The Books: “Dubliners” – ‘The Sisters’ (James Joyce)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Dubliners – by James Joyce

James Joyce said: “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.”

Dubliners is James Joyce’s first book – a collection of short stories. It was finally published (after much brou-haha) in 1914. Publishers balked (especially in Ireland) at the frank portrait of Dublin – with its prostitutes, its fake piety, its aimless wandering young men … I mean, all of that, yes – was very shocking at the time. But I think there was more to the reaction than just rigidity and prudery. Obviously, Joyce touched a nerve. Joyce was telling the truth, as he saw it, about his own country. I think it might have been seen as a betrayal in some circles. Not like he was LYING, no – quite the opposite. They were mad at him for telling the truth. It made them look bad. It was not, shall we say, a flattering portrait.

James Joyce’s feelings about Ireland were complex and contradictory. He loved it, it was his homeland – he could never write about anything else – even when he had been living in exile for 20 years – it was to Ireland his mind constantly went in his work. But he could never live there. It was the most suffocating place for him imaginable. So he was not forgiven for choosing to de-camp.

I love that Joyce is so honored now, and that Ireland has decided to be proud of their wayward son – but they ran him out of town on a rail back in the early years of the 20th century. He aired the dirty laundry of the “family” out in public. They hated him for it. The reaction wasn’t a: “Hey you, stop LYING”. It was more “Hey you, stop making us look bad to outsiders!” George Bernard Shaw said, after reading Ulysses – which shocked and disgusted him, “If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing — not whitewashing — it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water.”

Well. Obviously that is a rare response. Most people – when shown a mirror will fight back, disputing the reflection. And that’s what happened to Joyce. He told the truth, and, as per usual, was not congratulated for it.

He left Ireland in 1904 – fleeing with his lover, Nora, a scandal. They settled down eventually in Trieste. Joyce had been publishing things here and there, he already had powerful allies like Yeats – who helped him out, thought there really was something special in his writing. But publishers still balked. If you read Dubliners all the way through – and try to put yourself back in 1908, 1909 – and imagine reading it then – put it in the context of its time – you can see what a shocking book it must have been. I have more to say about that, but I’ll do it later. Anyway, Dubliners finally was published in 1914.

Harry Levin, the editor of my Portable James Joyce, writes in his introduction:

He left too early for the Revolution; he arrived too late for the Renaissance. His undergraduate idol, the subject of his first published article, was not Yeats but Ibsen. He greeted the Irish Literary Theatre with a polemic against folksy estheticism. He outraged his college debating society by expounding the iconoclasms of European drama. On several visits home from the Continent, between the ages of twenty and thirty, he considered whether some journalistic or pedagogical niche existed for him in the cultural life of his native city. In his single play, Exiles, as in actuality, he pushed this problem toward a negative conclusion. In his short stories, Dubliners, the recurrent situation is entrapment. Their timid protagonists are trapped into marriage (“The Boarding House”), kept from eloping (“Eveline”), wistfully envious of colleagues who get away (“A Little Cloud”). In “Counterparts” a father makes his son the victim of his own frustrations. The plight suggested in “The Dead” is that of a mill-horse harnessed to a carriage, pulling it round and round a public statue.

Escaping from the treadmill of Dublin, Joyce spent the rest of his life brooding upon it and writing about it. His insistence on calling its denizens by their names, and pointing out its local landmarks, held up the publication of Dubliners for several years.

It was too private. It revealed too much. It felt like an accusation – which, indeed, it was. Ireland, at that time, was a deeply conventional society and Joyce bucked convention. He looked to Europe for better freer models. And yet his creative consciousness always went back to Ireland. In all his stories and books, it is Ireland that comes to life. I find it very moving. People, in general, do not like complexity. They find it threatening, and somehow hostile. They want things to be either/or. They cannot practice Keats’ “negative capability.” It is very difficult for such people to understand that Joyce hated Ireland, and Joyce would kill for Ireland. Joyce could never live in Ireland, but Joyce yearned for it every day of his life. He was Irish. He loved his country. Only something you love can break your heart. Ireland broke Joyce’s heart.

Here’s Levin again, in his introduction:

Those who confuse a writer with his material find it all too easy to make a scapegoat out of Joyce. They make Proust responsible for the collapse of France because he prophesied it so acutely; and, because Joyce sensed the contemporary need to create a conscience, they accuse him of lacking any sense of values. Of course it is he who should be accusing them. His work, though far from didactic, is full of moral implications; his example of esthetic idealism, set by abnegation and artistry, is a standing rebuke to facility and venality, callousness and obtuseness. Less peculiarly Joycean, and therefore even more usable in the long run, is his masterly control of social realism, which ingeniously springs the varied traps of Dublin and patiently suffers rebuffs with Mr. Bloom. The heroine of Stephen Hero, who has almost disappeared from the Portrait, says farewell after “an instant of all but union.” By dwelling upon that interrupted nuance, that unconsummated moment, that unrealized possibility, Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things.

Dubliners is a very insightful book, very revealing – and most of the stories are … bitchy, honestly. He is gossiping, passing on dirty stories. But … but … the collection ends with ‘The Dead’. And in ‘The Dead’ – Joyce pulls the veil back, goes from microscopic to telescopic – and reveals his love and loss and grief and humanity … all of which can only come from the deepest places in his heart.

That is why I say to people who have not read Joyce and who want to know where to start (because, yes, he can be daunting) I tell them to read Dubliners. Each story is about 5 or 6 pages long on average (except for “The Dead”, which is longer) so you can take it in small chunk. I also tell them, and I tell you now: to read the stories in order. Read them in order! At least your first time through. I dip in and out Dubliners all the time now, picking up this or that story … but my first time through, I read them in order, first to last. Joyce was very careful about where each story went in the collection – there was, as always, a method to his madness – and so much of his genius (not yet in full flower) is there, in the slow methodical progression – from ‘The Sisters’ – the first story in the collection – to ‘The Dead’ – the majestic last story in the collection (and the greatest short story ever written).

In ‘The Sisters’: a priest is dead, and he lies in a coffin in an upstairs room, and everyone (all women, except for our narrator – obviously a young boy) sits in the sitting room downstairs and gossips about the priest upstairs. Death hovers over ‘The Sisters’. And so ‘The Dead’, the last story – in all its tragedy and scope – is a bookend, a counterpart to ‘The Sisters’. Joyce did this deliberately. So I’m just saying this as a suggestion to those who want to give Joyce a try. Read Dubliners story by story, going in order. You’ll start to see what Joyce was about then. Because in most of these stories, not much happens. The revelations are seemingly small, but the epiphanies are gigantic, and the stories work cumulatively. Suffice it to say, Dubliners would not have HALF the reputation it does now if ‘The Dead’ were not included. It is ‘The Dead’ that elevates the book into something transcendent and universal.

‘The Sisters’, the first story in Dubliners is a simple gossipy little tale. It feels like you are eavesdropping, your ear pressed up to the door. (Many of the stories in Dubliners have that feel.) The narrator of the story is a young boy, young enough to still get angry when he is referred to as a child. He appears to live with his aunt and uncle (no parents are mentioned). And dead Father Flynn upstairs: he was a fallen priest (he appears to have gone mad), and he was the boy’s friend. Father Flynn had a stroke, and after a couple of days of vigil he passed away. This sparks in the narrator an unfurling stream of memories about Father Flynn, and who he was to him, etc.

That’s the excerpt below.

Oh, and one last quote from Harry Levin, who has a way of saying things that I can’t: He’s talking at first about the challenges of getting the collection published, and what the official problem with the book was. But then he goes on to talk about what Joyce was DOING in these stories, and why they were so amazing at the time … something that you might miss today. It’s almost like the influence of Marlon Brando in the late 40s and early 50s. What he did was so completely revolutionary – he changed our expectations of actors with one performance … and now, everyone lives in the wake of his influence. That’s just the fact. It’s hard to remember how influential he was since he changed things so completely that young actors today STILL want to be Marlon Brando. To go back and see him in Streetcar is like trying to get at the source. It remains influential today, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that since now everyone “acts” like that. The old style of acting is gone forever. No comparison was left.

So. Back to Joyce. The reason I want to post this next quote from Harry Levin is because: I was rereading ‘The Sisters’ last night, in preparation for today – and it occurred to me that the semi-stream-of-conscious voice is the voice of most short stories today. We follow an internal journey, we go with the narrator up, down, around … we understand that events have internal causes as well as external. Remember, Joyce was living in the beginning of the “Freudian century”. The revolution at the time was: there are things within our hearts and minds that cannot be seen in broad daylight. Childhood contains sparks of events, experienced through the 5 senses, and these events continue to influence us in adulthood, even if we’re not aware of it. The surface is NOT everything. Joyce was trying to not just write ABOUT that, but to reflect that knowledge IN his writing.

Now, of course, today, that is how short stories are written, that is the accepted style, no one finds it odd or intrusive to move so closely with another soul, to succumb to a subconscious rendering of events. That’s how it’s done now – but “that’s how it’s done now” BECAUSE of the influence of people like Joyce. And Dostoevsky before him.

Okay, I’ll finally let Harry Levin take over now:

Most of Dubliners was written, from earlier notes jotted down on the spot, during Joyce’s first year in Trieste, 1905. The manuscript was accepted the following year by the English publisher, Grant Richards, but was not brought out until 1914 because of objections raised by his printers. Meanwhile Joyce had added three more stories to the original twelve and sent them all to the Dublin firm of Maunsel and Company, which printed them, then changed its mind, and destroyed the sheets. When Joyce’s insistence finally triumphed over the long delay, the published text included the exceptionable matter; the repetition of “bloody,” the innuendo against Edward VII, and – what was most offensive to the Irish publisher and most intrinsic to Joyce’s method – the specific mention of local establishments and personalities. The book is not a systematic canvass like Ulysses; nor is it integrated, like the Portrait, by one intense point of view; but it comprises, as Joyce explained, a series of chapters in the moral history of his community; and the episodes are arranged in careful progression from childhood to maturity, broadening from private to public scope. The older technique of short-story writing, with Maupassant and O. Henry, attempted to make daily life more eventful by unscrupulous manipulation of surprises and coincidences. Joyce – with Chekhov – discarded such contrivances, introducing a genre which has been so widely imitated that nowadays its originality is not readily detected. The open structure, which casually adapts itself to the flow of experience, and the close texture, which gives precise notation to sensitive observation, are characteristic of Joycean narrative. The fact that so little happens, apart from expected routines, connects form with theme: the paralyzed uneventfulness to which the modern city reduces the lives of its citizens.

Now. Onto the excerpt from ‘The Sisters’ – the first story in the collection.

Excerpt from Dubliners – by James Joyce: ‘The Sisters’

The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street. It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery. The drapery consisted mainly of children’s bootees and umbrellas; and on ordinary days a notice used to hang in the window, saying: Umbrellas Re-covered. No notice was visible now for the shutters were up. A crape bouquet was tied to the door-knocker with ribbon. Two poor women and a telegram boy were reading the card pinned on the crape. I also approached and read:

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, nearly smothered in his great-coat. Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuff-box for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quiet inefficacious.

I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock. I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I or nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death. I wondered at this for, as my uncle said the night before, he had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. Often when I thought of this I could make no answer or only a very foolish and halting one upon which he used to smile and nod his head twice or thrice. Sometimes he used to put me through the responses of the Mass which he had made me learn by heart; and, as I pattered, he used to smile pensively and nod his head, now and then pushing huge pinches of snuff up each nostril alternately. When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip – a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.