Kevin Whelan
The Memories of “The Dead”
The Celtic Twilight had its origins not in mysticism but in starvation.
—Denis Ireland1
Introduction
The Great Irish Famine (–) was the single most important
event in Ireland in the modern period. Uniquely, a European country
suffered a catastrophe which the continent had not endured for centuries.2 Over one million people died and two million more emigrated
within a decade, sending the country into a spiral of demographic decline which it has only recently arrested. Yet it is a commonplace of
Irish cultural history to claim that if one looks for a representation of
this terrible and defining event, it is impossible to find one adequate to
the scale of the catastrophe.3 It has also often been observed that the
Famine is rarely (and then only obliquely) represented in the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, this reading
may be superficial, as this essay seeks to demonstrate through a sustained excavation of the historical layers—biographical, literary, historical, geographical, musical—of James Joyce’s short story of ,
“The Dead.” One of the chief discoveries of this excavation is the
buried history of the Famine embedded at its center. The resonance
of “The Dead” and its peculiarly charged language derives from this
depth of historical layering, all the more evocative because it is hidden. This story is also set in the period of the Irish Literary Revival,
whose origins are conventionally dated to Douglas Hyde’s manifesto
“On the necessity for de-anglicising the Irish people.”4 “The Dead”
may therefore be taken as a work of strategic importance in a consideration of what the Revival was and why modernism was its preeminent style.
Indubitably, Ireland remained culturally traumatized in the immediate post-Famine period. It is possible to see the cultural revival as a delayed, second-generation effect, inspired by people born during the
Famine. The best known examples would be Michael Davitt
(–), founder of the Land League in , and Michael Cu-
The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number (): 59–97
© by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press
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sack (–), founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association in .5
Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was born in . Joyce himself,
born in , belonged to a generation that sought to reshape Ireland
in fundamental ways.This reshaping took place in the aftermath of the
Famine, which accelerated the hollowing-out of Irish culture.The period from the s, when the post-Famine generation took over, witnessed the creation of an Irish radical memory that sought to escape
the baneful binary of modernisation and tradition—the Hegelian
view that all that is lost to history is well lost, the Scottish Enlightenment paradigm in which what is sacrificed to progress is retrieved
imaginatively as nostalgia. This attitude generated a wistful, rearmirror view of history where the past stayed firmly in the past,
drained of politics and available merely as sentiment. Modernity’s nostalgia for its past became a political placebo, sweetening the bitter pill
of history and establishing the comfort of distance between past and
present. By contrast, radical memory deployed the past to challenge
the present, to restore into possibility historical moments that had
been blocked or unfulfilled earlier. Violence, not tranquillity, sustained
the distinction between modernisation and tradition: “tradition” was
not a site of atavism and violence but a defence against a deliberately
torn culture, fully exposed to, and unprotected against, the modernist
blast. In the Irish case, as in other colonial situations, “tradition” and
“custom” were rooted in violence, instability and discontinuity, not
anterior or antecedent to modernity, but absolutely implicated in and
sustained by it. The “levelled lawns and gravelled clay” of W. B. Yeats
were laid over blood: the high monuments of Anglo-Irish culture
were brutal petrifications of violence.6
Davitt used his personal Famine experiences as the spur to undermine that landlordism which he blamed for his predicament:
Almost my first remembered experience of my own life and of the existence of landlordism was our eviction in , when I was about five years of age. The eviction
and the privations of the preceding Famine years, the story of the starving of Mayo,
of the deaths from hunger and the coffinless graves on the roadside—everywhere a
hole could be dug for the slaves who died because of “God’s providence”—all this
was the political food seasoned with a mother’s tears over unmerited sorrows and sufferings which had fed my mind in another land, a teaching which lost none of its
force or directness by being imparted in the Gaelic tongue, which was always spoken
in our Lancashire home.7
Remarkably in a still profoundly agrarian society, Davitt set in motion
the legislative euthanasia of an entire landed class, predating the massive upheavals in Russia a few decades later. This achievement arose
from his fusion of the land with the national issue, bringing together
for the first time the physical-force nationalists (the Fenians) and the
constitutional nationalists in a unified campaign.8 Charles Stewart
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Parnell, Joyce’s political hero, was also pivotal to this transformation,
advising the tenants in not to repeat the mistaken acquiescence
of their fathers in the Famine dispossessions: “You must show the
landlords that you intend to hold a firm grip on your homesteads and
lands. You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed as you were
dispossessed in .”9 Parnell’s appeal to general history was also an
appeal to personal history: the children of those who had suffered the
Famine evictions had fused the personal and the political and this
steeled their determination in the s.Their memory of the Famine
was a direct personal experience, not some spurious invention of tradition derived from folklore and song, some second-hand version inculcated by rabid nationalist ideologues via speeches, newspapers and
crude polemical histories. Davitt claimed that “The men who made
the Land League were the sons of those who went through the horrors of the Great Famine.”10 In contrast to the conservative orientation of arguments centered on the invention of tradition in Victorian
Britain, memory in Ireland was deployed for radical political purposes.
Memory acted as a spur to agency rather than a prop to passivity.
Davitt himself argued in : “I shall never beg a penny for Irish
famine. If the people of Ireland, if the tenants and farmers of the west
pay rent that should go to feed their children, then let them die and
humanity are well rid of such a coward race.”11
This cultural territory was also the terrain of the Irish Literary
Revival: after great violence, emotion recollected in tranquility.
Consider how close so many of its practitioners were to the Famine:
John Millington Synge’s grandfather Dr. Traill and Standish Hayes
O’Grady’s grandfather Rev. Thomas O’Grady were central Famine
figures in west Cork; Oscar Wilde’s father William made his
reputation with his nosological tables on the Famine in the Census; Augusta Gregory was the widow of William of the infamous
“Gregory Clause” which facilitated the eviction of at least half a million people during the Famine. James Stephens, Joyce’s friend, had
been literally starved as a child: “His twisted frame, goitrous throat,
rickety limbs were due no doubt to malnutrition in infancy. He never
spoke of his childhood though a glimpse may be had in that dark tale
‘Hunger.’ Often he would say in that whimsical way that when he was
a child, he used to chase the ducks in St. Stephen’s Green to steal bits
of bread from them.” Or, in the words of that “dark tale” to which he
refers, “They could scarcely die of hunger for they were native to it.
They were hunger.”12 Even well into the twentieth century, the connection back to that past persisted. Patrick Kavanagh’s grandfather had
been a workhouse master just after the Famine.13 It may also be the
case that the young Joyce himself knew hunger in the penurious,
crowded, downwardly mobile household of his father.14
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Irish Modernism and the Famine
A further issue is the relationship between the Literary Revival and
modernism. Why did modernism become the preferred stylistic mode
of the Revival? This broaches a wider question in literary studies concerning the relationship between modernism and peripherality.15 Why
was modernism, especially its British manifestation, a peripheral rather
than a metropolitan phenomenon? Why did it have so pronounced an
Irish accent—Joyce, Yeats, Moore, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Beckett,
O’Brien? An answer to this question might begin by observing that
the decentered subject of modernism resembled the colonial subject.
The colonial encounter in Ireland had produced a hollowed-out identity. Linguistically adrift between two languages, many Irish writers
possessed the self-conscious awareness of language characteristic of
modernism. The modernist viewpoint was more readily available to
those who were acutely aware of the instability of language—the
Yeatsian position that “Irish is my national language but English is my
mother tongue.”16 This linguistic position was already sufficiently estranged and distanced to allow use of the English language while escaping the specific gravities of its traditions, the dense weight of its
parochialisms. An aesthetic virtue could then be wrung from historical necessity, turning linguistic disenfranchisement to advantage, enlarging rather than contracting its possibilities.
In these conditions, the possibility exists, in Seamus Deane’s phrase,
for a dialectic between “dumbness and eloquence.”17 The Irish Literary Revival was an extravagant discourse in the English language
about dumbness in the Irish language. It restlessly sought access to a
world elsewhere—the world of Gaelic civilisation, dismissed, expunged, unknowable, vanished, whose very absence must be articulated or “summoned” to use a Yeatsian word. That articulation required a new language that was not exactly English, even if it was
English-based. It found expression in Yeats’s occultism of “A Vision,”
Joyce’s ur-English of Finnegan’s Wake, Gregory’s Kiltartanese, Synge’s
sing-song, Beckett’s experiments in writing in French and then translating it back into English. We can also see this as a narrative about
eloquence. In both Joyce’s A Portrait and Synge’s “Playboy,” the central characters finally achieve eloquence and narrative self-sufficiency
only at the cost of leaving their communities. In a wider sense, this is
culturally diagnostic, a linguistic parable of post-Famine Ireland,
which illuminates Benjamin’s aphorism:“no one has ever know mastery in anything who has not first known incompetence.”
But the dialectic of dumbness and eloquence could also be reversed,
as in the case of the transition from Irish-speaking to English-speaking.
Joyce himself in wrote the essay “Ireland at the Bar” about Myles
Joyce executed in [the year of his own birth] for his part in the
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Maamtrasna murders. Five of “the ancient tribe of the Joyces” had
been charged with the brutal murders of five members of another
family in the Joyce country in county Galway.18 Myles Joyce was a
monoglot Irish-speaker tried before an English-speaking court. Joyce
uses his interrogation as a metaphor for Irish/English relationships:
The magistrate said:
“Ask the accused if he saw the woman on the morning in question.”
The question was repeated to him in Irish and the old man broke out into intricate explanations, gesticulating, appealing to the other accused, to heaven. Then, exhausted by the effort, he fell silent; the interpreter, turning to the magistrate, said:
“He says no, your worship.”
“Ask him was he in the vicinity at the time.”
The old man began speaking once again, protesting, shouting, almost beside himself with the distress of not understanding or making himself understood, weeping
with rage and terror. And the interpreter, once again replied drily:
“He says no, your worship.”19
Joyce points the moral:“The figure of this bewildered old man, left
over from a culture which is not ours, a deaf-mute before his judge, is
a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion.”20 In brutal
circumstances, Myles Joyce was executed by the English hangman,
Marwood, on December , still vehemently protesting his innocence in Irish. His ghost was believed to haunt Galway gaol where
he was buried, and his widow’s curse, delivered on her knees in the
formal Gaelic manner, was believed to follow the gaol governor. The
principal informer subsequently retracted his evidence, proving Myles
Joyce to have been an innocent man. James Joyce’s detailed knowledge
of the case came from the oral tradition (presumably from Nora Barnacle) rather than the well-known contemporary account by the nationalist M. P., Tim Harrington.21
Joyce was sufficiently interested in his namesake to use his dying
words “Tá mé ag imeacht” [I am going] in twenty five different languages in Finnegans Wake. Recorded and translated by a local journalist, they were as follows:
I am going. Why put me to death? I am not guilty. I had neither hand or foot in the
killing. I didn’t know anything at all about it. God forgive the people who swore
against me. It’s a poor thing to die on the scaffold for what I never did. I never did it
and it’s a poor case to die. God help my wife and her five orphans. I hadn’t hand or
part in it. But I have my priest with me. I am as innocent as the child in the cradle.22
The condition of Myles Joyce was that of post-Famine Ireland. As
late as , Samuel Beckett rehearsed the same sensibility:“I have always sensed that there was within me an assassinated being. Assassinated before my birth. I needed to find this assassinated person again.
And try to give him new life.”23
One final annotation is necessary here. The conditions of colonised
Ireland could not readily be accommodated within the canonical
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British forms of representation such as the realist novel.24 Because
conventional literary forms were deemed insufficiently effective, unratifiable or corrupt, Irish writing was challenged to be both highly
experimental in its search for alternatives and subversive of its own
procedures. Here, a long line of formal experimentation can be traced,
from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy through James Clarence Mangan to
Joyce and eventually to Flann O’Brien. Irish literature was always a
minor literature, because it is was a colonial literature—disempowered
by the canonical forms of the coloniser’s discourse, re-empowered by
the experimental quest for alternatives to it. Irish literature sought to
rewrite its marginality as a new centrality, as its precociously decentered colonial subject becomes the classic modern subject.25
The linguistic situation in Ireland is clarified by considering Derrida’s recent meditation on monolingualism. He explicitly identifies
himself as a pied noir, aware of his triple dislocation from the Arabic
and Berber languages of Algeria, the French language of France, and
the Hebrew language of his Jewish origins. Derrida—like the Irish
writers of the Revival—is eloquent about the silence, about the “terror” of a hyphenated identity, about the chasm created by the transvoicing of memory, and the consequent instability of his voice:“I was
the first to be afraid of my own voice, as if it were not mine, to contest it, even to detest it.”26
Derrida has no source language, only a target language, no language
of the past, only of the future.27 A linguistic alien, his mantra becomes:
“I have only one language and it is not mine.”28 This linguistic position is similar to that of a Joyce or a Beckett. Héléne Cixous, with her
Spanish/French/Jewish father, and her German/Jewish mother, has
similarly stressed her Algériance, with its curious sense of having departed but never having arrived.29
Joyce, Modernism, and the Famine
It is possible to identify—however crudely—two broad strands within
modernism.“Right” modernism (Eliot, Pound) desired a unified, authentic Western culture, of hierarchy and social order, with an organic
cultural unity and no “dissociation of sensibility.” Mournful and elegiac, it lamented the loss of the organic community, Gemeinschaft, a
victim of the alienating anomie of modern industrial society. “Left”
modernism (Beckett, Joyce, Brecht) accepted this deracination and
was uncompromisingly avant-garde and determinedly political, finding expression in dadaism, constructivism, and surrealism. It embraced
the demotic rather than the elitist, the urban rather than the rural, and
espoused the hybrid multiplicity of a fragmented tradition.The choice
between these two forms of modernism was cultural as well as individual. The “right” wing model of a deep past opposed to a shallow
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present was not available to Joyce because, for his generation, an Irish
deep past no longer existed. It had been eviscerated by a dual colonialism—“The English tyranny and the Roman tyranny”30—that curious complicity of British imperialism and Roman Catholicism
which made Ireland “the scullery maid of Christendom” and the
home of “the gratefully oppressed” (). So thorough was the evacuation that an indigenous Irish culture could no longer be resuscitated
even by a determined policy of cultural revival:“Just as ancient Egypt
is dead, so is ancient Ireland.”31 To believe otherwise was to live delusionally in a twilight world of Celtic kitsch, by “the broken lights of
ancient myth.”32 The only reality the Irish past bequeathed was a
treadmill of brute repetition, the endless circling of Patrick Morkan’s
horse around King Billy’s statue in “The Dead.”
Modern Ireland was haunted by the afterlife of that deeper world
from which it was permanently estranged. And here lay Joyce’s most
profound insight: the Irish in this condition were not deprived of
modernity—they literally embodied it.33 Their provincialism and
alienation were central to the condition of modernity, not its benighted opposite. For Joyce then, to be colonised was also to be modern. The derivative, shallow and broken identity of his Irish subjects
was also the archetypal modern identity. In Dubliners and A Portrait,
Joyce employs a repetitive lexicon to describe this colonised world—
spectral, shrivelled, stale, vague, mean, dull, dark, melancholy, sombre,
sour, sullen, gaunt, bleak, bitter, denuded, pallid, grey, servile, consumptive, narrow, tawdry, gloomy, listless. It is a world of shadows, condemned always to the second hand, to an identity based on alienation
from self and others.
Joyce’s critique was not just abstract or generalising: it was rooted in
a penetrating analysis of post-Famine Irish culture. In chapter five of A
Portrait, Stephen Dedalus walks from north to south across Dublin City,
and his journey through space is also a journey through time. Stephen
draws parallels between the paralysis of “a bleak decaying seaport” and
his own unease, while contemplating a series of versions of Ireland.
Passing “the great dull stone” of Trinity College, he rejects “the fetters
of the reformed conscience,” before engaging with nationalistic Ireland.
In its cultural manifestations, he dismisses the dutiful bad verse of
Thomas Moore, “the nationalist poet of Ireland,” and the Gaelic Revival, as symbolised by the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic
League.34 In a long passage, he explores the possibility of modern Anglicised Dubliners being able to reconnect with the older Gaelic culture, as symbolised by the Irish-speaking communities of the west coast,
before rejecting that possibility as unattainable.35 Having rejected literary nationalism (Moore), the Irish language revival, popular nationalism and Gaelic sports, he also rejects political nationalism, in a consideration of the “tawdry tribute” of the Wolfe Tone monument.36
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The Irish past, like Michael Furey in “The Dead,” can only return
to the present as an absence: the Irish language, love, a national community have all been consigned to the spectral. Stephen then traverses
St. Stephen’s Green to Newman House, where in a remarkable passage, he registers his unease at Roman Catholicism as he passes down
a corridor:
The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not
unwatchful? Was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the Jesuit house extraterritorial and was he walking
among aliens? The Ireland of Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.37
Here, Catholicism is presented as “extraterritorial” and “alien.”38
Later, Stephen, recalling his Roman namesake, concludes that “his
countrymen and not mine had invented what Curley the other night
called our religion.”39 Stephen is then in a position to reject Catholicism as yet another insidious snare. These reflections precede the celebrated encounter with the English Jesuit, with its equally alienating
reverberations:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the
words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these
words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be
for me an acquired speech.40
Stephen is continually reminded that his position as an Irishman is inescapably derivative.
This remarkable chapter ushers in the equally celebrated conclusion
of the novel, in which Stephen rejects the nets of nationality, language
and religion, choosing to combat them with the weapons of silence,
exile and cunning. These famous words have usually been read tritely
as representing Joyce’s contemptuous dismissal of Ireland in favour of
cosmopolitanism. As always with Joyce, we need to read carefully. The
triple collocation “silence, exile, cunning” is derived from Balzac, La
Comédie Humaine, volume five. Lucien and Blondet are conversing:
“Mon cher, répondit Lucien, j’ai mis en pratique un axiome avec lequel on est
sûr de vivre tranquille;‘Fuge, Late,Tace!’” [flee, hide, be silent].41
The deliberate literary echo deployed by Joyce reminds us of two
principles. One is that Joyce treats memory as itself a constructed
form, interspliced with literary representations. Again and again in A
Portrait, Stephen’s memory is triggered by literary references, which
he then imaginatively absorbs and blends with his own experience.
The second principle is the imperative not to reduce Joyce’s cultural
politics to a crude and morally-charged choice between “national”
and “cosmopolitan.” The complexity of the Joycean cultural critique
was its refusal to inhabit the binaries of Celtic or Saxon, Catholic or
Protestant, modern or traditional, national or cosmopolitan, English or
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Irish—the binaries that so transfixed his contemporaries (and later
commentators). Yeats, for example, reversed the value systems of
Celtic/Saxon, traditional/modern, but still left the binaries intact.
Joyce rejected the categories, instead seeking to dismantle the binary
system itself. That is one of the points of his famous remark to Yeats:
“I’m afraid, Mr. Yeats, you’re too old for me to be able to help you.”42
However, Joyce did share Yeats’s sense that Ireland in the post-Parnell
period would “be like soft wax for years to come.”43
We also need to pay precise attention to the cultural politics of Ireland in the late Nineteenth Century. Dubliners and A Portrait offer a
sophisticated critique not of “old Ireland” but of the new Ireland that
had emerged since the Famine; Stephen Dedalus rejects what is essentially the Ireland of the Devotional Revolution, of the second-hand
language, of a spurious narrow nationalism.44 Escaping the despised
post-Famine present, two options were available: a retreat into the
Irish past (rejected as unavailable except in a shallow revivalism), or a
soaring flight of aesthetic transcendence. This second solution was
dangerous and potentially deforming, a free-fall without the parachute
cords of community and identity. Read in this way, Joyce’s work, beneath its calm surface, is pervasively disturbed by the presence of the
Famine: the post-Famine condition of Ireland is the unnamed horror
at the heart of Joyce’s Irish darkness, the conspicuous exclusion that is
saturatingly present as a palpable absence deliberately being held at bay,
“the terror of soul of a starving Irish village.”45
This is the world described in by John Mitchel:
A calm still horror was over the land. Go where you would, in the heart of the town
or in the suburb, or the mountainside or on the level plain, there was the stillness and
heavy pall-like feel of the chamber of death. You stood in the presence of a dread,
silent, vast dissolution. An unseen ruin was creeping around you. You saw no war of
classes, no open Janissary war of foreigners, no human agency of destruction.
You could weep but the rising curse died unspoken within your heart like a profanity. Human passion there was none but inhuman and unearthly quiet. Children
met you, toiling heavily on stone heaps but their burning eyes were senseless and their
faces cramped and weasened like stunted old men. Gangs worked but without a murmur or a whistle or a cough, ghostly, like voiceless shadows to the eye.
Even womanhood had ceased to be womanly.The birds of the air carolled no more
and the crow and the raven dropped dead upon the wing.The very dogs, hairless with
the head down and the vertebrae of the back protruding like a saw of bone, glared on
you from the ditch side with a wolfish, avid eye and then slunk away, slowly and cowardly. Nay, the sky of heaven, the blue mountains, the still lake, stretching far away
westward, looked not as they wont. Between them and you rose up a steaming agony,
a film of suffering, impervious and dim. It seemed as if the anima mundi, the soul of
the land, was faint and dying, and that the faintness and death had crept into all things
of earth and heaven. You stood there too, silenced in the presence of the unseen and
terrible.46
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Mitchel’s remarks were echoed by the American writer W. G. Haskins a decade later in Dublin:
In the midst of all so rich and beautiful, a solemn, sad loneliness hung like a black pall
over everything. The streets, though wide, were deserted; the stores, though lofty and
built for endurance, were closed; business there was almost none. Dublin was like a
deserted village or a city of the dead.47
As a counterweight to the vacuity of post-Famine Irish culture,
Joyce and the other Irish modernists espoused the importance of
representation as an auratic process which rescued presence and fullness from depletion. Wilde, O’Casey, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett
were from that Dublin which so glaringly presented that pallid vacuum. For all of them, a cult of representation became a means by
which the political could be replaced by the aesthetic. The artist restored the aura in the aesthetic realm which had been stripped by the
brute contingencies of politics. The aesthetic absorbed and then saturated the political. This process required a cult of the artist—selfcreated as at once intimate and exilic, immersed in reality but detached from “the local stupidity” (Pound). This generated the classic
modernist stance, which required the Nietzschean “pathos of distance” to allow for the creation of the autonomous work of art. In Ireland, that pathos of distance was cultural as well as individual, the distance travelled from an intact Irish culture, securely grounded and
self-reliant. The Famine represented the most visible landmark on that
terrible journey.
Here was a people exiled, refugeed, unhoused, evicted from a community of recognition, silenced. This was the condition prophesied by
Thomas Davis on the eve of the Famine:
To impose another language on such people is to send their history adrift among the
accidents of translation;‘tis to tear their identity from all places—’tis to substitute arbitrary signs for picturesque and suggestive names—’tis to cut off the entail of feeling, and separate the people from their forefathers by a deep gulf . . .48
Local reports of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Knock in
County Mayo in noted that she was silent.49 In the midst of a
community in rapid transition between two languages, in which
should she have spoken? In the Mayo of that time, it was not uncommon for monoglot Irish-speakers to have grandchildren who were
monoglot English speakers.
In a vivid anecdote, Douglas Hyde captures the confusion of the period:
About two or three miles west of Ballaghdereen [County Roscommon], I chatted
with a little “gossoon” [Garsún, boy] who ran beside my car. And as I spoke to him
in Irish, he answered me in English. At last I said: “Nach labhrainn tú Gaedhlig?” [Don’t
you speak Irish?]. His answer was:“And isn’t it Irish I’m spakin?”50
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Joyce and “The Dead”
One of the best-known passages in Irish literature comes at the end
of “The Dead,” where Gabriel Conroy becomes aware of the snow
falling outside his hotel window.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow
again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the
lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the
newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part
of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and,
farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling,
too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay
buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of
the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow
falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. ()51
The snow here is not just an objective correlative of Gabriel’s psychic desolation. His comfortable middle-class journalistic world has
disintegrated with his devastating realization that the passionate love
of his wife Gretta was the young Galway man, Michael Furey, who
had literally died for love of her. Gretta’s buried passion had been resurrected by the singing of “The Lass of Aughrim”—a folk song which
summoned the deep, oral, Irish-language, Jacobite, Gaelic past of the
west of Ireland. This song was a favourite of Nora Barnacle and her
mother. On August in a letter to Nora, Joyce tells her:“I was
singing an hour ago your song ‘The Lass of Aughrim.’ The tears are in
my eyes and my voice trembles with emotion when I sing that lovely
air. It was worth coming to Ireland to have got it from your poor, kind
mother.”52 By contrast with the deep cultural history of the west,
Gabriel occupies the shallow bourgeois present, typecast as a provincial journalist with the unionist Daily Express. He is a “West Briton,”
a teacher of Romance languages at the Royal University (). He
lives life vicariously, at a distance from it: throughout “The Dead,” he
observes things at second hand through his spectacles, as here where
he is looking through a window, a recurrent metaphor for separation
in this short story. He is routinely unnerved, ill at ease in his body, indicated by the nervous tic of constantly blushing. He occupies the
shadows, as if he is not fully alive, as if his participation in life is at one
remove, like “distant music.”
Joyce uses the falling snow to ease the scene from Dublin to the
west of Ireland, ending in the desolate graveyard “where Michael
Furey lay buried.” Joyce hinted to his brother Stanislaus that “The
Dead” was “a ghost story.”53 Michael’s surname recalls the Furies, who
in Greek mythology represented the spirit of the dead, notably the
avenging souls of murdered men. Furey is associated with the snow,
the chill, the cold which pervades everything, even the bodies of the
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participants (Gretta “perished alive,”“Mrs Malins will get her death of
cold”)—that cold air prowling outside the house, a malignant energy
seeking to penetrate the warm house and even the bodies of the living (, ). The shade of Furey is borne on that cold blast.54 When
Gabriel enters the house, and takes off his coat, “a cold fragrant air
from out of doors escaped from crevices and folds” (). It is as if
Gabriel has unwittingly released Furey into the party. Furey had
worked at the gasworks in Galway and at the critical emotional event
in the story for Gretta, “the flame of the gas lit up the rich bronze of
her hair” (). As they leave the house,“The piercing morning air came
into the hall” (). When Gabriel tries to kindle a sexual flame with
Gretta in the hotel,“The air of the room chilled his shoulders” ().
At the moment of revelation, Gabriel is seized by “a vague terror,”“as
if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and
vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him
in its vague world.” It is only with “an effort of reason” that he can
shake himself free of this incubus (–). Throughout the story,
Furey is associated with sudden blasts and releases of air, cold, and gas.
At the end of the story, Gabriel’s attention is directed to the snow outside by “a few light taps upon the pane,” recalling Michael’s efforts to
attract Gretta’s attention by throwing gravel up at her window.
Furey can also be taken as symbolic of a vibrant, passionate life
which has vanished—it is now “barren”—the dynamic life of the preFamine Gaelic countryside, subsequently safely paled by “crooked
crosses” (Roman Catholicism).55 Gretta, we remember, has been sent
to a convent in Dublin to sever her unsuitable relationship with
Michael.56 The snow can then be seen as a metaphor for the cultural
change in post-Famine Ireland—that stultifying pallor which the
deadly combination of British imperialism and Roman Catholicism
imposed on Irish life, reaching its nadir in Dublin, “the mask of
capital” ().
Literary Reverberations
Joyce’s snow deliberately evokes earlier moments in Irish literature.
One of the inspirations of his short story was Thomas Moore’s “Oh
ye Dead,” a party piece of Joyce’s.57 Moore’s lyric (see Appendix A)
concerns the Irish folk belief that the shades of men who have died
on foreign soil (notably the Wild Geese) return to haunt their familiar and beloved places of origin.58 They converse with the living but
if asked why they do not return home, they say that they are obliged
to go to Mount Hecla and instantly disappear. Moore’s Irish politics,
however thickly syruped and disguised, were generally radical: the
song returns to his familiar ground of vanished possibilities and the
betrayed present. His Ireland is haunted by the United Irishmen and
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
their redemptive projects: the fading of the light is a leitmotif in Moore
for the defeat of their Enlightenment project and the consequent
gloom in Ireland.59 The veteran United Irishman Andrew O’Reilly
claimed in the mid nineteenth century: “The music of Ireland is the
music of a heart-broken people: it is a collection of sighs.”60 Like the
revenants of his lyric, Moore obsessively revisited the radical politics
of his youth, before he and they had been evicted into the callous
present—a desolate world of shadows, of the living dead, of the broken dream. Moore’s master image is of the dead condemned to glacial
cold, “to freeze ‘mid Hecla’s snow.” The second stanza was sung as if
the dead were whimpering for the bodily existence which they could
no longer enjoy, as if their voices issued from an out-of-body experience. His brother Stanislaus reported this mode of singing the song to
a fascinated James.61
The Wild Geese are also referenced in the place name Aughrim—
their defeat at which caused their exile—and the goose at the center
of the festive table.62 There is one further reference coded in the
goose. Nora Barnacle’s surname would originally have been the common Connemara name Ó Cadhain, normally anglicised as Coyne. On
a false etymology, the name in Nora’s family had been anglicised as
Barnacle, the word cadhan in Irish meaning a “Barnacle goose.”63
When Joyce himself was visiting in Galway, her family referred to him
as Shames Showe—a phonetic rendering of the Irish version of his
name Séamas Seoighe—and an indication that they were an Irishspeaking family.64
In one sense, Joyce’s short story offers a variation on Moore’s lyric.
Joyce learned from Moore the power of music to articulate the unspeakable. Moore’s Melodies ache for a political impossibility, for a vanished world superior to the present, for all that loss and silence seeking again to come to presence and voice. Moore’s music echoed across
the Irish nineteenth century as a language of the politically unsayable,
of the impossible public sphere. Once Ireland actually achieved a measure of independence, the popularity of Moore instantly plummeted,
indicating that his appeal to Catholic Ireland stemmed from its peculiar position within nineteenth-century British politics.
In , as he began to think about “The Dead,” Joyce was reading
Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy ().65 The novel opens with a party of
emigrants (initially led by the now dead Captain Gabriel Conroy)
trapped in the Californian Sierra in March . In their trek west to
California, having become engulfed by snow, they are immobilised,
quarrelsome and starving. The novel is derived from the Donner
party, a real-life group of emigrants (including two Irish families, the
Breens and the Reeds) who had been trapped by unusually early and
heavy snowfalls while crossing the Sierras in the winter of –
(also the worst season—Black ’—of the Irish Famine). The stranded
kev i n wh e lan
party had eventually resorted to cannibalism to keep themselves from
starving.66 These events, so redolent of the Irish Famine experience,
form the basis of Harte’s narrative and suggest why Joyce gestures directly towards the novel in his choice of Gabriel Conroy as a name for
his protagonist. It also helps to explain why “The Dead” so insistently
emphasizes food and hospitality. Harte places particular emphasis on
the relationship between death and silence (see Appendix B).
It is not just Moore and Harte that are frozen into Joyce’s snow. His
favourite Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan, is also there, and the latter’s Famine poem “Siberia” (see Appendix C).67 This oblique
meditation on Famine revolves around the image of “the killing
snows.” The poem mimics the trajectory by which the intimate human circadian rhythm gradually slows to an abstract geological time.
In an inhuman violation of the body’s basic integrity, its barriers are
breached by a grotesque invasion of materiality, an infestation that
slows the blood to a sandy sludge. Consciousness is then displaced into
a space beyond, beyond biology, beyond memory, beyond ethics. An
entire culture is annulled, sinking into a glacial coma, a cultural deep
freeze of silence, isolation and death. Human time cedes to a chiliastic time, beyond redemption. All of this is observed in the poem with
the detached fascination of experiencing one’s own dissolution: its
voice emanates not from a warm, living body but from its spectral
mutant. Mangan tracks the Famine’s ontological violence—history’s
appalled reversion to geological time, into a space and a time which
precede and follow human geography and human history and which
are supremely indifferent to them. Again, we can feel the weight of
Mangan’s snow impressed on Joyce’s, notably in the final sentences
where Joyce generalises from Gabriel’s predicament.
There is a further presence and pressure in the writing of this ending. Throughout Dubliners, there are palpable echoes of George
Moore, especially the “Zola’s ricochet” Moore of A Drama in Muslin
(). Moore treats Dublin as “a land of echoes and shadows,” whose
precise physical description conveys “the moral idea of Dublin in
,” where “the souls of the Dubliners blend and harmonise with
their connatural surroundings,” in which “the poor shades go by,
waving a mock-English banner over a waxwork show.”68 This Dublin
is “a corpse, quick with the life of the worm.”69 For Moore, the city
lay “mysteriously dead—immovable and mute beneath the moon, like
a starved vagrant in the last act of a melodrama.”70 Moore’s version of
Dublin as a necropolis, a city of the dead, the leprous and the paralytic,
is powerfully present in Joyce’s Dubliners, and nowhere more so than
in “The Dead,” which reworks Moore’s motifs—the statue of
O’Connell, the dinner party disrupted by a political discussion, the
world of the journalist. One of these motifs is snow. In the Galwaybased section of his novel, Moore envisaged the plain but intelligent
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
Alice Barton—one of his “muslin martyrs”—staring out the window
at the snow-drenched west of Ireland landscape, as she comes to a realization that there was no escape for her “from this awful mummery
in muslin,” this “white death”:
But through her gazing eyes the plain of virginal snow, flecked with the cold blue
shadows of the trees, sank into her soul, bleaching it of every hope of joy; and, gathering suggestions from the surroundings, she saw a white path extending before her—
a sterile way that she would have to tread—a desolate way, with no songs in its sullen
air, but only sad sighs, and only stainless tears, falling, falling, ever falling—falling
silently. Her life is weak and sterile, even as the plain of moonlight-stricken snow. Like
it, she will fade, will pass into a moist and sunless grave, without leaving a trace of herself on the earth—this beautiful earth, built out of and made lovely with love.71
This passage influenced Joyce, from the highly polished Paterian
patina even to the celebrated chiasmic cadence of the “falling
faintly”—“faintly falling” snow. Joyce has also redeployed Moore’s use
of a figure gazing through a window at snow as a metaphor for desolate detachment and isolation, and the snow as a proleptic evocation
of future psychological pain.
The snow in “The Dead,” then, is not just weather. To be meteorologically accurate, rain would have been the more appropriate western weather—but this would not work so well in the cultural economy of Joyce’s work, as we can see in the relative failure of his
poem “She weeps over Rahoon,” which rehearses the end of “The
Dead.” Rahoon was the Galway cemetery where Michael Bodkin, the
model for Michael Furey, was buried. Joyce imagines Nora Barnacle/
Gretta Conroy grieving over the grave:
Love, hear thou
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling
Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling.
Then as now.
Dark too our hearts, o love, shall lie and cold,
As his sad heart has lain,
Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould
And muttering rain.72
Translating the rain into snow intensifies the ramifying cultural registers of “The Dead”: snow combines the personal and the cultural,
while drawing on its many earlier figurative uses in the Irish literary
tradition.
Joyce’s language was therefore intensely and consistently reverberative, an effect heightened by the constant imaginative absorption and
reworking of literary precedents. Consider his use, for example, of
George Moore’s Vain Fortune () (see Figure ).73 In the novel, a
bridal couple receives the devastating news on their wedding night
kev i n wh e lan
Figure : Title page of George Moore’s Vain Fortune, signed by James Joyce
in . (Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University)
that a young woman whom the husband jilted has committed suicide.
The news separates the wedding couple: there is no kiss, no consummation of the marriage, only remorse and separation. The wife finally
falls to troubled sleep while the husband goes to the window to look
out at the melancholy dawn. He realizes that his life is a failure and
that he has made a terrible mistake. His wife lacks the passion of the
girl who killed herself for him. In his treatment of Gabriel and Gretta
at the Gresham Hotel, Joyce carefully varies this scenerio. As Gabriel
is inflamed by memories of their honeymoon, Gretta is consumed by
memories of Michael Furey. His shade drives a wedge between the
married couple, opening Gabriel to the realization that he is merely a
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
second-hand lover of his wife and that their marriage has consisted
only of “the years of their dull existence together” ().
Joyce similarly recycled a scene from another Irish novel, Joseph
Sheridan Le Fanu’s All in the Dark (). This contains a passage
where a man gazes from a darkened stairwell towards a woman further up them: “She had quite vanished up the stairs and he still held
the door handle in his fingers and stood looking up the vacant steps
and, as it were, listening to distant music.” The scene is closely mirrored at the end of “The Dead” and the phrase “distant music” is used
by Joyce. That same scene also replicated the theatrical staging of the
end of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” a play with which he was intimately
familiar.74
All these literary precedents add to the charged language of “The
Dead,” the point at which the mature style of Joyce emerges. At one
level, the story can be read as a successful exercise in naturalism, an
acute diagnosis of a marriage set in a dense and closely observed social context. At another level, the story is structured around a matrix
of symbolism (consider the careful choreography of color, for instance). At yet another level, it can be read as a series of sophisticated
variations on other texts.75
Historical Reverberations
The story can also be read as the subtle deployment of a series of historical traces. Consider the familial similiarities between the Morkans
and the Joyces, which become clear if one compares the relevant genealogies (see Figures and ). The story is permeated by a foreboding sense of generational transition, both personal and cultural. There
is a clear sense of a passing from the aunts’“generation on the wane”
to the “new generation” of Mary Anne and Molly Ivors, with their
“new ideas, new purposes” (, ). This waning signals the wider
transition between an older, more anglicised Dublin and a newer one,
steeped in the Gaelic Revival. The theme is explicitly foregrounded
by Gabriel in his dinner speech. The aunts are equally uncomprehending of the intellectual interests of the college-educated Molly
Ivors and of the musical taste of their niece, who plays a technically
difficult “Academy piece.” This becomes even more apparent if we
take the conventional thirty years as a generation. Three times in the
story, that thirty-year interval is specifically recalled.The last big snowfall ominously occurred thirty years ago, when Patrick Morkan died.
This is proleptic of Julia’s death: she sings the song “Arrayed for the
Bridal,” with its shades of imminent death and its close parallels with
the spinster aunt’s life. Joyce also used here a motif from Irish folklore—the “lightness before death.” (This was the common belief that
just before a person died, they experienced a brief moment of rekev i n wh e lan
Starch miller in Back Lane
Port and Docks Board
Figures and : Joyce and Morkan family geneaolgies
newed energy and exhilaration.) The short story places a heavy emphasis on how well Julia looks, how well she sings, how lively she is—
all of it ominous in this context.76
Joyce also signalled that Gretta can be identified with Nora Barnacle: “Do you remember the three adjectives I have used in ‘The
Dead’ in speaking of your body? They are these: musical and strange
and perfumed.”77 The sentence in the story reads:“But now after the
kindling of so many memories, the first touch of her body, musical
and strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust”
().
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
Geographical Reverberations
His close friend Constantine Curran observed of Joyce:“His memory
was a map of the town.”78 The influence of Vico should be observed
here. The Italian philosopher of the interplay between myth, memory
and history disrupted a cosy historicism, developing an alternative enlightened tradition.79 Memory was not for Vico a merely passive
record of experience but an active and dynamic force that opened
rather than restricted the imagination. William Blake despised “the
rotten rags of memory” precisely because he believed that this narrow
realist version of it precluded imagination and creativity in favour of
an empirical epistemology.Vico believed that memory involved imagination, ingenuity, even invention: “Memory thus has three different
aspects: memory when it remembers things, imagination when it alters or imitates them, and invention when it gives them a new turn or
puts them into proper arrangement and relationship.” That understanding informed Vico’s distinctive style: not the linear, discursive
method favoured by the mainstream enlightenment but a spiral of
connectivity, a recursive, clotted, elliptical matrix. The influence on
Joyce is clear. He felt a special affinity with this genius, neglected and
spurned in his own time and place—Naples in the early Eighteenth
Century—and yet judged by posterity to be its finest product. Naples
often appeared to other Italians as, in Antonio Gramsci’s dismissive
phrase, “un angolino morto della storia” [a dead end of history]. Vico’s
imaginative horizon never extended too far beyond the Sinus
Cumanus—the semi-circular Gulf of Naples, whose shape irresistibly
recalled Dublin Bay for Joyce.When Vico was exiled in Vatolla for nine
years, he took Naples with him in memory, imagination, desire . . . It
is within this expansive Viconian sense of memory that we should locate Joyce’s engagement with his native city.
Thus if we plot the city of Dublin as revealed in “The Dead,” we
find one of the codes to its complex historical narrative (see Figure
). The story is set across three different zones of the city—the medieval (now shabby) Catholic sector, the eighteenth-century Georgian grid of the “Protestant Ascendancy” and the expanding middleclass coastal suburbs. Joyce’s own imagination was drawn to the
“medieval” quality of the oldest part of Dublin. This area had been
the fashionable Catholic mercantile quarter until the end of the eighteenth century. It had lost out socially when the centre of gravity of
the city shifted irreversibly east and down-river under the aegis of the
Protestant parliament, with its set-piece Georgian squares and streets
and its land mark buildings like the Custom House and the “menacing” Four Courts (). The Catholic merchants had resisted tooth
and nail the decisive switch east of the Customs House, which they
knew would seal the fate of the old mercantile quarter of the city—
kev i n wh e lan
the Liberties, Stoneybatter and Usher’s Island. As the nineteenth century proceeded, vitality seeped out of the area, it lost its social cachet
and the dread tenementization inexorably encroached. Yet Joyce’s
imagination was drawn to this area of the city. He told Arthur Power:
“One of the most interesting things about Ireland is that we are still
fundamentally a medieval people, and that Dublin is still a medieval
city. I know that when I used to frequent the pubs around Christ
Church, I was always reminded of those medieval taverns in which
the sacred and the obscene jostle shoulders.”80 Joyce also believed that
the “old classical Europe” was destined to disappear, and that there
would be a return to medievalism. Thus Dublin’s classical inheritance
held little attraction for him; one finds no sustained treatment in
Joyce of the neo-classical city, despite its undoubted importance on a
European scale.
Set in this context, it is no surprise that “The Dead” is set on Usher’s
Island and concerns the desolate fall of the old houses of Usher into
multiple occupancy, the gregarious, poverty-stricken slums of
O’Casey’s plays.81 We are told on the first page of the story that the
aunts live in a “dark, gaunt house” () and soon after that they live
above a corn-factor’s offices (see Figure ). That this is a step down in
the world is hinted at in the aunts’ plaintive memory of the time when
their family had their own horse and trap (). That all three
Morkans are unmarried fits the demographic profile of post-Famine
Ireland, and the palpable sense that this is a terminal family. Usher’s Island is a setting which reinforces the social liminality of the Morkan
sisters, the sense of a cultural world which is out-of-kilter with the
present, and which is close to termination. Thus for the Morkans to
move there from Stoneybatter was not a step up the social ladder.82
Writing in , the Catholic historian William James Fitzpatrick describes Usher’s Island as “the fashionable R. C. district of the old city
now fallen in status.”83 By contrast with the downwardly mobile
Morkans, the Conroys are on the rise. T. J. Conroy is an upwardly mobile, respectable Catholic in a “Protestant” job with the Ports and
Docks board who lives in Monkstown, one of the exclusive “Protestant” suburbs to which the wealthy had fled after the Union, leaving
the old city to tenementize and moulder.84 His domineering and socially conscious wife called her children the fashionable names Constantine and Gabriel: “It was she who had chosen the names for her
sons for she was very sensible of the dignity of family life” (). Contrast the old fashioned Morkan names of Ellen, Julia, Kate, Pat and
Mary Jane. She steered her sons into the respectable middle-class occupations of priest and lecturer.85 She bitterly opposed Gabriel’s marriage to the “country-cute” Greta (). Constantine is a Catholic
priest stationed at Balbriggan on the railway line to the north of the
city. Mary Jane’s pupils come from “the better-class families on the
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
kev i n wh e lan
Figure : The geography of “The Dead.” Drawn by Matthew Stout.
Figure : Harold Clarke,“The Last Hour of the Night,” . The Georgian
house shown on the right of the image is remarkably similar to the house on
Usher’s Island where “The Dead” is set.
Kingstown and Dalkey line” (). She herself plays in the new church
of Haddington Road, which bridges the Georgian city and the middle-class world of the coastal suburbs, while her aunt plays for Adam’s
and Eve’s, the infinitely less fashionable Franciscan chapel located in
the city slums.
An additional reason for the Usher’s Island setting is that the adjacent Guinesses brewery is on the site of “Lord Galway’s Walk.”86 This
introduces both a Galway and a Jacobite theme. The Huguenot Lord
Galway had been the victor at the Battle of Aughrim and the principal instigator of the Penal Laws, seen in Catholic narrative as a betrayal
of the Articles of Limerick.87 As a result, the Wild Geese regiments
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
had flocked to the service of France in the eighteenth century, vainly
awaiting a French invasion in support of the Stuarts.88 It is also possible that the island setting is intended to recall Nun’s Island in Galway,
Nora’s birthplace. The location also helps the east-west symbolism of
the story. Gabriel looks east always—to the continent, to Monkstown,
to the Gresham Hotel.
It should also be pointed out that Francis Magan lived on Usher’s
Island. In the s, Magan had just been sensationally unmasked as
the most famous informer of , and this context fits into the
complex series of betrayals in the story. Lord Edward FitzGerald was
betrayed on Usher’s Island, on his way to Lord Moira’s House, but his
betrayer long remained unknown, despite intense archival scrutiny. A
great sensation was accordingly created by the publication in by
W. J. Fitzpatrick of Secret Service Under Pitt which “outed” Francis
Magan as the Catholic informer who had betrayed the Protestant
Lord Edward Fitzgerald for blood money.89 Magan had been recruited
by the “Sham Squire” Francis Higgins. Magan, the secretive betrayer,
was a respectable Catholic barrister who lived at Usher’s Island,
which had been the residence of Dr John Carpenter, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin in the Penal Days.90 The house was inherited by
Magan’s eccentric spinster sister Elizabeth Magan, who vegetated
there for twenty years in one room of the old house: “gloomily passing the closing years of a hidden life” . . .“the garden was covered from
end to end with some feet deep of cinders” . . .“covered in rank nettles” . . .“sewers and gratings choked.” She herself had been betrothed
to Mathias O’Kelly’s brother “but he broke away.”“Whether the bridal
feast had been absolutely spread is not stated.”91 Here we have a direct
echo of Julia Morkan “Arrayed for the Bridal.” The Irish poet William
Allingham wrote about the sealed room in the Magan house as if the
feast had been laid and never subsequently removed:
Within there were carpets and cushions of dust,
The wood was half rot, and the metal half-rust:
Old curtains, half cobwebs, hung grimly aloof
’Twas a spiders’ Elysium from cellar to roof.
But they pried not upstairs, through the dust and the gloom,
Nor peeped at the door of the wonderful room
That gossips made much of, in accents subdued
But whose inside no mortal might brag to have viewed.
Full forty years since turned the key in that door;
’Tis a room deaf and dumb ’mid the city’s uproar,
The guests for whose joyance that table was spread
May now enter as ghosts for they’re everyone dead.92
Joyce himself had an intimate familiarity with . We know that
his father pointed out to him the home of Francis Higgins on
kev i n wh e lan
Stephen’s Green and that J. J. O’Neill, a librarian in the National Library, showed him the Dominick Street house of Leonard McNally, the
other notorious informer “outed” by W. J. Fitzpatrick, as well as the
Molesworth Street residence of the Emmet family.93 That interest was
deepened by the centenary commemoration which, in Dublin, had a
strong emphasis on Lord Edward. One visitor to Dublin in this period
was startled when he asked a cabbie to take him to the best-known
tourist spot in Dublin: the driver took him straight to Thomas Street
and pointed out the house where Lord Edward was arrested.94 In a remarkable little book called Memorable Dublin Houses (published in
Dublin in ), Wilmot Harrison describes over one hundred city
houses with literary or historical connections. Just over half were linked
to the rebellion, and the highest number of entries for an individual was seven for Lord Edward. Remarkably, Magan’s house at
Usher’s Island was also included.95 A three mile ceremonial way
passed from the site of Wolfe Tone’s putative statue at the top of
Grafton Street, via his birthplace in Stafford Street to St. Michans
(burial place of the brothers Sheares), via Moira House on Usher’s Island (where Lord Edward had been almost taken) to Thomas Street
(where Lord Edward was arrested) and then St. Catherine’s Church
(outside which Robert Emmet was executed in ).96 In and
, this became a secularised pilgrim route for nationalist processions
commemorating the centenary of (with its motto “Who fears to
speak of ’?” taken from the most popular commemorative song
“The Memory of the Dead” by John Kells Ingram) and the execution
of Emmet in .This ’ way traverses the area in which “The Dead”
is set. That Joyce was intimately acquainted with this theme is
demonstrated in the “Wandering Rocks” section of Ulysses where Tom
Kernan muses as he walks down Island Street on Usher’s Island:
Somewhere here Lord Edward Fitzgerald escaped from Major Sirr. Stables behind
Moira House. Damn good gin that was. Fine dashing young nobleman. Good stock,
of course. That ruffian the sham squire, with his violet gloves, gave him away. Course
they were on the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that is: Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing that ballad touchingly. Masterly
rendition. At the siege of Ross did my father fall.97
This motif of betrayal surfaces in a series of incidents in the story. Lily,
pregnant and abandoned, resentfully claims: “The men that is now is
only all palaver and what they can get from you” (). As one of the
aunts notes, “She’s not the girl she was at all” (). “The Lass of
Aughrim” ballad has exactly this theme (see Appendix D). There is
also the betrayal of Gabriel by Gretta, which mirrors Joyce’s own fear
of betrayal by Nora Barnacle.98
Thus, the house on Usher’s Island forms the centerpiece of the
story. But Joyce does not offer a merely sociological, historical or ar
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
chitectural account of it. All those are present, but the writing itself
cannot be reduced to these conditions of its creation. He explained his
writing method to Arthur Power: “In the intellectual method, you
plan everything beforehand. When you arrive at the description, say,
of a house, you try and remember that house exactly, which after all is
journalism. But the emotionally creative writer refashions that house
and creates a significant image in the only significant world, the world
of our emotions. The more we are tied to fact and try to give a correct impression, the further we are from what is significant.”99
Musical Reverberations
In the treatment of music, the class and cultural gradations are finely
shaded, in the interplay between traditional (folk song), popular (pantomime) and classical (operatic) music. This creates, as with the literary, historical and geographical references, a series of interlocking layers. “Thought-tormented music” is an apt phrase to describe its role.
“The Lass of Aughrim,” for example, releases the emotional charge in
the story. It belonged to “the vernacular undergrowth of song” which
flourished in the Dublin of Joyce’s youth.100 This is a long narrative
ballad, with the evocative or implied narrative characteristic of the
Irish song tradition.The ellipsis permits a lyric intensity which deepens
the power of these haunting songs. Versions of this song had first appeared in print in Scotland in the early eighteenth century as “The Lass
of Loch Royal.”101 From there, it spread from north to south in Ireland,
acquiring a local habitation and a name as “The Lass of Aughrim,” the
association of the Gregory family with Galway perhaps cementing the
link. In the ballad, the mother of Lord Gregory rejects the girl who
has borne his love child: she is forced out into the threatening rain,
wind and storm, and baby and mother die, to the intense grief of a
stricken Gregory, who curses his callous mother. The snow in “The
Dead” reprises this aspect of the song. Certainly Joyce knew and sang a
version: according to his sisters, he was “perpetually singing at home. He
purported to know verses of it.”102 It is quite possible that Joyce, a
voracious reader, knew the long, thirty-five verse Scottish version
printed in Francis Child’s five volume The English and Scottish Popular
Songs (–). The Barnacle version included the following lines:
If you’ll be the lass of Aughrim.
As I am taking you mean to be
Tell me the first token
That passed between you and me.
Oh don’t you remember
That night on yon lean hill
When we both met together
Which I am sorry now to tell.
kev i n wh e lan
The rain falls on my yellow locks
And the dew it wets my skin
My babe lies cold within my arms
Lord Gregory let me in.103
In considering the song, it is important not to prioritise the printed
words. As Gabriel Conroy registers, its strange attraction stemmed
from the fact that it was sung in the distinctive Irish way, on the pentatonic rather the diatonic scale.104 Joyce understood the power of
music to capture emotion and sought to replicate its effect in his
prose. Arthur Power describes him at his Parisian parties: “Towards
midnight Joyce would go over to the piano and try running his fingers in a ripple over the keys. He would sing in a light and pleasant
tenor voice many Irish ballads in which romance and satire were
combined, and which were the secret source of his inspiration.”105
The argument over tenors (Irish, English and continental) replays
the earlier cultural argument over language.106 The Pope’s axing of the
women from the church choir signals one more generational shift.
Mary Jane’s “Academy Piece,”“full of difficult runs and passages” loses
its audience and, like Gabriel’s literary references, suggests an inability
to command emotion, a retreat from the warmth and fullness of life
into a merely technical or professional accomplishment. Freddy Malins’s championing of the Negro tenor in the music hall pantomime
introduces another theme—the role of popular culture. The Hydean
and Yeatsian animus to low-brow culture took in the intense popularity of the music halls which had sprung up in the city in the last
two decades of the nineteenth century. For Yeats, there was no difference between the appeal of the “yellow press” and the music hall—
both were equally degenerate manifestations of modern urban, mass
culture. Joyce embraced the demotic elements of mass culture (he was
soon to be involved in introducing to Dublin the cinema, whose
montage technique was to play a powerful role in liberating his mature style from late Victorian naturalism). Malins, in some respects the
most decent of all the characters in the short story, rallies to the Negro singer’s defence: “Is it because he’s only a black?” ().107 The
racial theme is also characteristic of Joyce, and foreshadows his choice
of the Jewish Leopold Bloom as the central protagonist of Ulysses. The
upwardly mobile Mary Jane quickly switches the discussion back to a
discussion of what she calls “the legitimate opera” and Bartell D’Arcy
talks about London, Paris and Milan—just as Gabriel earlier had retreated to talk of the continent when pressurised by Molly Ivors about
Ireland (–). These cultural tensions are also evident in the
dances at the party: the waltz, for example, was frowned on by IrishIrelanders as a degenerate foreign importation, which encouraged too
much physical contact.108 The lancers and quadrilles had both been
introduced to Ireland by the military and spread from Dublin Castle
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
downwards. In , the first Irish céilí had been held at Bloomfield
Hall in London, and this period witnessed the invention of a series of
specifically “Irish” dances, such as “The Walls of Limerick” and “The
Siege of Ennis,” designed to minimise any risk of erotic contact.109
Once more, the impact of the Famine had been to seriously weaken
the vigorous vernacular tradition of dance. One reason for Miss Ivors’s
abrupt departure from the party may have been because she disapproved of the type of dances that were occurring there.
Music in “The Dead”110
Singers
Georgina Burns
Therese Tietjens
Ilma de Murzka
Campanini
Zelia Trebelli
Antonio Giuglini
Ravelli Aramburo
William Parkinson
Enrico Caruso
Negro at the
Gaiety Theatre
Hamburgh
Croatia
Italy
Paris
Italy
England
Italy
–
–
–
–
–
soprano
soprano
tenor
mezzo-soprano
tenor
tenor
Operas
Mignon
Paris
Dinorah
Lucrezia Borgia
Paris
Milan
Ambroise Thomas [after Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre]
Meyerbeer
Gaetano Donizetti [after Hugo]
Aria
“Yes let me like a soldier fall” from Maritana [London, ]
by Vincent Wallace (–)
Dance
Waltz, lancers, quadrilles
Conclusion
In , Peter Ackroyd reminded us:
We must not think of time as some continually flowing stream moving in one direction. Think of it more as a lava flow from some unknown source of fire. Some parts
of it move forward, some parts branch off from it and form separate channels, some
parts of it slow down and eventually harden. There are parts of London, I believe,
where time has actually hardened and come to an end.111
In geological terms, Joyce shared Ackroyd’s igneous rather than sedimentary view of historical layering. Rather than each historical layer
been laid down uniformly over its predecessors, smoothly and quietly
kev i n wh e lan
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
Figure : Cultural and historical layering in “The Dead.” Drawn by Matthew Stout.
building up, and with each earlier layer completely buried under its
successor, Joyce believed in an unconformable geology, whose layers
abruptly impinged on each other. Tremendous stresses and strains
wrenched settled geological formations asunder, reassembling them in
violent unions and then juxtaposing them in unpredictable combinations. The underlying geology remained unstable: old forces rumbled
away deep in the substrate and at any time volcanic stresses in the
bedrock could be suddenly released by unstoppable eruptions which
pierced the brittle surface. In a country like Ireland with a troubled
history, the seemingly quiet surface was a deceptive crust, which offered only a temporary stay against the flows of unfinished history
seething beneath it. In such circumstances, there could be no easy partitioning of the past from the present in Ireland. The city itself was a
palimpsest, a multilogue of competing versions of history and culture.
Its monuments and traces reached down into the layers from which
they derived their power and presence, their aura (see Figure ).
This analysis of the cultural history embedded in “The Dead” allows
us to make some wider claims. Firstly, it insists on the impact of The
Famine on Joyce and on its primacy as a theme in “The Dead”; it may
well be that a similar reading strategy could decipher it in other texts
of the revival period. Secondly, this essay demonstrates that an account
of writing in post-Famine Ireland which neglects the linguistic transition in the period is fatally flawed. The language—Irish—in which
the experience of the Famine was actually lived by the bulk of its victims was itself one of its casualties. The trauma was to be increasingly
remembered in a different language to the one in which it was experientially endured. Despite the absolute centrality of this point, it is
scarcely glanced at in recent accounts of the cultural history of the
Famine. It is this abrupt linguistic transition which differentiates the
Irish Famine, its representation and its memory from comparable historical disasters. Palestinians remember the expulsions from their
homeland as Al-nakbah (The Disaster) and do so in Arabic, the language in which they lived the experience. European Jews writing
about the Shoah (Holocaust) have mainly utilised the language that
they used at the time of their experience of it. Thus the representation of the Irish Famine in the English language presented remarkable
difficulties. The Irish Literary Revival itself can be seen as one coping
strategy. In a wider sense, general trauma theory needs to be modified
in the Irish context to take account of this linguistic lesion.
These are not contexts in which it has been usual to locate Joyce. It
is the contention of this essay that we need to pay attention to them.
Joyce understood the force of William Faulkner’s aphorism:“The past
is not dead. It is not even past.” The scale of his achievement is to
weave this complex historical understanding and narrative imagination into what seems at first reading a standard naturalist text.
kev i n wh e lan
Appendix A
Thomas Moore,“Oh, ye Dead”:
Oh, ye Dead; oh, ye Dead; whom we know by the light you give
From your cold gleaming eyes, though you move like men who live,
Why leave you thus your graves,
In far off fields and waves,
Where the worm and the sea-bird only know your bed,
To haunt this spot where all
Those eyes that wept your fall,
And the hearts that wail’d you, like your own, lie dead?
It is true, it is true, we are shadows cold and wan;
And the fair and the brave whom we lov’d on earth are gone;
But still thus ev’n in death,
So sweet the living breath
Of the fields and flow’rs in our youth we wandered o’er,
That ere, condemned, we go
To freeze ’mid Hecla’s snow,
We would taste it awhile, and think we live once more!112
Appendix B
Opening of Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy:
Snow. Everywhere. As far as the eye could reach—fifty miles, looking southward from
the highest white peak,—filling ravines and gulches, and dropping from the walls of
canyons in white shroud-like drifts; fashioning the dividing ridge into the likeness of
a monstrous grave, hiding the bases of giant pines, and completely covering young trees
and larches; rimming with porcelain the bowl-like edge of still cold lakes, and undulating in motionless white billows to the edge of the distant horizon. Snow lying
everywhere over the California Sierras on the th day of March , and still falling.
It had been snowing for ten days; snowing in finely granulated powder, in damp,
spongy flakes, in thin, feathery plumes; snowing from a leaden sky steadily; snowing
fiercely, shaken out of purple-black clouds in white flocculent masses, or dropping in
long level lines, like white lances from the tumbled and broken heavens. But always
silently! The woods were so choked with it,—the branches were so laden with it,—
it had so permeated, filled and possessed earth and sky; it had so cushioned and muffled the ringing rocks and echoing hills, that all sound was deadened. The strongest
gust, the fiercest blast, awoke no sigh or complaint from the snow-packed, rigid files
of forest. There was no cracking of bough nor crackle of underbrush; the overladen
branches of pine and fir yielded and gave way without a sound. The silence was vast,
measureless, complete! Nor could it be said that any outward sign of life or motion
changed the fixed outlines of the stricken landscape. Above, there was no play of light
and shadow, only the occasional deepening of storm or night. Below, no bird winged
its flight across the white expanse, no beast haunted the confines of the black woods;
whatever of brute nature might once have inhabited those solitudes had long since
flown to the lowlands.
There was no track or imprint; whatever foot might have left its mark upon this
waste, each succeeding snowfall obliterated all trace or record. Every morning the
solitude was virgin and unbroken; a million tiny feet had stepped into the track and
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
filled it up. And yet in the centre of this desolation, in the very stronghold of this dim
fortress, there was a mark of human toil.
[Trees felled to indicate blazed tree with canvas square on it; Canvas gives notice
that Captain Conroy’s party of emigrants are lost in the snow and are camping up the
canyon. Starving. Itinerary given. Names of living—eight men including Gabriel
Conroy, three women including Grace Conroy—names of three (children) who died
on route, and of one man lost.]
The language of suffering is not apt to be artistic or studied, but I think that rhetoric
could not improve this actual record. So I let it stand, even as it stood this th day of
March, , half-hidden by a thin film of damp snow, the snow-whitened hand stiffened and pointing rigidly to the fateful canyon like the finger of death.113
Appendix C
James Clarence Mangan,“Siberia”:
In Siberia’s wastes
The Ice-wind’s breath
Woundeth like the toothed steel;
Lost Siberia doth reveal
Only blight and death.
Blight and death alone.
No summer shines.
Night is interblent with Day.
In Siberia’s wastes always
The blood blackens, the heart pines.
In Siberia’s wastes
No tears are shed,
For they freeze within the brain.
Nought is felt but dullest pain,
Pain acute, yet dead;
Pain as in a dream,
When years go by
Funeral-paced, yet fugitive.
When man lives, and doth not live,
Doth not live—nor die.
In Siberia’s wastes
Are sands and rocks.
Nothing blooms of green or soft,
But the snow-peaks rise aloft
And the gaunt ice-blocks.
And the exile there
Is one with those;
They are part and he is part,
For the sands are in his heart,
And the killing snows.
Therefore in those wastes
None curse the Czar.
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Each man’s tongue is cloven by
The North Blast, that heweth nigh
With sharp scymitar.
And such doom each drees,
Till, hunger-gnawn,
And cold-slain, he at length sinks there,
Yet scarce more a corpse than ere
His last breath was drawn.114
Appendix D
“The Lass of Aughrim”:
I am a king’s daughter that’s straight from Cappoquin,
in search of Lord Gregory, may God I find him.
The rain beats on my yellow locks, and the dews wet my skin,
My babe is cold in my arms, Lord Gregory, let me in.
Lord Gregory he’s not here, and henceforth can’t be seen,
He is gone to Bonnie Scotland to bring home his new queen.
Leave now these windows and likewise this hall,
for it’s deep in the sea you should hide your downfall.
I’ll shoe your babe’s little feet, I’ll put gloves on her hands,
And I’ll tie your babe’s middle with a long and green band.
I’ll comb your babe’s yellow locks with an ivory comb,
And I’ll be your babe’s father until Lord Gregory comes home.
Do you remember, Lord Gregory, that night in Cappoquin,
when we both changed pocket handkerchiefs and that against my will,
for yours was pure linen, love, and mine was coarse cloth,
yours cost one guinea and mine but one groat.
Leave now these windows and likewise this hall
for it’s deep in the sea you should hide your downfall.
Do you remember, darling Gregory, that night in Cappoquin,
when we both changed rings on our fingers and I against my will,
for yours was pure silver, love, and mine was black tin.
Yours cost one guinea and mine but one cent.
Leave now these windows and likewise this hall
for it’s deep in the sea you should hide your downfall.
My curse on you, mother, and my curse it being sore,
Since I heard the lass of Arms came a-rapping to my door.
Lie down, you foolish son, and lie down and sleep,
for it’s long ago a weary lass sat wailing in the deep.
Come saddle me the black horse, the brown and the grey,
Come saddle me the best horse in my stable this day.
And I’ll range over valleys, over mountains so wide.
And I’ll find the lass of Arms and lie by her side.115
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
Notes
For valuable assistance of various kinds, I am grateful to Dudley Andrew, Peter Brooks, Ted
Cachey, Joe Cleary, Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons, Catherine Morris, Mathew Stout, Jay Walton, and Mary Thompson.
Denis Ireland, Eamon De Valera Doesn’t See It Through (Cork: Forum Press, ), .
For many years, the standard history was The Great Famine; Studies in Irish History
1845–1852, ed. R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams (Dublin: Browne and
Nolan, ). More recent general treatments are C. O Grada, Black ’47 and Beyond;The
Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
), and J. Donnelly,The Great Irish Potato Famine (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, ). A good modern cultural history is Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland; Rebellion, Famine and Emigration (New York: Oxford University Press, ).
Chris Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ).
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland;The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan
Cape, ).
Note the deaths of both men in , about the time that Joyce was contemplating writing “The Dead.” He was later to present an unflattering portrait of Cusack as “The Citizen” in Ulysses.
W. B. Yeats,“Ancestral Houses” in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, ),
.
Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or,The Story of the Land League Revolution
(London: Harper, ), . Two good modern treatments of Davitt are T. W. Moody,
Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846–1882 (Oxford: Clarendon, ); and Carla King, Michael
Davitt (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, ).
Joyce admired the clear sense of purpose of the Fenians. His friend Arthur Power said of
Joyce in Paris:“There was much of the Fenian about him—his dark suiting, his wide hat,
his light carriage and his intense expression—a literary conspirator, who was determined
to destroy the oppressive and respectable cultural structures under which we had been
reared” (Power, Conversations with James Joyce [Dublin: Lilliput Press, ], ).
Cited in D. McCartney,“Parnell, Davitt and the Land Question” in Famine, Land and Culture in Ireland, ed. Carla King (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, ), .
Cited in King, Michael Davitt, .
Cited in P. Travers,“Davitt after the Land League” in King (ed.), Famine, . Davitt never
allowed his commitment to Ireland to obliterate his sense of wider responsibilities. He
wrote about, among other issues, the pogroms against Jews in Russia, the plight of the aborigines in Australia, and of the Kanakas in the South Sea islands. Among the countries he
visited were Palestine, Egypt, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Italy and
the United States. His own suggestion for his epitaph was: “Here lies a man who from his
cradle to the grave was considered by his foes to be a traitor to alien rule and oppression in
Ireland and in every land outside her shores” (King, Davitt, 66).
Austin Clark, A Penny in the Clouds; More Memories of Ireland and England (Dublin: Moytura Press, ), . The bleak story “Hunger,” set among the Dublin poor of the early
twentieth century, was published in Etched in Moonlight (London: MacMillan, ): –.
Una Agnew, The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh (Dublin: Columba Press, ),
–. Kavanagh’s grandfather, James Kevany, had been born at Easkey, County Sligo,
and was an Irish speaker. He was appointed National school teacher in Kednaminsha in
County Monaghan, where his name (due to his strong accent) was inadvertently written
as Kavanagh, thus severing the family from their Gaelic ancestry. He was sacked (following the birth of an illegitimate child) and ended up as a workhouse teacher and master
in Tullamore, County Offaly from –, losing all contact with his illegitimate
child, the father of Patrick Kavanagh (–).
See the suggestive comments on Joyce’s later food fetish in John Garvin, James Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, ), –. In James
Stephen’s “Hunger,” the starving Dublin family envisages a feast, of the type presented in
“The Dead”:“He used to make up lists of the gigantic feeds they would have when the
kev i n wh e lan
ship came home (what ship he did not say, nor was it understood that he expected one)
and he or she or the children would remind each other of foods which had been left out
of his catalogue: for no food of which they knew the name could justly be omitted from
their future” ().
Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, );
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, ).
W. B. Yeats,“A General Introduction to My Work,” in Selected Prose, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan, ), . Note Gabriel’s defensive comment in “The Dead” that
“Irish is not my language”: James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. T. Brown (London: Penguin, ),
. Subsequent references to Dubliners will be made parenthetically in the text.
Seamus Deane,“Dumbness and Eloquence” in Ireland and Post-Colonialism, ed. C. Carroll
(Cork: Cork University Press, forthcoming).
James Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
Joyce, Occasional Writing, . Joyce makes him an old man, despite his actual age being .
Joyce, Occasional Writing, .
Timothy Charles Harrington, The Maamtrasna Massacre (Dublin: Nation Office, ).The
crucial discussion of this is by John Garvin,“The Trial of Festy King” in James Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom, ‒. A more recent discussion of this still controversial miscarriage of
justice is Jarlath Waldron, Maamtrasna;The Murders and the Mystery (Dublin: E. Burke, ).
Garvin, Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom, .
C. Juliet,“Meeting Beckett” in Triquarterly (–), .
David Lloyd, “Violence and the Constitution of the Novel” in Anomalous States: Irish
Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, ): –; J. Kenny, “No Such
Scene: Tradition and the Contemporary Irish Novel,” in New Voices in Contemporary Irish
Criticism, ed. P. Mathews (Dublin: Four Courts Press, ): –.
There is an illuminating treatment of this theme in David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor
Literature; James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, ). Note too that Joyce considered American literature,
like Irish literature, to be a minor one; hence his interest in writers like Bret Harte, Jack
London and R. W. Service (see Power, Conversations, ).
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or,The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. P. Mensah
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), .
This aphasia creates the unappeasable desire for a first language, a mourning for what one
never had, a language of the other but radically different from the language of the other as
the language of the master or colonist. This other language would speak the memory of
the originary defect, would describe what did not happen, would be a language of spectrality, negative traces and scars. Since this prior language does not exist, it must be generated from within the resources of the given language. This is the double hand that Derrida
possesses in relation to French—a hand reaching out to touch and thank, a hand to restrain, and to keep him at a distance. Derrida describes this impulse of love and of aggression as a caressing of French with borrowed claws, as he feels simultaneously both
outside and inside the language. This outside space is an elsewhere whose geography and
language were unknown and prohibited—an elsewhere to which Derrida feels he has
been exported in advance. This is equally the territory of Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz
Korzeniowski’s metamorphosis into Joseph Conrad, the modernist novelist, or of Franz
Kafka and Paul Celan, learning to write in German as a way of exiting their Judaism:“They
wanted it, but their hind legs still stuck to the Judaism of the father and their forelegs could
not find any new terrain—the despair that followed constituted their inspiration” (Letter
from Franz Kafka to Max Brod, June ; cited in Derrida, Monolingualism, –).
Derrida, Monolingualism, .
Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, ). A comparable example, in this case involving Native American languages, is discussed in Louise Erdrich,
“Two Languages in One Mind But Just One in Heart,” New York Times, May .
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (London, ), .
Joyce, Occasional Writing, .
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
Joyce, A Portrait, .
S. Deane, “Dead Ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge
& Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ): –.
The question of the extent of Joyce’s knowledge of Irish remains open. He entered the
Catholic University in and, in the winter of –, special classes were arranged
for the university students at the Conradh Na Gaeilge [Gaelic League] offices (
O’Connell Street). George Clancy, the model for Davin in A Portrait, was a prime mover
in this. We know from his own account that Joyce attended some of these classes, and that
Patrick Pearse was among his teachers. The Irish-language newspaper An Claideamh
Soluis of // lists consecutively John F. Byrne and James Joyce in attendance at the
Antient Concert Rooms at a meeting on “The Irish language and education” [Byrne was
Joyce’s close friend, the model for Cranly in A Portrait]. A Mr. Joyce was also in attendance at Pearse’s lecture on “The literature of the Cuchulainn epoch” (See T. O. Fiaich,
“James Joyce ag foghlaim Gaeilge” in Everyman I [], –).
A celebrated book by Daniel Corkery The Hidden Ireland (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son,
) was later to argue that the genuine Ireland of the eighteenth century survived in
the oral, Irish-speaking culture of the remote countryside, far from the spurious and alien
glamour of Georgian Dublin.
Luke Gibbons,“‘Where Wolfe Tone’s Statue Was Not’: Joyce, Monuments and Memory,”
in History and Memory in Modern Ireland, ed. Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ): –.
Joyce, A Portrait, . Buck Whaley built the house on Stephen’s Green which housed
the Catholic University of Cardinal Newman and its successor the Royal University,
where Gabriel Conroy of “The Dead” teaches Romance languages.Whaley, whose family
rejoiced in the nickname “Burnchapel” for their notorious anti-Catholicism, represents
one type of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Tone and Parnell represent another version of the
type, but with strong nationalist leanings. Note the strong Gothic subtext here.
The effect is heightened because the Catholic University was then staffed by Jesuits—an
extraterritorial order in that they were not under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the local bishop—recruited from “alien” England.
Joyce, A Portrait, .
Joyce, A Portrait, .
Balzac is citing himself here. The original use of the motto comes from Le Médicin de
Campagne. Dr. Benassis flees Paris after an unhappy love affair and ends up in a mountain
community. He claims to have found “Fuge, Late, Tace” on the walls of a cell in the
monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, deserted after the French Revolution. I am grateful
to Peter Brooks of Yale University for this identification. Martial’s Epigrams (Chapter ,
epigram , vol. I, ) contains “Leitus venit: sta, fuge, curre, late.”
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce refers to the “Cultic twalette.” A critical faultline is embedded
here also. Following Edward Said’s positive assessment of Yeats, Declan Kiberd has offered
an essentially celebratory reading of Yeats’s cultural politics. (See E. Said, Nationalism,
Colonialism and Literature:Yeats and Decolonization [Derry: Field Day, ]; D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, –.) A much darker version, following the Joycean line, is offered by
Seamus Deane, “The Literary Myths of the Revival” in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern
Irish literature 1880–1980 (London: Faber and Faber, ): –.
W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London, ), . There is a good treatment of this theme
in W. Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands (Austin: University of Texas Press, ).
Joyce would have endorsed Yeats’s stinging dismissal of Irish culture as one “made timid
by a modern popularisation of Catholicism sprung from the aspidistra and not from the
roots of Jesse”:Yeats,“General Introduction to My Work,” Selected Criticism, .The term
“Devotional Revolution” was coined by the American historian Emmet Larkin to describe the extraordinary changes in the devotional and institutional life of Irish Catholicism in the post-Famine period, when the church metamorphosed from its deeper Gaelic
vernacular form into a more bourgeois, Roman form. The transition had been massively
accelerated by the cultural carnage wrought by the Famine. Thus the form of Catholicism practised in Ireland in the late nineteenth century was not an aspect of tradition but
kev i n wh e lan
of modernity: E. Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland –,” American
Historical Review (June ): -. Emer Nolan, in James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, ), offers a revisionist reading of the complexities of Joyce’s attitude.
Joyce, A Portrait, .The traditional Dúiche Seoighe, the “Joyce Country,” literally the hereditary lands of the Joyces, was in west Galway, an area devastated by the Famine. Joyce, obsessive about origins, would have considered this Irish-speaking region as his ancestral home.
Cited from United Irishman (newspaper) by W. Dillon in Life of John Mitchel, vols (London, ), i.. Such scenes developed the saeva indignatio in Mitchel, as he himself acknowledged: “I had the misfortune, I and my children, to be born in a country which
suffered itself to be oppressed and humiliated by another”: Dillon, Life of Mitchel, ii..
Mitchel’s savage account of , The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) was to provide a
compelling, emotionally-charged narrative of the Famine which dominated subsequent
nationalist and especially Irish-American memory of it: see James Donnelly, Great Irish
Potato Famine (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, ), –.
W. Haskins, Travels in England, France, Italy and Ireland (Boston: P. Donahoe, ), .
T. Davis,“Our National Language,” The Nation, April .
J. White, “The Cusack Papers: New Evidence on the Knock Apparition,” in History Ireland, iv. (): –.
Douglas Hyde,“My Memories of the Irish Revival” in The Voice of Ireland, ed. W. Fitzgerald (Dublin, ), . Hyde’s own early notebooks offer a vivid example of the linguistic strain in Ireland in the immediate post–Famine period. At the age of thirteen in
, among his copperplate exercises in Latin, Greek, French and English, are jotted
down what appears to be an extraordinary farrago of nonsense or gibberish words. Closer
study reveals them to be a preliminary attempt to transcribe phonetically the words of an
Irish-language poem by Antoine O’Raifteire (ob. ). Hyde went on to found the
Gaelic League in to safeguard the future of Irish as a living modern language. See
the introduction by Dominic Daly to Douglas Hyde, Songs Ascribed to Raftery (Shannon:
Irish University Press, ), vii.
The Shannon River geographically and symbolically separates the east from the west of
Ireland. Joyce’s adjective “mutinous” recalls the last stand of the Jacobites in Limerick, the
city on the Shannon (). This Jacobite sub-text runs like a seam through the story.
Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, vols (London: Viking, ), ii..
Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce (New York: James Joyce Society, ), .
Furey is modelled on Michael Bodkin, an admirer of Nora Barnacle, who had died in
. To Joyce’s chagrin, her initial attraction to him was because he reminded her of
Bodkin. The Joyce/Barnacle relationship is in play in the Gabriel/Gretta one.
It is important that Michael is said to come from Oughterard in the Joyce country, and
that his country origins are stressed by Gretta. Earlier, Gabriel had tried to distance his
wife from the suggestion that she was a country girl.
This replicates events in Nora Barnacle’s life: she had worked in the Presentation convent
in Galway.
James Flannery, Dear Harp of My Country;The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore (Nashville:
J. S. Sanders, ), .
The Wild Geese were the (overwhelmingly Catholic) Irish soldiers who, after their
crushing defeat at Aughrim in , went to fight in the armies of France and Spain, but
always (as the name itself suggests) remained intent on returning to Ireland with a conquering Jacobite army. See Joyce’s own commentary in his Occasional Writings, .
Kevin Whelan, Fellowship of Freedom;The United Irishmen and 1798 (Cork: Cork University Press, ).
A. O’Reilly, Memoirs of an Emigrant Milesian, vols (London, ), iii..
Ellmann, Joyce, .
Aughrim was the decisive battle for the Catholic cause in the Williamite War—far more
so than the better known Battle of the Boyne. On Aughrim, see the following: E. Ó
Muirgheasa, “Briseadh Eachdhroim” [The Defeat at Aughrim] in Dhá chéad de cheoltaibh
Uladh [Two Centuries of Ulster Song] (Dublin, ), ; and B. Ó Buachalla, “Dán ar
Chath Eachroma” [A Poem on the Battle of Aughrim] in Éigse xiv, (): –; B. Ó
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
Buachalla, Aisling ghéar. Na Stíobhartaigh agus an t-aos léinn 1603–1788 [Bitter Allegory: The
Stewarts and the Irish Learned Class –] (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, ); E. Ó
Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause;A Fatal Attraction (Dublin: Four Courts Press, ).
Indeed when Nora’s alcoholic father retreated from Galway to Oughterard, he wanted to
reassume the Ó Cadhain name. The surname Coyne is particularly linked to counties
Galway and Mayo: Edward MacLysaght, The Surnames of Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, ), .
Garvin, Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom, .
G. Friedrich, “Bret Harte as a Source for James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’” Philogical Quarterly,
xxxiii. (), –. On September , Joyce had written from Rome to Stanislaus: “Do you think I should waste lire on buying a book of Gissing’s or should I buy
a volume of Bret Harte?”
For the details of the Donner party, see The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, ed. Michael
Glazier (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, ), .
Joyce described Mangan as “a true poet” to his brother (see S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper:
James Joyce’s Early Years [New York: McGraw Hill, ], ). He later wrote two long and
penetrating accounts of Mangan in and —the year he finished “The Dead” (see
The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan; Poems 1845–1847, ed. Jacques Chuto, R.
Holzapfel and E. Mangan [Dublin: Irish Academic Press, ], ).
G. Moore, A Drama in Muslin (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, ), –.
Moore, A Drama in Muslin, .
Moore, A Drama in Muslin, .
Moore, A Drama in Muslin, .
James Joyce, Poems and “Exiles,” ed. J. C. C. Mays (Dublin: Penguin, ), .
Joyce’s personal copy in the Beinecke Library (Yale University) bears the date ; see
Fig. . My thanks to Dudley Andrew for checking the inscription. Stanislaus lists it among
his brother’s reading: S. Joyce, James Joyce’s Early Years, . In , Joyce judged it to be
the best of Moore’s novels—“fine, original work”: Joyce, Occasional Writing, .
Joyce championed Ibsen in his essay of (“Ibsen’s New Drama,” Occasional Writings,
–); Stanislaus talked about his brother’s “cult of Ibsen” (James Joyce’s Early Years, );
and Arthur Power of “the merit of Ibsen” as the first of three issues about which he was
“quite fanatical” (Conversations, ).
Another possible source, closely read by John Kelleher, is the Paris edition by Whitley Stokes of Togail Bruidne Da Dhearga [The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel], an early
Irish mythological tract (see J. Kelleher, “Irish History and Mythology in ‘The Dead,’”
Review of Politics xxvii []: –). Paul Muldoon, more playfully and less persuasively,
reads the story as a sustained retelling of the magnificent Irish eighteenth-century lament
Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (see Paul Muldoon, To Ireland I [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ]).
Ulysses informs us that Aunt Julia died the following June—an indication that Joyce intends us to intuit her impending death in his short story. I am assuming that the story is
set on January , because the Papal decree on female singers was issued in November .
Letter of August , in Ellmann, Letters of James Joyce.
C. P. Curran, James Joyce Remembered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
Giambattista Vico, New Science; Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature
of Nations, trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin, ); Guiseppe Mazzotta, The New
Map of the World;The Poetic Philosphy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, ).
Power, Conversations, .
The echo of Poe’s title is deliberate: there is a recurrent gothic element in the story. Later,
Joyce’s contemporary, Harry Clarke, produced a superb series of illustrations of Poe’s Tales
of Mystery and Imagination (New York, ) which included “The Fall of the House of
Usher.”(See Fig. .) Poe’s motto from de Béranger for this story could also have functioned for “The Dead”:“Son coeur est un luth suspendu:/sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.” Note
too how a ballad forms the emotional core of this story of the living dead, how it fea-
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tures a storm outside, “gaseous exhalations,” the “sentience” of objects, and a series of
words favoured by Joyce: sullen, vague, melancholy, bitter . . . See the map of tenement
housing () in F. Aalen, “Health and Housing in Dublin –,” Dublin City and
County: From Prehistory to Present, ed. F. H. A. Aalen and K. Whelan (Dublin, ):
–.
The aunts moved there “when the previous big fall of snow had taken place thirty years ago.”
W.J. Fitzpatrick, Secret Service Under Pitt (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., ), .
Lord Moira’s once fashionable house on Usher’s Island had been converted to the Mendicity Institute in —symbolic of the rapidly collapsing status of the area. Francis
Rawdon, Lord Moira, was a critic of hard-line Protestant policies in Ireland in and
. He was a friend of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the United Irish leader, and it was to
his house that he was going when he had been almost captured in May . Moira was
a leader of fashion—the “king of the coxcombs” as he was described by the acerbic John
Giffard. A leading Whig, he ended up as Governor-General of India.
John Kelleher suggests that T. J. Conroy, Gabriel’s father, is modelled on Charles Halliday
(–), author of the posthumously published The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin
(Dublin, ), a book which supplied Joyce with the various references to the Vikings
which stud his texts. Halliday moved from Arran Quay (opposite Usher’s Island) to
Monkstown in , details of which are supplied in the antiquarian memoir of pages
of his life by the historian J. P. Prendergast. Monkstown is the residence of Gabriel’s family
in the story.
The names Constantine and Gabriel are both symptomatic of the “Devotional Revolution”
in Irish Catholicism. By the end of the century under the influence of the Gaelic revival,
there was a palpable surge of interest in using more distinctively Gaelic Christian names.
These two names mark out the Conroys as a family with upper-middle class ambitions.
Henri Massue, second Marquis de Ruvigny, was created Viscount Galway in , and elevated to Earl of Galway in , by William of Orange.
J.G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland 1685–1691 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ).
The text presumably known to Joyce on this topic was John Cornelius O’Callaghan, History of the Irish Brigades in the Service of France (Dublin: Kelly, ).
The mystery had been treated at length in Thomas Moore’s much reprinted Life and
Death of Lord Edward FitzGerald ().
For Carpenter, see H. Fenning,“The Archbishops of Dublin –,” in History of the
Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, ed. D. Keogh and J. Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, ):
–. John Carpenter (–) was the son of a Dublin tailor. He was considered
to be dumb until the age of seven, when he blurted out his name while frightened in a
Dublin crowd: he was presumably only speechless in English as he came from an Irishspeaking family, possibly of south Ulster derivation. He was to become a diligent collector of Irish-language manuscripts and he left a library of , books. Educated in Lisbon during –, he returned to Dublin, where in he was consecrated
Archbishop in a private house (probably the one at Usher’s Island) because of the Penal
Laws. He lived at Usher’s Island until his death in .
Fitzpatrick, Secret Service Under Pitt, .
Cited in G. F. Cuming,“The Betrayer of Lord Edward Fitzgerald; Counsellor Magan” in
The Gael, November , .
S. Joyce, James Joyce’s Early Years, ; Curran, James Joyce Remembered, –.
T. J. O’Keefe,“The Efforts to Celebrate the United Irishmen: The ’ centennial,”
in Eire-Ireland, xxiii (): –. For Joyce’s own familiarity with Lord Edward, see
Joyce, Occasional Writing, .
W. Harrison, Remarkable Dublin Houses (Dublin: Leckie, ). My thanks to Luke Gibbons for making a copy of this book available to me.
G. Owens,“Nationalist Monuments in Ireland –: Symbolism and Ritual” in Ireland: Art Into History, ed. Raymond Gillespie and Brian Kennedy (Dublin: Town House,
): –.
Ulysses, . Joyce’s interest in is also reflected in the passage in A Portrait about
Archibald Hamilton Rowan at Clongowes Wood. There is a poignant description by
Rowan’s biographer Sir Harold Nicolson of his meeting with Joyce in Paris in to
t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m
discuss the source of this anecdote (see H. Nicolson, The Desire to Please:A Story of Hamilton Rowan and the United Irishmen [London: Constable and Co., ], –.)
There are the barest of hints that the “country cute” Gretta had entrapped Gabriel via
pregnancy. This would explain Gabriel’s snobbish mother ostentatious hostility to Gretta.
She reprises the role of Lord Gregory’s mother in the song “The Lass of Aughrim” who
callously turns away the pregnant girl. We should treat none of these effects as accidental
in a writer of Joyce’s penetration. He himself believed that a genius makes no mistakes.
A small example: count the number of “good nights” at the end of the party—an ominous thirteen.
Power, Conversations, .
Curran, James Joyce Remembered, .
H. Shields,“The History of ‘The Lass of Aughrim,’” in Musicology in Ireland, ed. Gerard
Gillen and Harry White (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, ): –.
Curran, James Joyce Remembered, ; Donagh MacDonagh,“The Lass of Aughrim, or the
Betrayal of James Joyce” in The Celtic Master, ed. Maurice Harmon (Dublin: Dolmen
Press, ): –; G. Geckle, “The Dead Lass of Aughrim” in Eire-Ireland ix ():
–. Joyce met Nora first in . About this time, he felt betrayed by the casual (and
lying) boast of a friend, Cosgrave, that he had previously slept with Nora. Joyce was also
obsessive about Nora’s relationship with Michael Bodkin, who died in . These tensions are tangible in “The Dead.”
Ellmann, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ; Ellmann, Joyce, . The finest version of the
singing of this song is by Elizabeth Cronin of County Cork, recorded in : The Folk
Songs of Britain, volume iv (New York: Caedmon, ; TC ).
One of the few false notes in John Huston’s film version is the use of a Scottish rather
than an Irish version of “The Lass of Aughrim.”
Power, Conversations, .
These arguments were frequent in the Joyce household itself. Stanislaus tells us that
“Singers of the past were often discussed as in ‘The Dead’”(S. Joyce, Joyce’s Early Years, ).
His father had “listened at the back of the Gaiety to rehearsals of Tietjens and Trebelli”
(Curran, James Joyce Remembered, ).
The theme had been foreshadowed in the earlier reference to “Christy Minstrels” ().
The relevant contemporary citations are in Potts, Joyce and the Two Irelands, . William
Rooney contrasted Dubliners’ love of the waltz with their hatred of traditional Irish music and tradition: Arthur Griffith denounced the Royal Irish Academy of Music (where
Mary Anne Morkan studied) for cultivating in its students “a horror of Irish music.”
Helen Brennan, “The Fleshpots of Egypt and Gaelic Mayo: Dance and the Gaelic
League,” The Story of Irish Dance (Dingle: Brandon, ): –.
Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vols (London, ).
Peter Ackroyd, London:The Biography (London: Penguin, ), .
Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, vols (London ), iv. –.
Bret Harte’s Writings, vol. xiii (Boston: Houghton Miffin Company, n.d.—copyrights on
this volume range from –).
The Nation, ., April .
As sung by Elizabeth Cronin (of County Cork) on The Folk Songs of Britain, vol. iv (New
York: Caedmon Records, ; TC ).
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