("The Dead" can be found in Joyce's collection Dubliners)
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS! If you want to read the story first, the link's at the bottom ... :)
It’s a snowy winter’s night in an early nineteenth-century Dublin. The Misses Morkan are giving their annual dance and everything is comfortable, easy, assured. Except of course that it’s not.
Gabriel Conroy, a slightly vain and corpulent man with a beautiful wife, is worried about the speech he has to make to the company who are gathered. He is worried that he will seem ridiculous; and indeed Miss Ivors, who has discovered that it is Gabriel who writes a book review column in the Daily Express, makes him feel so. She makes him feel too, that he is colourless and vain, a man without the fire of patriotism, a “west Briton”.
Of the other men here, what are we to say? Freddy Malins is a well-meaning drunk. The Morkans have papered over the cracks with the protestant Mr Browne, who is also prone to drink too much, and the art which is on show (in the form of singing and music) does little to impress. Mr Bartell D’Arcy, the famous tenor, refuses to show off his celebrated voice until it's too late for most to hear.
Indeed, it is the men, as Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, accurately points out, who all have something wrong with them. Gabriel awkwardly presses money into her hand in some sort of gesture, but ‘The men that is now,’ as Lily knows, ‘are all palaver and what they can get out of you.’ We are left to wonder what exactly that might mean, but the men invited here are trussed up in waistcoats too tight for them, adorned in goloshes to keep out the wet. They are insincere. They drink too much, and above all, they can’t be too careful.
Gabriel’s accomplished after-dinner speech is full of insincerity, except perhaps in his remark that it is a ‘thought-tormented’ age. Thoughts, rather than actions, plague almost everyone at this genteel gathering, except the saintly Mary Jane, and of course, Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, too ‘country 'cute’ for his late mother (though it is she who nurses her to her end), too much of a good wife to be allowed to return on holiday to her native Galway, too stimulating a character to allow Mr Bartell D’Arcy to get away without singing, just for the joy of the moment, rather than easy applause.
And it is Mr D’Arcy’s choice of song that releases a sudden tide of joy from Mrs Conroy’s heart. The ‘Lass of Aughrim’ is the song that her youthful would-be lover used to sing, a poor boy who, unable to contemplate being separated from the young Gretta, chooses to die for her.
The brief story of Michael Furey’s passion, delivered like a stiletto to her husband of many years, serves to deflate him utterly. At one moment, his own thoughts are of physical desire. The next, as his wife lies sleeping beside him, he can only contemplate the death which the characters in the story are approaching.
It is chilling stuff. How much is a life without passion worth? How much more do moments of passion weigh against decades of mediocrity? Are we alive, or are we all already dead?
http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/958/
Michael Spring
Michael Spring writes occasional fiction under his own name and on sport as Jeff Blakeney. He loves horse racing, books and his family, but perhaps not in that order. Brittle Star, Fieldstone Review, Volume and Radio Ulster are among those who have published and broadcast him. He lives in London.
Stories Written: "My Part in the Collapse of Civilization" (read by Camila Fiori), "Narky Jack" (read by Susannah Bond, Ed Cooper Clarke), "They Live in the Clouds" (read by Alex Willmott), "Frank's Lucky Day" (read by Camila Fiori), "The Crunch" (read by Max Berendt), "Kalashnikov" (read by Thomas Judd)
