The Dead

March 27^th, 2013

James Joyce – The Dead Reading Journal

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

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James Joyce chose Dublin as the setting of his fifteen short stories because the city was, he saw, “the center of paralysis”. In such sense, The Dead, the final chapter of his collection Dubliners, should culminate in the lifelessness and paralysis. Surprisingly, however, the story is set in a seemingly lively party. Old Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia throw a magnificent annual dance party with their only niece Mary Jane. People from diverse classes are invited – from an educated scholar to a rum-dum. The party is held in a house upper of which they had rented from Mr Fulham, in Ireland upper of which is ruled by the Great Britain.

Amidst the majority in the party, who drinks, dances, and enjoys, Gabriel Conroy is a protagonist who thinks he is distinguished from other Irishmen. He is a college professor and a literary critic living in prosperous Monkstown with his wife Gretta, unlike Usher’s Islanders. An educated man himself, Gabriel can make a speech referring to John Milton and write a literary column with Browning’s poems. He is also a very considerate man who “sometimes [I] fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.” He is a Universalist who prefers to go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany than to visit his own land Ireland he is sick of.

Gabriel is a man with strong self-consciousness. When Gabriel asks her about love, Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, replies with great bitterness that “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” Gabriel colors with embarrassment at her back answer. Deeply humiliated, he hastily trots to the stairs and wave his hand to Lily in deprecation after (almost forcefully) handing her some coins for Christmas tip. Gabriel encounters another disconcertion while dancing with Ms Ivors, a frank-mannered, talkative young lady. Ms Ivors refers what Gabriel considers as scholarly acts to unpatriotic. She calls him a West Briton in the midst of all partiers. Gabriel, frustrated by all the eyes on him, nervously shouts that he is “[I’m] sick of my own country!”

Apart from Gabriel’s frustration, the party reaches its full swing as goose and pudding are served. Aunt Julia sings an old song in her strong and clear voice, Mary Jane plays her piano, and Gabriel delivers a wise and witty speech. Guests sings “For they are jolly their gay fellows” in unison, and the party is over. After the guests leave Ms Morkan’s, tenor Mr D’Arcy sings The Lass of Aughrim. Gretta listens hard to this traditional Irish song standing right under the dusty fanlight. Looking at his absorbed wife, with colour on her cheeks and her eyes shining Gabriel finds “a sudden tide of joy going leaping out of his heart.” Gabriel’s desire toward Gretta mounts when they two reach hotel. Here, “only the stress of his nails against the palms of his hands held the wild impulse of his body in check” while “[he] could have flung his arms about her hips and held her still, for his arms were trembling with desire.” Gabriel tries to see some passion or desire in Gretta’s eyes as well. But against Gabriel’s wish, Gretta remains abstracted. When Gretta talks to Gabriel about Michael Furey, a guy who got her mind lost, however, Gabriel finds a shameful consciousness of his own person assailing him. Gabriel is a man sure of his belief to embrace the present, to “not linger on the past”, as he addresses in his speech at Ms Morkan’s party. To him, whoever dead is the dead from the past, while he is the alive living the present. But Gabriel is “humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks.” While the dead Michael Furey is remembered by Gretta, Gabriel, facing her in the very present, is in nowhere in her heart.

Gabriel’s solid belief is challenged. What he thought was dead is alive and what he thought is alive is actually dead. He notices it is the foolish people lingering in the past who linger in time. Watching Gretta crying herself to sleep, Gabriel realizes that it is “better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” Generous tears start filling Gabriel’s eyes, as his soul approaches that region where dwells the vast hosts of the dead. The revelation of time, as Thomas Aquinas wrote in Summa Theologiae that “priority and posteriority are discerned, so the cessation of motion puts a stop to priority and posteriority; and so nothing remains but eternity, which is simultaneously whole,” illuminates Gabriel’s heart. Untangled from its own stubbornness and vanity, Gabriel’s mind goes on to accepting what Ms Ivors meant when calling him a West Briton. By the end of the story, when he says “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward”, he finally concedes how he had disregarded people like Ms Ivors as an ignorant narrow-minded nationalist, how he had neglected his own country without properly understanding it.

Just like anyone else, I encountered diverse experiences and went through the break of my belief few times. The latest one of them happened during the Lunar New Year’s Holiday in February. But it was none of the bitter experiences or great adversities that brought me to such realization. It was but my grandmother’s phone call.

I was in my mom’s car when my grandmother called me. I was surprised to see my grandmother’s number on the screen since she did not call me so often. So I assumed there was some urgent matter she had to tell me. But opposed to what I expected, the question she asked me was plain and simple: “Are you staying in your school during the holidays?” I responded I was staying in my house. She then added some incoherent comments, like what she ate for dinner last night and when she is planning to go to church during the holidays. Then before hanging up the phone, she asked if I could come over to her house and have a dinner together. I replied yes. And that was the end of our talk.

After getting off the phone, I suddenly reminded what my mom had told me few days before about my grandmother. She told me that my grandmother these days barely visited or even called our house unlike before. Since last year when she was bereaved of my grandfather, my grandmother started visiting our house very often, sometimes twice a day in Sundays. She called us time to time without special event and asked us what we were doing. I was raised by my grandmother since I was little and I was for no reason uncomfortable with her. But my mother was different. She didn’t feel so comfortable with grandmother in my house. The general Korean ‘mother-in-law and daughter-in-law’ relationship might have worked in theirs as well. According to my mom, it is against manner to rest in bed with the presence of elders in the house or to serve a simple meal. To me, grandmother wasn’t a kind of person who would be cruel to my mom with such trifles, but my mom did feel very uncomfortable with my grandmother.

It wasn’t long after my grandfather’s death my mom started to get irritated with my grandmother’s frequent visits. She answered grandmother’s call with brusque words and greeted her with a sigh. She complained grandmother never notices how much my mom feels uncomfortable with her. But now, with grandmother knowing what my mom feels about her, would my mom feel comfortable than before?

If Gabriel was a wise man living the present and not dwelling on the past in his own conceit, I was the honest one in my own. I had long considered myself as an honest and truthful person who never dissembles. At the same time, I disliked those who often put a fake smile and feigned kindness. They were, in my viewpoint, tainted in secular society. But frankness is not always the best. If my mom made a little more effort to treat my grandmother with kindness, even if the kindness might be an affected one, no one would have to bear the awkwardness whenever my mom and grandmother are together. The emotion that is swirling my mind is not always rational and is better not shown. After all, the jealousy I might have toward a beautiful and talented girl is never worth being expressed. What I defined as ‘honesty’ was a convenient excuse to express whatever is in my mind and never containing it.

That frankness is not always the best choice might not be as philosophical as Gabriel’s realization of time. It may merely be seen as a ‘socializing’ of me rather than an epiphany. In fact, the immediate feeling the word ‘epiphany’ oozes is somewhat scholarly, as the word is mostly used in literature classes (especially when discussing eminent yet unkind writer James Joyce). It would be for similar reason that the word ‘epiphany’ seems very convoluted and profound. Even James Joyce defined epiphany as somewhat spiritual when he wrote in Stephen Hero, his autobiographical novel, that “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.”

But the word itself does not exclude anything. What the narrator in Araby found as an epiphany might be seen as a simple disillusion of an ingenuous youth. The most crucial thing is, perhaps, readily realizing whatever an incident may teach. Like Gabriel, who accepted his wrong values of life instead of simply being furious when his wife got lost in the memories of her first love, the true realization may occur from the nastiest instances, or even the most trivial ones.