James Joyce's "The Dead" (part 1 - from memory)

This story is, in my humble opinion, one of the finest short stories or novellas ever written. I am about to reread it one more time, both for the enjoyment, but also to write a sort of literary analysis of it. I will do a brief overview of it now, if anyone is interested.

The basic framework of the story is that the main character, a fellow named Gabriel, is going to a dinner party. Gabriel considers himself a well-educated man, and resents most of the people with whom he is forced to associate in this party. The fact that they are related to him chagrins him to no end, and a number of awkward situations ensue throughout the party. It is narrated in third person, with a limited omniscience - we are sometimes able to tell how Gabriel is thinking and feeling.

And this is part of the true brilliance and craftsmanship of this novella - the narrative distance. While technically third person, the distance of the narrator from the character of Gabriel gets fuzzy at times - deliberately so. As we, the readers, get closer in to what Gabriel feels and thinks, the narrator gets less and less reliable. In essence, as we start to think like Gabriel, the narrator is very close to being Gabriel's own internal monologue and loses any sense of objectivity that a third person narrator should have.

This is a striking point of interest for me in this work, as it lends itself to a depth of reading that is provocative and fascinating (and for those of you who know me, you know I love puzzles - and this is one of the finest puzzles ever written - you can uncover something new on each reading).

What we really have is Gabriel, a puffed up buffoon of a man who is most remarkable for his pathos, self-absorption, and high degree of esteem for himself while eschewing contact with people who are not on par with him. The real problem is that he is a pathetic fool, who is neither smart nor witty - he is essentially a bad English teacher. What I mean by this is that he is an idiot with an education, and he gains some sense of self-importance from that and lords it over other people. If you have ever had an English teacher who is not that smart but who believes that he is, that is Gabriel. In a way, it is Joyce's ultimate joke on us - he places as a main character a man who is embodies all of the worst qualities of an erudite person, without any of the scholarship to back it up. This ends up as a joke on us if we take the piece seriously but miss those bits of humor, or a joke for us, as we get to laugh a little bit at ourselves for taking anything like this so seriously, and we get to see where our own foibles might dovetail with Gabriel's.

All in all, I think Joyce crafted a piece where he could make fun of people who didn't understand him but claimed to, all the while giving those of us with a hint of what might be going on a little bit of a laugh. Of course, this is all my opinion, and I have no scholarly research to bear it out. I know a bit about Joyce, Ireland, history, and context of the work, but I mainly rely on interpretation of the text, so take this for what it is worth - one person's opinion on an interesting piece of literature.

And if you think, perhaps, that I am giving Joyce to much credit for painstaking craftsmanship of literature, lets not forget that this is the man who said of his masterwork, Ulysses, that "it took me ten years to write it, I do not see why it shouldn't take you ten years to read it". I don't know if that is the exact quote, but it is pretty darn close.

Anyway, just from what I remember, the setup for this character and his contempt for others is started very early. (Forgive me, I do not have the text with me, and it has been three years since my last read, so some of my quotes are probably a bit off. I will fix them in a later post, but these are still useful, because I do remember some very particular statements). Almost the first line (if not the first) that we hear from Gabriel sets us up to dislike him if we pay close enough attention. He and his wife are late for the party, this makes him very frustrated, and when he is greeted at the door, he says something to his aunt of his wife; "You know it takes my wife three mortal hours to get dressed."

This one sentence tells us so much about the relationship between Gabriel and his wife. He has nothing but contempt for her. It is easy to write this off as a surface statement of frustration - he is angry at being late, and expresses it to his hostess. But dig a little further and really read the implications here. He is badmouthing his wife to his relatives when she is right there with him. The use of the word "mortal" certainly was not for use in polite company - it would almost be the equivalent of swearing - as you enter an elegant dinner party. And look at the verb tense. He did not use past tense. He is not merely upset at one incident - in his mind, this is a pattern of behavior, and he is the victim of it - he has little to no regard for his wife, and clearly this is a typical response from him. Interestingly enough, she bears it with good natured aplomb, and mostly laughs it off, although she does have a barb or two in return. She mentions about Gabriel's insistence that she wear galoshes - nasty rubber things that she does not like - she is a country girl and grew up tromping around in Irish weather - galoshes are an affectation for city folk - Britons and repressed people who are not in touch with their roots. Gabriel's insistence that she wear them asserts both a sense of the controlling type of relationship that he has, and also speaks to a degree of sexual repression as well - the rubber galoshes are not so far removed from the rubber condoms of the time - and the sexual imagery here is not much of a stretch.

An that is just from a couple of lines on the first page. I could go on and on and on. There is a wonderful scene where Gabriel's wife is on the balcony and he does not recognize her immediately - she is transfigured by an epiphany which she is experiencing (this is a very classic interpretation - I somewhat agree with it, but I digress from much of popular opinion in other of my interpretations) and I think that Gabriel is just smart enough to recognize that his wife is experiencing something that he never can. But because he is the well-educated one and she is just an Irish peasant, he cannot abide this, and forces an epiphany on himself. This is one of the most brilliant written parts of the work, because it is so deliberately trite. Gabriel analytically goes through a process of a very generic epiphany - the kind that a bad English teacher would write. He is not even self-aware enough to understand what he is doing, he just does it out of jealousy of his wife. We are left with a horrible feeling - he is so pathetic and self-deluded that he is The Dead while his wife is growing and going to surpass him. They are all covered by snow, and many people erroneously interpret it as death - but snow is commonplace for the Irish - it is only death for the foolish - Gretta will clearly survive and blossom in the Spring, while Gabriel will die, or at least be paralyzed in an eternal rime from which there is no escape.

Anyway, that is just scratching the surface; I need to read it again and write a much more serious piece about it. More forthcoming :)