The Dead - James Joyce

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead"

In observation of the Christmas season this week I will take a brief break from my Ray Bradbury series to discuss what I find to be a very poingiant if somewhat ironic Christmas tale.

When most think of literature around Christmas thoughts tend to jump immediately to either Dr. Seuss or Charles Dickens and while I love my Grinch and Scrooge I find myself year after year drawn instead to the final tale in James Joyce's book The Dubliners. While I plan to blog about this book in its entirety at some point I do think I must first preface my experience of "The Dead."

Sometime in Autumn of 2004 while studying abroad in London some friends and I decided to take a weekend trip to Dublin. Naturally our first destination was the Guinness Brewery and after some wandering back and forth across the Liffey, stopping whenever we saw landmarks from Ulysses imbedded in the sidewalk and keeping as warm as possible we arrived at the brewery gates. After taking the brewery tour we boarded an elevator which took us to a circular room overlooking the entirety of Dublin. We were handed our complimentary pint and walked over to one window to raise our glasses to Arthur Guinness. When I looked up I saw that the glass had frosted letters on it which read: "The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres." Looking past the letters I could see a stone spire peeping up amidst the houses and trees of darkening Dublin and though snow was not yet resting upon it my spine chilled nonetheless.

I am sure that this experience is what first brought me to "The Dead" around Christmastime. But is its appropriateness within human experience that continues to draw me back. If you think about it, stories like The Grinch and A Christmas Carol tend to emphasize the redemption of fallen mankind through the poigniant change of attitude in each tale's protagonist; a theme which is undoubtedly repeated in almost every modern holiday film in which Christmas as a concept must be 'saved' again and again.

"The Dead" offers a very different story. Purposefully placed at the end of The Dubliners "The Dead" emphasizes an ultimate acceptance of the Wintertime of life. Winter is not a time of rebirth and renewal but a time when leaves fall dead upon the ground and trees remain bare and lifeless until the new year allows the cycle to begin again. But this is not an ending to be mourned, it is a simple fact of life that follows poigniantly after all other points have been made, accounts have been settled, and all inconsistencies in life must be accepted for what they are since our time left is too short to pine away. Gretta mourns the death of Michael Furey not because she wishes him alive but because he was a chapter in her life that has unalterably closed. Gabriel, in a way, represents the difficulty which we have in accepting the winding down of the clock.

Don't call me Scrooge just yet. I'm by no means all gloom and doom around Christmas; very much the opposite. But perhaps it is significant to remind ourselves of the evanescence of life before we forget it completely upon the breaking of Spring.

For your viewing pleasure: a photogram of G. Matthew Varner metaphorically 

violating the shoulder blades of James Joyce but thinking about Jackson Pollock

On a more technical note: this volume was purchased at Trinity College in Dublin on the same trip I spoke about above. It was part of a set of small books that my friend Matt (pictured above) refers to as my Leprechuan Joyce set. It contains the complete works of James Joyce but I will leave further discussion on these for another day (hopefully someday I will actually get around to reading Finnegan's Wake without hemorhaging my brain). I will say that I'm not really clear on the publisher of this particular volume and I have noticed a number of typological errors throughout this volume. But you can't beat the story that goes along with it.
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Joyce, James. "The Dead." The Dubliners. Dublin: Trinity College Press? date?