Literature paper

Alienation in James Joyce's Dubliners

Date: 2009 Author: Blake Hobby From: Alienation, Bloom's Literary Themes.

Initially shocking readers and printers because it criticized sacred institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and broached sensitive subjects such as human sexuality and alcoholism, James Joyce's Dubliners (1904) broke from traditional ways of telling a story. As with Franz Kafka's fiction, especially such works as The Trial and The Metamorphosis, Dubliners is an expressionist artwork. Such works use the most penetrating means imaginable, no matter how unusual, to communicate inner thoughts and emotions—a goal that echoes Joyce's desire to describe the Dubliners "for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness" (quoted in Ellman 210). As they depict angst-ridden lives, Joyce's stories convey a powerful sense of alienation. By quickly shifting characters and perspectives and moving through the stages of a human life—childhood, adolescence, and maturity—Joyce provides a panoramic view of turn-of-the-century Dublin as a paralyzed world.

One of the three italicized words introduced to readers on the first page of the text, paralysis conveys the alienation of Joyce's characters. As Joyce explains, he intended "to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to me the centre of paralysis" (quoted in Levin 30). Thus, like many expressionistic works of art and pieces of music, Dubliners takes as its subject the modern, disillusioned person as described by Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud: isolated, filled with inner conflict and anxiety, suppressed by institutions and cultural values, and acting out in irritated rebellion against established order and accepted forms. Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), yearns to be free of this same world: "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets" (Portrait 196). These same nets trap the Dubliners, who inhabit a suffocating urban world.

The opening story of Dubliners, "The Sisters," concludes with a silent wake, a communal ritual robbed of its efficacy. In the story's opening paragraph, the boy remembers repeating the word paralysis as a "mantra" at the priest's window (3). The word sounds strange to him, "like the name of some maleficent and sinful being," filling the boy with fear (3).The boy next remembers Old Cotter, who arranges "his opinion in his mind" of the priest's demise as he smokes his pipe before the fire (4). The story ends, however, before an empty fireplace in a communion ritual whose painful silence causes the boy to refuse the host-like crackers offered for fear of making noise. The boy's aunt breaks the silence with a timid suggestion, an incomplete thought, as she says, "I heard something …" (11). Although the aunt speaks of rumors, what the reader hears in the lapse, after the silence, is laughter. The story ends with a mysterious phrase that is repeated like the boy's mantra at the story's opening. Eliza repeats what Father O'Rourke has told of Flynn's condition the evening he was found in the confessional: "Wideawake and laughing-like to himself …" (11). Flynn's own laugh, co-opted by O'Rourke, reinterpreted by Eliza, and then retold by the narrator, ends the exposition of Dubliners, creating a sense of alienation in the reader that mirrors Joyce's own alienation from Irish society.

Rituals with awkward silences and musical parodies in Dubliners call attention to the alienated state of the city dwellers, highlight their need to escape, and often set up dark "epiphanies," the expression Joyce borrows from the theological tradition to indicate sudden moments of awareness. Music accompanies this alienated world, a world paralyzed in its adherence to ritual, a world sick and weary from imprisoning moral values, as Nietzsche describes in On the Genealogy of Morals. Many of the collection's dark epiphanies contain awkward silences, where word and deed have failed to make meaning. At the end of "Araby," for example, a young boy faces a dark epiphany in which his dreams of being a bold knight-errant fade as he accepts his failure (27). His epiphany, revealing that there is nothing behind the illusive shadow of the woman he fabricates and in which he believes, brings anger and anguish. The boy recognizes "a silence like that which pervades a church after a service." The music of the "fall of coins" from "two men … counting money on a salver" breaks his silence (26). The boy then allows "two pennies to fall against the sixpence in his pocket," an act that symbolically associates the boy with the merchants. Gazing up into the darkened bazaar, he vaults his own suffering, fictively creating himself "as a creature driven and derided by vanity," one whose own suffering and disillusionment are great (27). The music of the coins in the boy's pocket enables the reader to see the boy's self-derision as part of a larger pattern of alienation. The boy fabricates the woman as his own desire and thus falls prey to an illusion. He functions as part of a world in which the uncle and the merchants, as well as the flirtatious couple the boy overhears, are victims of their own wills, alienated creatures following thwarted desires.

Joyce describes the Dubliners as hearts that, like the strings of Orpheus, beat to the rhythm of desire. "Eveline," for example, contains many allusions to the heart and heartbeats. Literally, the story palpitates (29). As the boat separates Eveline from Frank, the narrator describes, "A bell clanged upon her heart" (32). Eveline muses on "the pitiful vision of her mother's voice" and her "life of commonplace sacrifices" (32). Similarly, "An Encounter" opens and closes with percussive palpitations: Joe Dillon "beating a tin" (12) and the "heart … beating quickly with fear" (20) of the little boy who yearns, like Dillon, to escape. Farrington in "Counterparts" likewise desires to escape his job and his home life. His frustrated desires culminate, after his arm-wrestling humiliation with Weathers, in a "heart [that] swelled with fury" (85). Similarly, Gabriel's heart in "The Dead" swells with another kind of fury when he desires Gretta: "The blood went bounding along his veins and then thought went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous" (194). Joyce renders Gabriel's desire, along with the impotent desires and ambitions of the other Dubliners, in a musical language that captures the Dubliners' alienation: their blindness, humiliation, and powerlessness.

For example, lulled by Frank's singing, Eveline desires his song to be more than it is. The narrative voice describes: "when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor she always felt pleasantly confused" (30–31). While Frank's song distorts Eveline's intent, so does Polly's song in "The Boarding House." As the virgin Polly plays her part in the seduction of Mr. Doran, a game in which she and he become pawns, she sings a bawdy ditty:

I'm a … naughty girl. You needn't sham: You know I am. (53)

Polly's song inflames Doran's desire and hers and makes the betrothal game of Mrs. Mooney an excessive perversion. Trapped but also playing the game, Doran meets Polly secretly at night, desiring to have her while still being virtuous in the eyes of the business community. Mrs. Mooney uses her own children in a musical exhibitionist show that lays the groundwork for Mooney's later scheming, amid the music of church bells, when she "deal[s] with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat" (54). The story's meat-cleaving images are fantastic distortions as are the songs Polly and Jack sing with the other artistes as part of the Mooney salon floorshow. While Doran is simultaneously tricked and one who tries to turn a trick, the reader sees all the Mooney and Doran machinations as part of the show.

Although "Araby" depicts a young boy following his own elusive desires, "Clay," "The Boarding House," and "After the Race" all depict people as part of cruel games that leave individuals alone, isolated, and at odds with themselves and the world. "Clay," the midpoint in Dubliners, depicts Maria as the center of a cruel game. Maria sings in "a tiny quavering voice" (93) and spoils her performance as she becomes entrenched in a lyric loop, repeating lyrics like the circling horse Gabriel mimics in "The Dead" (189). Maria's first mistake (the choosing of the clay) brings snickers, but her guffaw evokes silence. Although the story's ending seems tragic and sentimental as Joe co-opts Maria's song, turning her pathetic longings for love into his own sentimental tears for the "time … long ago" (94), the story ends with an ambiguous image of a wine opener. The corkscrew is a sexual allusion that mocks Joe's impotence as husband, brother, father, and son and, in a strange double irony, caricatures Maria and pities her virginity.

Likewise, as the waltz and card game end in "After the Race," Jimmy counts "the beats of his own temples," knowing he has become a victim in his own game, a pawn in the world of commerce.

Bastardized rituals appear in Dubliners with musical descriptions and musical effects. In "Grace," "the light music of whiskey falling into glasses" accompanies the men who lure Kernan to the retreat (153). Purdon's sermon is a musical performance in which he "develop[s] the text with resonant assurance," speaking on the difficulty of "interpreting properly" and addressing an audience of "hearers" with the kind of coin-clinking music heard in "Araby" (157). Purdon's sermon rings with irony, as does all the political talk in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," a story of political doggerel and awkward silences interrupted by the music of beer bottle "poks!" (118, 119, 122). The poks lend irony to the long-winded music of the co-opters who gather to honor Parnell and lament his demise yet participate in the same corrupt games that caused his end. The co-opters use Parnell as the race-car drivers use Jimmy and Europe uses Ireland. "A Painful Case" likewise ends with a grotesque musical scene. Duffy listens to the tram just as he listened to a musical performance the evening he met Mrs. Sinico. The tram's music reminds him of the performance Sinico gave in her own death. Although Duffy eschews the world of sound after breaking off with Sinico, the music of the tram is inescapable. The tram's music, uttering Sinico's tripartite name repeatedly as its wheels move across the tracks, comes from Duffy's perspective. The reader sees that Duffy believes he is responsible for Sinico's death and feels pride that he has power to control another's life. Duffy's narration and the newspaper account are only two perspectives, while Mrs. Sinico's perspective is conspicuously absent. Duffy's interpretation is wily, snaky, and suspicious, bringing the reader to imagine that Duffy has snaked his way into the Sinico home and perhaps even tunneled into Mrs. Sinico.

In "Araby" the boy describes himself as a harp, a thing that responds in an overstated, hyperreactive manner to the illusion he creates: "But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires" (23). Lenehan and Corley of "Two Gallants" also pass a harpist in the Dublin streets who plays his instrument as they themselves play women:

They walked along Nassau Street and then turned into Kildare Street. Not far from the porch of the club a harpist stood in the roadway playing to a little ring of listeners. He plucked at the wires heedlessly, glancing quickly from time to time at the face of each newcomer and from time to time, wearily also, at the sky. His harp too, heedless that her covering had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of the eyes of stranger and of her master's hands. One hand played the bass melody of Silent, O Moyle, while the other hand careered in the treble after each group of notes. The notes of the air throbbed deep and full. (45–6)

The harp heard by the gallants is both woman and Ireland, a thing played by manipulative hands, an alienated world controlled by external forces beyond individual control. The harp also attracts the scheming Lenehan on his return as he runs his hands along the railings of Duke's Lawn: "The air which the harpist had played began to control his movements. His softly padded feet played the melody while his fingers swept a scale of variations idly along the railings after each group of notes" (47–48). Lenehan becomes the victim of his own game and is associated with the woman, which places Lenehan in a passive posture of waiting for Corley and alludes to his possible homosexuality. The opening paragraph of "Two Gallants" describes the streets as an expressionistic canvas: "The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur" (41). This opening passage associates the music of the city, its unceasing murmur, with the shifting colors, shapes, and hues that depict inner conflict expressed in external signs, an inner world mirrored in the cacophony of the city. The gallants, seeking to escape the mourning music of the harp, encounter the music of the city, "the noise of trams, the lights and the crowd" that releases them "from their silence" (46).

Dubliners contains many frenetic spectacles that depict commerce, social mechanisms, and the pace of modernity as a meaningless, cacophonous game that engulfs all and leaves individuals alone and isolated. In "After the Race," Dame Street is "busy with unusual traffic, loud with the horns of motorists and the gongs of impatient drivers" (37). The furious ringing of a bell opens "Counterparts" as a voice amplified through a tube barks out Alleyne's wishes. The story comments on the absurdity of business and the inhumanity of a world of commerce in which people are used as machines. The office's characters and machines constantly click and clack, forming the monotonous office routine that is satirized in Farrington's "Bernard Bernard" copy blunder (79). Similarly, Jack's violence, the church bells, and the bawdy singing are all part of Mrs. Mooney's economic venture in "The Boarding House." We do not feel at home in such infernal worlds; instead, we feel a sensation Freud called "the uncanny."

"The Dead" concludes Dubliners, opening with the music of Lily's scampering feet and the "halldoor bell" clanging (159). The reader hears "gossiping and laughing and fussing" from the dressing room upstairs, the scraping of snow from galoshes, and "the shuffling of feet" of dancers (161). As a waltz ends, hand clapping begins (165), followed by the laughter of Freddy Malins, the drunken "high-pitched bronchitic laughter" that rings throughout the story (168). The young ladies, listening to the "whiskey, … it's the doctor's orders" of Mr. Browne, "laugh in musical echo, swaying their bodies to and fro" (166). The music at the table is disordered and cluttered; yet it expresses the festive ritual that ends Dubliners and opposes the bare communion rite at the collection's opening. At the Morkans' meal, "there [is] a great deal of confusion and laughter and noise, the noise of orders and counterorders, of knives and forks, of corks and glass stoppers" (179) that simultaneously parries and mirrors the "thought-tormented music" Gabriel laments in his speech (183). The crowd gathered at the table, rapping the table until "the patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether," encourages Gabriel to speak (183). Applause and laughter interject Gabriel's speech, which concludes with more clapping and a sung "acclamation" to which the comic "Freddy Malins beat[s] time with his pudding fork" (187). "Peals of laughter" follow Gabriel's imitation of Johnny the circling horse (189). The evening's celebration ends as Mary Jane helps "the discussion from the doorstep with cross-directions and contradictions and abundance of laughter," a tone that changes as Gabriel watches Gretta on the stairs and asks himself, "What is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of ?" (190-1). Gabriel listens to the voices outside, the voices in the hall, and the music coming from upstairs as the house's voices blend. Gabriel directs his attention to "the old Irish tonality" sung with uncertainty by D'Arcy, whose "voice made plaintive by the distance and by the singer's hoarseness faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief" (191). D'Arcy's words, internalized by Gabriel in his own sentimental way, cause his blood to boil. Gabriel remembers "the first touch of her body, musical, strange and perfumed" (196). The silence that Gabriel and Gretta observe as they follow the innkeeper to their room feeds Gabriel's hunger as "the falling of the molten wax into the tray" echoes "the thumping of his own heart against his ribs" (196). Gretta's choking sobs leave Gabriel alone in silence as his wife drifts off to sleep (202).

Here, alone, Gabriel experiences the final moment of alienation in Dubliners. "The Dead" ends with "a few light taps upon the [window] pane" as Gabriel breaks the silence by describing the snow-covered countryside before him. Gabriel resists what he called in his Robert Browning review the "thought-tormented music" of modernity. Instead of the stark, scrupulous style used until now, the narrative voice shifts, rounding out the collection with lush Romantic prose. As he co-opts the story of Michael Fury and The Lass of Aughrim, which so occupies Gretta, and makes the song his own self-pitying, nationalistic ballad, Gabriel becomes another of the isolated voices in Dubliners, speaking in the night but unheard. While it's tempting to read the ending of "The Dead" as a hope-filled epiphany that converts Gabriel, such a reading discounts the continuity of Joyce's stories, the common thread of alienation that unites the Dubliners in their paralytic lives. In a collection that begins with a wake and ends with a marital crisis, Joyce creates a cohesive portrait of urbanites following vain desires, Dubliners for whom alienation is a shared condition after centuries of oppression—not just from the colonizing British but also from the social, political, and religious institutions that influence their lives. In life they seek freedom but find only emptiness echoed in "the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Bibliography

· Ellman, Richard. James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

· Joyce, James. Dubliners. Hans Walther Gabler and Walter Hettche, eds. New York: Vintage, 1993.

· ———. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Hans Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1993.

· Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941.

Citation Information

Text Citation: Hobby, Blake. "Alienation in James Joyce's Dubliners." In Bloom, Harold, ed. Alienation, Bloom's Literary Themes. New York: Chelsea House, 2009. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=1&iPin=BLTA008&SingleRecord=True (accessed March 25, 2010).

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