Essays: As everyone in the country must know by now, June 16th, 2004 is the centenary of Bloomsday, the day on which Joyce's Ulysses is set.
The publication of this volume of essays on Dubliners is timed to coincide with another anniversary: the earliest versions of some of these short stories first appeared in print 100 years ago. 1904 was also the year in which Joyce, then aged 22, left Ireland for good.
In effect, Joyce was to spend the rest of his life writing about Dublin as it was in 1904. But is the Dublin of Dubliners the same as the Dublin of Ulysses? Would we now even be reading the bleak tales of Dubliners, written in what Joyce described as a style of "scrupulous meanness", if their author had not gone on to produce those daring comic masterpieces, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake? Contrary to what some of these essayists assert, Joyce's first book has surely already received more than its fair share of critical attention.
Nevertheless, as Paul Devine points out in his essay, stylistic "meanness" does not necessarily make for textual "transparency", and several of the writers here tackle some of the oldest themes in Joyce criticism. They reconsider the issues of symbolism, of the Joycean "epiphany", and of the "paralysis" which Joyce identified as his fellow citizens' biggest problem (R. Brandon Kershner offers a particularly suggestive discussion of paralysis in relation to protest or rebellion). What is Father Flynn guilty of in the story 'The Sisters'? What is the meaning of the mother's dying cries in 'Eveline'? Why is there a rusty bicycle pump in the shrubbery in 'Araby'? All of these questions crop up again, even though they can never be definitively answered.
Fritz Senn shows how complicated even Joyce's simplest narratives can be, by means of a wonderful sentence-by-sentence analysis of the opening paragraph of 'A Little Cloud'. Several of the most interesting contributions read the stories in the light of what Joyce did next, especially those essays which consider the representation of women in Dubliners.
Keith Williams's fascinating essay, 'Short Cuts of the Hibernian Metropolis', deals with Joyce's "quasi-filmic" storytelling techniques, showing how these anticipate the more radical cinematic experiments of Ulysses. Other critics debate issues of historical context, especially the late 19th-century sexual scandals involving Parnell and Wilde, and the considerable influence of Dubliners on later Irish writers such as John Banville and Neil Jordan.
What attitude does Joyce take towards the thwarted lives he depicts in this book? This must be a key question in the interpretation of Dubliners. For if Joyce's cultivated aestheticism (signalled by his fastidiously precise style), and a quick exit to Europe, were the only ways to escape from dreary early 20th-century Dublin, then what hope was there for any of the city's less brilliant sons and daughters? If Joyce was right about Dublin in this book, then how did its citizens manage to achieve so much, both in his own lifetime and since? Was the much more celebratory and optimistic Ulysses merely the result of Joyce's later contact with French or Italian culture, rather than of his own continuing fascination with Ireland? T.P. Dolan gives us an amusing account here of Joyce's exploitation of Hiberno-English and "Dublinese", but without speculating as to why Joyce remained so obsessed with the voices of his native city. And most readers would surely reject the premise of David Norris's essay, that Joyce exhibits the characters of Dubliners as hilarious grotesques (although he is of course right that the stories make us laugh). Spurgeon Thompson details how surprisingly prominent Dubliners has been in recent attempts to make sense of what we might call Ireland's "colonial modernity".
Such accounts offer a clue as to how Dublin could figure both as a provincial backwater and as an emancipatory modern metropolis, at different stages of Joyce's career. These complexities do not trouble Michael Holmes and Alan Roughley, however, who argue that the Irish are showing as many symptoms of their old paralysis as ever (demonstrated, evidently, by continuing social inequality and xenophobia). Holmes and Roughly adopt the tones of anthropologists reporting about a backward and puzzling society - an approach wholly at odds with the intimacy and intricacy of Joyce's unmatched analysis of a century ago.
• Emer Nolan, author of Joyce and Nationalism, lectures in English in NUI Maynooth