Gallic Anti-epiphanies in Joyce’s <i>Dubliners</i>

Abstract Joyce’s stylistic debts to French literature in Dubliners have long been acknowledged. Another connection to France is supplied by the abundance of French within the text. These Gallicisms might be assumed to connote a vibrant cosmopolitan alternative to the meanness of Dublin life. Instead, they consistently evoke pretention, false hope, and bad faith. Rather than a way out of provincial entropy, French and Frenchness come to resemble a beguiling dead end. That process of disillusionment is structured around a series of Gallic-hued “anti-epiphanies”—conspicuous turns of phrase and moments of heightened consciousness that portend but ultimately fail to deliver narrative progression and spiritual growth as the characters act out sterile parodies of Frenchness. In “After the Race,” we also encounter an allegorical political critique of naive faith in Franco-Irish friendship in the wake of the Entente Cordiale, anticipating Joyce’s development of the same theme in Ulysses. The perils of reflexive Francophilia are further explored in “The Dead,” where the protagonist’s attachment to continental Europe betokens provincial alienation from his own surroundings rather than genuine cosmopolitanism. The collection’s final story ultimately evokes the need to overcome the opposition between Ireland and Europe in favor of an ethic of locally rooted cultural hybridity that is realized in the multilingual idioglossia of Finnegans Wake.