James Joyce’s Ulysses routinely tops any critical list of the best novels of the 20th century and is usually only beaten out by Don Quixote as the greatest of all time. Joyce’s path to the heights of literary glory began with the short story, however. Joyce first attracted notice in 1915 with the publication of Dubliners which features a sequence of self-contained but interrelated short stories about a group of people calling that city home. The stories told in Dubliners would come to be representative of the method by which Joyce approached the form and, indeed, would later approach the long-form of the novel.
Although common enough now, at the time that this collection appeared, short stories in which it can effectively be said that nothing much actually happens (action-wise or plot-wise) were rare at best. Prior to the arrival of Joyce on the scene, short form fiction on both sides of the Atlantic generally were story-driven and often dependent upon what might be termed artificial techniques: coincidence, the macabre, sentimental emotional transformations, and ironic plot twists. One of the few major practitioners of the form widely published before the Joyce who wrote stories anywhere close to what Joyce would produce was the Russian Anton Chekhov. Chekhov was also a master of writing a short work in which the tone, mood, atmosphere or theme took precedence, but even in comparison to Chekhov, the stories in Dubliners are remarkably free of conventional forward narrative movement. A perfect way to convey the constriction of action in the stories which comprise Dubliners is to quite a quick summary of one or two of them as currently published on Wikipedia:
“After the Race”: College student Jimmy Doyle tries to fit in with his wealthy friends.
“An Encounter”: Two schoolboys playing truant encounter a middle-aged man.
Now, obviously, more detailed summaries flesh out these one-liners, but whether one clicks through to Wikipedia’s pages devoted specifically to summarizing these stories or investigates other websites featuring plot summaries or reads books offering the same, these more expansive summaries are still not likely to comprise more than three or four short paragraphs at most. The brevity of the plot summaries of a James Joyce short story whether found in Dubliners or otherwise is neither a reflection of the length of the story nor its capacity for analysis. Indeed, many critical papers have written about some of Joyce’s shortest stories which are double, triple or even quadruple the word count.
The reason why Joyce is ranked at or near the top of the literary genius writing in the 20th century is that what is going on in short fiction is not demonstrated through action, but through other literary elements such as the previous mentioned tone, mood, and theme as well as characterization, autobiographical content, allusion, metaphor, imagery, and a host of other significant replacements for plot and storyline. Readers, critics and scholars come back to Joyce’s short fiction for multiple readings precisely because they aren’t “about” what is happening on the surface. “An Encounter” may very well be accurately described as a story of two kids playing hooky having an encounter with a middle-age man, but to say that is not nearly the same thing as saying that “The Tell-Tale Heart” is about a guilt driving a murderer mad or even to describe “The Interlopers” as a story about two stubborn men fighting over land rights whose feud ironically makes them food for wolves.
