Dubliners discussion

Well after some gentle prodding by Karen….here are my recollections of the discussion of James Joyce’s Dubliners. (I am sure my memory is imperfect now that the holidays have taken their toll…so chime in folks and add to or correct me.)

I choose Dubliners because it is a book I have read several times. I also like to re-read the story The Dead during the Christmas holidays because it seems to me to capture the melancholic but also sweet memories of the passing of one year into another.

As I re-read the stories this time I noticed that they seemed inter-linked with similar characters appearing on several stories. (Andy compared them to a book of stories by Will Self where characters from one story crop up in another.) I can see that there is a sort of narrative arc moving through the stories depicting youth through middle to old age. Joyce wrote in a letter about seeking to describe a Dublin that he saw as the “centre of paralysis” and indeed many of the characters of Dubliners are trapped by their circumstances, fears or belief.

Several people in the groups mentioned that Joyce’s language made them fell they could really “hear” the characters. Others felt his descriptions are “dead on”. For instance the description of Maria in the story “Clay” as a “very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin,” allows us a clear picture of her physical character.

We discussed the fact that Joyce had difficulty in getting the stories published and that there were elements, particularly about the church and sex, which would have riled the average Irish reader of his time.

I also quite clearly remember someone mentioning that the stories “didn’t go anywhere” and indeed the stories are less concerned with describing an event or series of events than describing an interaction between people or describing a situation. Many of the stories seem to trail away and come to no real resolution…I imagine this is another way to indicate Dublin’s “paralysis”.