‘The Dead’: A Portrait of Insecurity
A review of ‘The Dead’, by James Joyce; from ‘Dubliners’, Grant Richards Ltd., 1914.
We should fear not death but a life lived badly. Only when Eliot’s ‘eternal Footman’ is there, holding our coat, do we tend to see we have made a hash of things. Memento mori, like the skull on Sebastian’s desk in Waugh’s Brideshead, remind us we will die, which has a way of focusing the mind and putting things in perspective.
The Dead is the last and longest story in James Joyce’s Dubliners. It takes place for the most part at a party held before the Feast of Epiphany. The tale follows Gabriel Conroy, favourite nephew of the hosts, who is well-liked, self-controlled and deeply insecure. On arrival with Gretta, his wife, he struggles to talk to the housemaid, Lily, and works himself into such a state that he gives her a big holiday tip, which makes her uncomfortable.
The tale follows Gabriel Conroy, favourite nephew of the hosts, who is well-liked, self-controlled and deeply insecure.
Now anxious, Gabriel doesn’t know what to do when an old friend, Miss Ivors, winds him up for writing for a conservative paper. He frets that when he gives a speech to wrap up the evening, the audience won’t appreciate his literary mentions, or will think him ‘superior’ for showing off his cleverness. He is both proud of his intellectual temperament and embarrassed by it. His inner monologue is full of second-guessing. He is deeply uneasy in his skin.
The evening takes a turn when a mournful ballad starts up. The tenor, Mr. D’Arcy, transfixes Gretta, who then reveals to Gabriel that a former flame used to sing it to her. Michael Furey, she says, died after waiting outside her window in the cold. Like the moth in Don Marquis’s ‘the lesson of the moth by archy’, he loved so much he faced death:
‘myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevitybut at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself’
This elicits a jumble of emotions for Gabriel and spurs him to reflection.
In her Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware describes how, with death round the corner, most of us regret our inauthenticity, and the hurdle to a well-lived life that represents. The Dead grapples with this idea. All that is unlived in the life of Gabriel cast a shadow over his present. He is so concerned with how others see him that he struggles to be himself. His inner torment, grounded in a loss of a sense of proportion, has turned him into a shade. The Dead reads like a portrait of paralysis, the death-in-life wrought by self-obsession.
Bronnie Ware describes how with death round the corner, most of us regret our inauthenticity
Joyce’s prose is unadorned, but vivid. He draws beauty from banality: ‘The morning was still dark. A dull, yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending.’ The party is rich in detail: the smell of goose, the strains of music, and the chatter of guests who seem as much part of the furniture as they are people. This world is alive, bringing Gabriel’s living death into focus. But there is also an air of stagnation, of an Irish society caught between past and future, amusing itself with small talk and petty spats and never moving forward.
In The Dead, Joyce shows us our ghosts. These are not spectres of the dead, but those of our unlived lives. Every choice not made, every thing not said, every road not taken, as Robert Frost put it, generates a shade, and we must live with the consequences. ‘You have to choose your future regrets,’ said Christopher Hitchens, who — it has to be said — lived well, and whose point casts light on the importance of considering the consequences of not doing. Thomas Sowell put it thusly, in a very different context: ‘There are no solutions; only trade-offs.’ But his point is well-made: ‘No path in life is free of losses. Every choice will close off other options. We must choose the losses we can live with.’ But the key is: to choose.
