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Abstract
Despite his self-imposed exile in continental Europe, James Joyce’s oeuvre is almost entirely set in Dublin. That paradox in itself reveals much about the psychological ramifications of diaspora in his life and writing. In their passing or more sustained encounters with migration, the characters of Dubliners are, like Joyce, subject to competing demands of personal, familial and national allegiance. The often subliminal presence of migration in their lives is especially manifest in their self-doubts, fantasies and obfuscations, as well as the conversations they have with themselves and others about it. In two stories in particular, “Eveline” and “A Little Cloud”, the focus is on characters who, while they both have aspirations to leave Ireland, decide to stay put. By addressing Dubliners through the lens of Avtar Brah’s concept of “diaspora space”, this article highlights the psychological complexities of migrant experience for those who choose to stay as well as leave. By demonstrating how such complexities are mediated through fiction, it contributes to a still under-researched aspect of Joyce scholarship, but equally, by putting diaspora space to the test of the narrative prerogatives and specificities of prose literature, it challenges and enriches our understanding of the concept and of diasporic Irishness more generally.
Notes
1. Ellmann, James Joyce, 175; Parrinder, James Joyce, 21; and Bowker, James Joyce, 132.
2. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 276. Burgess, Here Comes Everybody, 27.
3. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 16.
4. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of “the chronotope” and Althusser’s model of ideology, Peeren has argued that individuals are interpellated as subjects into diaspora space by the chronotope of time-space. See, Peeren, “Through the Lens of the Chronotope,” 71.
5. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 208.
6. For an explanation of the narrative dimensions of diaspora space, see Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 183.
7. Joyce, Dubliners, 6. Subsequent page references to this collection are cited in parentheses within the text.
8. For studies of Irish migrant letters, see Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation and Miller, Exiles of Erin. For a fuller explanation of “narrative diaspora space”, see Murray, “Edna O’Brien and Narrative Diaspora Space,” 89–92.
9. See, for instance, Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire; Norris, Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners; and Leonard, “Dubliners”.
10. Kenner, The Pound Era, 34–40.
11. Mullin, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”. For a subsequent critique along these lines, see, Barberán Reinares, “Frankly Speaking”.
12. Mullin, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” 195.
13. Ibid., 173.
14. Ibid., 172.
15. Ibid., 179–80.
16. Ibid., 195–6.
17. Corless’s was a haute cuisine restaurant situated at the junction of St. Andrew’s Street and Church Lane to the west of Trinity College, where it had existed from 1884 when Thomas Corless first marketed it as a French dining establishment. It was frequented by luminaries such as Maud Gonne and Charles Stuart Parnell and was taken over by François and Michel Jammet in 1901, but still referred to by Dubliners as Corless’s for some years thereafter. See, Mac Con Iomaire, “‘From Jammet’s to Guilbauds’”.
18. Owens, “Clay,” 608.
19. For further examination of the east-west axis in Dubliners, see, Ingersoll, “The Psychic Geography of Joyce’s Dubliners”.
20. Keegan, “The Usual,” 69.
21. A picture of the younger Ignatius Gallaher can be discerned from a section of the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses that is named after him. See Joyce, Ulysses, 172–3.
22. See, for instance, Ó Conaire, Exile; Walsh, “The Quiet Man”; and Keane, The Field.
23. See, for instance, Murphy, James Joyce and Victims, 56–7; Gibson, James Joyce, 71–2; and Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire, 117–20.
24. For an extended analysis of this generational rift, see Sheehy, Irish Journalists and Litterateurs.
25. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 208.
26. Ibid., 125.
27. There is strong evidence that the character is based on the noted journalist, Fred Gallaher, with whom Joyce was acquainted as a young man in Dublin. Ellmann, James Joyce, 46.
28. Gallaher is under the misapprehension that deoc and doruis means “a small whiskey” rather than “one for the road”.
29. Ellmann, James Joyce, 255.
30. Ruoff, “‘A Little Cloud’,” 256–71.
31. Müller, “The Fragmented Self,” 4.
32. Ibid., 5.
33. One thinks here of the famous photograph taken by C.P. Curran of Joyce standing with his hands in his trouser pockets and his feet apart. Richard Ellmann claimed that when he was asked what he was thinking as the photo was taken, Joyce replied, “I was wondering would he [the photographer] lend me five shillings.” Ellmann, James Joyce, plate VIII.
34. For contemporary treatments of this topic, see two recent adaptations of “A Little Cloud”. Kelly, “A Little Cloud”; and O’Connor, “Two Little Clouds”.
35. For a discussion about the origins of the term ‘a little cloud’, see Spoo, “‘Una Piccola Nuvoletta’”.
36. See Bowker, James Joyce, 154.
37. Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 133.
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