James Joyce’s The Dead is the longest and final story in his 1914 collection, Dubliners, which explores domestic life in early 20th Century Ireland. The stories appeared during the peak of Irish Nationalist sentiment, and deal with the human condition, through the experiences of the middle classes.
Joyce considered Dublin to be at the centre of a regressive thought-movement in Ireland. Whilst his stories themselves don’t always offer total condemnation of the nationalist esprit de corps, his well-reasoned concerns are expressed through the dispositions of his characters.
Gabriel Conroy, leading man in The Dead, is one such character. Conroy is an escapee from the life, but not the tradition, of his family. He is educated, but not aloof. He is encultured of Britain and Europe, but still kindly and loyal to his homeland and its people. Conroy is not a man who leaves town for a higher life station, only to return as a holier-than-thou. But he is not at home as a middle-class Irishman either. He must deal with the burden of his divorced internal identities - the new and the old, both inextinguishable, both cohabitating within his singular consciousness. He heaps on top of this burden the added encumbrance of living as something of a public figure, both within his family (as a de-facto male figurehead) and as a minor newspaper columnist.
So Gabriel Conroy is a person constantly under mild to moderate duress. Joyce paints him beautifully, the image emerging of a man of light and kindly character; considerate, troubled, and perhaps gently overwhelmed by his condition.
It feels natural then, that Conroy retreats to introspection whilst negotiating the various social interactions at his Aunts’ annual Christmas Party. Introspection is a suitable refuge for those who are simultaneously eloquent and frustrated.
Without reading ahead, it is curious to consider why Joyce allows Conroy to grow lighter troubles into deeper thoughts. We know that Conroy does not hold his family in contempt. He has his outburst on the state of the nation, but it is not linked to a personal animosity toward his kinsfolk. He seems consumed by himself, and there is a feeling of paralysis which leaps from the page. The reader is frustrated that Gabriel Conroy can’t just let things be, and find ease within himself and his surroundings.
Joyce however, is exploiting Gabriel’s personal futility to great effect in order to set up the story’s great revelation. This revelation, the dawning of a deeper personal truth upon a character, is key to Joyce’s style.
As the narrative unfolds, we catch mere glimpses of Gabriel’s wife, Gretta. Her role for three quarters of the book is sweet in tone but functional in nature, the spectre of her inner troubles only cresting upon the reader (via Gabriel as proxy) late in the text. We are primed not to consider Gretta as a likely reservoir of emotion upon which the story may draw. Until the last, Joyce plays on Gabriel’s obsessiveness to defer close examination of Gretta’s condition. When it is apparent that something is wrong with Gretta, it is through Gabriel’s despair at his fleeting control that we witness the scene.
And then the moment arrives. Gretta is overcome by her loss, and ‘the dead’ imposes upon the story arc from beyond the grave. At once, Gabriel is blindsided by the depth of his wife’s life and love. The utter irrelevance of Gabriel’s mental gymnastics to which the reader bears witness throughout the story is laid bare.
The text’s key however, is not in itself the revealing of Gretta’s past love. Whilst the knowledge of poor Michael Furey and his desperate death provides the trigger, it is the subsequent awakening consciousness within Gabriel’s soul that Joyce invites us to appreciate as the book’s great revelation.
The final two paragraphs are heart-wrenchingly beautiful. The penultimate, quoted below, captures this moment of awakening, the hardness of the personal blow softened by the miracle of transformation that occurs as Gabriel reckons with his newfound awareness. In sorrow, Gabriel’s heart is liberated from its burdens;
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. Otter forms were near. 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.
Benjamin Crocker
(December, 2021)