Dubliners
James Joyce statue in Earl Street-Dublin
A collection of 14 +1 short stories
adolescence
childhood
The sisters
An encounter
Araby
Mature life
Public life
Eveline
A little cloud
Grace
Two gallants
Clay
Ivy day in the
committee room
After the race
Counterparts
The boarding house A painful case
The dead
A mother
Joyce’s purpose
“My intention was to write a chapter of
the moral history of my country and I
chose Dublin for the scene because that
city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.
I have tried to present it to the
indifferent public under four of its
aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity,
and public life. The stories are arranged
in this order. I have written it for the
most part 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.”
James Joyce
A paradox
He abandoned his native land , culture and religion
For the rest of his life he wrote about nothing else
The struggle for publication
Written in 1905
Too many allusions, places, people
who would be recognized
Published in 1914
Language and material
considered too free
Objections about the irreverent
treatment of EdwardVII in “Ivy day”
It was finally published only when Joyce was enjoying some renown
after the “Portrait”.
When the book came out no one was particularly shocked
Short story
Features
Brevity
70-80 pages
Few paragraphs
compression
Single central theme
immediacy
It strikes the reader with immediate images
consistency
Unity of time –place-action
economy
Language is concise.
homogeneity
Despite the simplifications, it is a complete unified whole
Limited number of characters
Why short stories?
European tradition
Maupassant Chekhov
Gaelic tradition
Wilde
Particularly suited to give expression to submerged groups
Great call for short stories in many
magazines and newspapers
Features
Each of the fifteen stories in James Joyce’s
Dubliners presents a flat portrait.
Each story in the collection is centred in an epiphany, and
each story is concerned with some failure or deception,
which results in realization and disillusionment.
Man-woman relationship
epiphany
Religion
Themes
Autobiography
Decay
Irish politics
Death
Result
Paralysis
Escape
Corruption
A grim picture of his homeland and its inhabitants
Style
Realism and symbolism
Symbolic colours
Characters are described through introspection
rather than description
Subjective perception of time
Omniscient narrator and single point of view disappear.
Media res
Characters vividly painted
Total objectivity of the artist
Artist “invisible” in his works
Independent from all moral, religious, political pressures
Isolated from society in order to be objective and give a true image of it.
He chose to be an exile for this purpose
Epiphany
In the Christian tradition the Feast of the Epiphany
celebrates the revelation of Christ's divinity to the Magi
Joyce adopts it to signify a sudden revelation in the
everyday life of the characters,
The moment in a novel or a story when a spiritual
awakening is experienced, in which all the details,
thoughts, gestures, objects, feelings come together to
produce a new sudden awareness
Thank you
Joyce was aiming at a “style of
scrupulous meanness” which implied
his rejection of a complicated plot, a
ruthless cutting of all superfluous
details, and rigorous selection, all
objectives which his keen sense of
artistic form allowed him to attain.
The colours he uses to suggest
the pervading atmosphere of
paralysis and decay are
essentially brown and yellow,
sometimes green. Joyce often
pays particular attention to the
colour of his characters’ eyes as
indicator of their personality.
They use linguistic
registers that closely
reflect their social situation
and psychological state
His self-imposed exile was
necessary not only to give him
the unrestricted artistic climate
he needed, but also to give
him the objectivity he needed
to write about Ireland with the
necessary emotional and
intellectual detachment.
Deaths are also implied in some stories,
as in The sisters and in "Araby" — those
of the boys' parents, absent from both
tales. Thereafter, death follows death in
Dubliners: Dead is the priest who last
lived in the house in "Araby"; Eveline's
mother in "Eveline"; and Michael Furey
and the other inhabitants of the
churchyard in which he lays buried in
"The Dead." Those are only the actual
deaths in the book; add spiritual and
moral deaths, and Dubliners grows as
crowded with corpses as the Hades
episode in Homer's Odyssey.
The author’s task was not to tell
people what to believe but to
persuade them to perceive reality
differently. For this reason Joyce
thought a work of art should be
impersonal. In Dubliners he remains
essentially outside the tales since he
does not give himself an authorial
voice that intervene in the narration.
He blamed the sorry state of affairs
on outside forces — England and the
church — rather than the Irish
themselves. Looking back, the writer
himself found the book insufficiently
sympathetic to Dubliners' best
qualities (hospitality, for example).
He would repair this deficiency in his
masterpiece, Ulysses, which itself
began as an aborted Dubliners story.
According to the critic O’ Connor, the
novel adhere to the classic concept of
civilized society, like supported by the
novels of Jane Austen. The short novel
on the other hand, remains distant
from the community. Joyce wanted to
write a people whose cultural and
linguistical identity had been repressed
by the English.
Paralysis or stagnation is a characteristic
condition of modern man which affects
many of us and may have different
sources: the frustration of an unfulfilling
job, an unhappy marriage or lack of
friendship; a life that many don’t like but
which few are able to change. In most of
the stories the protagonists have some
desire they would like to fulfill; they
attempt to do so but are forced to give up
and accept the limitations imposed by the
social context they have to live in.
The style of Dubliners is complex.
Apparently it is realistic, it recreates
characters, places, streets, pubs,
idioms of contemporary Dublin. On
the other hand it is also symbolic
because it gives the common object
unpredicted depth and becomes the
key to a new, more conscious view
of reality.
In the past, fiction writers had
almost invariably changed the
names of their short-story and novel
settings, or discretely left them out
altogether. In fact, including these
details delayed publication of the
book by years, as potential
publishers and printers feared
lawsuits by those businesses
mentioned by name
It was published on the
newspaper “ The Irish
Homestead” with the
pseudonym Stephen
Dedalus
In Ireland the short story is a national
tradition, with roots in the Gaelic
culture. Every year from Halloween to
St. Patrick day story tellers were the
very soul of the “ceili”, a gathering of
people around the fire place.
Before discos and nightclubs, there
were céilidhs in most town and village
halls on Friday or Saturday nights; they
are still common today. In more recent
decades, the dancing portion of the
event has usurped the older meanings
of the term.
Paralysis
Physical
Moral
External forces
Climax of the stories
Politics, religion and culture
not paralysis but its revelation
In a letter to his brother Stanislaus
he wrote: “What’s the matter with you
is that you are afraid to live.You and
people like you.The city is suffering of
hemiplegia of the will.”
Decay
Paralysis leads to decay
things that don’t move begin to erode quickly
Again, this idea is applied not only to the individuals,
but also to Ireland in general.
Escape
Opposite to paralysis
Caused by a sense of enclosure
Doomed to failure
Religion
A negative and oppressive force
Paralleled to the negative authority of the English rule.
Dubliners is filled with details of
Church institutions
Sacred practices and traditions
Church buildings
Repeated references to the catechism
Religious attitudes
Irish politics
Joyce did not take an active part in politics
He did not approve the Irish Ireland
movement or the Irish literary revival
They are not a solution
but
He was not supporter of British rule in Ireland
Man-woman relationship
He showed suffering women
Socially and legally inferior to men
Death
Dubliners begins with a death and ends with a story called
“The Dead”
Death is the natural end of the previous ideas:
paralysis leads to decay which ultimately ends in death
Especially in “The Dead,” we will witness a
number of characters that live and breathe, but
are actually “dead” inside
The collection overflows with unattractive
human behaviour: simony, absenteeism,
pederasty, drunkenness (all of them in the
first three stories alone!), child and spousal
abuse, gambling, prostitution, petty
thievery, blackmail, and suicide. Even the
use of the mild British oath "bloody," was
thought by many to go beyond the bounds
of good taste. A precedent existed in the
19th century French Naturalism, but no
writer had ever been quite as explicit as
Joyce in Dubliners.
At the beginning of the 20th century radical
changes were taking place in the way man
saw the world. Ideas concerning
consciousness, time and space were
reformulated by major figures like Bergson,
Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein. In the fields
of science and philosophy the idea of a
single truth was called into question and
consequently writers , too, found a single
voice or point of view inacceptable.