James Joyce's Novel, Dubliners

While the slim volume Dubliners is years (and indeed light-years) away from Ulysses in style and scope, the culture out of which Joyce drew his material is identical for both texts. Irish Catholicism, from which Joyce was, famously, not only disconnected but also disaffected, informs the pattern of ideas in the short-story collection and the novel. Indeed, the means by which Joyce develops his multiplicity of ideas and patterns the events of the narratives can be said to owe something to the parochial education--and the parochial society--that Joyce was at such pains to distance himself in the way he led his life. But Joyce could not escape the givens of his personal history, and he drew on it extensively. If he did so chiefly in order to make a literary project of delegitimizing its prescriptions and commenting critically on what he saw as the stultifying features of Irish experience, he also did so not least because his native culture served as an almost bottomless well of inspiration that uniquely enabled him to have his say about and against it with nuanced and deliberately problematized insight.

The biographical details of Joyce's life show how decisively he rejected the moral tenets of Catholicism and its hold on life experience in Ireland. His nonmarriage marriage to Nora Barnacle, his insistent atheism, and his deliberate self-exile have been cited in that regard (e.g., Cixous passim). The theme of exile, or more exactly the exile's return, dominates Ulysses, and Dub

though certainly no claim is being made for the comforts of that identity. "Counterparts" is a character study of a man doomed to the pattern of what Dr. King in another, not altogether dissimilar, context referred to as "the bleakness of nagging despair" (King 91). Catholic Farrington is a document copyist in an office apparently run by Protestant Alleyne, a mousy tyrant. A bit indolent, given to drink during the workday, and resentful of what he sees as Alleyne's constant criticism, Farrington makes a wisecrack about Alleyne to Alleyne in front of their colleagues. At first pleased with himself, then embarrassed, Farrington pawns his watch to get enough money to spend the night drinking, first in glee over his momentary triumph over Alleyne, then in despair as the alcohol takes over. By the time he returns to his family, he is drunk enough to beat his son for no particular reason. No one whose life has not been thwarted would enact his despair in quite that way. Farrington is the victim who becomes a brute. He is partly a victim of his own making, given his laziness, his predilection for alcohol, and what appears to be a self-absorption born of what he views as the injustice of life. After all, he is one of the "oppressed" in a