Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. Joyce felt Irish nationalism, like Catholicism and British rule of Ireland, was responsible for a collective paralysis. He conceived of Dubliners as a “nicely polished looking-glass” held up to the Irish and a “first step towards their spiritual liberation”.
Joyce’s concept of epiphany is exemplified in the moment a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. The first three stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, while the subsequent stories are written in the third person and deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people, in line with Joyce’s division of the collection into “childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life”. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appeared in minor roles in Joyce’s novel Ulysses.
Publication history
Between 1905, when Joyce first sent a manuscript to a publisher, and 1914, when the book was finally published (on 15 June), Joyce submitted the book 18 times to a total of 15 publishers. The London house of Grant Richards agreed to publish it in 1905. Its printer, however, refused to set one of the stories (“Two Gallants”), and Richards then began to press Joyce to remove a number of other passages that he claimed the printer also refused to set. Under protest, Joyce eventually agreed to some of the requested changes, but Richards ended up backing out of the deal.
Joyce submitted the manuscript to other publishers, and, about three years later (1909), he found a willing candidate in Maunsel & Roberts of Dublin. A similar controversy developed, and Maunsel too refused to publish the collection, even threatening to sue Joyce for printing costs already incurred.
Joyce offered to pay the printing costs himself if the sheets were turned over to him and he was allowed to complete the job elsewhere and distribute the book, but, when he arrived at the printers, they refused to surrender the sheets and burned them the next day, though Joyce managed to save one copy, which he obtained “by ruse”. He returned to submitting the manuscript to other publishers, and in 1914 Grant Richards once again agreed to publish the book, using the page proofs saved from Maunsel as copy.
The stories
“The Sisters” – After the priest Father James Flynn dies, a young boy who was close to him hears some less-than-flattering stories about the father.
“An Encounter” – Two schoolboys playing truant encounter a perverted, middle-aged man.
“Araby” – A boy falls in love with the sister of his friend Mangan, but fails in his quest to buy her a worthy gift from the Araby Bazaar.
“Eveline” – The young Eveline Hill weighs her decision to flee Ireland with a sailor, Frank, to ‘Buenos Ayres’.
“After the Race” – College student Jimmy Doyle tries to fit in with his wealthy friends.
“Two Gallants” – Lenehan wanders around Dublin to kill time while waiting to hear if his friend, Corley, was able to con a maid out of some money.
“The Boarding House” – Mrs Mooney successfully manoeuvres her daughter Polly into an upwardly mobile marriage with her lodger, Bob Doran.
“A Little Cloud” – Thomas Malone “Little” Chandler’s dinner with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher, who left home to become a journalist in London, casts fresh light on his own failed literary dreams.
“Counterparts” – Farrington, a lumbering alcoholic scrivener, takes out his frustration in pubs and on his son Tom.
“Clay” – Maria, a spinster who works in the kitchen at a large Magdalene laundry, celebrates Halloween with a man she cared for, Joe, as a child and his family, the Donnellys.
“A Painful Case” – James Duffy rebuffs the advances of his friend Emily Sinico, and, four years later, discovers he condemned her to loneliness and death.
“Ivy Day in the Committee Room” – Several paid canvassers for a minor politician, Richard Tierney, discuss the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell.
“A Mother” – To win a place of pride for her daughter Kathleen in the Irish Revival, Mrs Kearney arranges for the girl to be accompanist at a series of poorly planned concerts, but her efforts backfire.
“Grace” – Tom Kernan passes out and falls down the stairs at a bar, so his friends attempt to convince him to come to a Catholic retreat to help him reform.
“The Dead” – After a holiday party thrown by his aunts and cousin, the Morkans, Gabriel Conroy’s wife, Gretta, tells him about a boyfriend, Michael Furey from her youth, and he has an epiphany about life and death and human connection. (At 15–16,000 words, this story has been classified as a novella.)
Also originally considered for the Dubliners collection was a short story called “Christmas Eve”. It was rejected by the author, though a sentence of it was later reincorporated into Clay.
Style
Besides first-person and third-person narration, Dubliners employs free indirect discourse and shifts in narrative point of view. The collection progresses chronologically, beginning with stories of youth and progressing in age to culminate in “The Dead”.
Throughout, Joyce can be said to maintain “invisibility”, to use his own term for authorial effacement. He wrote the stories “in a style of scrupulous meanness”, withholding comment on what is “seen and heard”. Dubliners can be seen as a preface to the two novels that will follow, and like them it “seeks a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be interference”.
Joyce’s modernist style entailed using dashes for dialogue rather than quotation marks. He asked that they be used in the printed text, but was refused. Dubliners was the only work by Joyce to use quotation marks, but dashes are now substituted in all critical and most popular editions.
The impersonal narration doesn’t mean that Joyce is undetectable in Dubliners. There are autobiographical elements and possible versions of Joyce had he not left Dublin. The Dublin he remembers is recreated in the specific geographic details, including road names, buildings, and businesses.
Joyce freely admitted that his characters and places were closely based on reality. (Because of these details, at least one potential publisher, Maunsel and Company, rejected the book for fear of libel lawsuits.) Ezra Pound argued that, with the necessary changes, “these stories could be retold of any town”, that Joyce “gives us things as they are… for any city”, by “getting at the universal element beneath” particulars.
Joyce referred to the collection as “a series of epicleti”, alluding to the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. He is said to have “often agreed… that ‘imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered'”. But he used the eucharist as a metaphor, characterizing the artist as “a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life”.
The theme of Dubliners, “what holds the stories together and makes them a book is hinted on the first page”, the “paralysis” or “living death” of which Joyce spoke in a letter of 1904.
The concept of “epiphany”, defined in Stephen Hero as “a sudden spiritual manifestation”, has been adapted as a narrative device in five stories in Dubliners, in the form of a character’s self-realization at the end of the narrative.
One critic has suggested that the concept is the basis of an overall narrative strategy, “the commonplace things of Dublin becoming embodiments or symbols . . . of paralysis”. A later critic, avoiding the term “epiphany”, but apparently not the concept, has examined in considerable detail how “church and state manifest themselves in Dubliners” as agents of paralysis. There are numerous such “manifestations”.
What immediately distinguishes the stories from Joyce’s later works is their apparent simplicity and transparency. Some critics have been led into drawing facile conclusions. The stories have been pigeonholed, seen as realist or naturalist, or instead labeled symbolist.
The term “epiphany” has been taken as synonymous with symbol. Critical analysis of elements of stories or stories in their entirety has been problematic. Dubliners may have occasioned more conflicting interpretations than any other modern literary work.
It’s been said that Dubliners is unique, defying any form of classification, and perhaps no interpretation can ever be conclusive. The only certainty is that it’s a “masterpiece” in its own right and “a significant stepping-stone . . . into the modernist structure of Joyce’s mature work”.
Christ in Dubliners
On 10 June 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle for the first time. They met again on 16 June. On both days, the Feast of the Sacred Heart was celebrated in Irish Catholic churches. The feast originated on another 16 June, in 1675.
A young nun, Margaret Mary Alacoque, had visions of Christ exposing his heart. During the so-called “great apparition” on that date, he asked that a new feast be established to commemorate his suffering. (In the Library episode, Mulligan calls the nun “Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!”) The Feast of the Sacred Heart was formally approved in the same year. The Jesuits popularized the devotion, and Ireland was the first nation to dedicate itself to the Sacred Heart.
The young nun claimed that Christ had made 12 promises to all who would dedicate themselves to the Sacred Heart. The 12th promise offers “salvation to the one who receives communion on nine consecutive First Fridays”. Mrs. Kiernan in the Dubliners story “Grace” and Mr. Kearney in “A Mother” try to take advantage of this promise, as did Stephen’s mother.
A colored print of
