Dubliners on a first pass

Suppose you want a way into Joyce that allows you not just to see what happens in Joyce’s prose works but, in the broadest sense, to appreciate what Joyce is up to; why he is ‘important’, why readers will be digesting Joyce well after we have all died. Your first stop is Dubliners, and in it just three stories: “Araby,” “Eveline,” and “A Painful Case.”

Text

First, get yourself a copy of Dubliners. For our purposes here, it actually doesn’t matter all that much which text you get. If you don’t have a text and want a recommendation, I would suggest you get the Oxford World’s Classics edition or the Penguin edition. A reason to favor these is that they have helpful introductions and explanatory notes. A reason to favor the first over the second is that footnote numbers don’t appear in the text, so you don’t feel like you’re reading a work of scholarship.

Background

I want to take a structural rather than historical approach to Dubliners. That means we’re not going to be talking about Irish national history or ‘Catholic guilt’ or any of that. We’re going to focus instead on the stories as expressions of a vision of the nature of literature.

Here’s an idea about the sort of expectations we might or even should have for literature. First of all, let’s say that in any literary work you have two things: a world and, to simplify things, a protagonist. Literature, then, is a dramatization of the relation between these two. Specifically, literature depicts the following sort of drama: The world and the protagonist stand in some recognizable relation to each other; then something complicates that; then the protagonist must overcome or resolve this complication in some way. The author’s role is to give this drama significance of some sort—through tone, voice, point of view; through the selection and arrangement of character, setting, and so forth.

Now, stand back and consider the basic grammar of all of this: It is the idea that the world is, fundamentally, a site of possible meaning. Let’s not let that mean anything fancier than this: All of my inner life points outward like hunger does to food. Love, desire, anger, hatred—they unambiguously reference things in the world. Sometimes the relation between the inner and the outer is upset, but the possibility of their getting together is ever-present. Most fundamentally, even when the protagonists’ motivations are unclear to themselves, everything manages to make sense. We know the business tycoon’s drive to bankrupt his competition has emotional roots he’s not aware of, but the unconscious motivations unambiguously explain the action. Input motivation, output action. Actions, and the world in which they occur, are legible.

“Araby”

Read “Araby” with this entire system of expectations intact. What does the boy want? What occasion for getting it does the world present? And then, when you’re finished with “Araby,” ask yourself this question: Why doesn’t the boy buy anything at the bazaar?

The answers to the basic questions are fairly straightforward. The boy is obsessed with “Mangan’s sister,” and that obsession mutates into the thought (per the usual capitalist logic) that he should buy her something. It’s a setup rich with potential for the traditional narrative, and Joyce even makes it looks like he’s going to do this sort of thing: delay the boy with the late-arriving drunk uncle, and thereby drive his readers mad with excitement about whether he’ll get the gift (and, per the capitalist contract, therefore the girl) or not.

Instead what happens is the boy gets to the bazaar finally, discovers it for the tawdry, dingy place it is, and becomes sickened at the very relation between his desire and this world. He does nothing. And that’s it. Story over.

All of the stories in Dubliners are a version of this: the same basic setup (desire to do something and a world in which this would seem to be doable), followed by a complete collapse of the protagonist-world framework. Most importantly, I think it misses the scope of what Joyce accomplishes here to say (as he does, for example) that it’s a sort of social criticism. It’s much deeper and more fundamental than that. It’s the beginning of a remapping of the relation between self and world.

“Eveline”

Now read “Eveline.” Everything should seem familiar. Eveline contemplates leaving Ireland with a sailor, Frank, for Buenos Aires. Let’s simplify her available ‘traditional’ arcs like this: Either she goes because she wants to be with him, or she stays because she doesn’t. In the end, she doesn’t decide to go or to stay; she just stands on the dock doing nothing.

“Eveline” ratchets up one dimension of the framework from “Araby,” which is that, whereas the boy feels “anguish and anger” at the moment of paralysis, Eveline—lost in strange comparisons between herself and the sea—doesn’t seem to feel anything at all. She seems to lose the mechanism of desire altogether. In the end she is drawn like a porcelain doll, as if there were nothing behind her pale face. The moment of indecision in “Araby” emerges from the world, as the tawdry bazaar deflates the boy’s desire. In “Eveline” the paralysis emerges from the inside: Eveline can’t act because her desire becomes unintelligible to herself.

“A Painful Case”

Again, once you get the basic idea of Dubliners, this will read familiarly. But it’s a more complex variation, and has a few more moving parts. Here’s a question to ponder at the conclusion of the story: What are Duffy’s feelings toward Mrs. Sinico?

There is this equally revealing, and prior, question, which will initially seem a weird one: What feelings toward Mrs. Sinico does Duffy want to have? The answer is none. To be clear, the answer isn’t that he wants to despise her; and certainly it isn’t that he wants to love her. In “A Painful Case” the world (in the form of Mrs. Sinico) manufactures a desire in him, almost by accident creates the possibility for meaning; and then it takes that away.

Duffy differs from the protagonists of the other two stories in this fundamental, and revealing, way: He has preemptively cut himself off from the world. But he meets a (married) woman who challenges that, as they forge the beginnings of a relationship. Then one day she touches his hand, and he simply cuts the relationship off. Note that he doesn’t break it off because he does (tragically) or doesn’t (comically) want to be with her; he simply tells her, by way of explanation, that every relationship “is a bond to sorrow.” Years later he finds out that Mrs. Sinico died after being hit by a train, and that, after a trial, “no blame attached to anyone.” She dies for no good reason. It turns out she had been drinking.

The question I posed was this: What are Duffy’s feelings toward Mrs. Sinico? I think the best answer to this question is that we have no idea, but they are strong ones. We also can’t have any idea, because there is nothing Duffy can do with those feelings: no action that can render his desire intelligible. By the end of the story (“He felt that he was alone”) it’s unclear whether he has fully processed his feelings about Mrs. Sinico or not, and that ending does a good job of capturing either the consequence of their hold on him or his inhuman capacity not to feel them. Like Eveline, Duffy’s insides are as inscrutable as the death of Mrs. Sinico is meaningless.

A technical way to appreciate what Joyce is up to in this story is to note how many times the story could end and still maintain the basic Dubliners logic. It could have ended with the breakup, or with him reading about her death in the paper. It could have ended, gothic-like, with his sense that she touches his hand after she’s dead, and really from that point to the end the story could end at the end of any sentence. “A Painful Case” takes the same protagonist-world structure (or rather non-structure) from “Araby” and “Eveline,” and it stretches the sudden moment of paralysis into an evening. From the moment he senses her hand touching him to the end of the story, Joyce is both creating and exploring the frontiers of modernism: art after the traditional protagonist-world relation collapses. What could that look like? Joyce is saying: It could look like this.

Next we’re going to read some selections from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and they’re going to make a different kind of sense with this as our background.