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Why Teach Dubliners?
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by Robert DiYanni
The College Board
New York, New York
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| | Why teach Dubliners? What is it about Joyce's Dubliners stories that make them a smart choice for engaging the minds and hearts of AP students? Another way of formulating that question is to ask what benefits accrue from a close encounter with these stories? The benefits, I think, are three, at least: (1) The stories stimulate students' developing analytical capacities; (2) they require leaps of imagination, and thus encourage the development of imaginative thinking; (3) they invite students into another world, that of late 19th-century Dublin, yet a world to which they feel a tie, and one that encourages them to consider the kinds of life experiences they share with Joyce's Dubliners.
Let's take this last point first. It is one of the paradoxes of great literature that in embodying the particular and the specific—the look and feel and taste and smell—of a place in all its gritty concreteness, works like Dubliners transcend such local particulars and become symbolic universals. They convey life in at a specific time, while also rippling with ever larger circles of significance. Readers a hundred years later and half a world away connect with Joyce's Dubliners characters, while allowing for differences that make the connections even more viable. The tie that these student readers feel with Joyce's Dubliners is one that, like the guy ropes on a tent pole, tighten and relax, as the tent sways in the wind. And they reinforce Melville's dictum that fiction "must present another world, but one to which we feel the tie." Lucky students who read and think about the Dubliners stories experience the truth of Melville's idea.
Beyond making connections between Joyce's world of Dubliners and their own world of the here and now, today's AP students, if they are to understand and appreciate Joyce's stories, need to do another kind of analytical work necessitated by modernist writers' narrative strategies. Joyce's narrators, for example, do not supply the discursive explanations typically provided by narrators of much nineteenth-century fiction. Instead, Joyce puts the burden of interpretive responsibility on his readers, letting details of dialogue, action, and description speak for themselves. And even when Joyce uses an omniscient narrator, as he does in "The Boarding House," his narrator moves through the minds of each of the characters without comment, providing, instead, glimpses into their thoughts and feelings that stir response and stimulate reflection.
Such a narrative strategy compels readers to pay attention to details, to add things up for themselves, to fill in blanks, make connections, and entertain various interpretive hypotheses about just what is going on in a Dubliner's story. This narrative holding back makes readers active in their reading, engaging their imaginations as well as their analytic powers. It sharply focuses readers' attention on details of dialogue and description, it encourages listening between the lines, attending to the subtext, and requires making myriad connections among them. Most importantly, it also nudges readers toward making inferences, and building from those inferences a provisional interpretation.
Consider "The Boarding House," particularly Bob Doran, who has had a sexual relationship with Polly, daughter of the Boarding House Madame, Mrs. Mooney. First of all, Joyce's narrator indicates only indirectly what happened between Polly and Mr. Doran. He fills in the details gradually, making the reader wait for confirmation, along with Mrs. Mooney, whose reaction when she confronts Polly and gets the full truth, is that "reparation" must be made and that the one to make it is Mr. Doran, since he has had his "moment of pleasure," while Polly now has to "bear the brunt." A further challenge for readers here is whether the nineteen-year-old Polly is pregnant, or whether she has simply lost her virginity to the thirty-five-year-old Doran. Joyce's narrator doesn't say; he leaves it for us readers to decide.
Another instance where readers are obliged to add things up for themselves is with Doran's state of mind. We glimpse indications of Doran wrestling with his Catholic conscience, worrying about his job and his reputation, debating internally what he should do. But we get these indications only from observing and connecting specific details, for Joyce lets us see and hear only so much of what goes on in Doran's mind and heart. He makes his readers do the work of inferring most of it from details like Doran's nervous manner, his constant taking off and cleaning his fogged up glasses, his sharp memory of sex with Polly, and his apparent fear of her mother, who cuts through moral problems the way a cleaver cuts through meat, a woman who wants something more for her daughter than she herself had as a butcher's daughter. With Mr. Doran, who has a good "sit," she is determined to help her daughter get it.
Joyce's narrator never says openly out that Polly and her mother have conspired to trap Doran, with the mother quietly approving Polly's seduction, and Mrs. Mooney's confident knowledge that Doran will do the right thing because he has a responsible job and is a practicing Catholic. Having sized him up morally and socially, she knows that he's trapped by custom and conscience. And, in what is perhaps Joyce's crowning touch in this story, when Mrs. Mooney lets Doran know that she wants to speak to him right away, we see him coming down the stairs apprehensively, debating his alternatives, feeling keenly the urge to flee (he wants to fly through the roof), but being forcefully propelled step-by-step down to his imminent fate. We know that Mrs. Mooney will make short work of him, as she calculates his and Polly's marital future in the same assured manner that she deduces she has just time enough to make the short noon Mass.
"The Boarding House" does not portray the encounter between Doran and Mrs. Mooney. It does not tell us what each said or thought. Nor does it describe a second omitted scene, that between Mr. Doran and Polly Mooney. The story ends with the anticipation of that scene, with Joyce leaving it up to the reader to imagine what is said and done between Mr. Doran and Mrs. Mooney, and then between Mr. Doran and Polly.
For all these reasons, this story, and the others in Dubliners as well, are exactly right for AP students, who are learning to hone their reading and interpretive skills. Joyce makes them work; and that's just what's needed. As such, the Dubliners stories are perfect for helping students develop a method for critical understanding of literature. Let me say a few words about this method, an approach to interpretation the Dubliners stories, especially, invite and gratify.
First, students must make careful observations of many details, as for example, the richly evocative religious images and romanticized imaginings described in "Araby," the hard, bright coin of transaction in "Two Gallants," and the references to three book titles at the beginning of "An Encounter." They need to notice the many bits of speech in "The Dead," including brief remarks like the servant girl Lilly's bitter reply to Gabriel's polite inquiry about her future wedding: "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you," a remark that throws Gabriel (and the reader off balance), or Miss Ivors' conversation with Gabriel, in which she harasses him about losing touch with his country, his Irish culture, and the Irish language.
Readers need to reckon with Gabriel's long, pontificating, and dull oration after dinner and with the facts that he wears galoshes, reviews books for a conservative newspaper, lacks interest in the west of Ireland, and is jealous of Michael Furey, as well as with the importance of Bartell Darcy's singing of "The Lass of Aughrim." Second, they must make connections among those observations—noticing patterns, looking for linkages, as they begin to understand the frustrations of Joyce's Dubliners characters, their unrealized yearnings, their bitter disappointments, and the general pathos of their circumscribed lives.
Third, based on those connected observations, AP students need to make inferences, for example that in Gabriel Conroy's case, he is out of synch in thought and spirit with his wife Gretta, and that, more generally, there is little prospect that the lives of Joyce's Dubliners characters will improve in ways they hope. (What, for example, is Bob Doran's future, or Maria's, or Farrington's, or Gabriel Conroy's, at the end of their respective stories?) By putting together the details of any one story and then setting the stories alongside others to notice the recurring patterns of experience they describe, students learn to make larger inferences about Dubliners as a whole, beyond their inferences about any particular story, such as "The Boarding," "Clay," Counterparts," or "The Dead."
Fourth, readers formulate a provisional conclusion based on their inferences, a conclusion, so to speak, about where they stand interpretively with regard to any single story and then to the book as a whole. However, this provisional conclusion, this tentative interpretation is subject to change—upon further reflection, upon sharing ideas in discussion with others, upon rereading the story, or upon accumulating additional life experience.
This entire interpretive process, moreover, from observing to connecting to inferring to concluding is not mechanical or formulaic. It is, rather, an approach, a method, that involves repetition and recursiveness. That is, once observations have been made and connections are being identified, additional observations will be made. And once an interpretive conclusion has been arrived at, further connections might be made or additional inferences developed. The process is cyclical rather than linear, complex rather than simple or predictable—as we know from our own rereadings of Joyce's Dubliners.
One might ask whether stories by other writers might not prove equally suitable to helping students develop their analytical capabilities? It must be acknowledged directly that other stories can indeed be of value in this regard. But not all stories, not entirely, and often not as well. The reasons have to do, primarily, with the reticent quality of Joyce's Dubliners stories, with what they withhold from readers, with the resulting demands they make upon us. They have to do, as well, with the way recurring images (like darkness), common themes (like paralysis), and modernist techniques (like multiple points of view) pervade the stories. They have to do, also, with the kinds of rewards these stories provide: the aesthetic pleasures they yield, the "aha" moments they stimulate, the feelings they stir up, the ideas they provoke, the pleasures of language they proffer, language pitched to the music of poetry with its assonance and alliteration, its controlled rhythms and artful repetitions, most notable perhaps in the famous description of the falling snow at the end of "The Dead":
It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. 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.
Though "The Dead" brings Dubliners to its culminating epiphany, there are fourteen other Dubliners stories to savor. They provide a treasure trove of discovery for the developing reader and neophyte literary analyst. Nor do they fail to satisfy the most discerning and demanding of readers. Like all great art, Dubliners provides much in little—can there be less provided for readers than in "Eveline" or "Clay," and yet so much for them to unravel in these stories? Dubliners rewards and gratifies repeated readings. The stories never wear out. They continue both revealing and concealing their mysterious and luminous beauties, but only to readers who remain attentive, engaged, and reflective.
What more can we ask of a work of art? Why teach Dubliners, indeed?
This article also appeared in the American Friends of James Joyce Annual Program Bulletin (2006).
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