Missing Pieces in Joyce's Dubliners

Abstract

Dubliners remains one of the stepchildren in Joyce studies, receiving less attention than its important siblings, and fragmented attention more often than not. form Joyce eventually devisedpublication of the stories in one volume, and addition of the important directing paragraph to The Sisters-indicates that the writer thought of the work as unit, and not as casual assortment of stories. That his intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of Ireland is undoubted, and most critics agree that the book treats paralysis. There is argument, however, about precisely what moral condition Dubliners describes, and about what Joyce meant by simony and gnomon. S. L. Goldberg finds the tone of Dubliners too insistently and constrictingly vivisective, and some of the stories too oversimplified. He believes that Joyce had an uncertain grasp of the values by which others are criticized, vagueness about the genuine 'life' by which simony and paralysis are constantly measured.' Goldberg hypothesizes that Joyce's own values were not yet developed enough to shine through the limited consciousness of his characters. Goldberg's diagnosis of the source of one's unease with the stories still seems to me acute. Yet, after years of rereading and teaching Dubliners, along with other Joyce works, I have come to feel that the volume does contain in ovo, both the moral standards and the technical approach that Joyce would maintain throughout his life. Because of Joyce's Jesuit education, and his claim to be writing moral history, the volume has been interpreted as latter-day Piers Plowman, offering procession of the seven deadly sins and incarnations of saints and sinners. Joyce himself contributed to such interpretation of his work by his youthful adoption of religious terminology to describe his work, his equation of poet and priest. He claimed he wished to nourish people spiritually: but what does spiritual mean? For