When it comes to modern letters, I don't think any author casts a longer shadow than James Joyce. His vocabulary--I've read somewhere that with Ulysses, one of Joyce's intents was to employ every single word in the English language--not to mention his audacity (read one page of Finnegans Wake and you'll see exactly what I mean), is mind-boggling. It's debateable whether or not he's even necessary reading, but make no mistake: he was an author who took his art very seriously, even if others don't.
Yet, for all his experimentation, I think Joyce's greatest strength lies in his short stories. Dubliners is arguably the best collection of short stories ever assembled, and "The Dead" is certainly one of the greatest short stories ever written. With shorter works--and Dubliners was indeed his first published book--Joyce isn't as self-consciously artistic as he would be in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Portrait is absolutely brutal to read, even more so than Ulysses--it's really the portrait of an artist trying to find his voice, of a man who, for all his ideas and experimentation, still hadn't mastered the novel form. Sure, Portrait is brimming with the writer Joyce would later become, but it's a disjointed work, despite occasional flashes of brilliance. Reading it is like listening in during the middle of a conversation; there isn't a clear sense of direction, and Joyce hadn't yet refined his style or his ideas. No matter: with Ulysses, a more controlled, assured work, Joyce pretty much sealed his reputation and forever changed literature.
For me, Joyce has been one of those authors whom I've learned to appreciate only in retrospect. For all its erudition and wordplay, its puns and its numerous literary styles, Ulysses is a novel that rewards even a cursory reading; granted, it's not the easiest book to read (indeed, it can be infuriatingly obtuse and tiresome), but given the book's reputation, there are moments of clarity where the symbolism and allusions make perfect sense. I highly doubt even the most careful reader could claim to understand Ulysses in its entirety after only one reading, but somehow, I don't think Joyce meant for it to be fully understood the first time around. Even after all these months, I still find myself dipping into the book from time to time, my copy of Homer's Odyssey close at hand, rereading passages and making notes. I'm slightly obsessed, but that's the effect Joyce has on me. ("Joyce is a tease," I once told a friend who noticed Ulysses in my bookshelf. "The fact that you can make sense of some of it makes you want to read it again.")
Dubliners stands out not only because it's accessible and unself-conscious, but because it also shows just how beautiful Joyce's prose really is. Joyce hadn't set out to reinvent the short story, and that's probably why it succeeds on all levels; this is Joyce stripped-down, laid to the bare essentials, more meat-and-potatoes than caviar. If Joyce would later make his presence known on his longer works, Dubliners shows him operating the camera, rather than becoming a part of the scene itself. It's here that Joyce becomes a storyteller, speaking for the characters, rather than the characters speaking for him, as in Portrait and Ulysses. There's nothing wrong with tradition, with simply telling a story the old-fashioned way. The sixteen loosely-connected stories that make up Dubliners are unmistakeably Joyce, with his trademark stream-of-consciousness style and Catholic overtones. These are stories in which nothing truly exceptional happens. Joyce was a great observer of ordinary life, and reading Dubliners is like peering at black-and-white photographs of life in early twentieth-century Ireland.
It took me a bit of time to finally get around to reading "Araby," the third story in Dubliners. My first impression of the story, which I'd read several years ago, was one of utter disappointment: it has no plot, and what little action there is occurs almost entirely inside the narrator's mind. Sure, "Araby" is about an adolescent crush, but it's still Joyce: he's a writer who shows his characters at their most vulnerable, who seems to take more interest in their failures than their successes. Nothing Joyce has written could be taken as a Hallmark movie-of-the-week, and in that respect, "Araby" is disappointing on several levels. The narrator doesn't end up getting the girl, but this being Joyce, we shouldn't really expect everything to work out according to clever plotting or some grand cosmic scheme.
To call "Araby" a story may be a bit of a stretch--it's really more like a modernist portrait, a simple snapshot of a few moments in time. If photographs reveal outward appearances--the setting, the way the subjects were dressed, their facial expressions at that particular point in their lives--then "Araby" is really more like a painting of a young man's thoughts. Joyce captures his feelings, his uncertainties, and his hopes, but the action, such as it is, is strictly confined to a particular person, place, and time, just like a photograph. Yes, the picture is very atmospheric, and there are other people in the picture, hovering at the edges, moving in the background, but that also gives the story a certain randomness, as if the photographer had held his camera above his head and snapped a quick picture. The image is a little dark and blurry, but Joyce still manages to show us that there's true beauty in simplicity.
