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Kiri, Jay, Rasik, etal I have carefully read, again, your mails on The Dead, and have learnt a lot in the process. I would never have seen everything you mention if I had just kept myself to the story, and treated The Dead as a simple story. I love this process of being educated by all of you. Thanks very much. What I liked specially was to know the background of the story, that it was written in Rome, that it was first Lied in exile, that Joyce was an insecure person, that Gretta was really Nora, etc. etc. About Lily being so important, symbolically, I just would not have seen it if I was not told because I lack that kind of background knowledge. But from now on whenever I see a lily; I will think of ... what actually - The Dead, Blessed Virgin, this list ?? I also saw that those of you who know the other works of Joyce are capable of appreciating this collection more. You see more connections, clarifications. I have started with Dubliners. So there is no aha effect! I had said that I will share with you what I read in Terence Brown's introduction to Dubliners. Here is part of it: "Dubliners has therefore endured a considerable amount of rather mechanical symbol hunting as if the surface of the text, with its realistic detail and subtleties of dialogue and socio/cultural allusion, can be disregarded in pursuit of some definitive interpretation rooted in a symbology which the ingenious critic has identified. It is as damage done to those finely woven textures that constitute the work's finesse, that these exercises in misguided scholarly acumen give most offence. For it is not that Dubliners does not possess a complex structure and a detailed symbolism, for all the realism it also achieves, but that such readings direct attention away from a full encounter with the individual story itself to a reductive account of some altogether simpler narrative which is a poor substitute for the true Joycean experience. ...what Joyce took from symbolism was something radically different from what, for example, his fellow-countryman W.B.Yeats took from it....For Joyce the symbolic power of writing lay in its capacity, as if it were a kind of revelation or manifestation, to suggest mood, psychology, the moral significance of an occasion, without (and here Flaubert is mentor and not Ibsen) obtrusive authorial presence or palpable design upon a reader...... (Here comes to me the core of the introduction!) ...So, when Dubliners gives us details of rooms, pubs, streets, churches, cityscapes, when it scrupulously attelnds to the to and fro of conversation, the momentary gestures of an individual, it is not because these things can be read as items in a complex process of reference to abstractions, concepts, historical and mythological analogues, systems of thought or even transcendent truths. Rather it is because it is in the givenness of the real, in time and place, that psychological, social, cultural and moral realities will reveal themselves. Not of course that the details of life in a city as burdened with history and experience as Dublin, will not carry with them associations, hints of parallel situations in the Irish and European past, in legend and mythology, and carry with them too general implications for the society observed in this exacting miniaturism of focus, to give added force to the moral urgency of the writing or to augment the sense of significance revealed. But it is in the details of the work and the complex patterns which they achieve in individual storeis and in the book as a whole that meaning is in fact primarily vested. to seek to experience it as any other kind of thing is accordingly to cheat oneself of the subtle particularity of a text whose meanings are inseparable from "the most delicate and evanescent of moments" recorded with shocking precision...." I could go on quoting from that book (Penguin edition) but it may be wise to stop here All in all reading Dubliners has been an enjoyable and educative experience. Which raises the question: Where do we go from here? Do we go at all anywhere, together? Are we ready to read another book? Do we want to? Are we ready to commit ourselves, our time, to read atleast a couple of pages (of the next book) a week, and share our thoughts regularly - at least once a week - with one another? How many of us are ready for such a commitment? For how many is this a swan song? Think about the above questions, and do answer. Chandra THE END! |
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