Why do we remain enthralled, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with Dubliners, James Joyce’s stories of ordinary people and ordinary life set in Dublin at the last century’s beginning? Those of us who call ourselves “modernists” or “twentieth-century” scholars have newly taken on the role once held by the Victorians, as critics of a previous century, a bygone era that passed from contemporaneity for the older among us into a time increasingly historical and historiographed. Dubliners, with its obsessive specification of turn-of-the century shop names, streets, train stations, bridges, books, songs, personages, and events, should appeal precisely to...

Among the stories in Dubliners, the gaps, ellipses, and silences in “The Sisters” have engrossed critics for decades, and have received such illuminating attention that their dilation of the story’s interpretive possibilities has been extensively explored. This is clearly no accident, for I believe (along with other critics) that Joyce made the figure and function of the gap, the silence, and the figure of incompletion an inescapably foregrounded trope in the story. By doing so he guaranteed that it could not be missed, and would therefore serve as a clew and a clue, a guiding thread and key to the...

Like many of the stories in Dubliners, Joyce’s “An Encounter” functions as an enigmatic provocation to problematized ethical reading. Consider the shift in ethical assumptions inscribed in the historical arc of the questions that were asked of the story when it was written (“Is this an immoral text?”) and those we might ask now (“Is this a homophobic text?”). Yet the puzzling and ambiguous gestures of both the story’s writing and its telling—enigmas of both text and narration—further complicate these questions of Joyce’s own time and our present moment. Grant Richards first underreacted, then overreacted, to a story...

Joyce’s “Araby” not only draws attention to its conspicuous poetic language; it offers the beauty of its art as compensation to the frustrations that are thematized in the story. The little boy whose heart is broken by a city “hostile to romance” transmutes his grief into a romance of language. Joyce, whose Dubliners stories tend to bear rhetorical titles, makes of “Araby” a rhetorical bazaar that outstrips in poetic exoticism the extravagant promise of the empty and sterile commercial confection that so disappoints the child. In an early essay on Dubliners, Frank O’Connor writes of “Araby,” “This is using words...

With a small aside tucked into his brilliant 1972 essay called “Molly’s Masterstroke,” Hugh Kenner turned the Dubliners story “Eveline” upside down by listening to a couple of commas. Kenner quotes the narration—“ ‘He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres [comma] he said [comma] and had come over to the old country just for a holiday’ ” (20). Kenner goes on to say, “Great issues may be said to hang on those commas, which stipulate not only that Eveline is quoting Frank, but that Frank has been quoting also: quoting from the kind of fiction Eveline will...

Joyce’s story “After the Race” exhibits a curious paradox. As the Dubliners story representing the most powerful figures—economically and socially—the story itself has emerged as perhaps the weakest in the collection, and the one most vulnerable to critical disparagement. Emboldened by Joyce’s own judgment—“The two worst stories are After the Race and A Painful Case” (SL 123)¹—Warren Beck virtually dismisses the story for being “labored” and “awkward” in narrative technique. In comparison to the other stories in the collection, he finds it “less penetrating,” “sketchier,” and “the least realized” (123). Whether or not one concurs with...

Like a number of other Dubliners stories, “Two Gallants” is uncertain on the level of significance because it is fundamentally uncertain on the level of narrative and plot. Some crucial information is strategically withheld from the reader that obliges us to construct a crude scenario of what we think is going on in this story. This scenario—that a repellent young man doubly despoils a young servant girl of “virtue” and money—is readily supported by the story’s central trope of a Celtic harp and its mournful song (“Silent, O’Moyle! . . . Lir’s loneliest daughter / Tells to the...

“She made Mary collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to help to make Tuesday’s bread-pudding” (64), we learn of Mrs. Mooney, the butcher’s daughter, in “The Boarding House.” The passage goes on to enact the servant’s gesture of boarding house thrift by serving us the twice-baked crusts, as it were, of the previous evening’s events. The form this narrative bread pudding takes is the redaction of a trimmed and hard account of Mrs. Mooney’s and Polly’s confrontation the night before, from which the interesting substance or “meat”—the juicy sexual and transgressive content—has already been extracted and...

If we imagine a first-time reading of “A Little Cloud”—rereading the story as though we had never read it before—we realize that for the first third of the story the narrator leaves us entirely adrift (like a ‘little cloud’?) as to certain significant issues of time and place. The opening paragraph strongly suggests that the protagonist has recently been reunited with an old friend he has not seen for eight years—“Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him godspeed. Gallaher had got on. You could tell that at once...

When Joyce’s brother Stanislaus read his story “Counterparts,” he wrote to Joyce that the story showed “a Russian ability in taking the reader for an intracranial journey” (SL 73). In response to this critique Joyce asked himself precisely what is meant when people say that something is “Russian,” and he came up with two answers. He surmised that most people probably meant “a certain scrupulous brute force in writing,” and he himself found the predominant Russian characteristic to be “a scrupulous instinct for caste” (SL 73). It is curious that the word “scrupulous” occurs in both descriptions, and it is...

“Clay” is a deceptively simple little story by design: its narrative self-deception attempts, and fails, to mislead the reader. But as a special case of the blind leading the blind, “Clay” also offers the multiple revelations that come with the restoration of sight: it allows us to see the blind spots in Maria’s story and, in them, to see ourselves as their cause, if not their instrument. Joyce displays a surprising philosophical and technical maturity in this very early work, whose object is, I believe, to dramatize the powerful workings of desire in human discourse and human lives. In “Clay”...

James Joyce’s story “A Painful Case” is about a story that is painful for a reader: a newspaper article of the same title that gives Mr. Duffy a disturbing shock when he reads of Mrs. Sinico’s death. This shocked reading produces a moment of classical anagnorisis when the man recognizes his implication in the woman’s fate. But is Joyce’s story, “A Painful Case,” painful for the reader as well? I hope to concur with critics who have thought so,¹ and argue that even though the reader is not implicated in Mrs. Sinico’s pain, the narration obliges “us” to vicariously experience...

Joyce’s “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” ends with a stirring poetic performance—Joe Hynes reciting his elegy on the occasion of the death of Parnell. This recitation is followed by an exercise in literary criticism. “What do you think of that, Crofton? cried Mr Henchy. Isn’t that fine? What?” (135). Given that Mr. Crofton is an Orangeman, a Conservative, and not a Nationalist, his answer “that it was a very fine piece of writing” (135) must be read as a highly equivocating judgment, one that says one thing but means another. But Crofton’s response reminds us that Hynes’s poem...

Narration inevitably provides readers of fiction with a lens or filter that manipulates their perception of the virtues and vices, the strengths and weaknesses, the charms and vulgarities of fictional characters. Joyce’s story, “A Mother,” demonstrates how gender ideology can serve as a particularly powerful narrative filter capable of conditioning an entire critical reception. For many years, the dominant response to “A Mother” was shaped by such strong critics as David Hayman and Warren Beck, who read the story as a satire on the self-defeat of cultural pretensions. In their argument, they took their cue in condemning Mrs. Kearney from...

“Grace,” as is well known, was at one time intended to be the last of the Dubliners stories, the capstone of the collection. Critics have therefore tended to read it for its plenary function of completing and summing up the significance of the preceding tales. In that tradition, I would like to press the story’s significance beyond the book’s confines, and argue that “Grace” functions—perhaps less by design than by historical convergence—to dramatize what would become a crucial ethical issue in the politics and aesthetics of Modernism. Although Ezra Pound learned social credit theory only in the 1920s,...

Although the first sentence of “The Dead” tells us that “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” (175), Lily does not complain about her lot. Indeed, that is why she gets on so well with her mistresses, as we learn a little later—“But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers” (176). The bourgeois agenda of the narrative voice¹ at this moment can be read as an intention to...