Retro Reads discussion

Dec. 6-12: The Dead by James Joyce.

Read online at http://www.online-literature.com/jame... or download the Dubliners collection free at Amazon (it's the last story in this collection).

One of James Joyce's most famous stories. I studied this in college but I don't think I fully appreciated it back then. :)

Interesting, although I don't think I'm a particular fan of his style. I did, however, mostly skim it because of reading it online, so I may not have done it full justice. ( I did keep thinking that I might have read it decades and decades ago, because parts did seem familiar).

I've been a slacker on this one, but I still plan on reading it this week! I hope a few others are as well. :)

I liked the characters from the beginning, but I was beginning to wonder if anything was going to happen. It seems like a rather long short story. However, the interaction between the two characters at the end was fascinating. Did you have the impression that the beautiful young wife was attracted to someone at the party, which reminded her of her youthful dead lover? And that she wasn't in love with her husband, although he was besotted with her?

I found it very interesting that although Joyce is considered a father of "modernism", this story read to me as though it were Victorian - the same rather long-winded emotionalism that you find in some Victorian authors.

Elinor wrote: "I liked the characters from the beginning, but I was beginning to wonder if anything was going to happen. It seems like a rather long short story. However, the interaction between the two character..."

She did seem rather indifferent to him, didn't she? Not cruel, but rather as though she didn't notice him very much! I think, though, it was the song that brought it all back to her; music did run through the whole story, didn't it? Hmmmm. Was there a symbolism there, too, I wonder?

For the past three or four years I’ve read the Dead every holiday season. And it’s always a different experience. Sometimes I emphasize with Gabriel, sometimes with Gretta, sometimes with the two old aunts. This year what struck me was the way passion or more specifically Gabriel’s lack of passion drives the story.

Gabriel’s experience in the Dead is all about first him lacking passion and then later recognizing that absence in a very personal, painful way. From his initial conversation with Miss Ivors it’s clear Gabriel is a pretty ritualized person. He’s more interested in cycling around Europe than visiting his own country, because well that’s what he’s done for years. He seems totally involved in the Irish cultural movement, that was consuming Irish intellectuals at the time.

Later on he clings to his memories and desire for his wife as proof that he isn’t a stodgy stuck in his ways middle aged man. I think what touches him and saddens him is his feeling that Michael Furey actions and Gretta’s response to that song indicate they feel a level of passion he never attained. It reminded me of Where Angels Fear to Tread when Philip talks about how people fall in love and have feelings but he’s never in that room or part of those feelings. (I’m paraphrasing obviously). He also recognizes that even in death Michael Furey draws a more passionate response than his do….

As to Gretta I have no doubt whatsoever that she loves Gabriel. At the beginning of the evening, she is teasing him in the way long married couples will. Later on she clearly helps out as one of the family and never gives any hint she’d have it otherwise. I think the impact of the song, the memory and the weather bring on a very emotional response. I didn’t take that to infer she didn’t care for Gabriel or didn’t love him.

That said I’m not entirely certain the Dead makes passion appear any better of a choice. Passion drove Michael Furey to an early end. It causes Miss Ivors to be pointedly rude. Gabriel’s brief inflammation with passion leads to pain on his part. The memory of her youthful passion causes Gretta to sob herself to sleep.

I've had Ulysses on the brain for a bit as a book I have to read and now I do feel like it is absolutely going on my 2021 reading challenge,

I read this a couple of weeks ago, as it was the final story in The Dubliners. This is the first James Joyce I've been able to actually finish. The other 14 stories were just so-so with me, but The Dead was excellent. I can certainly see reading this once a year.

Kavan wrote: "For the past three or four years I’ve read the Dead every holiday season. And it’s always a different experience. Sometimes I emphasize with Gabriel, sometimes with Gretta, sometimes with the two o..."

I have to agree about Gretta. Mourning a great loss (whether lover or friend) does not preclude loving someone else in a deep way. (Thank God)
It's not as though Michael died 6 weeks before her new marriage. Nor is there any implication that Gretta has reacted like this on anniversaries; in fact, Gabriel behaves as though he's never seen her behave this way before. Through a combination of circumstances, she flashes back on a very emotional time in her life.
I'd say, How lucky for Gretta that after such great loss, she was able to find love again.

Reading some of the online commentary helped me appreciate this story SO MUCH more. The symbolism is amazing, and a lot of it went over my head initially, along with some of the historical details that are actually very meaningful. Here are some links to check out if you're interested:

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dublin...
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literatur...
http://www.mendele.com/WWD/WWDdead.no...

Here's what the commentators on the last website had to say about the final paragraph of this story:

The final paragraph is generally conceded to be one of the finest, most moving, and beautiful in twentieth-century fiction; it is also one of the most ambiguous. (view spoiler)[It opens with the sound of the snow tapping against the pane, uniting and contrasting the scene with the earlier occasion of Gabriel at the window during the party and, of course, of Michael Furey's "tapping" on Gretta's window with the pebbles. Gabriel is described as watching "sleepily," and in western literature there is tradionally a close connection between sleep and death. We have seen in the preceding paragraphs that Gabriel is being visited by the shades of the dead, and the implication is that, because of the events of this night, he has come to realize not only that he is a ridiculous figure, but that he has never known what true love is, and, moreover, that Gretta felt more for someone in her earlier life than she has for him. The crux of the problem of interpretation is the meaning of "The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward." Certainly to go west is a time-honored trope in literature for death, for the setting of the sun; however, in this story the west (Galway, the Aran Isles) has symbolized the life force (the Gaelic, the true roots of Ireland, the sturdy peasantry, the life force of Michael Furey). Consequently, there has been considerable disagreement over whether Gabriel is now irretrievably dead spiritually or that he is realizing here that his true regeneration lies in the renewal of life that can come from seeking out his roots, of no longer being a "West Briton." The reader will have to make a choice or, in the spirit of contemporary literary theory, decide that there is no choice, that the contradictions render the sentence meaningless. On the other hand, one can accept both meanings, revel in the ambiguity, attempt to hold two contradictory interpretations in the mind at the same time without trying to resolve them. A final possibility is that Joyce himself had not settled on a meaning, that he himself is leaving Gabriel's spiritual state torn between two contradictions. (In this regard see William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, a seminal twentieth-century theoretical work, in which he presents as one of the types of ambiguity in a literary work the situation where the author remains indeterminate.) The other major problem of interpretation is presented by the image of the snow, which is falling all over Ireland (including the Bog of Allen, some twenty-five miles southwest of Dublin). Does it represent death, is all Ireland covered by the spirit of the dead, is there no physical or spiritual fire in Ireland? (Joyce certainly knew his Homer, and may be alluding to a passage in The Iliad where the stones thrown by warriors on both sides are compared to snow falling, a snow that covers "the grey sea, the harbours and beaches,/ and the surf that breaks against it is stilled, all all things elsewhere/it shrouds from above."In the Homeric comparison snow=arrows=death, and this may be Joyce's intent in his final paragraph. See Iliad, XII.278-89, Lattimore translation.) Attempts to determine an unassailable interpretation are further confounded by the final images of death (the graveyard) and yet a death with promise of resurrection, as we are given allusions to the crucifixion of Christ with the "crosses" on the headstones, and the "spears" and the "thorns." So, is Gabriel incontrovertibly spiritually dead or is there the suggestion that he will be renewed. All we know is that his soul is fainting (has "swooned") and that the snow -- whether death or rebirth is "falling faintly" not only "upon all the living and the dead," but on all the readers of this timeless story. (hide spoiler)]

I'm going to reread this one before I do my review.

My first Joyce & I really liked it - particularly the last few pages - although I missed all of the symbolism in Tadiana's links.