Jerome Espinosa Baladad read and liked Choupette's review of Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics):

"So. Dubliners, hey? Honestly, didn't love it.

Joyce's Dublin is defined by a sense of paralysis. (I'm not making this up; just read any piece of criticism on the subject - it gets repetitive.) Many of the critics like to extend this to tal...more So. Dubliners, hey? Honestly, didn't love it.

Joyce's Dublin is defined by a sense of paralysis. (I'm not making this up; just read any piece of criticism on the subject - it gets repetitive.) Many of the critics like to extend this to talk about the themes of 'gnomon' and 'simony' (don't know what they mean? Well, I expanded my vocabulary, thankYOU Mr. Joyce), because they're mentioned in the same context as 'paralysis'. And it works, I guess, if you stand on your head and use a microscope. But I prefer to just use the paralysis angle.

All the characters are stuck in some profound hole. They are in dysfunctional relationships and can't get out, they are trapped by repetitive, restrictive routines, they spend their lives travelling in useless circles... and every attempt to escape is foiled, whether because they meet a paedophile, are obliged to marry for the sake of career, discover that they actually know nothing about their wife, and so on and so forth.

I liked that about Dubliners, though it gets tiring and I suspect a few personal hangups are involved. Nonetheless, he portrays very well "a chapter in the moral history of this country", albeit one that is somewhat one-sided and negative, though probably based on the truth. Dublin is a place where it is impossible to move, and it is very grim. One of my favourite stories, Eveline, illustrates this perfectly: in fact, it was one of the few stories that made a strong impression on me when I first read it. The story begins with a sort of interior monologue in which we find out all about Eveline's life. It's a pretty harsh one. She has an alcoholic, violent father, a dead mother, two younger siblings to look after, a thankless job, not much money, and so on. But then we discover that she has a sweetheart. His name is, I think, Frank, and he wants to sweep her off her feet and take her to Buenos Aires to be his wife. It's everything a girl could want - it's a fairy story arising miraculously from the greyish gloom of Dublin. And finally, we think, someone's going to be able to escape! To be free, to have the potential for a good life, far from the paralytic influence of Dublin! Hurrah!

But then, she starts thinking about how much she loves her father, and how nice he could be sometimes, and how scared she is about leaving everything she knows. And at the last minute, as she walks with Frank onto the ship that will take them away, she doesn't go - she can't go, she is physically incapable of going.

"He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition."

Paralysis triumphs once again and it's very sad, even confronting, to be suddenly faced with this vision of despair when we had such hope.

So I suppose I liked Dubliners. But all the criticism I was reading for my essay kept waxing lyrical about how rich in symbolism it was, and then going on about something that the author evidently thought was very clever symbolically, such as the movement of the book from east to west or something I didn't quite understand. But frankly, it all seemed like a case of the critics reading far, far too much into it. One case especially in point: Grace is the penultimate story, and was originally intended to be the last. So, say my old pals Jackson & McGinley (they are usually very solid and sensible), it should complete the themes from the opening chapter, namely paralysis, gnomon and simony. So there's a morally corrupt priest who debases the scripture with material things, so that's simony, and that makes sense to me, I can pay that. But then there's this drunk, right? And he's drunk, so he's paralytic, ha-ha very funny there's your second theme you can tick off the list. And yeah, maybe I can pay that one too, though it's a stretch. But then this drunk, right, he falls down some stairs and hits his head and bites off a bit of his tongue, right, and 'gnomon' means something incomplete, and his tongue is incomplete, so it's like, closure, y'know?

And I mean seriously, WHAT THE FUCK?? How does this count as serious criticism? It's ridiculous, it's farcical, it is so far-fetched as to be totally ludicrous, what do we pay you for, I can't believe the government funds this, etc.

There is one piece of symbolism, though, that I really liked. In the whole book, the only character who ever achieves a measure of freedom is the narrator of the first story, because he's friends with a priest (who's a bit of a suspect character; there are whispers and hints in the corners) who has some strokes and is paralysed. When the priest dies after his third stroke, the narrator admits to feeling a sense of freedom, though he feels bad about it because it comes from his friend's death. But it makes sense, because paralysis is dead!

Now, the first three stories are widely acknowledged to be almost completely autobiographical. Joyce himself called them 'stories from my childhood'. So I (backed up by critical work, incidentally, though the rest of this interpretation is my own) don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the voice of the narrator is Joyce's own voice. And Joyce escaped. He was the only person connected with Dubliners who got free - he went into voluntary exile and left!

But even Joyce couldn't completely escape Dublin. Dubliners itself is proof of his continuing preoccupation.

It's possible that I'm being unfair to Joyce and just getting frustrated with the stupidness of some of the criticism. Maybe things will be better in a few years. But I have a feeling that, like Orwell's fiction, Dubliners and I were just not meant to be.

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Written after my first reading, in February 2009:

The first few stories of this collection were so boring. I yawned, I dozed, I even fell asleep a few times. And I just couldn't stop thinking that Chekhov does it better. But the stories improved, or I got into it or something. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, often genuinely moving, this panoramic literary portrait of Dublin is nothing if not impressive. And there's a few bits of gorgeous writing too:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Not bad, Mr. Joyce, not bad.(less) "