![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0486268705\")
<\/i> – by James Joyce – excerpt from the final story in the collection: “The Dead”.<\/p>\nThe story never loses its power. To describe the plot of it doesn’t do it justice, and I also agonized over an excerpt – because it’s the ENDING that packs the punch – but the punch wouldn’t exist without all that came before. It’s important, too, to look at “The Dead” in context of the rest of the collection – which is also marvelous – but “The Dead” feels like a symphony and makes the other stories seem like practice runs, a pianist doing scales. “The Dead” can also be seen (since it is the last story) as the launching pad into the novels. Joyce wrote 3 novels: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/i>, Ulysses<\/i>, and Finnegans Wake<\/i> – and while Dubliners<\/i> is marvelous, it doesn’t prepare you at all for the ground-breaking quality of the novels – except for “The Dead”. “The Dead” is where you know, okay – this Joyce fellow is somethin’ ELSE. The fact that he was so young when he wrote the thing is astonishing in and of itself – and that’s another part of “The Dead” that interests me: where Joyce was at in his development when he wrote it. He wanted to stick it to Ireland, that is true. He wanted to rub his fellow countrymen’s noses in it. “The Dead” is different, though. It’s like he draws back the veil over his own heart, and love pours out of it. It’s not a pleasant process, because along with that love comes grief, and loss … but the collection would not have the same power if “The Dead” were not in it. Bitchy gossipy observations are all well and good, and many a novelist has made use of such things to great success. Joyce could have been one of them. But no, he had other things in mind. It’s like a quick-flash jujitsu move at the end of the book. It’s like Bob Dylan going electric. If you think you know him, if you think you have him pinned down, if you think you have classified and labeled him correctly: you are wrong wrong wrong. Because look at THIS. Joyce was conscious of this, highly conscious. At some point, during the writing of the collection, he felt that maybe he was being too harsh on Ireland – that maybe the harshness, taken as a whole, did not serve the book – and also did not truly express what was in his heart. He wrote, in a letter:<\/p>\n I have often confessed to you surprise that there should be anything exceptional in my writing and it is only at moments when I leave down somebody else’s book that it seems to me not so unlikely after all. Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners<\/i> at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter ‘virtue’ so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe. I have not been just to its beauty: for it is more beautiful naturally in my opinion than what I have seen of England, Switzerland, France, Austria, or Italy. And yet I know how useless these reflections are. For were I to rewrite the book as G.R. suggests ‘in another sense’ (where the hell does he get the meaningless phrases he uses) I am sure I should find again what you call the Holy Ghost sitting in the ink-bottle and the perverse devil of my literary conscience sitting on the hump of my pen. And after all Two Gallants<\/i> – with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare Street and Lenehan – is an Irish landscape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Another element of “The Dead” is Joyce’s relationship to his wife, Nora. Nora was a Galway girl (just like Mrs Conroy in “The Dead”) – and had had a love affair back in her youth – where a young man stood outside her window in the rain, and then died of pneumonia later. Joyce knew about this event – and it always kind of haunted him, because it somehow made it seem like he, Joyce, was indistinct to Nora. It made him jealous to think that Nora could still be moved by what had happened in her past, with another man. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Joyce, devotes an entire chapter to “The Dead” – and the background thereof, how all of these different strands came together to make Joyce write it the way he did. Joyce said, much later in life, that every woman in his stories was Nora – he didn’t know any other women, basically – and could only write about her. She fascinated<\/i> him, and he stole from her, her lack of punctuation in her letters (think of Molly’s run-on sentence – 40 pages worth – at the end of Ulysses<\/i>) – her Galways roughness, her tone of voice, how she was … all of that was pilfered from his wife, and you see it come up time and time again. James and Nora were in Rome for about 6 months – in 1906, 1907 .. and Joyce’s experience of Rome – with its ancient ruins abutting up against modern buildings – also became another strand that would make up “The Dead” – how one can be dead at the same time that one is alive. How consciousness of mortality can change what it feels to actually be alive: it is possible to be in both states at once (as Gabriel experiences so devastatingly at the end of “The Dead”). Gabriel, up until the revelatory last 2 pages of the story, has been – for all intents and purposes – a good man, a good husband – a bit stuffy, perhaps – self-conscious – but he tries to do the right thing. He carves the goose gallantly, he dances with Miss Ivors – he works hard on his speech that he wants to give at the party … he’s not a buffoon or an idiot. We don’t get the sense that something is MISSING in Gabriel Conroy – until the end. Then we realize that what he was missing was consciousness<\/i>. Now he has it. The story of his wife’s failed love back in Galway (same story as Nora’s) – has launched him into life. And at the very same moment he is acutely aware of his own life, he becomes even more aware of how death approaches – as death approaches us all. We are all becoming “shades”. His consciousness becomes telescopic – and moves over the snowy Irish landscape – moving ‘westward’ – he sees the fields, he sees the “mutinous Shannon waves” (meaning: west) – he sees the country cemetery where his wife’s lover is buried … Gabriel, in his sense of loss in regards to his wife, has – for the first time – become connected to all of mankind. He is now in connection with others. What we all share is that we will all die. And for the first time Gabriel really feels the pain of that. He feels the pain of his wife, lying asleep in bed – tears in his eyes – for the love that she once lost.<\/p>\n One of the other things going on in this story – which may be a bit too local for American readers (or anyone not Irish, I suppose): the feeling of west vs. east in that country, which still exists, on some level, today. The west represents rural life, the east is the rush and bustle of Dublin. At the time of Joyce’s writing of the story, the Irish Revival was in full swing – and the Irish began to look “west” to see who they really were. It seemed that the rural folk had been lost in the shuffle, the rural folk still spoke Irish – they were untouched by British oppression, there was something that still survived out there in the west that those in Dublin have lost. So people like Yeats and Synge wrote about the west. It was almost political in nature. A reverting to a time before the British. Irish language schools started popping up, and people started traveling out to the Aran Islands, and Galway, etc. – as a way to reclaim a bit of their lost history. Synge – the playwright – took Yeats’s advice to “go west, young man” – and lived out on the Aran Islands (wrote a wonderful memoir about it too) – and from that experience of the untouched peasantry of Ireland – began to write his plays that would make his name. And cause riots in Dublin. Story here.<\/a><\/p>\n So what does that have to do with “The Dead”. Joyce was never big on the Irish Revival. He didn’t go for that stuff. His whole thing was to get AWAY from Ireland. (Gabriel, in the story, has that, too – instead of vacationing in Ireland, he takes cycling tours through Germany, etc. He has no interest in exploring his own country. Which is amazing, later – when Gabriel’s imagination breaks free and begins to float over Ireland – seeing the snow falling on hill, dale, monuments, cemeteries, waves … Internally, he is now “visiting” his country – for the very first time.) Joyce places a character at the party – a Miss Ivors. She represent the Irish nationalists. She chides Conroy for publishing his book reviews in a non-Irish magazine. He thinks literature should not be political. She couldn’t disagree more, and calls him a “West Briton”. This discombobbles him completely. She asks him if he wants to come out to Aran with a group of friends … he says no, he prefers to vacation “on the continent”. Miss Ivors can’t let it go. “What – your own country isn’t good enough for you?” She’s rude. Gabriel has a hard time dealing with her – he feels attacked and humiliated … like no matter what he says she will never accept it. She leaves the party early – and says goodbye to the crowd in Irish … Beannacht libh!<\/i> she cries, and then she’s off. The Irish language, in that context, is a weapon. A way to shame the others. Miss Ivors is basically saying, I am more Irish than any of you … why aren’t YOU all speaking in Irish??<\/p>\n Joyce had contempt for such provincial issues – and felt that Irish people’s dedication to their own country was just another way to keep themselves down. The point was not to go west, and romanticize their own peasantry – who lived in poverty – and spoke a dead language … The point was to get the hell OUT so you could have a chance.<\/p>\n But! But. Joyce never stops there. In “The Dead” he presents all of those issues – it’s all there – Gabriel feels a bit superior to the rest of the party, and wonders if he should re-word his speech so that everyone will ‘get’ it. He chooses a Robert Browning quote to start it all off and questions this choice. He wonders if he should choose another quote. (Notice that he doesn’t choose an Irish poet to start things off. Gabriel sees himself as continental – he takes pride in that – which is what Miss Ivors senses, and sets about to pierce through that pride) Despite the fact that his wife is actually FROM the “west” of Ireland – they have never gone back to visit Galway together. Gabriel just has no interest in ‘seeing’ the countryside, and having some Irish Renaissance experience out there. It seems silly to him.<\/p>\n But by the end of the story, what has happened to Gabriel is nothing short of a complete transformation. In a matter of moments, he sees it all. He sees that his wife never really loved him. He sees that he has never loved anyone as much as Michael Furey loved his wife when she was a young girl – Michael Furey who died for love of her by standing out in the rain all night beneath her window. Gabriel sees his own pomposity, and silliness – and avoids looking at himself in the mirror, for shame. He realizes that his tenderness and lust towards his wife, through the end of the party – was misguided. He felt that her attitude and soft manner were to do with him – when what it really was was that she was catapulted back into the past, with Michael Furey. He, for the first time, feels his own isolation from his fellow man. But again, Joyce does not stop there. In the last 3 or 4 paragraphs of the story, Gabriel – by realizing his own alone-ness, his own failures as a man – joins the human race for the first time. He is connected to all. To Michael Furey, to his sweet Aunt Julia, to his sleeping wife – Instead of feeling jealous about her old affair, he looks down on her sleeping form, and finds himself in tears – imagining what it must have been like for her. But again, Joyce does not stop there. He then launches us up – up – into the atmosphere – and Gabriel looks down on all. As though he is already a ‘shade’. And where does Gabriel go? Where does he HAVE to go? “Westward”. There is no other direction. “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.” What a sentence. What a mysterious sentence. It is as though Gabriel had had this date from the beginning – only he had no awareness of it. But now he knows. It is “westward” he must go. And so, in the truly stunning last paragraph of the story, he floats out west – through the snow – which is “general all over Ireland” – looking down on the landscape – the fields and waves and dales of the west he had always scorned. And what does he feel? But love. A “swoon” of it.<\/p>\n For me, that last paragraph feels like a swoon – with its uncanny repetition of words (“falling”) – it takes on the tone of a prayer, a mantra.<\/p>\n Ellmann writes in his biography of Joyce:<\/p>\n In its lyrical, melancholy acceptance of all that life and death offer, ‘The Dead’ is a linchpin in Joyce’s work. There is that basic situation of cuckoldry, real or putative, which is to be found throughout. There is the special Joycean collation of specific detail raised to rhythmical intensity. The final purport of the story, the mutual dependency of living and dead, is something that he meditated a good deal from his early youth. He had expressed it first in his essay on Mangan in 1902, when he spoke already of the union in the great memory of death along with life; even then he had begun to learn like Gabriel that we are all Romes, our new edifices reared beside, and even joined with, ancient monuments. In Dubliners<\/i> he developed this idea. The interrelationship of dead and living is the theme of the first story in Dubliners<\/i> [excerpt here<\/a>] as well as of the last; but an even closer parallel to ‘The Dead’ is the story, ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ [excerpt here<\/a>]. This was in one sense an answer to his university friends who mocked his remark that death is the most beautiful form of life by saying that absence is the highest form of presence. Joyce did not think either idea absurd. What binds ‘Ivy Day’ to ‘The Dead’ is that in both stories the central agitation derives from a character who never appears, who is dead, absence. Joyce wrote Stanislaus that Anatole France had given the idea for both stories. There may be other sources in France’s works, but a possible one is ‘The Procurator of Judaea’. In it Pontius Pilate reminisces with a friend about the days when he was procurator in Judaea, and describes the events of his time with Roman reason, calm, and elegance. Never once does he, or his friend, mention the person we expect him to discuss, the founder of Christianity, until at the end the friend asks if Pontius Pilate happens to remember someone of the name of Jesus, from Nazareth, and the veteran administrator replies, “Jesus? Jesus of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.” The story is overshadowed by the person whom Pilate does not recall; without him the story would not exist. Joyce uses a similar method in ‘Ivy Day’ with Parnell and in ‘The Dead’ with Michael Furey.<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n That Joyce at the age of twenty-five and -six should have written this story ought not to seem odd. Young writers reach their greatest eloquence in dwelling upon the horror of middle age and what follows it. But beyond this proclivity which he shared with others, Joyce had a special reason for writing the story of ‘The Dead’ in 1906 and 1907. In his own mind he had thoroughly justified his flight from Ireland; but he had not decided the question of where he would fly to<\/i>. In Trieste and Rome he had learned what he had unlearned in Dublin, to be a Dubliner. As he had written his brother from Rome with some astonishment, he felt humiliated when anyone attacked his “impoverished country”. ‘The Dead’ is his first song of exile.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I agonized over what to excerpt. I feel the ending of the story is somewhat sacred – and although very famous I didn’t feel right in excerpting it separated from the whole. I thought then that I would excerpt the moment when the party starts to break up. It’s gone well. Gabriel puts on his overcoat. He and his wife are staying in a nearby hotel. Snow is falling – “newspapers say snow is general all over Ireland”. Which is already odd, somewhat uncanny. Ireland is not known as a snow-bound nation. It brings a feeling of cold and paralysis to the scene. Gabriel looks up the stairs and sees his wife standing there, in silhouette. She appears frozen. She is listening to something. Someone is playing the piano in an upper room and it has caught her attention. Gabriel is suddenly struck by the vision of his wife. They have two kids together, they’ve been married a long time … and suddenly: he SEES her. The devastation that comes later, when he realizes that what she was thinking about in that moment had nothing to do with him … has not arisen yet. Gabriel stares up at his wife. Watch, too, how Gabriel – an intellectual, a book-reviewer, turns his wife into an inanimate object – he immediately begins to see her as a work of art – and wishes he could paint her – capture her. Meanwhile (we find this out later) – Gabriel’s wife is struck dumb by the playing of an old Irish song … which reminds her of her dead lover. She stands, frozen … and from that moment on, the past has got her. Gabriel does not perceive this. He feels that she is suddenly in the present. He cannot wait to be alone with her, to touch her, make love. It is Gabriel’s tragedy that they have actually never been further apart than in that moment when he sees her at the top of the stairs.<\/p>\n And that’s the end of my posts on Dubliners<\/i>. I will be sorry to move on.<\/p>\n