Dubliners in Its Epoch by Lilia Qian

I first searched Weston LaBarre’s scrapbook, a dense trove of exclusively James Joyce-related clippings, for something that would reveal to me some new secret about Dubliners. Instead, I found a wealth of commentary on Joyce’s later, more adventurous brainchild, Ulysses. Fascinating, but frustrating—what could a Ulysses review say about Dubliners?

This question conceived a new project altogether: finding a piece that could say something about both works at the same time. This seemed quite plausible; after all, many of the places and people in Dubliners make reappear in Ulysses.

This second search proved more fruitful than the first.

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In 1934, Padraic Colum, childhood friend of James Joyce, wrote in a review: “…no city and no citizenry have been presented with fuller knowledge than the Dublin and Dubliners of ‘Ulysses.’” I feel that I could perhaps replace the “Ulysses” in this sentence with “Dubliners,” and find the sentiment still acceptable.

The world of Ulysses captures the events of two men in one day in Dublin, 1904, which is the same year that Joyce began work on his short story collection, Dubliners. It appears that both works are borne of Joyce’s observations of a single Dublin. The lucid prose of Dubliners is a far cry from the nauseating prose experiments Joyce conducts in Ulysses, but Colum’s review offers a reminder that there is continuity between the works.

Both texts offer an earnest attempt to capture Dublin, the city that Joyce loved even in his later self-imposed exile. The footnotes seen in Dubliners reveal to modern readers the great pains Joyce took to retain historical and geographical precision: he mentions The Daily Express, a  “Dublin newspaper with Unionist leanings” and the Bog of Allen, a peat bog “west of Dublin; near Clongowes Wood School, which Stephen Dedalus attends in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Colum writes in his review of Ulysses: “The itinerary of Dublin is in ‘Ulysses,’ and merely as an itinerary it is extraordinarily complete—there is the seashore and the city bridges, the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, the library and the brothel the quay and the public garden, the newspaper office and the pub.”

Colum himself grew up near Dublin and was a lifelong friend of Joyce’s. His review speaks to a familiar recognition of the Dublin captured in Joyce’s work and makes a wistful remark that without one’s own memories of 1904 Dublin, it is not possible to fully experience his stories as intended: “Without knowing the Dublin of this closed epoch one cannot get the overtones of ‘Ulysses,’ particularly the comic overtones.” The same might be said of those somewhat obscure references in Dubliners. It is somewhat disheartening to hear; despite Joyce’s best efforts to preserve the reality he knew and the reader’s best efforts to comprehend them, there is still a gap that can only be filled by existing in the past.

Even as that thought strikes the mind, I find it immediately a boring thought—the same might be said for any age, any place, any work. Flipping through a scrapbook as comprehensive as Weston LaBarre’s can certainly make one wish that they had been alive in the moment when Joyce was, or even Colum, writing alongside the momentous federal court decision to release Ulysses from its publication ban. But the more interesting thought, I think, is to see the way Dubliners exists as a precursor to Ulysses. I now read Ulysses as Joyce’s attempt to overcome the obvious limitations of using short stories to preserve the enormity of his experience. Ulysses’ maximalism exposes what Dubliners’ concision omits. Some of Joyce’s Dublin is lost to history, but this is no tragedy—no artwork can preserve everything about a moment in time. More importantly, Joyce’s development as an artist is not lost on readers. I now imagine these snapshots of Dublin life as early meditations that began to turn the wheels in Joyce’s mind, priming him to begin the long and laborious work of truly understanding Dublin and its people.