Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories depicting its titular characters by Irish author James Joyce. Cast in a general atmosphere of light melancholy with a few bordering on the point of lugubriousness, Joyce delineates in scrupulous detail while also satirising what he perceives to be an insular, stagnant, and complacent Irish society. As Joyce himself wrote in a letter, “I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.” This air of desolation and entrapment is pervasive in all his stories, whether it be related to marriage, or family, or work, or money.
In one of the more approachable short stories, “Counterparts”, our protagonist Farrington seems to find his job as a low-level clerk of a law firm insufferably tedious, his only solace in life the enjoyment of a night of drunken revelry with his acquaintances in the “comfort of the public-house.” Whilst Joyce initially positions our sympathies with Farrington through the humorous archetypical description of a monotonous office job, his rapid degeneration into irrational and impulsive behaviour as epitomised by his thirst for alcohol (to the extent of pawning away his watch for a crown) reveals his utter lack of self-control- an emasculating impotence. His pathetic desire for power and respect is further eroded when he loses an arm-wrestling match (a physical embodiment of strength, and thus, masculinity) to Weathers, “a mere boy.” Ultimately, he takes out his anger and frustration by beating his own innocent son, Tom, a pitiable attempt to assert his meagre dominance. Joyce’s illustration of the drunken wreck stereotype strikingly exposes the cyclical nature of familial abuse, and we are left to contemplate the generational implications ourselves. Yet, for all of Farrington’s flaws, his short-sightedness, his predisposition to violence, his hedonistic debauchery, does not seem out of place amongst his equally complicit colleagues and companions. In this larger sense, Farrington is merely an exemplification and a victim of the corrupt society he lives in.
This societal corruption is even more overt in “Two Gallants”, which depicts two men, Corley and Lenehan, who live a life of swindling and pilfering as they live in an uneasy state of perpetual vagrancy on the streets of Dublin, only forced together by their deprived status. The title is itself ironic, their manipulation of a maid to steal a gold coin from her master is perhaps the antithesis of chivalry. Also a bracingly candid portrait of the stagnant Irish society as with “Counterparts,” we are perhaps afforded a bit more comfort and hope by Lenehan’s private desires for a stable family and home. Perhaps this is what is most bitingly cruel about the title, that these men were forced into their present circumstances by the poor economic and social conditions of Dublin and we are left to wonder at the lost opportunities. With such a depressing account of bachelor life, Joyce does not depict marriage in a particularly positive light either. In “The Boarding House,” the owner of the establishment, Mrs. Mooney, had divorced with his drunken, useless husband, and over the course of the story, manages to manoeuvre her daughter into a socially beneficial marriage with one of the lodgers. Materialistic concerns are very much a thematic pattern in Joyce, where higher ideals like true love and integrity are given up for the sake of pecuniary gains and climbing the social ladder.
Like the rest of his stories, the intensity of Joyce’s characters and the lingering thoughts that are left with the reader upon the conclusion is what makes them so potent. The character-driven, plotless style places the people in them at the forefront, forming a subtly powerful portrait of these inhabitants of Dublin.
James Joyce and Lu Xun
Joyce’s philosophy towards his writing, at least in Dubliners, I feel, is highly reminiscent of contemporary Chinese author Lu Xun (魯迅). Lu Xun famously inveighed against what he perceived to be a sickness of entrenched superstition and tradition caused by the exalted dogmatic status of “Confucian” values in China, a view shaped by the humiliation and defeat of the late Qing army by the Western powers. In Lu Xun’s short story Kong Yiji,《孔乙己》, the titular character ultimately suffers a fate of drunkenness, debt, and death. The laughingstock of the children and the town, Kong Yiji’s (孔乙己) self-esteem seems to be contingent upon his self-perception as a 文人 (the educated class). Yet his past failure of the Imperial Examinations typifies the misguided aspirations of a whole class of people.
I think Joyce’s stories feature characters are more human than Lu Xun, with each at least containing some redeeming values to attenuate their evils. Lu Xun’s characters, like Ah-Q (啊) and Kong Yiji, are more like caricatures than anything else, with an amalgamation of hyperbolised features and quirks to typify the faults of the Chinese person in an incarnate. Both styles have their unique intrigue and deserve more comparative analysis with reference to the respective societies under which they had arisen.
Dubliners. Joyce, James, HarperCollins Publishers, 2011.