This week I had the pleasure of reading a very recent short story by Roddy Doyle called Sleep. Roddy Doyle is very well-known in my hometown of Dublin, but I suppose not so familiar over here in the USA.
I like the story - having grown up in the city in which it is set, I think it speaks accurately of the grimness of Dublin while also highlighting the quest for the absolute universal to the human condition, and the joy which such beauty, when found and appreciated, can cast over even the ugliest of situations.
While Roddy Doyle is known for having criticised Joyce - and I would be sympathetic to some of his criticisms, particularly of the “Joyce industry” - I could not help but think of Dubliners. Dubliners is an excellent book to be sure, but I’m not so interested in talking about its excellence per se here, rather about the connections with Roddy Doyle’s story. What I find most amazing is that, although Roddy Doyle’s piece was written more than a hundred years after Joyce’s collection - a hundred years of incredibly fast change. The independence of Ireland from the British Empire, various social and political struggles, and most recently a period of the greatest economic prosperity the country had ever known. Yet despite all this, Joyce’s Dublin and Doyle’s Dublin both have the same tones of deprivation, poverty and grimness - of ugliness and inequality. On one level, I find this almost shocking. But given further thought, you could probably take fiction of a certain vain set in a particular city but a hundred or so years apart, and find these sorts of similarities too.
That would be an interesting thing to do, in fact.
Tags: dublin, fiction, joyce, roddy doyle
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