An urban legend revisited

Richard Fitzpatrick looks at James Joyce’s short story collection, Dubliners, the focus of the One City, One Book festival in the capital

JAMES JOYCE’S collection of short stories, Dubliners, is the subject of the One City, One Book Festival in the capital this year. Joyce was only 23 years old when he first tried to get Dubliners published. It was a torturous saga that concluded with its publication nine years later, in 1914.

The portrait he paints of Edwardian Dublin, of stultifying, dreary lives, of the anxiety of being trapped in a bourgeois world, or tending to its needs in the servant classes, is mature and modern, particularly for its insight into middle-aged angst. It was a remarkable feat of the imagination, which even hints — in An Encounter — about paedophilia.

“To have such acute observation of an environment one has just grown up in suggests that one must have never been fully caught up in it,” says Professor Declan Kiberd, who is speaking as part of a selection of Dubliners-themed events in Dublin over the month of April.

“It’s a rare thing in a young person. You read accounts of how, even when Joyce was dancing with a girl at parties in people’s houses, he would suddenly jump away and go into a corner and take down a note of something the girl had said. It must have been quite unnerving for the girl. I think he was able to be both inside the experience and outside it at the same time.

“There’s great wisdom in a story like The Dead — the understanding of so many streams of Irish life, the engagement with the past, the damaging effects of alcoholism on so many rich personalities; the sense, if you like, of a society unsure of where it’s going. To be able to tap into all that personal frustration and longing in your mid-20s, writing as if you were Tolstoy and that this had the depth of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, shows you how early he matured as an artist.”

Kiberd agrees that Joyce might well have been dramatising his father’s world, and his father’s friends, rather than his own. “Take Gabriel Conroy in The Dead, or the men depicted in dead-end office jobs hitting the booze. Apart from the early stories, it’s nearly all about the frustrations of middle-aged people trying to keep up a respectable front.

“This is before it happened to Joyce himself. It has to be something he witnessed more than he endured because he was gone from Ireland well before he was middle-aged. It’s like a report of a life he narrowly escaped, but might have had — notes to himself about a kind of world that was both loveable and yet one he needed to escape.”

The stories are almost listless. Their plots don’t travel great distances, but Joyce’s eye for character is beguiling, and there are rich undercurrents of humour, of ladies, for instance, sniping beside a corpse at a funeral, outdoing each other in boastfulness about “them newfangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told them about, them with the rheumatic wheels”.

The language, too, is accessible. “Joyce had the greatest palette of any writer,” says David Norris, the senator and Joycean scholar. “He could do anything he wanted with language, but in Dubliners he deliberately restricted it and perfected what he called ‘a style of scrupulous meanness’. The vocabulary is restricted. Words are repetitive. They’re short. They’re often monosyllabic. They’re grey. Joyce is doing that because he had done a little bit of medicine and he was acting as a kind of moral physician — analysing the spiritual illness that he saw in Ireland.

“Joyce said that he thought it would do the Irish good to get one good look at themselves, in what he called ‘the nicely polished looking glass of my prose’. People don’t want to confront the reality of their appearance, but Joyce thought it would be good for them.”

Echoes with a Dublin of a century later abound, says Norris.

“One character, prefiguring Ireland’s property crash and the flood of tribunals the State has stomached over the last 15 years, bemoans the class of ‘fellow now that’d sell his country for four- pence — ay — and go down on his bended knees and thank the Almighty Christ he had a country to sell.’”

Kiberd refers to an essay Joyce wrote for a Trieste newspaper in 1912, Home Rule Comes of Age. “Joyce says the presiding ghost will be Parnell,” says Kiberd. “He says Home Rule is going to be a sell-out in which the Irish themselves take responsibility for the Treasury debt once discharged by others, and that the Irish will be saddled with this debt for years to come, which is not one they really incurred.

“It’s completely contemporary in terms of right now. Joyce says the trouble with all of this is that when they sold out their country, they didn’t even bother extracting the usual 30 pieces of silver. That’s the last sentence in the essay. If you were Paul Krugman or anyone writing an essay about the debtor countries in Europe, it would be up there with Swift’s Drapier’s Letters as a key document.”

For the reader, there is a delight in stumbling across familiar landmarks, of rugged urchins traipsing around Temple Bar, of pubs like Mulligan’s on Poolbeg St, The Scotch House and Davy Byrne’s off Grafton St.

Inevitably, some of Dubliners captures a world that is disappearing. Characters recite long verses of poetry to each other; they honk snuff up their noses; they wear galoshes in wet and snowy weather; and they talk (protesting too much) about taking the pledge. They are also coming to grips with a new, imagined Ireland as the Irish cultural revolution was flourishing at the time.

Joyce, however, was unconvinced about the merits of the Irish celtic revival movement. “He laughed at it,” says Norris. “He called it the ‘cultic twalette’ instead of the ‘Celtic Twilight’ in Finnegans Wake; instead of the ‘twittering of the birds’, he talked about the ‘twattering of bards’.

“But he admitted the genius of Yeats. Yeats had imagination, but Joyce said he had no imagination himself at all. He was more like a mosaic artist putting stones together. Joyce constantly underestimated himself. He didn’t want to be lionised. He got on with chambermaids and hotel waiters.”