Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day, and being American and of
mostly Irish extraction, it’s a holiday I’ve always celebrated. Not in the
Irish tradition, which I’ve been told involves a visit to church, but in the
American tradition of wearing green and drinking beer. When I met the man who
became my husband, I was a vegetarian, but when I went back to being a
carnivore about ten years ago, he seized the opportunity to add corned beef to
our holiday observation. He usually makes potatoes and cabbage as well. It’s a
meal that I enjoy, once a year.
And that’s all we do on March 17th, usually. But this year,
I decided I would also mark the day by reading something Irish. There’s a lot
to choose from; the Irish are a wordy people. I didn’t have a lot of time, though,
so I decided to go with a short story: “The Dead,” by James Joyce. It appears
in his short story collection, The
Dubliners, published in 1914.
It was actually a re-read for me. I first read “The Dead”
years ago, in college, and I really liked it. I’m not a huge fan of James Joyce
in general. I never did make it very far into Ulysses, though I may have been a victim of my own bravado. I had
heard the prose was dense but assumed that I, of course, would be able to
handle it. I did, for about a chapter, then fell asleep. And then I tried again
the next day, and felt annoyed. It remains one of the very few books I’ve ever
started and not finished.
But The Dead is a
fairly accessible story about how the dead haunt the living. It’s about a party
held at the house of two older women and their niece, on or around the
Epiphany, in early January. Events are seen mostly from the perspective of
their nephew, Gabriel, who is there with his wife. He’s making a fool of
himself, at least in his own mind, throughout the evening. Toward the end, another
guest sings a song that seems to deeply affect his wife, and after they leave,
he finds out that the song reminded her of a boy she loved when she was a
teenager. The boy had been sick, and died at age 17, after coming to see her
one last time in the rain. Gabriel realizes that the boy his wife loved as a
girl has stayed in her mind as a romantic, idealized image. It’s very difficult
to compete with that type of perfection. He also realizes that the boy, Michael,
had experienced love in a way that Gabriel never had, and this lead to his own
epiphany:
“His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast
hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward
and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey
impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared
and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”
That the dead never leave us, and that we eventually have to
join them, is something that I understand a little better now than I did when I
was 20. Also that the dead can become idealized in the minds of the people they
leave behind, because they can no longer make mistakes. There are other themes
that are probably just as important- Gabriel’s epiphany and awakening, Joyce’s
commentary on Dublin
La Fhéile Pádraig Shona Daoibh.
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