Dubliners, 100 Years On

Now considered canonical, there was a time when Dubliners risked being dismissed as unpublishable. The centenary in 2014 of the publication of Dubliners appears, with the benefit of hindsight, to be several years overdue. Though completed in manuscript when James Joyce was twenty-five, the book was not published until the author had turned thirty-three.

That delay in getting the book into print provides a clue to why Dubliners represents such a significant landmark in the history of modern short fiction, for it was radical in both form and content. The scenes of provincial urban life depicted have only become more relevant as an ever increasing number of people throughout the world live in cities which as they proliferate become less easily distinguishable from one another.

In seeking to convey the stagnation of Edwardian Dublin prior to the Easter Rising, Joyce distilled an essence of the torpor that may characterise any post-colonial, post-industrial city where nothing ever seems to happen first.

Melbourne, the city in which I write this and which resembles Dublin in many ways in outer solidity and inner uncertainty and decay, is mentioned by name as one of the places to which former Dubliners have moved in keeping with the great Irish exodus that brought my own ancestors to Australia.

In Melbourne, and no doubt in every Anglophone former colonial capital, there is no shortage of creative types whose lives and aspirations echo those of Little Chandler, the frustrated poet dreaming of overseas fame and resenting the success of expatriate contemporaries such as his garrulous journalist friend who have made it big in the former imperial centre of London. Then there is Gabriel Conroy, the Europhile literary critic who somehow must be pressured to choose between internationalism and provincialism, a cultural either/or rather than both/and.

Joyce himself, together with great contemporaries such as Yeats and Beckett, proved that in the modern world the universal lay in the provincial, as opposed to the parochial, and inspiration was no longer necessarily to be found in say London or Paris, places that had already by the end of the nineteenth century exhaustively been re-imagined by numerous writers and artists attracted by their sheer size and cosmopolitan glamour.

Thanks to Joyce in particular, in terms of world literature, Dublin itself these days is no longer remote but central, as acknowledged in the stations of the Ulysses walking tour, and in the annual costume festival that signifies Bloomsday. Countless travellers, whether scholars or tourists, arrive in Dublin because of the achievements of writers like Joyce in a way such literary pilgrims never did before Joyce wrote about his home town.

The provincial condition is social as well as cultural. In “After the Race”, Jimmy Doyle, the son of a wealthy merchant, experiences a certain kind of self-consciousness in the company of his wealthy, seemingly more sophisticated friends visiting from overseas.

The Dublin dreariness Joyce gives us is as much moral as it is cultural or social. Dubliners was ahead of its time in the attentive and empathetic treatment of the desperate lives of women and children. While the physical abuse of the young child by his father in “Counterparts” is manifest, the predatory paedophile lurking in “An Encounter” might not have seemed quite so obviously creepy to early readers of Dubliners, though perhaps it was somehow just as disturbing as it is now at a time when such matters are widely discussed in public and indeed every passing month seems to bring to light a new scandal of this kind.

The arbitrary closeness and concomitant impersonality of city life is reflected in the easily fractured relationships and casual tragedies that seem to pass virtually unnoticed in the crowd. The anonymity and alienation that are characteristic of city life also come through in the somewhat elliptical style that Joyce employs, making his stories fragments of disconnected urban lives rather than a cohesive depiction of the entire city as Dickens or Zola (or later Tom Wolfe) attempted in their huge portraits of world capitals such as London, Paris (and New York).

Joyce in Dubliners is not interested in registering the full extent of Dublin society and topography, but rather the atmosphere of the city, its mood. A poetic attitude, indeed, albeit that the unadorned prose style is determinedly matter-of-fact.

Politically, there is a complacent mediocrity displayed in the discussions prompted by “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”. There is no sense of politics being genuinely progressive or a means to action, just rhetoric masking personal self-interest. Similarly, the expression of the ideals of cultural nationalism, as depicted in “A Mother”, quickly degenerate into a protracted quarrel over contractual obligations.

The secular nature of modern city life makes religion seem diffuse as a force in bringing people together and regulating their behaviour. Joyce may have viewed the Catholic Church in Ireland as an oppressive influence, but there is little indication that its presence dictates the way in which the characters in the stories behave privately. In the city, you can choose to be unaccountable and thus more easily gratify your secret self than might be possible in tight-knit rural communities.

Dubliners is compelling precisely because it does not distract from the banality of the ordinary lives of people living in a place with no collective awareness of itself or its significance in the world. It is not until the end of the book, in “The Dead”, that Joyce moves from the everyday dreariness of the commonplace to the sublime discoverable beyond the commonplace.

Nowadays, it might be as difficult to dissociate the Feast of the Epiphany from our reading of “The Dead” as it is to think about June 16 without reference to Ulysses. In “The Dead”, at last, the city glimpsed in Dubliners is no longer self-contained and superficial; there is a sense of its deeper geographical and historical connectedness, through the revelatory story of Gabriel’s wife’s long-dead rural swain, with the wider world in Ireland and beyond.

As is apprehended at the very end of “The Dead”, the snow in winter falls in so many different places.