The Cheer of the Gratefully Oppressed

In a 1905 letter to Grant Richards, James Joyce explained his reasoning for choosing Dublin as the epicentre for his collection of short stories titled Dubliners. Joyce writes that “my intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.” Joyce successfully paints a close-knit portrait of the Irish following their vain desires in an assortment of stories that begin with a wake and end with a marital crisis. A feeble sense of paralysis and escapism via the consumption of alcohol are shared conditions after centuries of oppression for the Dubliners; and these are a direct result of the colonizing British and the social, religious, and political institutions that influenced the island. This essay will evaluate Joyce’s depiction of a state of immobility in the Irish people as a direct result of British colonial rule and how this feeling of paralysis serves as a catalyst for the senseless consumption of alcohol in the novel; a consumption that is introduced by the urge to fight off this shared feeling of inertia of the Dubliners.

Being a student of medicine, Joyce had an ingenuity for diagnosis. He found himself unable to withstand the restrictions of a life in Dublin, which led the author to decide that Ireland was sick and diagnosed the island’s psychological disorder as hemiplegia, a partial, unilateral paralysis. “What’s the matter with you is that you’re afraid to live. You and people like you. This city is suffering from hemiplegia of the will” (Ellman 145). It comes as no surprise then that the first story in the novel deals with the death of a paralyzed man. Father Flynn represents not only paralysis by the hand of the Catholic Church, but by England. He lives on Great Britain Street and dies on the anniversary of England’s victory over Ireland in 1690, which might be an allusion to the Vatican’s compliance with the Conservative Party in England, who were famously opposed to the Irish independence. Father Flynn’s death is received with sadness, but mostly with relief. When news of his death reaches the narrator, he experiences a sense of “freedom, as if [he] had been freed from something by his death” (Joyce 4). Flynn’s authority is no longer significant. Not only because of his death, but because he is a relic from the past and his practices and ideals have become obsolete. Joyce is arguing that the teachings and influences of the Catholic Church and of the British Empire have ceased to matter. These were parts of Old Ireland, a sad, outdated, and paralyzed creature that's aching to wake from its decade long slumber and embrace the modern age. Nevertheless, one must ask themselves: if Father Flynn is water under the bridge, and his death suggests that he and everything he stood for have become obsolete for the country, why are the Dubliners still stuck? Joyce argues that the Irish are not aware of this obsoleteness, and that regardless of the death of these values, they keep haunting Ireland.

This is best represented in Eveline. The protagonist wants to leave Ireland, yet when she is presented with the opportunity she becomes paralyzed - she quite literally cannot move. This short story begins with “the odour of dusty cretonne” (Joyce 29) and follows with Eveline romanticizing the past. The recognizable smell along with the glamourization of her past is a nod to Eveline’s decision at the end of the story. “Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive” (Joyce 29). Eveline is letting the nostalgia detract her from the bleak reality that is her current, stagnant life in Dublin. What she does not realize, however, is that her past; rather than being a cause of revelation for action in her present and future, remains inert, “the object of contemplation, mystified into the ‘good old days’” (Williams 439). It is not a dream of a better future, but rather a nightmare of the past. Eveline is standing by the station about to leave Dublin, but “distress awoke a nausea in her body and [...] all of the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. [...] He would drown her” (Joyce 34). Where does her paralysis come from? According to Georg Lukâcs, the two essential effects of colonialist oppression are “the contemplative stance” and a loss of linguistic ownership. Eveline is the perfect example of how the political interwaves with the personal, and questions how much power an individual has over their fate. She represents the whole of Ireland in that the nightmare of the history of her past lives in her memory, rendering her unable to act in the present. She is robbed from the choice to compose her own history - taken away from her in the crowd - she is not even allowed to speak. Speaking up would mean fleeing from her past and to rebel against the colonial power that muted her in the first place, it would turn Eveline into an individual who is breaking away from her paralysis. But Joyce shows us that it matters very little where she goes or who she goes with, because this paralysis lives in her consciousness and in the shared past of the Irish; thus denying her emergence into action and healthy individuality. As readers, we are robbed of Eveline’s character development because it ceased even before the narrative ever began. “Without the possibility of development, without a future, such characters can only flounder in the narrow space allowed to them, all potentiality displaced into false consciousness, petty snobbery, dreams of escape, and fixation upon the past” (Williams 424). Eveline, along with the rest of the island, has no choice but to become part of a muted and crippled collective - the colonized.

It is quite significant then that the story which directly follows this one - After the Race - is one concerned with cars, speed, and movement. “Rapid motion through space elates one [and] so does the possession of money” (Joyce 37) narrates the protagonist Jimmy, a young man from an affluent family, privately educated in England, who is accompanying the French racing team on their endeavors in Dublin. Regardless of the momentum, Jimmy is the representation of Irish paralysis in that he never progresses. He physically finds himself in a racing car but he does not get anywhere; after all, race cars just go round and round in circles. Joyce seems to hint at Jimmy’s subconscious recognition of his paralysis; and the way in which he uses status, money, and (most important of all) alcohol to try and escape this feeling. Jimmy and his family seem to be aware that you need money and status to move up in this world, which explains their decision to make their son study abroad and invest in French businesses. However, Joyce seems to hint that to do this one must also betray their Irish identity. To put it in the words of Althusser, the “state apparatuses” that are of the ideological control of the “owning class” guarantee the necessary social relation that allow the reproduction of a colonial state. Thus, the colonial past not only becomes “not so much a particular body of ideas, but the normal, the "natural" way of perceiving and analyzing reality” (Williams 416). Colonialism has taken everything away from the Irish, including the choice to stay in the place where one is from and staying true to one’s identity. Thus, an elixir of an illusion of freedom and adventure is presented in the form of a cloudy Guinness or an amber Jamesons whiskey and so we are introduced to the role of alcohol in Dubliners. “They drank Ireland, England, France, Hungary, the United States of America” (Joyce 40). Joyce’s choice of having the men drink these countries is symbolic in alcohol’s feeble promise of freedom and mobility, because to drink is to escape. Nevertheless, this is short-lived. Alcohol is granted to give Jimmy a false sense of power. This is best presented at the end of the night when the men are playing cards. Jimmy knows he will lose yet he keeps playing, and by the end of the night he has lost it all to the Englishman, Routh. “He knew that he would regret it in the morning but at present he was glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly” (Joyce 41). Alcohol might present Jimmy with an ability to forget his inertia, but it will only, and always, reinforce the walls of the cage. Jimmy is buying a momentary escape and he is losing all his money in the process; thus, keeping him down and only reinforcing his paralysis. If money really is the only way out, Jimmy and Ireland can never fully grasp it because they lose it all on a drink. The Irish always finish in last place.

According to Gandhi, after colonialism there seems to be a pattern in the emergence of anti-colonial and “independent” nations that is followed by the yearning to forget the colonial past. “ This ‘will to-forget’ takes a number of historical forms, and is impelled by a variety of cultural and political motivations. Principally, postcolonial amnesia is symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the need to make a new start – to erase painful memories of colonial subordination” (Gandhi 4). This is what alcohol provides the Dubliners with: a way of forgetting the cold and constant shadow of England. Joyce’s Dublin is presented as the capital city of a country that “resists imperial definition at the cost, ultimately, of existence itself—not through assertive rebellion but through a passive and mute self-destruction that keeps meaning in play” (Kane 193). There seems to be an impossibility in bestowing self-governance, autonomy, and individuality to a people who only seem to be able to achieve freedom and liveliness solely through the dead weight of their drunken bodies. In his critical essay, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” (1907), James Joyce writes that “no one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.” But what of those, like Eveline, who cannot leave? They are left to process their collective past, paralysis and lack of freedom through a drink. However, even those like Jimmy who have the possibility to leave find themselves stuck; for freedom is both a luxury and a misery that is limited by the “nightmare of history”.

Much like Dante’s progression down the Inferno, Dubliners progressively plunges its readers to the darkest and coldest depths of sterility and paralysis in Dublin, a society in decadence - a moribund organism. Paralysis is intimately linked to the chronic drunkenness in the novel, and leads the audience to reevaluate the politics of colonialism and the mechanisms that produce the colonizer and the colonized. Dublin is an underdeveloped village that has been violently frozen in time by colonial rule, and it’s citizens are depressingly forced to find escape and momentum in the bottom of a bottle. The paradoxical nature of this dynamic, where a drunken body that has been rendered useless by the sick consumption of alcohol, having to be dragged by the shoulders at the end of the night from the pub through the streets of Dublin, becomes a symbol of freedom for the Dubliners - if only momentarily.