(Poelker) Fictional Geography

To relate to James Joyce’s view of Dublin 100 years ago, it helps to think about New Orleans now. Ireland’s capital has about three times the population of our city, but they share a reputation as international centers with rich histories, in addition to being ports of cultural and economic importance. Dubliners is full geographical details that have me browsing Google Maps in anticipation, drawing comparisons to the places I’ve gotten to know in New Orleans. Each time I read of Stephen’s Green I wonder whether its more like Audubon Park (being close to Trinity College) or Jackson Square (being an open space landmark downtown). As much as I can imagine the landscape, it won’t make sense until I’m there and even then I fear a sense of surreality.

In “A Painful Case,” I’m reminded of Walker Percy’s New Orleans, as described in The Moviegoer. Joyce writes, “Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.” Duffy’s attitude is interesting because it implies the sort of qualities that are intriguing about Dublin, but also shows how the city had begun to change in the early part of the last century. In the same way, Percy’s protagonist Binx prefers the slower pace and open space of Gentilly to the old-family pressures he feels in the Garden District, and the more urban atmosphere of the French Quarter. Gentilly is a different place than in the 1950s setting of The Moviegoer, now less of a suburb then an extension of the city itself. But I think that difference is part of why I’m drawn to the comparison. As much as New Orleans has changed in the last 50 years, Dublin must have changed all the more in the last 100 years. I hope for familiarity amongst the foreign.

Still, some spirit ties the two cities and the two stories together. The two main characters share a loneliness in between there halted love affairs. Binx’s constant and self-aware “search” aligns with Duffy’s “autobiographical habit” of composing sentences about himself; The same “malaise” that overtakes Binx’s romances seems to have caused the end of Duffy’s affair. Both men fictionalize there lives, narrating within the narration. Each story in Dubliners is centered around Joyce’s notion of the epiphany. As readers and writers, the trick is to maintain our sense of beauty and taste for art, without imposing artificial melodrama on our daily lives.