Turns Out That No One Needs To Be Afraid of James Joyce's Dubliners

It's Ulysses that is scary.  This collection of portraits was not difficult to read. Quite the contrary. But the panorama of Dublin that they created brought out a great discussion.   One member of Irish descent, felt disgust? shame? *at   the bleak  cast of manipulative, cheating, drinking, base characters. Save the husband in  "The Dead"; none of the characters grow in wisdom or spirituality.   Others felt that this collection, sequenced to mirror stages of a man's life, reflected universal themes.  And the bleakness reflects the human condition...not that of one place or time.  (Yet other books...Portnoy's Complaint and its portrait of Jews, for example, can be called universal but still sting a Jew.)

One member pointed out that they read much the way that a modern New Yorker short story reads. Joyce is the first modern writer.  And a great writer.

We wondered how a young man of 25 could have had the wisdom to write these stories...and wondered if perhaps it took someone that young to see the world in such bleak, conflicted way.  We questioned the symbol of snow because a writer (whose name I didn't write down)** suggested that a new writer analyze that in order to understand writing.  (A purifying, unifying, substance that falls on living and dead alike?)

And we wondered why did so many writers have to leave Ireland in order to write about it.  We pooh-poohed literary critics who saw incest, venereal disease, in every page of the stories. (Okay that is an exaggeration.) They interfered with instead of enlightening our reading.

From BB:

It wasn't just "disgust" and "shame" that this member of Irish descent felt but also anger and disappointment at the, for the most part, one-dimensional characters. The discussion calmed my defensive ire, however,and I have to agree that the stories are wonderfully crafted, especially "The Dead." It was Flannery O'Connor who advised a fledgling writer: "See how he makes the snow work in that story."

Speaking of the New Yorker and Irish writers, I'd recommend Colm Toibin's story "Sleep" in the March 23 issue. In it the imagination--secular rather than religious--yields such a bad trip that either the protagonist can no longer love or he needs to protect the one he loves from himself. 

Another recent New Yorker story to interest our members is Stephen King's excellent "A Death" in the March 9 issue.