James Joyce didn’t have a reputation for difficulty for
readers a century ago this month, only for his publisher. Dubliners, his first
foray into fiction, was released this month, but only after seven years of
contending with a publisher worried about offending the Roman Catholic Church,
real-life originals all too close to their print counterparts, and anyone bothered by his treatment of contemporary mores. To all of these, as he would
continue to do through the rest of his life, Joyce refused to bend.
Unlike with Ulysses
and, even more so, Finnegans Wake,
readers do not need to know much if anything about ancient literature, obscure
scraps of Latin, or the like to appreciate Dubliners.
This is not to say, however, that Joyce does not make readers work, nor that
the text doesn’t present its own challenges.
Young readers in what can be called post-Catholic
Ireland, for instance, might have a difficult time understanding the exalted but problematic
nature of the Church early in the 20th century in their country. In the
anthologies where these tales have found honored places, reading them out of
their original context means that readers will miss the “links of syllable and
image” noted by novelist-critic Thomas Flanagan.
Moreover, though Joyce put virtually everything in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Dubliners,
like the early tales of Hemingway, often focuses more on “the thing left out.” In
the opening story, “The Sisters,” for example, Old Cotter says of Father Flynn
that he “wouldn’t like children of mine…to have too much to say to a man like
that.” But the priest’s exact vice is never spelled out.
Ostensibly, the stories in Dubliners progress from childhood to maturity. But one of the words
that Joyce uses most commonly is “paralysis,” a condition leading not just to
physical but also to intellectual, spiritual and emotional death. The highlight
of the collection is, in fact, the sublime novella “The Dead.” There is a movement from “The Sisters” to this story, but it is a circular one. “The
Sisters” is written from within the consciousness of a boy who, even if he is
some years beyond the events of the tale, still tries to contend with the
passing of Fr. Flynn. “The Dead,” while centering on an adult intellectual, deals
with a similar dilemma: the attempt to make sense of the death of someone (in
this case, the youth that his wife loved before their marriage).
Dubliners
was published the same week that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in
Sarajevo. Little if any notice was taken at the time of the work of Joyce, and
few copies of the book were sold for a number of years. In time, however—especially
with the notorious publication, eight years later, of Ulysses—the essential truth was confirmed of Joyce’s boastful
prediction to his timorous publisher: “I seriously believe that you will retard
the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from
having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”
For many, though, it is far more than a “nicely
polished looking glass. Novelist Colum (Let the Great World Spin) McCann speaks
for them when he proclaims, “For me, James Joyce is the original energy behind
all contemporary literature.”
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