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# Intro to Dubliners
- URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/dubliners-intro-to-dubliners/
- Published: 2026-01-02T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:28:24.000Z
- Description: Banville introduces Dubliners as the stillest book Joyce wrote: stories made at 23, perfectly controlled, that take mean material and make it glow.
- Author: Andrew Wessels
- Tags: John Banville on James Joyce's Dubliners, #video

John Banville, novelist, reviewer and screenwriter, introduces James Joyce's *Dubliners*, the book his sister handed him at 12 or 13 and he has reread every decade since. Joyce wrote most of the stories in 1905, at 23, then fought nearly a decade to get them printed; the printers objected to "bloody" and broke up the type. What strikes Banville is the stillness: Joyce told anyone who'd listen he was a genius, yet none of that posturing gets into the stories.

The turn is his account of what art does with mean material. It concentrates on an object, a stone in the road or a person, until the object begins to blush, and Joyce's aim was to make the world blush. He doesn't quite buy Joyce's tidy scheme of childhood, adolescence, adult and public life, but he thinks the book coheres as its narrators grow more aware. He ends with the old schoolfriend in Zurich who preferred *Dubliners* to *Ulysses*, and Joyce agreeing.

## Transcript

Hello, I'm John Banville. I'm an Irish novelist, book reviewer, screenwriter, and I'm here to introduce James Joyce's *Dubliners*. *Dubliners* was published in 1914\. Joyce would've been swirled at the notion it was published just as World War was starting. It had gone through many, many years of trying to have it published, failing. He wrote the bulk of the stories in 1905 when he was 23, which I still find both amazing and slightly depressing. He was so young. And then he wrote the last long story, "The Dead," when he was 27.

And the book shows remarkable control for a person so young. He knew exactly what he was doing, exactly what he wanted to do. He knew exactly the effects he wanted to achieve, and for the most part, he did achieve them. An extraordinary feat for a person so young.

I first read the book when I was about 12 or 13\. My sister gave it to me and said, you should read this. And she was right. I was astonished to find that literature could be about life as I knew it. It wasn't a Wild West tale or detective story or story about schoolboys. Here was life itself. I was tremendously impressed by it. I was amazed by it, and I'm still amazed by it. I've read the book, I suppose, every decade in my life, which means I've read it quite a few times.

There's a lot of literature and a lot of fiction, a lot of short stories, and novels, but not many of them aspire to the condition of art. *Dubliners* does aspire to it, and it reaches the condition of art. These stories are almost perfect works of art. I mean, we can't have absolute perfection, but they're as close to perfect as they could possibly be. They are extraordinarily controlled. They're extraordinarily well judged. They're cold in the Joycean sense of not involving himself or his own sensibility in the work. He stands outside it, as he says, you know, paring his nails while the work goes on. Of course, that's not how it is. Every work of art is made in varying levels of torment and passion. But the stillness of these stories, that's something that really fascinates me. They're completely still, there's no agitation. There's no young man behind them waving his arms and saying, look, admire me. Look how clever I am. None of that.

And Joyce, you know, he was very, very arrogant, very ambitious. He knew that he was a genius and told everybody that would listen what a genius he was. And yet, the stories don't have any of that rodomontade or posturing. They are perfectly controlled, perfectly achieved works of art. He told his publisher that his aim was a scrupulous meanness of tone, and he does achieve that. So nothing is overstated. He said to his publishers and to his friends and to his relatives that his aim was to show Ireland to itself in his wonderfully polished looking glass. And he's constantly on about Dublin. And, you know, Dublin's second city of British Empire and all this is just, this is all material out of which to make art. Joyce no more cared about Dublin than he cared about the moon. This was material, but look what he did with his mean material. He is scrupulous. The tone is mean throughout, and yet it glows. These stories glow with a pale, inextinguishable fire.

They have lived for a long time, and they will live for as long as people read. Joyce worried that the stories would seem merely snapshots of Dublin life. He worried that they would seem mean and narrow, but he was writing about a mean and narrow time and people living mean and narrow lives. So he had to reflect the reality of that. And he did. But this is the extraordinary thing about art, that no matter how grim the material, no matter how mean the material, no matter how base the material, that art makes it glow. This is what art does. It focuses on the object. And the object can be anything. It could be a stone in the road, it could be a human being, but it concentrates on the object to such an extent that the object we didn't expect to be concentrated on with such passion and intensity. And the object begins to glow and it begins to blush. And as we know, when we're blushing, we're at our most vulnerable, but we're also at our most exposed. And that was Joyce's aim in *Dubliners*, and throughout his career as an artist, is to make the world blush. And he did.

Joyce had great difficulty in finding a publisher. Most writers starting out have the same experience, but Joyce encountered the most extraordinary obstacles. I mean, at one point the printers broke up the type, and Joyce said that they burned the books. The printers said, no, we didn't. We just pulped them. Not much difference, really. He had extraordinary tenacity. He kept on through years, I mean, almost a decade. He kept on, he had absolute belief in himself. One of the strange things is that, I mean, we find it almost incomprehensible now, but it was the printers for the most part who objected to what they said was the obscenity of the stories. I mean, looking at these stories now, they're entirely innocent. But, you know, you couldn't say "bloody" in those days.

Joyce was a great systematizer. He was a student of Aristotle. He loved making systems, loved making patterns. He said that *Dubliners* could be divided into: there were three stories about childhood, three stories about adolescence, three stories about the adult life, three stories about public life. I don't quite buy this, but it doesn't really matter that the collection does cohere. Now I'm slightly biased, because I've read it so many times that it is a unified work of art to me. But I think that it does cohere in the sense that the early stories are very simply narrated, the young boys in the first three. So they really don't know what's going on. And then as it moves on, people become more aware of themselves and of the world in which they live. And the narrative broadens and expands. These stories are as fresh and as illuminating and as beautiful as they were when they were first published, and they were first written.

We go to art not to become better people. Art is not going to bring world peace. It's not gonna make our children more handsome or more intelligent. We go to art in order to have a more vivid sense of what it is to be alive, what it is to be a human being on this earth, on this strange planet where we find ourselves. And when you read Joyce's *Dubliners*, as is the case where you experience any real work of art, you do have that vivified sense of what it is to be alive. And it's a small thing. Our lives are brief. We can't all be James Joyces. We can't all achieve great things, but we have our own little precious moment on the planet. And art makes us remember that, makes us value that and prize that.

There's a nice anecdote told, it's probably not true, but that Joyce at the end of his life was visited by an old school friend of his, from Ireland, in Zurich. And the school friend said, "Ah, Jimmy, I tried to read those books, you know, *Ulysses*, *Finnegans Wake*. And I'm sure they're masterpieces, but I think your best book is *Dubliners*." And Joyce said, "Do you know what? I think you're right."