An Analysis of The Dead
To start in absolutely the least likely place, we have here another version of family life in Ireland (moving East, and from here through The Snapper make a unit contrasting with the previous one), with another way of picturing what the Irish take to be their insularity and closedness, their ludicrous longing for union with the supposedly superior but alien culture of "the continent", and especially that confusion and torment about sexuality which derives so directly from the Irish church's inability to reconcile desire as sin and desire as life-affirming. A fact (at least according to a major recent survey): married Catholics have better sex than other married Americans. Why? It's been suggested that you can't preach so fully the analogy between the union of man and woman with the union of Christ and his church and indeed of man with God without giving a celebratory turn to married love. But this would be inconceivable to the Irish, whose church (despite its being the dominant influence on American Catholicism) focuses on the ascetic and the equation of sex with sin.
In a sense, because he is so firmly embedded in this tradition, struggling against it, Joyce seems both hopelessly dated and eternal: hopelessly dated because we don't have enough residue of the sense of sinfullness in our culture to have it be much of a force we have to struggle against, and eternal because it remains true for everyone that passing into adulthood (especially through adolescence) means somehow coming to terms with what is a strand of conflict between sexuality insofar as it is self-aggrandizing and aggressive and the affectional life as it is non-self-aggrandizing and other-centered and in some sense more "pure"-seeming. It is of course possible to come to good terms with this contradiction, but it is also possible to understand and be undermined by its existence, and Gabriel is a very clear instance of the person who can't really reconcile simple physical desire for his beloved wife, a 'getting close to and taking' motive, with equally simple adoration and affection for her in the grace and authenticity of her autonomy, a 'standing back and in some sense giving' motive (I read two passages from Portrait, 171, as against 99-101).
So Gabriel is troubled by what strikes us awfully oddly as his moments of pure and "clownish" "lust", and the essential sadness of this story is in the irony with which the missed communication with Gabriel (the central Joyce theme, I argue) seems to play into and support that: she is not thinking of the fellowship of desire and their life together with its history of ecstacies as well as goloshes, but of a sad unfulfilled feeling of youthful promise and tragic loss which, simply because it cannot have been contaminated with reality and come to in fact be a history of mixture, seems (quite falsely) to set its quality of youth and purity against the reality of age and the mixed life as the good and sincere is set against the corrupt and grotesque and selfish.
Gabriel is vulnerable to this, as we all are, and its light makes plausible the anguished (and quite incorrect) cry, "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age", especially as that cry contrasts with what Gabriel comes to feel is the falsity and stupidity of his own counter to it, in his speech, that "We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavours." Joyce, the artist standing back paring his fingernails, sees that that is the way we tend to feel (though it is no more true than its denial would be), and his rendering of that feeling--the theme of anguish at lost idealism--is his center.
Thus I read the story rather differently from other people, I think: My basic point (others seem not to agree): Gabriel is a much better and less absurd person than he thinks he is, his reading of himself in the mirror being a 'least sympathetic possible reading of himself' only plausible in the presence of the idealized dead and completely undercut, for the observer of Gabriel like ourselves, by the fact that he can have it. If he was really this conventional and 'dead' figure he wouldn't think of himself so. I'm sure Gretta wouldn't necessarily agree that their life was a waste (he makes more of the Michael Furey business than she might, ultimately, if she were to estimate it in the light of her whole life) and she does appreciate Gabriel; and his "generosity" to Freddy (which she responds to and the deletion of which response is one of Huston's most telling transformations of the story) and his handling of the speech and his ability to tell the Johnny the horse story as well as he does and in that social setting say that he's not a hypocrite even if he is oversensitive about his ways (in re goloshes) and though at his worst he can be cruel to Gretta ("you go if you want"), and stupid and blind about Miss Ivors and self-indulgent in finding a way to deal with her in his speech and internally dismissive of his aunts ("only two ignorant old women"): he is in fact "delicate" like Michael Furey, and he is not 'spiritually dead' as people seem to want to say, though God knows he's what we might call "stuck", with his longing for absorption into a different culture than the one he knows and feels imprisoned in, and for a way to live in some pure literary realm unconnected with politics, and with his complete inability to read his sexuality about his wife in any other way than "lust".
So what would it be not to be spiritually dead? That is, when people talk about this book they seem to imply that Joyce sees Ireland as more constraining than other places and the Irish as more cloddish, so that he writes satire on it and them perhaps somewhat like McGahern. But I think (and maybe I'm just oversimple and don't understand) that Joyce is much more universalizing than that, that the mysterious "westward" that it's time for his journey to is not a place different from Ireland but maybe exactly "the region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead" , which is to say where everyone, living and dead alike are, into which one's identity dissolves. That is, into the world of Finnegans Wake, where in fact Shaun's is a journey Westward to an antipodes which mirrors the European world (and where Dublin County Georgia echoes the one in Ireland), and where "all the living and the dead" are copresent and present in everyone just as they are here.
In other words, I think Joyce presents the world of Dubliners as the human condition, and it is a pretty bleak vision, that condition, one of thinking oneself to fall short of a kind of idealization which is possible only when unrealized, like Michael Furey. But insofar as one thinks of oneself as so falling short one has the sweetness, the reflectiveness, the soft self-criticism and the appealing moral value of Gabriel and of Leopold Bloom. There are ways of not having this, and Joyce sees the world as full of them and accusable in their terms--especially notable is that in Finnegans Wake HCE is much more what Gabriel thinks he is than what we see Gabriel as, and Shaun has the pomposity of Buck Mulligan and Shem the coldness of Stephen without the compensating reflectiveness at least of the latter. It's almost as if Joyce forsakes Bloom and lets Blazes Boylan become more self-doubting and guilty but more hardened in his defensiveness, and makes even more impossible the kind of connection among the second level (the Stephen, Shem-Shaun level) and the first (the Bloom, HCE level). The soft sensual yearning of Stephen gets hardened and ironized into HCE's voluptuousness (of which Bloom in "Circe" gave a model) and is competely lost from Shem, so that the two sides of Gabriel are torn apart. But that there are the two sides is always true--an idealized and also voluptuously yearning part (when real it is Gabriel looking at Gretta on the stairs, or Stephen in Portrait virtually throughout, when longed-for and unreal it is Michael Furey), and a necessarily practical, goloshes-centered, city-builder, man-in-the-world with all the alazon qualities that entails in whom the lusts turn clownish both in self-contempt and in outright Blazes Boylan brutishness.
In terms of their being realistic fictions, what we see in a Joyce work is preeminently what we have here: except for Portrait (which gives the prelude period to this, the preparation period) we see a man and a woman side by side in a bed, each thinking their own thoughts: the woman thinks of a lover (Michael, Boylan, Magrath) and the man thinks of her thinking of it and of his own inadequacies. Molly and Gretta think of their own pasts and their sexual life with rather less focus on their husbands than the husbands might like: Molly's sexual life is cast rather more in present terms than Gretta's; ALP thinks some similar thoughts but also (a kind of reversal of Gretta ) more of the future and of the return to the father, as well as having more room and more orientation for HCE, in more the way that we think Gretta might than Molly's focus on Boylan. The men play out different strands of what I think is the same thing: Gabriel thinks of the general truth of it, of how what is real is what is envisioned and how the mere actuality is such a pale shade of it that it is as if the living ones were really the dead (though since the dead are dead they are too); Bloom and HCE bring in and think about the second generation in a way Gabriel doesn't: he contains Stephen and Bloom in himself (or we could say that he is only a softer Bloom as Stephen in Portrait is a softer Stephen than the one of Ulysses--that is, that in Dubliners and Portrait Joyce deals with his nascent Bloom type and his nascent Stephen type, and in the later books has both). Bloom has been thinking about Stephen and Rudy and recedes from our view; HCE also thinks about Shaun his inheritor and recedes from our view as well, so that the last view is the woman's (representative of cycles, where in Portrait it was all man-the-projector as youth and in Dubliners it is man-the-projector as failure, a parallel to the Haveth Childers Everwhere of Finnegans Wake .
Clearly then we also see, in a Joyce fiction, the play of two generations, son and father, or here a version of it in promise and fulfillment, with the fulfillment being both necessary and also a falling off, and in which each echoes a strand of the other.
And the sense that these stories (the replacement of the father with the son, and the sense of a life as reduction of what had been hoped, and the story of a doomed incommunication between man and woman) are universal and cyclical and always repeat is captured in the recurrent image of the snowfall (for which see other notes): this is Joyce's world, of unfulfilled longing and a turning clownish, of failure of communication, of a death of God and his replacement by the otherwise meaningless cycles of effort, guilt, fall and return. Observing this is the artist, entering everything and becoming its style, but in essence remaining aloof, paring his fingernails.
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