Abstract
IT IS A MISTAKE for you to imagine that my political opinions are those of a universal lover; but they are those of a socialistic artist.' So James Joyce declared to his younger brother Stanislaus in May 1905, when he was immersed in the composition of Dubliners and Stephen Hero. But this political-aesthetic credo seems not to have been taken very seriously by Joyce's critics. Modern discussions of Dubliners, especially since Brewster Ghiselin's influential article of 1956,2 have been devoted mainly to the stories' intricate and interlocking patterns of symbolic meaning. These patterns certainly exist, and they provide a ready and easy way of teaching Dubliners; but to do justice to Joyce's achievement we must combine symbolic exegesis with an equal attentiveness to the material realiti s on which symbolic meaning is grounded. In Two Gallants, for example, Lenehan's paltry supper may be explained as a debased reenactment of the Eucharist; the attribution of such a meaning, however, depends on Lenehan's debased status in the actual society of which he forms part. The critical principle involved is that symbolic form should not be assigned to a closed and self-relating universe of meaning; it should be derived from social reality (as represented in the work), and that social reality should be recognized as primary. Only then can Dubliners be seen to merit the particular status continually claimed for it by Joyce: that of a moral work. This status was asserted most memor-
- Journal
- College English
- Published
- 1972-11-01
- DOI
- 10.2307/375283
- CompPile
- Open Access
- Closed
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