James Joyce Dubliners

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James Joyce - Dubliners

Themes
The first story of the book, The Sisters, was rewritten to fit more perfectly the start of a larger collection. In the final version, three words are italicised on the first page: paralysis, gnomon, and simony. This is typical of Joyce's style. It is in keeping with his sense of realism that these foreign sounding words would stick in the head of a young child. But the words simultaneously take on a symbolic value that identifies the thematic contents of the book.
Simony is a religious term taken from the Catechism that denotes the buying of ecclesiastical favours. Joyce, particularly in Grace, is concerned with religious hypocrisy, but he also means the term to refer to a more widespread materialist corruption of the spirit. This phenomenon is most obviously manifested in a secular form in Ivy Day in the Committee Room, where the substance of the Irish Movement is exploited by its own members for motives of personal greed. This conflict between money and integrity resonates throughout the collection.
Gnomon is a term taken from Euclidean geometry that refers to the smallest part of a parallelogram. Critics have taken this as a reference to Joyce's economy of style (where the part signifies the whole - thus the lack of obvious beginnings and endings in the stories). The stories in Dubliners are brief narratives in which he makes his points through the tiny details of gesture in his characters, or through the even subtler movements of a character's consciousness. But the word gnomon also denotes an indicator, and is most commonly used in reference to the sun-dial, where the gnomon indicates time. In the same first paragraph the child recalls the self-conscious realisation of the priest: "I am not long for this world." Later, we are told that for Eveline, "her time was running out". The epiphanies (moments of spiritual revelation) around which the stories are based aim either to raise the trivial existence of his characters to a level of conscious significance for the reader, or to illustrate an instant of self-realisation in the characters themselves.
The stories in Dubliners find their most strongly binding aspect in the theme of paralysis. Joyce talked about the physical phenomenon of hemiplegia to symbolise a paralysis in his characters that extended into the psychological, the social and the spiritual as well as the physical realm. His art, in its criticism of this state of paralysis, is, by implication, a defence of active and fulfilling Life
Style and Form
The tension between art and life is central to the richness of Joyce's writing. In the development of his prose style, he sought to represent simultaneously the monotonous reality of life with its wider and more compelling significance.
The aspect of realism in Joyce's art continued the tradition in which the novel had developed during the course of the nineteenth century. Like Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary, Joyce aimed to write impersonally - that is to say, he does not allow himself as author to intervene directly in the narrative, but relies instead on the effects of structure, language, plot and allusion to communicate with the reader.
A strong aspect of the Flaubertian tradition that Joyce inherited was the use of irony. Unlike the novels of Balzac or Tolstoy, where the narrator can be assumed to be truthful, the narrator of Joyce or Flaubert is unreliable. In the case of the latter, the narrator speaks from a point of limited consciousness. For the earlier novelists, it was acceptable for the narrator to assume omniscience.
Flaubert's sense of realism is also reflected in Joyce's use of the indirect free style in his prose. This technique allows the author to reflect the consciousness of his characters in the register of the language that he uses. This effect displaces the author in the consciousness of the reader, drawing him, instead, closer to the character, so that an overall sense of realism is more powerfully achieved.
But Joyce was equally aware of the limitations of realism: namely that as an author, he could never entirely absent himself from his work; that he was always shaping and interpreting reality in his art through the aspects of reality that he chose either to reflect or omit; but most importantly, that language itself was an imperfect vehicle though which to register the reality of experience. In Dubliners, therefore, Joyce seeks less to extend the reach of realism than to extend the reach of the novel beyond the realms of realism and into those of symbolism.
Joyce's genius is his ability to create fiction which simultaneously satisfies all the criteria both of realism and symbolism. It is, essentially, the creation of a perfect harmony between life and art. At no point does he allow himself the self-indulgence of a detail that merits mention only for symbolic purposes. He never strays from the sensibility of verisimilitude. Yet the "scrupulous meanness" (his phrase) of his language, means that he gives his reader little that is not endowed with a wider significance. The most trivial seeming details take on a richness for the informed reader, resonating as symbols through history, language, art or myth. For example, in Eveline, the description of the photograph of the anonymous priest that hangs above the "broken harmonium" is at once a description of Eveline's observation, and also an indication to the reader of the absence of spirituality and the broken harmony of the household. In A Painful Case, Joyce chooses to locate Mr. Duffy in Chapelizod, the mythological setting of the adulterous romance between Tristan and Iseult. Here the association is deliberately ironic: the passion evoked by the myth serves to emphasise the emotional sterility of Mr. Duffy. Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, made explicit the fact that Joyce intended the movement of location in Grace from an underground toilet, to a stale bedroom, to a church, as a parody of Dante's The Divine Comedy.
Philosophy
At the heart of this artistic vision is a belief in "the significance of trivial things". In a letter to his brother, Joyce wrote of "a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass" and his own artistic endeavour, which he saw as being "to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent life of his own". Joyce was not religious in the sectarian sense of the word, but he certainly believed in the reality of the spirit. However, his sense of the existence of the spirit was what is called "essentialist" as opposed to "transcendentalist", and takes its form from the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, whom Joyce had studied closely. In reference to his art, this means that he believed that the essential form, or reality, could be penetrated by the imagination only in the physical world and not in an abstract way, divorced from the physical world.
It is in this context that we can understand exactly what Joyce meant by the idea of an epiphany: a momentary manifestation of reality in an environment where reality has been largely distorted. In Stephen Hero, he writes: "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." For example, in An Encounter, it is the increasingly clear manifestation of the stranger's repressed perversions that awakens the two boys to apprehend his nature correctly. In A Mother, Mrs. Kearney's vulgar behaviour towards her husband, Kathleen and Mr. Holohan, reveals the reality of her character that lies beneath her façade of decorum and propriety. In The Dead, the epiphany is internalised. It is Gabriel himself who honestly apprehends his own being, just as Mr. Duffy does in A Painful Case and it is on these grounds that the author seems to treat these characters more sympathetically.
In the main, Joyce is severe with his characters in Dubliners. For this reason, the book has been criticised for its coldness and lack of feeling for humanity. This does no justice to the depth of Joyce's passion. The satirical tone of much of the collection is the product of a genuine anger, which is itself borne out of the same sympathetic anguish that Joyce shows for Gabriel at the end of "The Dead". Joyce wrote of his desire to create an art for the "mental, moral and spiritual uplift of the people". In a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, Joyce wrote that his "intention was to write a chapter of the moral history" of his country. The idea of a "moral history" is evidence that Joyce's art has a moral purpose; namely to create a conscience with which to stir humanity from its state of paralysis.

Modernism
The idea of Modernism is a complex one. In a general sense it brings together the various movements in the arts during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century including symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, futurism, constructivism, imagism, vorticism, expressionism, dada and surrealism. These movements, experimental in their nature, sought to find new forms with which to represent the modern world and modern perspectives more forcefully. Other Modernist writers of a comparable stature to Joyce include T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. In the literature of Joyce, we can see the fundamental aspect of Modernist Art: namely, to seek out "the real" - that which is universal and timeless in humanity - from the apparently "unreal" detritus of modern existence, but to do so through actual experience rather than through imaginative fantasy.

The dead
The Dead is the last story in the collection. It is the longest and the last to have been written, finished after Joyce had already made one unsuccessful attempt to get the collection published. In style it is very different from the other stories, far more complete on the page, leaving less for the reader to fill in with his imagination, and ending with a much more solid conclusion with respect to its protagonist. It is therefore, more accessible and was, unsurprisingly, acclaimed by critics as being the outstanding piece of the collection. The rest were initially dismissed as being somewhat banal. It would be, in Gabriel's words, as though a critic were feeling that most of the stories "had no melody for him, and he doubted whether it had any melody for the other listeners".
As the dinner party guests listen to Mary Jane play the piano, we are shared Gabriel's response to the music. As the piece comes to an end, we understand that "he knew that Mary Jane must be near the end of her piece for she was playing again the opening melody with runs of scales after every bar and while he waited for the end the resentment died down in his heart". "The Dead" within Dubliners is that melody.
Gabriel is also an example of the antihero. His sense of his own absurdity and fear of taking up "a wrong tone", being made "ridiculous before people", are characteristics which influenced T S Eliot in his portrayal of J. Alfred Prufrock ("That is not what I meant at all./ That is not it at all"). And yet Gabriel must also deal with his own heroic pretence, his longing "to be master", comparable to the way Prufrock alludes to the soul of Hamlet in his self. For Gabriel, the love which he shares with Gretta, consummated in the "moments of their secret life", is his consolation, his happiness, making him "proud, joyful, tender, valorous", just like a hero.
The bomb shell of her past, "that romance in her life", a sacred memory of her own from which Gabriel is forever excluded, is enough to isolate him; to return him to "a shameful consciousness of his own person". He sees himself as "a ludicrous figure", "a nervous well meaning sentimentalist". Joyce uses Shakespearean imagery to compare Gabriel with the tragedy of Othello, a cuckold, hiding from "the shame that burned upon his forehead". Yet the mediocrity of his passions are made clear to himself as he realises that "he had never felt like that towards any woman". He is reduced to the same state of misery as the young boy at Araby, "driven and derided by vanity", eyes burning "with anguish and anger".
Just that evening, Gabriel had spoken in public, of how "our path through life is strewn with many sad memories". And he offers, by way of advice: "were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living". Joyce's cruel irony shows this to be true. Gabriel's own mind becomes filled with "the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree". "His soul had approached that region where dwelt the vast hosts of the dead". He has been overwhelmed by the burden of the past, overwhelmed by the realisation of his misery, overwhelmed by the loss of a love that was once his only consolation, as he fades "into a grey impalpable world" and the snow falls faintly on "all the living and the dead".

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James Joyce Dubliners

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James Joyce Dubliners

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