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    Dubliners
    Dubliners
    Dubliners
    Ebook270 pages4 hours

    Dubliners

    By James Joyce, Edna O'Brien and Malachy McCourt

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    This Vintage Classics edition of James Joyce’s groundbreaking story collection has been authoritatively edited by scholars Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and includes a chronology, bibliography, and afterword by John S. Kelly. Also included in a special appendix are the original versions of three of the stories as well as Joyce's long-suppressed preface to Dubliners.
     
    With the fifteen stories in Dubliners Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest ("The Sisters"), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of "Two Gallants," or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife ("The Dead"), Joyce takes narrative art to places it had never been before.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateFeb 6, 2007
    ISBN9781101042182
    Author

    James Joyce

    James Joyce kam 1882 in Rathgar nahe Dublin zur Welt. Katholisch erzogen und ausgebildet wandte er sich nach dem Studium von der Kirche ab. 1904 verließ Joyce seine Heimat und lebte u. a. in Triest, Zürich und Paris. Das erste Prosawerk von Joyce war der Kurzgeschichtenzyklus „Dubliner“ (1914). Mit dem autobiografischen Roman „A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man“ (1916, dt. zunächst „Jugendbildnis“, später „Ein Porträt des Künstlers als junger Mann“) artikulierte Joyce in der Form des Künstler- und Bildungsromans die Position des modernen Schriftstellers, der sich aus den Bindungen der Kirche, des Staats und der Gesellschaft löst und auf künstlerischer Freiheit besteht. Der Roman „Ulysses“ (1922), der als moderne „Alltags-Odyssee“ in die Weltliteratur einging, gilt als Joyces Hauptwerk, als „der Roman des 20. Jahrhunderts“. In „Finnegans wake“ (1939) radikalisierte Joyce seine auf sprachliche Verschlüsselungen und Wortspiele zurückgreifende (und deshalb kaum übersetzbare) Schreibweise, u. a. indem er Traumfragmente verwendete. James Joyce starb 1841 in Zürich. Die drei erstgenannten Werke wurden – teils in intensiver Zusammenarbeit mit dem Autor – von Georg Goyert ins Deutsche übertragen. Aus „Finnegans wake“ übersetze Goyert das Kapitel „Anna Livia Plurabelle“.

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      Book preview

      Dubliners - James Joyce

      INTRODUCTION

      James Joyce was a very superstitious man. With all the adversities that attended the publication of Dubliners, he must have thought he had written a dirty book indeed. He was told so to such an extent that at one point he cried out in print, I am not a literary Jesus Christ!

      Things began well enough, as things do. He was asked by George Russell to submit some stories to the Irish Homestead, stories of a simple, rural, pathetic nature, and the payment was to be a sovereign. The first story was The Sisters and three others followed, but there followed as well rampant objections from the plain people of Ireland. These tales were amoral. Joyce himself admitted that a sense of mischief took over when he took pen to paper, but he also felt that he could justify the stories because he tried to make a significance out of trivial things and to write about those who were outcast from life’s feast. He chose a pseudonym, that of his future fictional character, Stephen Daedelus, because he was ashamed of writing, as he said for the Pigs Paper. He needn’t have worried; after three stories the editor wanted no more. In Trieste, where he went to teach, he wrote several more stories and eventually had enough for a collection to be published. Thus began his Calvary. In 1904 the book was accepted for publication, but the largesse that he permitted himself was precipitate. Just as the public had once objected to his work, now the printer objected and informed the publisher, Grant Richards, that he was not willing to print such lewd stuff. Two of the offending passages seem tame by to day’s mores. One is having a girl, and the other is a woman changing the position of her legs often. No wonder Joyce fumed. Oh one-eyed printer! he raged to the publisher, failing to recognize the fact that in those times the printer as well as the publisher was liable for prosecution. In the ensuing diatribes that flew back and forth, he was unrelenting, said how could he be blamed for bringing odour of ash pits and old weeds and offal to his stories because that was how he saw his city. We are foolish, comic, motionless, corrupted yet we are worthy of sympathy too, he said, and added loftily that if Ireland were to deny that sympathy to his characters the rest of the world wouldn’t. He was mistaken. No sooner had he battled with the wrangles about his immorality when another bombshell dropped, which was his book was offensive to the King of England. In the story, On a Day in the Committee Rooms (which would become Ivy Day in the Committee Room, King Edward VII is referred to as being a bit of a knockabout and a man fond of his drink. This too, was libelous according to the publishers. Joyce tried every avenue of persuasion and eventually wrote to King George, the son of King Edward VII, asking him to give his blessing to the offending paragraph. It is not surprising that a frosty reply came back through a secretary, saying that it was inconsistent with rule for His Majesty to express his opinion on such matters. Desperation got the better of Joyce. He agreed to cuts, but no sooner had he agreed to cuts in one story than another batch was suggested, and eventually he had to look for another publisher and another and still another.

      He called on his literary friends, Thomas Kettle and C.P. Curren. Thomas Kettle read the stories, said they would be harmful to Ireland, and in no uncertain terms told Joyce, I’ll slate that book! Curren was somewhat kinder, but said that the virginal mentality in which Ireland was steeped would guarantee objections.

      After nine years and twice that many intending publishers, Dubliners saw the light of day. It sold just over three hundred copies, one hundred of which were bought by Joyce himself. It is not, however, the catalogue of adversity that is its publishing history that makes us love these stories, it is because they are great.

      What makes a story great—now that is the mystery. These stories have a life, had it when they were written and continue to have it after almost a century. They seem small, insofar as the characters inhabit a small world, outside the mainstream of history as they toil, drink, and dilate on sundry matters. The men may give utterance to occasional prurient remarks while the women are chastity incarnate, a strange legacy from the man who was to go on to create the most rapacious and unashamed female character in literary history with the exception of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. All the characters are on the verge of something, on the verge of death, disgrace, leaving home, relinquishing love, or finding out the truth, as in the case of Gabriel Conroy, who knows with maddening certainty that the shade of his wife’s dead lover in the grave at Oughterard occupies her mind more fully than he does, or ever will, her body. The stories are also full of humour, crammed with the small miraculous absurdities of everyday life. Joyce wrote with the eyes of a child and an adult, the perfect, indeed the only fusion, for any writer.

      I often wonder what Joyce thought of Chekhov, and I am surprised that no one has remarked on the inner similarity of both these short-story writers. In essence they are alike. It is not simply that they are both great, it is that they both steal into one’s consciousness, so the stories are lived by us and the moments from them become part of our own experience. Very few writers have that telepathic genius. Thomas Mann, for instance, is a genius, but I do not feel that I am living his stories. I am reading them. With these tales there is no artifice, no conceit, they touch one like a breath of nature. A great writer’s first work is often his purest, and this is certainly true of Dubliners. The man who conceived them had no thought but to depict the pain and longing of people like himself whose dreams outdistance their chances. They are in a backwater-Eveline in Eveline wants to leave home with her sweetheart, but out of guilt baulks at the last minute; the smitten boy in Araby only reaches the bazaar as the lights are being quenched; Mr. James Duffy in A Painful Case kills a woman by virtue of his thwarted celibacy, and Joyce has him ask, Why had he witheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces— Yet he overcomes these scruples and reverts to his puny puritanism. No redemption here. That had to wait until the last story, The Dead, when Joyce admitted that no country equalled Ireland for its largesse and hospitality. The Dead is where at last he opened his heart to his more tender feelings. He was in love with Nora Barnacle when he wrote many of these stories and it certainly shows. When a writer is in love, the work has a scalding tenderness and everything is rendered as precisely as every feature of the beloved is in the writer’s mind. They are suffused with love. Then there is Dublin itself, the small box-like houses, the dark dripping gardens, the smells from ash-pits, rain, apple-trees, arrowroot biscuits growing musty in a shop window, the canals, the Liffey with its granite bridges, and the sea, the glistening sea beyond.

      A good story is like a comet, it comes from nowhere, bewildering the author as much as it will bewilder the reader. It is one of the few miracles left in this world of crass ambition, manipulation, calculated profundity and soulless rubbish. Even if he had not gone on to write his masterpieces, these stories would have assured James Joyce a place in the galaxy of literature, and I like to ponder that if there is a heaven—a thought he would berate me for—what he and Chekhov would make of each other’s lasting, transubstantiating fictions.

      —Edna O’Brien

      The Sisters

      There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of the corpse. He had often said to me: I am not long for this world, and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

      Old Cotter was sitting at the fire, smoking, when I came downstairs to supper. While my aunt was ladling out my stirabout he said, as if returning to some former remark of his:

      —No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly .. but there was something queer ... there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion....

      He began to puff at his pipe, no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. Tiresome old fool! When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery.

      —I have my own theory about it, he said. I think it was one of those ... peculiar cases.... But it’s hard to say....

      He began to puff again at his pipe without giving us his theory. My uncle saw me staring and said to me:

      —Well, so your old friend is gone, you’ll be sorry to hear.

      —Who? said I.

      —Father Flynn.

      —Is he dead?

      —Mr Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house.

      I knew that I was under observation so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.

      —The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him.

      —God have mercy on his soul, said my aunt piously.

      Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his little beady black eyes were examining me but I would not satisfy him by looking up from my plate. He returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate.

      —I wouldn’t like children of mine, he said, to have too much to say to a man like that.

      —How do you mean, Mr Cotter? asked my aunt.

      —What I mean is, said old Cotter, it’s bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be ... Am I right, Jack?

      —That’s my principle, too, said my uncle. Let him learn to box his comer. That’s what I’m always saying to that Rosicrucian there: take exercise. Why, when I was a nipper every morning of my life I had a cold bath, winter and summer. And that’s what stands to me now. Education is all very fine and large.... Mr Cotter might take a pick of that leg of mutton, he added to my aunt.

      —No, no, not for me, said old Cotter.

      My aunt brought the dish from the safe and laid it on the table.

      —But why do you think it’s not good for children, Mr Cotter? she asked.

      —It’s bad for children, said old Cotter, because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect....

      I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile!

      It was late when I fell asleep. Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding to me as a child I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences. In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.

      The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street. It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery. The drapery consisted mainly of children’s bootees and umbrellas; and on ordinary days a notice used to hang in the window, saying: Umbrellas Re-covered. No notice was visible now for the shutters were up. A crape bouquet was tied to the door-knocker with ribbon. Two poor women and a telegram boy were reading the card pinned on the crape. I also approached and read:

      July 1st, 1895

      The Rev. James Flynn

      (formerly of S. Catherine’s Church, Meath Street),

      aged sixty-five years.

      R.I.P.

      The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, nearly smothered in his great-coat. Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuff-box for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quite inefficacious.

      I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock. I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death. I wondered at this for, as my uncle had said the night before, he had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. Often when I thought of this I could make no answer or only a very foolish and halting one upon which he used to smile and nod his head twice or thrice. Sometimes he used to put me through the responses of the Mass which he had made me learn by heart; and, as I pattered, he used to smile pensively and nod his head, now and then pushing huge pinches of snuff up each nostril alternately. When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip—a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.

      As I walked along in the sun I remembered old Cotter’s words and tried to remember what had happened afterwards in the dream. I remembered that I had noticed long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashion. I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange—in Persia, I thought.... But I could not remember the end of the dream.

      In the evening my aunt took me with her to visit the house of mourning. It was after sunset; but the win dowpanes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds. Nannie received us in the hall; and, as it would have been unseemly to have shouted at her, my aunt shook hands with her for all. The old woman pointed upwards interrogatively and, on my aunt’s nodding, proceeded to toil up the narrow staircase before us, her bowed head being scarcely above the level of the banister-rail. At the first landing she stopped and beckoned us forward encouragingly towards the open door of the dead-room. My aunt went in and the old woman, seeing that I hesitated to enter, began to beckon to me again repeatedly with her hand.

      I went in on tiptoe. The room through the lace end of the blind was suffused with dusky golden light amid which the candles looked like pale thin flames. He had been coffined. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman’s mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side. The fancy came to me that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin.

      But no. When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling. There he lay, solemn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. There was a heavy odour in the room—the flowers.

      We blessed ourselves and came away. In the little room downstairs we found Eliza seated in his arm-chair in state. I groped my way towards my usual chair in the comer while Nannie went to the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wine-glasses. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. Then, at her sister’s bidding, she poured out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us. She pressed me to take some cream crackers also but I declined because I thought I would make too much noise eating them. She seemed to be somewhat disappointed at my refusal and went over quietly to the sofa where she sat down behind her sister. No one spoke: we all gazed at the empty fireplace.

      My aunt waited until Eliza sighed and then said:

      —Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world.

      Eliza sighed again and bowed her head in assent. My aunt fingered the stem of her wine-glass before sipping a little.

      —Did he ... peacefully? she asked.

      —Oh, quite peacefully, ma’am, said Eliza. You couldn’t tell when the breath went out of him. He had a beautiful death, God be praised.

      —And everything ... ?

      —Father O’Rourke was in with him a Tuesday and anointed him and prepared him and all.

      —He knew then?

      —He was quite resigned.

      —He looks quite resigned, said my aunt.

      —That’s what the woman we had in to wash him said. She said he just looked as if he was asleep, he looked that peaceful and resigned. No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.

      —Yes, indeed, said my aunt.

      She sipped a little more from her glass and said:

      —Well, Miss Flynn, at any rate it must be a great comfort for you to know that you did all you could for him. You were both very kind to him, I must say.

      Eliza smoothed her dress over her knees.

      —Ah, poor James! she said. God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are—we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it.

      Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall asleep.

      —There’s poor

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