Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce

James Joyce isn’t scary.

At least, not in Dubliners. I was nervous to read Joyce, as I’m somewhat of a neophyte to classic literature, and Joyce’s reputation is that of a nearly impenetrable etymological, historical, and poetic genius. But, luckily for me, this is no Finnegans Wake (which I once peeked into to see what all the fuss was about and set down almost immediately, feeling like I was reading a different language). It’s no Ulysses, either. Hell, even A Portrait of the Young Man As An Artist is a measurably tougher read than Dubliners. I came to learn after beginning that Joyce purposely wrote it to be the most approachable of his works; the polar opposite of Finnegans Wake, which requires the footnotes and annotations of an almost post-graduate level of study to be rendered even somewhat coherent. No, Dubliners is Joyce at his most consumable, most easily digestible, and still provides as much soulful nourishment as any other work I’ve ever read—which is admittedly not very much, yet.

It’s not altogether correct to describe Joyce’s Dubliners as a short story collection. It may be technically accurate, sure. But while these can be read stand-alone–and indeed, I began reading Dubliners with the goal of reviewing each story individually on Goodreads – they’re better taken in as a singular work as each story elevates the others. It’s far greater than the sum of its parts when approached as a novel rather than a collection of short stories.

There were some chapters I deemed forgettable when I tried to analyze them in a vacuum. But reading Farrington’s despicable character in Counterparts prior to Maria’s sweet, independent loneliness in Clay before finally wading through Duffy’s regretful heartbreak in A Painful Case provides such a rollercoaster of emotions that consuming the three in one sitting is a far different experience than reading one of the trio by itself. Thus I’d recommend against approaching this like a typical short story collection and suggest reading it as a novel instead.

A number of the stories depict the more mundane aspects of Dublin life, but Joyce’s prose elevates everything to a higher level. From Joyce’s pen the mundane springs beautifully and the beautiful emerges jaw-droppingly. Joyce is at his best when he writes about love. I have yet to read any author from any country in any time period who is able to approach depicting the feeling of love as skillfully as Joyce does.

These are not all happy stories, though. This is realist literature, after all. And they’re not always coherent, either—modernist, too. Joyce assumes his readers’ intelligence and often leaves it to them to fill in the blanks. While this can be frustrating when attempted by a sub par writer, it works beautifully when done by Joyce, and adds another facet of quality to the stories rather than detracting from their impact with ambiguity.

Perhaps the only negative (albeit a subjective one) I experienced when reading this was my own lack of consistent understanding regarding the constant references to the city, its social norms, and its religion. This struck me particularly with the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room, which centers upon several men attempting to create a fire of Catholicism in their friend, a converted Protestant, who takes little interest in the religion and only converted in order to marry his Catholic wife. I’m too ignorant of Catholicism to dig deeper than the surface of what they were discussing and initially it seemed nothing more than a relatively dry story of a man’s friends striving to make him more religious. It was only after I referred to some analysis of the story online that I realized these friends, throughout the conversation, were blatantly wrong with many of their assertions and references to the history of the Catholic church. Another reference I missed was that the priest himself was named after a street in Dublin’s old red light district, and was surrounded by motifs of the color red through the entire final scene. With this added context, Ivy Day becomes much deeper; it morphs from a fairly bland story into a subtly scathing criticism of many of Dublin’s denizens in what Joyce depicts as a fair-weather form of Catholicism which saves nary a soul.

The fact that I’m not a Catholic and not from Dublin constantly detracted from my enjoyment of the book throughout, and caused me to regularly refer to the gratuitous endnotes my edition contained, along with exterior internet analysis, to get the most out of Dubliners. This is very much a subjective criticism, of course, but something to note nonetheless.

Perhaps due to this ignorance of so much of its subject matter, when I think of my time reading Dubliners, I think first about emotion: love, melancholy, relief, sorrow, regret. Joyce’s writing left such a specter roaming my brain that I recall the raw emotion I felt while reading Dubliners more than I recall any of its rumination upon Dublin’s character, religion, and politics. I’m not sure I’ve ever had the written word affect me so much as some of these stories have, and the fact that I’m neither from Dublin nor, obviously, a 100+ year old man who lived at the time in which Joyce was writing, is a testament to Joyce’s skill in conveying these ideas. Doing so with such mundane, everyday stories of regular people renders Dubliners even more impressive.

Even apart from their context, his words are powerful:

“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.”

“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.”

“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

“I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.” 

“When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.”

Despite this beauty, reading through Dubliners was up-and-down for me. Joyce's prose is clearly enrapturing and I always feel myself settle into the reverie that comes with reading a really, really good writer each time I sit down to continue reading. While all his short stories in this collection deal with some sort of epiphany or another, I find that not all of these epiphanies have hit me as hard as he probably intended. Perhaps some of this is the fact that I'm reading this 100 years after he had written it. Perhaps it's also due to the fact that I am not Irish, or that I've spent nowhere near long enough in Dublin to grasp its eccentricities. This has left me with the feeling more of reading some good word porn rather than being impacted by a great story, and I'm thankful my paperback copy has a healthy amount of annotations to help me grasp a bit of what Joyce is assuming is colloquial knowledge regarding Dublin's early 20th century neighborhoods, popular restaurants, streets, and buildings.

To add to this difficulty, I often have the feeling when experiencing sparse modernist work like this that the artist, rather than being purposefully ambiguous for greater impact, is being purposefully obtuse in an attempt to obscure the fact that the story is rather threadbare and create a facade of more depth than actually exists. I couldn't shake that feeling while reading the very first story in the collection, The Sisters, despite Joyce's reputation as a literary Titan.

Don't get me wrong; The Sisters is a beautifully atmospheric work by Joyce despite the fact that it leaves the reader to fill in the blanks and place their own suppositions. Though I enjoyed his skill at setting the tone and found some portions of his prose outright gorgeous, Sisters didn't do enough for me. Maybe I'm too old-fashioned, concrete, and objective; too much a philosophical Luddite to really get modernism? But that's unfortunately not a question I'm equipped to answer.

“I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

As I continued reading I found myself more and more invested in the sheer beauty of Joyce's words, even if I couldn't fully relate to the stories themselves. The third story, titled Araby, is a stunningly beautiful coming-of-age vignette in which a boy becomes aware of his unrealistic idealism. Joyce's style is subtle almost to a fault, but engulfing. He assumes the reader's intelligence and floods his prose with gorgeous personification and simile. Reading this was more like experiencing a painting than it was reading a short story. Wonderful.


However, it wasn't until the eighth story, titled A Little Cloud, that I found the first story I could truly relate to; one not centered upon examining Dublin, Irish Nationalist politics, Catholicism, or alcoholism.

Centered around Little Chandler, a 32-year old timid, introverted, married man with a child who, upon meeting an old friend Galleher, realizes the path his life has taken and begins to yearn for Galleher's more well-traveled, Bohemian lifestyle. Joyce's class as a writer allows him to impact the melancholy of the existential worry Chandler feels, even though as a single, childless, 30-something travel junky my own life is more similar to Galleher's than Chandler's.

A Little Cloud is particularly appealing to me because it explores an internal, subconscious conversation I've had with myself constantly: Am I missing something important by choosing to live this way? Is it a 'grass is always greener' situation? Am I making the right choice? These questions are asked of themselves by more Western adults in 2018 than in the preceding decades, given our economic and political climate—particularly in the United States—and thus I wouldn't be surprised if this story is similarly impactful to other millennials who might choose to break into reading Joyce with Dubliners.

In addition to the story's particular appeal to me, there are the usual nuggets of Joyce's poetic brilliance nestled into the prose that make it a complete joy to read:

"The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures — on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens."

And then, finally, comes The Dead. Joyce saves his best for last. The Dead is a wonderfully written; a melancholy short story that encapsulates Dubliners very well. It touches on the same subject matter; Irish nationalism, the Catholic church, alcoholism, the city of Dublin. The closing lines are particularly moving and do a fantastic job to end Dubliners as a whole:

“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.”

The Dead is considered a masterpiece of short fiction, and I feel it makes a perfect endcap to Dubliners, being literary while also remaining approachable enough to be easily recommended as the jumping-off point for anyone interested to read Joyce. It's the only story I believe truly works as a stand-alone within this collection.

Dubliners's impeccable craft is impossible to deny, but I couldn’t shake the fact while reading it that it wasn’t written for me. It encapsulates the city of its namesake and will resonate most with its denizens. For the rest of us, though, Dubliners's other strengths do more than enough to suggest a read—and even a re-read if you’ve already walked the streets of Dublin with Joyce once before.

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