Warnings from “The Dead” in Joyce’s Dubliners

January 19, 2009 at 12:50 am (Critical Writing, Prose)

This is old. And by old, I mean it was written before I developed a more carefully honed critical edge in my writing. If anything, the largest failing of this essay is that it can’t make up its mind between including everything and proving a finely crafted point/thesis. Still, I think there are some worthwhile observations herein, so I have decided to finally post it, and I have made some small changes to make the argument a more solid contribution to the study of Joyce, specifically “The Dead” and Dubliners. Also the articles this article refers to have gone missing from my files, so I cannot be certain which books, etc. it refers to; although, I imagine they wouldn’t be that hard to track down.

“The Dead” as Our Door Out of Dubliners

     The term “epiphany” generally means a moment of clarity. Many critics, not least of all Scholes and Litz, have argued that for Joyce the epiphany was a moment when someone or something was revealed for its honest and true self (Harty 36). This distinction is important because the situations presented are not just about understanding but also a kind of unavoidable truth. All throughout Joyce’s short story collection, Dubliners, there are these moments. A prominent example is at the end of “Araby” where the narrator sees himself “as a creature driven and derided” as well as “burn[ing] with anguish and anger” (35). Literary criticism is littered with the graveyards where the educated try to exhume truth via careful examination. To do this in Joyce’s work is to pursue epiphanies because they are clearly this sort of mark of clarity and understanding. Truth is at the heart of Joyce’s writing. This shows in that “the theme is not merely pointed to, but is incorporated into the style: the reader is forced to experience it” (French 444). To conclude Dubliners, Joyce had to complete one seemingly impossible venture: guide his readers to have an epiphany related to the collection. It is in “The Dead,” as we get ready to set the book down, that we are meant to recognize ourselves in the collection of stories, but not with the intention of simply chastising ourselves; rather, it is so that we should see how to better use our knowledge of the language. Joyce gave us a way to leave Dubliners behind but take its significance with us in the memory of the experience. He does this with Gabriel, a sacrificial lamb created as a character only to have his throat metaphorically slit and be destroyed in “The Dead,” so that we, the readers, might have a profound understanding of moral society as it is defined by the powers of language. That is a little heavy-handed perhaps, but not entirely unfounded, as there is in fact a “cure [for] blindness to reality suggested in ‘The Dead’” (French 445). We are meant to find it and utilize it as we set the book aside and return to the world of the living.
     In “The Dead,” Joyce establishes that people are equal, across the board, as human beings and should be treated as such. Throughout the collection the reader gets selective glimpses of characters, and then when there is an epiphany, we see the most intimate often harsh reality of a character. Over time it is easy for this to make a reader judgmental of people, and “The Dead” is meant to remind readers that they–the readers–are people as well. Joyce makes this fair warning through Gabriel, who sees himself as superior to others. If, in fact, the readers have come to see themselves in some way as superior to the characters in the stories, then Gabriel is a sort of mirror image. We notice this in “the condescending insincerity in Gabriel’s manner” (Keen 201). This attribute of his appears almost as soon as he arrives at the celebration occurring at the start of the story, when he jokes with the servant, Lily, about how he “suppose[s] [he]‘ll be going to [her] wedding one of these fine days.” In this conversation, Gabriel uses a “friendly tone” and speaks “gaily,” but Lily responds to him with “great bitterness” (178). He wishes to communicate a mood of happiness but uses words that are contextually inappropriate (Avery 411). This lack of perspective he conveys comes from seeing himself as evidently greater than Lily on several levels: she is serving him, and he is her intellectual superior. He tries to reach out with his mirth and share it, but he cannot connect because he has built himself up in such a distinct way. He views himself as a greater being, and when he sees those lesser than him and tries to reach out, he inevitably fails because he is incapable of being adequately considerate of them. Gabriel has come to think of his intellectual superiority as human superiority (French 466). It is of no small significance that Gabriel’s greater intellect stems largely from the written and spoken word, which interestingly enough is unimportant to Lily, and she is even affronted enough by it that she says, “The men that is now is only all palaver …” (178). What would equate to human superiority to her is actually as far as it could be from Gabriel’s perception of the same idea. If anything, she values the man who is more than just talk. This could be seen to reflect on the reader, who is of some intellect in reading the book and engaging in the wordplay therein. To question the value of that intellect and any superiority that may coincide with it seems important to Joyce’s writing. Unfortunately for Gabriel, that is about all his abilities amount to–talk–which is reflected in his speech to what he describes as “indelicate” men and women but is nonetheless well received. He talks to them like they are ignorant and deceives them with false charm. He even goes so far as to lump his aunts (his family!) in with them as “two ignorant old women” (192). Gabriel displays that he is truly “all palaver.”
     Gabriel’s superiority complex creates the blindness to reality mentioned earlier, as he is unable to understand the sensitivities of the other people at the celebration. This makes him feel reasonably isolated, which at no point registers in his mind as an absurd irony. Being the educated man, one would expect him to have a greater scope of ability to communicate, not a narrowed one. Recognizing this as absurd, or at least ironic, is key to the reader, who should be educated and developing a greater sense of language through Dubliners. We witness is self-centered view as he thinks on the encounter with Lily and the aforementioned speech to come. He worries that he will not be able to talk to the crowd and will fail “just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry” (179). Notice that he calls her “the girl in the pantry” and not “Lily.” Gabriel’s concern does not lie with his aunts, Lily, or even the auditors who are present, but with himself. The intelligence of Gabriel should reflect the intelligence of the readers, allowing them not to make his mistakes.
     His bolstered ego even extends to his educated peers. Ms. Ivors challenges Gabriel in jest, calling him a West Briton. It is difficult for him to retreat to his intellectual superiority as an escape, but he still considers some things in his head, such as “literature was above politics” (188). Ms. Ivors shows some affection towards him, but he is too concerned with his own shaken ego. She even presses “her warm hand eagerly on his arm” (189). It does not matter. Clearly it is just as difficult for others to connect with Gabriel as it is for him to connect with others. Here we see Joyce erode the value of Gabriel’s intellect, raising questions about what is more important and what is above what–literature, politics, relationships. We already knew that Gabriel was a person, the same as everyone else, even if he did not. Now, what we might have considered exceptional about him–his education–is called into question. This begins to show that Gabriel is no better than those around him, and that by considering himself above other people, he in fact puts a stranglehold on himself. Gabriel’s error is Joyce’s way of showing us that it is important to recognize the shared nature of humanity.
     Finally, we come to the woman with whom we assume Gabriel has the closest bond, his wife. What we find is that when asked if his wife is from Connacht, he shortly retorts, “her people are” (189). Even his wife, whom he claims to love, is not beyond his condescending nature, as he tries to separate her from her history, so that her upbringing does not reflect poorly on his own person. It would simply be appalling if he did something like marrying a farmer’s daughter. The world Gabriel has come to involve himself with is beneath him as he sees it, and he has become detached from reality. During another conversation, Gretta, his wife, mentions the humor she finds in Gabriel’s newly found obsession with galoshes. Gabriel responds by saying that Gretta finds them “funny because the word reminds her of Christy Minstrels” (181). This comment is clearly to remind her of the perceived quality of her culture as somewhat ignorant, and it puts her in her place (Morrissey 22). He silences her, and she hardly speaks for the rest of the night. Gabriel has humiliated his wife, even if only to a minor degree, because he was being embarrassed. His sense of priorities is called into question along with his now very clear view of other beings as less than himself. Joyce continually reinforces the idea that we should recognize others as equals by showing Gabriel’s inability to do so, and how that keeps him from enjoying various aspects of life, including passing conversation, keeping good company with his friend and fellow intellectual, and from truly loving his wife and treating her respectfully. At the end of the story, Gabriel recognizes the unity shared by all people as the snow is “faintly falling … upon all the living and the dead” (224). Gabriel almost reaches an epiphany, trailing just behind the reader. We are all faced with the human condition: we will all die. “The Dead” is thus aptly named. Joyce leads us through the experience of realizing how important human connection and mutual respect are, by showing us Gabriel floundering with the basics of human relations. It is important that we are able to share our learning from Dubliners with others and not simply keep it to ourselves and stew. This is one objective Joyce achieves through the telling of “The Dead.” It is okay to be intelligent and an intellectual, just do not be Gabriel.
     Another task that “The Dead” takes on in order to take us out of the stories in Dubliners is to show the power of language and how it can be a trap. There is some irony in Gabriel becoming trapped by language, when, given his education, we would assume he would have greater mastery and control over language. The most prominent scene is when Gabriel comes up behind his wife in the “gloom of the hall” and begins to describe her in her “grace and mystery … as if she were a symbol of something”; he goes on to explain how he would paint her and how in his painting “her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness”–”Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter” (210). It is important to remember here that Gabriel is not talking about just any woman; he is talking about his nearest and dearest, his wife. He is trapped by his own clever wordplay. The ideal of the situation and the symbolism become more important to him than the actual woman standing in front of him. Gabriel reduces experience to a conventional image (Morrissey 26). She is a collection of objects: a “blue felt hat,” “bronze hair,” a reflection “against the darkness.” The extremity of the situation is stressed by the hypothetical painting being of the woman he married, presumably for love. By taking his wife and reducing her to conventionality, she has become a plot hook, or at best, a theme to be written on. Instead of considering what she is thinking, he wonders what symbolism can be derived from her as an image of a woman thinking. He is too busy deciding how he would manage her details on a canvas to care for her beauty nearly as much as her beauty’s meaning. The title Distant Music only serves to emphasize the way Gabriel has taken the meaning out of the experience and tried to turn it into something much more artificial. Such obvious detachment to the immediate world of experience is an extreme representation and presents an obvious message from Joyce to his readers: be ever wary of the powers of language and how easily language can entice the human spirit. Human experience is not just a pretty picture.
     And still, this theme of “distant music” and Gabriel’s attachment to it carries on as the story progresses. Later, during the development of Gabriel’s emotional condition as he and Gretta go to their room at the Gresham, we see the words make a return: “Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past” (214). The term “distant music” is now seen as positively associated by Gabriel with his relationship to Gretta (Zasadinski 4). Not only does Gabriel initially perceive his wife as a symbol, but now when he remembers her fondly, he is recalling what she may have symbolized to him. Joyce uses this phrase as a sort of allusion, but it only alludes to other parts of the same story (Zasadinski 4). This creates a controlled metaphor that pertains to the relationship between Gabriel and his wife. She is a beautiful, thought-provoking theme embodies in the moments that he privately witnesses her; clearly, this is what Gabriel’s linguistically intellectual mind relishes. The seemingly poetic moments of their life together are what Gabriel remembers most, but in these memories, Gretta is drained of what we would be inclined to call her humanity. She becomes an idea, rather than a person with her own history and emotions. Captivating language builds an impenetrable, descriptive wall around the personal details of Gretta in Gabriel’s mind. The real world becomes a literary reference. The effect of literature being a means for understanding the world seems to implode, and the real world becomes fictional in a way that seems devoid of the living. “The Dead” clearly expresses a word of warning to readers through these examples. In Dubliners, readers are taught to see the world through a literary lens, but this reminder in “The Dead” makes certain to show that life is not one and the same as that lens.
     Gabriel is caught in a trap at the end of the story, ensnared by how own poetics. When Gretta falls asleep after just having confessed how a boy from her youth had loved her so truly and deeply, Gabriel is left to try and reconcile the situation with himself. He moves from describing a snow-covered graveyard where “[h]is soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (224). Some scholars believe that the tone shows remorse and a desire to change. The comment has been made that Joyce abandons being judgmental of Gabriel in this last line (Avery 418). While there is evidence to support such a theory, there is more evidence that suggests Gabriel has become completely separate from the real world and hidden himself in this resonant final sentiment. The poetics of the closing line likewise support this theory. Instead of recognizing the situation with his wife and trying to find how he can rectify their relationship, he convinces himself everything is fine: “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes” (223). Of course, it is Gabriel who thinks the tears are generous, and he sees himself as somehow giving in this situation, even though that does not logically follow from what has happened. Then he wanders off, looking out his window onto a world that he molds in his mind’s eye with words, so that he can reshape everything in accordance with him he wants it to be: beautiful and pure. He comes close to an epiphany but then misses it entirely.
     Regardless of a positive or negative light, critics focus on the truth in Gabriel’s looking west to try and find a solution to the problems directly in front of him. Again, we see him trying to escape to somewhere else, but now it is to a place, since his intellect has failed him. Joyce shows his readers how wonderful that far off place we can see right beside us is by letting us go there with Gabriel. The narrator’s voice becomes Gabriel’s, and we see as Gabriel sees. It is up to the readers to remember that they are someplace constructed by words at the end and that these paragraphs really show Gabriel’s prison, where he has walled himself off from reality. This is how Joyce guides us to our own epiphany. The end illuminates the prior stories and shows the readers what significance the truth and meaning the collection has for them (Murphy 466). Joyce warns his readers about the trappings of language by showing them just how readily they too can be pulled into a different version of the truth and how easily they can lose touch. The jolt that should keep the reader out of being lulled into the world constructed by Gabriel’s words should come in the closing words of “the living and the dead,” which acts as a leitmotif, reminding the reader of how Gabriel’s not seeing equality amongst all people has treated him.
     In concluding “The Dead,” Joyce is really bringing all of Dubliners to a close and ushering us out the door. In as little as the last few paragraphs, Joyce gives us a much needed feeling of closure that we do not often get in the other stories and essentially tells us that it is now okay to close the back cover on the book. “A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily …” (Joyce 223). With just the right words and imagery, the reader also becomes tired and nostalgic, which creates a strong emotional bond between the reader and the collection. We have not only read something–we have experienced it. The intellectual pursuit of the book has transferred to the more important realm of experience. We feel as if we too, like Gabriel, are looking out the window with the snow and seeing the significance “like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (224). Unlike Gabriel, however, we have gotten to reflect on the alternate path we could take–the one that Gabriel does take–and see the error in doing so. As aforementioned, we get the epiphany that Gabriel does not, and we are free to go. Fortunately, Joyce allows the pace to ease at the end, and the reader gets a chance to take one last breath of the foreign yet familiar air of Dubliners before leaving. As Joyce brought us in as a young boy looking through an open window, he sends us off, looking out of a window as an older man. He has done almost all he can to bring his readers to point where they can truly experience an epiphany. We are still locked into that poetic world Gabriel has constructed for us until we close the book and step back into our own world. This break allows us to remember the lens of the world of Dubliners and how the poetics of it are artificial; however, closing the book does not eliminate the valuable recognitions of the truths expressed in the text.
     We have learned that language is powerful. But language can also be limiting. We find the strengths and weakness of language as we are forced to define ourselves by it daily. If James Joyce had a mantra that guide him while writing, it would surely have included this notion and most likely would have been founded on it. In his short story collection, Dubliners, he stretches the capabilities of language but also reminds his readers that there are boundaries, as he often invites them in to make his characters come to life. And through this strange, modernist experience, we are given the gift of truths. As readers, we become more fully aware of how words and ideas work and can be manipulated, as well as how these facts affect our everyday lives. Still, it is not until the last story, “The Dead,” that Joyce passes on a few warnings about the use of these concepts. Marilyn French describes these warnings as a cure for blindness to reality and says they involve becoming more aware of what truly is (445). It is made clear how important it is to allow ourselves to be human, how we need to think carefully because we can become deluded with ourselves, and how language can become an entrapment. It is in this final story that Joyce wraps up his collection by providing us with closure and a sense of how to recognize and relate to the world of language he has tried so hard to show us. This world of language is of course our own, and it is the end of Dubliners that is meant to open our eyes to the parts of it we tend to overlook every day, and show us how to carefully walk away from the book with our fresh insight to be put to good use.