The Employment
of Style
in James Joyce's Dubliners
A thesis
Presented to
The English Department of
Shanghai International Studies University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement
For the Degree of Master of Arts
ByZhanYun
Under the Supervision of
Professor Li Weiping
November 2003
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
II
Abstract (English)
III
Abstract (Chinese)
IV
Chapter 1 Introduction
....................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2 Stylistic Features of James Joyce's Dubliners
....................................................................................... 10
2.1 Lexical Categories
10
2.2 Grammatical Categories
12
2.3 Figures of Speech
13
2.3 Cohesion and.Context
,
15
Chapter 3 The Employment of Style in Dubliners
....................................................................................... 24
3.1 Background Knowledge
24
3.1.1 Discoursal Speech Presentation
24
3.1.2 Presentation of Thought
30
3.2 Development of Style in Dubliners
32
3.2.1 The Sisiters
32
3.2.2 Eveline
36
3.2.3 Ivy Day in the Committee Room
39
3.2.4 A Little Cloud
48
3.2.5 The Dead
,
57
Chapter 4 Conclusion
....................................................................................... 71
Bibliography
75
Acknowledgements
It is a most exciting moment to record the helps that I have received as the
entire progression of activity culminates in the finalization and defense of the thesis.
First, I want to express my great appreciation to my supervisor, Professor Li
Weiping. Without his instructive lectures and rewarding advice, the thesis would
never develop into the present distilled shape.
My thanks also go to my dear parents, whose concern and attention encouraged
me ~ lot during the process of thinking and composing.
And I want to thank my dear friends as well. They always give me strong
spiritual support. And they are always ready to offer me help when I need it.
Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to the authors whose invaluable
works illuminate my understanding of the topic under discussion.
II
Abstract
James Joyce is one of the greatest Ireland novelists in the twentieth century, as
well as an outstanding representative of the modernist novels of the Western world.
His writing exercises great influence on the development of the western literature.
Sometimes he is compared with Dickens as two writers after Shakespeare. The short
story corpus, Dubliners, is one of his masterworks. In the collection, Joyce chooses
Dublin, the capital of Ireland, as the background, and presents to us vivid description
of the life in Dublin at the beginning of the last century.
In the present thesis, the author is going to investigates Dubliners through
stylistic approach. Several short stories from Dubliners are selected as the subject of
study, so as to discover the employment of stylistic features of the corpus. The
emphasis is put on Speech and Thought presentation in the stories. The author of this
paper hopes to provide objective evidence for the stories' aesthetic value through
describing and analyzing the chosen linguistic features and their stylistic effects,
thus enabling readers to understand and appreciate better the subject's significance
and artistic value.
III
摘要
詹姆斯·乔伊斯是二十世纪里一位伟大的爱尔兰小说家，也是西方现代主义
小说的杰出代表。他的创作对西方文学产生了巨大的影响。他和狄根斯一起被
誉为莎士比亚之后两位最伟大的用英语创作的作家。而短篇小说集《都柏林人》
则是其代表作之一。这本小说集以爱尔兰首都都柏林为背景，生动地再现了上
世纪初的一幅幅都柏林生活图景。
本文以《都柏林人》为文本，从文体学这一崭新的角度出发，对小说集中
若干具有代表性的小说的文体风格进行了研究，重点探讨了小说中人物的言语
行为与心理行为的表现方式。通过描写和分析作者选择的语言成分及其产生的
特定文体效果，为挖掘文本的美学价值提供了客观的依据，并使我们能够更好
地理解和鉴赏文本的意义和艺术价值。
IV
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
Chapter 1 Introduction
James Joyce, one of the greatest authors in the twentieth century, is now
commonly classified with Virginia Wolf, William Faulkner and other modernists as
the writer of "Stream of Consciousness". His masterwork,
Ulysses, which he
reportedly boasted that "would keep the professors busy", has indeed occupied the
bulk of articles related to his work. His another well-known production, Finnegans
Wake, is also beginning to arouse a growing number of researcher's attention. At the
same time, his early work, Dubliners, a corpus of short stories, is often seen as a step
to Ulysses, and its stories are often picked over for evidence of their influence on
Ulysses. However, as Fritz Sean states, "even in his (Joyce's) earliest published
prose Joyce wrote in a most complex, heavily allusive style, different from its later
intricacies in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in degree only.:" Therefore, it is argued
that Dubliners should have a critical life of its own.
In the present paper, the author intends to explore the employment of stylistic
features in James Joyce's Dubliners systematically through the stylistic approach.
Her aim is to discover James Joyce's style by examining a few characteristic stories
in this corpus, and hopefully to present a reasonable interpretation of these stylistic
features, thus to get an insightful evaluation of Joyce's style in general.
Before we begin the stylistic analysis, we may have a look on various research
methods having been applied to Dubliners. A Joyce critic states that the criticism of
Joyce's Dubliners falls into three unique threads, to which the author of the present
thesis agrees. They are: the Symbolic thread, the Theoretical thread, and the
Pedagogical thread. 2
I Faith Steinberg, "The Sisters and the Case of the Broken Chalice," The Modem Word, June 2003
<http://www.themodemword.com/joyce/joyce paper steinberg.html>.
"An Annotated Bibliography of James Joyce's Araby," mason.gmu.edu, June 2003
<http://mason.gmu.edul-lhill2/araby_annotated.htm>.
2
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
The symbolic thread interprets Dubliners from three directions. First, it seeks to
uncover allusions to other authors. For example, in the story Araby, there appears an
important name, "Mangan", which belongs to both the protagonist's friend and his
idealized sister. To some critics, this name indicates the influence of Ireland's poet
James Clarence Mangan on Joyce. Researchers would as well locate allusions to
Yeats and Dequincy, two important figures in Joyce's life. For them, the stories'
significance lies in its symbolic details. On the other hand, another group of scholars
would illuminate various intricacies of Joyce's text. Take Araby again for example:
in addition to reading the name Mangan, critics touch upon, among other things, the
symbolism of "blind", the word "Araby", the implication of "chalice", and so on. A
famous critic, Robert apRoberts, for instance, gives a fine reading of the bicycle
pump (an item that has generated much criticism) as "a symbol of the British
commercial materialism which has corrupted Irish Catholism"'. Finally, the third
group of symbolic researchers focuses on the structure of the plot and its possible
allusion to various legends. Critics argue that the stories are governed by "extended
similies'", which are comparisons that "affect the total meaning of the work'".
Among these critics, some do successfully make plot connections between stories in
Dubliners and works such as Paradise Lost, Rousseau's Confessions, etc.
Indeed, symbolic criticism of Joyce continues today. However, more and more
articles concerning the analysis of Joyce's stories began to have more theoretical
bent, which introduces to us the Theoretical thread of criticism. But, on the whole,
the theoretical area has not been sufficiently exploited. The limited range of the
post-modernist theorists concentrates on Lacanian analysis. There are no strong
J "An Annotated Bibliography of James Joyce's Araby," mason.gmu.edu, June 2003
<http://mason.gmu.edu/-lhill2/araby_annotated.htm>.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
2
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
historicist readings. There are no strong feminist approaches either, although there
are books on Dubliners with these theoretical bents.
Dubliners also proves to be a fruitful training ground in the Pedagogical project.
The debate over the stories in the classroom offers us new interesting ways of
reading them, which may arouse significant illuminations on the stories.
In summary, there have been three main threads in Dubliners criticism. The
symbolic dominates. The theoretical has work still needed to be done. But it is not to
be denied that it will account for some illuminating articles in the future. And the
pedagogical approach has found stories in Dubliners both a teaching ground for
students and an accessible starting point for more complex theoretical endeavors.
While these threads do overlap on occasion, they have all independently provided
innovative approaches to Dubliners.
The above is a summarization of various approaches to Joyce's Dubliners. We
may notice that there are few articles discussing the language techniques employed
by Joyce in his Dubliners, which, if investigated into, will prove to be meaningful
and fruitful. That accounts for the first reason why the author of this paper chooses
Joyce's style as the subject. As we have commented, Joyce's language is full of
stylistic values. His style in Dubliners is creative enough to serve as the object of
stylistic study. In fact, Joyce is known as one of those experimental modernist
writers who are engaged in a revolution against nineteenth century style and content
in fiction. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Joyce's works have been
investigated into by plenty of researchers. Nevertheless, most of the research works
already produced concentrate more on Ulysses. Even if several stories in Dubliners
are paid attention to, the emphasis is put on their thematic or symbolic, rather than
stylistic importance. Therefore, a study of Joyce's style in Dubliners should
certainly be productive and instructive.
As we know, Joyce's Dubliners contains fifteen short stories in all, which is
divided into four stages. The Sisters, An Encounter and Araby are stories from
Childhood. Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants and The Boarding House are
stories from Adolescence. A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay and A Painful Case
3
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
are all stories concerned with Mature Life. Stories from Public Life are Ivy Day in
the Committee Room, A Mother and Grace. The Dead is the last story in the
collection and probably Joyce's greatest. It stands alone and, as the title would
indicate, is concerned with death.
Of course, a detailed analysis of every aspect of Joyce's language in these
fifteen stories is impossible, especially in this short thesis of limited pages. On the
other hand, we should also notice that beyond the general language norms, an
individual text might set up its own secondary norms. Joyce's Dubliners should be
no exception to this rule. Therefore, the author of this paper is going to select several
characteristic stories from the corpus, namely, The Sisters, Eveline, A Little Cloud,
Ivy Day in the Committee Room and The Dead, as the texts for stylistic illustration.
The reason for choosing these stories is that each of them serves as the first story of
every stage. As Joyce doesn't arrange the stories casually, these five stories should
playa very important role in terms of the theme of the corpus. Therefore, a study of
these stories may be more illuminating.
As this paper concerns the stylistic study, an introduction to it is necessary. To begin
with, the author thinks it is significant to clarify some misunderstanding and
prejudice against stylistics. To many people, the stylistic method of interpreting
literature is not reliable, because the aesthetic feeling of a literary work is such that it
should be experienced as a whole. The stylistic approach, however, is to "dissect"
this flower of beauty. Nevertheless, they are often confronted with some intuitive
understanding toward a certain literary work, a "click" in the mind, which cannot be
proved of solidified. In than case, the stylistic approach may be of some help. In fact,
the aim of stylistic study is not to destroy the wholesome beauty of a literary work,
but to examine it more carefully. To quote Geoffery Leech and Michael Short, two
eminent linguistic-critics, "the aim of a stylistic approach to literature is not only to
understand better how a particular effect or meaning of a literary work is achieved,
but to gain a greater appreciation of what the writer has created."!
4
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
Therefore, stylistics is a systematic, theoretically grounded research method
which can help us to validate our intuitions, so as to achieve an insightful
understanding. The question is, in what way the stylistic approach helps us to gain
such understanding.
To study the style of a certain text, we should first make it clear what "style" is,
As we can find in most stylistic monographs, style is usually defined as "the
linguistic characteristics of a particular text.,,2 Stylistics, therefore, investigates the
relation between the writer's artistic achievement, and how it is achieved through
language. That is, it studies the relation between the significances of a text, and the
linguistic characteristics in which they are manifested.
The study of the above mentioned relation will inevitably lead us into the long
debated topic of the relationship between STYLE and CONTENT. Generally
speaking, there are three different views toward this relationship, Monism, Dualism
and Plurism.
Monism insists on the inseparability of style and content. It contends that any
change of style will bring the change of content. But this absolute idea will make it
impossible to evaluate a literary work through a stylistic approach. On the other
hand, Dualism views style as the 'dress of thought' or as 'manner of expression'.
Therefore, different choices of expression may not necessarily lead to different
contents. However, this argumentation, though seems right at first sight, also has its
flaws. It sees style as something that is attached to the content, which does not
always prove to be true. One may simply ask the question "Why is it impossible to
change a word in poetry?" to counter-argue it.
The pluristic view of the relationship between style and content is the view that
the author of the paper personally holds. It can be illustrated in the following
1 Geoffery
2
Leech, and Michael Short, Style in Fiction (London and New York: Longman Group Limited) 2.
Ibid. 5.
5
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
diagram:
mp::tnino
----i~.1
dvli<:til'v::tlllp
~---i~.1
<:tvlidil'. v::tIIlP
~---I~~I
<:tvli<:til'. v::tIIlP
In this diagram, "meaning" refers to Content, while "expression" refers to
different style. That is to say, the same content may be expressed in different ways,
which may result in different significances. If we change 'expression' for a more
professional phrase in stylistic domain, 'stylistic variant', then the diagram would be:
mp::tnino
-:1stvlistic variant ~
k~,,--i
srvlistic variant
"~
stvlistic variant
<,
~
~
<:tvli<:tir v::tIIlP
stvlietir- vs IIlP
ervli <:til'. v::tIIlP
Here "stylistic variants" refer to different words or phrases employed by the
author. From the above diagram, we can see that the relationship between Style and
Content is a pluralistic one. Different contents, such as works of different writers,
will achieve different style, thus resulting in different artistic values. On the other
hand, the same content may be expressed by different stylistic variants, resulting in
different significances as well. In Dubliners, we can find plenty of instances to
illustrate this view. Take The Sisters as an example. Faith Steinberg noted that "The
Sisters was first published in the The Irish Homestead in 1904 and before final
publication went through many revisions?'. He noticed that in the Homestead
version the priest in his coffin has a rosary on his chest, while in an early text
printed in the Scholes and Litz edition, there is a cross rather than a rosary: and in
1 Faith Steinberg, "The Sisters and the Case of the Broken Chalice," The Modem Word, June 2003
<http://www.themodemword.com/joyce/joyce paper steinberg.html>.
6
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
the final version the rosary and the cross are replaced by a chalice. Why does Joyce
deliberately choose "chalice" as a symbol here? Undoubtedly, the importance of the
chalice is worthy of note. All the three vessels, rosary, cross and chalice share the
same meaning in that they are all used in the funeral, as something put on the
corpse's chest. But the chalice values most as it is the most important vessel in the
Catholic Church used in the Eucharist and according to church dogma hold the
blood of Christ. Very near the end of the narrative, Eliza, after a long silence, slowly
says, "It was the chalice he broke...That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say
it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still...They say it was the boy's
fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him!" So the chalice does
playa very important role in the priest's life. The replacement of rosary and cross by
the chalice can lead readers better into an insight of its symbolic meaning: the
paralysis of religion and the ailment of the priest, which is further enhanced by the
adjectives combined with it, such as 'broken' or 'idle', as the boy later refers to the
chalice.
In the last story, The Dead, Joyce has reached a further stage in his skillful
control of language form in order to illustrate the subtle meaning of the narration.
But a more proving example of Joyce's artistic technique appears in a later work, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which we shall take a brief look at. Portrait
takes "the stylistic infection of The Dead to a more complete realm, as the style of
each period of Stephen's life, from infancy to graduation from college, takes on the
vocabulary and rhythms of his intellectual and emotional life'". This feature of
Portrait has been noticed by many critics. One of them, Anthony Burgess, has
proposed a division of novelists into 'Class!' and 'Class2'. A Class! novelist is one
"in whose work language is a zero quality, transparent, unseductive, the overtones
i Faith Steinberg, "The Sisters and the Case of the Broken Chalice," The Modem Word, June 2003
<http://www.themodemword.com/joyce/joyce paper steinberg.html>.
2
Geoffery Leech, and Michael Short, Style in Fiction (London and New York: Longman Group Limited) 27.
7
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
on connotation and ambiguity totally damped'". The Class2 novelist is one for
whom "ambiguities, puns and centrifugal connotations are to be enjoyed rather than
regretted, and whose books, made out of words as much as characters and incidents,
lose a great deal when adapted to a visual medium"l. Burgess classifies James Joyce
as a Class2 novelist, and offers a mock-Class1 version of the beginning of James
Joyce's Portrait, which I quoted here. [1] is the original beginning and [2]
IS
Burgess's Class1 version.
[1] Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the
road and this moo cow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named
baby tuckoo ...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold
lemon platt.
[2] My earliest recollections are of my father and my mother bending over my cot and of the
difference in personal odour that subsisted between my two parents. My father, certainly,
did not have so pleasant an odour as my mother. I remember I would be told infantile stories,
altogether appropriate to my infantile station. One of them, I seem to recall, was concerned
with a cow coming down the lane - which lane was never specified - and meeting a child
who was called (I am embarrassed, inevitable, to recollect this in maturity) some such name
as Baby Tuckoo. I myself, apparently, was to be thought of as Baby Tuckoo. Or was it
Cuckoo: It is, of course, so long age ...
Though we need not take Burgess's parody too seriously, we could easily find
that [1] is more abundant of 'stylistic values compared with [2]. It leads us directly
into the child's mind. In that way, Joyce seems to be exploiting language, using it to
the extreme through destroying all the rules, conventions and expectations.
In summary, the stylistic way of interpreting a literary work puts emphasis on
various language phenomena. As a practitioner of the stylistic approach, we will try
to find out unique and valuable linguistic phenomena and illuminate on them,
mostly through comparison and contrast, so as to find out different significances of
different stylistic variants, which may lead to a more insightful interpretation. In the
following part of the paper, we are going to discuss the stylistic features of James
Joyce's Dubliners by using the stylistic approach. The author is going to comment
on Joyce's style from the general to the specific, thus enabling readers to get a
wholesome appreciation of Joyce's style. Chapter two is a general analysis of the
8
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
stylistic features in James Joyce's Dubliners. The author is going to examine Joyce's
language under four stylistic categories, from vocabulary to discourse, so that
readers will get a primary impression of the linguistic characteristics in Joyce's
Dubliners. Then, in Chapter three, the author will discuss the stylistic features of the
five chosen stories in details. The emphasis is put on the way of Speech and Thought
presentation. As we know, Joyce is very famous for his subtle, delicate investigation
into the inner world of the characters, which we can find evidences in Dubliners as
well, and his stories is often commented as psychological stories. In what way does
Joyce achieve the effect of psychological stories? This is a question that the author
of the paper mostly interested in. And the stylistic analysis of the speech act and
thought activity presentation in the stories will be helpful in answering this question.
Chapter four, and the last chapter, is the conclusion of the paper. In this chapter, the
author is going to sum up the artistic effect and significance of James Joyce's
Dubliners. Through this general-specific process, readers will certainly be able to
gain a profound appreciation of the stylistic values of Joyce's Dubliners.
Finally, all the extracts in this paper are taken from an edition published by
Penguin Books, which is first published in 1926.
9
The Employment of Style in James Joyce's Dubliners
Chapter 2 Stylistic Features of James Joyce's Dubliners
In this chapter, the author is going to present a general analysis of the stylistic
features in James Joyce's Dubliners, so that readers can get a preliminary
impression of the style in this book. As we know, linguists, when studying language,
usually put it into several categories, such as lexicology, syntax, semantics, etc.
Similarly, Michael Short and Geoffrey leech, when discussing stylistic categories,
have placed the categories under four general headings: lexical categories,
grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context. As all
linguistic and stylistic phenomena are contained in these four categories, the author
is going to examine the language in Dubliners under these four headings as well.
2.1 Lexical categories
Generally speaking, the vocabulary in Dubliners is simple, colloquial and
descriptive. Even those who study English as a second language do not have to
count on dictionaries too much, which may be explained by Joyce's intention to
"convert bread into art'". However, this does not mean that there are no big words in
the stories. Actually there are such words. And when they occur they usually contain
some associative meanings. Take the first paragraph of The Sisters as an example:
There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night had
passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window:
and night after night 1 had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If
he was dead, 1 thought, 1 would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind,
for 1 knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said
to me: 'I am not long for this world,' and 1 had thought his words idle. Now I
knew they were true. Every night as 1 gazed up at the window I said softly to
myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the
word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it
sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being It filled me with
fear, and yet 1 longed to be neared to it and to look upon its deadly work.
10