Dubliners

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Dubliners
James Joyce statue in Earl Street-Dublin
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A collection of 14 1 short stories
childhood
adolescence
Mature life
Public life
Grace
Eveline
The sisters
A little cloud
Ivy day in the committee room
An encounter
Two gallants
Clay
After the race
Counterparts
Araby
A mother
The boarding house
A painful case
The dead
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Joyces 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
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A paradox
He abandoned his native land , culture and
religion
For the rest of his life he wrote about nothing
else
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The struggle for publication
Written in 1905
Published in 1914
Too many allusions, places, people who would be
recognized
Language and material considered too free
Objections about the irreverent treatment of
Edward VII 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
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Short story
Features
Brevity
70-80 pages
Few paragraphs
compression
Single central theme
Limited number of characters
immediacy
It strikes the reader with immediate images
consistency
Unity of time place-action
economy
Language is concise.
Despite the simplifications, it is a complete
unified whole
homogeneity
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Why short stories?
European tradition
Gaelic tradition
Maupassant
Chekhov
Wilde
Particularly suited to give expression to
submerged groups
Great call for short stories in many magazines
and newspapers
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Features
Each of the fifteen stories in James Joyces
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.
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Themes
Man-woman relationship
epiphany
Religion
Paralysis
Autobiography
Decay
Escape
Irish politics
Death
Corruption
A grim picture of his homeland and its
inhabitants
Result
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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
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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
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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
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Thank you
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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.
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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.
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They use linguistic registers that closely
reflect their social situation and psychological
state
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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.
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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.
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The authors 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 dont 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.
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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.
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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
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It was published on the newspaper The Irish
Homestead with the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus
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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.
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Paralysis
Physical
Moral
External forces
Politics, religion and culture
Climax of the stories
not paralysis but its revelation
In a letter to his brother Stanislaus he wrote
Whats 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.
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Decay
Paralysis leads to decay
things that dont 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
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Religion
A negative and oppressive force
Paralleled to the negative authority of the
English rule.
Dubliners is filled with details of
Church buildings
Church institutions
Sacred practices and traditions
Repeated references to the catechism
Religious attitudes
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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
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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
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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.
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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.