The Short Stories Of James Joyce

Introduction

The status of James Joyce's short stories as successful, original, or even completed compositions has always been in question; even in more subjective terms, however, they seem to offer few of the rewards of their longer and better known counterparts. First, and most damagingly, they are humorless; what humor may be discerned in them is bitter or ironic, inspired by pained defiance or jaded cynicism. Secondly, they are spare, denuded of the variable styles and elaborate contexts that make Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake seem inexhaustible. Finally, they easily dismissed as immediately derivative of both Joyce's experiences and his reading (Muller, pp. 24).

Discussion

Although the brevity and earnestness of Joyce's minor pieces put them in opposition to the principal ones, the relationship between the shorter and longer productions is much closer when viewed in structural and thematic terms. Chamber Music, the Epiphanies, and Giacomo Joyce are all composed of isolated, artistically rendered moments arranged to form flowing progression; the three acts of Exiles loosely divide thirteen unmarked scenes, each an intimate dialogue between two characters, stitched together by the conventions, both social and theatrical of entrances and exits. The strategy of producing a longer and more complicated text together by stringing a series of formally independent units is essential not only to the design of Dubliners, where the structural building blocks are short stories, but also to the increasingly complex episodic structures of A Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake (Levin, pp. 127). In short, the minor works make it much more apparent that Joyce's technique, even in the longer texts is in large part an imagist one, adapted from poetry to narrative and massively elaborated in the process.

If the shorter texts outline the basic structure of all Joyce's works, they also provide the simplest statement of Joyce's most characteristic themes, which treated, polyphonically in his longer compositions: themes of loss, betrayal, and the interplay of psychological and social experience. Strikingly, all of the short stories record the experience of some loss: the Epiphanies seem to be arranged to depict the loss of innocence (Joyce, pp. 45). Chamber Music plays out the loss of youthful love, a theme picked up and translated into predominantly visual terms in Giacomo Joyce. Many of the poems in Pomes Penyeach echo the theme of wasted youth, but the collection also includes more anguished treatments of different kinds of loss: in 'Tilly', a figurative loss of limb makes the dead speak; it is the illusion of beauty that lost in 'A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight'. The list can be expanded to include loss of sight in 'Bahnhofstrasse', loss of life in 'She Weeps over Rahoon', loss of faith in 'Night piece', and loss of peace and security in the nightmarish 'I Hear an Army'; in the words of another 'pome', 'Tutto e sciolto' (all is lost) (Deming, pp. 371). Exiles are the most complicated of Joyce's briefer treatments of attrition, since it probes the loss of spontaneity in ...