ArticleJames Of All Genres

Reinventing a city by populating it with an array of larger-than-life - yet utterly realistic - characters is a remarkable literary feat but not a unique one. Nor was Joyce the first to accomplish that feat as Honore de Balzac's “The Human Comedy” had beaten the “Dubliners” by a little bit more than half-a-century. The French writer produced a massive bulk of 91 works, many of them novels - as opposed to Joyce's 15 stories (to be fair to Joyce, it took him three years to complete those stories, while Balzac spent 19 years to create his most important legacy).

“The Human Comedy” is a collection of interconnected novels featuring mostly the same set of characters, each character epitomizing hir social segment and/or psychological type. The events described in the novels are happening in the same city (Paris) and within roughly the same period of time, and the narrator/author shifts the focus from one character (or even a whole family) to another, depending on the title of a given novel. This almost cinematic technique results in a character, briefly introduced or even casually mentioned in one novel, becoming the main protagonist of another. Taken together, those characters provide for a comprehensive picture of the French society in the first quarter of the 19th century. In terms of painting the big picture of his contemporary Irish society. Joyce's approach to “Dubliners” was quite similar, but his characters wouldn't migrate between the stories. “Dubliners” were about to set the stage for bigger literary forms, and an autobiographical novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” marked the next breakthrough in Joyce's literary exploration. 

While “Dubliners” is a wide panorama focusing on the society, the “Portrait…” is…well, just that - a portrait, and its focus is almost solely on the individual whose inner life by far dominates everything that is going on around him.  The rest of the characters looks almost like “the king's retinue” in comparison - yet, those characters both contribute to the above-mentioned social panorama and represent the two most important issues Joyce's alter-ego Stephen Dedalus (and Ireland as a whole) is struggling with - God and Parnell. In other words, Catholic Church and Irish nationalism. As the title of Joyce's novel indicates, Dedalus, torn between the two, chooses neither - and so did his creator. It was the third path, that of an Artist, that ultimately led Joyce towards one of the most inexplicable literary pinnacles of all time.