New York and Dublin in the Works of Joyce and Eliot - Literature review Example

The both offers and restricts possibility” (Lehan, The in Literature, p.250). In an essay of 2000 words, discuss this ment with reference to two of the set texts from part 5 of the module. James Joyce, Dubliners; ‘New York: poems and stories’ A city offers possibilities not just to its inhabitants but also to its writers, since a city acts as a centre for publishers, journals, bookshops and libraries. A city also acts as a cultural centre, a place where artists and writers can meet each other and share ideas. A good example is the Harlem Renaissance in New York, which gave birth to new modes of music, dance, art and writing. New York was modern, exciting, innovatory and rapidly expanding. It broke with the past and demanded new ways of writing. An example of this is the short story ‘Pushcart Man’ by Langston Hughes, which uses scraps of fragmented dialogue to convey the chaotic, multifaceted nature of modern city life ( Haslam, p.149). Another example is James Joyce’s decision to use sketches in the form of short stories – Dubliners – rather than a novel to encompass all the various aspects of city life. It is important to remember that Dublin and New York were very different from one other, each offering their own possibilities and restrictions. New York was much bigger than Dublin, much more multicultural, and with a much bigger economy. New York was increasingly lit by electric light at a time when Dublin still retained gas lighting. Dublin was more rural, though that was gradually changing, and Joyce’s work is partly concerned with “the transition from an agrarian and a landed to a commercial and urban world” (Lehan, p.107). Even so, Dublin was still considered rather a backwater – this is an important theme in Dubliners – and its economy was stagnant: “Look at all the factories down by the quays there, idle!” (Dubliners, p.128). Many Irish people emigrated to New York to escape the restrictions of their old life back home and to embrace the new possibilities which New York seemed to offer. Likewise, many African-Americans moved from the southern states to New York in search of greater freedom and greater employment prospects. Yet the new possibilities of employment often went hand-in-hand with a miserable and restricted existence, since most employees were exploited. Claude McKay describes them on their unhappy way to work: Out of tenements, cold as stone, Dark figures start for work; I watch them sadly shuffle on, Tis dawn, dawn in New York. (quoted in Haslam, p.145, ll.5-8) These lines bear a close affinity to T. S. Eliot’s description of the unhappy workers in his city poem The Wasteland: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many” (Eliot, p.55, ll. 62-63). Most city workers were trapped in jobs they could not escape, as cogs in a machine, “in a new kind of city controlled by money and commodity relationships” (Lehan, p.107). Even in an older city like Dublin we find that most of the workers hate their jobs. In Joyce’s story ‘Counterparts’, Mr Farrington the clerk cannot endure the tedium of his job in a solicitor’s office and seeks escape from it by going on a pub crawl round the bars of Dublin. In a world without social security, the prospect of losing one’s job was a terrifying prospect, and many of Joyce’s characters are haunted by this possibility. In Joyce’s story ‘The Boarding House’, Mr Doran is pressured into marrying the girl he had slept with, as her mother threatens to denounce him to his employers and lose him his job. In the story ‘Grace’, Mr M’Coy seems to have suffered chronic job insecurity, since he had been “a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements for The Irish Times and for The Freeman’s Journal, a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the Sub-Sheriff and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner” (Dubliners, p.147). This list gives us a good indication of the kinds of low-level job available to Joyce’s characters. Workers could get to work using that key ingredient of the modern city – public transport. This was another feature of city life which both offered and restricted possibility. Transport opened up people’s lives, allowing them greater opportunity to pass from place to place. It could also be exhilarating in its own right. Langston Hughes remembered his first trip on the New York subway: “I can never put on paper the thrill of that underground ride to Harlem . . . the noise, the speed, the green lights ahead” (quoted in Haslam, p.142). Yet Claude McKay gives us a very different impression in his poem ‘Subway Wind’, which stresses the subway’s stifling airlessness and “deafening roar”, with passengers squashed like sardines into the “packed cars” (quoted in Haslam, p.147). In Joyce’s story ‘A Painful Case’, the tram allows Mr Duffy to live in the leafy suburbs, but because his work is in central Dublin he has to endure the daily tedium of a long-distance commute Related to the growth of public transport was the growth of boarding houses. Both offer the freedom of movement from place to place, and yet both are also symptomatic of rootlessness, a breakdown of community, and loneliness for the individual. Joyce tells us that Dublin had a large “floating population” staying in these boarding houses (Dubliners, p.56) and one of Joyce’s characters – Mr Kernan, the protagonist in ‘Grace’ – is a commercial traveller, always on the move. The possibility of loneliness is a key element here, since city life gives us the freedom to be individual, yet it also risks the possibility of isolation and loneliness. A city is a place where we can be surrounded by other people and yet, at the same time, also very alone. In a city it is easy to make acquaintances, yet there is the risk that these will be shallow and superficial, as Joyce’s Mr Lenehan (‘Two Gallants’) knows: “He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls. He knew what those friends were worth; he knew the girls too” (Dubliners, p.52). In the world of the fast-moving commercial city, the old ties of community have broken down, and the individual has only himself or herself to rely on. Langston Hughes wrote that he “Ain’t got nobody but ma self” (quoted in Haslam, p.158). Cities can offer us the possibility to “get on” in life, to succeed, to make money. In Joyce’s story ‘After the Race’, Jimmy is the son of a successful father, an entrepreneur who has made money by opening a chain of shops. Jimmy’s friend, Ségouin, is even more successful, owning a chain of French hotels. But the story hints that Jimmy himself is unlikely to be a success, and the story end with him being cleaned out in a game of cards. Business and city life offer possibilities to make money but even more possibilities to lose it again. There are infinite ways to self-destruction. To take an example, the poet Hart Crane eked out a precarious existence as an advertising copywriter and an alcoholic, eventually jumping to his death from the deck of a ship at sea. There may be an anticipation of his own end in Crane’s description of the “bedlamite” (lunatic) who throws himself from the Brooklyn Bridge (Haslam, p.143). In a city one also encounters many marginalised people, who have never had any opportunity to succeed in life. As examples, we can mention the vagrants who are told to move on in Langston Hughes’ poem ‘Drama for Winter Night’ (Haslam, p.151) or the ragged street children who haunt the fringes of Joyce’s Dublin stories. In Dublin, the lives of its Roman Catholic inhabitants were restricted by the dominating influence of the Protestant minority, who reserved the best jobs for themselves. Similarly, in New York, the African-Americans suffered from racism. But city life to a certain extent allowed people to overcome this kind of discrimination, because in a city people are thrown together into a melting pot and have to co-operate to keep the city functioning. The protagonist of Langston Hughes’ poem ‘Not a Movie’ leaves his home in the deep south and moves to New York because “there ain’t no Ku Klux” there (quoted in Haslam, p.137). In Joyce’s story ‘Clay’, the protagonist, Maria, is Roman Catholic but is employed by a Protestant charity: “She used to have such a bad opinion of Protestants but now she thought they were very nice people” (Dubliners, p.96). The fact that Maria has a job illustrates that city life gave women increasing possibilities of employment and independence, working mainly in shops, offices and domestic service. Maria “thought how much better it was to be independent and to have your own money in your pocket” (Dubliners, p.98). Maria is given an evening off by her employers and she goes shopping for some fancy cakes to take to her friends. The modern city offered vastly increased opportunities for shopping and consumerism – assuming one had the necessary cash for this. The late nineteenth-century saw the opening of great department stores in all the major cities, so that even a domestic servant like Corley’s companion (‘Two Gallants’) was able to dress well: “She wore a short black jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons and a ragged black boa” (Dubliners, p.49). Dubliners also contains references to the city’s numerous eating houses, such as the legendary Corless restaurant where Mr Doran (‘A Little Cloud’) goes to dine with his old friend Gallaher: “He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name. He knew that people went there after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs; and he had heard that the waiters there spoke French and German” ( Dubliners, p. 66). Closely related to the theme of shopping and dining is the new phenomenon of the ‘flaneur’, the leisured stroller who wanders the streets with no purpose in view other than to observe the crowds, the shop windows, the bright lights and the constantly changing scene. Yet it may be that the city’s excitement will grow wearisome in the end. Mr Lenehan (‘Two Gallants’) spends an afternoon wandering round Dublin but “he found trivial all that was meant to charm him” (Dubliners, p.50). Joyce’s characters are not free because they feel trapped in a mundane existence from which they cannot escape. But this cannot be attributed entirely to the restrictions of city life. Joyce seems rather to attribute his characters’ entrapment to their own failure of nerve and their fear of change. They are thus partly to blame for their restricted possibilities. Like the speaker in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Joyce’s characters see themselves on an uneventful progress towards old age. Feeling the pressure to conform, Mr Doran (‘The Boarding House’) gives up his freethinking opinions and begins to lead “a regular life” (Dubliners, p.61). Mr Chandler (‘A Little Cloud’) no longer reads the poetry books he had bought in his youth. He fantasises about writing poetry but never writes a single line. Mr Duffy (‘A Painful Case’) commutes daily to his office, bemoans the aridity of his existence, and feels that he has been “outcast from life’s feast” (Dubliners, p.113). But when a chance of happiness finally does come his way, with Mrs Sinico, he fails to take it. Similarly, Eveline (‘Eveline’) has the chance to escape her situation and go overseas to Buenos Aires with her lover, who is a sailor, but her nerve fails her in the end and she cannot bear to leave her familiar life in Dublin. As in Eveline’s case, one way to escape the city’s restrictions would be to leave it and go elsewhere. Much of Claude McKay’s poetry is concerned with his memories of the Caribbean and his longing to return there. Langston Hughes (in his poem ‘Second Generation: New York’) reminds us that New York’s immigrants often retained fond memories of their countries of origin, which they had often been forced to leave. In Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, Gretta misses her old life in rural Galway and is disappointed when her husband, Gabriel, refuses to go with her there on holiday. But all this longing for a more rural way of life is, perhaps, nostalgia for a way of life that is already past and no longer possible. Another option might be to leave one’s own city and move to a seemingly better city. Gallaher (‘A Little Cloud’) tells Chandler that “there’s no city like Paris for gaiety, movement, excitement”, although Gallaher’s idea of Paris is really quite vulgar, as he sees it as a vice centre, home of ‘cocottes’ and the Moulin Rouge (Dubliners, p.72). Thus, in its own way, Gallaher’s vision of Paris is as much a wish-fulfilling fantasy as McKay’s dream of the idyllic islands of the Caribbean. Yet it is important to note that Joyce himself eventually left Dublin for Paris, which is where he wrote most of the stories found in Dubliners. It was perhaps only by escaping the restrictions of his native city that Joyce could find the freedom and the detachment that he needed in order to write about it. Word count approximately 2,200 words References Eliot, T. S. (1974) Collected Poems 1909-1962, London, Faber and Faber. Haslam, S. and Asbee, S. (ed.) (2012) The Twentieth Century, London, Bloomsbury Academic for The Open University. Joyce, J. (2000 [1914]) Dubliners, Penguin Modern Classics, London, Penguin. Lehan, R. (1998) The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. Read More