If You Want To Unlock The Mysteries Of Life, Turn To James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’
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(OPINION) When winter streets freeze and night skies are black and snow swerves down against the glow of porch lights, my thoughts inevitably turn to one of the more powerful works of fiction I know, James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” which appeared in his 1914 collection “Dubliners.”
(“The Dead” also is among the few literary masterpieces whose film adaptation — directed by John Huston, released in 1987 — is about as brilliant as the original).
I’ll admit up front, “The Dead” takes a bit of patience. For a short story, it’s unusually long, almost a novella.
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It meanders, layering one telling detail onto another all the way to its quiet denouement. But in the final two or three pages you’ll realize you’ve witnessed up close the great, unanswerable mysteries of life: ardor, agony and self-deception coexisting always in every human heart, even in the most mundane moments.
(What follows from this point on is a detailed spoiler, so consider yourself alerted.)
The bulk of the action, if we can call it action, takes place at a holiday party held by two aged sisters between New Year’s Day and the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrated on Jan. 6.
The sisters’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, and his wife, Gretta, are among the guests. Gabriel, a professor, has been asked to deliver a speech. He keeps fretting and tinkering with his notes.
The partygoers drink, eat and entertain one another with musical performances, elocutions and political posturing. A wayward son shows up drunk and embarrasses his mother. Gabriel’s speech indeed falls flat. It’s a party not unlike small parties throughout the ages.
When it draws to a close, Gabriel and Gretta return to their hotel.
There, Gabriel is seized by lust. Gretta seems distracted.
But then, “suddenly raising herself on tiptoe and resting her hands lightly on his shoulders, she kissed him.”
He believes his affections are being returned. His heart brims over with happiness, to use Joyce’s expression. He hugs her — then she pulls away.
She’s been thinking of a song, she admits, “The Lass of Aughrim,” which another guest sang at the party: “I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.”
She tells him of a young, delicate boy with a beautiful voice named Michael Furey, who was in love with her. He died at 17.
She was staying then with her grandmother in Galway. She was to leave for a convent in Dublin. Michael Furey was desperately ill, but when he heard she was leaving he came out at night in a winter rain and stood in the garden outside her grandmother’s house.
“I implored him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain,” Gretta says. “But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree.”
The boy died a week later. Gretta bursts into racking sobs and flings herself face down on the bed.
This is all news to Gabriel. He realizes he’s never loved anyone as much as this Michael Furey — a boy he’d never heard of — loved his wife.
“So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake,” he thinks. “It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife.”
And soon after comes the story’s last, devastating paragraph:
“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. … Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay 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.”
Earlier, I wrote about the contemporary short story master and novelist George Saunders, who said there are three illusions we need to rid ourselves of before we’re ready to leave this world and move on to whatever follows: that we’re permanent, that we’re the most important thing there is and that we’re separate from others.
I’d argue that more than a century ago Joyce addressed all three illusions marvelously in “The Dead,” and put the lie to each.
Do yourself and your fellow pilgrims a favor. Read this story, or watch the film. The effort may transform your soul.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.