Seinfeld and Inevitable Dread: James Joyce's "Dubliners" and "Portrait of the Artist"
In which I square up against the titan of 20th century literature
What am I supposed to say about James Joyce? Entire careers, entire college departments' worth of people much smarter and more perceptive than me have been spending their entire lives analyzing every letter out of these stories for the past hundred years. All I can do is parrot, and try to express what he tried so hard to make inexpressible. But parrot I must. ("Parrot I must?" He's fucking getting to me, I would never write that under normal conditions...)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This collection really should have started with Dubliners. It's shorter, punchier, leaner, meaner, and it was written earlier (meaning Joyce's in-house style is less developed, so it's marginally less impossible to read). Well, I guess the title "A Portrait [...] / Dubliners" reads better, and the opportunity to end the whole physical book with the last page of "The Dead" was too good. Anyway, I went into Portrait expecting the widespread cultural image of Joyce - the long incomprehensible sentence fragments and such - but (after the bit with the moocows) was faced with what seemed to me a shockingly normal, everyday, if a little dry piece of writing. The real point of the book didn't hit me until I thought about this beautiful paragraph in Chapter 1:
O yes, Stephen said. But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Fleming was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel. That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop.
In a vague, indescribable emotional state, the ten-year-old Stephen (a stand-in for Joyce) is doing something I myself did as a child - the thing where you open and close your ears in a crowd with that weird roaring, rushing sound? For me, it was a weird-smelling elementary school gym with a lame magician show going on; for him, it's a stone room in the bowels of an ancient countryside castle repurposed into a boarding school. I've never seen that experience reflected in any other kind of art - a book, a song, even a meme - and certainly not with that kind of poetic beauty.
That's the whole idea of the novel, to bring out into the light what had previously been unexpressed or implicit in literature. Dubliners is also obsessed with this (I'll get around to that), as is Ulysses, and really, it was an aspect of the entire modernist movement to be drawn to experiences, thoughts, and feelings that previous generations of artists saw as too minor, ignoble, or unwholesome to be let onto the page. I mean, it was originally published in full in 1916. Just forty years before, the height of literature was Mark Twain and Leo Tolstoy. Imagine going straight from that to the moocows?
In the modern day, it's easy to miss how revolutionary this stuff was, because it invented the modern. Or at least solidified it. It's like those episodes of Seinfeld or Friends where they seem to be repeating tired sitcom cliches - no, they invented the cliches! The prose style was pretty revolutionary compared to the stuffy European literature Joyce was brought up on, but it made such a permanent impression on the English-language novel it now feels almost samey (if somewhat more poetic and melodic). You just know every nepo-baby MFA holder in New York has read Joyce. And for good reason - he’s the best.
One of my favorite moments was the bit with the English deacon in chapter 3 who belittles Stephen for using an Irish provincialism, "tundish." It's another small, little, unnoticed moment, but Joyce makes it huge in several dimensions. It's turned into a tearjerking passage about 'his language not being truly his own' that seems to predict or influence future post-colonialist literature (here's an interesting essay on this aspect in Ulysses, fittingly enough from a translator's point of view); it's used as a new facet/direction in Stephen's development as an incredibly complex and human character (in this case, the complexity of his identity as Irish-or-not-Irish, explored more in chapter 5 and Dubliners’ “The Dead”); and most importantly, it's just written really well. The prose is deep and complex, coughing up new ideas on every re-read of each sentence.
These little gems of moments happen only a few times in the book, but they're so unique they make the entire thing worth reading. Other favorites were the bit in chapter 4 when he gets inspiration from going down to the shoreline and the bit in chapter 5 where the villanelle with repeated lines springs into his mind fully formed in a dream, a breathtaking and incredibly real dramatization of the creative impulse.
These moments of genius are few and far between, however. I found myself strung out, waiting for the next hit through incredibly dull blathering (the sermons in chapter 3, which were interesting but overstayed their welcome, the horribly stodgy and stiff "witty" banter between Stephen and his college friends in chapter 5, etc). It's mostly a guy being a moody teenager, sitting around thinking about stuff, and the good bits come when another person (such as the mysterious love interest) disturbs that lonely equilibrium.
Portrait overall gets 3.5 stars from me. It's good, but not as good as...
Dubliners
Dubliners, Joyce's first book, was completed in 1904, but not published until 1914 because no self-respecting publisher wanted to put their hands on it. It was groundbreaking in its realism. Again, we think nothing when a modern-day author uses coarse language or dark themes in their work, but Joyce was on the vanguard. Multiple publishers outright refused to print his manuscript solely because of the use of such hoooorrifying terms as 'bloody' (admittedly, it was a bit stronger back then than it is to modern day Irish and Brits). The perversion of “An Encounter” and “Two Gallants” were another non-starter, as was the open slander of the recently deceased King Edward VII and his mother Victoria in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” Everyone from executives to secretaries to publishers to printers was afraid of the social repercussions of working with it. (They had no idea what kind of insanity was coming down the pipeline in his next three books, of course.)
Each story follows a Dubliner of older and older age, from the immature schoolboys of "The Sisters" and "Araby," to the young adults setting out in the world for the first time of "Two Gallants" and "After the Race," to the old people past their prime of "A Painful Case" and "A Mother," and finally, of course, to “The Dead.” Each story ends with dissatisfaction, paralysis, unfulfilled desires, an awkward break-off or implication. This ranges from out in the open ("Eveline" has the most obvious and literal paralysis, and is a good intro to Joyce for skeptical readers) to subtle and implicit ("Clay"'s ending, in an extreme case, depends 100 percent on a footnote or a Google search, but when you finally find the second verse of that obscure opera song...). There are lighter dissatisfactions (the lady from "Clay" and the guy from "After the Race" don't seem to really be *that* sad about their situations, just not thrilled) to more crushing ones (the guy from "Counterparts" losing his job, friends, and all his money in the space of like four hours - gosh, but there is a little piece of him inside every single one of us, isn’t there?)
A few stories seem relatively positive, but when placed in the context of the collection, they make powerful statements about the Dublin of Joyce's day. "Grace" seems almost optimistic at first glance - the last thing we see is the old guy going to church and apparently starting to be won over from his alcoholic ways - but on a reread, giving a good look to the sermon, it's cheapo and treacly and does not look likely to stop him from biting off even more of his tongue. (Joyce thought the Catholic church’s influence stifled Irish cultural progress and enforced the paralysis that is one of the book’s recurring themes.) "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" closes on the clearest expression of hope in the whole book, Dubliners plus Portrait, a heart-stirring ode1 to Irish separationist Thomas Stewart Parnell that places him among the very greatest heroes of Irish history, but as explored further in Portrait (another reason to order it after Dubliners!), he was forced out of his office in disgrace after an extramarital affair and later died in disgrace, lending an implied sour taste to the proceedings.
And I just have to highlight "The Dead." The ultimate dissatisfaction. The last three paragraphs - well, I don't know about the people who claim they’re the greatest ever written in the English language, but they are certainly incredibly profound. They turn the end of the book into something that, if not actually hopeful at all, is at least a little more Zen. Gabriel may have squandered his grand epiphany and lost the chance to reconnect with his wife, but being an intelligent and aware man, he at least knows what he's lost.
…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.
All these stories offer a previously untouched lens into the inner life of people from all walks of life. Joyce claimed arrogantly that it would slow the progress of Irish civilization if his book was taken off shelves since it taught Dubliners a lesson they needed to learn - that they were paralyzed, stuck in place on the island he himself had left so long ago. That's the most important reason I wish Portrait was ordered after Dubliners. It offers a positive contrast, and the ending where Stephen finally leaves, escaping the stultifying stasis of Ireland, makes much more sense contrasted against the stories of those who could not do so.
Dubliners: 4.75 stars
Overall rating: 4 stars - but upper echelon, there's so much here...
Important note: If you want to read either of these books, get an edition with lots of footnotes if you can find one! I would have been totally lost without the reminders as to who X obscure historical poet/nun/saint was and the explanations of fin-de-siècle Dublin slang. The Barnes & Noble Classics edition with the enlightening introduction by Kevin J.H. Dettmar had particularly good ones, though it omits a key piece of info at the end of "Clay" I had to look up :P
Important note 2: Since Dubliners has now come into the public domain, Irish folk duo Hibsen made a 2023 album based on it, with each song based on a story. I listened to it for research. It is not particularly good, but because this is a music blog, I’ll put the first song here:
This passionate poem is ironically delivered by a character who has just been out in the street canvassing for a soulless pro-British Dublin city council candidate because it pays better than following his deeply held beliefs. There’s an interesting parallel to our times in there - have you heard the anecdotes of the people in New York’s primary who canvassed for Cuomo because he was paying $25/hr, but told anyone who would listen they were going to vote for Zohran instead?