PROSE
James Joyce – Dubliners
“My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order.”
James Joyce on Dubliners (New York, 1939)
Why this book?
We have chosen a story from Dubliners as the first prose work in the LitSalon Challenge because it provides a wonderful gateway to the world of James Joyce, whose reputation as one of the world’s greatest literary masters is combined with that of the author of two notoriously ‘difficult’ books: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
The stories in Dubliners can be read individually or as a whole (like a novel), or in differing groupings: childhood (The Sisters, An Encounter and Araby), young adulthood (Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House), mature life (A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case), public life (Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace) and The Dead.
We would love you to read the whole collection of fifteen stories, but it is the first – The Sisters – that we suggest should be your focus.
The story
The Sisters begins with a boy staring at window, wondering about death. The first paragraph gives us three key words: paralysis, simony (a form of corruption of spiritual values) and gnomon (which can mean both the part of the sundial that casts shadow and, in geometry, an L-shaped figure made by removing a parallelogram from a larger similar parallelogram). These words are significant not only in this story, but also become recurring motifs in all the stories in the collection.
Joyce uses the word ‘sounded’ twice in the same opening paragraph, and the method of reading we recommend is to ‘sound out’ the text by reading it aloud. This may seem strange and unfamiliar when you are reading the book alone rather than as part of a group, but in our experience it is an extraordinarily effective way of unlocking meaning, particularly in more challenging writing. Speaking and hearing the words can help to discover the familiar, the uncanny and, critically, the unsaid.
Consider the narrative voice. What do you think is the position of the boy narrator to the priest in the story? Notice the details of the setting and how these paint a mood and background . . . how does the chalice figure?
This story lays the groundwork for a sense of the uncanny and the instability of the world as it is known. The fascination with death and the image of the gnomon: the child of the father figure, the chip off the block, the shape known by the shadow of the unknown. How does this reflect on the focus of the title: The Sisters, when the focus of the story is the relationship between the priest and the boy? Why is the boy living with his aunt and uncle, where are his parents?
What is the narrator’s understanding? What is told on the surface and what struggles lie beneath? How does the narrator develop through the story? What aspects define this world and the roles of people within it?
Overall, the story does not offer a single point, moral or unifying insight. Rather it illuminates the questions and struggles of a young person against the power of a model or mentor, an ambivalence that is also reflected in the relationship with an organised faith. There is the power to teach, to inspire, to expand a young and hungry mind, but also the reality of the potential to abuse power and the tricky dance of inspiring another without oppression.
The Writing
Joyce’s writing is simultaneously archaic and modern. A mixture of straightforward narrative story telling is twinned with a discursive style of self-reflexiveness (in which the reader is directed to an awareness of the writing style). Joyce blends realism with Modernism: the story feels located and concrete, but also suggests currents beneath the surface . . . what is said vs. what is suggested, the space of what is not said.
It is important to know that NOTHING in Joyce is casual. Each image, reference, description carries symbolic resonance.
In The Sisters it is not just the priest who is paralysed, all the stories in Dubliners are characterized by a sense of paralysis, which Joyce saw as a moral failure in his homeland, resulting in an inability to live meaningfully. The moral centre of these stories is not paralysis alone but a recognition of that static state. Joyce loved Ireland but could not remain there – part of his critique of his culture and its people is imaged in these stories – in people caught in patterns and prejudices that they cannot escape. In many of the stories a clang of awareness or self-realization marks the climax. Often these moments reveal Joyce’s fascination with epiphanies – moments of sudden and intense illumination when a profound truth may be revealed or clarity attained. For Joyce, these moments did not occur at the height of the heroic or dramatic gesture, but in the mundane acts of life.
Are there moments in this story that fit this description? More importantly, what is revealed?
History and context
James Joyce is held by many to be the greatest modern writer of literature. Viewed from our own time, the stories in Dubliners may seem tame, but when Joyce first attempted to have them published in 1910-12, the Dublin publishers who considered the project grew frightened of the content and the book was not published until 1914.
By this time, Joyce, who had first moved away from Dublin to Paris in 1902, was living in self-imposed exile in Trieste, at sufficient distance to turn over the views and inherent prejudices of his upbringing. The writing of Dubliners is the result, and its critique of an oppressive faith, a backward-looking patriotism, a hypocritical moralism and a nationalist movement that turned on its own leaders was widely perceived as a betrayal of his own people.
The writers of Modernism strained to peel back layers of their inherited perspective; showing their world with all its gaps, dissonances and contradictions. If the critique is only venomous and not drawn from a love of and disappointment in your culture’s achievements, this rendition will be bitter. Joyce’s portrayal of his native city voices both critique and despair. Joyce rejected the Gaelic League, the Irish Literary Revival and the Catholic Church as cultural institutions attempting to define Irish perspective. Ireland in Joyce’s time was effectively a British colony – and a struggling one at that – due to centuries of British rule and economic servitude. While many artists turned to Ireland’s heroic and mythic past to reclaim a unique and proud heritage in the face of oppression, Joyce saw potential in an international perspective that would rise above the limits of nationalism – but first, he had to capture the beauty and paralysis of the Dublin he loved.
Dubliners is available in a number of editions and as an audio download from Penguin Books. Suggested further reading: Navraj Narula’s essay, The Epiphany as the Evanescent Moment: Flashes of Unintellectual Light in James Joyce’s Dubliners; Are Joyce’s Dubliners Paralyzed? A Second Opinion by John Hobbs; James Joyce: A Life by Edna O’Brien.
POETRY
Elizabeth Bishop – One Art
Why this poem?
Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about dealing with loss has inspired and comforted readers since it was first published in 1976. Always avoiding easy answers, in One Art Bishop challenges us to formulate a response to continuing losses and to begin to understand them.
At a time when so many of us have experienced loss – sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent – this poem seems particularly resonant.
The repeating lines of the villanelle form create a structure which perfectly expresses the poem’s meaning. Reading and re-reading will help to work towards a greater understanding of this moving poem. Try not to be self-conscious about reading poetry aloud (whether alone or to an audience), hearing and feeling the power of the words can greatly enhance the process of unlocking their meaning.
Elizabeth Bishop’s life
Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an American father and a Canadian mother. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother returned with her to Nova Scotia. When she was five, her mother became mentally ill and was institutionalised, remaining in the asylum until her death in 1934. Elizabeth went to live with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia. In her later childhood her paternal grandparents gained custody and she went to live with them in Massachusetts, a move which made her unhappy and she missed her life in Nova Scotia, a place to which she returned throughout her life and in her poetry. As an adult, she inherited enough money from her father to travel and live independently, living in France, Key West and Santos, Brazil, all of which figure in her work.
In 1944 she left Key West and lived for 14 years in Brazil with her partner, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Tragically, this relationship ended when Soares took her own life in 1967, and after this Bishop spent more time in the United States.
One Art was included in Bishop’s final collection, Geography III, published in 1976, three years before her death. The poem went through seventeen drafts. Earlier drafts contain references to the “blue eyes” of her much younger lover Alice Methfessel, and their estrangement is thought to be the inspiration for the poem. Although the poem has become justly famous as a record of pain and loss, the pair did later reconcile.
Elizabeth Bishop and poetic form
At its most basic, form is what distinguishes poetry from prose. The form can define elements such as rhyme, meter, number of stanzas and number of lines, but while some poems are highly formal and follow a strict pattern, others may appear to have no discernible pattern. More information about form can be found online (for example, Poetry Foundation has a comprehensive glossary of poetic terms) and there are excellent books on the subject, including The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.
According to Caroline Hammond, the LitSalon’s resident poet, one of the reasons that Bishop is held in such high esteem by her fellow poets is her ability to create poems that are fresh, naturalistic and vibrant within the constraints of rigid formal structures. In the case of One Art the formal structure is the villanelle, and both One Art and Bishop’s Sestina are considered among the best 20th century examples of their respective forms.
What is a villanelle?
- A villanelle is a poem of nineteen lines in total, comprising five stanzas of three lines and a final stanza of four lines.
- The first line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas, while the third line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas.
- These two refrain lines follow each other to become the penultimate and last lines of the poem: the final couplet.
- The rhyme scheme (discovered by labelling the words that rhyme with each other with a letter of the alphabet) is A-B-A.
Given the rigorous demands of both repeating lines and rhyme, it is easy to see how a villanelle can turn into a clunky mess. Nonetheless, it has found a place in modern poetry: Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney and WH Auden have all written villanelles. In One Art Bishop plays with the strictness of the villanelle form in subtle, heartbreaking ways to create a memorable and moving experience for the reader.
The complete poems of Elizabeth Bishop are available in a Centenary Edition by Penguin Books, One Art can also be read on The Poetry Foundation and poets.org websites (by permission of the publisher).
CREATIVE WRITING
an exercise inspired by Dubliners
If you feel inspired, try your hand at this freewriting exercise inspired by James Joyce’s Dubliners (takes about 30 minutes).
Introduction: Freewriting is spontaneous, intuitive, continuous, and timed. Let go of any rules — don’t worry about spelling, grammar, punctuation. Banish your inner critic — trust whatever you write will be right. This is about the process, not a finished product.
Freewriting is sometimes called stream of consciousness writing. Both a psychoanalytical and a literary term, “stream” of consciousness was originally conceived as metaphor by William James, psychologist and philosopher and brother of author Henry James: “Consciousness… is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (James 1892). Freud’s free association is a psychoanalytical application of this idea, and the writings of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are both prime literary examples of this form. But in her diaries, Woolf also used the technique for introspection, to explore her life: “Melancholy diminishes as I write. Why then don’t I write it down oftener? Well one’s vanity forbids. I want to appear a success even to myself” (Woolf 1997, p 116).
So as a type of journal writing, flow writing (or stream of consciousness writing) — a continuous blurting of thoughts and feelings — demands we put vanity and form aside so that unrelated thoughts and feelings can flow together and perhaps reveal something we didn’t know we knew, and maybe make us feel better.
The exercise*: After you’ve read through the instructions, look at the list of binaries below — all of which are themes running through Dubliners. Quickly choose the pair of words that appeals to you today.
- Write down the pair of words and think about what it means to you.
- Ask yourself some questions: Why did you choose that pair of words in particular? Which word of the two do you feel most drawn to? Does it relate to any part of your life at the moment?
- Write for 5 minutes. Set an alarm, and let your thoughts fly wherever they want to go.
- Read what you wrote; underline any words or phrases that seem powerful, intriguing, surprising or pleasant.
- Choose one of the phrases or words you underlined and write it at the top of a clean page. Starting with that phrase or word, write for 5 more minutes. Set a timer. Again, let your writing fly.
- If you have time for a third round, go again for 5 more minutes, using a phrase from your second piece of writing.
- Now gather your underlined words and phrases. Do you notice repetitions? Can you begin to make connections? Is there an overall feeling or theme emerging? What have you learned? Take 5-10 minutes to reflect in writing: add connectors to make a poem or write a paragraph that begins with “As I read this, I feel…”.
If you enjoyed this, you may want to consider joining a creative writing for wellbeing study.
*adapted from Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, and Kate McBarren, WriteWell
Word pairs:
Light : Dark
Male : Female
Past : Present
Public : Private
Paralysis : Action
Silence : Speech
Liberation : Promise
Hold on : Let go
Remember : Forget
