Renascence

Volume 68, Issue 1, Winter 2016

Essays on Values in Literature

Joyce’s Doubling

One of James Joyce’s best-known tendencies as a writer of fiction is his avoidance of anything like authorial intrusion. As his best biographer, Richard Ellmann, puts it: “Joyce never insists.” This choice could have presented a problem for him in writing Dubliners, for he intended that collection of stories to be a moral exposé of the “dear, dirty Dublin” that he had fled. A main means of his satisfying both desires is what this essay identifies as “doubling.” Time after time, Joyce gives characters descriptions, mannerisms, modes of speaking, etc., that duplicate those of another character in another story. Simultaneously, he puts characters into similar situations, sometimes facing common dilemmas. Differences in their ways of responding to their crises nudge the reader—who is often predisposed by Joyce’s mnemonic devices—into the moral judgments that Joyce almost certainly hoped to instill.