Reading between the lines.
May 4 2014 11:45 PM
“Have I Ever Left It?”
100 years after Dubliners, James Joyce’s Dublin—and mine.
On a bright and blustery morning in
February, I stepped out my front door and walked until I reached the
north bank of the River Liffey, where I crossed a bridge and stopped in
front of a dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island. The house stood a little
back from the street, as though in quiet reproach of its surroundings,
the only Georgian redbrick in a row of humbler buildings facing the
river; it was flanked squatly on one side by a small car upholstery
concern, and, on the other, by a large modern block of apartments.
The windows of this dark gaunt house were opaque with brownish grime from the heavy traffic along the south quays, but in one of the dim street-level rooms I could make out the looming profile of a massive papier-mâché head, perhaps 3 feet high. The sheer slope of the nose, terminating in a trim gray mustache; the almost comic nobility of the chin; the gigantic fedora overmastering a high forehead: It was instantly apparent whom this cartoon head was intended to represent. Printed on the fan window over the front door were the words James Joyce House, and then, directly beneath these, “The Dead.”
The windows of this dark gaunt house were opaque with brownish grime from the heavy traffic along the south quays, but in one of the dim street-level rooms I could make out the looming profile of a massive papier-mâché head, perhaps 3 feet high. The sheer slope of the nose, terminating in a trim gray mustache; the almost comic nobility of the chin; the gigantic fedora overmastering a high forehead: It was instantly apparent whom this cartoon head was intended to represent. Printed on the fan window over the front door were the words James Joyce House, and then, directly beneath these, “The Dead.”
Mark O'Connell
The house was unlit and unoccupied. I looked down over the railings
into the basement entrance, where there lay a heap of discarded items:
the carcass of what seemed to be an old wooden dresser, a sodden
mattress, a few plastic bags bulging with rubbish. I removed my phone
from my pocket and took some photographs, and as I did so, a group of
middle-aged Scandinavian tourists ambled past. Two men at the rear of
the group noticed me and, as is the way of tourists, stopped to look up
at what I was photographing. “James Joyce’s house,” said one of them,
pointing up toward the fan window and misreading what was written there.
His friend made a guttural noise of mild interest, and they both continued down along the river in the direction of the Guinness brewery. I briefly considered stopping them, to explain that this was not actually one of the 20 or so Dublin addresses Joyce had lived at, but the place in which he set “The Dead,” the greatest of his short stories, the story which closes Dubliners and which elevates the book to the level of the supreme artworks of the 20th century. This is the “dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island” where Gabriel Conroy’s elderly aunts Kate and Julia live, and in which they throw the party that provides the occasion for one of literature’s most powerfully sustained performances of narrative brilliance. Just behind that locked front door is where Gabriel stands in “a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase” at his wife, complacently admiring “the grace and mystery in her attitude” as she listens to another guest sing “The Lass of Aughrim,” unaware that she is thinking of a boy she once loved, a boy who died for his love of her before she ever knew her husband.
His friend made a guttural noise of mild interest, and they both continued down along the river in the direction of the Guinness brewery. I briefly considered stopping them, to explain that this was not actually one of the 20 or so Dublin addresses Joyce had lived at, but the place in which he set “The Dead,” the greatest of his short stories, the story which closes Dubliners and which elevates the book to the level of the supreme artworks of the 20th century. This is the “dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island” where Gabriel Conroy’s elderly aunts Kate and Julia live, and in which they throw the party that provides the occasion for one of literature’s most powerfully sustained performances of narrative brilliance. Just behind that locked front door is where Gabriel stands in “a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase” at his wife, complacently admiring “the grace and mystery in her attitude” as she listens to another guest sing “The Lass of Aughrim,” unaware that she is thinking of a boy she once loved, a boy who died for his love of her before she ever knew her husband.
Photo by William Murphy/Flickr Creative Commons
The house at 15 Usher’s Island, also mentioned in Ulysses
as the home of Stephen Dedalus’ two aunts, was bought by a literary
entrepreneur a few years back and converted into a kind of Joycean
events venue operating under the pleasingly weird name James Joyce House
of the Dead—a name which leads me to imagine some sort of formally
experimental Hammer horror film, starring Vincent Pryce as a sinister
Irish necromancer who speaks in convoluted Homeric allusions. The house
is available for private functions, including wakes. The idea of a
Joyce-themed wake seems slightly mad, but in a way that reflects a
peculiar reality of Dublin, which is that the whole place seems in some
fundamental sense Joyce-themed. This can be maddening at times, as
though the author, after his death in 1941 in Zurich, far from the city
where he was born, had somehow slyly arrogated to himself the position
of municipal god, and designated the whole place a monument to his
works.
Photo by C. P. Curran
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.
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.
* * *
Near the start of his almost decade-long effort to see Dubliners
into print, James Joyce wrote a remarkable letter to the London
publisher Grant Richards, in which he explained his unwillingness to
change his manuscript in response to Richards’ anxiety about its coarse
language and references to sexual matters.
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me to be the centre of the paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.
Of all the sentences Joyce ever wrote, I think I might be most
perversely fond of this last. For an Irish writer to inform an English
publisher that, should he choose not to publish his debut collection of
short stories, he will be personally responsible for impairing that
writer’s country even more than it’s already been impaired by centuries
of colonial oppression? That, to me, is both the greatest and worst
elevator pitch in literary history: a kind of reckless masterpiece of
emotional blackmail, encapsulating so much of Joyce’s arrogance and
self-righteousness and outright grandiosity, all of which qualities were
entirely validated by his greatness.
Joyce’s looking glass, nicely polished though it is, frames a grim
reflection of life in the city around the turn of the last century. The
Dublin of Dubliners (as distinct from the more vibrant and various setting of Ulysses)
is a claustrophobic place, a place of entrapment and congenital
disappointment, filled with frustrated people living thwarted lives. It
is in every sense a small city. There is a particular airlessness to the
trio of childhood stories that open the collection, a thick fug of
corruption that seems to suffocate the spaces in the city the stories
explore.
“Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms,” the narrator of “Araby” tells us. On the opening page of the book, the narrator of “The Sisters,” recalling the paralyzing stroke that killed a priest with whom he had a peculiarly close relationship as a boy, notes: “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.
It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.” This looking is the morbid business of the book itself, which often seems less a diagnosis than an autopsy.
“Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms,” the narrator of “Araby” tells us. On the opening page of the book, the narrator of “The Sisters,” recalling the paralyzing stroke that killed a priest with whom he had a peculiarly close relationship as a boy, notes: “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.
It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.” This looking is the morbid business of the book itself, which often seems less a diagnosis than an autopsy.
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