James Jocye’s Dubliners: Essay
By Armando Ortiz
I learned about James Joyce through a classmate. We were taking the same Biology course at Los Angele City College back in the late 90’s. Just mentioning that seems a bit frightening, since it was almost twenty years ago. We were inside a Salvadoran restaurant, eating pupusas, sharing stories. He’d traveled through Russia and Eastern Europe, enjoyed drawing what he saw, instead of writing. He’d been born in South Korea, and was planning to transfer to UCLA. Somehow he began to talk about James Joyce’s Ulysses and how it was the best novel he had ever read. Since then I kept coming across Joyce’s name, and more importantly I became somewhat familiar with the book, so while reading Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey I knew that there was some link between those epic stories and Joyce. It took several books and years, tackling several of Pynchon’s novels and reading several of Roberto Bolano’s novels before arriving at Joyce. I’d been challenged by Bolano’s writings, and the interviews that you can see on YouTube, so I made it a point to finally read Joyce. Ever since then I’ve read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and more recently Dubliners. This essay will mainly be on Dubliners, and will focus on a few themes presented in Joyce’s collection of short stories.
We live in a time where everything seems to have a quick solution despite the fact that many things require time and energy to maintain, the main one being our bodies which over time deteriorates. If you turn your computer or television on, in less than thirty minutes you will come across advertisements that promote renewed and prolonged virility, natural hair regrowth, more testosterone, Botox, plastic surgery, skin whitening creams and so many other things related to aging and our bodies. For a few years now some have looked into what steroids to take before beginning a bodybuilding workout program so that in a few months they can bulk up and be a completely different person. Different fad diets also claim to have unimaginable results that guarantee healthy but drastic weight loss in just a few weeks. In light of all these promises James Joyce’s Dubliners becomes ever more relevant today than when it was written back one hundred years ago.
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories that contains characters who vary from elderly men to children, and of people who fall in love or are tricked into relationships. These stories all contain their own plots and internal allegories, so it is difficult to explain each one, and doing so would wipe away any chance for future readers discovering for themselves the magic of Joyce’s story telling power. After reading his stories there is a greater awareness of the overall cycle that life offers to every person on this earth. While reading his stories one cannot help to see that what he shares with the readers is relevant and that the themes have much more to do with human nature than anything else. Although some claim that these stories have a nationalist bent he reveals an intimate and human side to these stories. Joyce captures the general social atmosphere of Ireland during the early years of the twentieth century, but it generally serves as a backdrop to the stories that he has to tell about people’s lives and the feelings, thoughts and emotions that they experience.
The first story has a scene where an old man sits relaxing, reflecting on life when he sees some children that most likely cut school. He engages them in conversation, and the generation gap is obvious, but that is the general trend in every society, yet it gives a glimpse into something that rarely happens, except maybe in schools or hospitals. You have an elderly person questioning and talking to youth in a manner that seems almost day to day. Another story has several memorable instances, but only one will be discussed here. There is a party that takes place in a house, and the ladies, all well past their youth, are busy serving people and trying to help out with the dinner party. They are described in such an elegant and lively manner that makes getting older an experience of further maturity, but also of a meaningful expression and engagement with people of all ages. Though the story ends on a different note that will not be discussed here there is a sense within Joyce’s writing that there is a wrestling of ideas and manners of expression with every passing generation. This might be one of his overall themes in all his writings, since most of the novels deal with memory, aging, youth and the generation gap between those that have lived life and those starting their lives. Everyone is trying to claim their right to existence, but it is done in a manner that allows the reader to appreciate the society that they live in. Yet, when you look around today, most of the messages that we get is that aging is bad, and that there are ways to remedy that instead of a message that states that with age comes wisdom, but also further engagement with society.
Dubliners is more relevant today than in the past because it seems that in today’s world there seems to be this desire to sweep the idea of growing, especially in Los Angeles, under the floor and ignore the fact that it is one of the longer and more memory filled times for all people. Aside from the passing of time that everyone has to come to grips, Joyce also focuses on love, and all its different manifestations, from a person using love as a way to get the other person’s money, or making the relationship between mother and father, where love has been slowly vanishing, but commitment to the relationship remains strong it to make a covenant in staying away from deviant behaviors, yet again we have the idea of love and what the other person who is currently committed had experienced previously, things like love and happiness.
Joyce certainly had a knack is capturing these moments in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where Stephen Dedalus has an amusing conversation with one of the main teachers of the school he attends, and there one sees the struggle between letting the will of youth dictate decisions and the wisdom of will experienced to guide the youth. Along those same lines, in Ulysses Stephen reappears, spending a day in discussion with various people throughout Dublin, ending up in Leopold Bloom’s living room in conversation. Later Mr. and Mrs. Bloom are in bed and the story quickly turns the tables on the reader to take on a different perspective of reality. Finally, Dubliners bring into focus the reality that ultimately our lives are lived individually and our experiences remain only within us, be it a memory of a past moment in time that we cherish and never share with anyone else, even our intimate lovers. However, it is through our interactions with people around us that we end up having our most treasured and cherished memories.
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