It is characteristic of Dublin’s love of words that Cranly atttends to the phrase ‘some-
thing in a distillery’ rather than to what Stephen has said. Joyce’s use of the French
convention of introducing direct speech by a dash rather than quotation marks,
reduces the distinction between words and things. When Joyce announced that he
was marrying, his father asked for the woman’s name. On hearing it was Nora
Barnacle, he replied, ‘She’ll stick to you, then.’ Such a father had his educational side.
Stephen’s own wit is appreciated by Cranly, but both are earnest young men. ‘—It is
a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is super-
saturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.’
Joyce studied languages, writing to Ibsen in Norwegian. Though he read Yeats and
others, his modern reading was European. He left Dublin at twenty-one, returned
for his mother’s death, then left with Nora, who stuck to him but never read his ‘dirty
books’. Stephen gives Cranly his reasons for leaving:
—I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my
fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as
freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself
to use – silence, exile and cunning.
Joyce lived obscurely, teaching English, helped eventually by a number of patrons.
Although the first story ofDubliners was written in 1904, publication was delayed,
so that Joyce’s three masterpieces appeared within eight years.Dublinersis a set of
naturalist sketches of the lives of citizens, mostly lower middle class. Each fails to
br eak out of habitual routines, and the effect is cumulatively depressing, as in
Maupassant’s tales of little urban lives and George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903).
Dubliners begins with children, moving gradually to older people. Joyce planned
twelve stories in a style of ‘scrupulous meanness’ to show a Dublin paralysed by
family, poverty, bigotry and small-mindedness. Each story is organized through
thematic symbols. All Joyce’s writings work in several modes at once.
Such systematic art, found in Renaissance verse, had been approached in English
fiction only in Jane Austen, in some Conrad and in James. Like Flaubert, Joyce wears
gloves of antiseptic irony, but some warmth comes through in such wincing stories
as ‘A Little Cloud’and ‘A Painful Case’, where human feelings are given greater
purchase. When his omission of Dublin’s hospitality was pointed out to him, Joyce
added a long final story, ‘The Dead’. This richly elaborate experiment is set at a
Christmas party, where Gabriel Conroy presides at the table of his musical aunts.
The unheroic Gabriel, a wearer of goloshes who takes holidays in Belgium, feels
culturally above the company. At the end of the evening he hears from his wife that
she had once been loved by a boy from the West who had died for love of her.
Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any
woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in
his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man
standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that
region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not
apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into
a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and
live d in was dissolving and dwindling.
Gabriel is sympathetic, yet remains a spectator. In a final paragraph Joyce allows
himself to write lyrically and imaginatively about the island he was leaving.
In A Portrait of the Artist, first drafted as Stephen Hero, Stephen Dedalus tells of346 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55