La "escrupulosa mezquindad" 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.