Happy Birthday, Mary Gordon

Best-selling author Mary Gordon has her birthday today. I am particularly taken by Gordon’s essay on James Joyce’s “The Dead”, which I post here.

Mary Gordon on James Joyce’s “The Dead”

It begins with a slap in the face. “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.”

Well, and did you fall for that one? Literally? Don’t you know the difference between literally and figuratively? You’re no better than Lily herself, are you? Or perhaps you’re not Lily, but the garrulous speaker of the second paragraph, the platitude-spouting fool. “It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance … Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember … Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout.”

“The Dead” is built around a party, and for most of its duration we, like partygoers, swim in a clamor of voices, not only Gabriel’s and the omniscient narrator’s. Even Gabriel has many voices. There is the self-conscious Gabriel, the prissy Gabriel, the pompous Gabriel, the affectionate Gabriel, the lustful Gabriel. But many others speak: Miss Ivors, the political nettler; Mr. Browne with his forced jokes; Freddy Malins, who’s just a little bit “screwed”; his mother, who tells us everything is “beautiful”, including the fish her son-in-law caught in Scotland and had boiled for their dinner by the innkeeper. There is the novelettish voice of such sentences as “Aunt Kate was making frank use of her handkerchief,” and the society-page gabble of “the acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper-room by many of the other guests and renewed time after time.” There is Aunt Julia’s voice singing “Arrayed for the Bridal” and Bartell D’Arcy’s singing “The Lass of Aughrim.” There is the voice of Patrick Morkan, Gabriel’s grandfather, imitated by Gabriel: the very model of a stuffy twit when his horse makes a fool of him by walking round and round the statue of the King: “Go on, sir! What do you mean, sir? … Most extraordinary conduct! Can’t understand the horse!”

To add to the tumult, Joyce offers us a series of lists, giving us information we have no need of: things that are only there for the pleasure of their naming. Guests are introduced briefly, for the sound of their names: Mr. Bergin, Mr. Kerrigan, Miss Power, Miss Furlong, Miss Daly. There are the secondhand booksellers on the Dublin quays: Hickey’s on Bachelor’s Walk, Webb’s and Massey’s on Aston’s Quay, O’Clohissey’s in the by-street. And, most important, the meal spread out before us, like Homer’s catalogue of ships. Followed by dessert, the sweetmeats joined together by their jumpy integument of “and’s”.

This is the hubbub of realism, the buzz and Babel of the nineteenth century. Words, words, words, talk talk talk, and in so many voices, such an abundance that of course there must be misunderstandings and mistakes. “The Dead” is chock full of mistakes, beginning with Gabriel’s ill-considered joshing of Lily about her beau, to which she replies, “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” Twice, Aunt Julia misunderstands: she doesn’t know what galoshes are and doesn’t get Gabriel’s reference to the Three Graces. Browne repeatedly calls Freddy Malins Teddy and embarrasses the young ladies by telling the kind of joke they don’t like. Errors of tone abound. Gabriel takes the wrong tone in responding to Miss Ivors’s political challenge, and he mistakes the pressure of her hand for a conciliatory gesture, when it is really a prelude to her standing on tiptoe to whisper into his ear: “West Briton.” Aunt Kate offers an ill-considered criticism of the pope’s decision to banish women from choirs in favor of young boys, and she is chastised for doing this in the presence of Mr. Browne, who is of “the other persuasion”. A conversation about monks sleeping in their coffin is dropped because it is too “lugubrious”. And Freddy is ready to pick a fight in defense of a black opera singer whom no one, in fact, has criticized. “And why couldn’t he have a voice too? Is it because he’s only a black?”

The mistakes and misunderstandings seem to be smoothed over by Gabriel’s speech in praise of his aunts and cousin, whom he compliments for their hospitality, their harmoniousness. There is the bustle of leave-taking, when Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne can’t make the cabdriver understand them, and everyone shouts directions from the door, only adding to the confusion. Finally, the cab takes off, and upstairs there is the sound of music.

In the quiet surrounded by music, Gabriel sees his wife standing on the stairs. “There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of.”

We usually think of mistakes as affairs of language, a by-blow of the very separateness that causes us to wish to communicate with one another. But what Gabriel perceives and tries to create in silence — a woman who is a symbol — constitutes the central mistake both of his life and of the story. He assumes that the light in her eyes and the color on her cheeks have to do with him, as he will later assume that she has understood his desire for her and shared it. In his silent creation of Gretta — a creation brought about without a word from her — Gabriel has misconstrued the woman he has lived beside. Just as the narrator refers to Gretta only as Mrs. Conroy or Gabriel’s wife, Gabriel assumes that Gretta’s whole identity is connected to him. It is only after she speaks what is in her heart, after she tells her story, that the vision which both takes in and transcends separateness can occur.

She tells him of a boy she knew as a young girl in the West Country, a boy who died for love of her. Afterward, she sleeps. And in this silence, the silence which comes after true speech, Gabriel is transformed from petty if dutiful pedant to a man of vision.

The process happens in stages. He is dully angry, and this anger rekindles his lust. He is jealous. He is ironic. He feels humiliated, seeing himself as far less than the boy who died for her. When he speaks, his voice is “humble and indifferent,” the humility and indifference Joyce thought to be the necessary conditions of the true artist. Then he is terrfied at the “impalpable and vindictive being … coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.” He notes that Gretta’s not as young as she used to be and feels disgust for the reality of her body, represented by her petticoat string and the limp upper of her boot.

He thinks of his Aunt Julia’s impending death, and this thought, born of benevolence, leads him to understand that to be alive is to be in the process of becoming a shade. Tears fill his eyes, and his blurred physical vision allows him to imagine the dead boy — a shade, to be sure, but standing near, under a dripping tree. Gabriel loses himself, that distinct and separate self by which he has been able to be named. He is among the dead.

“His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world in itself which these had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.” What a strange word, the word “reared”. What does it imply? That the dead have nurtured the world we think of as the real one as parents “rear” a child, feeding it, sheltering it, educating it, until it is ready to leave them?

Gabriel’s vision takes him to the graveyard where the boy is buried. The snow is falling. In the extraordinary last paragraph of “The Dead”, the word “falling” is repeated seven times: seven, the theologically magic number, the number of the seven deadly sins, the seven moral virtues, the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

The vagueness of the flickering shades subsides. Gabriel sees the snow on “the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns,” those singular sharp things asserting, inexorably, their individuality, their separateness from their fellows. But the snow that is falling generally falls on them all alike and muffles their sharpness, their distinctness. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Consider the daring of Joyce’s final repetitions and reversals: “falling faintly, faintly falling” — a triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement. How can any of us come up to it? Only, perhaps, humbly, indifferently, in its honor and its name, to try.

And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.

Brilliant. My dad loves that last line, too.

Here is my essay on the greatest short story ever written.