The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
James Joyce · fifteen stories in the order Joyce set · 67,590 words · first published by Grant Richards, London, 15 June 1914 · read in the Project Gutenberg e-text #2814
Mode
Naturalist short fiction made one book; diagnosis, comedy and lyric under a narration that offers no moral
Mythos
Paralysis and the failed escape; a grail quest in small, a betrayed and absent lord, a fall, a sickbed and a church, and the dead who call the living west
Phase
From a boy at a window watching for candles to a man at a window watching the snow: childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life, and a last story
Presentation
Fiction; fifteen stories, the first three told by a boy in the first person and the rest in a third person that takes the idiom of whoever it follows; every story stopping before its event resolves
Register
From the boy’s grave first person and Maria’s euphemisms to the canvassers’ talk, a sermon in the terms of a ledger and the cadence of the last paragraph
Scale
One city, from childhood to public life; nearly a quarter of the words in the last story
Governing Proposition
A boy watches a dying priest’s window and says the word paralysis to himself; fourteen stories later a man at another window watches the snow fall on the living and the dead. Between them the people of one city try to leave, to love, to rise or to be honoured, and each comes back to the place it set out from. The wager of the book is that what holds them is less the Church, the Castle, money or drink than their own consent and the fine words in which they dress it, and that a plain prose which takes their words for its own can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.” The book opens on a boy outside a house where an old priest is dying. Night after night he has studied “the lighted square of window”, waiting to see “the reflection of candles on the darkened blind”, since two candles are set at the head of a corpse. Then: “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.” Three words, one from the body, one from geometry and one from the trade in holy things, are set down in the first paragraph, and nobody explains them. Paralysis is never named again after this first story.
The fifteen stories stand in the order Joyce set, and the order has a shape. They are commonly read in four groups, childhood in three stories, adolescence in four, maturity in four and public life in three, and then “The Dead”. The stories lengthen as the lives in them widen. The stories of childhood hold an eighth of the book’s 67,590 words, the stories of public life a quarter; the shortest, “Eveline”, has 1,827 words, and “The Dead” alone is longer than the four stories of maturity together, nearly a quarter of the whole. The first person belongs to the boy and to no one else. Outside dialogue the word “I” stands 76, 72 and 90 times in the first three stories, and never more than eight times in any of the other twelve. The book’s first person ends with “Araby” and does not return.
The priest’s death is not explained either. His sister remembers the chalice he broke, and how he was found one night “sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself”. He lies in his coffin “solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.” The story ends in her voice, on a sentence that trails away. What the priest did, what the boy was to him and what the broken chalice meant are left where she leaves them. The method of the whole book is here in small: a death, a sacred object, a room of people talking, and an ending that stops before anything is resolved.
Movement II
In “Araby” a boy falls in love with a friend’s sister and carries her name through the flaring streets on a Saturday evening: “I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.” He promises to bring her something from the bazaar, is kept late, and arrives as it closes. “I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service.” Before a curtain “two men were counting money on a salver.” A young lady at a stall talks with two young men in English accents, and asks him, out of a sense of duty, whether he wishes to buy. The light goes out in the upper hall, and the first person ends: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
“Eveline” is the shortest story and the plainest. A girl sits “at the window watching the evening invade the avenue”, weighing a promise to her dead mother against a sailor who would take her to Buenos Ayres. She remembers her mother’s last words, “Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!”, and stands up in terror: “Escape! She must escape!” At the North Wall the boat blows its whistle into the mist. “All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her.” She grips the iron railing. The story ends on her face, turned to the man who is calling her name: “Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”
No story in the book ends on the resolution of its plot. Each ends on a speech, a perception, a gesture or an object. In “Two Gallants” Lenehan waits all evening to learn whether Corley has got money from a servant girl, and the answer is a hand opened under a lamp: “A small gold coin shone in the palm.” In “The Boarding House” a mother settles her daughter’s marriage to a lodger while the daughter waits upstairs in a revery, until she is called: “Then she remembered what she had been waiting for.” The stories close at the moment their people are about to act, or have just been acted upon, and leave the act outside the book.
Movement III
Already in the second story, an old man in a field within sight of the Dodder talks to two truant boys, and his mind, the boy reports, “was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit”. It is the shape of every life the middle of the book follows. Little Chandler, a clerk who would be a poet, meets a friend back from London, goes home, and finds he cannot read Byron over his crying child: “He was a prisoner for life.” His story ends on “tears of remorse”. Farrington, a copying clerk, is shamed by his employer, whose head looks “like a large egg reposing on the papers”, pawns his watch, drinks, loses a trial of strength in a public house and goes home to beat his son, who falls on his knees and pleads: “I’ll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don’t beat me”.
“Clay” is told in its heroine’s own words. “Everyone was so fond of Maria.” She works in a laundry, and the story follows her evening in sentences longer than any others in the book, run together as she would run them, full of what is nice and what is very nice. At a Hallow Eve game her blindfolded hand comes down on a saucer and feels a “soft wet substance”, and nobody tells her what it was. Asked to sing, she sings the first verse of her song twice: “But no one tried to show her her mistake”. The form knows what she cannot say, that she is pitied and that she is alone, and says it without a word of its own.
Mr Duffy, in “A Painful Case”, lives in Chapelizod as far as possible from the city and keeps a habit of composing “a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.” He breaks with the one woman who has loved him; four years later he reads of her death on the railway line over a dinner whose cabbage leaves a “cold white grease on his plate.” In the Park at night he sees “a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness”, and knows himself “outcast from life’s feast.” The story ends: “He felt that he was alone.” The man who narrated himself in the third person is left with nothing to narrate.
Movement IV
“Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is more than half talk. On the anniversary of Parnell’s death, canvassers for a candidate in a municipal ward sit by a low fire waiting to be paid, argue over an address of welcome to the king, and open bottles of stout on the hob: “Pok! The tardy cork flew out of Mr Crofton’s bottle.” Parnell, dead since 1891, is the absent lord of the room, and the ivy leaf in a lapel is worn for him. Hynes, the one man still loyal, is asked for his poem on the death of the chief, in which Parnell is “Our Uncrowned King” and his enemies betrayed him “with a kiss”.
There is a silence, then applause; another cork goes. The last sentence gives the verdict in the room’s own words: “Mr Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing.” In “A Mother”, Mrs Kearney fights the committee of a concert series over her daughter’s fee, and the committee man she has fought is told at the end that he did “the proper thing”. In “Grace” a man is found at the bottom of a public house stair: “He lay curled up at the foot of the stairs down which he had fallen.” His friends bring him from his sickbed to a retreat for business men, where the preacher calls himself “their spiritual accountant” and gives them the words in which to audit their souls: “I find this wrong and this wrong.”
The three stories of public life carry the first story’s third word into the city. Simony is the sale of sacred things, and here the sacred is sold at every scale: a dead leader’s memory canvassed for a ward, a national revival priced by the concert, the grace of God kept as an account. Nobody in them is a villain. The trade is carried on in the language of dignity, and the dignity is sincere, which is what holds it in place. Each of the three ends in that language: an elegy praised as writing, a committee man approved, a sermon in the terms of a ledger.
Movement V
“The Dead” is nearly a quarter of the book, and it opens in the idiom of a servant: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” It is the Misses Morkan’s annual dance, and Gabriel Conroy, their nephew, the most educated man in the book, is to carve the goose and give the speech. Small things go wrong for him all evening. Lily answers his pleasantry with bitterness: “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” Miss Ivors, who wants him to come west to the Aran Isles, calls him a “West Briton”. His speech praises Irish hospitality and turns from the past to “living duties and living affections”. He tells the story of the horse Johnny, who walked round and round King Billy’s statue. The word snow, absent from fourteen stories, falls twenty-one times in this one.
At the end of the night he sees his wife on the stairs, listening to a man singing, and makes a picture of her: “Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.” In the hotel she tells him what the song was. A boy she knew in Galway, Michael Furey, used to sing it; he was ill, and came through the rain to her window on the night before she left, and he died within a week. “I think he died for me,” she says. Gabriel sees himself as “a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts”. She sleeps, and his thoughts go to the aunts and to their coming deaths: “One by one they were all becoming shades.”
“Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes.” He imagines “the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree”. Then the book ends where it began, with a man at a window: “A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.” The first story’s boy watched a window for candles; the last story’s man watches the snow. “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.” The snow falls on the central plain, the Bog of Allen, the Shannon waves and the churchyard where Michael Furey lies, and the last sentence turns its words over as the flakes turn in the light: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Whether the journey is death, a surrender or charity, and whether the snow is a grace or the old paralysis falling on everyone alike, the book does not say.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book is mostly made of what cannot go. Inside the stories there is almost nothing to cut: “Eveline” runs to 1,827 words, and its last scene at the North Wall carries the whole of a life’s refusal. The order is argued: three stories in a boy’s first person, then youth, maturity and public life, the stories lengthening as the lives in them widen, then “The Dead”, which turns the book’s verdict back on the man best placed to deliver it. Remove “The Sisters” and the book loses its key words, paralysis, gnomon and simony. What holds the axis at 8.7 is the book’s history and one story. It grew by addition, from twelve stories to fifteen, so its scale was permitted before it was compelled; and “After the Race”, the thinnest of the fifteen, could go with the loss of one station, new Catholic money and the Continent, and little else.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the people of a city are held in place less by the powers over them, Church, Castle, money, drink and family, than by their own consent, and by the language in which they dignify it. Simony, in the first paragraph, names the method: the sacred traded. The bazaar the boy reaches is closing, and “two men were counting money on a salver” (“Araby”); a priest tells business men he is “their spiritual accountant” (“Grace”); an elegy for Parnell is applauded and called “a very fine piece of writing” (“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”). Then the disclosure turns inward, on the book’s most educated man, who sees himself as “a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts” (“The Dead”). It holds without its Dublin. Held off the top because in “After the Race” and “A Mother” the verdict is reached before the people are found, and a diagnosis named in advance makes a story its illustration.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Height is rationed by design, in a register chosen to be plain, and the book rises at its endings, though not at all of them. The ceiling is the last paragraph of “The Dead”, the snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”, among the summits of English prose. Below it stand Eveline at the barrier, where “All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart”; the boy in the darkened hall, “a creature driven and derided by vanity”; Mr Duffy on Magazine Hill watching a goods train “like a worm with a fiery head”; and the dreadful close of “Counterparts”, a child offering a Hail Mary for his father under the stick. Held below the top by frequency: “The Boarding House”, “A Mother” and “Grace” close in comedy by intention, and the plain style Joyce chose keeps whole stories at ground level.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built more often than the surface admits, and evoked more often still. “Araby” is a grail quest in small: the boy imagines “I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”, and arrives at a silence “like that which pervades a church after a service”. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” builds a Passion round an absent lord, betrayed “with a kiss” in Hynes’s verses, his anniversary kept by men canvassing for a candidate who may welcome a king. “Grace” moves from a fall down a lavatory stair to a sickbed and a church; the plan of the Commedia claimed for it rests on a later report and is contested. “The Dead” carries the deepest structure: a man named for the archangel, his journey at the last westward among the dead, and a boy who died for love standing “under a dripping tree”. Each figure stays particular. Held below the summit because only in the last story does the archetype bear the whole weight; elsewhere it is implicit, parodic or allusion.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance was the plotted magazine story, Maupassant’s turn and Kipling’s finish, and in Ireland the Revival’s tale of the peasant West, with George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903) the nearest precedent. Joyce’s turn: stories that end before their events resolve, on a perception rather than an act; a narration that takes the idiom of the person it follows, so that “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” is Lily’s phrase, not the author’s; no moral offered; the city’s real streets, shops and public houses named. The stake was paid in full: about a decade from the first story, in 1904, to the book, in 1914, and Grant Richards’s withdrawal in 1906 over words and passages Joyce would not cut. Held a step down because Chekhov had already made the plotless story and Flaubert the impersonal one; the swerve completes a European turn in English.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book moves from a boy’s “I” in its first three stories to a third person that never again belongs to a narrator, as if the child’s self were absorbed by the city. Free indirect style is the instrument. “Clay” is told in Maria’s own euphemisms, “Everyone was so fond of Maria”, in the longest sentences in the book, and the form knows what she cannot say: that she is pitied, and that the verse she sings twice is not the one about suitors. Endings stop at the edge of change: Polly “remembered what she had been waiting for”; Eveline’s eyes give “no sign”. Paralysis has a shape: a mind “circling round and round in the same orbit” in “An Encounter”, the horse Johnny walking round King Billy’s statue in “The Dead”. Held off the top because the frame grew by addition, and in “After the Race” and “A Mother” form holds more than it shapes.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over more than a century: Ezra Pound’s notice in The Egoist (1914); Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce (1955), which made the narration a problem; Richard Ellmann’s biography (1959), which made the book’s history known; Clive Hart’s collection of 1969, a critic to each story; the critical edition of Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (1969); Florence Walzl on paralysis and epiphany; Don Gifford’s annotations; Margot Norris’s Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners (2003). The text keeps its questions open: what Father Flynn did, and what the broken chalice meant; whether Eveline is saved or lost at the barrier; what Maria’s saucer held; whether Gabriel’s “journey westward” is death, a yielding to Miss Ivors, or charity; whether the snow is grace or paralysis. Held a step down because much of the book’s depth has been drawn out by readers of Ulysses, and “After the Race” has yielded little on return.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is the short story in English, and within it Irish fiction. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a short story could be: one action or state, given without comment, turning on a perception and closing before resolution, in a narration shaped by its characters’ speech; and a book of stories made one work by a city and the stages of a life. Held below the top because Chekhov shares the credit, because the reach was delayed, the book having sold poorly, and because much of it ran through Ulysses. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Irish story after it, in Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, Mary Lavin, John McGahern and William Trevor, works in its light and against it; the linked book of stories follows within a decade, in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), though direct debt is argued, not documented; and the quiet ending on a recognition became the common form of the twentieth-century literary story.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 112 years, with no discount for age. The book sold poorly on publication; B. W. Huebsch published it in New York in 1916, and it has been read since wherever literature in English is taught. “Araby” and “The Dead” are among the most anthologised stories in the language, and John Huston filmed “The Dead” in 1987. The text is whole: what separates the text of 1914 from the critical texts of 1967 and 1993 is words and points, not matter. It has outlived its conditions. The Castle, the Parnell split, the municipal ward and the Revival’s quarrels are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon. Charged: its surface is fixed to one city in one decade, its coins, shops, songs, priests and politicians named, and it needs more annotation than its plainness suggests.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Joyce’s English. The prose is load-bearing, and its plainness is a method: sentences of ordinary length, a median of thirteen words, common words, and a narration that takes the colour of whoever it follows, Lily’s “literally”, Maria’s “very nice”, Mr Duffy’s habit of a sentence about himself “containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense”. Dialogue carries whole stories: “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is 53 per cent speech, a political comedy of rumour, stout bottles opened on the hob and an elegy. The detail is chosen to carry a person: Corley’s head “large, globular and oily”, Mr Alleyne’s “like a large egg reposing on the papers”, the “cold white grease” on Mr Duffy’s plate. The last paragraph turns plainness into music by repetition and inversion. Charged: the overwritten prose of “After the Race”, “the machinery of human nerves”, and the ironies of “A Little Cloud”, which press harder than they need.
Score: 9.4 / 10
One law governs the whole: the living are held by the dead and by the words that stand in for life, and each attempted escape returns to its point of departure. Take the two most distant elements: the corks flying on the hob in the committee room, “Pok!”, and the snow on the churchyard “where Michael Furey lay buried”. They obey the same law. Parnell, dead since 1891, holds that room as a boy dead at seventeen holds Gretta. The boy at the window in the first story, watching for “the reflection of candles”, returns as Gabriel at the window in the last. The range is wide and held: farce in “Grace”, terror in “Counterparts”, lyric in “Araby”, social comedy at the Misses Morkan’s. One strain is charged: “The Dead” brings a warmth, the aunts’ hospitality and Gabriel’s “Generous tears”, that the verdict of paralysis had not allowed, and its last paragraph leaves undecided whether the law is kept or lifted.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Many orders, held in one city and one life’s course. Consciousness: a boy’s, a girl’s at the barrier, a celibate’s, a drunkard’s, a husband’s. The family: fathers who beat, a mother who bargains, a dying mother’s “Derevaun Seraun!”, two aunts and a niece. Labour: the copying clerk, the laundry, the canvassers, the boarding house, the concert trade. The state: the ward election, the Castle, the king’s visit, the Revival’s language and Miss Ivors’s west. The sacred: a priest’s breakdown, a retreat, a convent, the monks who “slept in their coffins”. History: Parnell’s fall and its afterlife. They are integrated by the city and by the order from childhood to public life. What holds the axis at 8.4 is the size of the rooms: the stories are short, history is a memory and not an agent, the natural order arrives only with the snow, and the city’s poor and its Protestant powers are seen at the edges.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.4, with The Unconcealment at 9.3. A plain prose that takes the colour of whoever it follows, carries whole stories in speech and closes on the most musical paragraph in the book; and a disclosure that holds without its city, that people are held less by the powers over them than by their own consent and the fine words in which they dress it.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.4, held by the size of the stories’ rooms: history is a memory and not an agent, the natural order arrives only with the snow, and the city’s poor and its Protestant powers stand at the edges. Next above it, The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7: a book that grew by addition and keeps one thin story; a height rationed by a plain register and by comic endings; and an archetype that bears the whole weight only in the last story.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.4, The Living Form at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, The Archetypal Deep by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a full reading of James Joyce’s Dubliners in the Project Gutenberg e-text #2814 (released 2001, last updated 9 March 2017), which does not name its copy-text: fifteen stories in the order Joyce set, 67,590 words with titles and contents excluded. The book is scored as one work, in its first edition, Grant Richards, London, 15 June 1914, the year of record. Every story Joyce added while the book waited for print is part of it, and “The Dead” is scored as its last story, not as a separate work. The versions of three stories printed in The Irish Homestead in 1904, signed Stephen Daedalus, are drafts, not the work. The critical texts of Robert Scholes (1967) and of Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (1993) are taken as the work where they restore Joyce’s words; neither is in hand, and nothing on this page rests on a reading in which they differ from the e-text. The e-text prints “Mr” without a stop and sets speech in quotation marks, neither credited nor charged; its few misprints, among them “Couterparts” in its contents, are not charged to the book. Every quotation on this page is checked character for character against the e-text. Counts of words, sentences, speech and recurring words were made by script on the e-text and are close, not exact. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates at which particular stories were written and added, the fate of an earlier Dublin printing and the sales of the first year, are not given; the plan of the Commedia claimed for “Grace” is stated as contested. Citations are by story.