Even before its London publication in 1914, James Joyce’s Dubliners caused considerable controversy due to the material in the stories that was obvious and accessible, available to even the most casual readers and reviewers. The collection all but overflows with unattractive human behavior: simony, truancy, pederasty, drunkenness (all of them in the first three stories alone!), child and spousal abuse, gambling, prostitution, petty thievery, blackmail, and suicide. The use throughout of the names of Dublin streets and parks—and especially shops, pubs, and railway companies—was seen as scandalous, too. (In the past, fiction writers had almost invariably changed the names of their short-story and novel settings, or discretely left them out altogether.) In fact, including these details delayed publication of the book by years, as potential publishers and printers feared lawsuits by those businesses mentioned by name. Disrespectful dialogue about the king of England, and even the use of the mild British oath “bloody,” were thought by many to go beyond the bounds of good taste—and they did. In contrast to his status-conscious character Gabriel Conroy, James Joyce rejected good taste—one of the characteristics that mark his art as Modern.
A precedent existed for Joyce’s warts-and-all approach, in the nineteenth-century French school of writing known as Naturalism, but no writer had ever been quite as explicit, or as relentlessly downbeat, as Joyce in Dubliners. To this day, despite a more liberal attitude in art and entertainment regarding the issues dramatized in the book (premarital sex, for instance, is hardly the taboo it was when “The Boarding House” appeared), many first-time readers are distracted by the unsavory surface details of nearly all the stories. This distraction can prevent them from appreciating Dubliners’ deeper, more universal themes. It can be difficult to see the forest in this book for the blighted, stunted, gnarled trees. Of course, the forest is no fairyland, either. For Joyce’s three major themes in Dubliners are paralysis, corruption, and death. All appear in the collection’s very first story, “The Sisters”—and all continue to appear throughout the book, up to and including the magnificent final tale, “The Dead.”
James Joyce himself wrote, “I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that . . . paralysis which many consider a city.” Joyce believed passionately that Irish society and culture had been frozen in place for centuries by two forces: the Roman Catholic Church and England. The result, at the turn of the twentieth century, was one of the poorest, least-developed countries in all of Western Europe. And so images of paralysis recur throughout the collection obsessively, relentlessly, and without mercy. In the first line of “Sisters,” and thus the first of Dubliners as a whole, it is revealed that Father Flynn has suffered a third and fatal stroke. Later, the unnamed protagonist of the story dreams of a gray face that “had died of paralysis,” which is that of Father Flynn himself. This sets the tone for much of the material to follow.
The main character of “An Encounter” wants “real adventures,” but is waylaid on his quest for the Pigeon House by a stranger who masturbates—a kind of paralysis because it is sex that does not result in procreation or even love. The Pigeon House itself is symbolic: A pigeon is a bird trained always to return home, no matter how far it flies. In “Araby,” although the boy ultimately reaches the bazaar, he arrives too late to buy Mangan’s sister a decent gift there. Why? Because his uncle, who holds the money that will make the excursion possible, has been out drinking. Drunkenness paralyzes too, of course. Eveline, in the story that bears her name, freezes at the gangplank leading to the ship that would take her away from her dead-end Dublin life. All three characters venture tentatively outward, only to be forced by fear or circumstance—by Ireland itself, Joyce would say—to return where they came from, literally or metaphorically empty handed. Indeed, characters in Dubliners are forever returning home, bereft: Think of the protagonists of “A Little Cloud,” “Counterparts,” and “Clay.” The bereft Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead” never makes it home at all.
