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“There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin��--Joyce

"Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.��

Dubliners is, by reputation (among English professors and scholars, at least) one of the greatest collections of short stories ever produced. Of course, as they say, them’s fightin�� words, so have it your own way, but I vote with that crowd of high admirers, and always have, having read it or stories from it, many times. This is the first time I am hearing it read aloud, in the appropriately Irish voice of Connor Sheridan, that somehow captures the dry and at sometimes mournful wit the ex-patriate Joyce brings to this tribute to the Dubliners he left behind. Some have found it maudlin, even grim, primarily a critique of the people Joyce left behind, but I found it at turns gently satirical, sometimes melancholy, and always loving, portraits of a time and place, filled with local politics and religion and (especially) finely sketched characters, some stories focused on lost opportunities for love or leaving.

In 2000 Time Magazine listed the greatest novels of the twentieth century and listed the difficult English major Everest of Ulysses as the worthiest literary mountain to climb, #1, which prompted thousands of Americans who may never have read 100 novels to read the first three pages and promptly declare Joyce a boring and inscrutable idiot. Though I do think Ulysses is one of the greatest novels ever written, I don’t think it would be particularly enjoyable for the general population; nor do I think most people “should�� read it. But Joyce is an amazing writer; he wrote four works of fiction, in increasing levels of difficulty and formal experimentalism. If you like short stories and want to try Joyce I would try Dubliners, the most recognizably traditional stories he wrote. If you like that, I might then try the somewhat more formally challenging A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If you decide to go to graduate school, then consider Ulysses, sure, but only then, which owes something mock-epic to Homer’s Odyssey, and each chapter in a literary style of different periods/centuries. Finnegan’s Wake, which took him twenty years to write, almost no one reads, for good reason. It is so experimental most people can’t make heads or tails of a single paragraph. (No, I have not yet finished it, and probably never will).

Dubliners, published in 1914 (after nearly ten years of his trying to get it published!), is short, as story collections go. I have my favorites: “Eveline,�� about a young shop girl conflicted about leaving her widowed father to live life with a sailor:

“He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.��

And “Araby,�� about a shy young man’s fruitless pursuit of a young woman, dooming them both to loneliness.

��. . . and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.��

“Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascent to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.��

He’s ambitious for her, but at the same time, he sees himself clearly and sadly: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.��

Some of the deft observations of character in the writing are beautiful. Of one woman: “She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.��

And about Mr. Duffy: “He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.��

The true gem of the collection may be the magnificent and mournful closing long story, “The Dead,�� which features Gabriel, asked to give a short speech in honor of his aunts at a holiday party, who is disappointed not to “experience intimacy�� with his wife Greta after the party, seeing her sadly draped on the bed. A song that was sung at the party reminded her of a time when she was seventeen when she had loved a boy, Michael Furey, who lost his life in the war. Gabriel is jealous of a love she sees Greta had for this boy, a love that he and Greta have perhaps never had themselves. And then, this reflection, using snow to punctuate Gabriel's sense of himself and maybe Joyce's view of Dublin:

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.��

Proust wrote: "In reality, when he reads, each reader is actually the reader of his own self. The work of the writer is nothing more than a kind of optical instrument that the writer offers. It allows the reader to discern that which, without the book, he might not have been able to see in himself."

Do we not in our empathetic reading of Gabriel, see ourselves and reflect on our own lives?

Many characters in Dubliners experience the struggle about whether to stay or leave, or to just act passionately, facing a kind of paralysis that Joyce refers to in the opening story, “The Sisters��:

“I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.�� One must act, one must move, one must engage with the world, one must break free from provincial beliefs.

Dubliners is a wonderful collection, short enough to read in a few hours. It’s full of self-reflection and "inwardness." Listen to it, read it. Some of the stories have been made into films, like John Huston’s The Dead.

Here’s the whole story “The Dead�� for you to read. (You’re welcome):




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