In brief
Dubliners is fifteen stories about people in one city who nearly do something. A girl nearly boards a boat, a clerk nearly becomes a poet, a boy nearly buys a present, and a lonely man nearly accepts the one person who has ever reached for him. Joyce wrote them between 1904 and 1907 and then spent seven more years trying to get them printed. It is his plainest book, and everything he wrote afterwards grows out of its exactness.
It is also not quite the book its reputation suggests. Fourteen of the stories are a cold diagnosis. The fifteenth, “The Dead”, written last and much longer than the others, looks at the same town from the far side of that coldness and finds something Joyce had left out.
Paralysis as design
Joyce said what he was doing. In 1904 he told his friend Constantine Curran that he would call the series Dubliners “to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city”. In May 1906 he told his publisher that he meant to write “a chapter of the moral history of my country” and had chosen Dublin because it seemed to him “the centre of paralysis”. The word then appears in the book’s first paragraph, where a boy stands under a dying priest’s window and repeats it: “It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work” (“The Sisters”).
Paralysis here is more than a theme attached to characters; it governs how the stories are built. Plots are set moving and then stopped. “Araby” ends in a darkening hall with the boy holding his coins. “Eveline” ends at the barrier of the North Wall, with a young woman unable to take one step. In “Clay” Maria sings the first verse of her song twice, and nobody corrects her. Each story reproduces the condition it describes: a promise of movement, a small humiliation, a stop.
The forces doing the holding are named as exactly as the streets. The Church appears in a priest undone by a broken chalice and in “Grace”, where a Jesuit tells businessmen that he is “their spiritual accountant”. Nationalism appears in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, where paid canvassers wait for their stout on the anniversary of Parnell’s death, ready to welcome Edward VII. Joyce’s phrase for the whole enterprise was a “nicely polished looking-glass” held up to the Irish. The mirror is unkind, and the people who saw themselves in it responded accordingly.
The fifteen stories
Joyce gave the book a four-part order: “childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life”. It is the plan of one life growing older, spread across many people, so that the city itself seems to age as you read.
Childhood. “The Sisters”, “An Encounter” and “Araby” are the only stories told in the first person. Each boy meets an adult failure he cannot yet name: a disgraced priest, a “queer old josser” in a field, a bazaar shutting up for the night. “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
Adolescence. “Eveline”, “After the Race”, “Two Gallants” and “The Boarding House” are about what the young do with sex and money, and what is done to them. “Two Gallants” closes on a coin a maid has been talked into stealing: “A small gold coin shone in the palm.”
Maturity. “A Little Cloud”, “Counterparts”, “Clay” and “A Painful Case” are the bleakest run, four portraits of people who have already lost. The violence is domestic and small.
Public life. “Ivy Day”, “A Mother” and “Grace” turn to politics, art and religion. Each great cause is shown as a committee with someone arguing about payment: canvassers over stout, Mrs Kearney over her daughter’s eight guineas, a retreat over spiritual bookkeeping.
Then comes “The Dead”, added after the plan was complete and belonging to none of its parts, which is why the map of the stories sets it apart.
The voice
Joyce told Grant Richards that he had written the stories “in a style of scrupulous meanness”, and the word does two jobs: mean as stingy and mean as low. The prose gives what was seen and heard and withholds comment. The last line of “Eveline” is an inventory of absences: “Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”
The flatness is not neutral, though. The narration keeps slipping into the vocabulary of the person it describes, so that “Clay” is told in Maria’s anxious niceness while the reader works out what she cannot admit. Blindfolded at a party game she touches “a soft wet substance”, and only the title says what it is. That habit of leaving the central fact out is what the first story’s odd word gnomon, a parallelogram with a piece removed, has been taken to announce. You read these stories by looking at the missing corner.
Joyce’s word for an ordinary thing suddenly disclosing itself was “epiphany”, defined in his abandoned Stephen Hero as “a sudden spiritual manifestation”. It is a good guide to “Araby” and “A Painful Case”, and a poor one to the whole book, where often only the reader sees anything.
The fight to print it
The publishing history reads like a sixteenth story. In 1904 George Russell invited Joyce to contribute something simple to The Irish Homestead, a farmers’ paper, for a pound. “The Sisters”, “Eveline” and “After the Race” appeared under the name Stephen Daedalus until complaints stopped the series. By 1905 Joyce, teaching English in Trieste, had a dozen stories and sent them to the London publisher Grant Richards, who accepted them early in 1906.
Then the printer read “Two Gallants”. Under English law a printer could be prosecuted along with an author, and he objected to it and to passages elsewhere, among them the word “bloody”. Joyce replied that the word appeared in sharper contexts elsewhere in the book, which only gave Richards more to worry about. Joyce made cuts under protest and added “A Little Cloud”, and that September Richards rejected the book anyway.
In 1909 the Dublin firm Maunsel, run by George Roberts, signed a contract. Now the objection was to “Ivy Day”, where a character calls Edward VII “a bit of a rake”, and soon to the real names of pubs and shops, which might bring libel suits. In 1911 Joyce sent the passage to George V and asked whether it was offensive; a secretary replied that His Majesty did not give opinions on such matters. In 1912 he came back to Dublin and offered to pay for the printing himself, but the talks collapsed, and that September the printed sheets were destroyed. Joyce said burned; Roberts said guillotined and pulped. Joyce got away with one set of proofs “by ruse” and, at Flushing on the way back to Trieste, wrote a furious broadside, “Gas from a Burner”. He never saw Dublin again.
He submitted the book eighteen times to fifteen publishers in all. On 15 June 1914 Richards issued it from the rescued proofs, seven weeks before Britain went to war, and it sold badly. What matters is the nature of the objections: almost no one said the book was false. They feared it was recognisable, and Dublin behaved as Joyce had written it would. A great many letters were written, and nothing moved except the sheets.
The Dead
“The Dead” is nearly a quarter of the book, around sixteen thousand words. Joyce conceived it in Rome in 1906, partly from a sense that the stories had been unjust: he wrote to his brother Stanislaus that he had given no credit to Irish hospitality. He finished it in Trieste in 1907, while recovering from rheumatic fever.
The story takes place at the Morkan sisters’ annual dance, in the Christmas season, usually placed at the feast of the Epiphany. For most of its length it is a comedy of manners with one sore spot. Gabriel Conroy, a teacher and reviewer, has come to give the speech, and is a clever, kind, self-conscious man who cannot stop rehearsing himself. Three women get past his guard. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, answers his joke about marrying with startling bitterness: “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” Miss Ivors finds out about his column in a Unionist paper and whispers “West Briton!” in the middle of a dance. Gretta, from Galway, would like to go west on the trip Miss Ivors proposes, and he will not. Then he gives his speech, praising his aunts as “the Three Graces of the Dublin musical world”, and applause covers it all.
The last third changes everything. Gabriel sees Gretta on the dark stairs listening to a tenor upstairs, and his first thought is to ask what she is “a symbol of”. He takes her to a hotel, full of desire, believing the evening has brought them close. What she has been hearing is The Lass of Aughrim, a song once sung by a Galway boy called Michael Furey, who stood ill in the rain in her garden and soon afterwards died. “I think he died for me,” she says. Gabriel’s irony fails at once: “What was he?” “He was in the gasworks.”
The self-recognition is the hardest in the book, in Gabriel’s own cadence turned on himself: “He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist.” Gretta falls asleep and he lies beside her working it through: “One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
The final paragraph is the most famous in Joyce. Earlier Mary Jane reported from the newspapers that “the snow is general all over Ireland”, a piece of chit-chat. Now Gabriel takes up her phrase and carries it across the country to the churchyard where Furey lies, until “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Critics divide. One reading says Gabriel has escaped himself, that the “generous tears” are real and the “journey westward” a thaw towards the Ireland he refused. Another says the snow is paralysis at its largest. I think the second underrates what has changed. Nothing has moved, as in the other stories, but this time someone has seen it and been moved, and the stillness is shared rather than merely endured.
There is a private source. Nora Barnacle, with whom Joyce left Ireland, had loved a Galway boy, Michael Bodkin, who died in 1900. The most generous thing in Dubliners is that Joyce lets a man very like himself, a reviewer for the same Daily Express, lose to a dead boy from the gasworks.
The people
Eveline Hill
Eveline keeps house for a violent father and has a promise from a sailor bound for Buenos Ayres. Joyce gives her reasons for going and for staying, and neither wins; her body simply stops. Hugh Kenner argued that Frank would have abandoned her at Liverpool. If he is right, the paralysis saved her, which is the bitterest thought in the book.
Little Chandler and Farrington
Two clerks, the same point at two volumes. Little Chandler dreams of being a poet, meets a coarse friend back from London, and ends at home with Byron in one hand and a crying baby in the other: “He was a prisoner for life.” Farrington loses his pay and his temper and goes home to a son who begs: “I’ll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don’t beat me.”
Maria
Maria, of “Clay”, is the gentlest person in the book and among the saddest. She works in a laundry and thinks well of everybody, and she is the reason not to call Joyce heartless.
Mr Duffy
James Duffy, of “A Painful Case”, “lived at a little distance from his body”. He ends his one friendship the moment Mrs Sinico touches him, and four years on reads of her death in the flat language of an inquest. His recognition is real, and too late: “he was outcast from life’s feast”.
Readers and critics
Ezra Pound reviewed the book in The Egoist in 1914, praising a writer who gave things as they are and could have told these stories of any town. Early readers took it for naturalism. Richard Ellmann’s biography (1959) supplied its Dublin and family sources, including a chapter on the backgrounds of “The Dead” that remains the place to start. Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce (1955) taught readers to suspect what the stories leave unstated. T. S. Eliot is reported to have ranked “The Dead” among the greatest stories in English.
Afterlives
The first afterlife is Ulysses, where Lenehan, Corley, Bob Doran, Mr Kernan, Martin Cunningham and Hynes walk through a little older. John Huston’s The Dead (1987), written by his son Tony and starring his daughter Anjelica as Gretta, was his last film, and for me the best adaptation of Joyce on screen. Hugh Leonard staged six stories as Dublin One in 1963, and a musical of “The Dead” by Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey won a Tony in 2000.
How to read it
- Read in order, at least once. The plan only shows if you follow it, and “The Dead” only works as an answer if you have heard the question.
- Read the last line of each story twice. Most stop on an image, not a conclusion. Ask what has been left out.
- Read “The Dead” in one sitting. The party is meant to feel long, and the last pages depend on it.
- Use a Dublin map. Joyce’s routes are real, and Lenehan’s walk in “Two Gallants” can be traced street by street.
- Get an annotated edition for the second reading. Margot Norris’s Norton Critical Edition (2006) explains the slang, politics and prices. The free Project Gutenberg text is complete, but keeps the quotation marks of the first edition, where Joyce wanted dashes and most modern editions have them.
Read next
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The one who got out, told from inside. Read it directly after and hear how different the same city sounds.
- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). The same streets over one June day, and many of the same people.
- George Moore, The Untilled Field (1903). The Irish story collection just before Joyce, and a measure of how far he went.
- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Another town of thwarted lives told as linked stories, warmer and stranger.
- William Trevor, The Ballroom of Romance (1972). Irish disappointment observed with equal restraint, half a century later.