James Joyce is most famous for his epic masterpiece, Ulysses, but his early work is probably just as highly regarded by critics. Dubliners – his first substantial work of fiction – is a set of fifteen short stories of varying length, the longest and last of which, The Dead, is one of the great masterpieces of the genre.
Joyce’s writing here is much less densely packed than it is in Ulysses, and is consequently a much easier read. But below the surface is a rich range of allusion, and a pervasive sense of melancholy hangs over the entire collection.
Joyce’s heroes here are flawed, working or lower-middle class people, living real, scarred lives in a Dublin overshadowed by the Catholic Church and the British Empire. As with much of Joyce’s work, Parnell’s downfall is an ever-present cloud on political life.
The stories are all closely linked to the later Ulysses, thematically but also through characterisation; many incidental figures from the great novel also appear here, several of the most easily recognisable in the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room. As with Ulysses, Joyce is at least as concerned with women’s lives as he is with men’s, and little injuries men do to women as a matter of course are a constant theme. As with Molly Bloom in Ulysses he gives us almost more of women’s inner lives than he does those of men.
Here his voice is perhaps slightly less cocksure than it later became, slightly more detached and ironic. One of the most loveable things about Joyce is the profound sympathy he has for his characters, and this emotion – which never becomes sentimental – is certainly nearer the surface than it is in later works. Many of these stories are profoundly moving, deeply sad in the ordinary helplessness of the lives they portray.
To my mind, Joyce is the greatest writer in the history of the English language, and Dubliners, while not the summit of his achievement, is a work of consummate genius.
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