Joyce's Dubliners: A Comprehensive Portrait of Dublin and Its Citizens, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Joyce's Dubliners: A Comprehensive Portrait of Dublin and Its Citizens e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Sigmund Freud  Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was a physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century. Working initially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the structural investigation of which is the proper province of psychology. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression, and he proposed a tripartite account of the mind’s structure—all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Notwithstanding the multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud’s original work. Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artifacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily fruitful, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields including psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation. However, Freud’s most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a successful science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy. HIS THOUGHT  Although a highly original thinker, Freud was also deeply influenced by a number of diverse factors which overlapped and interconnected with each other to shape the development of his thought. As indicated above, both Charcot and Breuer had a direct and immediate impact upon him, but some of the other factors, though no less important than these, were of a rather different nature. First of all, Freud himself was very much a Freudian—his father had two sons by a previous marriage, Emmanuel and Philip, and the young Freud often played with Philip’s son John, who was his own age. Freud’s self-analysis, which forms the core of his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams, originated in the emotional crisis which he suffered on the death of his father and the series of dreams to which this gave rise. This analysis revealed to him that the love and admiration which he had felt for his father were mixed with very contrasting feelings of shame and hate (such a mixed attitude he termed ambivalence). Particularly revealing was his discovery that he had often fantasized as a youth that his half-brother Philip (who was of an age with his mother) was really his father, and certain other signs convinced him of the deep underlying meaning of this fantasy—that he had wished his real father dead because he was his rival for his mother’s affections. This was to become the personal (though by no means exclusive) basis for his theory of the Oedipus complex. Secondly, and at a more general level, account must be taken of the contemporary scientific climate in which Freud lived and worked. In most respects, the towering scientific figure of nineteenth century science was Charles Darwin, who had published his revolutionary Origin of Species when Freud was four years old. The evolutionary doctrine radically altered the prevailing conception of man—whereas before, man had been seen as a being different in nature from the members of the animal kingdom by virtue of his possession of an immortal soul, he was now seen as being part of the natural order, different from non-human animals only in degree of structural complexity. This made it possible and plausible, for the first time, to treat man as an object of scientific investigation, and to conceive of the vast and varied range of human behavior, and the motivational causes from which it springs, as being amenable in principle to scientific explanation. Much of the creative work done in a whole variety of diverse scientific fields over the next century was to be inspired by, and derive sustenance from, this new world-view, which Freud with his enormous esteem for science, accepted implicitly. An even more important influence on Freud however, came from the field of physics. The second fifty years of the nineteenth century saw monumental advances in contemporary physics, which were largely initiated by the formulation of the principle of the conservation of energy by Helmholz. This principle states, in effect, that the total amount of energy in any given physical system is always constant, that energy quanta can be changed but not annihilated, and that consequently when energy is moved from one part of the system, it must reappear in another part. The progressive application of this principle led to monumental discoveries in the fields of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and nuclear physics which, with their associated technologies, have so comprehensively transformed the contemporary world. As we have seen, when he first came to the University of Vienna, Freud worked under the direction of Ernst Brücke who in 1873-4 published his Lecture Notes on Physiology (Vorlesungen über Physiologie. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller), setting out the view that all living organisms, including humans, are essentially energy-systems to which, no less than to inanimate objects, the principle of the conservation of energy applies. Freud, who had great admiration and respect for Brücke, quickly adopted this new dynamic physiology with enthusiasm. From there it was but a short conceptual step— but one which Freud was the first to take, and on which his claim to fame is largely grounded—to the view that there is such a thing as psychic energy, that the human personality is also an energy-system, and that it is the function of psychology to investigate the modifications, transmissions and conversions of psychic energy within the personality which shape and determine it. This latter conception is the very cornerstone of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS  Freud’s theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic—a fact which, given the nature of nineteenth century science, should not be surprising. Freud was arguably the first thinker to apply deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental, and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behavior is explicable only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states which determine it. Thus, instead of treating the behavior of the neurotic as being causally inexplicable—which had been the prevailing approach for centuries—Freud insisted, on the contrary, on treating it as behavior for which it is meaningful to seek an explanation by searching for causes in terms of the mental states of the individual concerned. Hence the significance which he attributed to slips of the tongue or pen, obsessive behavior and dreams—all these, he held, are determined by hidden causes in the person’s mind, and so they reveal in covert form what would otherwise not be known at all. This suggests the view that freedom of the will is, if not completely an illusion, certainly more tightly circumscribed than is commonly believed, for it follows from this that whenever we make a choice we are governed by hidden mental processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no control. The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental states at all is a direct function of Freud’s determinism, his reasoning here being simply that the principle of causality requires that such mental states should exist, for it is evident that there is frequently nothing in the conscious mind which can be said to cause neurotic or other behavior. An unconscious mental process or event, for Freud, is not one which merely happens to be out of consciousness at a given time, but is rather one which cannot, except through protracted psychoanalysis, be brought to the forefront of consciousness. The postulation of such unconscious mental states entails, Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud’s account of this is as follows: when a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be reprehensible (for example, a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child towards the parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the mind to push this impulse away, to repress it into the unconscious. Repression is thus one of the central defense mechanisms by which the ego seeks to avoid internal conflict and pain, and to reconcile reality with the demands of both id and super-ego. As such it is completely normal and an integral part of the developmental process through which every child must pass on the way to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed—it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can give rise to the dysfunctional behavior characteristic of neuroses. This is one reason why dreams and slips of the tongue possess such a strong symbolic significance for Freud, and why their analysis became such a key part of his treatment—they represent instances in which the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the repressed drives are accordingly able to present themselves to the conscious mind in a transmuted form. The difference between normal repression and the kind of repression which results in neurotic illness is one of degree, not of kind—the compulsive behavior of the neurotic is itself a manifestation of an instinctual drive repressed in childhood. Such behavioral symptoms are highly irrational (and may even be perceived as such by the neurotic), but are completely beyond the control of the subject because they are driven by the now unconscious repressed impulse. Freud positioned the key repressions for both, the normal individual and the neurotic, in the first five years of childhood, and of course, held them to be essentially sexual in nature; since, as we have seen, repressions which disrupt the process of infantile sexual development in particular, according to him, lead to a strong tendency to later neurosis in adult life. The task of psychoanalysis as a therapy is to find the repressions which cause the neurotic symptoms by delving into the unconscious mind of the subject, and by bringing them to the forefront of consciousness, to allow the ego to confront them directly and thus to discharge them. PSYCHOANALYSIS AS THERAPHY  Freud’s account of the sexual genesis and nature of neuroses led him naturally to develop a clinical treatment for treating such disorders. This has become so influential today that when people speak of psychoanalysis they frequently refer exclusively to the clinical treatment; however, the term properly designates both the clinical treatment and the theory which underlies it. The aim of the method may be stated simply in general terms—to re-establish a harmonious relationship between the three elements which constitute the mind by excavating and resolving unconscious repressed conflicts. The actual method of treatment pioneered by Freud grew out of Breuer’s earlier discovery, mentioned above, that when a hysterical patient was encouraged to talk freely about the earliest occurrences of her symptoms and fantasies, the symptoms began to abate, and were eliminated entirely when she was induced to remember the initial trauma which occasioned them. Turning away from his early attempts to explore the unconscious through hypnosis, Freud further developed this talking cure, acting on the assumption that the repressed conflicts were buried in the deepest recesses of the unconscious mind. Accordingly, he got his patients to relax in a position in which they were deprived of strong sensory stimulation, and even keen awareness of the presence of the analyst (hence the famous use of the couch, with the analyst virtually silent and out of sight), and then encouraged them to speak freely and uninhibitedly, preferably without forethought, in the belief that he could thereby discern the unconscious forces lying behind what was said. This is the method of free-association, the rationale for which is similar to that involved in the analysis of dreams—in both cases the super-ego is to some degree disarmed, its efficiency as a screening mechanism is moderated, and material is allowed to filter through to the conscious ego which would otherwise be completely repressed. The process is necessarily a difficult and protracted one, and it is therefore one of the primary tasks of the analyst to help the patient recognize, and overcome, his own natural resistances, which may exhibit themselves as hostility towards the analyst. However, Freud always took the occurrence of resistance as a sign that he was on the right track in his assessment of the underlying unconscious causes of the patient’s condition. The patient’s dreams are of particular interest, for reasons which we have already partly seen. Taking it that the super-ego functioned less effectively in sleep, as in free-association, Freud made a distinction between the manifest content of a dream (what the dream appeared to be about on the surface) and its latent content (the unconscious, repressed desires or wishes which are its real object). The correct interpretation of the patient’s dreams, slips of tongue, free- associations, and responses to carefully selected questions leads the analyst to a point where he can locate the unconscious repressions producing the neurotic symptoms, invariably in terms of the patient’s passage through the sexual developmental process, the manner in which the conflicts implicit in this process were handled, and the libidinal content of the patient’s family relationships. To create a cure, the analyst must facilitate the patient himself to become conscious of unresolved conflicts buried in the deep recesses of the unconscious mind, and to confront and engage with them directly. In this sense, then, the object of psychoanalytic treatment may be said to be a form of self-understanding—once this is acquired it is largely up to the patient, in consultation with the analyst, to determine how he shall handle this newly-acquired understanding of the unconscious forces which motivate him. One possibility, mentioned above, is the channeling of sexual energy into the achievement of social, artistic or scientific goals—this is sublimation, which Freud saw as the motivating force behind most great cultural achievements. Another possibility would be the conscious, rational control of formerly repressed drives—this is suppression. Yet another would be the decision that it is the super-ego and the social constraints which inform it that are at fault, in which case the patient may decide in the end to satisfy the instinctual drives. But in all cases the cure is created essentially by a kind of catharsis or purgation—a release of the pent-up psychic energy, the constriction of which was the basic cause of the neurotic illness. FREUD’S DISCOVERY  At a less theoretical, but no less critical level, it has been alleged that Freud did make a genuine discovery which he was initially prepared to reveal to the world. However, the response he encountered was so ferociously hostile that he masked his findings and offered his theory of the unconscious in its place (see Masson, J. The Assault on Truth). What he discovered, it has been suggested, was the extreme prevalence of child sexual abuse, particularly of young girls (the vast majority of hysterics are women), even in respectable nineteenth century Vienna. He did in fact offer an early seduction theory of neuroses, which met with fierce animosity, and which he quickly withdrew and replaced with the theory of the unconscious. As one contemporary Freudian commentator explains it, Freud’s change of mind on this issue came about as follows: Questions concerning the traumas suffered by his patients seemed to reveal [to Freud] that Viennese girls were extraordinarily often seduced in very early childhood by older male relatives. Doubt about the actual occurrence of these seductions was soon replaced by certainty that it was descriptions about childhood fantasy that were being offered. (MacIntyre). In this way, it is suggested, the theory of the Oedipus complex was generated. This statement begs a number of questions, not least, what does the expression extraordinarily often mean in this context? By what standard is this being judged? The answer can only be: By the standard of what we generally believe—or would like to believe—to be the case. But the contention of some of Freud’s critics here is that his patients were not recalling childhood fantasies, but traumatic events from their childhood which were all too real. Freud, according to them, had stumbled upon and knowingly suppressed the fact that the level of child sexual abuse in society is much higher than is generally believed or acknowledged. If this contention is true—and it must at least be contemplated seriously—then this is undoubtedly the most serious criticism that Freud and his followers have to face. Further, this particular point has taken on an added and even more controversial significance in recent years, with the willingness of some contemporary Freudians to combine the theory of repression with an acceptance of the wide-spread social prevalence of child sexual abuse. The result has been that in the United States and Britain in particular, many thousands of people have emerged from analysis with recovered memories of alleged childhood sexual abuse by their parents; memories which, it is suggested, were hitherto repressed. On this basis, parents have been accused and repudiated, and whole families have been divided or destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this in turn has given rise to a systematic backlash in which organizations of accused parents, seeing themselves as the true victims of what they term False Memory Syndrome, have denounced all such memory-claims as falsidical — the direct product of a belief in what they see as the myth of repression. (see Pendergast, M. Victims of Memory). In this way, the concept of repression, which Freud himself termed the foundation stone upon which the structure of psychoanalysis rests, has come in for more widespread critical scrutiny than ever before. Here, the fact that, unlike some of his contemporary followers, Freud did not himself ever countenance the extension of the concept of repression to cover actual child sexual abuse, and the fact that we are not necessarily forced to choose between the views that all recovered memories are either veridical or falsidical are frequently lost sight of in the extreme heat generated by this debate, perhaps understandably. d. The Efficacy of Psychoanalytic Therapy It does not follow that, if Freud’s theory is unscientific, or even false, it cannot provide us with a basis for the beneficial treatment of neurotic illness because the relationship between a theory’s truth or falsity and its utility-value is far from being an isomorphic one. The theory upon which the use of leeches to bleed patients in eighteenth century medicine was based was quite spurious, but patients did sometimes actually benefit from the treatment! And of course even a true theory might be badly applied, leading to negative consequences. One of the problems here is that it is difficult to specify what counts as a cure for a neurotic illness as distinct, say, from a mere alleviation of the symptoms. In general, however, the efficiency of a given method of treatment is usually clinically measured by means of a control group —the proportion of patients suffering from a given disorder who are cured by treatment X is measured by comparison with those cured by other treatments, or by no treatment at all. Such clinical tests as have been conducted indicate that the proportion of patients who have benefited from psychoanalytic treatment does not diverge significantly from the proportion who recover spontaneously or as a result of other forms of intervention in the control groups used. So, the question of the therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis remains an open and controversial one. and warmth of humanity that is arguably unsurpassed in fiction. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also remarkable for the intimacy of the reader’s contact with the central figure and contains some astonishingly vivid passages. The 15 short stories collected in Dubliners mainly focused upon Dublin life’s sordidness, but “The Dead” is one of the world’s great short stories. Critical opinion remains divided over Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake, a universal dream about an Irish family, composed in a multilingual style on many levels and aiming at a multiplicity of meanings, but, although seemingly unintelligible at first reading, the book is full of poetry and wit, containing passages of great beauty. Joyce’s other works—some verse (Chamber Music, 1907; Pomes Penyeach, 1927; Collected Poems, 1936) and a play, Exiles (1918)—though competently written, added little to his international stature. DUBLINERS  This is the title that Joyce gave to his collection of 15 short stories written over a three-year period (1904–07). Though he finished the final story, “The Dead,” in spring of 1907, difficulties in finding a publisher and Joyce’s initial refusal to alter any passage thought to be objectionable kept it from being published by Grant Richards until 1914. From their inception, Joyce intended the stories to be part of a thematically unified and chronologically ordered series. It was a searing analysis of Irish middle- and lower-middle-class life, with Dublin not simply as its geographical setting but as the emotional and psychological locus as well. 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 the centre of 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. (Letters, I.134) A number of times Joyce made clear his intention of presenting “Dublin to the world” (see Letters, II.122) at least as he conceived the city and its inhabitants. He did so in a direct, unadorned, realistic style that included unvarnished descriptive elements and commonplace diction. However, these elements that he saw as essential to conveying the gritty essence of his narrative vision proved to be obstacles to publication, as publishers feared that the realistic evocation of the city would give offense to the merchants whose businesses were named and the readers whose coarse everyday language was captured on the page. At the same time, as Joyce well knew, it is this attention to detail, the ordering of the stories according to the stages of human maturation, the pervasive theme of paralysis, manifest in multiple variations like entrapment, disillusionment, and death, and the stories’ common setting that give the collection coherence and provide a comprehensive and lifelike portrait of Dublin and its citizens. It would be a mistake, however, to read the collection as a vindictive assault upon the city in which Joyce grew to manhood. His significant use of the word moral also throws light on what he meant by “a style of scrupulous meanness.” It does not primarily signify ethical judgment or valuation; rather, derived from the Latin moralis, the word means the custom or behavior of a people, and Joyce is portraying the customs, behavior, and thoughts of the citizens of Dublin. In effect, he feels that by conveying a realistic impression of his city, readers of Dubliners will come to their own conclusions regarding its citizens. That is not to say that the narratives shy away from harsh representations. Rather, Joyce endeavors to capture as accurately as possible the atmosphere that he felt made life in the city so difficult for its inhabitants. The oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural, and economic forces on the lives of lower-middle-class Dubliners provided Joyce the raw material for a piercingly objective, psychologically realistic picture of Dubliners as an afflicted people. The arrangement of the stories and the use of imagery and symbolism peculiar to each and to its place within the whole sharpen the variations on Joyce’s central theme of a stultified city. “I call the series Dubliners,” Joyce wrote in August 1904 to his former classmate Constantine Curran, “to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city” (Letters, I.55). In the opening lines of “The Sisters,” paralysis confronts the reader as the collection’s initial and dominant theme. It emerges as more complex than simple inertia, evoking both stasis and an underlying sense of despair, a combination of resignation and loss that emerges throughout the collection. The psychological, spiritual, and emotional ambiances of the collection evolve slowly, along carefully delineated lines paralleling human growth and development. As early as 1905, Joyce had established a fourfold division of three stories each for Dubliners. Although this structure changed somewhat as the number of stories grew, its basic design remained intact. In the first maturational division of Dubliners, childhood, there are three stories: “The Sisters” (written in 1904 and first published that same year in the Iish Homestead under Joyce’s pseudonym, Stephen Daedalus), “An Encounter,” and “Araby” (both written in 1905). The second division, adolescence, includes four stories: “Eveline” and “After the Race” (both composed in 1904 and first published in that year in the Irish Homestead under the name of Stephen Daedelus), “Two Gallants” (written in 1905–06), and “The Boarding House” (written in 1905). The third group, adulthood, consists of four stories: “A Little Cloud” (composed in 1906), “Counterparts” (written at the same time as “The Boarding House” in 1905), “Clay” (composed in 1905–06), and “A Painful Case” (written in 1905). The fourth and last division, public life, consists of “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother,” “Grace” (all written in 1905), and “The Dead” (written in 1906– 07) In her essay “The Life Chronology of Dubliners,” Florence L. Walzl has examined the reasoning that motivated Joyce to order the stories in progressive stages corresponding to the stages of human life. According to Walzl, Joyce employed the terms childhood, adolescence, and maturity in ways that parallel the Roman division of life rather than the division commonly identified with these concepts. “Joyce had a strong awareness,” Walzl argues, “of the Roman divisions of the life span. His statements and practices indicate that he adopted the view that childhood (pueritia) extended to age seventeen; adolescence (adulescentia) from seventeen through the thirtieth year; young manhood (juventus) from thirty-one to forty-five, and old age (senectus) from forty-five on.” Joyce’s concern for chronology and age distinction reveals the general importance for him of order in his art, and it also touches on his sense of the fluctuating forms of identity through which we pass as we slowly mature. Despite the significance of context for the cohesion of the collection, stylistic expression is as important to Joyce as thematic development. His concern with and careful attention to word order and overall structure began with Chamber Music, a work completed prior to Dubliners, and it remains a central element in his compositional strategy throughout his oeuvre. Indeed, as his thematic endeavors became more complex and diffuse, stylistics functions as the primary means by which Joyce achieves coherence in and among all of his writings. Although some of Joyce’s methods in the short stories may seem understated when compared with the formal experimentation that he undertook in subsequent prose fiction—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake—time and again passages in Dubliners wonderfully adumbrate fully developed techniques that characterize the later work. Indeed, realizing the stylistic and thematic virtuosity of the short stories stands as the first step to full comprehension of their significance. In “Araby,” for example, religious iconography counterpoints the basic narrative thread, making both ironic and straightforward commentary on the quest of the young narrator. In “An Encounter,” “Two Gallants,” and “Counterparts,” detailed representations of Dublin geography enforce the claustrophobic atmosphere of each story. In “A Mother,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “The Dead,” Dublin’s social mores reflect not only universal human concerns but the very precise ways in which they are played out in Joyce’s city. Perhaps most significantly, throughout the collection a series of rich literary, theological, philosophical, and cultural allusions bring a variety of perspectives and possible meanings to the text, and they test a reader’s ability to comprehend and unify the diverse associations. While readers rightly see Dubliners as marking an early stage in Joyce’s creative development, one needs to avoid a simplistic sense of what that means. One can certainly trace a growing artistic sophistication over the course of Joyce’s fiction writing. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake each manifests abilities not evident in the works that preceded it. Nonetheless, as early as Dubliners one can find the fundamental artistic elements that will characterize Joyce’s writing over the course of his career as an author. Furthermore, it is important to remember that these stories were created during a time of economic trial, emotional upheaval, and cultural disorientation. Joyce, Nora, and his growing family were struggling to adjust to a radically different environment from life in Dublin, and evidence of those trials, while not explicit, is certainly embedded in his short stories. Araby This is the third story in the Dubliners collection, and the final one in the initial group of stories dedicated to childhood. Written in October 1905, “Araby” is the 11th story that Joyce composed for the collection. Like the first two stories, “Araby” relies upon an introspective, unnamed narrator who is recollecting his adolescent infatuation with the sister of a neighborhood friend, Mangan. More than a simple account of childhood love, however, the story lays out the larger question of the proper use of the imagination. In asking what differences, if any, exist between the images that an active mind produces as a source of aesthetic pleasure and those created as a form of escapism, the story challenges readers to articulate the interpretive values that allow one to distinguish a powerful narrative from idle speculation. In the opening paragraphs the narrator vividly depicts the confining environment of North Richmond Street where he lived as a boy. (Although the time of the narrative remains indeterminate for most of the story, as will be noted later, the final lines give a strong indication of a retrospective analysis of events.) The narrator immediately highlights a central concern of the story by contrasting the physically circumscribed limits of this dead-end street with the imaginative potential offered by the books found in “the waste room behind the kitchen” (Dubliners 29). At the same time, the narrator does not restrict his search for imaginative stimulus to books. With no apparent concern for the implications of voyeurism, he recounts how on school mornings he would peer through a lowered blind in a front parlor window to watch Mangan’s sister— herself unnamed—leave her house. He describes how he would then shyly follow her and pass her with a few perfunctory words when she reached the point where their paths separated. He was never able to engage her in an audience: “At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry” (Dubliners 42). Though none of the characters has been introduced, readers can see retrospectively that the tone of this opening, employing free indirect discourse, mimics the nonchalance of Jimmy and his friends and their patronizing disdain for the provincial curiosity of the Irish spectators. Although the narrative moves quickly beyond the scene to develop the action of the story, these opening images form an emblematic impression of the unarticulated struggle for identity that takes place within Jimmy’s consciousness. Despite the relentless emphasis on materiality in the opening pages, in short order the narrative of “After the Race” foregrounds personal spiritual alienation and communal privation as insistently as any of the other stories. Presaging the dilemma that James Duffy will face in “A Painful Case,” “After the Race” portrays Jimmy’s emotional entrapment, or paralysis, in a tone of chilling finality that belies his material security. Although these themes areembodied by most of the major characters throughout the collection, “After the Race” represents its central figures in a fashion closer to that of the Russian writers Dostoyevsky or Lermontov than to anything else in Dubliners. Throughout the hectic day Jimmy moves from one location and situation to another as a passive observer rather than an active participant. In many ways this is the most suitable role for him to adopt, for despite his 26 years and lifelong familiarity with Dublin, the places and incidents featured or alluded to in the story—life at Cambridge University, a drunken, private dinner in a Dublin restaurant, a late-night card party on a yacht—even when he appears as a participant are all outside his field of comprehension. When he does endeavor to inject himself into the midst of the action, it is always with an unvoiced sense of being on the brink of a social misstep. Thus, if the wealthy Jimmy Doyle embodies the hopes for social acceptance of an affluent Irish Catholic upper-middle class, the success of that prospect remains uncertain. With the encouragement of his father, Jimmy plans to invest a substantial amount of his inheritance “in the motor business” (Dubliners 45), a plan he takes seriously, but which—given his behavior throughout the story—the reader may view with skepticism. By the end of “After the Race,” Jimmy is exhausted and in debt after heavy losses in an all-night card game, an apt symbol for his future. The new day breaks “in a shaft of grey light” (Dubliners 48) that brings Jimmy personal remorse and prefigures what is to come: “He knew that he would regret in the morning but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly” (Dubliners 48). Despite the significant difference between Jimmy’s social position and that of other characters in Dubliners, these final lines situate him in the same moral landscape they all inhabit. In his ambivalence between guilt and denial, Jimmy reflects the same lack of assurance that countless other characters express in Joyce’s stories. It is not simply that he is unable or unwilling to judge his behavior dispassionately. Rather, he reflects a stark lack of faith in the ability of any standard of values to provide an accurate assessment of his life. Further, the ambiguity of the situation makes it difficult to discern the real consequences of Jimmy’s folly. Has he lost so much that his future is genuinely in jeopardy, or has he simply incurred more debt than his father will be willing to pass off with a tolerant laugh? A Little Cloud This is the eighth story in the Dubliners collection. It marks the beginning of the third section of stories, those concerned with maturity. Written in early 1906, “A Little Cloud” was the 14th story in Joyce’s order of composition. Along with “The Boarding House,” it was published in the May 1915 issue of the American magazine Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken. Joyce took the story’s title from a biblical verse, 1 Kings 18.44: “And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” The passage punctuates an account of the defeat of the prophets of Baal by God’s prophet Elijah. By ending a long drought that had plagued the people of Israel, Elijah manifested to them the power of God, and brought the people of Ahab back to the worship of the Lord. The line from which Joyce draws his title marks the turning point in Elijah’s struggle to overcome the prophets of Baal. Joyce depicts a similar contest, arguably based on this struggle, in his account of the confrontation of St. Patrick and the Druid in Finnegans Wake. “A Little Cloud” centers on a series of frustrations, disappointments, and insecurities that mar the seemingly contented bourgeois existence of a law clerk, Thomas Malone Chandler. He is known to his friends and to the story’s narrator by the diminutive, “Little Chandler,” and that provides an eponymous identification of the source of his trouble: a progressively shrinking sense of possibilities. The narrative describes in detail Chandler’s meeting with Ignatius Gallaher, a man whose life stands as the antithesis of Chandler’s. Gallaher is an old acquaintance, though calling him a friend would exaggerate their relationship, who now, after a number of years’ absence, is revisiting Dublin as a successful London journalist. After being patronized by Gallaher when they meet for a drink, Little Chandler goes home to a domestic scene that makes clear that the dissatisfaction with his life that he has felt throughout the day will more than likely continue and even grow for the remainder of his life. Stylistically, the story unfolds using the free indirect discourse technique that is by now becoming familiar to readers of the collection. As the narrator describes events in the third person, while punctuating the discourse with poignant observations drawn from Chandler’s point of view, the reader has exposure to both a detached and a highly subjective sense of events. The effect of this bifurcated technique is to play off any sympathy one might feel for the main character’s growing dissatisfaction against an awareness of the banal, conventional nature of his life. These divergent points of view combine to emphasize Little Chandler’s frustration with his own inability as a man to develop the artistic aspirations that he felt as a youth. Predictably, the return of Ignatius Gallaher to Dublin for a brief visit brings Little Chandler’s feelings of dissatisfaction to a head. Gallaher’s achievements as a journalist remind Chandler of his own frustrated efforts to gain recognition as a poet. Further, Gallaher’s material success and open way of living underscore for Chandler the circumscribed physical, emotional, and psychological conditions of his own household. From the perspective of the reader, the character of Ignatius Gallaher may seem less than meets the eye. One can hardly fail to notice the bluff and bluster that overlay the accounts of his otherwise pedestrian professional and personal successes. At their meeting in the bar of the Burlington Hotel (known to locals in Joyce’s day as Corless’s, the surname of its manager, Thomas Corless), Gallaher’s conversation takes on the nature of a performance, undertaken perhaps as much for his own benefit as for Chandler’s. While the reader may find Gallaher’s achievements suspect, the opportunities that he has had, and taken, nonetheless sharply underscore for Chandler the timidity of his own life. When Gallaher speaks of living in London and Paris, the mere mention of the cities confers for Chandler an aura of glamour upon the stories. This is not to say that Chandler naively accepts everything that Gallaher says at face value, but he does stand in awe of Gallaher’s willingness to seize the opportunities that were presented to him. In the final scene, which plays off the story’s hopeful title with painful irony, the domestic tranquility that readers might have assumed stood in contrast to Gallaher’s hectic bachelor life is now represented as smothering. Whatever euphoria Chandler may have taken away from his meeting with Gallaher quickly dissipates as his wife, Annie, criticizes him for coming home late and for neglecting to buy coffee at Bewley’s. When she rushes out to purchase tea, Chandler is left to watch their infant son and to brood. While waiting for his wife to return, he expresses his feelings in a series of desperate rhetorical questions: “Could he not escape from his little house? Was it too late for him to try to live bravely like Gallaher? Could he go to London?” (In the Ithaca episode, chapter 17, of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom—contemplating his options after the adultery of his wife—will ask himself these same basic questions, and come no closer to answering them than does Chandler.) During this reverie, the baby awakens and begins to cry. Chandler’s attempts to soothe him only increase the child’s unhappiness. When Annie returns, she berates him for his ineffectual efforts, shunts him aside, and, while he watches in shame and chagrin, proceeds to comfort the baby and seemingly call into question Chandler’s role in the family by cooing to the infant: “My little man! My little mannie!” (Dubliners 85). Joyce has prepared this final scene that underscores both for Chandler and for the reader his sense of entrapment and emasculation in the materially comfortable middle-class life that he has created for himself. At the same time, Joyce refuses to allow a single point of view to dictate the full meaning of the story. Chandler’s feelings show that he lacks the courage to turn his back on the material and psychological ties that sustain his domestic life. When the baby begins to cry uncontrollably, Chandler is angered by its outburst, but he also feels measurable concern: “He counted seven sobs without a break between them and caught the child to his breast in fright. If it died!” (Dubliners 84). As Annie comforts the baby while he stands by helplessly, genuine contrition replaces his resentment and anger. “He listened while the paroxysm of the child’s sobbing grew less and less; and tears of remorse started to his eyes” (Dubliners 85). This last line of the story cannot redeem the harsh critique of bourgeois Irish domestic attitudes so carefully built up over the course of the narrative, nor is it meant to. Nonetheless, it underscores for readers the complexity and even the contradictory nature of Chandler’s attitudes. If he inhabits a sort of domestic hell antithetical to a supposedly carefree life like the one that Gallaher lives, it is one that Chandler has carefully constructed and conscientiously maintains for himself. Joyce was fully aware of the aesthetic complexity inherent in the structure of the story. In a letter of October 18, 1906, to his brother Stanislaus, he underscores his sense of satisfaction at the story’s achievements when he asserts that “a page of A Little Cloud gives me more pleasure than all my verses” (Letters, II.182). YEATS VS JOYCE  W.B. Yeats’s imagination was a crowded place, chockfull of folklore, mythology, magic, hermetic philosophy and the events and personalities of his busy life as a writer, literary evangelist and a distinctive presence in the Ireland of his time. his wife’s plans for an amorous afternoon encounter with Blazes Boylan. Bloom’s heroism is the heroism of daily life. Yeats and Joyce were chalk and cheese in their approaches to the task of writing. But how did they view each other? When Joyce first met him in the early years of the 20th century, Yeats was part of a literary establishment against which the younger writer self-consciously sought to rebel. Joyce could be quite acerbic in his views, including about Yeats who invariably tried to be helpful, recognising as he did the younger man’s talent, and his arrogance. When they first met, Joyce famously told Yeats that he was ‘too old’ for Joyce to be able to help him. Yeats wisely advised Joyce that writers needed ‘less qualities of talent than qualities of character … patience, adaptability … and a gift for growing by experience and this is perhaps rarest of all.’2 In a pamphlet published during his student years, The Day of the Rabblement, Joyce had a right pop at Yeats’s Irish Literary Theatre for surrendering to the popular will. It must, he wrote, ‘now be considered the property of the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe.’3 A few years later, he would describe Yeats and others as ‘the blacklegs of literature. Because they have tried to substitute us, to serve the old idols at a lower rate when we refused to do so for a higher.’4 In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce wrote that ‘Michael Robartes (Yeats) remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.’ In Ulysses, Yeats is subjected to some gentle ribbing as when Buck Mulligan asks Stephen why he hadn’t, when reviewing a book by Lady Gregory, given it ‘the Yeats touch’, a reference to the logrolling of each other’s work to which Yeats and his circle had often resorted. In Mulligan’s view what Stephen ought to have written, à la Yeats, was that Gregory’s book was, ‘The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time. One thinks of Homer.’ Yeats was persistently helpful to Joyce, especially when he arranged a British Civil List grant for him in 1916 for which Joyce was, rightly, deeply grateful. Yeats was also an admirer of Ulysses, a novel that was hugely controversial when it first appeared. One might have expected someone like Yeats, in his late 50s when Ulysses appeared, to have had difficulty with Joyce’s experimental techniques, but he understood the novel’s strengths and thought it ‘a work perhaps of genius’. He believed that some passages from Joyce’s book had ‘great beauty, lyric beauty, even in the fashion of my generation’ and that the novel as a whole was of ‘immense importance’5. He insisted that Joyce was ‘the only Irishman who had the intensity of the great novelist.’6 Yeats was brilliantly perceptive in his appreciation of Ulysses, spotting that it was ‘an entirely new thing – neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.’7 Although Joyce was sparing in dishing out praise, he did admire Yeats’s work, and especially Yeats’s poem, ‘Who Goes with Fergus’, which he quotes in Ulysses and apparently sang for his mother on her deathbed. Yeats’s phrase ‘love’s bitter mystery’ had special appeal for Joyce. He sent warm congratulations to Yeats when he was awarded the Nobel in 1923 and signed a letter of congratulations to Yeats on his 70th birthday in 1935 and sent a wreath to his funeral in 1939, which however arrived late in the south of France. Joyce politely but firmly declined Yeats’s invitation to join the Irish Academy of Letters. Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, wrote an imaginative account of the first meeting between Yeats and Joyce. ‘The defected Protestant confronted the defected Catholic, the landless landlord met the shiftless tenant. … Joyce knew the limbs and bowels of a city … The world of the petty bourgeoisie, which is the world of Ulysses and the world in which Joyce grew up, was for Yeats something to be abjured. Joyce had the same contempt for both the ignorant peasantry and the snobbish aristocracy that Yeats idealised. The two were divided by upbringing and predilection.’8 Yes, Yeats and Joyce were divided in their approach to literature and to life; they wrote in very different styles and dealt with contrasting subject matter; they came from different backgrounds and lived very different lives. Yeats delved into the heroic while Joyce casually mocked all heroic pretensions. And yet, there is a compatibility between our two great writers. They both covered the same ground, the ground of early 20th century Ireland that frustrated and disenchanted Yeats while it absorbed and obsessed Joyce. The late Denis Donoghue once wrote that ‘Yeats invented a country, calling it Ireland.’ Joyce brilliantly excavated the mind-set of that same country, or at least its capital city, in his novels and short stories. Ireland reached an extraordinary peak of literary achievement in 1922-23, with the publication of Ulysses and Yeats’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. This was a culmination of decades of creative activity of a high standard. That’s why I like to refer to the period between 1880 and 1940 as the Age of Yeats and Joyce. Yeats believed in Ireland’s romantic and heroic potential while Joyce focused on its foibles and frailties. They looked at Ireland from different angles and through differently contoured lenses. Both produced compelling images of the Ireland of their time. Between them, they offer a rounded picture of Ireland in an era of change and possibility. We are fortunate to have had such probing and perceptive witnesses. We benefit from the romantic yearnings embedded in Yeats’s pursuit of the Ireland of his dreams. And we can also be glad to have the forensic, tell-all approach to Ireland that runs through Joyce’s works. Yeats vision and Joyce’s searchlight combine to reveal their Ireland to us in all its clouded glory. As I look back at the changes that Ireland has undergone since the Age of Yeats and Joyce, I like to imagine that Cuchulainn and Kathleen Ní Houlihan moved in with the Blooms of Eccles Street, just as Stephen was invited to do in the ‘Ithaca’ episode of Ulysses, and that their mixed household is, as Yeats would have it, indomitably Irish. George Orwell  He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953). Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of matriculating at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,” classics of expository prose. In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields. Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing. In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In the book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous. Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of those states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and continuously