You Can File this All Under "A City in Decline" (Dubliners, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Dubliners, we welcome editor Ian Whittington to discuss
how this collection of short stories was received by its publisher, by its literary audience, and by the people who made up its subject matter; the Dublin in which Joyce grew up; and, of course, Ian's favorite story.

Ian Whittington is an independent scholar whose research and teaching focus on twentieth-century anglophone literature and culture. He is the author of Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology. His work has appeared in Modernist Cultures, Modernism/modernity, The Global South, and other venues.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Dubliners, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/dublinersNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Dubliners: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0pOrIz0CbgngT4sANu6fkC?si=2c9950dee6f542ab.

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Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/dubliners/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Dubliners, James Joyce's 1914 book of short stories. To explore Joyce and these classic stories, we welcome the volume's editor, Ian Whittington. In our first episode we discuss Joyce's life and how he came to write and publish Dubliners, the themes Joyce explores, his famous writing style, and we focus on Ian's favorite story “The Dead.” Ian Whittington is an independent scholar whose research and teaching focus on twentieth-century anglophone literature and culture. He is the author of Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology. We are so happy to have him with us today. Ian Whittington, welcome to the Norton Library podcast. 

[Ian:] Thanks very much, Mark. It's great to be here.  

[Mark:] Oh, it's so good to have you to discuss your new edition of James Joyce's Dubliners, his book of short stories, and why don't we start with the author himself. How did he come to write Dubliners? 

[Ian:] So Joyce was born in Dublin, as you might expect from the title of this book, in 1882. So, sort of one of the older members of the generation that we think of as modernism or at least sort of canonical modernism. And he died in 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland. Dubliners was Joyce's first complete book of fiction that was published in 1914, and it really bears in it, I think, a lot of his own experiences growing up in Dublin, not that it is in any way autobiographical, but it very much shows the city as he knew it, I think, a city that he knew deeply and cared a lot about. Joyce was raised Catholic, like many Dubliners were, and had a fairly typical upbringing. It was sort of an observant family, his mother especially so, his father like much less so. His father sort of had some of the anti-clericalism of some members of the Nationalist movement in Ireland, and that religious sort of framework I think guided a lot of what we see in Dubliners. He was deeply invested in the kind of rituals and iconography of religion, and we see that coming through in these stories a lot. So, there's that aspect of it, and I'm happy to get into the sort of religious aspect of these stories, but it's also a deeply sort of socially engaged book of short stories. It's a collection that tracks the sort of material reality of life as it was lived among middle and lower-middle class Dubliners and even some who are sort of much worse off than that. It is absolutely a book about everyday Dubliners, not about the elites, and that also reflects Joyce's life and Joyce's experiences, as his family sort of went through a period of both good fortunes and then decline. 

[Mark:] Well those are great insights. We can touch on those in just a little bit. I guess I'm wondering: so, the book of short stories was published when Joyce was in his thirties. Did this book, the composition of these stories, last a long time. 

[Ian:] Yes, absolutely. Yeah, the story of what informed the stories of Dubliners is different than the story of how Dubliners came to be a book in the world. Joyce wrote the first of the short stories that would become Dubliners in about 1904. They were published in an unlikely magazine called The Irish Homestead, which was sort of a book of Irish agricultural life and rural living, which is not usually what you think of as an incubator of experimental fiction, but it was a place for Joyce to sort of plant his flag, as it were. So, he wrote “The Sisters” first, which is the first story in the collection and was quickly asked to write a couple more stories for The Irish Homestead, and as those stories sort of came into focus for Joyce, he realized that there were a great many more that he might like to write about his native city. And so, over the next few years he came up with a total of about twelve stories which he then submitted to a publisher, Grant Richards, in London, and everything seemed to be going okay. The publisher said ‘this looks good, we'd like to you know publish this collection of stories.’ And then Joyce added a couple more stories, and he added one more, until there were fifteen in total, the last story being “The Dead,” which is probably the story that most people are familiar with from this collection. And as the book went into the actual printing process, one of the employees at the actual press itself, so not the editor and not the publisher who owned the company, but one of the printers themselves sort of balked at some of the language and some of the content of these stories, in particular, some kind of really crude, sexual conversations among male characters about female characters, not crude by our standards by any means, but by the standards of the early 1900s, it was. And so, the printer said, ‘I refuse to print this,’ and the publisher had to think about it and said, ‘all right, well, we need to make some changes.’ And this, anyway, led to a long, long, long back and forth over many years where Joyce initially tried to please Grant Richards, this press, to no avail. Grant Richards rejected him; that broke the contract. Joyce shopped it around to dozens of presses over the years, and it wasn't until 1914 that the first edition actually finally came out into the world, and by that time it had gone around all these dozens of presses and ended up back at Grant Richards. So, it was a long and a tortured journey, and Joyce hated the thought of making changes to what he considered stories that presented Dublin as it truly was. He wanted to give Dubliners a view of themselves in what he called his “nicely polished looking glass,” so that they could actually, you know, confront the reality of what their city was. But it took a long time for him to get that. 

[Mark:] So he's writing these as almost as a precocious young writer, but he's publishing them as a more mature man. When Dubliners was published in 1914, was the reception universally positive? That this was the publication of this guy who was going to become the titan of twentieth-century literature? Or was it mixed? 

[Ian:] So, there were kind of two receptions to the book. On the one hand there was still that element of Irish and British literary society that was scandalized by the sort of tawdriness of some of these stories, their willing engagement with sexuality, and with the sort of gritty details of what it means to live a life of impoverishment, scrambling from one paycheck or one petty scheme to another. And so, on the one hand some reviewers and readers were scandalized by that and rejected the collection, but on the other hand some very important readers saw a great deal of promise in it. So, Yeats thought – who's sort of the eminent poet of his generation, and of several generations, in Ireland – saw in it the promise of a great novelist, he said. Ezra Pound quite liked Dubliners, although Pound interestingly said, ‘you know, Dubliners is great’ – this is when Dubliners comes out in 1914 – but he said, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that's the one to watch.’ Because by this time, June of 1914, when Dubliners is released, finally after a decade of gestation, Joyce is already on to the next thing. He's already publishing in serial form, that is, in sort of monthly or bimonthly installments in a literary journal, he's publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his sort of quasi-autobiographical novel of his growth as an artist. And that is – we can talk about this a bit if we want, in terms of the style and the difference – but it is an altogether different beast. And so, some of his more literary readers were already aware of what he was doing that was sort of pushing the envelope a little bit more. So, Dubliners was very well received. I think people recognized it as a really strong collection among that sort of literary set, but people were aware that Joyce had even more in store. 

[Mark:] When you edit these stories, do you see this as uniformly of a high quality? Are all fifteen stories great, or is it uneven? 

[Ian:] That's a tough question for an editor to answer, because you live with these stories so long and you get into all of their intricacies and you sort of tease out the allusions and the subtle shifts in tone, sometimes things dictated by the placement of a comma or how a character puts a particular phrase or line of dialogue. So, to me, they are all immensely rich and immensely rewarding, and they've been so rewarding to work with in this level of detail as I read and reread them and sort of dig into them. So, on one level my answer as an editor is absolutely yes, these are all great stories. And I think it's up to readers to check them all out and to give them that time and to see which ones connect with them. I don't imagine that every story will connect with every reader in the same way, and I think, you know, one interesting way to think about that question is to look at the sort of structuring impulse that Joyce put into this collection. So fifteen stories, none of them deal with the exact same characters, but Joyce thought of them as kind of linked in that they trace like a coming-of-age. So, the earliest stories are about children, are told from the point of view of children. Then there's a few stories that are sort of youth. And then there are stories that are young adulthood, and then there are some stories of kind of maturity. And so it might be that readers find themselves drawn to different stories at different phases of their lives or different stories might appeal to them for different experiences that they've had, but I think there is greatness in all these stories.  

[Mark:] You were talking about Joyce's style that was so particular to readers of Dubliners as it was published. Is there a way you can articulate that? How would you describe the Joycean prose style that we're going to find in Dubliners? So Dubliners is different from Joyce’s later works that people might be familiar with, in terms of Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake or even A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which are quite overtly experimental in their form, trying to do new things with words and with sentences, with paragraphs, and Dubliners doesn't strike the reader like that at first glance. It's more like what we call the realist novels of the nineteenth century: Flaubert and Tolstoy and Émile Zola, people like that, realist and naturalist novels, in that it achieves what seems like a very direct and uncomplicated expression of the world on the page. You know, there's a subject and there's a verb and an object and you sort of can picture it in your head. But what distinguishes Joyce from that kind of clear picture of the world, with clearly identifiable characters doing clearly motivated actions in a way that makes sense to us all, what's different about Dubliners is that Joyce holds back some of the explanation from us, leaves things unsaid, things unexplained, in a way that I think was, if not completely new at the time, at least Joyce I think took it in important and new directions. He described his style as a kind of ‘scrupulous meanness,’ and he doesn't mean meanness in terms of being unkind but in terms of being sparing or a sort of ascetic you know like stripped of any excess. And so often when we're reading a Joyce story, you get a feeling of like a creeping unease or a creeping dread or something that you don't quite understand gnawing at the edge of your consciousness. And so the first story is a great example if I can dive into just one little example, there, “The Sisters.” It's about a young boy who realizes that this older priest who he's been friends with and visiting and he would go to his house and like help him fill his pipe and listen to this old priest talk about you know Catholic doctrine and his life as a priest. The young boy realizes that this priest has died after a stroke, a series of strokes, and we follow the young boy as he listens to his own family members and to the sisters of the dead priest sort of talk about the priest's life, and he had been defrocked or in some way estranged from the church, which is probably a huge scandal in there. But the boy doesn't know why, and we don't why, and we have to try to comb through this boy's perspective on things to try to figure out what went wrong and figure out why it sits so uneasily with us, and literary theorists have a field day with trying to sort of tease out the things that are left unsaid in this story. And I just encourage people to read it and to see if they can make sense of that feeling of dread. And so, that's a difference that I would point to between what came before in the nineteenth century and what Joyce does, is just leaving it to the reader to disentangle the mystery a bit more. 

[Mark:] That's excellent. I'm interested in the title Dubliners, and I'm wondering if that sets up this collection of stories as a provincial view, where Joyce is talking about his hometown and all of its peculiarities, or if there's some kind of a universal application to it? Are we looking at this through both of those lenses or how do we reconcile that? 

[Ian:] I take it as not sort of universalizing across all Dubliners but presenting us as sort of you know a sampler, as it were, you know the sort of assorted teas of the city world. So here are some Dubliners, not The Dubliners, but here are some Dubliners. These are the people you might encounter were you to spend you know the first twenty, twenty-five years of your life growing up in Dublin, as Joyce did, and they represent a particular selection of people from particular social strata. I mentioned earlier that it’s mostly middle and lower-middle class, if not people who are struggling even more than that. There are a couple of characters who are sort of upper-middle class you know. They have, one of them's got a university teaching gig, and you know they are sort of the son of a wealthy businessman who's in the story “After the Race.” But those are the exceptions, absolutely. So Dubliners is about what it means to be living not that far from the poverty line in Dublin, and I think it says something that that, to Joyce, is the representative experience of a Dubliner, you know? That this is, these are, the people who make up the city. There might be other people who are more comfortably off and might have traditionally been the subject of fiction, but to Joyce those aren't representative I think of the city. 

[Mark:] Sometimes during William Faulkner’s career, he's viewed as a local writer or somebody's who’s just writing about Mississippi folk, and then as his career went along people were saying, well he really has a lot of insight into all of human nature, whether you are from the South or from the North or even from America, he just has such great insight into human nature. And I'm wondering if Joyce has been, first of all, what it was once the collection of stories was published, but also if we don't even have to know anything about Dublin or have ever been to Dublin to sort of see ourselves in this story or see people we know or ideas that we might have that might apply to us. 

[Ian:] Absolutely, yeah! I mean I think like Faulkner is a great comparison here. There's no need to understand Dublin inside out as a city to understand what these people are going through and the experiences that they have, because they are, if not universal, they are certainly widespread. And, I mean, Faulkner is a great comparison because for all the talk that people make about early-twentieth-century literature being literature of the city and of the Metropolis, why is it that some of the most famous writers are the ones who sat outside it to some extent, whether it's in Oxford, Mississippi or in Dublin, not that Dublin was a small city. You know, Joyce calls it the Hibernian Metropolis. You know, the northern metropolis, or the wintry metropolis. And it's true, it was once the second city of the empire, but it had provincialized as you point out. You know, it's an eccentric location from which to view the modernizing world. 

[Mark:] So is this a love letter to Dublin? Is it a hard criticism or a realistic gaze at it? Where do we end up? Do you think that the folks of Dublin were offended by what they read in 1914? 

[Ian:] Yeah I would say a lot of people were a little shocked, that this is not the flattering view of the city that they wanted to see. But you know Joyce was insistent that they look honestly and closely at the city as he knew it. That's that ‘nicely polished looking glass,’ as he put it. And so, I think for Joyce the question of whether it was flattering or not is separate from the question of whether it's a love letter or not. I think he loved his city deeply. I think he also understood its flaws, its injustices and inequities. But he also, you know, he saw it its promise, and he famously left Dublin in 1904 and came back only briefly in the years since, and then I think after about 1914 did not ever return to Dublin and died in 1941. That's a long time for someone to spend away from a city that they know so well, that they love so much, and that they devote their entire career to recreating in fictional form. So it is a love letter but you have to be sometimes far from the thing you love to write it a letter, don't you? 

[Mark:] Is there something about Dublin historically that we need to know here in the twenty-first century that would be helpful context to approaching these stories? 

[Ian:] Yes, absolutely. You can file this all under ‘a city in decline.’ And there's several strands to that. So, Dublin had been this, what they called, the second city of the empire. For a time in the eighteenth century it was, you know, rivaled only by London as the sort of most thriving and prosperous city in the British Empire. And then basically the United Kingdom government decided to pull all of Irish political power out of Dublin and have these parliamentarians sit in Westminster in London, so a whole sort of elite swath of society was cut out of Irish life. And slowly through economic processes, you know, that wealth and that vitality continued to drain away, and then there was a series of calamities in the nineteenth century, the Irish famine, which listeners are probably familiar with that, which you know killed many millions of people and then led to the immigration of many others. Ireland lost about half its population in the mid-nineteenth century, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and has not actually fully recovered to the population that it had around 1840 or so. So absolutely catastrophic changes to Irish life which meant that its capital city which had once been this you know splendid and prosperous place had fallen on hard times. So a huge percentage of the population lived in poverty in the inner city, you know, and poverty doesn't just mean you know ‘it's I can't buy a new pair of shoes whenever I want to,’ it means missing meals, it means people selling their labor for next to nothing, it means, you know, epidemics of disease. It was a, I think, an unpleasant place for a lot of people to live, not that there weren't still rich people in Dublin but they were in the minority. So Joyce sort of grew up in this environment of a faded glory so to speak. And then the other part of that decline is, as I mentioned earlier, it was a city that was at the time part of the British Empire and of course had not always been part of the British Empire. Ireland was independent for millennia and is again, and so Joyce is writing in a moment of increased agitation for Irish independence. But at that precise turn of the twentieth century moment there had been some kind of heavy blows to the Irish independence movement, so I think there was still that intense desire among nationalist Irish people to have their own country, but it wasn't clear when it was going to happen and so there was a feeling of kind of exhaustion of living under the British heel, as it were, and wondering when and how are things going to change. So if I say a city in decline, I mean all of those things: economically and socially and politically and just sort of wondering what'll come next. And the twentieth century brought a lot of change to Ireland. 

[Mark:] Do Joyce's own politics emerge from these stories? 

[Ian:] They do, but like many a writer before and after him, he is reluctant to wave a banner for anybody. So Joyce loathed the British Empire and sought Irish Independence and that is clear from not only Dubliners but other works, but he also saw the ways that the Irish nationalist movement kind of became channeled or limited to certain very particular forms of expression, that were related to ‘the Irish language is the only language that Irish people should speak.’ Other listeners might know it as Gaelic; it's known as Irish in Ireland. Or you know, ‘you got to play the sort of Gaelic football and hurling; those are the proper outlets for Irish uh manhood and sport. And that literature and the arts have to be directed towards nationalist aspirations. And to Joyce who believed so strongly in the independence of the individual artist's vision, you know, a stereotypically modernist belief in the autonomy of art and the artist, this was anathema to him. He didn't want his art to be anybody's propaganda. So, you see in his works of fiction caricatures or at least maybe takedowns of people on both the British Imperial side and folks who are a little too stridently nationalist, even if Joyce agreed with that ultimate goal. 

[Mark:] Ian, of these fifteen stories, is there one that you like the best? 

[Ian:] You know, I do. And I wish it weren't maybe as predictable as this is, but “The Dead” is the most famous story in this collection for a reason. It is a masterpiece, and it is the longest story in the collection, so there's also just so much going on there. And it is a delight to teach and to think about and to talk about. So this is the last one Joyce wrote. It takes up maybe not quite a quarter of the book's length, but it's a big chunk of the book and it’s just set at a Christmas party on the day of Epiphany. January 6th I think is when people generally think of this as taking place. An annual Christmas party held by the Morken sisters, and I see you've got your book out in front of you, I don't know if you have a passage you wanted to take us to. 

[Mark:] I’m ready! Is the story powerful for its linguistics. for the poetry in the way that Joyce tells the story? Is there something about the idea? It seems like “The Dead,” of all of these stories, is where he's really trying to be, he's really at his most profound, where he's asking some of the massive questions about human existence. The story after all is called “The Dead.” What is he trying to penetrate with this piece?  

[Ian:] Woo, asking the big questions today. It's everything, like I think that is what makes it such a successful story. Yes the big questions; so, it is a story for me about, at the most macro level, what is our individual and collective fate? You know, we are born onto this Earth, and we live a short while, and we may interact with others, we will interact with others, we may have a profound impact on others, and then we die, and what is the ultimate and meaningful pattern in that experience that we all share? Is there one? So that's the biggest sort of like you know life “whoo” kind of question. And then the one that I think is maybe less expansive but more cutting is the question of do we ever really know another person. The main character of the novel, Gabriel Conroy, comes to understand by the end of the story that he has not known his own wife in the way that he thought he did. He doesn't know her past, he doesn't know the full range of her emotional life, and that he has likely not touched her emotional life in the way that others have in the past. And that is you know devastating I think for him but also might represent a turning point for him. The end of the story is ambiguous about whether he's going to kind of I think fully embrace a new kind of humility maybe in his relations with his wife and with others, and to understand his place in their universe as a little more relative and a little less like he's the center of that universe but the story isn't one hundred percent clear on that I think. So that's the big question I think for me anyway is that you spend your life thinking you know who matters to you and who you matter to, but what if you've just got it wrong, and what if you've just been telling yourself these stories because they're nice? So it encourages us to reflect always on on what we know about others and to not impose our I think view of situations on other people. So there's that level too. But then I think for those who are maybe more formally minded, stylistically minded the story is just a master class in prose style, because Joyce I mean he accomplishes many things, he gives us a portrait of this sort of strata of Irish cociety, you could sort of say middle class, maybe slightly gentile poverty. It's hard to tell, some characters seem to sort of be barely hanging on to the jobs that make the difference between poverty and middle classness, others seem more comfortably off, so it's a sort of ambiguously middle class social strata, and Joyce gives us a portrait of this world in such fine detail and with such vividly rendered characters, and sometimes all it takes is a few deft touches and he paints these characters so clearly. And then he also, at the same time, manages to give us insight into the minds of some of these characters through his control of the point of view. So, not to get too technical, but Joyce was a master at what literary critics call free and direct discourse, which is a way of channeling an otherwise third-person story through the eyes of a particular focal character. And Joyce goes in and out of the minds of certain characters, so you think you're reading a third person story where there's an omniscient narrator and everything's very clear, the world makes sense, and then you suddenly realize that you've been receiving everything filtered through the point of view of a character. Famously, Lily, the woman who's sort of doing some of the work of helping to staff this Christmas party, opens the story by saying you know she was literally run off her feet. And you're like ‘what, like literally? Like is she on her butt now? Like what's going on? But no, it's that we've dipped into her mind and we're reading the language that she would maybe use to talk to herself in her own head. And of course Gabriel's perspective is the one that we follow through most of the rest of the story, and through that limited perspective we get totally sucked into his way of seeing things which is why it's final realization, that we are not actually maybe the center of the universes of those around us is so crushing, because we believed it too for a little while. 

[Mark:] So you used the phrase ‘final realization,’ Is the end of “The Dead” an example of an epiphany, which you talk about in your introduction, the kind of Joycean epiphany, where all of these stories or many of the stories have these sudden flashes of insight that kind of are the engine to these narratives. 

[Ian:] Yeah, exactly. It's a perfect example of that. So, Joyce beginning with the stories in Dubliners and then especially building into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was really interested in those sort of flashes of insight that we sometimes have in our lives where it seems like we have a kind of encounter with the world as it really is, and some veil of ignorance or of unseeing is sort of pulled away from our eyes and we were suddenly like forced to encounter the world as it really is. And it might be a realization about some part of ourselves, something we didn't realize about ourselves, or it could be realization about you know the way the world is outside us. And for Gabriel, this is a realization about the fate that awaits us all you know death in a graveyard under falling snow as it may be. And it's also a realization about, as we've been saying, his place vis-à-vis others, especially his wife. 

[Mark:] Ian Whittington, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast to discuss your new edition of James Joyce's Dubliners. 

[Ian:] Thanks, Mark, it's been a real pleasure. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Dubliners by James Joyce, edited by Ian Whittington is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library including the full catalog of titles.