In the first lecture we have seen that Joyce’s scrutiny the Dublin of his childhood and early manhood led him to the conclusion that the people around him were suffering from a condition that he called ‘spiritual paralysis’, or - alternately - ‘hemiplegia of the will’. This theme and this term serves as a central reference point for the narratives of Dubliners and equally dominates the stories about victims of institutional or familial oppression and those about others who are culpable of exploiting others in the same contexts. While the order of the first three stories is not quite the same as that in which they originally appeared under the pseudonym “Stephen Daedalus” in The Irish Homestead during 1904 - Homestead was the journal of the Irish agricultural co-operative movement [IAOS], and a less literary venue it is difficult to imagine - “The Sisters” eminently serves to establish the radical nature of Joyce’s charge against Irish society and, more especially, his keen-edged animosity towards the Irish Catholic clergy, at the beginning of the published collection.

Expressing that charge more through things unsaid than things said - and here the role of the ellipsis [i.e., ...] is all important - “The Sisters” hints that the central character has contracted syphilis - presumably through sexual relations with a prostitute - and that the diocesan clergy has effectively sequestered him with his sisters who are only dimly aware of the real causes for his distressing symptoms. Holding on to the idea that his fall from favour was due to an accident when the chalice slipped from his fingers, they blame the altar-boy who served at Mass; but the place of the word ‘paralysis’ at the head of the story, together with the symptoms described and the reaction of the other characters - including the curate an ‘another priest’ (significantly unnamed) who appears to remove all of his personal papers suggests a different story. What is now known as ‘clerical cover-up’ seems to be the underlying plot of the story.

All of this is told through the eyes of a boy now grown to manhood who seems to understand the significance of the events described without overtly declaring what they mean to the reader. Instead he invites us to reach a tacit understanding of the truth of circumstances which are still more shocking than the account of them that appears on the literal surface of the story Hence the curmudgeonly remark of Old Cotter that he would not allow a man ‘like that’ to have anything to do with a young boy comes to hint at dark areas which can only be filled in by inference; and hence, in a difference sense, the lessons that the priest teaches the boy about the laws of the Church - ‘as thick as a telephone directory’ - seem to flesh out the term simoniac, with its overtones of empty religious ritual on sale for a profit rather than genuine spiritual devotion. Priesthood is power and, as the story reveals, it is often a power abused or corrupted.

A similar first-person narrator - being the grown-up counterpart of the child who experiences these things - is used in the stories “Araby” and “An Encounter”, both of which depict the disillusionment of a young boy who finds himself face to face for the first time with a world in which romantic feelings such as love, adventure and the exoticism associated with each are reduced to ashes.

In “An Encounter”, for example, the boy not only meets with sexual corruption in the person of a pederastic loner but also discovers in himself an unexpected form of moral alienation from the schoolfriend to whom he turns for help in the last moment: ‘He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.’ The man who writes this sentence knows that he had been carried away from the easy companionship of childhood by a new informing mood: a sense of intellectual apartness which brief and dangerous complicity with the pervert has triggered in him. (The story is based on an experience of Joyce’s brother Stanislaus rather than the author himself, but the inward aspects of the experience are those of a sensitive youth like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait.)

In “Araby” the same boy (we assume) has made a journey to a travelling bazaar laid out in a suitably oriental manner by the proprietors. He has gone there with the intention of bringing back a present for Mangan’s sister, the girl for whom he has fallen in the illimitably romantic way of pubescent love. However, due to family circumstances - themselves concerned with drink and moral squalor - he arrives in time to witness only the closing-down operations of the bazaar as by some very ordinary English people, thinly masquerading as orientals for purposes of the entertainment, dismantle the stalls and turn off the lights. His mortified sense of disillusioned selfhood at this revelation of the artificiality of the scene is emblematic of many similar moment in the story-collection: ‘Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.’

Several of the stories examine the conduct and predicament of women in the ‘paralysed’ society that Joyce has chosen to depict by means of these ‘epicleti’, as he once called his stories in a letter to his brother Stanislaus. Such a story is “A Boarding House” [....] in which Mrs Mooney organises a plot to trap Bob Doran, a resident in her guest house, into marriage to her daughter Polly. Here mother and daughter are said to be involved in an unspoken complicity so that each understands each other perfectly without the daughter having to admit (even to herself) her role in the intrigue. Other figures involved in managing Bob Doran’s fate include a bullying brother and a parish priest who insists that ‘reparation’ be made for his sexual misconduct with Polly - arising from her appearance on the landing in a night-dress and an unsolicited invitation into her bedroom.

What is more, it is apparently the same priest who has provided the clerical separation that enabled Mrs Mooney to banish her husband from the household at the outset of the story. All in all, then, the mother is a woman who ‘deals with moral problems as a butcher deals with meat’ - as the anonymous narrator tells us in one of the most explicitly sarcastic sentences in the collection - though, for the most part, Joyce holds in this story to the method of indirect narrative which permits the mentality of the characters to leach into the descriptive prose without positively declaring on their moral character in the manner of the conventional ‘realist’ novelist in English. Mrs Mooney is, indeed, an exception in the blantancy of her motives and the brutality of her intentions. By comparison Mrs Kearney in “A Mother” is a very different type who insists on her daughter should be paid by the organising commitee for an appearance in an early musical feis of the Connradh na Gaeilge - thus revealing the intensely petty-bourgeois instincts of the emerging nationalist élite who would, in fact, come to form the governing class of the new Irish state after Joyce’s own departure.

“Eveline” is the portrait of a girl who has been turned into a house-keeper for her brutal father since the death of her mother and who meets a sailor who promises to take her away to be his wife in Buenes Aires where, according to his own account, he had ‘landed on his feet’.

Considered in that light, the story is of course a simple case of a girl escaping the trap of family which had devoured so many Irish souls and denied then the proper fulfilment of their individual nature. But there are certain ironic hints in the story which should caution us against such a simple, liberationist view of the matter. For one think, he appears to be a deck-hand on the ship departing from the North Wall of Dublin’s Port, not a paying traveller; for another, the ship is bound for Liverpool and not for South America (at least as an initial destination). Considering these factors, it is at least as likely that she will be deserted by her sailor under circumstances that make her return to Dublin quite impossible, and that her fate thereafter will be that dreaded by so many Irish girls for whom prostitution in English was often the only alternative to brutality and poverty in Ireland.

Eveline, therefore, understands the risks and is duly sceptical about Frank’s love when it is her life, not his, that is placed in danger. Hence, perhaps, her final relapse into the condition of ‘paralysis’ which is so much in keeping with the diagnosis of the whole collection: ‘ He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on, but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.’

Yet, in assessing her failure to board the boat, we should remember that another young woman, Nora Barnacle, accepted the same risks when she left Ireland unmarried with James Joyce in November 1904 to embark on an uncertain life with him that led her through such various and unknown places as London, Paris, Pola, Trieste, Zurich and Paris. The two sides of the coin of courageous indifference and moral submission to the canons of Irish society provide a sort of counterpoint in the story of Eveline and reflect, in a peculiarly intimate way, the connection between the Dubliners stories and the real choices that Joyce and his companion had to make in leaving Ireland.

In “Two Gallants”, a young man called Corley engages in the unchivalrous practice - whence the ironic title - of seducing servant-girls and then persuading them to steal valuables from the households of their employers in the better squares and suburbs of the city. While Corley is so engaged one evening, his side-kick Lenehan occupies himself by walking in the city, considering his own predicament as a ne’er-do-well passing from youth to a more troubled period of life without prospect of either steady employment or a settled family existence.

The story includes a bitterly amusing epiphany of a street-musician - in this case a player of the national instrument, the harp - which serves as a symbol for the reduced condition of Irish art that Joyce elsewhere compares with ‘the cracked looking-glass of a servant girl’ (in the opening chapter of Ulysses):

In fact the air being played is Thomas Moore’s sentimental lament of the Flight of the Earls from Lough Foyle in the seventeenth-century and, with it, the destruction of native Irish culture. It somehow seems unlikely that a revival of national self-esteem of any real moral significance is going to arise from this quarter in spite of the enthusiasm of the Gaelic League.

In several of the stories Joyce sketches in characters who are not unlikely possible portraits of the artist had he stayed in Dublin or if his family circumstances there had been slightly different. In “After the Race”, for instance, a young man whose father is a successfully meat-merchant manages to insinuate himself into the company of a group of cosmopolitan motor-car enthusiasts engaged in running off a session of the Gordon Bennett racing cup on the sole occasion when that competition was brought to Dublin. (Joyce reported on it for the local newspaper.) In this story, the young man is left with a sense of mortification when he realises that he is socially and culturally out of his depth, as well as falling dupe to the better card-players in the game of poker which ends their yacht-borne party in the early hours of the morning.

In “A Painful Case”, a literary-minded clerk becomes involved with a like-minded married woman but suddenly breaks off the friendship when she permits herself to display a passionate attachment to him. Later he learns from a newspaper report of her suicide and feels contaminated by the knowledge that he has shared his intellectual life with her. Only later, when he is walking at evening in the Phoenix Park in the proximity of couples engaged in love-making under the trees does he begin to feel ‘excluded from life’s feast’ and to recognise the sterility of his own nature: he feels that ‘his moral nature is falling apart’ as he faces the solitude that is the consequences of a too-exclusive isolation. Like Joyce himself, he is a translator of the plays of Michael Hauptmann and, like his brother Stanislaus, he keeps meticulous notebooks of his literary ideas. (Joyce called them his “Bile Beans” in a dismissive phrase.)

Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead” is another example of the kind of man that Joyce might have been had he stayed in Dublin. A university teacher and a literary reviewer with the English papers, Conroy attends an annual party given by his aunts, themselves survivors of a less educated generation of his family who they make their tenuous living by teaching music and - until the Pope bans the practice - singing in the choir of the Catholic church in Dublin. A forebear, from whom the family wealth originates, has been a knacker engaged in the business of reducing horses’s bones to glue. (Their home on Usher’s Island is now a Joyce museum and was, in fact, connected with the author’s maternal family in something like the way described.)

Gabriel begins his evening by adopting a tone of thoughtless levity with Lily, the daughter of the caretaker - since the house is rented - who, it turns out, has been having trouble with her young man, and hence professes in response to his condescending question about her likely marriage in the future: ‘The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.’ Throughout the party he is chiefly concerned with gauging the pitch of the dinner speech that he will make - whether it is over the heads of his audience or too familiar. As the evening progresses his self-esteem comes increasingly under attack. In the course of the dancing, he encounters a young nationalist in a certain Miss Ivors - formerly a fellow-student - who accuses him of being a ‘West Briton’ because he ignores ‘his own country’ in his literary reviewing. He defends himself against the charge of betraying his native language (Irish) with the intemperate rejoinder: ‘if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language’, and - on being pressed by the Irish-Irelander about his feelings for Ireland, he professes: ‘O, to tell you the truth [...] I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!’

There is one element of his country from which Gabriel is not however disaffected and that his wife Gretta, a girl from Galway whom the elder members of his family suspect of being ‘country cute’ and whom he loves in a keenly romantic way that enables him to see her, standing poised on the stairway and listening to a song being sung in the drawing room below, as a picture of feminine beauty which he would call “Distant Music” if he were a painter. But when the Conroys reach their hotel room - being prevented from travelling home by the falling snow - his display of amorous affection is diverted by her revelation that what she has been thinking about is not him but a boy who was in love with her in Galway. ‘I think he died for me’, she tells Gabriel.

Faced with the collapse of his ironic references to the boy ‘in the gasworks’, and with the revelation of a passionate existence which he immediately recognises as more intense than his own temperate love for his wife, he feels once again belittled and envisages himself, in this mood of humiliation, in terms not unlike those that assailed the young boy in the earlier “Araby”.

Yet that moment of humiliation passes as he gazes on Gretta, who has cried herself to sleep: ‘It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. [...] Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.’ The character who thinks and feels in these terms is not, finally, trapped by the symptoms of spiritual paralysis which has formed the main subject of the collection; and, indeed, Gabriel is expressly called ‘generous’ by Gretta for the small monetary gift he has earlier given one of the hopeless characters at the party.

In the final paragraphs of the story - widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of the genre for its control of mode, suggestion and profound humanity - Joyce supplies an impressionistic version of the mind verging on sleep and sensing itself part of a wider humanity community in which the petty egoism of the individual is absorbed and, in a sense, absolved of its limiting intentionalities and concerns:

It is probably a mistake to take this as meaning that he is acquiescing in Miss Ivors notion that he should divert his annual cycling holidays from France and Germany to the West of Ireland - in other words, that he should join the Irish-Ireland movement. Instead, it speaks of a generalised acceptance of the position of the individual in the wider courses of a life which ultimately places us in the ranks of a community the majority of whose members are already among the dead - a place typified here by the little graveyard where Michael Furey is interred.

Significantly, Joyce has added here a number of details which evoke the idea of the crucifixion - the crosses, spears and thorns are chief of these - and these operate symbolically to suggest a kind of resurrection through humiliation and death. To that extent the final story of the Dubliners collection expresses the possibility of redemption and escape from the condition of Irish paralysis by an alteration of spirit which a character such as Gabriel Conroy can arrive at in himself, letting go the divisive animosities of his society and simply engaging with life in its own ineluctable terms. But Joyce is too good a writer to be a simply moralist of that kind; and all that can be said about the mood of “The Dead” is that, in writing it, he felt that he had previously been ‘unnecessarily harsh’ on Dublin - as he wrote to his brother in Sept. 1906:

Such a sentiment shows Joyce preparing for the more humane canvas of Ulysses, a novel that was first conceived as the final story of Dubliners but which never ‘got forrarder than the title’ in that form, as he once expressed it. What immediately marks Ulysses out from Dubliners - as apart from its extent and its much greater reliance on experimental techniques - is the addition of another form of literary conscious embodied in the characterisation of Leopold Bloom, Marion (“Molly”) Bloom, and many of the lesser characters such as Martin Cunningham who now appear less as cases of Irish paralysis than as examples of resilience and spirit, courageously surviving in a complex and not always amiable world by dint of good spirits, limited but resourceful mental abilities and an openness of spirit which marks them out as life-affirming in constrast the the population of the Dubliners stories.

Embodying this new spirit in its highest form is Leopold, whom Joyce - in a brilliant, throwaway phrase - describes as ‘a keyless competent citizen’. And, just as the personality and temperament of Bloom is in ascendant over that of the increasingly melancholic and alienated Stephen Dedalus in that novel, the former can be seen as standing closer to Joyce’s mature conception of his own personality than the latter. This interpretation is most simply suggested by the fact that Stephen Dedalus is Joyce’s age at the time when the events of the novel Ulysses take place - on 16 June 1904 - whereas Leopold Bloom is Joyce’s age at the date when he embarked upon that novel.

The intervening years of his migrant life as a teacher in Europe, his co-habitation with Nora Barnacle, and finally his becoming a father had wrought fundamental differences in his estimate of the respective roles of the artist and the citizen, the poet and the ordinary man. Ulysses is the monument to that shift in sensibility; and if Joyce’s career had stopped with Dubliners, or even with A Portrait, he would be remembered as a minor writer of awkward disposition and perhaps even as a dissident from the nationalist revolution that overtook his country. In Ulysses, however, he secured a place in the front rank of world literature, finally converting the ordinary matter of Irish life into the ‘soaring, impalpable thing’ that Stephen Dedalus, in his aesthetic exaltation, dreams of. If there is any truth in Joyce’s claim through Stephen that he would ‘forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of his race’, then Ulysses is the proof.