La "escrupulosa mezquinidad" de la escritura en Dublineses, de James Joyce

Abstract

Given Joyce’s statement that he had written Dubliners “for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness”, this article explores the stories in the collection under this light and taking into account the historical context behind the urban depression apparent in the stories, from the 1801 Act of Union, through the Great Famine in the middle of the xixth century. In this context of urban and economic depression aggravated by the inveterate obsession of the Irish “to escape, at all costs, from the ‘doomed and starving island’ and find safety elsewhere”, the main themes of the collection are first revised in the light of this context; then, some of the stories are subjected to a closer scrutiny—especially “The Sisters”, “A Little Cloud” and “The Dead”. The analytical revision emphasizes not only the “scrupulous meanness” of the style, which is the signature of the sober realism of the stories, but also the symbolic dimension that lies in Joyce’s narrative strategies of indirection, in that which is left untold, the absent story (gnomon) that casts its shadow or its light in the typically joycean epiphany, all of which constitutes the poetic and symbolic dimension of Dubliners.