“The Dead”

1. “The Dead” 24 March 2009

2. James Joyce • Born 1882, one of twelve children; father took family fortunes from prosperity to near poverty. • 1888 and 1893: sent to Jesuit schools (imagination informed by Catholic education; disillusionment with Catholicism in Portrait) • 1898: University College (Dublin) (Catholic University as an alternative to Protestant Trinity College). • 1902: Paris to study medicine

3. Influences (1) • “I am the servant of two masters… an English and an Italian… and a third there is who wants me for odd jobs” (Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses); shaped by his Irish Catholic upbringing and the cultural repression of the Irish by the ruling British. • Charles Stewart Parnell (Irish nationalist and political leader of the Irish parliamentary Delegation; leader of the Irish Home Rule Movement, but not a Catholic)

4. Influences (2) • Contemporary Irish Literature (William Butler Yeats and the Celtic revival, Irish myths, legends, and heroes) • [1922: the founding of the Irish Free State] • P. 30-33: Gabriel’s dialogue with Miss Ivors; Aran is where Synge’s Riders to the Sea is set). • Supported Yeats and his colleagues’ right to express themselves, but thought that the appropriate direction for Ireland was to join the European intellectual and cultural community (Odyssey, Shakespeare in Ulysses) • Irish Parochialism.

5. Oscar Wilde • Stephen’s aestheticism in Portrait and Wilde’s theories (search for the beautiful, scorn of bourgeois society, love of the eccentric, etc.; Wilde’s theory of masks and fictions)

6. Biography • 1904: met Nora Barnacle; published earlier versions of several stories in Dubliners. (“The Dead” completed in 1907). • Many audiences in mind: Dublin’s drowsing citizens; Catholic hierarchy; Irish intellectual elite, British public. • The reader, accompanied by the narrator-guide, sees the landscape of Dublin and is urged to think of the possibility of renewal. • Renewal in “the Dead”, the last story?

7. Dubliners • Blunted aspiration and frustration, crass materialism, sexual repression, drunkeness, moral idiocy • 1904: submitted a story “A Portrait of the Artist”, which became Stephen Hero, and, after the completion of “The Dead” in 1907, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • 1904:James and Nora (not married) leave Ireland; they settle in Trieste. • Returned to Ireland twice (1909 and 1912) • 1914: Serialisation of A Portrait in The Egoist; publication of Dubliners; began to write Ulysses • (Stephen=first Christian martyr).

8. Biography • 1920-1940: Paris; died in 1941 (Zurich). • 1918-1920: Ulysses serialised in the American journal The Little Review • 1922: Published as a book in Paris (1934 in the US) • Ulysses (Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom): June 16, 1904; at any random point in time, one can evoke through allusions what has been significant in human history; contemporary events acquire additional significance through connections to absent literary and historical figures (and viceversa); history as a series of concentric circles (Vico’s influence) • Parallax: mathematical term that describes how an object can look different if perceived from different places.

9. Biography • 1923: began to write “Work in Progress”, the book that became Finnegans Wake (1939). • The first sentence starts in the middle and is the end of the sentence with which the novel ends. • Based on the legend of drunken man who has fallen off a ladder and apparently dies, only to arise at his wake. • Is Gabriel a figure who “falls off the ladder” of his hopes and illusions only to awaken and recover in his final epiphany the common humanity that binds human beings together?

10. Backgrounds to “The Dead” • The story began to take shape in Rome • Michael Bodkin’s courting of Nora Barnacle (tubercolosis, sings in the rainy weather when Nora moves to Dublin) • Rivalry with the dead man • 1905 (Trieste): his brother send him the words of a song “O, Ye Dead”, in which the dead complain about bodily existence they can no longer enjoy (jealousy of the dead for the living). • The dead do no stay buried.

11. Backgrounds • “The Dead” begins with a party and ends with a corpse. (What’s the significance of this?) • “Why is it that words like these seem to be so dull and cold?” (52) (a letter Joyce wrote to Nora in 1904); Joyce wrote book reviews for the Daily Express; Gabriel’s physical image (23-24). • Mother’s rejection of liaison (30)

12. Gabriel’s character • Private tremors, sense of inadequacy; generous overtures are regularly checked. • P. 23: Lily and Gabriel in the pantry: marriage • Embarassment about Gretta’s origins: p. 33: “She’s from Connacht, isn’t she?”; “Her people are”. • The west is savagery (West of Ireland vs the Continent) (31-2). (The west at the end)

13. “The Dead” • Gabriel’s uneasiness about his attitude to the west, but clings to it to the end • The Lass of Aughrim’s challenge (49) (village not far away from Gretta’s village) • (A girl seduced and abandoned by Lord Gregory=inversion) • Violent passion is in Gretta’s past, not in the Dublin present • P. 51: “The blood went bounding along in his veins”

14. "What was he?" asked Gabriel, still ironically. • "He was in the gasworks," she said. (56) • (Attempt to pose as superior; attempt to elicit pity, but Gretta stresses love) • “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward” (59). • Is Gabriel conceding and relinquishing civilised thinking, Continental tastes; giving up narcissism and self-possession? Is he dying for her? Sacrifice of himself?

15. The snow • Cold outside vs warmth inside, in the house where the party is taking place • But warmth can be stuffy and confining (34: “Gabriel's warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. 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!” • Warmth in Michael Fury’s being outside, in the cold. • The imagery of fire / passion (51-2), but it is Gabriel’s unilateral vision

16. The Dead and the living • Interrelation of the dead and the living?

17. Allen Tate • “If the art of naturalism consists mainly in making active those elements which had hitherto remained inert (i.e. description, expository summary), the further push given the method by Joyce consists in manipulating what at first sight seems to be mere physical detail into dramatic symbolism”. • Gabriel enters the house, and flicks snow from his galoshes; by the time the story ends the snow has filled all the visible earth, and stands as a symbol of the revelation of Gabriel’s inner life (i.e. egoistic relation to his wife, inadequate response, etc.

18. Narrative strategies (Tate) • We know Gabriel at any given moment through what he sees and feels in terms of that moment. • If he is to see the action for us, he must come authoritatively out of the scene. Lily is a function of his arrival on the scene. • We are never told anything. We are shown everything (i.e, we are not told that the milieu of the story is the provincial, middle-class society of Dublin at the turn of the century, etc.) • As he enters we are never far from Gabriel’s sight. Miss Ivors disappears the moment she has served her purpose of eliciting from Gabriel his relation to his culture.

19. Narrative strategies • Gabriel’s partial view: He sees his wife as “Distant Music” (48: read) (irony about “distance”). He sees only the “lower part of her figure, from below; the upper part is involved with a song. The concealment of the upper part is a symbol, dramatically active, of his relation with his wife. • We begin to see Michael (gravel thrown at the window, etc.

20. The snow • Snow as overall symbol. What was a scenic detail on Gabriel’s galoshes expands. The snow is the story. At the beginning the snow is the cold and even hostile force of nature, enclosing the warm conviviality of the Misses Morkan’s party. As the action develops, the snow reverses its meaning. It becomes a symbol of warmth, of expanded consciousness. It stands for Gabriel’s escape from his own ego, into the larger world of humanity, including “all the living and the dead”.

21. Snow • A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes (23). • The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument (34). • The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres (42) • Cap (Cape), Tap, Pat (Fingers and snow)

22. Tapping / Patting • Gabriel's warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window (34) • The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. (42) • A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. (59)