Dubliners

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Mark Osteen

In some cases the editors' labors bear fruit: they provide, for example, the full text of the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Purdon's biblical text) for "Grace," the model for the newspaper story in "A Painful Case" and a photo of a gold sovereign for the end of "Two Gallants." The Afterwords to each story are generally brief, insightful explications; it's a pity the editors didn't exercise similar restraint elsewhere in the volume. In sum, while the visual material is sometimes illuminating, too often the editors allow their personal hobbyhorses to trample the text. Reading this edition is like eating watermelon: you're so busy picking out the inedible seeds that you can no longer savor the tasty flesh. Let us move on, shall we?

Grace

The Garland critical edition of Dubliners, while much less visually stimulating, is much more useful to the serious scholar. It contains Gabler's detailed introductory essay about Dubliners' textual and publication history, an explanation of the editing symbols and sigla, a set of manuscript traces (transcripts of the extant manuscripts on which the critical text was not ultimately based -- e.g., the early "Christmas Eve" -- but not the Irish Homestead versions of the stories), Joyce's suppressed preface, a meticulously edited and collated text, and, finally, a list of emendations of accidentals and a historical collocation. Gabler's introduction wastes no time: he presents two important discoveries within the first three pages. The first is the claim that the genesis of "The Sisters" was influenced by AE's directive for Joyce to read the story in the 2 July 1904 Irish Homestead, which featured a tale called "The Old Watchman," in which a 12-year-old boy recalls the death of an old man he had befriended. Although Gabler's claim that Joyce "rewrote" the earlier story seems exaggerated (2), nonetheless the parallels are striking. His second discovery may be described as a bombshell, and could revise one of our cherished critical commonplaces. In a letter to Constantine Curran,(10) Joyce is supposed to have written that he was writing "a series of ten epicleti . . . to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city" (Letters 1:55). For years critics have attempted to define what Joyce meant by "epicleti," usually tracing the word to the Greek epiklesis, which refers to an invocation in ancient Christian liturgies calling upon the Holy Spirit to effect the transformation of bread and wine into Christ's blood and body." But after having looked at the original letter, Gabler concludes that Joyce actually wrote "ten epiclets" (Gabler 3). I suspect that Gabler's claim will be controversial: not only does it eliminate a striking liturgical parallel, but it also removes the accusatory connotations of "epicleti" (as suggested by Scholes and Litz 256) that extend some of Joyce's other condemnatory comments on his city. I wouldn't presume to judge whether Gabler is correct without looking at the original letter, but I must say I find "epicleti" to be plausible in the context of words like "hemiplegia."(12) On the other hand, if Joyce conceived of the stories as mini-epics, then Ulysses (after all, originally conceived as a Dubliners story) may be even more continuous with the earlier work than has been previously thought.