"I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity;
and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Araby, p. 28.



JAMES
Augustinus Aloysius
JOYCE

DUBLINERS FOR AGREGATIFS

Programme officiel:

James Joyce, Dubliners (1914).
Penguin Modern Classics, 2000

Merci vivement à nos collègues qui envoient des suggestions et partagent leurs trouvailles, notes de lecture, réflexions... e-mail

Time running short ?

Pour ceux qui auraient besoin d'un petit "refresher course" sur Dubliners, il y a l'équivalent des Cliff notes ici sur Pink Monkey - Evitto.

Opinionated stuff

> 'I *h.te* Joyce. IMO the guy is a fruitcake who writes sh.t that no one in their right mind would bother reading. Then again, I feel much the same way about Proust. Joyce is Proust on steroids.' - Phil B., 2000.
-
> Je me surprends à ne pas trouver Dubliners complètement dépourvu d'intérêt. Il y a effectivement des choses intéressantes pour le narratologue en herbe que je suis. - Phil B., 2001
-
> "It's a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind) & unformed & unimportant drivel; & until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & thought can make a work of art without the cookÿs intervening...The same applies to [T.S.] Eliot, whose The Wasteland had also been recently published." - Edith Wharton (1862-1937), letter, Jan. 6, 1923, to art connoisseur and historian Bernard Berenson. Wharton was commenting on Ulysses, published in Paris the previous year.
-
D.H. Lawrence as an enemy of Joyce - a case of personal rivalry...

Throughout his writing, he connects his characters with himself by contrast as well as by affinity. As in Portrait, people and events depend for their nature on Joyce' view of himself and his experiences.

Written 1904-7, busy years: rapidly changing and often difficult personal circumstances made him brood intently on his own situation and compare his life with others real, or imagined. Death of his mother, his estrangement from his family, his relationship with Nora Barnacle, the birth of a son, his status as a writer - a secular priest of the imagination - and his position as a voluntary exile from Ireland, bringing his relationship with Dublin to a state of crisis and partial resolution.

All to be traced in Dubliners, despite Stanislaus claiming that only 'An Encounter' and 'A Mother' were based on personal experience, it is clear that most of the stories are indebted to his process of self-evaluation, self definition and self-justification at the time of writing. These processes are worked out in various complex ways and there are signs that Joyce planned the collection with this autobiographical purpose in mind as well as to produce an educational tract and mirror for Dublin's populace.

Changes made to 'The Sisters', written before his departure from Ireland, and revised after it, have this private purpose as well as the more public one, ''The Dead' was also added from partly autobiographical motives. As Joyce came to envisage the collection in its final form he sought to make more consistent and purposive his personal appearances in the text.

Dubliners = Joyce as he would have become had he remained in Ireland. Stephen Dedalus is always younger than the Joyce writing about him, so we can notice differences between him and Joyce at the same age. Dubliners such as Father Flynn and James Duffy are older, therefore characters Joyce may have grown to resemble. But such relationships should be interpreted with the same irony Joyce applied to depicting them. Father James Flynn may dramatise his conviction that he had been right to turn away from the Catholic Church.

Those characters he might have grown to resemble are treated with a kind of benign amusement, sympathy and judgement, cooler than but similar to his manner of treating his •ownÿ past in Stephen Hero, a mood which represents his acceptance of lifeÿs possibilities rather than a rejection. This mood is clearest in the presentation of Gabriel Conroy.

Dubliners years = trying to write Stephen Hero, proof of Joyce's autobiographical orientation during this time, and there are important connections between the two works.

Stephen Hero = defines Joyceÿs present position by analysing his past states, Dubliners = defines him by a contrast closer in time, but geographically and emotionally distanced. Stephen Hero treats of a Joyce-like character defying Dublin at a time when Joyce was there (author is explicitly included), Dubliners mostly shows characters contrasting with Joyce and defeated by Dublin when he had achieved intellectual detachment from the city or had actually left it (author is implicitly excluded).

Exception = the first triad of stories, which do depict a past Joyce-figure, possibly worked up from discarded Stephen material.

Joyce associates himself with his characters, often facetiously or ironically, like a private joke in serious speech. In such cases the suggestion seems to be that Joycean wit and self-insight could provide a way out of the impasse in which many Dubliners find themselves. Images used to explore, fix, defend or modify his present position in relation to the society about which he writes = traveller, writer, priest.

Allusions to overseas travel are usually made with implicit glances at Joyceÿs own recent travel. These allusions relate to the 'paralysis' motif of Dubliners and also anticipate Joyceÿs treatment of a modern Odysseus who never leaves Dublin. Such allusions even extend to the accoutrements of the traveller : nautical clothing ( a yachting cap, token of his •differenceÿ, panache and mobility).

Lenehan in 'Two Gallants' has the cap, Joyceÿs white rubber shoes and a 'jauntily slung waterproof'. Corleyÿs girl wears a 'white sailor hat', reinforcing the affinity between Lenehan, who lives Corleyÿs experience vicariously rather as a writer does that of his characters, and the girl. Lenehan's marine garb = he is not sailing anywhere, unlike Joyce, and he spends the end of the story wandering in tight circles around central Dublin. Lenehan soothes himself with a meal, while Joyce left what he disliked behind him.

'After the Race' after a broad sweep of exhilarating movement from the west of Dublin to the east - mostly by racing car in this book of paralysis - they end upon a yacht anchored in Kingstown Harbour, but the Belle of Newport will not carry Jimmy to any •new portÿ (continentals named after people Joyce knew in Europe, but Joyce profited from them, unlike Jimmy who was exploited by them). The yacht is American and the ending of this story balances that of its predecessor 'Eveline' where the protagonist was similarly unable to take a ship to the New World.

Unlike Jimmy or Captain Sinico, Joyce had made or would make a voyage with a woman.

'A Painful Case' Mrs. Sinico's husband is a sea-captain, the travelling of the husband emphasises the stasis of the wife (whose earthbound existence ends under the wheels of a train). Links with Eveline where another woman is left behind by a seagoing man, albeit her own choice, springing from panic rather than deliberation. Sydney Parade recalls Melbourne where the priest in Eveline has gone, sad allusions to a distant place and the fixity of the character.

'An Encounter' the boys dream of escape by ship (anticipating Stephen's vision at the end of Portrait). The failure to read the name of the Norwegian ship demonstrates the lack of preparation for Continental voyage. Joyce had some knowledge of Norwegian.

Joyce makes some of his characters into writers; Farrington in 'Counterparts', Little Chandler, (impotent provider of small illuminations), Ignatius Gallaher is a journalist, but incapable of Joycean writing (see prurient attitude to Continental society). In 'A Painful Case', James Duffy, like Joyce translates Hauptmann, and keeps a diary like Stanislaus Joyce. And his 'odd autobiographical habit' echoes Joyce's habit of composing phrases about himself as seen in Stephen Hero. But his inability to enter freely into a relationship distinguishes him from Joyce. The narrator in 'An Encounter' and the old man he encounters are bookish, the narrator of •Arabyÿ , also the two boys share the 'Araby' narrator's interest in sexuality. 'The Encounter' narrator likes books. Books and sexuality are liked when the 'Araby' narrator approaches Mangan's sister. The idea is that books can contain dangerous information, the liberation he hoped to achieve through Dubliners.

References to the priesthood which are prominent in the first three stories, are to be expected in a work set in Dublin. Joyce had contemplated this calling. That this personal association was in mind seems to be confirmed by the close relationship between a priest and the autobiographical narrator in 'The Sisters' (the priest instructs the boy) and 'Araby' (the boy chooses which aspects of the priestÿs life to contemplate). The art of religion is becoming the religion of art. References to the mass in many of the stories reinforce this, as they are used by Joyce for his own non-ecclesiastical purposes. First and third stories suggest reasons for Joyce's refusal to enter priesthood.

Father Flynn dies at the beginning of the first story; Father Butler is eluded by the boys in 'An Encounter' ; a nameless priest dies before the third story opens; a fourth priest, his name unknown to the storyÿs protagonist, has left Ireland before the action of 'Eveline' begins. Thereafter the Church and its representatives become less and less effectual, a process which culminates ironically in 'Grace' , originally planned as a conclusion to the work. Only in 'The Sisters' and 'Grace' are approximations of Church services actually depicted. Church representatives are also associated with sexual ambivalence or perversity; •The Sistersÿ and 'Araby'.

Thus the priests seem degenerate and increasingly ineffectual, despite the hold the Church claims to have over the populace. The progressive removal of the priesthood from the centre of the action in the stories intriguingly parallels the retreat of the 'Joycean' narrator, fully present in 'The Sisters' and most completely absent in 'Grace'. 'The Dead' is a special case, but Gabriel's priest brother is absent.

These three types of reference are the most conspicuous bases for Joyce's wry comparisons between himself and his characters. There are numerous less prominent examples.

The connection between the aesthetic Joyce devised at the time (emphasis on the nature of beauty) and the banal examples of beauty cited by his characters: the appetite-dominated hungry Hungarian Villona in 'After the Race' .
Joyce's assumption of a pseudonym 'Stephen Dedalus' to sign the first story and the boys' assumption of false identities 'Murphy' and 'Smith' at the end of the second.

The personal references illustrate the intricacy of Joyceÿs manner of self-definition and imply that with Dubliners as with Finnegans Wake, he wanted his books to resemble him.

He also employs other particular techniques for the purpose of characterisation, which appear in only one or two of the stories.

'Eveline'/i>ÿ, the shortest and on the surface one of the simplest, has important autobiographical content and is based on Joyceÿs self-reflection to a great extent. The equation of Frank with Joyce and Eveline with Nora does not stand close examination, Eveline's most immediate living model was Joyce's sister Margaret, (called Poppie by her family); Eveline's nickname evokes a doll-like or puppet-like quality. Eveline is Margaret's age in 1904 when it was composed, just as Stephen and bloom in Ulysses will share Joyce's own age in the phases of his life he uses them to inspect.

In 1904, Margaret and Eveline had a dead mother and a drunken, ill-tempered father from whom they had to extract money to buy provisions for the household. Blackthorn sticks. Margaret played the piano, and its sale in 1904 anticipates the broken harmonium in the story. Margaret had played Eve in the childhood theatricals where Stanislaus was Adam and Joyce was Satan, though he surely named her ironically š an Eve intimidated by her father, lacking the courage to pose serious temptation and unwilling to 'fall'.

Joyce used his appreciation of Nora's qualities to reinforce his feelings of superiority to his family. The Joyce family might seem trapped (Evelyn Hill and her immobility contrasts with the Waters who have 'gone back to England'), but James could distinguish himself by being with the unacceptable Nora and by leaving home. Stanislaus, the only one Joyce felt understood him, is a model for James Duffy in 'A Painful Case' yet no trace of him appears in any of the homes in Dubliners which reflect the Joyce household. Joyce changes his companion in the adventure narrated in the second story from his brother to a friend.

With Stanislaus reserved for use in Stephen Hero, Joyce turned to Margaret to represent entrapment in Dublin. 'My brothers and sisters are nothing to me.' Joyce often associated the image of drowning (end of 'Eveline') with the fear of being smothered by his family. Stephen thinks of his sister in Ulysses: 'She is drowningáShe will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.' By 1910 Margaret had become a nun, in 1904 it must have seemed possible for Eveline to do so.

Maybe this is the reason for his revising the story for a 1910 edition, to add the reference to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. Margaret became Sister Mary Gertrude. Eveline is a debased Margaret, whose visions of the Sacred Heart she recalls only in her 'palpitations', an affliction which symbolises her emotional instability, her denial of the sacredness of the heart, of the central importance of love. Margaret would escape to New-Zealand, and the priest's flight to Melbourne is strangely prophetic (present in 1904).

The similarities between Frank and Joyce stop at the yachting cap, overseas experience, fondness for singing and a relationship with a young woman in Dublin. The differences are more striking; Frank shows no interest for literature, he apparently lacks Joyceÿs kind of religious and family context (the boy in •The Sistersÿ lives with an uncle and aunt clearly based on Joyce's parents). 'Frankness' is the opposite of 'silence, exile and cunning', a credo Joyce was already formulating.

The qualities that strike Eveline; 'very kind, manly, open-hearted' are attributes which induced some scepticism in Joyce. Apart from in 'The Dead', other references to the word 'frank' in the book are generally ironical. Frank's idea of overseas experience is that of adventure, like Mahony in 'An Encounter', rather than a dedicated search for broader knowledge. He has chosen to live in Buenos Aires, and has been to Patagonia and Canada, all in the New World, the Americas, which Joyce instinctively disliked and never visited. 'The good air' of Buenos Aires seems too much of a contrast with dusty Dublin. •Going to Buenos Airesÿ was once a common euphemism for 'becoming a prostitute'.

Nor is Eveline much like Nora. Eveline clutches the iron rails at the end in her anguish, as later Mrs Sinico will die on iron rails. The 'sudden failure of the heart's action' which causes Mrs Sinico's death is a more extreme version of Eveline's palpitations (in Mrs Sinico's case, it is rather Duffy's heart which has failed to act.) The spirited Galway girl, Nora is depicted by Ellmann as 'sauntering' about Dublin and into Joyce's life. As they contemplated departure for Europe, Nora 'was too much like a girl going off to summer camp, and he tried to make clear to her how reckless and drastic a step they were taking'. Perhaps Joyce bestows Nora's high spirits on Frank and transfers his own anxiety to Eveline.

Autobiographical characterisation is here mostly a matter of contrast. This story dramatises his estrangement from his family by showing how superior he himself was to the kind of image of escape his family might be able to imagine.

In 'Eveline', therefore, Joyce makes himself the oblique measure of his subject, contrasting characters and events in the story with what he felt his own circumstances to be.

Similar strategies can be seen operating in many of the other stories, of which the most interesting is 'The Dead'. When he added this story, no doubt he was partly seeking, as he said, to put the record straight by illustrating Dublinÿs hospitality and warmth, slighted in most of the earlier stories. He also showed a concern with the shape of the whole collection, a concern apparent in some of the parallels between the first and last stories. 'The Dead' = prominent sisters, 'The Sisters' = a dead man.

'The Sisters' begins with a boy looking in a window and wondering about a dead man, •The Deadÿ ends with a man looking out a window, meditating on the image of a dying boy which his wife has just described for him and envisaging some dissolution or fusing of both living and dead. But Joyce may also have wished to end the volume by making a more personal appearance. The last few stories show a gradual effacement of the author, anticipating Stephenÿs prescriptions for this process given in the 'Portrait' but in 'The Dead', Joyce appears with an immediacy not seen since the first three stories of the volume.

One such 'more personal appearance' may lurk in the photograph Gabriel sees depicting his mother and brother, resembling an photograph of Joyce with his parents and grandfather.

Gabriel Conroy is the most conspicuously Joycean protagonist in the later stories. Resemblances; physical appearance, continental experience and enthusiasm, teaching, book reviewing and relationship with a woman from Galway who has had an admirer called Michael. Gabriel and Joyce have affinities in personality; Gabriel's fears resemble Joyce's and anticipate aspects of Bloom in Ulysses.

Gabriel's relationship with his aunts evokes Joyce's changing attitudes to his family at the time he wrote the story. There is still stagnation (Morkan = morkin, literally 'a beast which dies by disease or accident') but also a new compassion in the relationship and a new self-scrutiny in which superiority could not be glibly assumed. For most of the story Gabriel treats his aunts urbanely.

Joyce's concern with the power of the dead over the living - a theme prominent throughout Dubliners and culminating in 'The Dead' š must owe something to his brooding on his motherÿs death. Several characters have to contend with mothers who have restricted them when alive and who dominate their thoughts once dead (Eveline Hill, Gabriel Conroy, Richard Rowan, and Stephen in Ulysses). Gabriel thinks of his motherÿs opposition to his marriage immediately after reflecting on pictures of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet and of the murdered princes in the tower, each depicting young love or leadership smothered by an older generation. When he refuses to play Paris, he refuses to award the prize to Aphrodite, and so perhaps fails to recognise the true nature of love. The image of Michael Furey under Grettaÿs window recalls the balcony scene, leaving Gabriel to be the stuffy unsuccessful suitor, Paris.

These allusions seem to limit Gabriel, but they also reflect his ability to apply literary contexts to his situation, to attain a broader sense of connection between people than most characters in the volume are able to perceive.

We should not take Gabriel's remorse at the end of the story too seriously. It is a more positive emotion than it seems because it reflects his sensitivity, his willingness to acknowledge the effects he has on other people's lives. He is the only character given Joyce's mature, self-critical perspective and thus he moves Dubliners away from the hostility and alienation which mark many of the earlier stories, in a direction of relative harmony.

Thus the autobiographical content of 'The Dead' concerns more than Joyce's self-analysis or the Michael Bodkin / Michael Furey connection. More importantly, we see Joyce stepping back into Dubliners, ensuring the final image of the city relates personally to him.

The partial escape from egotism which Gabriel manages at the end of the story has parallels in Joyce's writing life as well. 'The Dead' was written just as Joyce was deciding to rework Stephen Hero into 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. The later Stephen will be presented more humbly, less heroically and with more qualifications than the earlier one.

With the addition of 'The Dead' Dubliners comes to embody in its total movement the structure which binds together all of Joyceÿs works. Images of the isolated individual give way to images of the society surrounding that individual, to be followed in turn by a combined image in which the individual fits, however uncomfortably, into his social context.

This union between the self and the world parallels the image of qualified unity conveyed in the final scene when Gretta is asleep and Gabriel lies awake. Ulysses, Exiles, and Finnegan's Wake will all end similarly, one member of the couple awake while the other sleeps. Portrait would become a kind of sequel and counterweight to Dubliners, and the structure found in the stories in this one book could be explored in a succession of separate books treating the same stages with increasing detail and subtlety.

Conclusion.

In the case of Joyce, studies of characterisation reveal meanings in the nature of his sources and his manner of treating them and he often hides information for readers to discover in due course. Certain information about his life and a knowledge of the factual details of historical Dublin become a legitimate aids to analysis.

In Dubliners most examples of autobiographical characterisation are oblique and ironic, while in Stephen Hero, written at the same time, there is an anxious preoccupation with the status of the autobiographical figure which is appealing, but by Joyce's later standards undisciplined and unsteady. Interplay between 'the self' and 'the other' is anticipated in Exiles and examined at length in Ulysses.

Ellman : 'in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce has demonstrated the repetition of traits in the first twenty years of one personÿs life; in Ulysses he has displayed this repetition in the day of two persons; in Finneganÿs Wake he displayed it in the lives of everyone'.

Characterisation is important in his work because almost nothing exists in his work except in relation to a characterÿs mind. He disliked exposition and omniscient description. He tries as far as possible to have his characters depict themselves, rather than employing a narrator. Information is conveyed not by a detached narrator but by a narrator or narrative voice able to imitate, enhance or limit the sensibility of a particular character.

One of Joyce's aesthetic principles - that style should express subject as fully as possible, that form and content should be inseparable š is intimately related to his modes of characterisation.

His use of a real location, Dublin, and of real models for his characters is closely related to their strength and solidity. Indeed, his characters become more realistic than his settings. He pays them far more attention than the settings. Even in Ulysses, his claim that Dublin, if destroyed could be rebuilt by the use of his books as a blueprint is not so exact. With rare exceptions (as in parts of 'Wandering Rocks') we see only what the characters see of the city.

His concern with the relationship between reality and fiction further substantiates detailed analysis of the ways in which he constructs his characters. He wished to create a certain type of character, but also adhered to a certain respect for reality.

Respect and affection which the difficulty and occasional perversity of writing never completely conceal. Joyce may have anchored his characters in directly observed reality because of a lack of imagination which he himself lamented, but most of all because he wanted to show that the world he envisaged in his books was, in fact, the real world.