What James Joyce’s “The Dead” Says About Memories
Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nGH0EZLm1o
“The Dead” is a story written from memory. As Richard Ellmann describes in his biography on James Joyce, the final and longest story in Dubliners, which is ostensibly about Dublin, was actually written in Trieste.
How did Joyce, who rarely visited Ireland after his self-imposed exile in 1904, manage to paint such well-regarded literary portraits of people and their everyday lives in Dublin? What Ellmann reveals is the influence of Joyce’s autobiographical memory on Dubliners.
The party at the Morkan’s resembles celebrations held by Joyce’s own family on Usher’s Island before Twelfth Night. Gabriel’s commanding speech at the feast is modeled after the way Joyce’s father talked. Even the story’s climactic scene, in which Gabriel learns that Gretta continues to dwell on the memory of Michael Furey, is based on an experience where Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle revealed to him that a boy named Sonny Bodkin had died of tuberculosis after having sung in the rain outside her Galway home. Joyce’s intense sense of jealousy about Nora’s longing for the past becomes the source of what Daniel Schwarz calls “Gabriel’s paralytic self-consciousness,” and “The Dead” can be read as an artistic rendering of Joyce’s memories.
This essay will do a close reading of how Joyce contrasts two types of memories, voluntary and involuntary memory, in “The Dead.” This will situate the overarching themes of Dubliners, specifically Joyce’s conception of paralysis and epiphany, in the relationships between characters and their pasts.
Following John Rickard’s definition, voluntary memory is the conscious retrieval of past moments, which is dependent on intellect and photographic images rather than sensations. This lack of inherent intensity in voluntary memory, which summons the past but keeps us emotionally detached from it, lends itself to the occurrence of habits.
Throughout the stories in Dubliners, voluntary memory is habituated through traditions and rituals, including national holidays like the commemoration of Parnell’s death in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” and religious events. Even the simple, everyday activities that occupy each character’s life becomes purely muscle memory, in which work, food, and relationships lose their uniqueness in an increasingly automatic and modern world. It is this mechanistic conception of memory that molds the attitude towards memory that the past is something to be reduced and repeated, rather than recreated in experience.
A telling symbol of this kind of paralysis in “The Dead” is the story of Johnny, the horse that Gabriel tells Mary Jane and the Misses Morkans after the party ends. Like the characters in Dubliners, Johnny is a creature of habit and muscle memory, working for Gabriel’s grandfather, “walking round and round in order to drive the mill.” When Johnny is finally let out of the mill on a carriage ride in the park, he sees a statue of King Billy and falls “in love with the horse King Billy sit on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue.”
Gabriel’s story is met with “peals of laughter” but what his audience doesn’t realize is that Johnny, who resumes his habits even in a novel situation, is a reflection of them. The statue that Johnny, who himself in enshrined in familial memory as “the never-to-be-forgotten Johnny,” chooses is a frozen image of the past. Beholden to a fixed and monolithic past, the citizens of Dublin are no longer alive in their commitment to the traditions of family, Catholicism, or Irish nationalism.
This commitment is not a sincere effort either. As in most of the stories of Dubliners, significant events are undergirded by the influence of money. The boy in “Araby” is delayed because he needs his father’s money, the climax of “Two Gallants” is the flash of a gold coin, and in “The Dead” the latent purpose of the party is not really a celebration of the holidays or of Irish “hospitality” (43) but to fundraise for the Morkans’ music school.
For Joyce, what is left of traditional Irish culture, or at least of the hollow preservation of it in current times, is nostalgia. This is what Joyce called the “hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.” Nostalgia, derived from the Greek nostos meaning “return,” idealizes and romanticizes the past, and thus calcifies it at the expense of the present and future. In the orientation of voluntary memory, the past becomes a safe haven for escape, postponing engagement with the ugliness of reality.
Gabriel, despite being estranged from Ireland, relies on nostalgia to fuel his speech at the feast. He lauds the “new generation” with its “new ideas and new principles” yet speaks with “pride and affection” about “the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.” This statement becomes ironic when later Gabriel argues that the living must not “linger on the past” or brood on “sad memories.” In this way, voluntary memory locks the ghosts of the past into images, which can be stored and used at will.
Gabriel’s appeal to nostalgia incorporates the past into the domestic spectacle of “camaraderie” as if only to affirm the propriety and hospitality of the partygoers without any meaningful discussion about the legacy or influence of the dead. What follows Gabriel’s speech is not the voice of the dead singers, but the clichéd lines of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Another song is used in “The Dead” to a different effect. Rather than being performed, “The Lass of Aughrim” is sung by Mr. D’Arcy alone in the drawing room, and is heard only accidentally by Gretta “leaning on the banisters” transfixed by what is later revealed to be her memories of Michael Furey and Galway. This melancholic ballad about a woman from the west of Ireland abandoned by the father of her son differs from Gabriel’s speech and the other music played at the party in its spontaneity and meaningful emotional connection with Gretta’s past.
This turning point in the story becomes not an example of consciously retrieved, voluntary memory but of involuntary memory. In the Proustian sense of the phrase, involuntary memories are triggered “by an external, chance stimulus.” The memory of Michael Furey is reimagined in Gretta’s present, revived with its passion and intense feeling of longing, momentarily displacing the dry habits of marriage. Her memory is liquid; existing only in her mind, dead Michael Furey’s actions live more furiously (ha, did you see what I did there?) than the cold recurrences of tradition.
A relevant contrast between the two forms of memory that gives insight into Gabriel’s paralysis is the line: “If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude.” Here, the tools of habit work to isolate Gretta’s experience into static images. However, voluntary memory is not strong enough to dissipate the sensations of Gretta’s childhood, which not only captures her intellect but her entire being. The result is an alienated detachment between the married couple, a lack of meaningful, non-ironic empathy that makes authentic communication possible.
An important argument from Margot Norris’ feminist reading of “The Dead” views this moment as one example of how Gabriel’s masculinity is dependent on his ability to control women, not just Gretta but also Lily the caretaker’s daughter, Mary Jane, and Miss Ivors. Many of the institutions and traditions that habituate voluntary memory like organized religion are hierarchical, and use the past to manipulate others.
Joyce, implicitly or not, must recognize this role of memory in the mechanism of Irish Revivalism and nationalism in the face of British colonialism. The cementing of Irish myths and heroes becomes a way to define and memorialize a coherent Irish identity against the chaos and uncertainty experienced by the colonized.
The reader’s epiphany in “The Dead” is recognition of how pathetic Gabriel and Gretta are, their humanity reduced to rare flashes of spontaneous memory. Gabriel’s epiphany comes when he is able to see Gretta “unresentfully” and connect meaningfully through these instances of emotional vulnerability. Gabriel reflects that Gretta “was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death,” showing that he has gone beyond the narcissistic pulses of offense and self-consciousness from before. He begins to take on a humanistic vision of love, one that is not concerned with finances or parties or jealousy, but with understanding and open-mindedness, a willingness to venture “farther westward” and brave “their wayward and flickering existence” together.
The significance of involuntary memory in these epiphanies is also integrated in the narrator’s tone. In the final paragraphs of “The Dead,” there is no dialogue. In place of the party’s mindless chatter is lyrical imagery, a feeling of resignation and internal melancholy. What Joyce uncovers at the end of “The Dead” and Dubliners is a powerful, retrospective orientation towards the past. The way the narrator weaves elements of the Irish landscape, the “Bog of Allen” and “the dark mutinous Shannon waves” into Gabriel’s conscious present works to emphasize, rather than reduce, the uniqueness of both.
Voluntary memories of Gabriel’s cultural heritage and the involuntary memories that swirl in Gretta’s dreams come together to form the snow that taps at the window, as if calling to his attention the potential for the retrospective attitude to bridge the past and the present, the living with the dead.
The development of characters in Dubliners then, from the boy in “The Sisters” who fears paralysis like a shadowy monster to Gabriel who can step back and appreciate the possibilities to overcome it, can be paralleled with Joyce’s growing understanding of what it means to be an artist. Joyce’s epiphany in the ending of “The Dead,” which is continued and elaborated in Ulysses, is the idea that the role of art and artists is to unveil the true nature of everyday human experience. That is, representing things in the world as they actually are. This requires that the artist recognize the superficial guises of society, a task that in Dubliners seems impossible while one is immersed in that society.
Gabriel then, as Joyce must have viewed himself, has the qualities of an artist because he is a person of exile. That is, he grew up in Ireland but then extricated himself to the European Continent, allowing him to hold the culture in his memory but be presently detached as an observer.
However, Joyce seems to suggest, partially through the actual structure and ordering of the stories in Dubliners, that this capacity for the retrospective attitude requires a person to be sufficiently old. It is hard to imagine that if Eveline had successfully fled Dublin with her lover Frank that she would suddenly have Joyce’s artistic potential. A part of Gabriel’s epiphany is his realization that him and his wife have been exhausted and aged considerably by life.
It is only when he stands at the precipice between life and death can Gabriel appreciate a whole life, which includes both happy moments and “sad memories,” and create revealing art that can be used to teach others how to live more enriched, fulfilling lives.
Joyce’s retrospective approach to literature is a personal one. By using his autobiographical recollections as source material, Joyce can sharply contrast the dominating forces of voluntary memory with his warm involuntary memories of home. Ireland becomes a nation he both hates and loves, Dubliners a people that he pities but cares deeply about.
Writing “The Dead” is an individual reckoning of past and present, the book itself a memory, a physical record of Joyce’s social and creative life. The lesson is a universal one that says anyone capable of using memory to reflect on everyday life can be an artist too.
If you enjoyed my writing, please consider leaving a tip on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/xichen
