Dubliner (James Joyce)
Dubliner (Original title: Dubliners ) is a cycle of 15 short stories by the Irish writer James Joyce .
This first prose work by the author, who later became famous for his Ulysses , was written between 1904 and 1907, but was first published in book form by Grant Richards in 1914. Joyce claimed forty publishers had previously rejected the book.
Emergence
Joyce had started writing this book in Paris in 1904 . He had just left Dublin and was planning to study medicine in Paris when the death of his mother called him back to Dublin. In a farming newspaper, Joyce published three of the short stories that would later be included in the Dubliners. The Irish Homestead , later run by George (A. E.) Russell , offered him the opportunity to write a 1800-word story for a fee of one pound. The first version of The Sisters , Eveline and After the Race then appeared . After violent protests from the readers (who had expected an easier to read, entertaining story), the fourth story was rejected. In 1907 Joyce finished the cycle in Trieste.
Content and style
The stories are all set in Dublin, the author's birth town, with which he had a love-hate relationship throughout his life. In them the world of the small to middle class is portrayed, an autobiographical component. In a loose chronological order - from the experiences of a child to those of older people - the majority of the stories deal with the motive of a futile departure, the stagnation of change, the paralysis of Irish society.
As is usually the case with Joyce, the lyrics are poor in external plot. The author is concerned with a differentiated psychological representation of the characters, with their inner view. Therefore he works mostly with the stylistic device of the experienced speech (a forerunner of the inner monologue ), whereby he adapts the (narrative) language to the characters - this in turn a specifically Joyce form. The text shows a multitude of poetic figures: Joyce experiments with word and context ellipses as well as with motif textures (a motif runs through the entire text in various variations), he develops the introduction of the step-like introduction, tries out punchlines and sharpens his " Epiphany ", the lighting up of an essential feature at a special moment.
stories
The Sisters
The story is about the death of the Reverend James Flynn, told from the perspective of a boy whose fatherly friend and mentor the clergyman had obviously been to the last and who had taught him general education, ethics and religion in conversation. The action takes place on the evening of death and on the following day.
Even before he learns of his friend's death, the boy ponders that there will be no more hope for him after his third stroke. When he comes home to his aunt and uncle, he receives news of the priest's death from a family friend who is staying there. From the conversations of the adults it becomes clear that they considered the dead, who had apparently been relieved of his office for some time, to be mentally ill and not quite right in the head.
The next day the boy at the mourning house (where an obituary notice hangs) ascertains that the news of his friend's death is correct, but does not dare to enter the house. Only in the evening does he and his aunt visit the mourning house, where they are led into the death room by the dead man's two sisters. From the conversations of the adults, the boy again gains insights into their perspective on his deceased friend: “ It was this chalice that he broke ... That is where it started. Of course, they say it wasn't bad that there wasn't anything in it, I mean. But still ... "The impression arises that after the event mentioned with the chalice, the Reverend gradually fell into madness :" Wide awake and as if he were laughing to himself ... so of course when they saw it, they thought, that something was wrong with him ... "
The first version of the story was written in 1904 as the first of the stories from "Dubliner" and was published on August 13, 1904 in " The Irish Homestead " (under the pseudonym " Stephen Daedalus "); It was received very mixed by the predominantly devout Catholic readers, since the behavior of the priest before his death did not correspond to the current expectations of a priest of the time. 1906 revised Joyce the story strongly and added, among other things at the beginning, the reflections of the boy about the " paralysis " (the one hand perceived as a result of the strokes of the priest, but on the other hand, together with the other later mentioned symptoms as signs of syphilis disease infection could be interpreted). This revised version was published in book form in 1914 together with the other stories.
Style and construction work again and again with a texture of the ellipses: directly with the "..." ellipses, with warning-indistinct allusions in the suggestive conversations during the visit to the house of the dead, with the priest's face attached to a confession in the boy's dream and in the Memory of the enigmatic age-wise or age-crazy smile of the deceased (about the faith, about the believers?). The paralysis of the city is made clear by Joyce by circling the hot porridge, in the common silence by the prejudiced and the - insane - wise men.
An Encounter
During a skipped school day, the first-person narrator and his friend roam the more distant suburbs of Dublin in search of adventure. Out in a field they finally meet an older man who sits down with them and u. a. about boys' interest in girls and the need for corporal punishment and spanking. The boys are more and more irritated and eventually run away in different ways.
The motivation of the man approaching, whose conversation is presumably an approach with pedophile-sadistic intent, remains obscure: On the one hand he speaks enigmatically and as if about a secret, on the other hand " his thoughts (...) slowly circled round after round in the same orbit ", without the first-person narrator being able to grasp the core. Once the man gets up briefly and seems to be masturbating in sight of the children : “ Well, something! Look what he's doing! “Exclaims the friend of the first-person narrator.
A double unsolved riddle determines the story: on the one hand, the first-person narrator does not want to look closely at what the older man is “doing”, on the other hand he is fascinated by the man's views and by his voice: “ I was still wondering whether I should leave or not when the man came back and sat down next to us again . ”In these conflicting tendencies there is a temporary paralysis of the figure. While the friend has the courage to ask cheeky questions from the beginning of the encounter and eludes himself by chasing a cat, the narrator ultimately only succeeds with great willpower in following his stronger friend.
As later in other stories by the Dubliners ( After the Race, Two Cavaliers, A Little Cloud, Correspondences, A Sad Case ), Joyce contrasts the protagonists with plot concepts that explain the Irish misery in their differences.
Arabia (Araby)
The story describes the narrator's first romance with his friend's sister and at the same time his departure into the new land of puberty. “Araby” is the oriental bazaar in Dublin, of which the narrator has promised his beloved something to bring back and “Araby” is also the metaphor for the distant, unknown. But because his uncle comes home very late, the boy cannot leave until after 9 p.m. and 10 minutes before it closes in the large hall with the gallery, where almost all the stands are already closed, like him - got angry and himself feeling ridiculous - notes.
At the end of the day, the basic figure is the abortion of a departure: the bazaar - almost without customers and salespeople - is just an empty, dark shell of hustle and bustle, a gigantic ellipse in which the boy's plan fails.
Eveline
The story describes the last hours before the departure, yes escape, of a 19-year-old from Dublin together with her lover on a ship to Buenos Aires . In her mind's eye, she reminisces the games of her youth, the familiar objects in the house, the mother's madness, the father's increasing violence after her death, her work as a saleswoman ... Finally, at the very last moment, she lacks strength to free herself from her ties to her homeland: On the trail of her mad mother, she clings to the bars on North Wall Quay in a panic - and stays behind.
The very first sentence hints at the theme of bondage and liberation, of resignation and violence: “ She sat at the window and watched the evening penetrate the street. “Then gradually a texture of futility emerges through the following allusions to the theme of a change that is both positively experienced and negatively or passively accepted.
After the Race
Jimmy, the son of a butcher who got rich in Dublin, enjoys the company of his apparently wealthy and urbane French acquaintances after a ride in a racing car. They offer him a financial stake in an automobile business and take him out of some card games on an American's sailing yacht, which he does not defend himself against. The hustle and bustle and skillful control of the conversation by the continental Europeans is countered by Jimmy, a child on the island, only with his constant "excitement", which makes it easier to pull him over the table.
The theme of paralysis is varied here as a slowing down of all movements that freeze in stages. The story begins with the racing cars racing into open Dublin and ends in the closed cabin of the sailing boat, in which the naive Jimmy loses his money to his buddies. While Jimmy is enjoying his “dark anesthesia” caused by the long game and the alcohol, the others are getting ready for new adventures despite the night of partying: “ The day is breaking, gentlemen. "
Two Gallants
Two young men in their early thirties are strolling through the early August evening and are talking about one of the rendezvous with a maid. Corley , her admirer, is a fat, self-satisfied, slow-thinking and waddling-walking son of a police inspector on his way into petty crime: He wants to get the girl who is in love with him to steal from his masters for him that evening.
While the couple first take the tram to a comfortable spot in one of Dublin's suburbs, Lenehan , the other, waits impatiently for the story to end. He is the sportier of the two men, brisk and fearless, smaller and smarter - but still on the verge of despair over the hopelessness of his life situation: no regular work, no money, no home. After wandering the streets of Dublin at night, his friend actually presented him with the success of the evening: a small gold coin stolen from their rule.
The winner of the tale is Corley , who personifies the paralysis of this town with his family relationships, attitudes and stature. Lenehan, on the other hand, possesses a number of talents and is “ equipped with an enormous supply of stories, limericks and puzzles ” (Joyce's preferences too), but all efforts have so far not improved his precarious position. But what future can Dublin have if not even the almost sympathetic Lenehan ?
The Boarding House
It tells the story of the moment when the landlady of a guesthouse had one of her regular guests called over to her on a Sunday morning to accuse him of dishonoring her daughter and to extort the promise of a marriage from him.
The time told is about 20 minutes before going to church, but the prehistory tells of the life of the determined landlady, full of disappointments, of the life of the lover, worried about his reputation and his career, and of his little romance with Polly, the landlady's daughter .
The building blocks of the story are spread out in great economy and arranged according to the climax, the calling down of the guest from his room. The actual negotiation is treated elliptically : Joyce has only indicated it with a dotted line. As a substitute, however, he describes the gradual brightening of Polly's mood in her sin room upstairs, while on the ground floor the landlady increases the pressure step by step on her daughter's lover.
Above all, the landlady proves to be business-minded and the moral is tightly calculated: It was her intention to make the pension more attractive for the male guests through the presence of the pretty daughter, that " little perverted Madonna " - and the ensuing romance among them she could approve of her roof in order to get her daughter under the hood.
A little cloud
Thomas Little Chandler, a small office worker in Dublin, has an appointment with his childhood friend Gallaher, who emigrated to London and became a star journalist there. On the way to the agreed bar, the timid Chandler feels the desire to break out of the misery he has observed in Dublin. But in the course of the conversation with Gallaher and then at home with his wife and child, he realizes more and more that he will not change his own path: “ He would always stay in Dublin because he stood in his own way . “This dream of departure is the quickly dissolving“ little cloud ”.
Chandler's vision of a poetic career, as quickly as it emerges, is dismantled again by Chandler himself: he is small, his body fragile, he quickly becomes fearful and excited and has to "brave" run through his own city, he sips only on his whiskey, while his friend " boldly pulls the glass to his mouth ". Many object descriptions and the personal characteristics of Chandler repeatedly emphasize the contrast to the necessary “boldness”. The initial glow of the late autumn sunset contrasts strongly with the petty-bourgeois domestic ambience, the cold and the hatred of the Chandlers in the last part.
Correspondences (counterparts)
Farrington, an office clerk and alcoholic, gets through the rest of his working day tiredly and lands a surprisingly quick-witted coup against his boss. Then he starts a train through three Dublin pubs where he brags about his idea. But he loses arm wrestling and comes home with no money and not even really drunk. At least he still manages to brutally beat his little son there as an alternative.
The main character is a personification of self-pity: Compared to the small, fragile, quickened and eager boss from the north, "the man", as Farrington is often called distantly without his name, is the "corresponding" opposite: with a "sagging face", “Heavy steps”, “dirty white” in the eye and unclear thoughts in the head, often thirsty, quick-tempered and vengeful. The self-inflicted failure, the feeling of humiliation and the resulting violence towards his drinking buddies, his wife and the child - Joyce's Irish description of the state.
Earth (clay)
Maria, a small and inconspicuous, perhaps also ugly woman, goes to one of her former foster sons after her work in a Dublin laundry facility, who now has a family and children of his own. They want to celebrate Halloween together and she buys a thick piece of plum cake on the way, which she loses on the tram because of her confusion from a friendly older man. When the children of her foster son play, she is distracted by her embarrassing loss, but when she hits the pot in a way, blindfolded, she reaches into an indecent "soft, damp mass": earth from the garden. "M aria understood that something was not right this time ... ", but she is allowed to end the evening with the performance of her longing song: " In a dream I saw myself in the marble hall ... "
The adjective “nice” is used eleven times to describe the main character's expectations and judgments. She thinks she is a woman with a “nice little body” and dreams of love and marriage, but on the way to her destination “life” breaks more and more into her world: she remembers that the birth mother both of them Had neglected foster brothers and the brothers hate each other today, then she loses the plum cake and in the end she reaches into the disgusting earth - a story of irony with which life tramples through a milkmaid bill. But Joyce does not denounce his main character, but remains in solidarity with her, whose willingness and at the same time not being able to otherwise he shows empathetically.
A Painful Case
An intellectually keen and accurate bank cashier who lives alone meets the lonely wife of a captain at a concert. During a variety of concerts, walks and conversations they discover their kinship. But once the woman takes his hand tenderly, the cashier becomes too close: He ends the relationship that has now pushed beyond the Platonic and misses the start of a perhaps fulfilled last phase of life.
Four years later, by chance, he reads in the newspaper about the fatal accident of his acquaintances while crossing the tracks on which the train had hit them - a late consequence of their alcohol consumption, which had become massive two years ago. The bank clerk, frozen in his neatness, only gradually accepts his share in the death of this woman who loved him and looks forward to a lonely life that will be forgotten.
Ivy Day in the Committee Room
As part of an election campaign for Dublin City Council, election officials meet in a boardroom on a cold October day to discuss the campaign and the alternatives of choice. All are adorned with the ivy leaf on the lapel to commemorate the anniversary of Charles Stewart Parnell's death. During his occasional mention, the election officials chat about their lack of commitment due to the rain and their too thin shoes, about the ingratiation with the British, about the immoral way of life of King Edward VII and the shrewdness of the election candidates.
Parnell and his visions of Irish autonomy are only thought of as if they were compulsory exercises. But when the grandfather Old Jack lit the fire again, " his crouching shadow rose up on the opposite wall, and slowly his face dipped back up into the light ." The story is not completely frozen yet.
Charles Stewart Parnell , 1846-1891, was an Irish nationalist and leader of a consistent opposition to England. His political goal was the Irish Home Rule . Parnell was seen as an Irish national hero and was often referred to as the "uncrowned King of Ireland". With a divorce suit brought by a captain against his wife, who had a relationship with Parnell, the English succeeded in dividing his Nationalist Party, which his supporters - u. a. the Joyce family - viewed as a betrayal of the Catholic Church and part of the Irish nationalists of the Irish cause.
A mother
A mother from Dublin's better society helps prepare a series of concerts. With a contract, she regulates the paid appearance of her daughter as the accompanist of the singers on the piano at four consecutive concerts. Over the payment of her daughter she sparked a superfluous dispute (if there is a contract and the mother keeps it, the concert committee will have to pay too), which threatens to prevent the last concert. With this scandal, her daughter's career as a piano player in Dublin came to an end before her real start.
The mother escalates this argument because of an alleged disrespect for her at the expense of the audience and at the expense of her own daughter. In doing so, she has done her interests a disservice - a parable for the citizens of Dublin who sacrificed the common good of their short-sightedness from Joyce's political standpoint.
Grace
Tom Kernan falls drunk down the stairs in a pub. His comrades visit the convalescent at home and promise his disaffected wife: " We will make a new person out of him ." If the friends can improve Tom, then only through a "plot": In a chat at his sick bed about Jesuits, priests, She coaxed the popes out of him to accompany her to a penance service. The common “dancing” there is as little religiously motivated as the indulgence sermon , which exhorts the businessmen present to put their “accounts” in order before God. Those present will understand it this way: grace is still for sale.
The story travesties the "spiritual matter": The faith of Tom Kernan, a traveling salesman, and his friends, three respected employees of the authorities and a shopkeeper, is perhaps just reaching the depth of the usual low of their whiskey glasses - too little for officially deeply Catholic Ireland. Ellmann (see bibliography) refers to the parody of Dante's Divine Comedy , in which the composition "begins with the hell of a Dublin bar, leads to the purgatory of the recovery of a drunkard and ends with the paradise of a highly secularized Dublin church."
The Dead
- See also: The Dead (James Joyce)
This last and most extensive story (50 printed pages) forms the focus of the collection. The story is considered “an axis in Joyce's work” (Ellmann) and was written as early as 1906/07 at the age of 24/25. The theme is the annual ball of the three maidens Morkan: the arrival of certain guests, the dances, the music, the food, the conversations and above all the thoughts of Gabriel Conroy, the young protagonist.
In a dozen surprising changes of mood, described in detail, the characters experience how thin the friendly varnish of their unsettled relationships is. Again and again in the friendly conversations that begin, mutual peaks and injuries develop, which reveal the fragile ice of the relationships under the surface of the exuberance of the party - the characters live in a persistent uncertainty about the appreciation of their person in the eyes of the others and in doubt about them Sincerity of favors. Joyce's analysis of the conversations at the festival shows again and again that the Irish society gathered there is also full of friction, full of conflicts and full of life that could break open the "paralysis" he so hated from within.
Only at the end of the understanding, which had failed because of the many conversation cliffs, is there a threefold reconciliation: the general laughter when the guests leave, the singer's remorse after his sudden harshness and - the key point - the forgiveness in which Gabriel his wife's romance with someone who died prematurely Admirer forgives and reconciles, but decides to travel with her to her family origins in the west of the island. Die Toten is the only story by the Dubliners that does not ironically demonstrate an Irish weakness in individuals, but rather in an entire group that portrays something general human. It is often interpreted autobiographically as the processing of personal memories, especially of Joyce's jealousy of a childhood friend of his wife, who died early of tuberculosis. But the fear “that the dead city could unduly encroach on the living one” (Ellmann) or the wilder west of the Irish island on the more cultivated east is also becoming clear.
An interesting side aspect is that this ending, and thus that of the Dubliners, represents the same situation overall with which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake , Joyce's two great novels, end, namely one of them lying awake in bed Spouse pondering the other in an internal monologue . Despite all the distance to the Irish paralysis, Joyce lets his main character Gabriel fall asleep reconciled and the Dubliners end with the vague possibility of a common future:
"Slowly his soul disappeared while he heard the snow falling silently through space, and silently it fell, like the descent of their last hour, on all living and dead."
The interpretation in the larger context
reception
The order of the stories is interpreted in different ways by literary criticism: some see chronological-autobiographical features in them, others seek a deeper meaning behind the relocation of their topographical reference points for the author's examination of his hometown. Joyce's biographer Jean Paris understands the stories as examples of sins in the Catholic sense: In his opinion, the first three stories tell of the decline of the three theological virtues of faith , hope and love ; The seven stories from After the Race to A Painful Case deal with the seven deadly sins of pride , avarice , fornication , envy , anger , gluttony and indolence , with each story also cumulatively containing the previously thematized sins; the last four stories would have violated the classic cardinal virtues of valor , justice , temperance, and wisdom .
Joyce on the "Dubliners"
Joyce himself referred to the Dubliners as "caricatures" and as "written by a pen directed with malice" (Ellmann: James Joyce ) or as "exposing the soul of that paralysis that many consider to be a city."
Anthony Burgess , who worked with Joyce for Everyone through Joyce , named the chapter on this book "A Paralyzed City":
“But when we dive into Joyce's books, we fall into a kind of Dublin. The hill of Howth stands for the man, the River Liffey for the woman, and in the end the city is a metaphysical one, suitable for the spread of human history par excellence. But before we can get to this stage of perfection, we must first see Dublin as the paradigm of all modern cities, as a stage for the portrayal of paralysis, as the tainted nest of a poet. "
"Dubliner" as a forerunner of "Ulysses"
There is a twofold relationship to Joyce's later novel Ulysses : The description of the daily routine of an ad sales agent named Leopold Bloom was originally intended to be just one of the narratives in this book before Joyce decided to develop it into a novel.
In the “Irrfelsen” chapter of Ulysses , Joyce relies structurally on his volume of short stories in which he describes episodes from the lives of some Dubliners in 19 short sections. Dubliner can therefore be regarded as an “introduction” to the world in which Ulysses later plays.
expenditure
- James Joyce: Dubliners . Bantam Books, New York 2005 (Bantam Classics), ISBN 0-553-21380-6 .
Translations
- James Joyce: Dubliner . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1969 a. ö., ISBN 3-518-03386-7 . German by Dieter E. Zimmer .
- James Joyce: Dubliner . Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1994 a. ö., ISBN 978-3-15-020226-5 . German by Harald Beck.
- James Joyce: "Earth" (from the Dubliner book) . Edward Viesel Media, Bad Belzig 2012. German by Edward Viesel. E-book in HTML, PDF and EPUB
Radio play editing
- Dubliner , radio play in twelve parts. Translated from the English by Dieter E. Zimmer . With Karin Anselm , Bibiana Beglau , Florian Fischer , Peter Fricke , Christian Friedel , Sylvester Groth , Paul Herwig , Brigitte Hobmeier , Nico Holonics , Thomas Thieme . Director: Ulrich Lampen , Production: BR Radio Play and Media Art 2012. The production was published on 8 CDs by Hörverlag . ISBN 978-3-86717-834-1 .
CD
- The dead , reading. Voiced by Christian Brückner . Parlando Verlag, ISBN 978-3-941004-31-3
literature
- John Brannigan: York Notes on James Joyce's "Dubliners" . Longman, London 1998, ISBN 0-582-32911-6 .
- Anthony Burgess : Joyce for Everyone . Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-627-10239-8 .
- Jörg Drews : Dubliners . In: Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers new literature lexicon . Study edition, Kindler Verlag, Munich 1996. Vol. 8, Ho – Jz, pp. 907–908, ISBN 3-89836-214-0 .
- Richard Ellmann: James Joyce . Revised and supplemented edition. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-518-39077-5 .
- Don Gifford: Joyce Annotated. Notes for 'Dubliners' and 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' . Second Edition, revised and enlarged. University of California Press, Berkeley 1982, ISBN 978-0-520-04610-8 .
- Klaus Reichert (Ed.): Joyces Dubliner . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-38552-6 .
- Ulrich Schneider: James Joyce: Dubliners . Fink, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7705-2063-7 .
- Andrew Thacker (Ed.): Dubliners, James Joyce . Palgrave, Basingstoke 2006, ISBN 0-333-77770-0 .
