‘An Encounter’ by James Joyce

What do you choose from a collection where every story is perfect? Well, how about An Encounter, a story of childhood misadventure? You could construct a map of the city from the stories in Dubliners, and indeed in some editions ‘An Encounter’ comes with a map tracing the journey the boys take over the river Liffey and along the Wharf Road to see the Pigeon House (never explained in the story, it’s a power station). A wonderful evocation of a childhood full of weekly comics and cowboys and Indians, there is a growing sense of menace as the boys make their journey. Dubliners is full of characters who seek to escape the oppression of the city, and the boys get further than most, though what they encounter in the end is a curdled vision of adulthood, rather than the world beyond the city.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914: there are many editions now available, including Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, it can be read online here

‘Araby’ by James Joyce

I remember that the first time I read ‘Araby’ all I was left with was that there was a house where a priest died. Those youthful days are long gone, but when rereading the story that first impression hits me straight from the first paragraphs. An unnamed boy is head over heels with “Mangan’s sister”, and when she mentions she can’t visit Araby, the local fair, the boy vows to go and bring her something. “The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me”. The house of the priest is the static element which stays unchanged on each reread, but it’s only this time that I noticed the narrator’s tone. The memory of Araby is painted in the blueish nuances of memory, and the story reads as a weave of bittersweet nostalgia and grandiose, yet gentle, irony. The boy’s feelings for the girl transform the mundane into the extraordinary, but the end of the story reveals the magical bazaar the boy imagined to be for what it really is – a dim, lacklustre place. In the end, it’s not really clear to me who is more disillusioned – the boy for not finding that perfect something to bring back or the adult narrator who knows what lies outside the illusion of perfection.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

The final story in Joyce’s Dubliners collection, ‘The Dead’ is perfectly proportioned. The plot is uncomplicated: at an annual party held by two sisters in their home on the quays of the River Liffey, their favourite nephew Gabriel Conroy attends with his wife Gretta. There is music, dancing, food, politics, and attempts to make Freddie Malins appear less inebriated than is the case. Towards the end, Gretta overhears another guest singing, and the profound effect this has on her in turn profoundly affects Gabriel.

It is set in 1904, on 6^th January, the Feast of the Epiphany. The significance of the date is sometimes noted because of epiphany’s secondary meaning as ‘a moment of great realisation’, and a key moment in the story is Gabriel’s realisation of a truth about his relationship to his wife. Another significance could be drawn without too much violence. In Ireland, the Epiphany is known also as Oíche Nollaig na mBan, Women’s Christmas, traditionally being a day on which women did not perform any domestic duties. The tenor of Gabriel’s evening is repeatedly disrupted by women. Firstly, he mismanages his interaction with the maid, Lily, and retreats awkwardly, almost fleeing. Then he is put out of countenance by fellow-guest Molly Ivors’ antagonistic querying of his political views. Finally, and catastrophically, he is disrupted by Gretta’s distraction after she hears the song, The Lass of Aughrim and by her later explanation of her reaction.

It is a story not only where the living are troubled by the dead, but where nostalgia is troubled by its reenactments. The story is set ten years in the past, and the Morkan sisters’ party is a tradition that has traditions: their nephew Gabriel always carves the goose, Freddie Malins always turns up drunk, Julia Morkan’s fading voice is admired out of respect for what it, and she, used to be. Throughout the evening, Gabriel is uneasy with his rôle in this; he worries that his speech will be pedantic, that he will let his aunts down in some way, he cannot cope with anyone who goes ‘off-script’, as Lily and Molly do. The traditions of the party, established long ago, appear familiar and festive, but the demands of their continued maintenance intrude upon the present, foreshadowing Gabriel’s final haunting by the dead of someone else’s past. The ideas and reflections raised are profound though not dramatic, and achieve an immensely satisfactory resolution in the expansion of Gabriel’s melancholy but accepting final thoughts.

First published in the collection Dubliners, Grant Richards London, 1914. Being out of copyright, it is available on-line at Project Gutenberg here

‘Clay’ by James Joyce

This story is built around a song and is a classic in the use of symbolism, something that would die in the hands of anyone other than Mr Joyce. We are with poor old Maria as she buys treats and makes her way to visit some of her relations. She is an ordinary well-meaning person but has never found a life partner. (Now I feel a bit gloomy and wish I’d chosen ‘Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen’ by P. G. Wodehouse, the go-to writer if you need a laugh.) When Maria is buying a cake, the shop girls tease her about a wedding cake. On her visit, she sings “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls / With vassals and serfs at my side / And of all who assembled within those halls / That I was the hope and the pride.” There is a game the family’s children play of guessing what something is by touch when blindfolded. Maria can’t guess what the hilarious substance is that they have given her to dabble her fingers in. It’s clay. By the way, there’s an excellent article about the story in Wikipedia, which has just reminded me how thin my own memory of it is.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg

‘Calypso’ by James Joyce

“I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a ‘novel’; and if you call it an epic it will not matter”, said T.S. Eliot of Ulysses. There’s also an argument for calling it a collection of spectacularly detailed short stories. Joyce said that it began as an idea for one of the tales in his debut, Dubliners (1914): a man wanders the city streets in a way that echoes The Odyssey. This eventually gave Ulysses its episodic structure, which plots the day of Leopold Bloom on 16 June 1904 onto the adventures of Odysseus. Epic as the later episodes are, they all technically take place inside an hour, and at their heart have the same mundane encounters that inspired Dubliners. What Ulysses adds is an amazing sort of colorization technique, whereby the black-and-white cinema of Joyce’s early realism suddenly engages all the senses simultaneously. In the virtually perfect “Calypso” — Joyce used the Homeric titles for magazine publication, but removed them from the final book — Bloom goes out to the butcher’s to buy breakfast, cooks and serves it to his wife in bed, then heads to the loo at the bottom of the garden. Its mouthwatering sentences make rich poetry of domesticity: “Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray”. I would happily re-read them every morning forever.

First published in The Little Review, June 1918, and revised and expanded for Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, 1922. Available to read here

‘Eveline’ by James Joyce

A good deal of my writing has been influenced by an interest in the Jewish history I’m connected to through my mum’s side of the family. But I find my dad’s family history interesting too: his ancestors were Irish Quakers, and in the 19th and early 20th Century part of the family lived in Dublin and ran a well-known shop in Great George’s Street South known as ‘Pim’s’ or ‘the Stores’. There are a couple of references to it in Dubliners: in ‘Two Gallants’ the caddish Corley mentions, apropos of the girl he’s pursuing, that “I told her I was in Pim’s. She doesn’t know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know.” In ‘Eveline’, which I prefer to ‘Two Gallants’, the titular character works there. As the 19-year-old weighs up whether to leave her painful homelife in Dublin and elope to Argentina with her lover, she wonders:

“What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. … She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.”

This is such a poignant story, written with such restraint and delicacy. You can hear the silences, feel the weight of Eveline’s own destiny on her shoulders. It’s an exquisite piece of writing.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, and widely republished since, including by Penguin Classics, 2000)

‘A Painful Case’ by James Joyce

To Chapelizod’s “most quiet quarters” now (I lived in Dublin in my twenties) and Mr. Duffy and Mrs. Sinico’s late evening walks. Joyce lays the ground with exacting authority: Duffy’s aloofness and self-regard are tenuous buffers to a solitary, regimented existence (have a read of the description of Duffy’s monastic room, the assiduous itemisation of a solitary life, the lens moving closer and closer in…). The principal characters, too, are carefully and finely woven – this delicate work (although there’s a wonderful instinctual ease to Joyce’s prose here too) paves the way for subtle, human paradox. Duffy is haughty and dry – we’re told about his “unamiable mouth” and the “harsh” character of his face – but then we’re made to dwell on his gaze: “there was no harshness in his eyes which… gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others…” Similarly, Mrs. Sinico – a forty-three-year-old mother whose husband captains a boat which sails to and from Holland – is revealed by the almost anatomical investigation of her eyes: “their gaze began with a defiant note but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility.” Mr. Duffy’s final wanderings in the park – that beautifully realised transition from age-old defensiveness into a hard and honest accounting of his “moral nature” – is a remarkable passage. All the while, below the crest of the hill, Dublin “burns redly and hospitably.”

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, and widely republished since, including by Penguin Classics, 2000

‘Clay’ by James Joyce

My next two stories are undoubtedly short stories in the classic tradition. They are short, in prose, about a single main character or event. They ‘cristallize’, in another sense: they are heart-rending vignettes, in a small space. One is from James Joyce’s Dubliners, ‘Clay’ (First published 1914; read here in Penguin Popular Classics 1996, pp. 110-18). The other is from Vladimir Nabokov’s A Russian Beauty. They are intimately connected in that, in each case, the protagonist does not understand that a personal disaster hangs over her, while the people around her do. But the way this is conveyed in the two stories is utterly different.

In Joyce’s ‘Clay’, the protagonist Maria, a tiny person with a lowly job in a laundry, is going to visit her brother Joe and his family for the evening of Hallow-e’en. Maria buys treats for Joe’s children on the way to his house: she is a generous soul whom everyone loves – and pities, though this she is unaware of. They all play a Hallow-e’en game which involves being blind-folded, and choosing a saucer, by touch alone. When Maria’s turn comes, she picks a saucer with something soft and wet on it. There is an embarrassed silence, and the bigger girls are ticked off severely, and told to throw it out. The only clue as to what this might have been, and its traditional significance, is in the title of the story. Then the company urge Maria to sing: she sings “I dreamt that I dwelled in marble halls”, repeating one verse by mistake, though no-one points this out. Her brother Joe, to whom she had been a little mother when they were young, is so moved that his eyes fill up with tears, and “he could not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell him where the corkscrew was”. The pathos of an impending death is completely down-played.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, now widely republished, including in Penguin Classics.

‘A Painful Case’ by James Joyce

I first read Dubliners in school, so I must have been about 14 or 15; it was a cheap paperback with some chintzy illustrations in it, and every week we went through the stories in great detail. On reflection, this was one of my first proper experiences of close reading, and as the weeks went by, I got more and more absorbed in the lives of these characters. I latched on to that volta of disappointment that Joyce detonates in each story, often a depiction of the rising and falling of an evening which begins in hope and ends in the revelation of an unflinching reflection of oneself. I could have picked any of these stories, but I chose ‘A Painful Case’, a story of a man who lives at something of a distance from himself, because of its clarity and its ruthless pity. The opening sketch, which describes Mr Duffy’s “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 predicate in the past tense”, is as perfect a distillation of character as I’ve read. But the real dynamite in this story is the closing sequence, in which Duffy stands purgatorial in the evening above Dublin, his lover abandoned and dead by his own neglect, the copulating couples below him wishing him gone, and the wormlike train winding its way out of his sight. Even then, in the nearest moment that he comes to realisation, he stands at a protective distance from himself; his thoughts remain behind the barrier of “he felt”; his epiphany is complete but abstract, on the other side of the glass. The final sentence – “He felt that he was alone” – is devastating.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, now widely republished, including in Penguin Classics. Available to read online here

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

I feel a bit embarrassed that I have included this story in my list, kind of like cheating an exam. All you need to know is that I read this story many times throughout the years, in Chinese, in English, in Chengdu, in Dublin.

And it was in Dublin where I began to hear all the voices in the story and it was in Dublin, shortly after my son was born, I was pinned on the bed by the sleeping baby on my chest and ended up rereading the whole story. I cried when I read out, in a muted voice, the ending of the story again and again. That day, through the repetition, I saw something profound – too profound that I knew right away that I would never be able to express it with words.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914. Published in the Melville House Press Art of the Novella series. Available online including here

‘Grace’ by James Joyce

The half-informed discussion of Catholic doctrine and Vatican politics among these worldly businessmen always reminds me of my father, who was born in 1920, and took over the family business aged 17. As a young Irish wannabee writer in England I felt possessive about Joyce, but of course I’d never read him until I crossed the water. What struck me most when I finally did was a vision of the very world I was trying to turn my back on, rendered in loving detail without overt critique or comment, at the centre of an acknowledged masterpiece of world literature. It had never occurred to me that this sort of chat could be worth writing down, that these men would offer a valid subject for fiction; in other words, that the stuff I already had might be all I needed. That’s a lesson I’m still struggling to bring to my own writing.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, now widely republished, including in Penguin Classics. Available to read online here

Any story in Dubliners by James Joyce

As staggering as Ulysses is, for me, this is Joyce’s masterpiece. The reason I include Dubliners is that it seems to age as you do. Somehow it’s not the same book I read as a teenager. Each time I return to it, a different story will come to the fore, resonating with whatever I’ve been going through. I feel like, at different times, I have been some of these characters, which is not very edifying. It’s quite a haunting experience at times but I keep coming back because it’s as brutally honest and unforgiving as a mirror.

In recent years, I’ve been really blown away by Wendy Erskine’s short stories. She’s a very different writer to Joyce (her writing is hilarious for one thing) but they share a number of traits – she has an incredible ear for language and eye for revelatory details, what would be called epiphanies I guess in Joyce’s case, and an unsentimental quality, which I think is quite radical these days. I spend a lot of time reading writers like Borges and Calvino, getting lost in labyrinths and bestiaries or whatever, and sometimes it’s cleansing to return to a world, exposed with all its flaws, that is so vividly recognisable and inhabitable. Dubliners is over a hundred years old but it’s as relevant today or tomorrow as it was then. Sometimes there is a great kindness in looking in an unflinching way at how life is actually lived, and Dubliners does that from a multitude of angles. As with Erskine’s work, there is a very distinct vernacular but also an acute awareness of the frailties, contradictions and complexities of human beings that will always be prescient.

First published by Grant Richards, 1914. Available in multiple print editions, also to read online at Project Gutenberg here

‘Araby’ by James Joyce

Adolescence…

I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play…

The narrator of Joyce’s ‘Araby’ is neither named nor aged, but going from his preoccupations (caught somewhere between enjoying the company of his schoolboy friends and longing for the company of a local girl whose name “was like a summons to all my foolish blood”) I think it’s fair to say that adolescent hormones are starting to simmer. When the object of his affections finally deigns to actually speak to him (flirtatiously bemoaning the fact that she will not be able to attend the local Araby bazaar) the narrator is determined to go in her stead and bring her back a gift. And so the visit to the Araby becomes an idee fixe in his young mind: a quest to win the girl’s love and progress on to the next stage in his development. But, as we have already seen in Greene’s ‘The Basement Room’ and Plath’s ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit’ the adult world is too vast and complex to accommodate the idealisations of non-adults. And when the narrator’s adolescent epiphany comes, it is crushing.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd, 1914. available now in numerous print editions and online at The Literature Network

‘Araby’ by James Joyce

“The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.”

Along with the two subsequent stories in my personal anthology, ‘Araby’ is one of the great evocations of boyhood. Though all the stories from Dubliners are dazzlers, there’s something particularly special about this brief encounter with a boy and the nameless object of his desire. We know her only as “Mangan’s sister,” though the narrator admits that “her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” Poignantly, Joyce’s epiphanic revelation appears here not as some illuminating romantic disclosure, but as disillusionment in tented darkness, a crisis of maturity metastasized.

First published in Joyce’s collection Dubliners, 1914, Grant Richards Ltd., available now in numerous print editions and online at The Literature Network