Dubliners, By James Joyce, And Its Representation Of The Irish Independence Process

DUBLINERS, BY JAMES JOYCE, AND ITS REPRESENTATION OF THE IRISH INDEPENDENCE PROCESS Nicolas Pelicioni de OLIVEIRA1 ABSTRACT: This paper presents James Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), and its relation with the Irish Independence process. Of the fifteen stories in the book, only “The Dead”, the last and longest one, is analysed in deep. KEYWORDS: James Joyce; Dubliners; Irish; Ireland; The Dead. James Joyce was born on 2 February, 1882, in Dublin, where he lived until his family moved to the seaside town of Bray. He studied in Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit school known as the Eton of Ireland. At the age of 16, in 1898, he began to study modern languages (English, Italian, and French) at University College Dublin, and, in 1901, he published The Day of the Rabblement, at his own expense, an critical essay first refused by the college magazine that criticised the parochialism and chauvinistic trend of the Irish Literary Theatre. The following year, Joyce left Dublin and went to Paris with the intention of studying medicine. In April 1903 Joyce returned to Dublin after receiving a telegram with the news that his mother, May Joyce, who suffered from cancer, was dying. “On his arrival, his mother pleaded with him to take confession and receive communion: he refused. She died that August” (ABBOT; BELL, 2001, p. 7). On 16 June, 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, the woman who would later become his wife. The date was represented in Ulysses and has come to be known as “Bloomsday”. Nora Barnacle was Joyce’s lifelong companion and also the inspiration for the character Molly in Ulysses. In 1904, Joyce and Nora moved to Pola, Austria-Hungary. Due to political or financial problems, it was just the first of several Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” – UNESP; Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas – IBILCE; Departamento de Letras Modernas – DLEM; São José do Rio Preto – São Paulo – Brasil; Orientação: Prof Dr Peter James Harris. 1 OLIVEIRA, Nicolas Pelicioni. Dubliners, by James Joyce, and Its Representation of the Irish Independence Process. Mosaico. São José do Rio Preto: UNESP, 2015, v. 14, n. 2. p. 155-164. locations in which the Joyces lived. Other locations include cities like Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. [p. 156] Between 1905 and 1914 Joyce made eighteen attempts to publish Dubliners, without success, due to content that was considered to be blasphemous and libellous. The publication of Ulysses was equally difficult. It was first published in The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, and, in its entirety, in 1922. It was published in the United States only in 1934. Joyce published his “unreadable” masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, in 1939, just two years before his death of a perforated ulcer on 13 January, 1941. In his introduction to Tomedi’s book, dedicated to Dublin, Harold Bloom asks: “Is a literary place, by pragmatic definition, a city?” (BLOOM, 2005, p. ix). If the answer is yes, then Dubliners is about the inhabitants of Dublin. But the relation between the fiction, the city, and Joyce himself had been so troublesome that it delayed the publication of the book for about ten years. Seamus Deane goes further than Bloom and states that Joyce’s enterprise was founded on a paradox. Dublin was an absence, a nowhere, a place that was not really a city or a civilization at all. It was a Cave of the Winds, like the ‘Aeolus’ chapter in Ulysses, the home of the cosmetic phrase, the Dublin rouge on the faded cheek of the English language. Joyce wanted to dismantle its provincialism and its pretensions; yet he also sought to env