Litchfield Talks 2
October 7. Joyce’s “The Dead”
Joyce is a daunting and towering figure, as essential to an understanding of modern fiction as T.S. Eliot is to modern poetry and Picasso is to an understanding of modern art. Joyce’s influence on modern writers remains immense. Some in despair of ever surpassing him have lamented that Joyce took fiction as far as it can go, as Shakespeare took drama. Others have complained that Joyce stretched the form of fiction beyond the breaking point with the aftermath the baffling chaos of form that many feel was Joyce’s principal literary legacy. I would argue rather that Joyce revolutionized the language and shape of literary fiction, creating a style and language to dramatize the subtle and complex dimensions of subjective consciousness while unlocking the profound significance of the everyday and the ordinary.
Joyce accomplished all of this not through the quantity of his writing. His collected works are few: two collections of poetry, a single play, one volume of 15 short stories, and three novels. Although hardly an innovative or preeminent poet or dramatist, his contribution to fiction is stunning. Dubliners set the dominating pattern and technique for the modern short story; in APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce took on the traditional novel of education and development in an absolutely new manner that has caused other treatments of this theme to seem both shallow and oldhat. With Ulysses Joyce fashioned an epic out of a single day in the life of Dublin in which a cuckolded Irish Jew named Leopold Bloom is revealed as a modern day Odysseus. With Finnegans Wake Joyce invents an entirely new literary language to a “night book” of dream logic and the unconscious in contrast to the daybook Ulysses. Demanding certainly, but I would argue at the core, Joyce is one of the greatest literary artists not for his puzzles but for his incomparable engagement with life in all its multiplicity that is liberating precisely because Joyce perhaps more so than any other writer refuses the simplistic formulas that have been the stock in trade of storytelling from its beginning. Joyce earns the right to say about all his work, as he did about Ulysses, “If Ulysses is notworth reading then life is not worth living.
Before turning to his great story “The Dead,” which I will argue forms the turningpoint of Joyce’s career and accomplishment as a writer, let me establish some biographical coordinates.
Born in 1882 on Ground Hog’s Day, Joyce was like Stephen Dedalus in Portrait, his fictional alter ego, the eldest of 10 children. The fortunes of Joyce’s family describes the descent of a middle class family into shabby gentility and destitution. Between 1882 and 1902, when Joyce first left Ireland after graduation from University College, Dublin, he resided in 14 different addresses, each a step lower on the social ladder. This is obviously a reflection of his family’s dire financial straits, just barely keeping ahead of the creditors. Joyce’s beloved father is accurately captured in Stephen Dedalus’ catalogue of his father: “a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past.”
While the family was still solvent, at age six and a half, Joyce was sent to Clongowes Wood, a prestigious Jesuit boarding school. He was the youngest boy at school, causing one to believe that the bullying Stephen receives in Portrait was not exaggerated. However, there are clear differences between Joyce and Stephen. Joyce’s school nickname was “Sunny Jim.” He was far from the dour and sad Stephen; he excelled at sports, primarily track and field. He was also well-liked and normally fun-loving. He was like Stephen “pandied” or beaten by his Jesuit masters, but not for breaking his glasses but for “vulgar language”: a prophetic act that would continue to be repeated for the rest of Joyce’s life. After three years, Joyce’s father’s financial difficulties caused Joyce to be withdrawn from Clongowes to resume his studies like Stephen at Belvedere College, the Jesuit day school in central Dublin where the family had re-located from the more fashionable Dublin suburbs. The impact of his Jesuit education would be profound. Joyce would later comment: “You allude to me as Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.” At Belevedere Joyce’s adolescence begins. He excelled at writing and languages, became the prefect of the sodality of the Virgin Mary and became obsessed with losing his own virginity, which he accomplished through the aid of a prostitute. Like Stephen, Joyce follows the fame pattern of sin, guilt, retreat, and confession. Both endured a brief period of devotion followed by a decline in faith and growth in the faith of art.
Joyce entered University College Dublin, the Catholic counterpart of the Protestant-only Trinity College. He was a language major, equally lax in attendance as Stephen. This was the period of the Irish Renaissance, the rejection of England for a genuine Irish identity reflected in embracing the Irish language, Irish themes and subjects. Characteristically, Joyce resisted this narrow provincialism for continental models. He became an early advocate of the playwright Henrik Ibsen whose naturalism would have a profound influence on his writing. After acquiring a certain literary reputation in college (he was able to publish a review of one of Ibsen’s plays in an English magazine while still an undergraduate), Joyce decided to become a doctor, but with the rather exotic and totally impractical notion of studying medicine in Paris, leaving Dublin on December 1, 1902, beginning a life-long exile from his home, though he never left off writing about Dublin. In his first taste of exile from Ireland he was home in time for Christmas and later returned for the death of his mother, staying for a time as a schoolteacher. The critical event of his life was his chance meeting with Galway girl, Nora Barnacle in 1904, the occasion of their first date became “Bloomsday,” the day in the life of Dublin that is celebrated in Ulysses. Joyce convinced Nora to accompany him unmarried to the Continent, where he taught English in Trieste and Zurich during World War I. He finally married Nora in 1931. In 1920 Joyce settled in Paris where he lived until war once again forced him to resettle in Switzerland where he died in 1941.
Dubliners is the appropriate place to start any consideration of Joyce’s fiction because it is really where he started. Joyce began collecting what he called Silhouettes: brief prose sketches of scenes, overheard conversations, and witnessed incidents ordinary Dublin life. From these Joyce developed a literary technique he called the Epiphany.
What is celebrated on the feast of the Epiphany? [the manifestation of divinity to the Magi]. Joyce secularized the event and redefined it, not as a manifestation of the godhead—the showing forth of the divine to the Magi—but the revelation of meaning, in Joyce’s words, the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing,” in which, again in Joyce’s description, the “soul of the commonest object . . . seems to be radiant.” Transformation of the actual into universal significance is the key function of the epiphany. In liturgical language, Joyce conceived his role as an artist as a “priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”
Joyce’s epiphany works like a spotlight momentarily lighting a scene and freezing it, in an instant revealing its meaning. It also functions like a magnifying glass intensifying and underscoring details, forcing the reader to consider every detail. When reading Joyce, remember that every detail, no matter how seemingly trivial, is included for a purpose, and it is the reader’s job to decipher that purpose. Listen for the single word that explains the story, the simple gesture that reveals a complex set of relationships, an instant in which the actual reveals a deeper significance.
For an equivalent consider the difference between a realistic paintings and a collage, or the difference of a narrative film and montage. Linear development or continuity is replaced by conjunction or succession of images. Each image, trivial in itself, achieves a greater significance through relationship, contrast, comparison. To read Joyce’s stories you must look for unity not in its plot but in its details, its images that establish a pattern of meaning beneath the surface of ordinary and often unexceptional experience.
Joyce’s technique of the epiphany shows him working out the central problem of the artist in the 20th century, expressed in the choice between realism and symbolism. On the one hand, fiction was opening up new territory of reality rarely examined before: sexuality, psychology, the pressure of class, gender, and environment in the formation of modern identity and behavior. On the other hand, writers were seeking a way of penetrating actuality, to go beyond surface experience to arrive at essential, universal truths. Reality therefore was processed for its symbolic significance. Joyce is at the center of these tendencies. Dubliners in on the one hand a collection of realistic, slices of life, portraying life as it is in all its grimness, vulgarity, and triviality. Gone are idealized characters. There are neither heroes nor villains in a typical Joyce story, and like most of our lives very little of importance ever seems to happen in one. Joyce attempts to mine this unexceptional material for its overlooked significance, and the stories are much more than just photographical realism. Details are arranged to uncover essential truths and symbolic association, bringing together both modes: realism and symbolism in a rich construct that neither invalidates the concrete nor ignores universal relevance.
Dubliners show Joyce applying his notion of the epiphany as well as expressing his dual interest in realism and symbolism. We are presented with 15 slices of Dublin life, objective rendering of average or ordinary experience. Joyce’s subjects are all unremarkable as are his incidents. For the most part, the stories avoid the conventionally dramatic. He works by indirection, implying much but asserting little. The method is presentative, lacking the guidance of the author to explain significance. Each story captures scenes, setting, and character with unflattering honesty, dealing with a decisive moment of comprehension, of insight (or the lack of it) into the life of his principal characters. As particular and specific as each story is, each serves as representative of a people, a nation, a state of mind, a modern condition. Joyce in describing his plan for Dubliners wrote:
My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard . . . .
Joyce here instructs us to see each story as a metaphor for a larger universal theme: the state of modern life. Each story must also be considered in its sequence, like individual chapters in a novel, connected by recurrent image and situation. Think of collage or montage as an organizing principle. The full meaning of each story is only revealed in relationship to the whole. The effect is a cumulative significance as each story follows the next, picking up meaning and insight from one story to the next. Joyce’s style of “scrupulous meanness” suggests a clinical detachment, an objective viewpoint that will render each scene with brutal clarity. As he commented, “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Isih people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.” But the writer is not just the cameraman recording Dublin life as he found it. All is strategically arranged. Joyce’s method suggests that everything must help to render the effect intended. Nothing is random, or incidental. Although nothing much happens overtly much is going on covertly.
Far from being a typical collection of random short stories, Dubliners was an innovative work having an unusual pattern of internal chronology and a structural unity based on related thematic and imagistic motifs (think Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heartsclub Band!). Joyce would provide the basic strategy of the modern English short story and the technique that would give the story collection the range and power of the novel.
In Joyce’s development as a writer, Dubliners gave Joyce his main subject matter and the central setting for all his subsequent work—Dublin citizens and Dublin life. He structured Dubliners to trace the life pattern of a gallery of typical characters from youth to old age, living in and reacting to an oppressively constrictive society. The environment enveloping the characters is explored with painstaking realism. From the conflict between the individual and society came Joyce’s central themes of paralysis-decay-death and freedom-escape-life. Joyce told a friend, “I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” In exploring the modern city and its impact, Dubliners established itself as the foundation of Joyce’s fictional canon. The central theme of the citizen and the city would be explored in ever-wider perspectives in Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Joyce would move from vignettes of Dublin people and places in Dubliners to broader pictures of society in the novels, climaxing in panoramas of universal man poised against the vast cosmic perspectives of interstellar space and unending time.
Dubliners also anticipates Joyce’s great achievements as a stylist. In the daring combination of realism, symbolism, and irony in Dubliners Joyce began the experimentation with language and style that character him as the greatest fictional innovator of the twentieth century.
Let’s now look at “The Dead” to show how Joyce’s method operates, as well as to demonstrate how this story is both the culmination of Dubliners and a decisive break with the stories that had preceded it.
“The Dead” provides a fitting conclusion to the collection of stories in Dubliners in recapitulating and bringing to completion the major theme of paralysis that typifies all the stories. “The Dead” is different in type and texture from the earlier Dubliners stories. It is longer, a fully developed story dealing with an array of characters of varying types. It differs structurally from the earlier stories that generally treated a single incident, described succinctly, and directed rapidly toward an ephiphanic climax. In contrast, “The Dead” develops the situations of the two main characters through various phases described in detail, and is built on a series of increasingly intense epiphanies, leading to a final great climax and epiphany of the snow falling all over Ireland, bringing “The Dead” and Dubliners to a close with one of the most celebrated endings in modern literature.
In another sense, “The Dead” represents a departure and break from what had come before in both tone and subject matter. Having completed the first 14 stories of his collection, Joyce wrote to Stanislaus in 1906 from Rome:
Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attractions of the city . . . . I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality . . . . I have not been just to its beauty.
In Rome, Joyce saw an ancient city that, like Dublin, inhabited by the ghosts and ruins of its past. It brought him to his finest expression of an important underlying theme of Dubliners: the inexorable interdependence of the living and the dead. As Richard Ellmann observes, Joyce had learned, like Gabriel, that “we are all Romes, our new edifices reared beside, and even joined with, ancient monuments.” This recognition of a tragic vision, ironically, led Joyce beyond the fatalistic vision that tends to crush the characters of the other Dublinersstories.
Accordingly, “The Dead” representsa crucial stage in Joyce’s development between the art of miniature in Dubliners and the massive panorama of Ulysses. The story widens Joyce’s range and sympathy from ironic satire to a more empathetic understanding of the emotional cost and human tragedy in his Dublin subjects. The previous stories seem more like clinical studies. “The Dead” maintains its focus on the Dublin environment but raises the stakes of universality so that the drama of Gabriel and Greta Conroy reaches an unprecedented profundity. Gabriel’s development in particular moves him from isolated detachment to commonality with the world, to sympathy and empathy with others that will become in Ulysses the basis for Joyce’s massive realism and saturation in the vitality of life itself. As Richard Ellmann has written,