James Joyce--by turns educator, drunkard, confidence man and genius--brought out Dubliners in 1914, nine or ten years after most of the fifteen stories that comprise the book had already been written. That same year, Portrait of the Artist was already being serialized in The Egoist, revealing a slightly older, more experimental Joyce, the precursor to the infamously unreadable master stylist responsible for 1939's Finnegans Wake--probably the least-finished work in all of English literature.
Today, we find it difficult not to look at Joyce through the tightly-shut eyes of the Wake: Joyce, mentioned often in the same breath with fellow-riddlemasters Nabokov and Borges, has become known more for his unreadability than for his actual words. He's known more for his fracturing of narrative than for the original narratives he fractured. But a look at Dubliners reveals that, together with his genius for destruction, Joyce had an equally fecund genius for structure, for narrative, pure, simple and clear.
Discovery: Dubliners
Because Joyce's later novels seem to cry out for analysis and explication (Joyce infamously gloated about how generations of scholars would be paralyzed by the mysteries of Ulysses), there's a tendency to think of Dubliners as requiring the same treatment. Much is made of the book's supposed analysis of the decay of Irish society, of its crisp structure (moving from youth to adulthood), its "epiphanies", and generally anything but the actual warp and weave of the book. An epiphany, however, is just a sudden revelation of the hidden soul of a thing: in other words, the truth about a thing, and nothing new. Epiphanies are what people have expected from great fiction since fiction first became great.
Discovery: Dubliners
Because Joyce's later novels seem to cry out for analysis and explication (Joyce infamously gloated about how generations of scholars would be paralyzed by the mysteries of Ulysses), there's a tendency to think of Dubliners as requiring the same treatment. Much is made of the book's supposed analysis of the decay of Irish society, of its crisp structure (moving from youth to adulthood), its "epiphanies", and generally anything but the actual warp and weave of the book. An epiphany, however, is just a sudden revelation of the hidden soul of a thing: in other words, the truth about a thing, and nothing new. Epiphanies are what people have expected from great fiction since fiction first became great.
And Joyce is excellent at fulfilling those expectations: he gives us the truth of things, and much more than that, beautiful things for us to look at. From the darkening, half-empty hall of the Araby bazaar to the quiet glint of gold in the hand of a brothel-goer to the snow seen falling through Gabriel Conroy's dull glass windows, Joyce's images are detailed, precise, and blessed with a kind of durable frailty: a quiet, glowing beauty, but an unsentimental beauty that, when pressed by critical fingers, shudders but refuses to bend or break. More, Joyce's images, although they tend to speak for themselves, have more to say to us than the mere fact of their presence: we see in them disappointment, self-loathing, despair, fear, grandiosity, and a drunken kind of contentment.
Through a faculty comparable to that of a master flower arranger, Joyce places his scenes and images in such a way as to make his points obvious, quietly bubbling up from the structure of the work, rather than explicitly spelled out. And when Joyce does explicitly spell his points out, the explicit point adds to the implicit effect rather than standing in for it: Dubliners never resorts to mere expository cheating. The result is a much more powerful story--one that feels less like a story and more like a look deep into a purer, simpler form of life.
The Point of It All?: Dubliners
If Dubliners can be said to have a point--and there's no reason why a work this beautiful on its own terms needs a point--that point would have to do with desires and with the frustration of those desires by the soft brutality of Dublin life, as well as by the restraint, fear, and self-defeat of the Dubliners themselves. What makes Dubliners shine, however, is that--like Joyce's other books--it doesn't need to wear its meaning on its sleeve. The quiet, desperate, twinkling stories speak--or more properly, exist--for themselves.
The Point of It All?: Dubliners
If Dubliners can be said to have a point--and there's no reason why a work this beautiful on its own terms needs a point--that point would have to do with desires and with the frustration of those desires by the soft brutality of Dublin life, as well as by the restraint, fear, and self-defeat of the Dubliners themselves. What makes Dubliners shine, however, is that--like Joyce's other books--it doesn't need to wear its meaning on its sleeve. The quiet, desperate, twinkling stories speak--or more properly, exist--for themselves.
Of Charles Dickens, some critics have said: he should have gone on writing in the Pickwick vein forever. He should have stayed with the lighthearted at the expense of the dark. A similar statement can be made of this book: It's easy to regret that Dubliners is both the first and the last full appearance of this facet of the gem-like Joyce.
Dubliners exhibits a genius for observation that still persists in the author all the way through Ulysses. It's a clear, objective eye that peeps through the cracks of literary parody and stylistic bombast, focused on true, lush, cold reality. And, in Dubliners, we see traces of an alternate literary destiny for Joyce: one that would have left a far less memorable scar on the face of capital-G Great literature, true, but one that would have been memorable in its own quiet right.
Dubliners exhibits a genius for observation that still persists in the author all the way through Ulysses. It's a clear, objective eye that peeps through the cracks of literary parody and stylistic bombast, focused on true, lush, cold reality. And, in Dubliners, we see traces of an alternate literary destiny for Joyce: one that would have left a far less memorable scar on the face of capital-G Great literature, true, but one that would have been memorable in its own quiet right.
