ReJoycing

New Readings of Dubliners

Rosa Bollettieri Bosinelli, Harold F. Mosher, Rosa Bollettieri Bosinelli, Harold F. MosherJr., Harold F. Mosher Jr.

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813109497, 9780813120577
• eBook ISBN: 9780813182797
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"In this volume, the contributors—a veritable Who's Who of Joyce specialists—provide an excellent introduction to the central issues of contemporary Joyce criticism."

Symbolism, Realism, and Style

CHAPTER ONE

A Book of Many Uncertainties

Joyce’s Dubliners

Sonja Bašić

“Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.”

(“Yes, stupidity consists in wanting to conclude.”)

Gustave Flaubert

One of the problems presented by the existing critical approaches to James Joyce’s Dubliners is overinterpretation or too literal interpretation. On the whole, there has been too much “irritable reaching” after verifiable facts and incontrovertible conclusions, not only among the critics who consider Dubliners preeminently as a realist work but even among those who give precedence to its symbolist complexities. The “realists” have tended to rely too much on the reputation of Dubliners as the simplest, most accessible of Joyce’s works, forgetting that this work is also revolutionary in a particularly underhand way. And the “symbolists” have in turn neglected the specifically subversive nature of Joyce’s symbols.¹

Some of this critical confusion has resulted from the fact that while seemingly following realist/naturalist conventions and also using symbolist devices even at that very early stage in his career, Joyce subverted both. Treacherously, Dubliners simultaneously invites and undermines categorization and sense making. In this respect it is quite unique, and this uniqueness has not been sufficiently acknowledged. The simplicity of Dubliners is a trap: led on by the deceptive transparency of the stories, the critics rush to conclusions about facts instead of patiently studying the infinitely tenuous and often imperceptible uncertainties and indeterminacies of the fiction.²

One indicator that Dubliners seems to be particularly at odds with certainties can also be demonstrated a posteriori by pointing out the sheer contradictory diversity of existing critical interpretations, which with respect to some characters, situations, and events or even entire stories are quite astounding.³ I cannot in fact think of any modern novel, let alone a collection of stories, that has been accorded such a number of contradictory interpretations. A good example of this is the particularly striking divergences in the moral and psychological motivation and evaluation of characters. Maria, Eveline, and Gabriel, for example, are submitted to a gamut of moral critical judgments running from complete sympathy to downright disgust. Some critics empathize with them and like them; others consider them sadly deficient and often responsible for their deficiencies (Eveline is unable to love; Gabriel’s love is worthless; Maria’s little illusions are the result of despicable moral blindness, and so on). This type of criticism strikes me as particularly unsuitable with respect to Joyce’s characters, who are superbly presented as human figures but also demand to be seen as Genettian figures.⁴

The very fact that “normal” referential or allegorical readings of Joyce’s stories seem to encounter the stubborn resistance of his text, causing great critical confusion, should act as a warning to the reader. On the surface these stories appear extremely transparent. As a rule, particularly at first glance, nothing sounds simpler than a sentence in Dubliners; nothing seems closer to that accurate mimeticism that is associated with realism or with that particular brand of objective documentation of the sordid, which is often called naturalism. Dubliners seems to offer its readers too few discernible warnings that they are surrounded by Roland Barthes’s espace littéraire. The warnings are therefore overlooked or ignored much more easily than in Ulysses, where the writerly aspects of the text are so conspicuous. Moreover, Joyce himself said he wanted to write “the moral history” of his country and allow the Irish people to have “one good look at themselves” in his looking glass (Selected Letters 88, 90), so why should the reader not take him at his word and proceed to be as referential, earnest, and moralizing as he feels?

The symbol hunters have been guilty of the same interpretive “earnestness,” regardless of whether they believed that “from first to last, Joyce was primarily a symbolist writer” (Magalaner and Kain 67) or simply saw symbolism as a prominent feature of the book. Prevailing among the symbolist readings of Dubliners are those concentrating on Christian allusions; the Homeric and Irish references have also received much critical attention. Images and symbols along with their allusive indirection certainly play a very important role in the structuring of these stories and, along with Joyce’s scrupulous reconstruction of the Dublin atmosphere, contribute to the unity of the collection. However, symbolist readings also abound in exaggeration, exclusiveness, and arbitrariness. Perhaps a careful look at what has been considered as realist and symbolist in Dubliners will reveal to us that Joyce has used both strategies with a twist, a twist that has been ignored or insufficiently appraised by too many critics and calls for a reappraisal and redefinition of these strategies in the light of their subversive functions.

Joyce has frequently been compared to Flaubert particularly as a modern realist-cum-symbolist. The writing of both authors produces a subversive quality, impeding or reducing the effects or functions of certain literary strategies or conventions that have been sanctioned by tradition and producing this effect in a covert rather than overt way.⁵

In his study Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, Jonathan Culler points out that for Flaubert realism was a mode of “self-protection.” “‘I never pose as a man of experience,’ said Flaubert, ‘that would be too foolish; but I observe a great deal and never conclude—an infallible way of avoiding error’” (53). Never concluding, Culler suggests, meant writing “against the novel as an institution,” the Balzacian novel, for example, which presupposed the existence of a “nice fit between the world and language” (93). I propose that this “nice fit” between world and language, this illusion on which realism seems to rely, was made problematic by Joyce as early as Dubliners. This can be observed in several strategies undermining the narrative authority that “guarantees” the existence of the fit.

In attempting to characterize the kind of realism we find in Dubliners and the type of subversion generated by its strategies, one should bear in mind that the collection was originally to conclude with “Grace.”⁶ “The Dead” was first planned in Rome in 1906-7, and, as suggested by Ellmann, it also seems to have been written in a different spirit from that of the rest of the stories (Selected Letters 35). In spite of the thematic unity of the stories in Dubliners as it stands today, including “The Dead,”⁷ the last story is the product of somewhat different narrative strategies, as I shall argue later on in this essay.

From “The Sisters” to “Grace,” Dubliners is the work of an artist working ostensibly in the manner of “modern realism” and/or naturalism. Some of the basic qualities of realism relevant for this study are (1) a striving for objectivity⁸ and (2) transparency, usually seen as a contrast to opaqueness, as these terms are defined in formalist structuralist critical theory. Tzvetan Todorov has argued—and this is also very relevant for poststructuralist critical theory—that no literary discourse can be a “docile reflection of events” nor are words “simply the transparent names of things” (80). Thus all literary discourse is opaque, and transparency is an illusion. However, it still seems useful to use these two terms conditionally and see transparency as a formal aspect of realism also often attached to the notion of its stylistic (linguistic) simplicity as, for example, in David Lodge’s definition of realism as “the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely the descriptions of similar experience in non-literary texts of the same culture” (25).

Realism thus offers us a code of interpretability based on the assumption (illusion) that mimesis is viable, that language is referential, and that in analogy with science, including the sciences of man (biology and psychology) and the science of language, literature can observe and study the human personality as an entity individually and as part of another larger entity, society, both entities describable, their actions and words imitable, and their meaning communicable. Or if one is inclined to doubt that this assumption is possible, one can see realism as a literary convention resting on verisimilitude as defined for example by Michael Riffaterre: “an artifact, . . . a verbal representation of reality rather than reality itself” (xv).

The concept of verisimilitude presupposes narrative authority and the notion of “fictional truth.” However, in his search for objectivity, the modern realist has divested himself more and more of narrative authority. In the English tradition it was probably in Henry James that readers first began to miss the author: the meddling Thackeray, the moralizing George Eliot, the copiously interfering Dreiser. And yet, although he did not directly offer us many of his own opinions, James gave us such exhaustive figural presentations of experienced and reflected life that he was still functioning as a kind of guide. Even when the meddling was silenced, most modern realists found ways of encoding their guidance to the reader. In Dubliners, however, these codes seem to be much sparser and, in addition, more mysterious and confusing. As the role of authors as persons involved with the story has shrunk, so has the presence and coloring of their voices. The general tone of Dubliners seems ironic, but often we cannot be quite sure. (How far are we to empathize with Eveline’s fear? Are we to take at its face value the boy’s feeling in “Araby” that he was “a creature driven and derided by vanity”? [D 35]; how sorry are we expected to feel for Little Chandler?) As early as Dubliners Joyce already seems to be asking us not to listen for personal narrators giving or implying their opinions and leading us, even if covertly, to conclusions. And this is not what the realists asked of us or, rather, this is not what traditional novel readers thought the realists were asking of them.

Dubliners is a fiction where the impersonality and restraint of the text can ideally accommodate narratology, which sees narrative told in the third person as stemming from a disembodied source called the narrator (divorced from the notion of author as a matter of principle) and called by Genette even more impersonally the “narrating instance” (31). In Dubliners Joyce’s narrator refuses to give us much guidance. Most of the time we are not sure what to make of the protagonists, and the exceptions seem to be there only to prove the rule. Thus we know what to make of Mrs. Mooney, who “dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat,” because it is the narrator who tells us this (“The Boarding House” D 61); and we know that in characterizing the “gratefully oppressed” Dublin crowds in “After the Race” (D 42), Joyce is letting the narrator “speak” because Jimmy, who often participates in the free indirect style of this story, could not be the source of that phrase. However, in most examples of characterization in Dubliners Joyce seems to tell us that knowing what to “make of a character” is not the point of his writing at all. His writing all too often avoids “coming to the point” because there is no point to come to. Joyce’s plots are never well-made, and his endings are inconclusive. For example, no amount of character analysis, psychological or moral, will give us an answer to questions such as: Was Eveline capable of love? Were Frank’s intentions honest, or was he a good-for-nothing who would leave her in the first port? What exactly did the boy in “An Encounter” see? We do not know, but Joyce also seems to indicate that we need not know the precise answers or even ask such questions, because in literature characters, events, and motivations are fluid and finally unfathomable just as they are in life.

In Dubliners Joyce has installed a narrator who seems to create opaqueness out of the very fact of objectivity pushed to the very limit. As Karen Lawrence has pointed out, “Paradoxically, the lack of authorial intrusion seems, at times, to be an announcement of a narrative feat: with his hands tied behind his back, the author seems to say, he will wrestle with and pin down his city and his characters” (17). Lawrence’s remark bears on the kind of subversion that Joyce’s realism seems to generate out of itself as it were: using so many devices spelled out in realism’s book, then foregrounding them as devices, or finding other ways of subverting mimesis or verisimilitude, thereby unsettling its code of interpretability. The lack of narrative intervention and guidance creates not a positive sense of objectivity but a “negative” sense of uncertainty unsettling the realist convention. With its insistence on observation and documentation and on the “scientific” method, this convention tacitly wished to add to the readers’ knowledge and awareness of life in its material, biological, social, and psychological manifestations (a wish that is seen today in more sophisticated terms as inscribed in the structure of the text), thus creating the code of realism’s “interpretability.” In the course of this essay I will also deal with the “interpretability” of symbolism, arguing as we go along that both are subverted by Joyce.

In the area of narrative meditation, an unsettling effect is created simply by the narrator’s absence, his refusal to mediate. This refusal can take several forms. One of them is the strategy used in “Grace,” where indeed the perspective seems to be that of an (ironical and Irish) God sitting somewhere above and beyond his creation, paring his fingernails. Descriptions of characters’ thoughts and emotions are conspicuously sparse, and, quite surprisingly, there is hardly any focalization. The story consists of three scenes connected by one protagonist who remains almost a completely closed book. All description is external. We only see the bare surfaces of the setting and hear the bare “surfaces” of the talking. All the rest is left to the reader to work out. Similar strategies are used, for example, in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”

Another and in fact quite opposed strategy of narratorial “invisibility” is to achieve restriction of field through focalization: having the character “see” and thereby making it unnecessary for the narrator to tell us what the character sees. However, focalization often hides as much as it reveals. For example, the transparency of the focalized narratives of “Eveline” and “Counterparts” is quite deceptive. In “Eveline” especially, her traumas and fears remain deeply hidden and unformulated under her simple (and evasive?) thoughts. When focalization passes into free indirect style, Dubliners can also be antirevelatory, often preventing us from finding out who speaks.

Joyce has been praised by countless critics for his use of free indirect style, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in particular. However, only a few critics have pointed out that along with drawing us into the figural perspective through focalization and letting us hear the figural voice, Joyce also often invalidates the no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Symbolism, Realism, and Style
• Language and Power
• Gender and Control
• Meaning Deferred and Revealed
• New Directions
• Contributors
• Index