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I had long resisted the temptation to buy a copy of "Dubliners" and read the stories on the web so far. But last week, I did buy a copy of the Penguin edition which contains notes and introduction by Terence Brown, who was a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the Trinity college, Dublin. The book has a beautiful black and white photograph (taken in 1910) of the O'Connell Bridge and the Sackville Street in Dublin. I felt quite sad that I did not make use of the opportunity I had last year to visit Dublin! Brown quotes a letter from Joyce which he wrote to Grant Richards, in which he encouraged symbolic reading of his work. "My intention", Joyce wrote, "...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. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order." Brown says the following about the story, The Sisters. He writes "Father Flynn is a paralytic whose past contains some unmentionable shame...That Father Flynn suffers a debilitating condition which some critics have even identified with that general paralysis of the insane which characterizes the terminal stage of syphilitic infection, in a story which begins with a brooding on the words "simony" and "paralysis" (whatever we make of "gnomon") seems in the light of this letter to invest him with central symbolic significance in the text as a whole...." Brown also says that the letter quoted above means that Dubliners should not be read as a series of discrete stories, but as a work of complex structure inwhich the characters unknowingly arrange themselves in a modern version of an ancient troupe: the ages of man. Maureen had previously written about the importance of the order of stories in Dubliners. I would like to mention two other things from the book: The first has to do with the story, Eveline. The phrase "Going to Buenos Ayres" was a slang used for taking up a life of prostitution. This bit of info throws a completly different light on the story we have all read and liked! The second info has also to do with Eveline. We had all thrown up our hands at the words, Deravaun Seraun, Deravaun Seraun, which the mother had said at her deathbed. According to the book in front of me, this is mere nonsense, probably gibberish but phonetically like Irish! What buying this book showed to me, once again, is that having a book in the hand to read is worlds different from reading something on the web! Chandra |
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