Dubliners - "The Dead" (Story 15 of 15)

[Chris OConnor]

Dubliners - The Dead (Story 15 of 15)

Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences.

[geo]

Bump . . .

Even if you haven't been reading along in DUBLINERS, it might be worth reading just this one. It's considered one of James Joyce's best short stories. Everyone is welcome. I believe DWill is going to give away a new car for some lucky participant. Okay, that last part isn't true.

I'm currently reading the second to last story, "Grace," but I've been really looking forward to "The Dead.". I think I may have read it before, but not sure.

[DWill]

I might consider gifting a lucky participant with a 2001 Prism with about 210k on it. What a sweet ride. But yes: extending an invitation to read a longer short story that I would bet might stay with you for much longer than almost any novel you might read.

[DWill]

Just off the top of my head, I can't recall a story in the collection before this one in which a character develops, as opposed to having things happen to him or her. Even if we talk in terms of the characters' epiphanies, it doesn't appear that these are character-changing events. It's not so unusual, though, for characters in short stories not to develop, due to the short format, and most of Joyce's stories are quite brief indeed. With the longer format used here, he shows us a character whose experience, his epiphany, appears to have changed him at the end. We can talk more about that, I'm sure. I wonder if you would agree that Gabriel Conroy is a problematic character through most of the story, conflicted and insecure in several ways. Do these conflicts and insecurities come to resolution by the end?

Boy it's nice to be able to pose the questions rather than try to answer them.

[geo]

Just finished "The Dead" this morning. Joyce does indeed take his time developing this story. He begins with a macro view of the Morkan sisters' annual dance and dinner, describing the festivities of the party, the evening meal, and idiosyncrasies of a whole cast of characters. It seems to me that Gabriel emerges as the central character only about halfway through.

I had the impression at first that Gabriel had a bit if a roving eye. His first encounter with Lily seemed borderline inappropriate, asking about her personal life, then offering her money. Then again, perhaps Joyce is showing how uncomfortable and socially awkward he is. A bit later, Gabriel takes offense at something Miss Ivors says and this too is just more social awkwardness. But then he offers to walk her home, which seemed a tad inappropriate as well.

Gabriel does have an epiphany at the end which seems to be confronting his own mortality upon discovering his wife's emotional connection with a man she met long before they married. He, in fact, has never felt like that towards any woman. This realization causes him to reformulate his world and especially his place in it. The world is becoming only a place of the dead and, "one by one, they were all becoming shades."

"His own identity was fading out into a gray impalpable world; the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling."

There's a certain existential angst in these lines. Gabriel is already a somber guy, perhaps a little self-important. I don't know if he'll recover from this epiphany at the end.

I mean, wow. What a story. I'm still processing the emotional impact.

[President Camacho]

I'll finish reading The Dead tonight to complete the book.

Thank you very much to all that participated in the discussion and a special thanks to DWill for leading it.

I have to admit that I don't find anything that truly draws me to Joyce. His stories were very nice but nothing seems to have had quite an impact.

Although I haven't finished reading the last story, I have to say that Araby and Counterparts were my favorite stories. These stories of Child/Guardian relationships are not only thought provoking and emotionally charged but are the most important lessons to learn in life.

My favorite short story remains To Build a Fire by Jack London

[DWill]

Joseph Conrad describes, through the character of Marlow, the purpose of the literary artist: “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.” This is a high achievement of a writer, and Joyce matches up well on this standard. I get a vivid and distinct picture of the sights and especially sounds of the all of that he describes in the story (music is a major motif). I feel as though I were there at the sisters' party (and what different sisters these are than "The Sisters"). As I think geo has mentioned, Joyce is a superb stage manager in his fiction, a master of character logistics.

Then, if the writer manages to convey the interior experience of characters, the package is complete. Gabriel Conroy interests us for several reasons. For the first time in these stories, we have a main character who has "gotten on;" at least in a career and material sense, Gabriel has not been paralyzed by his background or by Ireland. He is a professor of literature and a book reviewer. A certain emotional paralysis might be suggested, it's true, but if so, then people in general are prone to the emotional ills that plague him. We can single him out as pompous and brittle, but he does become fully sympathetic in his plight.

I get the feeling of someone who from the beginning is under stress, and who doesn't even know that he could be headed for an emotional crisis. He has a ceremonial duty to perform at his aunts' annual party for their students, and he wishes he could escape it. Although he acts the part of the ebullient, outgoing man, he is rather more private than his public image image allows. He makes pronouncements on books for a Unionist paper, but his real pleasure (sure to endear him to us) is books themselves. "The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. Nearly every day when his teaching in the college was ended he used to wander down the quays to the second-hand booksellers, to Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, to Web's or Massey's on Aston's Quay, or to O'Clohissey's in the bystreet."

After several things in the evening go wrong, he wishes that he could be out alone in the middle of the rare Dublin snowfall. "How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!"

The theme of Irishness is raised in the story, first by Miss Ivors and much to Gabriel's chagrin. Gabriel is at war with Irishness, as he must be in some way, having come up in the Anglo system and professing its literature to students. He doesn't know who he is, or should be, culturally, but in a lager sense, too, he doesn't know who he is. He hasn't been able to reconcile his public self with a more authentic self. Authenticity, both cultural and emotional, is thematic in the story. There is a telling detail offered by Joyce toward the end: "As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses."

In discussing further his development, these passages are some that might give us insight into an emotional pattern we can detect in Gabriel.

"O, then," said Gabriel gaily, "I suppose we'll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh? "

The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:

"The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you."

Gabriel coloured, as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.

"Goloshes!" said Mrs. Conroy. "That's the latest. Whenever it's wet underfoot I must put on my galoshes. Tonight even, he wanted me to put them on, but I wouldn't. The next thing he'll buy me will be a diving suit."

Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly, while Aunt Kate nearly doubled herself, so heartily did she enjoy the joke. The smile soon faded from Aunt Julia's face and her mirthless eyes were directed towards her nephew's face. After a pause she asked:

"And what are goloshes, Gabriel?"

"Goloshes, Julia!" exclaimed her sister "Goodness me, don't you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your... over your boots, Gretta, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Conroy. "Guttapercha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the Continent."

"O, on the Continent," murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly.

Gabriel knitted his brows and said, as if he were slightly angered:

"It's nothing very wonderful, but Gretta thinks it very funny because she says the word reminds her of Christy Minstrels."

He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl's bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

"O, Mr. Conroy, will you come for an excursion to the Aran Isles this summer? We're going to stay there a whole month. It will be splendid out in the Atlantic. You ought to come. Mr. Clancy is coming, and Mr. Kilkelly and Kathleen Kearney. It would be splendid for Gretta too if she'd come. She's from Connacht, isn't she?"

"Her people are," said Gabriel shortly.

"But you will come, won't you?" said Miss Ivors, laying her arm hand eagerly on his arm.

"The fact is," said Gabriel, "I have just arranged to go----"

"Go where?" asked Miss Ivors.

"Well, you know, every year I go for a cycling tour with some fellows and so----"

"But where?" asked Miss Ivors.

"Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany," said Gabriel awkwardly.

"And why do you go to France and Belgium," said Miss Ivors, "instead of visiting your own land?"

"Well," said Gabriel, "it's partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change."

"And haven't you your own language to keep in touch with-- Irish?" asked Miss Ivors.

"Well," said Gabriel, "if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language."

Their neighbours had turned to listen to the cross- examination. Gabriel glanced right and left nervously and tried to keep his good humour under the ordeal which was making a blush invade his forehead.

"And haven't you your own land to visit," continued Miss Ivors, "that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country?"

"0, to tell you the truth," retorted Gabriel suddenly, "I'm sick of my own country, sick of it!"

"Why?" asked Miss Ivors.

Gabriel did not answer for his retort had heated him.

"Why?" repeated Miss Ivors.

They had to go visiting together and, as he had not answered her, Miss Ivors said warmly:

"Of course, you've no answer."

Gabriel tried to cover his agitation by taking part in the dance with great energy. He avoided her eyes for he had seen a sour expression on her face. But when they met in the long chain he was surprised to feel his hand firmly pressed. She looked at him from under her brows for a moment quizzically until he smiled. Then, just as the chain was about to start again, she stood on tiptoe and whispered into his ear:

"West Briton!"

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

[DWill]

I wondered about one thing in particular: how do you feel about Gabriel's feelings that develop towards Gretta after the party is over? Joyce says that "lust" pretty much takes over him, and some perhaps brutal impulses emerge in Gabriel. Is Joyce's use of 'lust' for sexual desire an example of his "scrupulous meanness?" Is there a judgment of Gabriel implied in his
lack of tender feeling toward his wife?

[geo]

I wondered about one thing in particular: how do you feel about Gabriel's feelings that develop towards Gretta after the party is over? Joyce says that "lust" pretty much takes over him, and some perhaps brutal impulses emerge in Gabriel. Is Joyce's use of 'lust' for sexual desire an example of his "scrupulous meanness?" Is there a judgment of Gabriel implied in his
lack of tender feeling toward his wife?

I was struck particularly by this paragraph:

He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. 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. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.

Then this:

She was walking on before him with Mr. Bartell D'Arcy, her shoes in a brown parcel tucked under one arm and her hands holding her skirt up from the slush. She had no longer any grace of attitude, but Gabriel's eyes were still bright with happiness. The blood went bounding along his veins; and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous.
She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory. A heliotrope envelope was lying beside his breakfast-cup and he was caressing it with his hand. Birds were twittering in the ivy and the sunny web of the curtain was shimmering along the floor: he could not eat for happiness. They were standing on the crowded platform and he was placing a ticket inside the warm palm of her glove. He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace. It was very cold. Her face, fragrant in the cold air, was quite close to his; and suddenly he called out to the man at the furnace:
"Is the fire hot, sir?"
But the man could not hear with the noise of the furnace. It was just as well. He might have answered rudely.
A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fire of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls' tender fire. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: "Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"
Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past. He longed to be alone with her. When the others had gone away, when he and she were in the room in their hotel, then they would be alone together. He would call her softly:
"Gretta!"
Perhaps she would not hear at once: she would be undressing. Then something in his voice would strike her. She would turn and look at him....

This is a beautiful passage. I see it as the climax of the story. I didn't see anything wrong with Gabriel lusting after his wife. He sees her idealistically, paints her with his mind, but he bases his portrait on their life and history together. In this moment he falls in love with his wife.

There is a tragic note to his discovery that during these same moments, Gabriel's wife is feeling only a distant remorse for her first love who died tragically young. She's not thinking of Gabriel at all. So 'Distant Music' is such an apt title for Gabriel's moment of idealization when he sees his wife as a goddess figure (of grace and mystery). And, yet, Gabriel is more alive and most sympathetic when he feels these strong emotions. The tragedy perhaps is that his feelings are not reciprocated. He tells himself later that he has never loved a woman as his wife did for the young Michael Furey, but maybe he's only never experienced reciprocated love. I think he has frittered his life away with detail and has never allowed himself to fall in love until this moment, and now it's too late.

There is something so ponderous about The Dead, the way the story slowly unfolds amidst a minutia of petty details and superficialities. See the passage about galoshes in DWill's post above.

[President Camacho]

In answer to DWill, my opinion may have something to do with a parting tenderness. The Anglican chill is warmed by Irish provincial truth by way of love. It's a redeeming quality and one that shows that the soil is more fertile than what the barren surface suggests. That there is a strong possibility of growth and that there is a clean/strong/honorable foundation to build from. That progressive and advanced may have forgotten what is real. The difference between concrete and plastic.