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  • Letters
  • Jim LeBlanc

Sir:

In his review of Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners," edited by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) in the JJQ 54.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2017), 437-41, Victor Luftig promotes a serious misunderstanding of my contribution to that volume, "A 'Sensation of Freedom' and the Rejection of Possibility in Dubliners" (pp. 51-68). He states that my "assignment of an unappreciated Sartrean 'existential freedom' to Joyce's characters results in a rather shockingly (at least I was shocked) neoliberal reading according to which Dubliners are actually free, and just unwilling, to overcome poverty, addiction, misogyny, and colonial oppression" (Luftig, p. 438). Shocking, indeed, if that was the argument I was making. Rather, I argued—clearly enough, I thought—that Joyce's Dubliners are existentially free to attempt to overcome, or escape from, their circumstances, including those specifically mentioned by Luftig in his critique.

Early in my essay, I remark that it is the responsibility of individuals to "choose the attitudes with which to face their circumstances, even if the reality of those circumstances is beyond their control" (p. 54). My argument stresses that the apathy, complacency, fretfulness, and rage that characterize the attitudes of many of Joyce's Dubliners towards their circumstances reflect a facile willingness "to accept their failures and to see their situations as hopeless" (p. 55). We see little evidence in Dubliners of a willingness to try to overcome "poverty, addiction, misogyny, and colonial oppression." Joyce's protagonists are more likely to embrace their victimization in a bad-faith belief that nothing can be done. As Joyce himself demonstrated in his bold self-exile, and as generations of Irish have demonstrated to this day, however, there are clearly courses of action to be taken—albeit with no firm guarantee of success—if one refuses to accept the idea that nothing can be done about his or her situation. As Sartre puts it, more vividly (and as cited in my own essay, p. 64), we "shall not say that a prisoner is always free to go out of prison, which would be absurd, nor that he is always free to long for release, which would be an irrelevant truism, but that he is always free to try to escape"—Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le néant: essai d'ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 495, my translation. [End Page 257]

Jim LeBlanc
Cornell University
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