I couldn't quite get into the stories we read in Dubliners. I've always been a fan of stories that have a little more action and I get bogged down when there is paragraphs of description about someone's house. It's nice sometimes to use that description to make the reader really imagine what the place looks like, but I think Dubliners just had too much. By the time I was done reading about what a bookcase looked like I almost forgot what was going on in the plot at the time.
In Araby I was able to get into the story a little more because there was a little more action and plot movement, the story is still very short though so it's hard to get a whole lot out of it.
In A Painful Case the early few pages were very slow due to the amount of description forced upon us, and not until about the bottom of page 91 does the plot start moving forward as Mr. Duffy started meeting the woman.
I am just looking forward to reading Cal and hopefully since it isn't a collection of short stories there will be more plot movement to keep it interesting and not paragraphs upon paragraphs of details that are really more in depth than what is needed for a 10-20 page story.
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I thought the ideas and history brought up in these stories were good, but I agree that Joyce's style made some of the stories feel longer than they actually were. Detail is good and all, but too much or using references that require specific historical or cultural knowledge, the initial read is a little more difficult to digest than expected.
ReplyDeleteAnd in one fell swoop Neil brushes aside one of the important watershed styles of literature ca. 1880-1910, realism. Good job! :)
ReplyDeleteI'd like to point you to a previous comment you made, just in the post below: "To me, some of the best stories are the ones that make me think and have ideas you have to dig for underneath the fairly straight-forward main plot" and I challenge you to reconcile the two.
[ps I'm not disagreeing that there's a lot of detail. But you know the whole "the devil is in the details" saying?]
Also, as to Kristopher's comment, remember that, quite frankly, people knew more stuff back in the day. Joyce's audience would have known the historical and cultural references that we do not. Doesn't make it less jarring to us, but we can't damn the author for it, retroactively.
ReplyDeleteI think you need to get into a rythm when reading Joyce. It takes an adjustment period for sure. That's why Joyce buolds in Dubliners from shorter, simpler (though no less dense)stories at the beginning to "The Dead", which is pretty much a novella. If you want to give it another shot, try "Counterparts." It's right in the middle, and therefore has a little more action but still has a lot of character development to work with.
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