Bernard Benstock

Narrative Strategies: The Teller in the Dubliners Tale

Those two sentences, neatly tucked away in the newspaper chapter of Ulysses, have only a tangential existence in that novel, a momentary construction in the mind of Stephen Dedalus during the “False lull” (Ae 761) in which J. J. O’Molloy lights his cigarette in preparation for his recitation. Disembodied as this fragment is — without prior or subsequent existence and no existing frame of reference — it represents a piece of literary narrative that makes itself significant through what it forecasts more than what it presents. The first sentence is hardly momentous: there are many such purposefully innocuous sentences in Ulysses, unobtrusive devices for a momentary thrusting forth of the narrative line. The second sentence, however, stuns with its implication that someone directly in juxtaposition with ourselves knows in advance the extended consequences of an action now in process, regardless of our realization that “Messenger” has no real existence in the text. There are no sentences in Dubliners like that nineteenth-century monstrosity, either in terms of its intrusiveness or omniscience.

Double Binds: Talismans of Immaturity

The “separateness” that exists between the stories of the “unified” scheme of Dubliners only becomes apparent on the rare occasion when a character who appears in an earlier story is mentioned in a later one, so that we become aware of how contained each of the narratives had been. Yet many aspects of Dublin life and its interpersonal relationships invisibly bind and interconnect the participants in that paralytic world of the Catholic bourgeoisie that is Joyce’s Dublin. In parallel proportions each of the protagonists is bound within his or her own world, caught in binds both of their own making and externally conditioned under circumstances at once indeterminate and overdetermined. The spaces that separate individuals often narrow dangerously and yet persist as unbridgeable, and the Dublin that becomes apparent is simultaneously a diffuse metropolis and a provincial town.

Symbolic Systems: Correspondences in the Tales

The distance between Stephen Dedalus, reconstituting an aesthetics based on Aquinas for an indifferent Lynch, and Gabriel Conroy, experiencing an aesthetic moment confused with sexual adoration of the entranced Gretta, is allied to the distance between literature and the market-place, both of which Stephen is aware of and Gabriel involved with. Stephen concedes that his definitions are in the realm of “literary talk”, and differentiates “beauty” (“in the sense which the word has in literary tradition”) from that of “the marketplace”, where “it has another sense” (AP 213). For Gabriel the apprehension of beauty leads also into the aesthetic realm, positing a symbolic painting of that which he immediately perceives, but a work of art that he has no intention of undertaking, never having adequately interpreted the symbolic significance. In giving the painting a title, “Distant Music”, he translates the experience into a potential commodity that would have relevance within the market-place. Although a teacher of literature and a reviewer of books, Gabriel has moved his aesthetics outside the area of language, whereas Stephen is especially specific in establishing the distance between words “used according to the literary tradition” and “according to the tradition of the marketplace” (AP 188).

Duplicitous Bonds: Talents of Maturity

The constraints of childhood are assumed to be the obvious ones of an incomplete being not yet ready for the world outside, protected and even secured within necessary confines: the boy in “The Sisters” is allowed to navigate the distance between his own home and that of Father Flynn; the boy in “An Encounter” that between home and school (which he violates by an unlicensed excursion in the direction of the Pigeon House); the boy in “Araby” permitted, with misgivings, the nocturnal venture to the bazaar. The liberties allowed the young adolescent extend the boundaries and remove various barriers, yet Eveline Hill is constrained by the limitations of the straight line between home and “the Stores”, usurping for herself the prohibited escapes with Frank that take her as far as the theatre, and the North Wall docks, until she is pulled back. The strictures imposed by her father, her dead mother and Margaret Mary Alacoque prove to be greater than the freedom she associates with the sailor and the seas that extend outward from restrictive Dublin: as a woman she has fewer territorial rights than the male “child” of “Araby”.

Pounds/Shillings/Pence: The Economics in the Tales

The Dubliners of Dubliners occupy fifteen designated areas of that city, a territorial separation that allows for just enough overlappings to attest to the “unity” of Dublin more than to the unity of the text. Unlike the citizens of Ulysses that many of them will eventually become, they have almost no points of contact with each other, and is not until late in the process that a journalist for the Freeman named Hendrick, who was scheduled to review the Eire Abu concert in “A Mother”, turns up at the businessmen’s retreat in “Grace”, while Kathleen Kearney, who had figured so prominently in “A Mother”, is mentioned by Molly Ivors in “The Dead”. Almost all of the characters in the fifteen tales are (temporarily) confined within the space of their individual narratives. Whereas Ulysses will later reprise some of them, they are essentially “fictional” characters who displace the real people of James Joyce’s Dublin for the purpose of the fiction. Also in sharp contradistinction there is no attempt to introduce real and fictional people to each other (like J. C. Doyle and Molly Bloom on the concert stage, Myler Keogh and Percy Bennett in the boxing ring, George Russell and Stephen Dedalus in the National Library). At least one known personage, however, the English Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan, mentioned by his actual name in Ulysses, is portrayed in Dubliners by a fictional surrogate, Father Purdon.

Introduction: A Confluence of Texts

James Joyce’s Dubliners has eluded critical classification because it remains a “sampling” of experiences within discrete borders (fifteen separate short stories), as well as a “running text” that forms a consecutive whole (a single work of interconnected entities). When “Araby” is anthologized in a volume of works by various authors (as it often is), the assumption is that it can stand on its own as a total experience, and the final reactions of the boy narrator derive from his immediate disappointment regarding Mangan’s sister, the darkened bazaar, and his insufficient funds (although it may then take on the contextual possibilities of the anthology — one of Irish stories, for example). When read inside Dubliners as the third story of childhood experiences, that resolution can also be read as a cumulative reaction to the boy’s traumas that include a succession of events such as a priest’s death and a frightening encounter with a stranger. We are constantly aware that the barriers exist between each of the fifteen stories, but never sure how firm those barriers actually are, of what seeps through to create a “Dubliners” context in lieu of an individual context. James Duffy stands resolute as an individuated self, attempting to divorce himself from Dublin and from almost all other Dubliners, yet his very isolation dooms him to identifying with others around him, the fornicators in the park — hardly his normal context.

Narrative Gnomonics: The Spectres in the Tales

In Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as he is about to disappear off stage Rosencrantz says, “Now you see me, now you … ” — the last word, like the character himself, lost in the closing ellipsis. Readers know from Shakespeare’s text that he is now a ghost through death; auditors know from Stoppard’s play that he is a ghost through absence. The pregnant ellipsis is itself a ghost through absence, suspended aloft and rattling its chains, unspoken but nevertheless “heard” by the process of subliminal anticipation, as we instinctively complete the familiar line by resorting to a pre-existing text. The gnomon of Euclid resurfaces thousands of years later in the opening paragraph of “The Sisters”, trailing clouds of meaning after itself, perhaps undreamed of in Euclid’s philosophy, probably only dimply perceptible to the young dilettante of words who is the central intelligence of the story, and variously apprehended by the variety of readers of Dubliners.

Opaque and Transparent Narrative

‘Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells’ (Pr 10–11). In this manner the second paragraph of the ‘Proteus’ chapter begins, and it would be only partially disingenuous to contend that nothing has quite prepared the reader for a sentence of such clear and open presentation, since many similar sentences in the first two chapters, ‘Telemachus’ and ‘Nestor’, are as lucid and direct. The sentences that open those first two chapters have the same quality and capacity for active narration:

Literary and Narrational In/Validities

The allusive methods favoured by the modernist poets — and utilised by Joyce as well — prove upon examination to be unusually diverse, handled quite individually by each practitioner. Yet the basic assumption remains that if the original source can be located, its ‘meaning’ isolated and determined, and its applicability to the new text illustrated, a neatly constructed unit becomes apparent that establishes a specific meaning within the new text, enlarging the operative ‘context’. Characterising Joyce’s allusive method, however, has often eluded the allusionists, although the principle of direct confrontational usage continues to define the methodology. What must we know about Dante Alighieri to be able to appreciate ‘the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus’ that Stephen so caustically credits him with having ‘invented and patented in all countries’ (AP, p. 252)? Will Dante’s heroic effort to sublimate Eros in favour of Agape in his appreciation of pre-nubile Beatrice Portinari suffice to substantiate a similar transition in Stephen’s attitude toward Emma, even if we acknowledge that Stephen’s is rather disingenuous and forced? Direct application would endow Stephen Dedalus with Dante’s perfected spiritualism, but his ironic tone favours an inexact application, no matter how sincere his love for Dante might otherwise appear.

Introduction: The Nature of its Narrative

Narrative Con/Texts in ‘Ulysses’ is composed of seven essays written over the past ten years as separate approaches to the ways in which narrative functions in Ulysses in relation to the changing contextual situation in that narrative; some of these essays have appeared in earlier forms in journals and as book chapters. They have been rewritten for the purpose of a book-length study but do not constitute a seamless narrative, nor is there a central thesis that constrains the various investigative avenues of approach, and certainly no attempt is made to track the eighteen chapters of Ulysses sequentially. Instead, several individual tracks move through the Ulyssean terrain, criss-crossing each other and opening and reopening the possibilities of analysing the narrational methods in operation and co-operation with each other. Various heightened moments and complex knots that intensify the narrative experience in Joyce’s Ulysses are returned to more than once to re-examine their function and impact from different perspectives.