Joyce's City: History, Politics, and Life in "Dubliners" by Jack Morgan (review)

Jack Morgan's elegant and enlightening study of Dubliners is the most recent in what appears to be a historicist turn in the study of James Joyce's early book of short stories. Looking back on the two decades that immediately preceded and followed the turn of the twenty-first century, one is struck by the extent to which the study of Dubliners was dominated by ethical and narratological readings. R. B. Kershner's Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature stressed both the performative nature of Joyce's stories and the extent to which his characters were caught within conflicting sets of discourses and ideologies.¹ In 1993, Garry M. Leonard's Reading "Dubliners" Again proposed a psychonalytic perspective which focused on stylistic shifts in the stories.² The subtitle of Tanja Vesala-Varttala's 1999 study of Dubliners, Ethical Probing of Reading, Narrative, and Textuality speaks for itself.³ Finally, Margot Norris's Suspicious Readings locates those strategies of conflict and occlusion in Joyce's stories that oblige the narrator, and even the reader, to play an interpretive role which frequently includes an ethical dimension.⁴ In contrast to an earlier generation of formalist readings, what all of these works have in common is the interpretation of an interplay between narrative form and the ethical implications of Joyce's fiction. Such interpretations have their roots in a long tradition; we learn lessons and make judgments about stories based on what we are told or not told about what fictional persons do or not do. What changes through the passing of time are the ethical frameworks of the lessons we draw and the judgments we make.

In contrast to this preoccupation with ethical interpretations, what I am calling the turn toward historicism takes the view that the deepest understanding of Joyce's first published work of fiction is to be found in the dense network of its allusions to the cultural and historical contexts of Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century. In keeping with this view, Frank Shovlin's Journey Westward: Joyce, "Dubliners" and the Literary Revival takes up such apparently marginal subjects as the role of whiskey distilleries in the Irish economy or the survival of Jacobitism into Joyce's day.⁵ Morgan works in the same way, proposing what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call a "thick description" of a seemingly minor incident or ritual in order to show how its meanings resonate throughout the world Joyce evokes.⁶ This kind of work has the virtue of bringing new and relevant historical knowledge to bear on Joyce's work.

Two different readings of Joyce's story "Clay" offer a striking contrast between the ethical and historicist interpretations outlined above. Norris argues that Maria, the middle-aged, unmarried woman at the center of the story, is a victim of the class and gender ideologies that stigmatize her as an "old maid" (140), even if the narrator fails to acknowledge this designation. When, in the Hallow Eve divination game toward the end of the story, the blindfolded Maria chooses the saucer with "a soft wet substance" (D 105), Norris finds that a trick has been played on her, one which unjustly reaffirms her lowly status as an object of ridicule.

In reading the same episode, Morgan is more interested in the nature of the Hallow Eve game as a vestige of pagan Irish folklore. He finds the real issue to be the attempt to reappropriate and sanitize the ritual in the name of bourgeois Catholic values. At the time when the story takes place, the augury game included saucers containing a ring, a prayer book, water, or clay—respectively symbolic of expected marriage, a religious vocation, fertility, and death. Morgan points out that the prayer book must be a late addition to the ancient Celtic practice (94). When Mrs. Donnelly scolds the next-door girls for having imported garden dirt for the death option, her attitude reflects...