Masaryk University Faculty of Education Department Of
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Masaryk University Faculty of Education Department of English Language and Literature Dublin through All Senses: The Poetics of the City in James Joyce's Dubliners Final Work Mgr. Petra Mašátová Supervisor: Mgr. Zuzana Klímová, Ph.D. Brno 2016 1 Declaration: I hereby declare that I have worked on this final work independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. Petra Mašátová 2 Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Zuzana Klímová, Ph.D., for her constructive advice and helpfulness throughout my work on this thesis. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 5 1.1 James Joyce's Dubliners .................................................................................................. 5 1.2 The Poetics of the City ..................................................................................................... 6 1.3 Dublin through All Senses ............................................................................................... 7 2. Colours of Dublin .................................................................................................................. 9 3. Sounds of Dublin ................................................................................................................. 16 4. Smells of Dublin .................................................................................................................. 26 5. Tastes of Dublin ................................................................................................................... 31 6. Touches of Dublin................................................................................................................ 40 7. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 47 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 48 4 1. Introduction "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book." (Joyce qtd. in O'Grady) 1.1 James Joyce's Dubliners In the short story collection Dubliners, published in 1914 by Grant Richards, James Joyce brought the capital city of Ireland onto the world's literary scene.1 In a letter to Grant Richards Joyce wrote: "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" (qtd. in Brown, Introduction xxxi). Joyce's portrait of Dublin as a paralysed city in the early twentieth century is not very flattering. It is a place inhabited by clerks, shop assistants, scribes, cashiers, maids or salesmen, but also by slackers and alcoholics, trapped in their small lives of lower middle class. They live banal, routine lives lacking love, enjoyment, money or any prospects. Also their melancholic desire for escape remains unfulfilled as they are unable to challenge their frustration and change their destiny. Their paralysed existence has its parallel in the paralysed city. Author's pessimistic depicting of the city life and lost existence of its inhabitants is regarded as a sign of modernism (Grey). Not only in content, but also in style Dubliners bear features of modernist writing. First of all, a genre of a short story itself is used to be seen as a typical modernist form (Wilson 87) and free indirect speech as well. This narrative technique, frequently used by Joyce, allows the author, or more precisely, a narrator to speak from the point of view of a character using his or her language to reveal his or her psychological reality and at the same time to maintain a critical distance (Wilson 159). Joseph Frank argues that in works of modernist writers, e. g. Thomas Searns 1 The collection consists of fifteen short stories arranged in the order of childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life (Brown, Introduction xxxi). In the first three stories there are boy's narrators conveying the city of their childhood, these are followed by four stories of young and four of adult experience and last four texts introduce the city from different ascpects of public life, dealing with national, political or religious issues. 5 Elliot, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust or James Joyce, the category of space in a narrative prevails over the category of time that seems like paused (Derdowska 38). Evoking space from a perspective of other senses than only of the dominant sense of sight is also characteristic of modernism (Fjellestad 641). Emily Brady points out that "James Joyce creates rich images of urban places like Dublin through sensory descriptions in his various novels" (Brady 187) and states his Ulysses as a particular example. This work has the ambition to show that this statement of James Joyce's novels could be applied to his short stories as well. 1.2 The Poetics of the City The literary analysis of the poetics of the city in James Joyce's Dubliners representing the body of this thesis is inspired particulary by conceptions of Alice Jedličková and Daniela Hodrová, Czech prominent literary theorists dealing with the category of literary space. In her typology of narrative constructions of space, Jedličková distinguishes among three main types of space developing in a narrative structure. Firstly, there is a type of "space introduced as it is", which is established through a description in a text and specified by an account of details. Secondly, there is a type of "space as it is experienced" by a narrator or a character. This type of space is created through narration. And thirdly, there is a type of "space as it is evoked" mainly through its sensory qualities.2 The third type can be combined with the second type, i. e. space is evoked through experience of a participating figure (Jedličková 16- 19). Actually, this typology concerns pure types, and thus in practice all three types can overlap each other. My intention is to focus on space of Joyce's Dubliners how is evoked through individual sensory qualities and how it contributes to the atmosphere of melancholy and paralysis hanging over the stories as suggested in the previous part. As mentioned above, it involves also to pursue characters experiencing space. This is what I understand as the 2 Although Jedličková introduces another three types of space, she herself considers them to be rather marginal, and therefore there is no need to expose them here. 6 poetics of the city, to put it simply, how the city is evoked in the text, what its mood is and how it is related to the characters. Jarosłav Malicki holds that people and places make up a city (Malicki 114) and it is impossible to separate one from another. This idea is followed also by Daniela Hodrová who perceives a literary piece as a net of various elements and their relations. Everything is connected with everything, and therefore an analysis of space necessarily involves an analysis of time, characters, style etc. (Místa s tajemstvím 5). Examining especially urban space, Hodrová introduces three ways how a city is present in literature: firstly, as an object, usually in guidebooks or books about cities, secondly as an environment, i. e. a setting of a story, and thirdly as a subject when it is impossible to distinguish a figure from a city. According to Hodrová, the third case occurs especially in the situations of proximity between a city and a figure in connection to a character's state of disillusion when a narrator's point of view merges with a character's one (Místa s tajemstvím 94-96). If the book has a title Dubliners and its characters are in fact defined by the city they live in, one might expect a close connection between the city and its inhabitants. This connection will be also a subject matter of this work. In my thesis I also used a term "narrative space" expressing an environment in which characters move and live (Ryanová), and furthemore, I work with a concept of "chronotope", which was introduced by Michail Michajlovič Bachtin, unifying temporal and spatial categories of a story (Derdowska 39). 1.3 Dublin through All Senses Man grasps space around him through his senses, transforming it, according to Immanuel Kant, from the world in itself to the world for us (194-210). As I have already suggested in the preceding subchapter, this fact is reflected by many literary theorists dealing with the category of narrative space. E. g. Daniela Hodrová states that "a human body with its 7 senses is significantly involved in experiencing a city" (Citlivé město 340, trans. P.M.) and that "a city represents a multidimensional and kinetic text - we can watch a city as a picture (view from up above), but more often as a film, ... we can read a city as a literary text, listen to it as to a musical composition, smell it or touch it" (Citlivé město 40, trans. P.M.). From this point of view, the narrative space of Dublin in Joyce's short stories provides a lot of sensual experience. During a night walk in its streets one can see the dim colours of lamplights, hear the quiet notes of the mournful music through the lighted squares of windows, the yell of the boys selling the evening editions on the corner, noises of the pubs inviting passers-by to taste a half of malt whiskey or a bottle of ginger beer with a plate of hot peas, and then go further from the centre, feel