The keywords in understanding Joyce’s Dubliners are language and Dublin. As a young boy he was attentive to the language spoken in his circumambient, the language of barflies, the language of gossip, common language. There are different sources that speak of Joyce’s struggles to establish connections between words and reality, a process that had its beginnings in Joyce’s early years. In trying to do so he realized how ignorant people were of the meaning of the words they used.
Dublin was to Joyce a city which did preserve its forms through the centuries, but not its content and meaning. ‘A man born into that Dublin, exhorted to admire the image of old buildings in the stream, might seek instead to admire the image of the once-living city, loving his city’s leisure and hating the lethargy of the living who cut him off from life, such a man-James Joyce- would find himself simultaneously citizen and exile’.
According to Joyce this paralysis was best seen in the spoken language of Dubliners, a language abounding in cliches, a language full of expressions that had been respoken for centuries. In Dublin, the circumambient language doesn’t serve the citizen’s thought but directs it. Men are unable of producing genuine opinions, they shape their mental processes according to the locutions they must use.
What Joyce proves is that every single word said by a Dubliner has a double nature, on one side it is a reference to a precise meaning in the past on the other hand, with respect to Joyce’s Dublin, every word which once a time had a precise meaning is now marked by vagueness, a vagueness that consists mainly in the inappropriate way the word is used. Book after book Joyce shed more and more light over this double nature of language which according to Joyce alone contained Dublin’s civic reality.
The showpiece of Joyce’s central technique is the fourteenth episode of Ulysses. Words flourish in the soil of known things. As for Joyce’s comment of this 14th episode, the author claimed that it was about ‘the crime committed against fertility by sterilizing the act of coition’. Coition is here employed in an Aristotelian context, i.e.: metaphor for the intercourse between mind and external things. What Joyce saw in Dublin was a tyranny of the patterns that impeded ‘copulation’ and rendered the society a dead one. In such a context nothing is generated and words’ pivoting center are the idée reçue.
Ethos and pathos elucidate both Joyce’s Dublin and Joyce’s writing, conformed with scrupulous irony to the principles of classical rhetoric and psychology. In Dubliners pathos prevails, and by pathos, according to the traditional definition in rhetorics, we mean what is undergone, or better, the passive, sentimental personality. In Ulysses the masculine culture is represented, still it’s in a process of relapse from ethos, that traditionally refers to a status of activity, to pathos. In The Siren Song, two apparently different, even opposite characters, merge into one another while singing: ‘Come, Come to me’. Such a song, sung by two men who have both lost their wives, though in different ways, symbolizes the common subconscious constitution of the characters and this decline of masculinity, of authority in the mere articulation of banal cadences, this metamorphosis of ethos into pathos.
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