The Importance of Colours in James Joyce ‘Dubliners’

    

    As an old Irish saying goes God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world. Nevertheless, nothing has prevented them from ruling the world of literature. Some of the greatest literary masters of the twentieth century were Irishman: Yeats in poetry, Beckett in drama, Joyce in fiction.

      The paper highlights the importance of colours in James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’. As a famous photographer Robert Henri once put it ‘Colour is only beautiful when it means something’. Indeed the colours that James Joyce mentioned in ‘Dubliners’ have their exact aim and meaning. But the puzzles and symbols suggested by James Joyce are difficult to deal with. As he used to say ‘I have put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries’. ( Ellmann 1983:  521). And he was right.

        Although it should be admitted, that at a glance Dubliners seems simple to the naïve reader (and indeed it is simple compared with Joyce’s other works). However, by scrutinizing the puzzling symbols in his visual images, word choice and shifts in style, the reader eventually realizes that Dubliners only seem simple. This chronologically structured book that develops from childhood, through adolescence, to adulthood and public life. It shows the inner world of the Dubliners' characters from their disillusioned, frustrated, trapped youth to their passive non-productive adult existence surrounded with static social groups in a dead paralyzed society.

          Colour symbolism plays an important role in creating this atmosphere. The primary colours that attract our attention is the constant struggle and a contrast between light and dark, and it should be noted that while in the short stories at the beginning the protagonists seek to survive from darkness and move to light, although they never achieve it. Adult characters from Dubliners on the contrary try to hide themselves in dark and to avoid light, as if seeking an opportunity to forget their shame and their being nobody.

        The first story which contrasts dark and light is ‘Araby’. The protagonist of the story the little boy who will probably grow up to become Gabriel Conroy of the last story, is innocent, ignorant and lost. He can only see specific images of a frustrating boring life in a dying and unimaginative city. His search for the light takes the form of his love towards Mangan's sister. This is how Joyce describes this light :

        The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there

        and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. ( Joyce 1914:19)

The whole story is the boy’s constant but vain struggle to get over darkness, buy a present at the Bazaar for her and enlighten the darkened environment around him. However the end of the story clearly marks his failure:

            light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.. ….Gazing up into the darkness….

           (Joyce 1914:21) -

These are the last words of the story.

While in ‘Araby’ the boy seeks to escape from darkness into light, the protagonist of ‘After the Race’ Jimmy Doyle, is in search of darkness, because it is the only place which can hide his shame and despair:  

               He knew that he would regret in the morning but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor

           that would cover up his folly. He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head between his hands,

           counting the beats of his temples. The cabin door opened and he saw the Hungarian standing in a shaft of

           grey light:

              "Daybreak, gentlemen!" (Joyce 1914:32)

 The fright of light and hiding oneself in the dark for the same reason, shame can be seen at the end of Story ‘The little cloud’

            Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight. He listened                      

             while the paroxysm of the child's sobbing grew less and less; and tears of remorse started to his eyes.

             (Joyce 1914:60)

 These three stories telling about characters at different stages of their life: childhood, youth and maturity, give a clear picture of a Dubliner’s evolution: while being a child, a person is in constant search of light, but after several attempts realizes that darkness as an escape and the only possibility to hide his shortcomings, and in maturity, although Joyce’s hero clearly understands that light is something he should seek for, has no more will or power to come out of darkness, because he has spent all his life there.

        Except the contrasts between black and white, the colour used most frequently in Dubliners is yellow. Although according to Colour theory yellow is a positive colour and represents life and happiness, in Joyce’s Dubliner’s it holds a negative value. Yellow becomes the colour of dishonesty, decline, past and disgust.

     This colour first appears in the very first story ‘The Sisters’, when we read the following passage:

When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip— a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance, before I knew him well. (Joyce 1914:6)

 The feeling that one gets from this extract is that of disgust. The discoloured teeth of the priest clearly alludes the Catholic Church. Father Flynn, a priest should be a person, whom others should look up to causes nothing but a sense of repugnance. If Father Flynn is paralyzed and arises hatred no wonder that the man the two boys meet in The Encounter is the holder of the same quality

            The man, however, only smiled. I saw that he had great gaps in his mouth between his yellow teeth.

            (Joyce 1914:14)

Another story, where the colour yellow is used as a characteristic of appearance is in ‘Ivy Day In The Committee Room’, where the following lines can be found:

              His face, shining with raindrops, had the appearance of damp yellow cheese save where two rosy spots

               indicated the cheekbones. (Joyce 1914:91)

Yellow in these paragraphs depicts the dishonesty and disgust, that the concrete characters in these short stories have in common. But the usage of the colour is not limited to this. In ‘Araby’ and ‘Eveline’ yellow is a symbol of the past, which is too far and too remote, and it seems to the reader that the characters have some fondness towards these objects, but they have forgotten and cannot quite clearly understand why it is beloved, because there is nothing in the past, that they can distinctly remember, just several objects, that remind them that past existed, somewhere, a long time ago. In Araby, we read

Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. (Joyce 1914:17)

As seen from the paragraph, the protagonist likes the leaves that were yellow, because it is something from the past, but does he know what was in the past? Probably not, just like Eveline, who

...yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. (Joyce 1914:23)

Thus yellow suggests not light and life, but decline, dullness, and paralyzes from which there is no way out. The reader gets this feeling while reading the following lines in The Dead

           A dull, yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending.

          (Joyce 1914:156)

This sentence gives a clear understanding that in Dublin, where all the values are destroyed and paralyses has struck the city. No wonder that in such an environment even the colour and it attributes are no longer the same and represents the absolute contradiction of what it used to be. If values are defrauded why cannot meanings of colours change in Dublin which is empty of ideals and exists in a spiritual, intellectual vacuum.

       Another colour frequently used in Dubliners is the colour brown. As suggested by the Colour Symbolism, Brown is the colour representing stability, reliability, and approachability. It is the colour of the earth and is associated with all things natural or organic. But as with the colour yellow, in Joyce’s stories the colour brown also acquires a different connotation. Nearly everything in Dublin is brown, the houses, the clothes, the physical attributes of people, even two of the characters are called so: Mr. Browne, from the Dead and Mr. Duffy, from the Painful Case. The name Duffy is an Irish surname derived from a much older Irish name, O’Dubhthaig, which means ‘brown’.

     The first short story, where we come across to the colour brown is ‘Araby’, where at the very beginning we can read the following passage:

                   The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown

                   imperturbable faces. (Joyce 1914:17)

At first glance it was difficult to understand, why these houses were brown, but after reading Eveline it all became clear. In Eveline we read

                      Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it—not like their little brown houses but                       

                      bright brick houses with shining roofs.  (Joyce 1914:23)

The brown houses in ‘Araby’ are holders of the meaning of something natural and organic to Dublin. But why do they look with ‘imperturbable faces?’ Because the colour is no longer an expression of stability. In Eveline the little brown houses represent a memory from the past, which is rather dear for the characters, because before that man came from Belfast and built those bright brick houses, the field was full of little, brown houses. This extract suggests the total transformation of Dublin: once it held Irish values, but lost its idviduality and has turned into city, which is no longer what it used to be. These lines even more highlighten that the colour brown is not associated with stability in the ‘New’ Ireland. However, in ‘A painful Case’, brown along with instability represents unreliability as well. To begin with, Mr. Duffy, who as mentioned above can be translated as Mr. Brown is an unreliable man, because he is not able to care and make happy the only woman he loves. James Joyce describes him with the following words:

                      His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets

                      (Joyce 1914:77)

The sentence quoted above underlines the similarity between Mr. Duffy and Dublin. Mr. Duffy is the holder of the whole past and has no courage to continue life in the future. And just like at the end of the story Mr. Duffy is left alone, likewise Dublin is abandoned and a place from which everyone tries to run away, because it cannot guarantee its dwellers either stability or reliability. Although it should be noted that in Araby Mangan’s sister is associated with brown as well

                       I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways   

                       diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her (Joyce 1914:18)

It is noteworthy that at the stage of childhood brown has its symbolism. However, at the stage of adolescence and maturity, it is transformed just like the people in Dublin.

In the final story ‘the dead‘ Mr. Browne is particularly annoyed whether he is brown enough or not.

The pudding was of Aunt Julia's making and she received praises for it from all quarters. She herself said that it was not quite brown enough.

"Well, I hope, Miss Morkan," said Mr. Browne, "that I'm brown enough for you because, you know, I'm all brown. (Joyce 1914: 147)

     Dubliners was created a century ago and yet many people today suffer from the entrapments that Joyce's characters are doomed for. The only way out from this is if after reading we just stop for a while and think…. Think and try to solve his puzzling symbols so as to try to understand Joyce's message to the Dubliners and to the whole humanity in general.