The Dead

1
The Dead

• 17-18 March 2008

2
James Joyce

• Born 1882, one of twelve children father took
  family fortunes from prosperity to near poverty.
• 1888 and 1893 sent to Jesuit schools
  (imagination informed by Catholic education
  disillusionment with Catholicism in Portrait)
• 1898 University College (Dublin) (Catholic
  University as an alternative to Protestant
  Trinity College.
• 1902 Paris to study medicine

3
Influences (1)

• I am the servant of two masters an English and
  an Italian and a third there is who wants me for
  odd jobs (Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses) shaped by
  his Irish Catholic upbringing and the cultural
  repression of the Irish by the ruling British.
• Charles Stewart Parnell (Irish nationalist and
  political leader of the Irish parliamentary
  Delegation leader of the Irish Home Rule
  Movement, but not a Catholic)

4
Influences (2)

• Contemporary Irish Literature (William Butler
  Yeats and the Celtic revival, Irish myths,
  legends, and heroes)
• 1922 the founding of the Irish Free State
• P. 30-33 Gabriels dialogue with Miss Ivors
  Aran is where Synges Riders to the Sea is set).
• Supported Yeats and his colleagues right to
  express themselves, but thought that the
  appropriate direction for Ireland was to join the
  European intellectual and cultural community
  (Odyssey, Shakespeare in Ulysses)
• Irish Parochialism.

5
Oscar Wilde

• Stephens aestheticism in Portrait and Wildes
  theories (search for the beautiful, scorn of
  bourgeois society, love of the eccentric, etc.
  Wildes theory of masques and fictions)

6
Biography

• 1904 met Nora Barnacle published earlier
  versions of several stories in Dubliners. (The
  Dead completed in 1907).
• Many audiences in mind Dublins drowsing
  citizens Catholic hierarchy Irish intellectual
  elite, British public.
• The reader, accompanied by the narrator-guide,
  sees the landscape of Dublin and is urged to
  think of the possibility of renewal.
• Renewal in the Dead, the last story?

7
Dubliners

• Blunted aspiration and frustration, crass
  materialism, sexual repression, drunkeness, moral
  idiocy
• 1904 submitted a story A Portrait of the
  Artist, which became Stephen Hero, and, after
  the completion of The Dead in 1907, A Portrait
  of the Artist as a Young Man
• 1904 James and Nora (not married) leave Ireland
  they settle in Trieste.
• Returned to Ireland twice (1909 and 1912)
• 1914 Serialisation of A Portrait in The Egoist
  publication of Dubliners began to write Ulysses
• (Stephenfirst Christian martyr.

8
Biography

• 1920-1940 Paris died in 1941 (Zurich).
• 1918-1920 Ulysses serialised in the American
  journal The Little Review
• 1922 Published as a book in Paris (1934 in the
  US)
• Ulysses (Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Molly
  Bloom) June 16, 1904 at any random point in
  time, one can evoke through allusions what has
  been significant in human history contemporary
  events acquire additional significance through
  connections to absent literary and historical
  figures (and viceversa) history as a series of
  concentric circles (Vicos influence)
• Parallax mathematical term that describes how an
  object can look different if perceived from
  different places.

9
Biography

• 1923 began to write Work in Progress, the book
  that became Finnegans Wake (1939).
• The first sentence starts in the middle and is
  the end of the sentence with which the novel
  ends.
• Based on the legend of drunken man who has
  fallen off a ladder and apparently dies, only to
  arise at his wake.
• Is Gabriel a figure who falls off the ladder of
  his hopes and illusions only to awaken and
  recover in his final epiphany the common humanity
  that binds human beings together?

10
Backgrounds to The Dead

• The story began to take shape in Rome
• Michael Bodkins courting of Nora Barnacle
  (tubercolosis, sings in the rainy weather when
  Nora moves to Dublin)
• Rivalry with the dead man
• 1905 (Trieste) his brother send him the words of
  a song O, Ye Dead, in which the dead complain
  about bodily existence they can no longer enjoy
  (jealousy of the dead for the living).
• The dead do no stay buried.

11
Backgrounds

• The Dead begins with a party and ends with a
  corpse. (Whats the significance of this?)
• Why is it that words like these seem to be so
  dull and cold? (52) (a letter Joyce wrote to
  Nora in 1904) Joyce wrote book reviews for the
  Daily Express Gabriels physical image (23-24).
• Mothers rejection of liaison (30)

12
Gabriels character

• Private tremors, sense of inadequacy generous
  overtures are regularly checked.
• P. 23 Lily and Gabriel in the pantry marriage
• Embarassment about Grettas origins p. 33
  Shes from Connacht, isnt she? Her people
  are.
• The west is savagery (west of Ireland vs the
  continent) (31-2). (The west at the end)

13
The Dead

• Gabriels uneasiness about his attitude to the
  west, but clings to it to the end
• The Lass of Aughrims challenge (49) (village not
  far away from Grettas village)
• (A girl seduced and abandoned by Lord
  Gregoryinversion)
• Violent passion is in Grettas past, not in the
  Dublin present
• P. 51 The blood went bounding along in his
  veins

14

• "What was he?" asked Gabriel, still ironically.
• "He was in the gasworks," she said. (56)
• (Attempt to pose as superior attempt to elicit
  pity, but Gretta stresses love)
• The time had come for him to set out on his
  journey westward (59).
• Is Gabriel conceding and relinquishing civilised
  thinking, Continental tastes giving up
  narcissism and self-possession? Is he dying for
  her? Sacrifice of himself?

15
The snow

• Cold outside vs warmth inside, in the house where
  the party is taking place
• But warmth can be stuffy and confining (34
  Gabriel's warm trembling fingers tapped the cold
  pane of the window. How cool it must be outside!
  How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first
  along by the river and then through the park! The
  snow would be lying on the branches of the trees
  and forming a bright cap on the top of the
  Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it
  would be there than at the supper-table!
• Warmth in Michael Furys being outside, in the
  cold.
• The imagery of fire / passion (51-2), but it is
  Gabriels unilateral vision

16
The Dead and the living

• Interrelation of the dead and the living?

17
Allen Tate

• If the art of naturalism consists mainly in
  making active those elements which had hitherto
  remained inert (i.e. description, expository
  summary), the further push given the method by
  Joyce consists in manipulating what at first
  sight seems to be mere physical detail into
  dramatic symbolism.
• Gabriel enters the house, and flicks snow from
  his galoshes by the time the story ends the snow
  has filled all the visible earth, and stands as a
  symbol of the revelation of Gabriels inner life
  (i.e. egoistic relation to his wife, inadequate
  response, etc.

18
Narrative strategies (Tate)

• We know Gabriel at any given moment through what
  he sees and feels in terms of that moment.
• If he is to see the action for us, he must come
  authoritatively out of the scene. Lily is a
  function of his arrival on the scene.
• We are never told anything. We are shown
  everything (i.e, we are not told that the milieu
  of the story is the provincial, middle-class
  society of Dublin at the turn of the century,
  etc.)
• As he enters we are never far from Gabriels
  sight. Miss Ivors disappears the moment she has
  served her purpose of eliciting from Gabriel his
  relation to his culture.

19
Narrative strategies

• Gabriels partial view He sees his wife as
  Distant Music (48 read) (irony about
  distance). He sees only the lower part of her
  figure, from below the upper part is involved
  with a song. The concealment of the upper part is
  a symbol, dramatically active, of his relation
  with his wife.
• We begin to see Michael (gravel thrown at the
  window, etc.

20
The snow

• Snow as overall symbol. What was a scenic detail
  on Gabriels galoshes expands. The snow is the
  story. At the beginning the snow is the cold and
  even hostile force of nature, enclosing the warm
  conviviality of the Misses Morkans party. As the
  action develops, the snow reverses its meaning.
  It becomes a symbol of warmth, of expanded
  consciousness. It stands for Gabriels escape
  from his own ego, into the larger world of
  humanity, including all the living and the dead.

21
Snow

• A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the
  shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the
  toes of his goloshes (23).
• The snow would be lying on the branches of the
  trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the
  Wellington Monument (34).
• The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of
  snow that flashed westward over the white field
  of Fifteen Acres (42)
• Cap (Cape), Tap, Pat (Fingers and snow)

22
Tapping / Patting

• Gabriel's warm trembling fingers tapped the cold
  pane of the window (34)
• The patting at once grew louder in encouragement
  and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his
  ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and
  smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of
  upturned faces he raised his eyes to the
  chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune
  and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the
  drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing
  in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the
  lighted windows and listening to the waltz music.
  The air was pure there. In the distance lay the
  park where the trees were weighted with snow. The
  Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow
  that flashed westward over the white field of
  Fifteen Acres. (42)
• 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. (59)