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Joyce and Emigration
Little Chandler from Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” is dissatisfied with his life. He has an uninspiring career, an unhappy marriage, he has never strayed far from his home city, and he never wrote the book of poems that he always dreamed of writing. Little Chandler is forced to confront his inadequacies when he meets his old friend Ignatius Gallaher, who he has not seen in eight years. Little Chandler admires his friend but he is also jealous of him. Gallaher has succeeded in all of the ways that Little Chandler has failed. He has a successful writing career, he is unmarried, and, perhaps worst of all, he was brave enough to leave Dublin behind all those years ago.
Gallaher lives in London and has spent the past eight years making a name for himself there. He is also well traveled and appears to take great pleasure in gallivanting off to various European cities. Gallaher represents an important archetype in Irish literature: the Irish emigrant. He, like Frank from Joyce’s “Eveline,” is an Irish character who leaves his own country in order to settle permanently in another. These two men made a name for themselves in very different ways: “Eveline”’s Frank settled in Argentina after making his fortune as a sailor and “A Little Cloud”’s Gallaher became a journalist after he moved to London. These two Dubliners characters might have had very different approaches, but they both had the same common goal: they both knew that they could only find success if they left Dublin. Over the course of “A Little Cloud,” and Dubliners as a whole, Joyce makes it abundantly clear that remaining in Dublin without ever venturing abroad restricts its citizens and renders growth impossible.
Gallager and Frank are both fictional people, but their stories reflect the real lives of millions of Irish citizens who immigrated to other countries in pursuit of a better life. For example, the Library of Congress estimates that as many as 4.5 million Irish citizens immigrated to America alone between 1820 and 1930. The diaspora of Irish people to other countries is an integral part of Irish history and is reflected in many prominent pieces of Irish literature including Dubliners. The subject of Irish immigration was a particularly personal issue for Joyce himself because he, like many of his fellow citizens, left Ireland. Joyce left Dublin for the first time in 1902 when he moved to Paris after his university graduation to pursue a medical degree, but he quickly turned his attention to writing. He returned to Dublin in 1903, where he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, the following year. From then on, Joyce made his home in other countries. From 1905 to 1915 he and Nora lived in Rome and Trieste, Italy, and from 1915 to 1919 they lived in Zurich, Switzerland. Between World War I and World War II, they lived in Paris. They returned to Zurich in 1940, where Joyce died in 1941. Joyce left Dublin because he, like Little Chandler, felt stifled by Irish culture, particularly in regards to Irish politics and religion. In his semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce famously refers to Ireland as an “old sow that eats her farrow.”
