Review: Dubliners by James Joyce

Note: This post originally appeared on my discontinued website maartensity.com. The published date and time has been adjusted to match the original.

I'm halfway through Dubliners, and this exquisite collection of stories almost makes me wish Joyce had never ventured into the land of the novel. What if he'd stuck to this genre, and given his best years to it? If his literary energy and reputation is anything to go by, we could be tempted to say: he would have given us a handful of the very highest exemplars. As it is, it's not too far behind, and only in the relatively youthful emotion and lack of variety do we feel any real reason to complain. These are no major objections, and are valid only insofar as the author never made good on the potential on show here, with an even greater collection. One wants to feel righteous by saying, "if you have the ability, you should use it." ...

But of course, he gave us Ulysses, and we should all be grateful for that. Even those of us, like me, who have never read it, but who can grasp its significance by reading a few quotes and seeing what followed. Without it, what would the literary landscape have looked like? Similar, perhaps, but some aspect would never have been brought to its proper conclusion.

There are even those who would be tempted to say Finnegan's Wake will be given its true place when posterity has figured out its worth; perhaps on a par, or in some respects ahead of Ulysses. When I get around to it I might comment, but suffice it to say Joyce's legacy would be nearly intact without Dubliners.

This, however, is perhaps more of an indication that the short story has never been taken seriously enough. Can it assume the same scope and level of enquiry as a novel? Can it reach the same depth of feeling as a poem? These are almost rhetorical questions for most readers. Most of the time, it would seem, short stories assume some sort of lesser middle ground.

With the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe's birth tomorrow, I intend to read a couple of his stories to remind myself what can be done!