Sunday Review: Dubliners
I always enjoy delving into short stories; they teach me about form, function, and language even more than most novels, and they’re too often neglected. Let’s take today’s review, James Joyce’s Dubliners, as a prime example; it is usually overshadowed by his mammoth and far more opaque novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Both of those novels are well worth reading (I assume; I haven’t gotten to Finnegan’s Wake yet), but it is the slim collection of short stories that I believe can teach writers more about writing. These short stories are also an important stop on the march of evolution of the short story. Following Chekhov, the father of the modern short, we cannot neglect Joyce, who defined the concerns and structure of short stories in a new way.
After that introduction to whet your appetite, let’s start with some good news: Dubliners is in the public domain, and can be downloaded for free in a variety of formats at Project Gutenberg. I had read it years ago in high school, but I decided to re-visit it recently on my Kindle; it’s great protein powder for anyone trying to tighten up their language. Dubliners is a series of profiles, as the title implies; it aims to capture a wide range of stories, all of them unfolding in the city itself. Dubliners is a very Irish work, with familiar tropes and archetypes; the stories are often populated by kind or oppressive priests, drunken and abusive fathers, stern schoolmasters, and long-suffering wives. The characters are familiar, but each story is unique; Joyce makes each character’s story seem unusual, heartfelt, or surprisingly tender or brutal.
There are many things to learn from these lean, telling stories, but one main reason that they work is that each character does have a plight, a problem of real drama. Boys out of school on a carefree afternoon find themselves followed by a threatening older man; a girl decides whether to elope; a man endangers his job by repeating old habits. Many of the stories are shadowed by a very heavy, very Irish-Catholic sense of guilt, shame, sin, and the precariousness of virtue. People can make one poor mistake that will lead to disaster; the danger of sin, or of disfavor with the city, with God, and with oneself, is never more than a step away. Joyce reminds us that all of the quiet drama unfolding in a city is rich, complex, and human.
Simply put, Dubliners is good education for writers, and pure enjoyment for readers. The stories often end in the middle, or with problems unresolved; while this made some of the stories seem more like sketches, in most it seemed to make Joyce’s point about the never-ending conflict of the many lives in a great city like Dublin.
The physicist Murray Gell-Mann was reading ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ when he determined that elementary particles called hadrons had to be made up of even smaller constituent particles. He got their name from a line out of the book:
“Three quarks for Muster Mark, sure his bite is worse than his bark.”
And that’s why we call them ‘quarks’…now THERE is some useful cocktail knowledge.
I need to read “The Dubliners.” My father was born in Ireland in 1902 & lived outside of Dublin ’til he was…I don’t know. In his 20s, for sure. Perhaps I might get to understand him & his 11 brothers & sisters better.
Though, I am not certain I want to. That was one wretched, wrecked family. But Joyce’s writing & style do sound instructive.
L&K, MB