noahslark:
James Joyce’s Dubliners 100th anniversary: Dublin a...
James Joyce’s Dubliners 100th anniversary: Dublin a century later:
This year marks the centenary of the publication of Dubliners, a collection Joyce wrote in his early 20s, and which writers of the short story form seem basically resigned to never surpassing. I’ve read it more often than I’ve read any other book; I am, I would guess, somewhere near double figures at this point. I read it first in school. Then I read it as an undergraduate in order to write a bad essay on the theme of paralysis in its stories. Then I read it a handful of times as a Ph.D. student and teaching assistant, in order to mark a great many more bad essays on the theme of paralysis in its stories. I’ve since read it a few times for no particular reason, because the thing about Dubliners is that it never loses its capacity to draw me into its confined narrative spaces, with all their cruel precision and humane comedy, all their beauty and their bleakness, their terrible evocations of boredom and desperation and yearning and entrapment. And if you live in Dublin, if you are yourself a Dubliner, no matter how many times you read the book, it will always reveal something profound and essential and unrealized about the city and its people. Somehow or another, it will always hit you where you live.
If you’re a person whose perception of the world is shaped by literature, Dublin can feel less like a place that James Joyce wrote about than a place that is about James Joyce’s writing. The city of his fiction exists in ghostly superimposition over the actual city, such as it is, and every street corner, every landmark, every fleetingly glimpsed stranger, can seem haunted by some Joycean revenant. If you’re already thinking about Joyce to begin with, Dublin will continually provide you with reasons to continue doing so. Joyce will not be escaped. He inheres in the city’s bones.
