James Joyce –
Dubliners
A review and a
comparison to the works of Raymond Carver
‘Dubliners’,
often deemed Joyce’s most ‘accessible’ publication, is a set of stories that
follows a vast array of characters who for the most part only share one commonality
between them, the city of Dublin. I felt reading the majority of the tales to
be a rather cathartic experience as they often ended in a sudden realisation or
a sense of cleansing as exemplified by A
Little Cloud, in which the protagonist
feels ‘tears of remorse’ after
upsetting his child and more generally envying a more exotic life, and Eveline, in which the lead ends up ‘like a helpless animal’ as she
realises she cannot leave her homeland and the responsibilities that lie with
it for a second chance in the Americas. Indeed, despite early on taking a
rather negative approach to the collection (which is more likely just a result
of my overdose with the short story format of late) I grew to appreciate and I
dare say enjoy the diversity of the collection and the interesting culture
Joyce paints and would happily recommend casual grazing of the book to most.
Upon reading
I could not help but draw similarities in style and substance to the works of
Carver which lay fresh in my mind following my ‘Carver binge’ earlier this
month. For instance, both Carver and Joyce (at least in this collection) convey
the emptiness of human converse frequently, as seen in the generic observation
in The Sisters that the deceased has ‘gone to a better world’*. Equally both
portray a general sense of dissatisfaction with life as seen in ‘the disappointed man’ of the same
tale. Both writers often portray man at his most animalistic as seen in the ‘conqueror’ of women in The Two Gallants and the bleak
prediction for the future as two boys ‘[chase]
a crowd of ragged girls’ rather predatorily in An Encounter. Furthermore both authors use the language of the people,
phrases such as ‘up the dodge’ and ‘up to the knocker’ making regular
appearances in Dubliners, and follow
the lives of the common people (following a general shift in literature at the turn
of the century from the aristocracy and landed interest to the middle and working
classes). Indeed The Boarding House has
a ‘butcher’s daughter’ as its
protagonist and ‘nobody’ notices the
main character of A Little Cloud as
he crosses the streets of Dublin. These are people who have practical,
relatable concerns, the lead of Clay for
instance ‘nearly [crying] outright’ after
the loss of her two and fourpence. There’s also a general sense of frustration
and entrapment among the characters for their rather stagnant, restrictive lives,
the individual in A Little Cloud feeling
a ‘prisoner for life’, the central
character of A Painful Case noting
the ‘adventureless tale’ that just
happens to be his life and the lead of Counterparts
‘[aching] to do something, to rush
out and revel in violence’. As seen in the latter example, this ennui drives
man to a primitive state of desperation. There is an even greater sense of
stagnation in the relationships described as exemplified by the lead of A Little
Cloud observing the eyes of his wife and noting that ‘they repelled him and defied him: there was no passion in them, no rapture’,
the eyes after all being ‘portals to the souls’. Furthermore, alcoholism, an
issue that affected the lives of both Joyce and Carver respectively (Joyce’s
father being an alcoholic and Carver in fact being one himself) also takes the
forefront of both of their collections as seen in Counterparts where the protagonist and his group of comrades waste
away their funds, income rapidly evaporating away. Indeed the tale of Grace centres on the reforming of an
alcoholic who has taken a step too far. Finally, for both writers there is
often an underlying sense of nastiness in there tales, something the critic
Budford, taking a more negative approach to Carver, was quick to point out. A prime
example of this occurs in Clay. At first,
I assumed the fact that ‘none of the
young men [in the train carriage seem] to notice [the protagonist], but an
elderly gentleman made room for her’ was a bleak comment on our hostile
future full for indolence and selfishness. Later on however, the reader learns
that this ‘gentleman’ in fact ended up robbing her, making the world portrayed
seem even crueller and sombre. This is very much the same for Carver’s tales
filled with domestic violence, murder and infidelity. I found this following passage
from Two Gallants particularly summative
of the general aim of both writers in their minimalist collections, trying to
bring beauty out of everyday life:
‘the grey warm
evening of August had descended upon the city and mild air, a memory of summer,
circulated in the streets...like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the
summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below, which, changing
shape and hue increasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an
unchanging, unceasing murmur’.
The sublime
imagery of streetlamps as ‘pearls’ shining
from their ‘summits’ (bringing
imagery of mountain tops) and the fluid variety of life they look down on is
rather stunning and thus is a prime example of what Joyce seeks to portray in
his collection and Carver wishes to get out of his dirty realism.
Thus the
ultimate question has to be what sets apart Carver and Joyce (in Dubliners) and furthermore which
approach to the short story do I find to be more successful and preferential?
This is a question that almost suffocated (METAPHORICALLY!!!) me by its
difficulty, but I feel I have at last managed to come to a sound conclusion.
But first, in terms of the differences between the two, I found Joyce’s turn of
phrase rather more poetic when compared to Carver’s often blunt style of
writing, phrases such as ‘I felt my soul
receding into some pleasant and vicious region’ as found in The Sisters would indeed be a rarity, if
found at all, in Carver’s works. I also found Joyce more successful in
portraying a distinct culture than Carver. The Dublin Joyce painted one that is
a centre of Irish patriotism, political and religious contention, a city of
contradictions (despite Christianity being at the forefront of life in general,
much of the acts of the characters are distinctly non-biblical, indeed Gallaher
of A Little Cloud making the point
that ‘every city is immoral’, some
just have better facades than others) but also a rather stagnant, claustrophobic
place. Examples of the last remark can be seen in phrases such as ‘Dublin is such a small city: everyone knows
everyone else’ and the shining example of dental alliteration that is ‘dear, dirty Dublin’. The last quote
particularly sums up the portrait Joyce makes in Dubliners that of a city full of ugliness and conflict yet still
being a warm shining beacon of family and community to many. There’s little
sense of this in the three Carver collections I’ve read so far, although
American suburbia is somewhat portrayed most of the tales can be quickly
transferred to much of the world they are so relatable and unspecific. I also
found that Joyce’s collection was far more varied than Carver’s, in the latter
I gradually grew more and more frustrated as the same themes of divorce,
infidelity and domestic violence sprouted up again and again and again, thus
somewhat losing their power. Although Joyce does explore these themes he looks
into strains of life such as politics, religion, wealth…as well, meaning that
each tale is that bit more powerful as they do not seem to be rewrites of
earlier ones. I also found each tale of Joyce’s collection to be rather
essential to the whole collection as a whole, in short there were no ‘spare
parts’, something I am afraid cannot be said for Carver’s. However, although I
preferred Joyce’s collection as a whole, in terms of individual tales, I still
find that Carver at his best supersedes Joyce. This is somewhat because his
tales are so believable and applicable for so many that they evoke more emotion
when read that Joyce’s which firmly lay in Dublin, a place I must admit I
rather knew little about (before receiving an education thanks to Joyce that
is). Equally, I felt that there were no moments of genuine beauty between the
characters of Joyce’s collection, whilst tales such as Cathedral and A Small, Good
Thing by Carver do showcase this tender nature to the human race. Genuine
beauty here is not the same as mere catharsis (as it is merely a cleansing from
something that was ugly) and besides this most of Joyce’s characters were as
unpleasant and ugly as the majority of Carver’s.
To conclude,
certain tales from Dubliners do
deserve a specific mention and recommendation. First of all there is An Encounter in which the bizarre old
man who cropped up ‘midstream’ was particularly interesting and amusing to me. His
rather sadistic manner (at one point he fantasises over a ‘nice, warm whipping’), disconnect (he is noted as ‘repeating his phrases’ many a time),
vulgarity (he randomly gets up and walks away for a period to, as it is
inferred, masturbate) and inconsistency (despite earlier on encouraging young
boys to have multiple girlfriends later on he changes his mind ‘seem[ing] to have forgotten his recent
liberalism’) clearly would traumatise and deeply affect the poor young
souls who have the displeasure of his acquaintance. I found Counterparts to be a moving tale of
fragility, the fragility of the mentally unstable protagonist, the fragility of
his marriage and the fragility of his child who he viciously attacks to unleash
his frustration at life. The main reason Clay
stood out for me was the moral of the tale, that wealth stands for little
compared to human relationships, whilst A
Painful Case interested me through its challenging to traditional Catholic
morals, the protagonist regretting his decision to not initiate an affair to
one woman he grew especially close too, after her death hearing ‘the laborious drone of the engine
reiterating the syllables of her name’ as his remorse encompasses him. Finally,
the famed blockbuster that is The Dead did
not fail to live up to its hype, the temperamental emotions of the lead Gabriel
made for compulsive reading as he descends into a very dark place indeed.
Thus to
finish off, I would recommend Joyce’s Dubliners
for anyone who is looking for an easy way in to the world of the famed
novelist or just to find out more about Dublin as a place than the pictures and
non-fiction books can tell you. Reading Dubliners
one becomes immersed in a specific culture and the lives of the real people
who are components of it.
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