James Joyce: “Counterparts” and “Clay” (Short Stories Discussion)

James Joyce’s Dubliners, first published in 1914, stands as one of the greatest and most influential short story collections in the English language. Offering an unflinching yet deeply evocative portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century, it serves as both a meditation on a city in stagnation and a moral history of a people whose “golden age” has passed. Joyce’s characters — at once profoundly Irish and universally resonant — linger in the reader’s mind, their inner lives rendered with striking psychological depth. Through prose that is at once mesmerizing and meticulously crafted, Joyce captures the rhythms of Dublin speech and the quiet struggles of its citizens with extraordinary realism. This collection of fifteen stories represents Joyce at his most accessible and, arguably, his most profound. (Penguin)

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This is a series of occasional meetups to discuss short stories by various authors. We started in 2023 and generally meet every other Sunday evening. Authors we have read include Haruki Murakami, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, James Baldwin, Feng Menglong, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This time we will continue our discussion of James Joyce's Dubliners with the 9th and 10th stories in the collection. In "Counterparts", a beleaguered office clerk drowns his failures in drink, and in "Clay", a quiet, unmarried woman’s small joys and anxieties hint at a life of loneliness and missed opportunities.

Please read the stories in advance (~20 pages in total) and bring your thoughts, reactions, queries, and favourite passages to share with us at the discussion.

A pdf copy of the text is available here (with handy footnotes for Irishisms! 🍀)

Stories by Joyce we've previously discussed in this group:

• The Sisters
• An Encounter
• Araby
• Eveline
• After the Race
• Two Gallants
• The Boarding House
• A Little Cloud