the rule book

I’ve been thinking about things Irish recently, and when you’re thinking about things Irish, perhaps Ulysses (the subject of my previous post) is a less useful work than Dubliners. Joyce clearly thought of the stories in Dubliners as a single work, which he described as “a chapter in the moral history of my country.” Hey, I’m interested in the moral history of countries, so I just reread those stories for the first time in, I dunno, maybe 25 years? Now, to be sure, I regularly re-read “The Dead,” which I, like many people, believe to be the greatest short story in the English language. But I hadn’t re-read the other stories, largely because, as I explained in my previous post, I focused so much pedagogical attention on Ulysses.

Returning to Dubliners after all these years away, the main thing that I found myself thinking was simply that here Joyce wrote the rule book for short fiction that would be used for the next hundred years and more; that people still, even if they don’t know it, and even if they’ve never read Dubliners, are writing stories the way Joyce did. How they sketch character, how they deploy point of view, above all how they handle plot and plotlessness — those who publish in literary journals in 2025 are essentially writing the kinds of stories that Joyce taught them to write.

Kipling wrote at roughly the same time as Joyce and is, I think, a greater writer of short stories. He never wrote one story as great as “The Dead,” but his whole body of short fiction is far superior to Joyce’s. But nobody writes stories like Kipling’s; his tales come from another world, another mentalité. How long before the writing of short fiction puts Joyce clearly in the past?