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Hi Folks:
I am glad to see a lot of comments about "The Dead"----- to me one of the most profound and complex stories written. Even the first word "Lily" raises questions and may reverberate throughout the text. Chandra pointed out many of the possible symbolic meanings that have been suggested for the word <<In choosing this name Joyce wants the reader to make the associations that the flower has with: 1) death (it is frequently used at funerals); 2) the Archangel Gabriel (it is symbolic of this guardian of the gates of death); and 3) Easter, and thus with rebirth. The reader will want to decidewhether or not there is a rebirth at the end of this story. Is Joyce's writing really so full of symbolism or is this all wishful thinking? Who can really say? I have to admit that when I encountered this symbolic reading of Lily the caretaker's daughter, I was not convinced by a long shot. It is a heavy symbolic weight to put on the initial word in the story. I think I first saw this reading in Wm. York Tindall's Reader's Guide to James Joyce. But the more I read the story, the more I liked the duality of the word "Lily" as a fitting opening for the story -- not because the symbolism is any way apparent at the start but that the idea of Life/Death/Life strikes me as embracing the main theme of the story. So when I look at the story again, the word seems to reverberate powerfully. Chandra writes "who can really say?" and there is no answer to that question. The reader can decide IF the reader finds that the symbol works in her or his mind -- does it tie something together that seems to fit together? Symbolism embraces a multiplicity of readings. Does the chalice on Fr Flynn's chest at the end of "The Sisters" show him as returned to the Church (he seemingly lost contact when he first dropped the chalice or so his sisters tell us)? Or is it something imposed -- a false reconciliation made not by a dead Fr Flynn but by the sisters and the priest -- to make this failed priest appear a good churchman at last? I think the answer rests on the way one reads the entire story. And I think the same thing happens here with Lily. I think the story is one of a kind of death and rebirth with the central image of this movement being the marriage of Gabriel and Gretta. I believe their marriage is traumatized and revitalized by the events of this story. Gabriel has to attain a new and deeper vision of Gretta --- to see her with fresh eyes -- to make their marriage come alive again. It is not that they are angry with one another -- but that they are so complacent with each other. Or at least Gabriel is. Gretta is the one person with whom Gabriel feel totally secure. We really don't get much of Gretta's view of their relationship since we are increasingly entering the mind of Gabriel and we come to see only what he sees. Their marriage seems stagnating. Gabriel thinks he knows all there is to know about Gretta-- that he can control her. He has to lose every vestige of control -- to face the fact that in life one can never possess another entirely------ that there are sacred and inviolable places in the heart that a lover can never enter. The memory of Michael Furey is one such place-- a private treasure of Gretta's that Gabriel can never fully touch. A theme that runs through the story is Gabriel's failures to control women. He tries to see Lily first as a little girl-- he is used to this view but he fails to appreciate that she is growing up and has a private life and now the problems of an adult woman: <<`The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.' >>He next tries to reassume some sort of control by bribing her with a Christmas tip which she declines and he has to toss it at her and run up the stairs to gain any sense of control over the situation. Later a similar failure occurs with Molly Ivors, his equal in age and education. The more she teases him about being a "west Briton" the more he flusters and his real animosities toward his ancestral land come out: <<`O, to tell you the truth,' retorted Gabriel suddenly, `I'm sick of my own country, sick of it!' >> I think that by the end of the story----- in finally coming to an acceptance of the fact that Gretta has a past all her own--- a past he can't control or overwhelm----- Gabriel begins to come to an acceptance of Ireland's past and the positive attributes of this world which he professes to disdain. To me a crucial passage to a determination of whether Gretta is really thinking about Michael Furey at all before she hears his haunting song "The Lass of Aughrim" is the dinner speech of Gabriel. With all his remarks about the singers of the past who we will not let die-who may be gone but whose memories fill our hearts, there is not a blush from Gretta. And if one believes that Gretta Does have Michael Furey in her thoughts at this point how could Joyce NOT show a reaction? My solution is that she is not thinking of him at all---- not yet.<< Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall, let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.' >> This is one of my quibbles with the John Huston film version. All films choose and edit the text to confirm to an editor's view-------- and in the film at this precise point, we have a close up of Gretta's face reddening and turning thoughtfully away. Remember this is the Huston view ----- it doesn't exist in Joyce's Huston chooses to underline one aspect of the story but in so doing he creates a narrative that eliminates some of the complexity of Joyce's text. I feel that Gabriel must go through a humbling process to attain self knowledge -- to finally come to accept the illusionary nature of his sense of control over people and events, to accept the past and with it Gretta's own existential individuality. For Gabriel to shed his false views, he has to confront his own failings: his view of the nature of his own marriage has to be challenged in order to give it new life. As Stephen Dedalus will say about Shakespeare's marriage in Ulysses: ---There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering. ( Ulysses 9:160:398) I think Joyce gave the essence of this idea here first in "The Dead." And even the first word of the story "Lily" emblematic of both death and resurrection illustrates this theme. PS Just had a chance to read Chandra's comments about Eggar's notion of a virgin-theme in "The Dead." I just don't see that at all. I think that the scene on the stairs IS crucial but the question one should ask is not Gabriel's "what is a woman on the stairs... a symbol of?" Gabriel, significantly, never asks the Right Question----- what is GRETTA thinking of -- what is causing this transformation in her? Gretta, here, is merely the artist's model for Gabriel's painterly fantasies. But it is precisely at this point when Michael Furey enters Gretta's mind---- through the association with the song "the Lass of Aughrim." Gabriel, filled with his own snug fantasies and complacently ignorant of his wife as an individual human being, just doesn't see her at all. In the hotel room he will be forced to see with new eyes -- and I think that is a very positive action for the future of their marriage. Have a good weekend, JAY |
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