday! Joyce's Contribution to the Modern Short Story

Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, which James Joyce made forever famous as the day Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedelus were out and about in "Dirty old Dublin" in the great novel Ulysses.

A few years ago, I took a group of students to Dublin for three weeks to study Ulysses and Dubliners in the city itself.  It was a grand time we had, for we were there for Bloomsday, and many of us had Gorgonzola cheese and red wine at Davy Byrnes pub just off Grafton Street.  And we had Guinness—lots and lots of Guinness. 

Today, I will have to content myself with having a Guinness in California alone—which is not as much fun as having a Guinness with friends in Dublin, but certainly better than not having a Guinness at all.

I have read Ulysses six times and would not mind talking a bit about it here.  But that novel, although it started as a short story, does not quite qualify for discussion on this blog.  Still I could not let Bloomsday pass without making a few comments about Joyce's contribution to the short story form.

Joyce's most famous contribution to the theory and technique of modern short narrative is his notion of the "epiphany," which he defined in his early novel Steven Hero:  "By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself.  He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."

 In a Joyce story, an epiphany is a formulation through metaphor or symbol of some revelatory aspect of human experience, some highly significant aspect of personal reality, usually communicated by a pattern of what otherwise would be seen as trivial details and events.  Joyce's technique is to transform the casual into the causal by repetition of seemingly trivial details until they are recognized as part of a significant pattern.  Two of Joyce's best-known stories, "Eveline" and "Araby," end with decisions or revelations that seem unprepared for until the reader reflects back on the story and perceives the patterned nature of what at first seem only casual detail.

In "Eveline," the reader must determine how Eveline's thoughts of leaving in Part I inevitably to her decision to stay in Part II.   Most of the story takes place while Eveline is sitting at the window watching the evening "invade" the avenue.  Nothing really "happens" in the present in the first part of the story, for her mind is on the past and the future, occupied with contrasting images of familiar/strange, duty/pleasure, earth/sea, entrapment/escape, death/life.  It is the counterpoint pattern of these images that prepares the reader for the last section of the story when Eveline stands among the crowds and decides not to leave her father and Ireland.

The problem is how to understand how the first part of the story, which focuses primarily on the bleakness of Eveline's past life at home and thus seems to suggest that she will decide to go with Frank, manages at the same time to suggest that she will decide to stay?  The basic tension is between the known and the unknown.  Although Eveline does not have many happy memories of her childhood and family life, at least they are familiar and comfortable.  Because these events have already happened, what "used to be" is still present and a part of her.  However, life with Frank, because it has not yet happened, is tinged with fear of the unknown, in spite of the fact that it holds the promise of romance and respect.  Thus, at the end, when she sets her face to him, passive, like a helpless animal, with no sign of love or farewell or recognition, we realize that her decision to stay is ultimately inexpressible.

What Joyce achieves in one of his most anthologized stories, "Araby," derives from Chekhov's experiments with creating symbols out of objects by their role or context, not by their preexisting symbolic meaning.  The primary counterpoint throughout the story consists of those images that suggest ordinary reality and those that suggest unknown romance.  The result is a kind of realism that is symbolic at the same time for the boy's spiritual romanticism is embodied in the realistic objects of his world. 

This is a story about the ultimate romantic projection, for the boy sees the girl as a religious object, a romantic embodiment of desire.  Her name is like a "summons" to all his "foolish blood," yet it is such a sacred name that he cannot utter it.  Her image accompanies him "even in places the most hostile to romance."  Thus, when he visits Araby, a place he fancies the most sympathetic to romance, what he seeks is a sacred object capable of objectifying all his unutterable desires. 

The conversation he overhears causes his realization precisely because of its trivial flirtatious nature, for what the boy discovers is that there is nothing so sacred that it cannot be made profane.  To see his holy desire for Mangan's sister diminished to mere physical desire is to see a parody of himself.  The result is the realization not only that he is driven and derided by vanity, but that all is vanity; there is no way for the sacred desires human beings store up in their ghostly hearts to be actualized and still retain their spiritual magic.

"The Dead" is the most subtle example of Joyce's innovative technique.  The first two-thirds of the story reads as if it were a section from a novel, as numerous characters are introduced and the details of the party are reproduced in great detail.  It is only in the last third, when Gabriel's life is transformed, first by his romantic and sexual fantasy about his wife and then by his confrontation with her secret life, that the reader reflects back on the first two-thirds of the story and perceives that the earlier concrete details and the trivial remarks are symbolically significant.  Thematically, the conflict that reflects the realistic/lyrical split in the story is the difference revealed to both Gabriel and the reader between public life and private life, between life as it is in actual experience and life perceived as desire.

The party portion of "The Dead" reflects Gabriel's public life; his chief interest is what kind of figure he is going to cut publicly.  However, throughout the party period of the story, there are moments--particularly those moments that focus on the past, on music, and on marital union--when reality is not presented as here and now, but as a mixture of memory and desire.  During their short carriage ride to the hotel, he indulges in his own self-delusion about his relationship with his wife: "moments of their life together that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory."

When Gabriel discovers that Gretta has a secret life that has nothing to do with him, he sees the inadequacy of his public self.  Michael Furey, who has been willing to sacrifice his life for love of another, challenges Gabriel's smug safety.  In the much-discussed lyrical ending of "The Dead," Gabriel confronts the irony that the dead Michael is more alive than he is.  "Generous tears" fill his eyes because he knows that he has never lived the life of desire, only the untransformed life of the everyday. 

At the end, awake and alone while his wife sleeps beside him, he loses his egoistic self and imaginatively merges into a mythic lyrical sense of oneness.  "The Dead" is not a story that can be understood the way most novels are read--one thing after another--but the way the modern short story must be read--aesthetically patterned in such a way that only the end makes the rest of the story meaningful.

Happy Bloomsday to one and all!

One City, One Book, 2012—Dubliners--“The Dead”

Let’s say that you are unfamiliar with the work and reputation of James Joyce (unlikely). What if you discovered Joyce’s “The Dead” in an anthology one day and read it cold? What would you think about it? Would you be impressed by the complexity and subtlety of this story? Would you be surprised to discover that this is one of the most respected and admired pieces of fiction in world literature? Or would you wonder what all the fuss is about? After all, it seems to be a relatively simple piece, primarily describing a group of people attending an annual after-Christmas party in Dublin in the early part of the twentieth century. If there is a focus, it seems to be on the apparently insignificant anxieties of a man named Gabriel who makes the dinner toast at the party.

Nothing dramatically happens in the long first section of the story: Gabriel is worried about his speech; he encounters a colleague who makes him uncomfortable; he tries to control Freddy Malins, who has drunk too much; he succeeds in his speech and feels good about it; he and his wife go to their hotel The last section of the story shifts to Gabriel and his wife Gretta, alone in their hotel room. Gabriel, desiring intimacy with his wife, is frustrated that she is distracted and is distressed when she tells him that a young man named Michael Furey was once in love with her and died from exposure after standing outside her window in the rain.

The key question readers may have about “The Dead” is how the story moves from the opening sentence about the practical problems of Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, being “literally run off her feet” ushering people in, to the final sentence about Gabriel’s reaction to his discovery about his wife: “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.” One might very well ask: If this discovery at the conclusion is the central point toward which the story has been moving, then what is the purpose of all the details about the party. How did the story lead the reader from what seems like a realistic or naturalistic tone describing ordinary, everyday, details in the first long section of the story to the lyrical tone describing a sort of spiritual recognition in the final section?

Perhaps there is a clue to the answer to this question in a letter Joyce once wrote to his brother Stanislaus: “There is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do…to give people a kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own…for their mental, moral and spiritual uplift.” The question is: How does a writer convert the “bread of everyday life,” i.e., ordinary details, into something that has a permanent artistic life and provides spiritual sustenance?

The basic problem Joyce faced in "The Dead"--how to write a realistic narrative that conveys a spiritual theme--is the same problem that Anton Chekhov had to deal with--how to arrange concrete details in such a way that they develop into a pattern that is equivalent to theme. Realistic details and events arranged in such a way that they are not merely an account of “what happened,” but rather a pattern that communicates “meaning” necessitates the reader’s knowing the “end” of the story before he or she can understand the pattern created by all that went before. This is the function of Joyce's notion of epiphany; for epiphany suggests that the story achieves closure either in retrospect by the realization of a character or by the reader processing the story in a circular way—i.e. beginning again once one has read to the end.

Most critics agree with David Daiches' opinion that "The Dead" is the "working-out, in terms of realistic narrative, of a preconceived theme" of a man's "withdrawal into the circle of his own egotism" until the walls around him are broken down by the "culminating assault on his egotism, coming simultaneously from without, as an incident affecting him, and from within, as an increase in understanding." However, Joyce's achievement in this story, its contribution to the development of the short story as a genre, may be better understood if we see the story's most basic theme as the difference between the kind of reality that realistic (or novelistic) prose imitates and the kind of reality that symbolic (or short story) prose reveals. Thematically, the conflict in "The Dead" that reflects its realistic/lyrical split is the difference revealed to both Gabriel and the reader between public life and secret life. This is announced in the first sentence—that Lilly “was literally run off her feet.” Although this mistake could be attributed realistically to Joyce’s technique of having the narrator assume the perspective of the character described, it serves the purpose of drawing attention to the difference between the “literal” and the “figurative”—that is Joyce’s transformation of the literal to the figurative by the story’s end.

The party portion of "The Dead" is the story of Gabriel's public life. His primary interest is his sense of superiority over the others at the party and how much he can impress them with his intelligence and style. However, throughout the party period of the story, there are moments--particularly those moments that focus on the past, on music, and on marriage--when reality is not presented as here and now, but as a mixture of memory and desire. Thematically, the basic issue the story poses is: In which one of these realms does true reality reside?

Throughout the story, Joyce uses ordinary references that mean little during an initial reading, but have symbolic significance for the reader by the end of the story, e.g. that Gretta must be “perished alive,” that Gabriel wears galoshes (in contract to Michael Furey who stood out in the rain unprotected from the chill), that attention is drawn to a picture of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, that Aunt Julia sings “Arrayed for the Bridal,” that Gabriel says “kindly forget my existence” (which Gretta does in the final scene), that Gabriel asks the partygoers to “take the will for the deed,” that he talks about a “thought tormented age,” that the snow is falling outside throughout the party, that the characters talk about the past. These seemingly ordinary details take on significance by their thematic similarity, by their patterned repetition, and by their relationship to Gabriel’s discovery about Gretta and himself at the end of the story.

Gabriel's discovery at the end of the story is not only that his wife has an inner life inaccessible to him, but that his own life has been an outer life only. This is all the more devastating to him because on the journey to the hotel, he has indulged in his own self-delusion about their relationship: "moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.... Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy."

Filled with desire and the memory of intimacy, wishing Gretta to at one with him, Gabriel is annoyed that she seems so distracted. When he discovers that she has a secret life that has nothing to do with him, he tries to use his typical public devices of irony to trivialize her memory, but the very simplicity of her story undercuts the effort. He sees the inadequacy of his public self. Michael Furey, who has been willing to give his life for love of another, challenges Gabriel's own smug safety.

In the much-discussed lyrical ending of "The Dead," Gabriel confronts the irony that the dead Michael is more alive than he is. "Generous tears" fill his eyes because he knows that he has never lived the life of desire, only the untransformed life of the everyday. The ending--in which Gabriel, awake and alone while his wife sleeps beside him loses self and imaginatively merges into a mythic lyrical sense of oneness--makes it possible for the reader to begin the story over again with this end in mind. "The Dead" is not a story that can be understood the way most novels are read--one thing after another--but the way the modern short story must be read--aesthetically patterned in such a way that only the end makes the rest of the story meaningful.

As a footnote, if you have not yet seen it, I recommend John Huston’s film of The Dead. As you may know, it was Huston’s last film—an act of love and admiration for the story, for he was very ill during the filming. Donal McCann plays Gabriel and Anjelica Huston plays Gretta. The film is mostly very true to the story, the only significant script addition being the invention of a character named Mr. Grace who gives a recitation entitled “Broken Vows,” by Lady Gregory. The final lines are:

You have taken the east from me;
you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon,
you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great
that you have taken God from me!

One of the characters remarks at the end of the recitation: “Imagine being in love like that”—which more explicitly sets up the romantic power of Michael Furey’s enactment of the “deed,” not just the “will.” Although the final shots of Aunt Julia in her coffin, the sky full of snow, and snow general all over Ireland may seem a bit too obvious, Huston quite rightly allows Joyce’s lyrical language to be what brings the film to its “final end.”

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.

I have enjoyed rereading the stories in Dubliners this month and hope that a large number of folks in Dublin and around the world read them also. I miss Dublin and hope to return some day.

One City, One Book, 2012—Dubliners--Public Life Stories

The three stories that Joyce categorized as being about “public life” in Dubliners—“Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother,” and “Grace”—have never been favorites of mine. However, Joyce once said that “Ivy Day” was one of his favorites in the book, second only to “The Dead.” After reading “Ivy Day” many times, and after reading Ulysses half a dozen times, I think I understand why Joyce liked the story more than I do.

Although most of the short stories in Dubliners have been a powerful influence on the twentieth-century short story--especially because of their “scrupulous meanness” or economy and their narrative movement toward what Joyce defined as an “epiphany”—the short story was probably not Joyce’s favorite narrative medium. Although its brevity encouraged a careful use of language similar to poetry (and careful use of language was indeed what Joyce loved most of all), the short story did not allow Joyce the flexibility to play with language the way a “long work” (Because it was so innovative I hesitate to call it a novel) like Ulysses did.

I have always felt that one of the hindrances to reading Ulysses is that you cannot skim it the way you can an ordinary novel, but must read it very carefully, letting your lips move, savoring every word and sentence. Usually, the traditional novel is built on an architectural structure—a group of characters in a plot that plays out temporally. However, Joyce did not have to worry so much about overall structure in Ulysses; he solved that novelistic problem from the beginning by patterning it after one of the most influential plot structures in world literature—The Odyssey. That allowed him to focus primarily on language, not plot. If you try to read Ulysses the way you read an ordinary novel, skimming the language and yearning for plot and character development to carry you along, you will soon fag out.

One of my favorite critical comments about Ulysses was made by the scholar Joseph Frank in his 1945 essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Frank argued, seemingly paradoxically, that Ulysses could not be read, but only reread, that one had to have the entire work in mind before being able to read it as it must be read. Although this is always true of the short story, it is, for reasons of length alone, not usually true of a long work.

When I taught Ulysses to American students I took to Dublin a few years ago, I provided them with reading suggestions for every chapter in the book several weeks before we made the trip, hoping that they would read the work through at least once before we read it a second time together while in Dublin. I also assigned a page or two of Ulysses to each student to read carefully and to read it aloud to the entire class; I wanted them to get in the habit of making their lips move when they read—not skimming, but reading every word. I think all of the stories in Dubliners should be read at least twice, for only when readers know the whole story can they begin again and perceive how the story is tightly organized around a thematic pattern.

If you really want to relish Joyce’s language, I recommend that you listen to good readers read the stories. Caedmon has a set of Dubliners CDs on which the stories are read by Frank McCourt, Colm Meaney, Stephen Rea, Sorcha Cusak, Ciran Hinds, T. P. McKenna, and others. I have listened to them several times and still enjoy them. For an even great challenge to reading Joyce’s language word by word, get the unabridged set of Ulysses, read flawlessly by Donal Donnelly, with Miriam Healy-Louie’s reading the Molly Bloom section. It is on 40 cds and runs 42.5 hours. I have listened to the entire book three times time and look forward to hearing it again and again, if I live that long. (Donal Donnelly, by the way, is the actor who played Freddy Malins in John Houston’s film of “The Dead.”)

"Ivy Day in the Committee Room"

I think Joyce liked “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” because--like “Grace” and “A Mother”—it shows his movement away from the short story so admirably represented in “Araby,” “Clay, “Eveline,” and others, and toward the novelistic form he mastered in Ulysses-- at least the way Joyce innovated the novelistic. In these three public life stories, the focus is, indeed, on a social situation, featuring an ensemble cast—not a personal/private, even spiritual, situation, as in many of the other, more famous and more familiar, stories.

The short story has never defined the self by society, or finding self in society, as does the novelistic, but rather the self escaping from, or being thrown out of, temporality and individuality to participate in the infinite and the universal.

The movement toward the novelistic is a movement toward realism, i.e. the assumption that what is perceived and experienced day-to-day, is real. The movement toward the novelistic is a movement away from the short story—a movement toward social organization and the conceptualization of ideas—a movement away from the momentary intuition of reality. There is a different "rhythm of reality" and a different "realm of reality" embodied in the short story and the novelistic. If all narrative sets out to give us the illusion of "reality," the question is not simply whether the technique of the novel and the short story are different in achieving this illusion, but rather whether the two forms present different interpretations of what reality is.

I have always argued that whereas the novel assumes a social and conceptual reality, the short story assumes intuitive reality. My argument is that the novel presents a reality that can be validated by social experience, whereas the short story presents reality that can only be validated by personal experience. The novel is a public art; the short story is a personal one. The novelist says, "I shall create the illusion of experience." The short story writer says, " I shall create the illusion of an experience. The basic difference between the short story and the novel can be summarized thus: the short narrative presents an experience, directly and emotionally encountered. The novel presents experience abstractly and conceptually considered.

These distinctions seem to me to define the “public life stories” as novelistic, rather than as short stories. “Ivy Day” is the most historically based of the three, since it takes place on October 6, Ivy Day, which commemorates the anniversary of the death of Charles Parnell. It is also a day of Dublin municipal elections, which gives Joyce the opportunity to satirically juxtapose current politicians against Parnell. Several different characters play roles in this little drama in the Nationalist Party committee room on a cold October day, beginning with Old Jack, who tends the Parnell flame in the fireplace—which is the central image in the room. I think Joyce liked writing this story because he wanted to create at least one story in Dubliners that would showcase the importance of the struggle for Irish Independence and how the current politicians were never able to measure up to the heroic stature of Parnell; it also gave him the opportunity to create memorable dialogue.

Nothing really happens in “Ivy Day”—certainly nothing in the minds of any of the characters. Moreover, the romanticism of such stories as “Araby” and “Clay” is reduced here to the banal poem Joe recites at the end of the story. Parnell’s memory is further reduced by the trivialization of a gun salute to the three “poks” of the beer bottles popping open from being placed on the fireplace.

"A Mother"

What aligns “Ivy Day” with the novelistic tactics that Joyce develops to such brilliant extremes in Ulysses is that it is a satire of Irish politics. Similarly, what aligns “A Mother” with the novelistic is that it is a satire on the Irish cultural revival—an attempt of groups to revive Irish language, literature, art, and folklore just before the turn of the century, after many years of being suppressed by British colonial rule. Just as a political context energizes “Ivy Day,” a cultural context provides the dynamics of Joyce’s satire in “A Mother.” The story gives Joyce the opportunity to have a bit of fun with sentences like this: “She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure, and fixed.” Whereas every detail in such stories as “The Sisters,” “Araby,” “An Encounter,” “Eveline,” and “Clay” are important to developing the movement of the stories toward a thematic pattern and/or a realization either by the character or the reader, much detail in “The Mother” is relevant to nothing except the creation of a social satire.

"Grace"

The third “public life” story, “Grace,” deals with the third important social reality of Ireland at the end of the century—religion, and it seems only satirically fitting that the story also focuses on that bane of Ireland morality and social progress—the drink. As Ed McMahon is credited with saying once, “God created whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.” Critics have suggested that Joyce uses a device in “Grace” that he later develops more impressively in Ulysses—a classical narrative plot to provide the structure of the story itself—in this case from Dante’s Inferno. Joyce’s narrative plot charts, of course, the plot the men create to rescue Mr. Kernan from drink and bring him back to the church. Several characters in the story later appear in Ulysses. Molly Bloom tells about a little man who fell down some steps into the WC and bit off the tip of his tongue. And in the Hades section of Ulysses, Mr. Kernan has still not settled his debt for groceries. Joyce’s title joke is that “grace” does not refer to the glory of God’s grace, but rather to the grace period that a creditor may allow a debtor before the debt is repaid. At the end of the story, the satire on the profanation of the church concludes with Father Purdon’s metaphor of being the men’s spiritual accountant, asking them to look into the books of their own spiritual life and see if they “tallied accurately with conscience.”

The three “public life” stories in Dubliners are not my favorites because they are like novels, depend on a realistic/satiric focus on public life, rather than like short stories, which traditionally and generically, more often deal with what might be called “”secret life.” The fact that the short story is more apt to deal with characters’ “secret life” than with their “public life” can be seen in one of the most famous short stories in world literature, Anton Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog.” I wrote a blog post on “Lady with the Pet Dog” back in November 2010. For some reason it has been the most visited post on my blog, logging over 3,000 pageviews since it was posted. Here is the key quote from the story about “public life” and “private life”:

"He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life, running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest, and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his “lower race,” his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night."

Of course, there is another story that centers on the difference between “public life” and “secret life,” equally as famous as “Lady with the Pet Dog”—Joyce’s “The Dead.” More about that next week in my final post to celebrate Dublin Library’s One City, One Book for 2012.

One City, One Book, 2012--Dubliners-Maturity Stories

"A Little Cloud"

Whenever I read Joyce’s “A Little Cloud,” I always think of a character named Joe Btfspik, created many years ago by Al Capp for the comic strip Li’l Abner. Capp once said you pronounce Joe’s name by closing your lips, sticking out your tongue, and blowing what we used to call a “raspberry.” My new granddaughter, age 10 months, does it most impressively. Joe Btfspik always appeared with a little cloud over his head and caused bad luck to anyone around him.

Little Chandler, Joyce’s central character in “A Little Cloud,” does not cause bad luck, but always seems to be in a state of funk or depression: “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.” Little Chandler is another Dubliner who holds back from life, living in his imagination, and who envies/admires someone else who lives a life of action. In this case, the admired one is Gallaher, a reporter, mentioned in Ulysses as the man who scooped the country by reporting the Phoenix Park murders of 1882.

Little Chandler fancies himself a poet. When he feels that a “poetic” moment has touched him, he wonders whether he could write a poem to express his ideas. Joyce, of course, knows that a poet is someone who actually writes poems, not someone who has poetic moments or fancies himself as a “poetic soul.” Little Chandler does not create poems, but rather invents sentences and phrases from the notices that he thinks his book would get, for example, “A wistful sadness pervades these poems.”

When Chandler meets Gallaher in a pub, the reporter is full of bluster and condescension for Dublin. As happens to many other characters in Dubliners, Little Chandler, befuddled by three whiskies and Gallaher’s cigar becomes “confused…for he was a delicate and abstinent person.”

When Chandler goes home he is struck by the contrast between his ladylike wife and the voluptuous passion of the women Gallaher has described to him. Looking at his wife’s picture, he sees no passion in her eyes, but rather something “mean” in them; he also sees something “mean” in the furniture of his little house. When he picks up a volume of Byron’s poems, he reads from the first poem in the book and feels its melancholy rhythm, wondering if he could also write like that—not realizing that the poem is a sentimental bit of juvenilia Byron wrote when he was only 14. When he tries to get in the “mood” he feels he needs to write a poem, his child begins to cry and he becomes so angry to have his mood spoiled that he bends down and shouts into the child’s face, “Stop!” The story ends with a sense of shame similar to that of the boy at the end of “Araby”--Chandler’s eyes stinging with tears of remorse.

Like several other stories in Dubliners, “A Little Cloud” is about the tension between the life of longing and the life of action. It is not so much that Joyce yearns to be like the bigmouth Gallaher, but he certainly does not want to be like the “little light” that is Little Chandler.

"Counterparts"

“Counterparts” depicts a character quite the opposite of Little Chandler, but no less empty and frustrated—Farrington—driven by drink and rage. Indeed, if “After the Race” is a story about elation, then “Counterparts” is a story about rage. Once again, as in other stories in Dubliners, after Farrington sneaks out for a quick drink, he returns to his work “confused” and longing to spend the night drinking in the bars with his friends. His head is unclear and his body aches to do something—“to rush out and revel in violence.” If thoughts about life make Little Chandler depressed, all the indignities of life enrage Farrington. After insulting his boss and having to apologize, “he felt savage and thirsty and revengeful, annoyed with himself and everyone else.”

If Little Chandler is almost bodiless, Farrington is almost all body; throughout the story, he feels his “great body” aching for the public house. When he finally does get out and starts his pub crawl, showing off by buying multiple rounds for his friends, he becomes all the more angry when he is fascinated by a young woman and curses that he has no money left to be able to impress her.

Joyce quite purposely does not have the narrator refer to Farrington by name, only calling him “the man” or “a man,” until Farrington gets to the pubs with his friends—as if he has no personality except the blustering man he is while drinking. When he runs out of money, loses a hand-wrestling match, and must go home, he once again becomes merely “a very sullen faced man” standing on the corner of O’Connell Bridge waiting for a tram. “He felt humiliated and discontented: he did not even feel drunk and he had only twopence in his pocket. He cursed everything.” Impotent with rage, “His heart swelled with fury…his fury nearly choked him.” At the end of the story, Farrington is finally able to vent his pent-up rage against his little boy who has let the fire go out in the stove. As he strikes the boy with a stick, the child cries out in pain, begging his father not to beat him, promising that if he will not, he will say a Hail Mary for him.

“Counterparts” is something of a counterpart to “A Little Cloud.” If Little Chandler is bodiless, then Farrington is spiritless; both are equally pathetic in their final humiliation by striking out at those who cannot defend themselves.

"Clay"

“Clay” is one of the most often anthologized stories from Dubliners, probably third after “Araby” and “The Dead.” “Clay” is a counterpart story to “A Painful Case”; both Maria and Duffy are “cases” of a conscious withdrawal from the life of the body.

Much has been made of the fact that “Clay” takes place on Hallows Eve and that when Maria laughs, the tip of her nose nearly meets the tip of her chin—a stereotype image of the Halloween witch. The story has often also been cited as a clear example of Joyce’s use of the so-called “free indirect style,” in which we hear the voice of a narrator replicating the tone of the character at the center of the story. For example, “But wasn’t Maria glad when the women had finished their tea and the cook and the dummy had begun to clear away the tea things?” Maria is a classic spinster figure, thus making the many superstitions suggested in the story about brides all the more comic/poignant. When Maria is getting dressed, she lays out her best skirt on the bed and looks at herself in the mirror. It is a folk superstition that if a girl lays out her clothes on the bed, she will dream of her husband turning them over; moreover, at the rise of the moon on Halloween, the mirror is supposed to reflect one’s future husband.

Once again, Joyce makes use of the motif of confusion of the central character. Maria leaves behind the plum cake she has bought because the gentleman on the tram has “confused her,” a fact which makes her colour with shame, vexation, and disappointment. Maria is childlike, much as Little Chandler is in “A Little Cloud.” She is the only adult asked to play the guessing game that supposedly tells one’s future based on the object chosen blindfolded. As they put the blindfold over her eyes, Maria once again, for the third time in the story laughs “until the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin.” The classic Joycean epiphany occurs for the reader when, as a joke, a neighbor child puts clay in the saucer, signifying death. Maria chooses again, this time getting the prayer book—which supposedly signifies that she may enter a convent. The story ends poignantly when Maria sings “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls” and Joe says there is no time like long ago and no music like the 19^th century music of the composer Michael Balfe—evoking a theme that Joyce uses again in “The Dead.”

"A Painful Case"

When I taught Dubliners a few years ago to American students in Dublin, I used the Norton Critical Edition. Published in 2006, it was the newest edition at the time, the text edited by Hans Walter Gabler, who also edited the text of Ulysses that I was using. The Norton included a number of notes and supplementary material that I found useful. I did not, however, like the critical essays that editor Margot Norris included because they were typical of the kind of peripheral criticism of the time that I found to be of questionable value in helping students learn how to read Joyce’s short stories.

For example, the essay on “Araby” was less about the story itself and all about the “context” of the great bazaar that actually took place in Dublin in 1894. The author of the article goes on for 22 pages supplying historical background for the bazaar, noting at one point: “The knowledgeable Dublin reader who knew the minutiae of the historical 1894 Dublin bazaar might well wonder why so few significant details survive in Joyce’s text.” Well, to answer that, I would refer this “new historicist” academic back to Joyce’s pride in writing the story in a style of “scrupulous meanness.” The essay in the Norton edition on “After the Race” deals with “colonial economics”; the essay on “The Dead” focuses on “empire and patriarchy”; and the essay on “A Painful Case” makes a case for the story being about homosexuality. My objection to these essays is that they primarily to serve the purpose of promoting the particular theoretical bias of the critic—e.g. feminism, postcolonialism, new historicism, and so-called “queer studies”-- rather than the purpose of increasing the reader’s understanding of the story.

In “A Painful Case,” Mr. Duffy, who lives alone out in Chapelizod near Phoenix Park is a bookworm—the ambiguously dreaded fate of the young boys in “Araby,” “An Encounter,” and “The Sisters.” Abhorring anything “which betokened physical or mental disorder,” valuing order and control, “He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful sideglances.” He fancies himself a writer who transforms his life into literature: “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 predicate in the past tense.” He has no friends or companions and lives his “spiritual life without any communion with others.”

When he meets Mrs. Sinico, he begins visiting her regularly, with the encouragement of her husband, who has “dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect anyone else would take an interest in her.” Duffy, being who he is, however, has only a mental interest in Mrs. Sinico, not a physical one, loaning her books, entangling has thoughts with hers. He feels that his involvement with her “exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life.” Like the boy in “Araby,” he thinks that in her eyes he “would ascend to an angelical stature.” However, one night when Mrs. Sinico clasps his hand passionately and presses it to her cheek, he is appalled and repulsed, and abruptly breaks off the relationship.

Four years pass and Duffy returns to his orderly ways. One of the sentences he writes reflects the ambiguity of his relationship with Mrs. Sinico: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” Although this is a central passage in the story, I do not think it means that Duffy is a repressed homosexual. It means rather that although he would like to have a friendship with Mrs. Sinico, he does not want it to involve anything physical. He wants it to be spiritual, the kind of relationship that a priest might have with her. Indeed, when he reads the newspaper story about her death, his lips move “as a priest does when he reads the prayer.” Like the boy at the end of “Araby,“ he is appalled to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred.”

However, almost immediately, Duffy begins to identify with Mrs. Sinico, to see how lonely her life might have been. Through this identification, he can also see how lonely his life will be, and he tortures himself his responsibility for her death: “Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.” When he sees two lovers near the Park, he is filled with despair, feeling he “had been outcast from life’s feast.” The last paragraph of the story is a carefully constructed rhythm of despair, equaled only in Dubliners by the final paragraph of “The Dead.”

“He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes, listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”

If the first three stories in Dubliners are about a child’s being torn between a future life of action in the everyday world and a spiritual/aesthetic life of study, thought, and writing, then these four stories of “maturity” are about adults who fail to find fulfillment in life. The most sympathetic of the four characters is Duffy, who at least at the end of “A Painful Case” has come to some meaningful realization about his failure to integrate body and spirit. The same cannot be said about Little Chandler, Farrington, and Maria.

One City, One Book--Dubliners--Childhood Stories

Each April for the past six years, the Dublin City Public Libraries has sponsored “One City, One Book,” which encourages everyone to spend Eliot’s “cruelest month” celebrating “dear dirty Dublin” by reading one book that focuses on the city. This year, (and one might indeed think perhaps it’s about time) the chosen book is James Joyce’s Dubliners.

I love Dublin—spent a year there once teaching the American short story at University College, Dublin and Trinity on a Fulbright Senior Fellowship. Went back several times, most recently two summers for three-week classes, teaching a group of American students Dubliners and Ulysses by “walking the walk” throughout the city where the stories and the novel “virtually” took place, and “talking the talk” about the world’s most close-mouthed short stories and the world’s most voluble novel.

I am going to participate in the “One City, One Book” Dublin celebration about the city’s most famous book by rereading the fifteen stories in the collection and commenting on them in several blog posts. I encourage my readers to join me and to give me whatever ragging’ I deserve for my misguided remarks. The James Joyce Center and the Dublin City Libraries are sponsoring a number of activities. If you are in the city this month, check the website at http://www.dublinonecityonebook.ie/

Joyce organized the stories in Dubliners into several groups: the first three, which I will discuss in this post, focuses on childhood; the next two emphasizes adolescence; the next six concentrates on maturity; the next three are on public life, and the final one, “The Dead” takes its departure from what Joyce once said he thought he might have unfairly neglected—Ireland’s “ingenuous insularity and its hospitality.”

The first three stories—“The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and “Araby”—are told by an educated man recalling events from his preadolescent upbringing in Dublin. Although we are not given any indication of the narrator’s present age or situation in life, we know he is educated because of his language—e.g. “inefficacious,” “elucidating,” “copious,” “stratagem,” “imperturbable”—not to mention the sophistication of his observations about his actions, motives, and thoughts as a child.

However, in spite of his obvious intelligence and education, the narrator does not try to analyze or explain his actions or his motives. In fact, in many ways, they seem as mysterious to him in his adult recollection as they did in his preadolescent experience. Indeed, one of the techniques that makes these stories so innovative and influential is their refusal to engage in explanation, their parsimonious use of language, their frustrating stinginess with words.

The most famous remark Joyce made about the stories can be found in one of the many letters he wrote to Grant Richards when he was trying to get them published in 1906, telling Richards that he had written the stories “in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.”

By using the word “meanness” Joyce was not calling either the city or his characters “cruel,” “ill-tempered,” or “shabby.” As always, Joyce was not talking about the content of his work but its style, and by a “mean” style, he was referring to the definition of that word as “stingy.” The style of Dubliners is a conscientious, exacting, stingy use of language. And to indicate that he was not interested merely in a realistic presentation or “presentment” of his experience, Joyce says he was interested in artistically “altering”—even more “deforming” that experience for the sake of revealing its mysterious significance. Joyce is alluding to what the Russian formalists of the time called “defamiliarization.” In his essay, "Art as Technique,” Victor Shklovsky says that the technique of the artist, the work of the imagination, is to make objects "unfamiliar." The Formalists see this distortion as the very stuff of art itself. As Shklovsky emphatically asserts, "Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important."

What makes Ulysses, and even more, Finnegan’s Wake, so difficult for readers is that in them, Joyce is, as he says in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, first and foremost, an “artificer.” He is no less an artificer in Dubliners; it is just that in these stories he practices a kind of “scrupulous meanness” that is not so obvious in his long fictions. (Although, I must say as a side note here, Ulysses is no less “scrupulous” and conscientious, no less carefully wrought, than the stories in Dubliners; it is just longer. In fact, the story of Leopold Bloom started as a short story and just got out of hand. One of the problems I had in teaching Ulysses to my American students in Ireland was to get them to read it as carefully and attentively as they might read a short story. What about Finnegan’s Wake, you ask? I still am not experienced enough to read it as carefully as I should; besides life is short; it is long; I am lazy).

Given the fact that Joyce is an artist before he is anything else, it is difficult to read “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and “Araby” as if they were about ordinary preadolescent boys in the real social world of Dublin. These three stories might well be subtitled, “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Boy.” They are all about the fearful attraction that the world of the mind, the spirit, and the imagination hold for a boy who is essentially a romantic; that is, these boys are not interested in the practical world of everyday reality, but rather obsessed with the intangible world of desire, the spiritual, the transcendent—not “stuff” but the stuff dreams are made on.

In the first story, “The Sisters” (which we might expect to be a threshold of some kind), the boy is caught between the two worlds of the “sacred and the profane.” According to those who embody the profane world of the everyday, the old priest who has been paralyzed by a stroke is “queer,” not a homosexual, but rather “uncanny,” he was too “scrupulous,” a “disappointed man” whose life was “crossed;” something has “gone wrong with him.” And the boy--for whom the old priest who taught the boy a great deal and for whom he has had a great wish—is cautioned that too much education is not good, that he should run about and play with other lads, get exercise, be active, not think so much.

As appropriate for his style of “scrupulous meanness,” Joyce does not examine or explain the significance of this schism between action and thought, and his characters are unable to explain exactly what they mean by it. The man who tells the story has some idea of the meaning of his childhood fascination with the old priest, but the boy does not. As he listens to old Cotter’s remarks about the priest, he says, “I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences.” At night he tries to think about something pleasant, like Christmas, but always sees the priest’s face and knows that it wants to confess something: “I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region and there again I found it waiting for me.”

The opening paragraph of the story suggests the future artist’s fascination with words, as he says over and over to himself the word paralysis, for it “sounds” “strangely” in his ears like the word gnomon and the word simony. Although it is the sound of the words that attracts the boy, Joyce chooses the words carefully to suggest his fascination with the spiritual. Gnomon is the root of the word gnostic, which suggests knower or interpreter. Simony comes from the sorcerer Simon Magus and refers to the practice of “selling the spiritual.” The artist is an interpreter of the spiritual and tries to embody the spiritual in the material world of mere content. Even paralysis suggests the paradox of the art work—what Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” refers to as a “still unravish’d bride,” “foster-child of silence of slow time,” an “attic shape.” Joyce embodies in the “idle chalice” that which is “still” in Keats’ poem—what the critic Murray Krieger once argued suggests both “not moving” and at the same time “still going on.” The chalice is the Holy Grail that contains the wine of transubstantiation—the incarnation of the word becoming flesh.

All this is for the young boy a “deadly work” that he longs to be near--a region both “pleasant” and “vicious” into which the boy feels his soul receding. The priest has taught the boy how “complex and mysterious” the rituals of the church are—how simple acts are complex and inexplicable. The problem of the old priest is that he was “too scrupulous always,” that he has sought out the mysteries of the spiritual and found them too elusive. When he broke the chalice, he found that it “contained nothing” and that has “affected his mind.” When he is found in the confessional in the dark laughing softly to himself, they know “something has gone wrong with him.” This impossibility of finding the spiritual in the physical is what the boy feels the old priest is trying to confess to him; it is now what the boy feels freed from.

The man who tells the story knows that there are only two choices for one who cannot be content with the everyday world of the physical—art and religion. In this story, although he is drawn to the mystery of the spiritual, he must deal with the disappointment of trying to embody that spiritual in the complex rituals of the church. As Joyce’s devotion to language and art have shown, he chooses the equally difficult task of embodying the spiritual in words.

I have already spent too much time on “The Sisters” and will only make a few suggestions about “An Encounter” and “Araby” from the perspective of these stories as “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Boy.” As in “The Sisters,” “An Encounter” is about a boy who is afraid to seem “studious or lacking in robustness.” He is drawn to the romantic adventures of the stories he reads—hungers for the escape that those chronicles of disorder offer him. But he wearies of them and wants “real adventures.” However, the “real adventure” of meeting the old man is “an encounter” with what he fears will be his future self. When the old man asks if he has read the words of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Lytton, and Thomas Moore—all romantic writers--he says he has. The old man says, “I can see you are a bookworm like myself.” When the old man talks about sweethearts and boys, the boy thinks the words are reasonable, but does not like them in the old man’s mouth. When the old man walks away and the narrator’s companion exclaims, “Look what he’s doing,” the narrator does not look up, but we suspect that the old man is masturbating. When he tells the boy that he would like to whip a boy for talking to girls, it is as if he were “unfolding an elaborate mystery.” The narrator says the old man seems to “plead with me that I should understand him.” Like “The Sisters,” the story is about the schism between the life of action and the life of thought—the life of everyday reality and the life of books--and the danger of a narcissistic withdrawal into the self.

“Araby,” which is Joyce’s most famous story, in fact one of the most famous stories in world literature, is a sweeter treatment of the schism between the real and the romantic, but it is no less ultimately dangerous in its appeal and inevitable disappointment. In this story, the boy is not fascinated by some frightening image of himself, but rather an alluring image of his desire. Mangan’s sister, who is not named, for her name is sacred, is not so much a real person in the world as she is a romantic embodiment of ultimate spiritual beauty. Her image accompanies him even in places most hostile to romance. He bears his “chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.” He does not know how to tell her of his “confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wire.” He is impatient with “the serious work of life” that stands between him and his desire.

However, when he arrives at the great hall of the Araby bazaar, recognizing the silence of it like that which pervades a “church after a service,” he hears men counting money on a platter, as did Jesus when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple, and a seemingly inconsequential dialogue between a young woman and two young men. The dialogue obviously suggests a kind of flirtation. It is an example of the kind of seemingly inconsequential that Joyce calls an “epiphany,” a showing forth of significance in the seemingly ordinary.

Joyce describes this notion of epiphany in Stephen Hero (the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), when a casual encounter in Eccles St., Dublin impresses Stephen:

A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses that seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

The Young Lady - (drawling discreetly) ... 0, yes... I ....... at the ...cha...pel... The Young Gentleman - (inaudibly) ... I ... (again inaudibly) ... I The Young Lady - (softly) .0... but you're ... ve....ry... wick...ed...

This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. 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. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. (Chapter XXV).

The epiphany in “Araby,” which makes the boy see himself as a “creature driven and derided by vanity,” is his recognition of the impossibility of attaining the spiritual in the merely physical. It is what Gatsby tragically recognizes when he knows that Daisy can never embody the ultimately ideal that he desires.

My next post will be about “Eveline” and “After the Race,” the stories about adolescence; and “Two Gallants” and “The Boarding House,” two of the six stories that deal with “maturity.”

My third post will be about the other four stories that deal with maturity: “A Little Cloud,” “Counterparts,” “Clay,” and “A Painful Case.”

My fourth post will deal with the three stories that focus on “public life”: “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother,” and “Grace.”

My fifth and final post will be on “The Dead.”

I hope you are reading these stories along with me. I appreciate your comments.

John Burnside's "The Bell Ringer": PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories, 2009

If you want to read a paradigmatic example of the traditional lyrical/realistic short story, innovated by Chekhov (Collected Stories) and Turgenev (Sportsman’s Sketches) and then developed by Joyce (Dubliners) and Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), take a look at John Burnside’s “The Bell Ringer.”

Burnside’s discussion of the creative origins of his story suggests that he is well aware of this tradition. He says he started thinking about the story when he thought of how important bells, usually church bells, were to the community—to announce the outbreak of war, the return of peace, marriages, deaths, and important social occasions. Since the community was often defined by the reach of the bells, with those “beyond the peal” deemed to be outside that parish, he started thinking that maybe an experienced listener could not only determine by the tenor of the bells what they signified socially, but also “the secrets of individual bell ringers—their hidden wishes, their secret desires and fears, their private loneliness.” It’s a nice trope, fanciful, but somehow believable.

The key characteristics of the Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce, Anderson lyrical/realistic tradition are all here: The “loneliness” that Frank O’Connor discusses in The Lonely Voice, the “secrets desires and fears” of an individual in a small community, a central metaphor that embodies the loneliness and secrets.

I don’t want to give a plot summary here, for another element of this short story tradition is, of course, the emphasis placed on the ending of the story, what Joyce described as an epiphany. Eva, the central character, has lost her father, lives in an old family house in a village in Scotland, is often alone because her husband works in other countries. She doesn’t really mind being alone, for there is little love or intimacy between her and her husband. Her one friend is her sister-in-law, who confides in her that she is having an affair. She joins a bell-ringing club so she can meet people. She does not make friends at the club, but she does become infatuated with a young American.

What I like about the story is the fictional world Burnside creates—a kind of reality/unreality that is both the world of everyday and the world of fantasy and fairytale. The story begins with Eva thinking the landscape around her looks like a children’s-book illustration, the snow steady and insistent in a kingdom that had succumbed to the bad fairy’s spell and slept for a hundred years in a viridian web of gossamer and thorns.” When she goes to the church for the bell-ringing in the tower, she thinks of the location as a “pagan place, a dark garden of yews and straggling roses and, at its center, the stone church, with its altar and its font and, above it all, the bells, suspended in the chill air of the belfry, heavy and still, waiting to be brought to life.” I like that rhythm.

The ending is announced this way: “It was like watching a conjurer perform a magic trick, when you shouldn’t really care, because you know it’s an illusion, but you just have to figure how it’s done.” The ending is absolutely inevitable and even predictable, but still a surprise. I like it when a story does that. I like it when everything comes together in a pleasurable little gasp.

If you like this story and you have not read all your Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce, Anderson, then you have a lot of wonderful short story reading ahead of you. And while you are at it, read the two very finest contemporary short story writers in this tradition—Alice Munro and William Trevor.