The Dubliners

              Notes:

Nhân đọc 1 đấngg viết về Joyce và cuốn The Dubliners của ông, bèn nhớ ra bài này, của Vargas Llosa vs cách đọc của G. khi dịch 1 truyện ngắn trong đó, cho tờ Tập San Văn Chương: Cái truyện "Eveline", là nằm trong dòng Lưu Đầy và Quê Nhà của Camus, và có thể nói, từ "Trước Pháp Luật của Kafka": Cửa này chỉ dành cho mi, nhưng mi bây giờ đâu cần nó nữa!

Bản post trên tinvan.limot đã hoàn tất.

Cách Vargas Llosa đọc nó, đừng nghĩ là G. phách lối: thua G.

Vargas Llosa là 1 tác giả G rất mê, và đã từng giới thiệu rất nhiều bài viết, lúc mới ra hải ngoại.

Sau, thôi.

Kafka đã từng phán, bạn đọc để hỏi.

G. thêm vô: Bạn đọc, vì đau!                                               

                     Joyce's Dubliners      

                        

Good literature saturates certain cities, covering them with a pati 

mythology   and images that are more  resistant to the passing o 

years than their architecture and history. When I got to know Di 

iri the mid 19605, I felt betrayed: that lively and friendly city, fi 

exuberant  people who stopped  me  in the middle of the street t 

me where I  was from and invited me  for a beer, did not seem muc 

the city portrayed in the books of Joyce. A friend patiently actel 

guide as we  followed the  footsteps of Leopold  Bloom   through 

protracted twenty-four hours in Ulysses; the names  of the street 

many  locations and  addresses were  the same,  but yet it lacked the

solidity, the squalor and the metaphysical greyness of  Dublin in the 

novel. Had the same city once displayed both these aspects? 

   Of course, it was never like that. Because  although  Joyce s 

Flaubert's mania for documentation   and although   he (who   wa 

lack of scruples personified in everything  other than  writing) 

scrupulousness  in description to such precise lengths that he N 

ask in letters from Trieste and Zurich which flowers and   which 

could be  found on which precise corner, did not describe the ci 

his fictions: he invented it. And he did so•with such art and fol 

persuasion that the city of fantasy, nostalgia, bitterness and (aboi 

of  words that was his, remains in the   memory of his readers v 

power  far greater in terms of  dramatic quality and colour  tha 

ancient city of flesh and blood — or rather  of stone and clay - was its model. 

  "Dubliners"  marks   the first phase of  that duplication. The 

whelming   importance of Ulysses and Finnegans  Wake, literary e: 

ments that revolutionized  modern narrative, sometimes    causes 

forget that this book of stories,  which at least appears to  be 

traditional and subsidiary (its use of naturalistic realism, even fi 

date  when it was published,  1914,  was somewhat archaic), is 

minor work   of apprenticeship, but  rather the first masterpiece that 

Joyce wrote. It is an organic work,  not a compilation of texts. 

straight through, each story complements and  enriches the other and, 

  by the end, the reader has a vision of a compact society which he has 

  explored in its social complexities, in the psychology of the people, its 

  rituals, prejudices, enthusiasms, disputes and even its lewd underside. 

    Joyce  wrote the first story of the book, 'The Sisters', in 1904, when 

  he was  twenty-two,  at the request  of  the publisher  friend George 

  Russell, who paid him a pound  sterling and published the story in the 

' Dublin   newspaper Irish Homestead. Almost  immediately he  conceived 

  of the plan to write a series of stories that he would entitle Dubliners. 

  They would, as he  said to a friend in July of that year, 'betray the soul 

  of that hemiplegia or paralysis which   many consider a city.' The be- 

  trayal would be more subtle and far-reaching than he could have imag- 

  ined   when he wrote those lines; it would not mean attacking or deni- 

  grating the city in which  he had  been born, but rather removing  it 

  from the objective, transitory and circumstantial world of history, to 

  the fictional, atemporal and subjective world of great artistic creation. 

  In September and   December of that year, 'Eveline' and 'After the Race' 

  appeared in the  same newspaper.  Other stories, with the exception of 

  the last, 'The Dead',  were written  in Trieste, from May  to October 

  1905,  when Joyce  was  scraping a living giving English classes in the 

  Biarritz School,  borrowing money    from everyone to keep   Nora and 

  their recently born son, Giorgio, and to pay for the sporadic bouts of 

  drunkenness which  would leave him,  literally, in a comatose state. 

    By  then, distance  had   smoothed some of the  rough edges  of his 

  youthful feelings against Dublin, lending to his memories a nostalgia 

  which, albeit very contained and diffuse, appears from time to time as 

  an iridescence of landscape or as a soft background  music to the dia- 

  logues. At that time, he had already decided that Dublin would be the 

  protagonist of the book. In his letters from the  period, he states his 

  surprise that the city  had been ignored for so long:   'When you re- 

  member that Dublin  has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is 

  the "second"  city of the British Empire, and that it is nearly three 

  times as big as Venice, it seems strange that no artist has given it to the 

  world.' (letter to his brother Stanislaus, 24 September 1905). In the 

  same letter, he indicates that the structure of the book will correspond 

  to the development of a life: stories of childhood, of adolescence, of 

  maturity and, finally, stories of public or collective life. 

     The final story, the most ambitious and the one that would  embody 

  that idea of the 'public life' of the city, 'The Dead', was written some- 

  what  later — in 1906 —  to show  an  aspect of  Dublin which,  as he 

remarked  to  his brother Stanislaus, would   not appear in the  of 

stories: 'its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality, the latter "virti 

so far as I can  see does not exist elsewhere in  Europe' (letter of 

September   1906). The story is a real tour de force because we leave 

pages with the impression of having embraced   the collective life of 

city and, at the same time, of having glimpsed its most intimate secrl 

In its pages, among the varied society that comes to the annual dal 

of  the Misses Morkan,  we  find on display the great public  theme 

nationalism, politics, culture, encompassing the local customs and pr 

tices in dances, meals, clothes, the rhetoric of the speeches — and a 

the affinities and disputes that bring people  together or keep  ti 

apart. But, in an imperceptible way, all that crowd is narrowed dowr 

just one couple, Gabriel Conroy and his wife, Gretta. The story ends 

exploring the most    buried emotions  and feelings of Gabriel, as 

share  with him  the  disturbing revelation of the love  and  death 

Michael Furey, a sentimental episode in Gretta's early life. In its penf 

blending of the collective and the individual  and in the delicate t 

ance that it achieves between the objective and subjective, 'The De 

already prefigures Ulysses. 

  But despite all the narrative skill that it displays, 'The Dead' is I 

the best story in the book. I still prefer 'The Boarding House' and 

Painful Case', and their peerless mastery places them alongside cert 

texts  by Chekhov,   Maupassant, Poe   and Borges as among  the   m 

admirable examples of that genre — so brief and intense, as only poetry 

can be — which we call the short story. 

  In fact, all the stories in Dubliners reveal the hand of a consummate 

artist, not the novice writer that Joyce then was. Some, like 'After 

Race' and 'Araby', are not stories as such but rather prints or snapshots 

which capture for  eternity some of its inhabitants: the empty frivol 

of  certain wealthy young people or the awakening of an  adolescence 

the adult world of love. Others, by contrast, like 'The Boarding Hou 

and 'A Painful Case', condense in a few pages stories that reveal all 

psychological complexity  of a world  and, in particular, the emotio 

and sexual frustrations of a society that has metabolized its religi4 

restrictions and many prejudices into  institutions and customs. 

ever, although the vision of society which the short stories of Dubliners

displays is most severe — by turn  sarcastic, ironic or openly furious -

this is a secondary concern of the  book.  Beyond these  document 

and critical aspects, an artistic intention always prevail. What I mean is that the 

'realism' of Joyce is closer to Flaubert than to Zola. Ezra 

who   was  wrong in many things, but  always  right in aesthetic 

 was  one of the first to recognize this. When he read, in 1914, 

the manuscript of the book that  had  been  passed from publisher to 

er for some nine years, without anyone    making a  commitment 

ish it, Pound  pronounced  that the  prose was  the best being 

at the time in the literature of the English language — comparable

only to Conrad and  to Henry   James —  and that what was   most 

about  it was its 'objectivity'. 

observation  could not  be  more  accurate   and the definition 

to  Joyce's art as a whole.  And where  this  'objectivity' first 

 organizing  the world of  the narrative, giving coherence and 

: movement  to the style, establishing a system of involvement 

tance between  the reader and the text, is in Dubliners. What do 

in by 'objectivity' in art? A convention or an outward appear- 

'inch, in principle, presupposes nothing  about the success or 

of the work  and is, therefore, as legitimate as its opposite: 

tive' art. A story is 'objective' when it appears to be projected 

vely on to the exterior world, avoiding  the intimate, or when 

rator becomes invisible and what is narrated appears in the eyes 

reader as a  self-sufficient and impersonal object, not tied or 

 mated to anything outside itself, or when both techniques are 

ted in the same text, as occurs in the stories of Joyce. Objec- 

s a technique or, rather, the effect that a narrative technique can 

e when it works well, without awkwardness   or other flaws that 

letract from its effectiveness and make the reader feel that he is 

tim of rhetorical manipulation. In order to achieve this magic, 

-t suffered indescribably for the five years that it took  him 

e Madame    Bovary. Joyce, by contrast, who suffered  with the 

effort that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake  demanded of him, wrote 

theses stories quite quickly, with a facility that is astonishing (and 

demoralizing). 

Dublin of the stories is described as a sovereign world, without 

-tanks to the coldness of the prose which  outlines, with math- thermal

precision, the gaunt streets where ragged children play, the 

ng houses of the dingy  clerks, the bars where the bohemians get 

and arm wrestle, and  the parks and  back streets which are the 

setting for casual love. Variegated, diverse, human  fauna enliven its pages 

and sometimes certain individuals -mainly children, talk in the                                               

first person, recounting  some  failure or passion, or 

someone,  who   might be everyone or nobody, narrates 

is so unobtrusive, so discreet, so attached to those bei 

situations that it describes, that we constantly forge 

absorbed  in what is being narrated to notice that it is I 

us. 

  Is it a seductive, desirable world? Not at all. It is squalid, filled with

pettiness, rigidity and repression, over which the Church maintains a

tight, intolerable control and where nationalism, however explicable it 

might appear  to us as a reaction against the semi-color status of the

country,  breeds  warped cultural values and a certain mental 

provincialism in some  of its inhabitants.  But in order  to 

defects, we have to leave the world of the narrative an 

to reflect critically on it. Because, when we are immer 

the squalor could not be  more beautiful or the people 

temptible and  wretched — more fascinating. The attract 

or of a social nature: it is aesthetic. And the fact that 

distinction is, precisely, a feat of Joyce's genius. He 

small- number  of  contemporary  authors who have  able to  endow

the middle class — an unheroic class "par excellence" — with an heroic aura and in

with an  outstanding artistic personality; in this, he is once more 

following the example of Flaubert. Both  accomplish this very difficult 

feat: the artistic dignification of ordinary life. Through the sensibility 

with which it is recreated and through the  cunning with which 

the stories are told us,  the  everyday existence  of 

"bourgeois"  takes on, in the book, the  dimensions of a very rich adventure 

of a redoubtable human  experience.

 Joyce's 'naturalism', unlike Zola's, is not social; its only intention is 

aesthetic. This caused certain English  critics to accuse Dubliners of: 

being 'cynical' when it first appeared. Since they were used to a realist 

technique which   adorned its stories with  reforming intentions  and 

edifying sentiments, they were disturbed by  these fictions which did 

seem to  have a testimonial and historical basis and yet did not make 

explicit any moral condemnation  of the iniquities and injustices that 

they described. Joyce — who  called himself a socialist when he wrote 

these stories — was not interested in any of this, at least not when he 

sat down to write: he did not want to give information or opinions on a. 

specific reality, but rather recreate this reality, reinvent it, endowing a 

purely artistic existence with the dignity of a beautiful object. 

And that is is what characterizes and  differentiates the Dublin  of Joyce from the 

other, the fleeting, the real, Dublin: a society in a state of ferment 

 seething with dramas, dreams   and   problems which  has been 

metamorphosed  into a beautiful mural of the most refined forms, colours, taste

and music, into a great  verbal   symphony in   which 

out of tune,  where the shortest pause or note contributes to 

:t harmony  of the whole. The two  cities are similar, but this 

is a subtle and prolonged deception, for although the streets 

same  names,  as do the bars, the  shops  and the   boarding 

id although Richard Ellmann, in his admirable biography, has 

to identify almost all the real models for the characters in the 

Le distance between the two is infinite, because their essences 

.nt. The real city lacks that perfection which only the artistic 

F life — never life itself — can achieve. The ceaseless, dizzying 

f real life, life in the making, can never achieve that finished, 

form. The Dublin of the stories has been purged of imperfections  or ugliness                                                                                                                                                                                                       

been or, and this amounts to the same  thing, they  have 

transformed by the magic  wand  of style, into aesthetic qualities. 

m changed   into pure form, into a reality  whose essence is 

of that impalpable, evanescent matter which is the word; into 

; that is sensations  and associations, fantasy and   dream, 

n history and sociology. To say, as some critics have, that the city of 

Dubliners lacks a 'soul' is a tolerable formulation as long as no 

Es implied. The soul of the city where the boys  of An   Encounter"

avoid  the attentions of a homosexual, where the little shop-girl Eveline

wavers   between fleeing  to Buenos  Aires  or  remaining enclaved 

to her father and where Little Chandler broods on his melancholy as a  

frustrated  poet, is all on the surface. It is that most elegant, sensory 

outward   appearance which imposes an arbitrary grandeur   on 

tunes of the city's humble inhabitants. Life, in these fictions, 

  deep, unpredictable force which  animates  the real world, 

s intense precariousness, its unstable swings of fortune, but 

ort of glacial brilliance, a still flash, with which the objects 

cters have been suffused by means of verbal conjuring. 

ere is no better way  to illustrate this point than to  stop 

mplate, with the calm and insistence that a difficult painting 

those scenes  in Dubliners which   seem to pay homage  to  a 

aesthetic of sentimental convulsions  and narrative cruelty. 

at decision of Eveline, for example, not to run away with her 

lover, or the beating that the drunken   Farrington inflicts on his 

Tom   in  'Counterparts', as a way  of taking  his frustrations out 

someone,  or the grief  of Gabriel Conroy, at the end of  'The  De 

when  he  discovers the youthful passion of the consumptive   Micl 

Furey for his wife Gretta. These are episodes  which in any   Roma 

tale would lead to rhetorical effusions and an emotional and  mour 

overload. Here the prose has chilled them, giving them a plastic qw 

and stripping them   of any trace of  self-pity or emotional black] 

towards  the reader. Whatever confusion or delirium these scenes m 

contain  has disappeared and, through  the  workings of the prose, 

become  clear, pure and exact. And  it is precisely that coldness en 

oping these  excessive  episodes that excites the sensibility   of 

reader. Challenged   by the divine  indifference of  the narrator, 

reader reacts, enters the story emotionally and is moved by it. 

 It  is true that Joyce developed first in Ulysses and then in Finnq 

Wake  (although this novel takes his experimental audacity to unri 

able lengths) the skill and talent that he had shown earlier in For 

of the Artist as a Young Man   and in Dubliners. But the stories of 

first attempt at narrative  already express  what those   masterpi 

would  later confirm in abundant   measure: the  supreme ability ( 

writer, through use  of detailed memories  of the small world   of 

birth and through his extraordinary linguistic facility, to create a w 

of his  own. Both beautiful  and unreal, it is a world capable of 

suading us of a truth and an authenticity which are nothing  more 

the result of intellectual juggling, of rhetorical fireworks, a world t 

through  the act of reading, enriches our own,  showing us some ol 

keys  and helping us to understand it better. Above  all, it makes 

lives more  complete,  adding  something which,   on their   own, 

could never  have or never experience. 

London, 23 June 1987-