CLASSICS REVISITED
Wandering Dubliners
By Ravi Vyas
Like Chekhov's sadness, where an essential sadness is mixed with a wry sense of humour, we need to keep the mix in mind when we read Joyce too.
Dubliners, James Joyce, Penguin Books, First published in 1914. Since the book is out of copyright, many editions are available now.
GEORGE ORWELL'S dictum that a novelist's prose should be a clear pane of glass through which the story can be clearly viewed doesn't quite apply to Irish writers. For them — Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, Heaney, Wilde, Synge, O'Casey, and so many others — on the other hand, language is not a sheet of glass but a lens, and the lens, as we know, not only magnifies but inevitably distorts. It is precisely that distortion, the product of a willed linguistic ambiguity that Irish writers aim for and revel in. Take the case of James Joyce, who wrought a revolution in English prose by reducing language to essentials without losing any of its coherence and concrete force. "O, rocks," as Molly Bloom memorably said in Ulysses, "tells us in plain words." But then, plain words carry a meaning that leads us out of books and into life, which is the proper direction to take both for writers and readers because all creative writing ought to be nothing more than a philosophy expressed in images.
Human situations
James Joyce's Dubliners, that perhaps best expresses the Irish approach to literature, consists of 15 stories about Dubliners. Though each of these stories has a beginning, a middle and an end, some seem lacking in conventional shape or import; yet, unlike those you find in upmarket popular magazines, these stories are of a kind more or less familiar since the time of Chekhov. Lacking in obvious action, the what-happened-next kind, the stories of Dubliners disclose human situations, moments of intensity. To the simple reader, deceived by surfaces, Joyce's stories appear simple, but they are not as simple as they seem. To the ingenious reader, the stories, though complicated enough, may seem more complicated than they are. So, the prudent course would be to take these 15 stories exactly as they are: don't see more in the truth than it actually contains.
What holds them together and makes them a book — or at least one of the controlling principles — is a theme or a common idea. Hinted at in the first page of Dubliners and displayed in the last story, "The Dead", the theme is paralysis or "living death". That paralysis was meant to be the central word and a clue to meaning is confirmed by Joyce himself, who, in a letter in 1904, said he intended Dubliners "to betray the soul of that...paralysis which many consider a city". The stories, then, betray impotence, frustration and death. His city is the heart of the paralysis, and all the citizens are victims.
Eveline, for example, is a girl too moribund to abandon the dirt of her native city for the fresh air of exile; and most of the partygoers in "The Dead" look less alive than the dead. (This long short story has often been compared with Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.)
A moral history
The paralysis that Joyce talks about is moral, intellectual and spiritual. In his Letters, which provide a guide to his writings, Dubliners is a chapter in the "moral history" of his country and "a first step towards spiritual liberation". As agent of "civilization", Joyce provides his countrymen "one good look at themselves" in "a nicely polished looking glass".
Paralysis, then, is moral and central. But it isn't paralysis alone but the revelation of paralysis to its victims. Coming to awareness or self-realisation marks the climax of these stories or of most at least; knowing oneself, as the Greeks and our own Upanishad texts tell us, is the basis of morality. The little boy of "An Encounter" and "Araby" comes to such knowledge; the coming to awareness of Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud" is far bitter and more terrible because it is longer delayed; and the self-realisation of Gabriel, the bitterest and most comprehensive of all, is not only the only point and climax of "The Dead" but of Dubliners.
When Joyce's heroes realise their condition, we too, if we are alert and sensitive, become aware of a condition so general that we cannot escape it entirely. The revelation of Dublin to its citizens and of Dubliners to themselves reveals our world and ourselves. Dubliners brings news to every one today-we are all "Dead Souls".
The question that the common reader might ask is whether the stories are too grim, too solemn to be readable? If the world around us is so muggy why do we want to learn what's worse? Serious to be sure, but never solemn, never didactic. As for satire, which we feel at home with when we meet it in George Orwell (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty Four) there is none of it in Dubliners. There is no sign of indignation and examining detestable things, Joyce seems detached and contemplative. If the general direction is towards goodness, somewhere hidden in the corners is a touch of irony. Also Joyce's stories are funny at times, and some however serious and moral, are altogether hilarious. "Ivy Day" and "Grace" are examples of this mix.
Genial humanity
Like Chekhov's sadness, where an essential sadness is mixed with a wry sense of humour, we need to keep the mix in mind when we read Joyce too. Dublin is a moral and spiritual "dunghill"; on the other hand, the streets and homes are fascinating and so are the people, down and out as they are. A genial humanity pervades throughout, as if to say, "don't judge, just carry on". Just see it through.
Joyce is very European, in a way, because all the stories, except three, were written in exile. Dubliners provides the reasons why he went away (of course it is better done in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man) but the European sensibility is fused into these stories. Europeans believe (especially the French) that the English novel's characteristic concern is with the social scene, while it fails to explore the "the deeper layers of personality". Joyce's Dubliners tries to bridge the gap and therein lies its greatness.
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