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Chandra, Jay and the list: Interesting to see the ball rolling again; and interesting comments from Chandra and Jay. I propose to paraphrase Richard Ellmann's comments on the backgrounds of the Dead, without, at this stage, commenting much on what Chandra and Jay have said: I agree generally that there are dangers in overscholarly interpretations of Joyce. It can be simply bewildering! On the other hand, Joyce is one writer one may not be able to appreciate (and enjoy) at all without the aid of critical interpretations and background material, specially the later Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Remember, Joyce had abandoned Ireland in pursuit, presumably, of his intention to 'forge, in the smithy' of his soul, 'the uncreated conscience' of his race. One should remember, perhaps that he was tired of the three institutions of Ireland which he found intolerable 'masters;: Irish nationalism, The Catholic Church and English imperialism. After some years in Rome, he became aware of the change in his attitude to Ireland. The story of 'The Dead' began to take shape in his mind in Rome. The story dealt with three generations of his family. It also drew upon an incident in Galway in 1903. There someone called Michael ('Sonny') Bodkin courted Nora Barnacle; but he contracted tuberculosis and was confined to bed. Nora had, at this point decided to go to Dublin. Sonny stole out his room in rainy weather to sing to Nora under an apple tree and to bid her goodbye. In Dublin, Nora learnt that Bodkin wsa dead. She wsa attracted to Joyce becuase Joyce resembled (as she told her sister) Sonny Bodkin. Joyce conducted interrogations of Nora (as was his habit) before they departed Dublin for Europe and did not like the idea that she had been interested in young men before him. Nor was he pleased to know that her heart was still moved by the recollection of the boy who had loved her. The Dead begins with a party. This has something to do with his feeling that the rest of his stories had not 'reproduced (Ireland's) ingenuous insularity and its hospitality, the latter "virtue" so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe' ( as he wrote to his brother, Stanislaus). He allowed a little of this warmth to enter The Dead. Richard Ellmann: "In his speech at the Christmas Party Gabriel Conroy explicitly commends Ireland for this very virtue of hospitality. 'I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our countryt has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it shouls guard so jealously as that of its hospitality.. It is a tradition that is unique as far as my experience goes (and i have visited not a few places abroad) aming the modern nations.' As to the choice of details: Festive occasions of Joyce's childhood were associated with his hospitable great-aunts Mrs. Callanan and Mrs. lyons, and Mrs. Callanan's daughter, Mary Ellen. In The Dead, Mrs. Callanan and Mrs. Lyons became the spinster ladies, the Misses Morkan, and Mary Ellen Callanan became Mary Jane. Freddy Malins is based on Mrs. Lyon's son called Freddy, who ran a Christmas card shop in Grafton Street. Th root situation in the creation of the character of Gabriel Conroy, of jealousy of his wife's dead lover, was of course Joyce's. "There are several specific points at which Joyce attributes his oen experiences to Gabriel. The letter which Gabriel remembers having written to Gretta Conroy early in their courtship is one of these; from it Gabriel quotes to himself the sentiment, 'Why is it that word like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?' These sentences are taken almost directly from a letter Joyce wrote to Nora in 1904. It was also Joyce, of course, who wrote book reviews, just as Gabriel Conroy does, for the Daily Express. Since the Daily Express wsa pro-English, he had probably been teased for writing for it during his frequent visits to the house of David Sheehy, M.P. One of the Sheehy daughters, Kathleen, may well have been the model forMiss Ivors, for she wore that austere bodice and sported the same patriotic pin. In Gretta's old sweetheart, in Gbariel's letter, in the book reviews and the discussion of them, as well as in th physical image of Gabriel with hair parted in the middle and rimmed glasses, Joyce drew directly upon his own life....." Joyce develops Gabriel's private fears, his sense of inadequacy, his small pretensions. His well-meant and generous overtures are regularly checked. The servant girl, Lily, punctures his blithe assumption taht everyone is happily in love and on their way to marriage. He is a little ashamed of Gretta having come from the west of Itreland, which he associates with the primitive, the backward. He remembers his dead mother's remark that Getta was "country cute" and when Miss Ivors says of Gretta, "She's from Connacht, isn't she?" he answers shortly, "Her people are". Miss Ivor's suggestion that he spend his time in the Irish-speaking Aran Islands in the west upsets him. Thev west of Ireland is connected in Gabriel's mind with a dark and painful primitivism, which he escapes by going to the continent for his holidays. To my mind, Gabriel's uneasiness about this attitude is a reflection of Joyce's own ambivalence about Ireland, its nationalism and the desire to go back to its own culture and roots, as was examplified by Yeats. It is, in a way, Joyce examining his own attitudes in fictional form, and being hard on himself by being objective in bringing out the petty fears and weaknesses in Gabriel's character. Joyce wrote this story at the age of about twenty-five. In Rome and in Trieste he had learned something new. He felt humiliated when someone attacked his 'impoverished country'. The dead is his first song of exile, his attempt to feel to be a Dubliner again. Chandra, on that video of the Dead. Perhaps, I am over-rating it. I found it be a particularky good visual and auditory represenattion of the story --the actual parlour where the party was taking place, the various accents and songs, the way in which Lily says, "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can gwet out of you". As Jay points out, this is just one possible way of representing the story. Personally, I cannot think of any cinematic version of a major literary work being so faithful to the original, except paerhaps that old version of Brothers Karamazov with Yul Brynner in it! Of course, the finest passage in The Dead is that lyrical piece at the end. I think it may be worth quoting the last two paragraphs here: "Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached taht region where dwell thye vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identuty was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which tese dead had at one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. 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. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow wsa general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It wsa falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Miachael Furey kay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His 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." Note my emphasis on the joutrney westward. Is Joyce here, from Rome and Trieste nostalgically ruminating about the journey westward, the journey he did not take, to the real roots of Ireland? Certainly the barbs of Miss Ivors were hurtful to Gabriel. The sheer lyricism of that passage, falling faintly, faintly falling, upon all the living and the dead, is so hypnotic in its power that it overshadows the earlier trace of jealousy or any conflict between the living and the dead. This is to me what an epiphany is at its best. -- Rasik Shah. |
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