Finished on the eve of The Dead*, as appropriate as ever a time to do so.

*Correction: on the eve of the eve of The Dead

I struggle, to breathe through these words.

I have a keen fascination with Irish lit and wanted to read this as a primer in some sense. It was. Chock-full with local, contemporary references to Dublin in the early parts of the twentieth century (and with that, outdated, harmful language and themes in some passages), many a consult to different online footnotes were made, but that served to satisfy my keen fascination with everything Irish, really. Obviously, there are threads of Irish nationalism woven throughout the stories, but not necessarily 'nationalist' in itself, not in the leagues with the rebels. I was actually much more interested in the influence of the Catholic church and that commentary.

Meandering, inconclusive plot might have made it difficult to decipher any sort of certain statement, per se, but I don't think this is required, and anyway, the idea of "movement" is there, a little seed planted. The ideas of moving forward (epiphany, with some new information, maybe) and moving backward, or not moving at all (paralysis, not coming to any real decision). I love short stories because they generally only serve as a few pixels in a bigger, unseen picture, a snapshot in a life, time, place. This is the case here, a little window into a few little lives in Dublin in 1914. And yet the book tells a life-long story -- youth to death -- and all that comes with the ages. I liked this structure.

My favourites:
-The Dead
-Clay
-A Mother
-Araby
-Eveline
-The Sisters
-Counterparts

I think these stories are deserving of another read at some point, and learning what I know about Joyce now, I definitely want to learn more.

I just don't enjoy short stories in general.

‘When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the ‘second city’ of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.’ - James Joyce in a letter to his brother Stanislaus.

Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories that Joyce believed reflected a ‘chapter of the moral history’ of his country. He intended its publication to advance civilisation by allowing the people of Ireland to have a good look at themselves in a nicely polished looking glass, and therefore all the stories are gritty, realistic and represent the paralysis of Ireland under British rule. Inspiration for this realism was taken from Henry James who said that the nineteenth century was ‘the advent of a time for looking more closely into the old notion that to have a quality of his own a writer needs to draw his sap from his soil of origin’.

The stories are arranged to show the impact of paralysis on every aspect of life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. They are epiphanic and as is said in the introduction: Dubliners functions as an oddly unstable text, ostensibly all naturalistic in detail and yet knowingly at work in the recesses and secrecies of consciousness where the world can seem a mere trace, a shadow amid the perplexing echoes of language.’

I read this in preparation for my trip to Dublin and personally I felt as though it equipped me with a better understanding of the history of the city and achieved Joyce’s goal.

Story 1 - The sisters:
This story follows a young boy after the death of Father Flynn to whom the boy was close. It symbolises the two forces trapping Ireland, Britain and the Catholic Church. When the priest dies he frees the boy from the church.

Story 2 - An Encounter:
Two schoolboys truant and encounter a middle-aged pervert. The boys are seeking adventure thinking ‘real adventures do not happen to those who remain at home…they must be sought abroad.’ However, their adventure goes awry and instead, they are prematurely exposed to adult sexuality when the man masturbates near them in the field. The villain’s eyes are green symbolising how there are no real adventures to be had in Ireland, only disappointment and hinderance to growth.

Story 3 - Araby:
A young boy falls in love with the sister of his friend and goes to the bazaar to buy her a gift only to find it has closed before he arrived.

Story 4 - Eveline:
This was a devastating story about a woman deliberating whether to stay with her abusive father to provide for her family or flee to Argentina with her lover. She is so paralysed by guilt and the ‘church bells clanging against her heart’ that she remains standing on the dock as her lover sails away.

Story 5 - After the Race:
A college student attempts to fit in with his wealthy friends. ‘Rapid motion elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.’
In this story there is the contrast of the French man having ‘shining white teeth’ whereas all Irishmen are described as having brown teeth, illustrating the disadvantage of Irishmen at the time.

Story 6 - Two Gallants:
Two conmen find a maid who is willing to steal from her employer as they remain disenfranchised by life in Dublin.

Story 7 - The Boarding House:
A woman discovers her daughter is having an affair with a man of a higher class and blackmails him into marrying her in order to advance her standing.

Story 8 - A Little Cloud:
Little Chandler’s catch up dinner with an old friend emphasises his failed literary dreams and acts as a reminder of Dublin as a Stagnant city: ‘If you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.’ However, the friend Gallagher is not a heroic character and this illuminates how the problems being faced by Ireland will not be solved by merely going away. I enjoyed Little chandler’s ruminations on indulging in the Celtic literature movement (wherein Irish poets would write mediocre verse about Celtic mythology to appeal to English expectations -Yeats’s early work was along these lines but her managed to rise above it) demonstrating Joyce’s contempt for this kind of work. I also enjoyed the phrase ‘Don’t make punch of that whiskey.’

Story 9 - Counterparts:
Farrington back chats his boss and embarks on a night full of disappointments. His boss and all of his superiors are English at the pub he is emasculated by losing an arm wrestle and losing money gambling. He then returns home taking out his frustrations violently on his son who repeatedly offers instead of a beating could he say Hail Mary. This demonstrates the inability of the Catholic Church to offer any real solution to the dispossession of Irish people.

Story 10 - Clay:
A woman spends Halloween with her former foster child and his family. They play a traditional Halloween game wherein objects with prophetic significance are placed on saucers and a blindfolded person must choose between them. The woman plays and disappointingly chooses a ball of clay.

Story 11 - A Painful Case:
A man rebuffs a woman and later hears that she was driven to loneliness and death. I enjoyed in this piece how the climax of the story (as in Ivy Day below) was a piece fo writing. In this case it was a newspaper clipping telling of the suicide.

Story 12 - Ivy day in the Committee Room:
Ivy day is the anniversary of Parnell’s death. Parnell was a favourable nationalist politician who was shunned when his affair with a married woman came to light thus further delaying Irish independence. The motif of betrayal throughout this story and the entire work is a direct response to how the Irish people felt about Parnell at the turn of the century. In this story minor politicians fail to live up to his memory and a poem is recited from memory about him.

Story 13 - A Mother:
A stage mother tries to showcase her daughter in the Irish cultural movement in a series of concerts however there is a fallout with the contract. I enjoyed the quote: ‘She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.’

Story 14 - Grace:
A man injures himself falling down some stairs and his friends try to reform him through catholicism. I enjoyed the quote: ‘The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.’

Story 15 - The Dead:
Gabriel Conroy attends a dinner party and later is consumed with jealousy about his wife’s prior lover. It is the longest story in the book and includes the most dialogue which was very rich. I particularly enjoyed the debate between Miss Ivory an Irish nationalist and participant in the Irish cultural revival and Conroy who is aptly termed a ‘West Briton’. Conroy’s paralysis in marriage appears to be as a result of his love for all things English (he reads a Robert Browning poem, writes for a newspaper opposed to Irish nationalism and refuses to holiday in Galway).

Overall, while a few of the motifs such as ‘brown teeth’ were quite overt I do not agree with those who believe this is Joyce’s simplistic work and I think it does a remarkable job of capturing a particular moment in Irish history right before the 1916 Easter rising.

I knew before reading these that they'd be character studies but that just must not be my thing. I missed having a true storyline to the book.

Enjoyable if only for the Dublin setting