'The Dead' by James Joyce (on account of the day that's in it)

 

The Dead by James Joyce (repost from 2012)

You will be told that the short story depends on the pivotal event; ‘something happens as a result of which everything changes’ is the expression that has lodged in my memory and is therefore probably false but it’s near enough to the intent and to its contrary which is that the Irish short story is one in which nothing happens as a result of which nothing is changed. .  That’s true enough to be significantly false.  Just being written of in that close allusive familial world of the Irish who live in a small country that is constantly being written about draws  into the light familiar mysteries.
Now you’ve said it’.
'Amn’t I tellin’ ya’.

Have you noticed how many doors there are in the Morkan residence on Usher’s Quay?  I count 24. They are both portals and vistas.   We are invited to look from one room into the other.  Gabriel Conroy is both aloof and locked out and in the end when he crosses the river to his hotel there is an acceptance of the ultimate limen, that bourne from which no traveller returns.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

There are subtle changes in the authorial voice which drop like filters over a spotlight.  It is at first clichéd and familiar.  Individuality is smoothed out till what is left is a tone of voice, an intonation and an emphasis that is of the family and the class.

LILY, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. ...... It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also......That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day.

This is your old comfortable aunt speaking.  The Morkan sisters Kate and Julia are firm women like herself.

They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.

But Julia is failing a little:

Though she was stout in build and stood erect, her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. 

You can see that we are invited to complete the cliche - where she was or where she was going is just near enough to - she didn’t know whether she was coming or going; a usage that is often accompanied by a tug with both hands on the lapels of a cardigan. Psychic self-assembly how are you!

I was amused to read in the latest L.R.B. about cool Lady Chat who crept out of the abode of her husband in her sneakers that were soled with latex in its natural unvulcanised state. cf. Lady Chatterly’s Sneakers by David Trotter. Gabriel Conroy has got for his wife
galoshes which as may be expected have little downstram erotic benefit:

"And what are goloshes, Gabriel?"
"Goloshes, Julia!" exclaimed her sister "Goodness me, don't you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your... over your boots, Gretta, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Conroy. "Guttapercha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the Continent."
"O, on the Continent," murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly.

There is more flourish in the introduction to Gabriel Conroy:

The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead, where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes.

He waits outside the door of the drawing room and also culturally outside:

He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl's bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers.

He is also locked out from the cult of Gaelic culture represented by Miss Ivors looking as he does towards London and the continent for his culture and his absurd footware. He turns down Miss Ivors invitation to join her in a trip to the Aran Isles. Gretta his wife would like to go and later when he learns the reason she is crying he suspects that she wants to see the boy that loved her once again. But he is dead and it was just a song that he used to sing, The Lass of Aughrim
Lass

The precise and exact modulation of the diction from the clichéd familiar to the elevated is accomplished by 'that queer thing, genius’. Like a conductor Joyce evokes the grand themes not with the irruption of bad art but with an absorption into the music itself.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, rooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. 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 deadsilver 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 faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

 

The pure drop of Omicron

 

‘It’s like a bad hangover for a couple of days’.  Omicron.  In ‘Grace’ by Joyce Mr. Cunningham gravely remarked - ‘It happened that you were peloothered'.  Here the toxicity which produced a dull ache to the frontal lobes was due to the viral potation imbibed I know not where.  After those two days there was another short time of a vile taste in my mouth and muscle twinges.   Now that’s passing.  You could say I had the pure drop never having had any inoculation and that leads me to ask - what is going on in those countries that are still insisting on masks and mandates?  They have pushed the game on well past the credence of the people.  It’s over.

Your Vote is Important to us

He said:

And on the seventh day He almost rested. A fragment of the Great Mind, a junior god, made mud pies and dishes but not being very good at it was mixing in sand with the clay. In time as they dried they fell apart. That was the beginning of politics.

What do you think of Leo V., I asked:

Fianna Fail love him. He’s the blue shirt my father wore with a pink collar. He will be hard to remove. So very intersectional.

What are you going to do for Bloomsday?

Get out the iron frying pan and send a corner of lard skating. Fire down liver of any beast, rashers, tomatoes, sausages, an egg, fried bread with good red tea to gently ease it over the bourne of my tonsils.

The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Why do so many readers of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses find Stephen Dedalus unlikable? Michael Chabon thinks him a pill, a hard to take bolus. Bloom is more to his liking now.

Reading it at twenty, I had identified with Stephen Dedalus, a grave mistake. Stephen Dedalus is a pill. Doubtless I was kind of a pill myself at twenty, but that didn’t make Stephen any more appealing even then.

His reading of Bloom is a common sentimental one which does not correspond to the archetype of the violent expulsion of the suitors. The malleable (Mollyable) assent of Molly hardly counts as affirmation.

. Where a bachelor had seen Bloom’s devotion to Molly as pathetic, a husband saw it as noble and, at the same time, as simply her due.

Leaving Bloom aside and focusing on Stephen D. for the moment I see in Joyce’s writing an element of the Ignatian exercises which as a good Jesuit boy he would be familiar with. Visualisation is an important aspect of this spiritual discipline. But why would an unbeliever adopt the M.O. of a medieval priest?

—It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. Did you believe in it when you were at school? I bet you did.

Whether he did or not his teachers are saturated in the synaesthesic method with yearly month long retreats. This has formed their minds and this mind they transmit in a perfectly conscious way. Joyce was aware of this so there was no indoctrination in his case. He adopted it in the ‘Portrait’. Consider the First Day of the Third Week:

The first prelude is taken from the his tory: how Christ sent from Bethania to Jerusalem the two Disciples to prepare the Supper, whither Himself also, with the others, afterwards went; and there, after the eating of the Paschal Lamb, and supper finished, He washed all their feet, and gave them His most sacred Body and Blood. Lastly, He preached to them after the departure of Judas, who was about to sell Him.
The second, from the composition of the place, by considering the said way as rough or smooth, short or long, with the other circumstances which might belong to it ; then viewing the place of the Sup per as wide or narrow, plain or adorned, and the like........

The first point will be, to see them that are at supper, and draw something to my profit.
The second, to hear the same, what they are saying, arid thence gather fruit.
The third, to attend to what they are doing, and profit by everything.

Gentle reader for your edification I have abstracted from the ‘composition’ of hell elements which are replicated in the famous sermon of Chapter 3:

The first prelude is here the forming of the place; which is
to set before the eyes of the imagination the length, breadth, and depth of hell.
The second consists in asking for an intimate perception of the punishments which the damned undergo ; that, if at any time I should be forgetful of the love of God, at least the fear of punishment may re strain me from sins.
The first point is, to see by the imagination the vast fires of hell, and the souls inclosed in certain fiery bodies, as it were in dungeons.*
The second, to hear in imagination the lamentations, the howlings, the exclamations, and the blasphemies against Christ and His saints, thence breaking forth.
The third, to perceive by the smell also of the imagination, the smoke, the brim stone, and the stench of a kind of sink or filth, and of putrefaction.
The fourth, to taste in like manner those most bitter things, as the tears, the rot tenness, and the worm of conscience.
The fifth, to touch in a manner those fires by the touch of which the souls themselves are burnt.

Elsewhere the template of the Spiritual Exercises is applied. There is the ‘examen’ (examination of conscience and consciousness), there is the self-abnegation. Dedalus feels himself humiliated and mocked, oppressed by bosthoons (ignorant churls). The girl that he is attracted to flirts with a priest:

 And thus there arise three degrees of perfection ; namely, poverty, self-abasement, and humility; which are diametrically opposed to riches, honour, and pride, and introduce at once to all virtues.

He admires Davin’s rack of well made boots, and is tripped by his broken heel on a grating to the mocking of a ‘young wan’. Done, done, done.

James Joyce and Walter Pater

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or [ix] experience—metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

(from the preface to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

When James Joyce followed those strictures of Pater and submitted to beauty all was well but his intellectual pride that would bind by a scholastic formula fought that surrender and left him a victim of arid schemata. The sunny irony of Ulysses was occasionally marred by them, Finnegans Wake entirely botched. When he loses that alert sense of outward things which Pater ascribes to Botticelli his strength goes with it. The vision of his anima embodied in the form of the girl standing in the water on Dollymount strand in the 'Portrait’ is like that of Venus rising from the waves without the strange coolness which Pater notices:

The light is indeed cold—mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their labours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she sails, the sea "showing his teeth," as it moves, in thin lines of foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this imagery to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it. But this predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depositary of a great power over the lives of men.

Nigel and the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I was reading Lila by Marilynne Robinson and finding it dull and ananda deficient decided to turn towards James Joyce and beat my breast in the house of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There’s leela (playful miracle) for you. Joyce is the Master no question. Irish writers have made him their template standing behind him like the Cavan poultry farmer behind the Japanese chicken sexer not knowing how he does it but somehow learning it. How can you learn what your teacher doesn’t understand? Of course there’s a shadow cast by Joyce but it’s not a gloom. I think of Nigel H. when he was at school.

Nigel was a long time in the confessional and the lads were wondering. Then they heard the shout of the priest -
- What, what, get out you blackguard, get out you scut.
With that cry he jumped out of his central box of audition of the sins of Nigel who had been winding him up like an 8 day clock, blurting his way towards incest and having unordered parcels delivered to members of the higher and the lower clergy. Father MacT. wrenched open the door of the box where Nigel was sitting inside with a straois (canine grin) on him. He easily dodged the lob and fled out under the arm of the priest who chased him up the chapel with his soutane hitched up bunching the berry buttons of it. On the way out through the porch Nigel paused to dip the font and bless himself.

More on the ‘Portrait’ when I’ve re-read it.

Joycean Triad and a Poltroon with a Wooden Sword

The other day I had the very great pleasure of discovering error on the internet. Joyce Images is an excellent site which marries the myriad references in Ulysses to images of the day mostly in the form of postcards. I informed the editor:

Nice site and I am enjoycing it. I notice a small error on page 8 of telemachus where you identify an 'irish triad' as an 'irish bull'. A version of that triad (three things to be distrusted) Three things to be distrusted: a cow's horn, a dog's tooth, and a horse's hoof. 'Smile of a Saxon is an obvious varient. cf: Kuno Meyer Triads

May I add a little note which is missed. 'whose mother is beastly dead' said by Buck Mulligan and upsetting to Kinch - beastly dead is the inverse in English of 'beo beithioch' which is the Irish for 'beastly alive' a common expression.

Again fine work gathering up all those references and finding pcs to match,

‘That has the true scholastic stink’ with a verb sap. matiness. Scholars are touchy folk but correction from the likes of me is like a kindly hour before dawn in the stocks before the burghers emerge.

The triad collection of Kuno Meyer is a great find and I recommend it as a source of poetic compression.
Kuno Meyer

Three slender things that best support the world: the slender stream of milk from the cow's dug into the pail, the slender blade of green corn upon the ground, the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.

Three smiles that are worse than sorrow: the smile of the snow as it melts, the smile of your wife on you after another man has been with her, the grin of a hound ready to leap at you.

Three signs of a fop: the track of his comb in his hair, the track of his teeth in his food, the track of his stick behind him.

Three idiots that are in a bad guest-house: the chronic cough of an old hag, a brainless tartar of a girl, a hobgoblin of a gillie.

Three things that constitute a comb-maker: racing a hound in contending for a bone; straightening a ram's horn by his breath, without fire; chanting upon a dunghill so that all antlers and bones and horns that are below come to the top.

One triad I two thirds remember (must talk to the brother) is - Three useless things that are as good as three right things: X, dirty water to quench a fire, a poltroon with a wooden sword (claiomh adhmaid ag cladhaire).

Proposals for X - a liars breath to blow out a candle.

Addendum 27/2/15: Aida of joyce images tells me that the image of Irish Bull refers to the smile of the Saxon. She wasn’t aware of the peculiarly Irish (and Welsh) tradition of triadic sayings. There’s a lot in Joyce and certainly he loved the obscure and recondite. Visit her site and experience the pantographical panoply of Dublin in June 1904

A Book I probably will never read

A flurry of reviews of Min Camp by Karl Ove Knausgaard must mean that a new book in the saga has been published. More of how he stares at a cornflake which has somehow lodged in his navel. The death of the author has been greatly exaggerated. K. claims that his future as a novelist has been annihilated by leaving nothing out but as I maintained in my note on Pelle the ConquerorPelle the Conqueror this is a metaphysical fallacy. There is always more to know and for you to find out. The description of an event does not exhaust its meaning contrary to the positivist slogan that the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification. Or was it that the method of its verification is the meaning of a statement? Do those expressions only mean the same thing if verification and meaning are singular. One meaning, one verification. One life, one telling of it and the rest is silence.

On the other hand maybe my navel really is a portal which is to say that it is an ‘omphalos’ (Gk.navel or centre) as Delphi when it was thought to be the centre of the earth. Buck Mulligan proposed the Martello Tower as a new omphalos which is appropriate as it was built to guard against naval attack. That novel which is a perfect copy of its eternal form has sport with ‘the ineluctable modality of the visible’ by showing moyen sensuel Bloom to be a hero inside out. One due a re-read, the other a never-read.

George Moore and the Revival of Irish (The Untilled Field / An t-Úr Gort)

George Moore was caught up in the enthusiasm for the revival of the Irish Language and offered to do his bit. The idea was that he would produce a collection of simple tales that could then be translated into Irish and serve as headline for writers in the native language. The originals would then be destroyed. Tadhg Ó Donnchadha and Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin did the translation and it was published as An t-Úr Gort, The Untilled Field in the original. I have never seen a copy and it seems that it plunged into the pool of indifference without a splash like an expert diver. T.W. Rolleston translated it back into Sacsbhréarla (Speech of the Saxons) and Moore declared it improved by its bath in Irish. And I’ve never seen that either.

Scholars of Joyce claim The Untilled Field as an influence on Dubliners. There’s a nice blog entry by David Wheatley on Joyce and Beckett under the influence:
influence
My own modest claim is that the story The Wedding-Gown has elements in it which seem translated from the Gaelic tradition picked up by Moore who if he had more that one hundred conversations with stable boys, jockeys and servants about Moore Hall would surely have heard. One of them is ‘bhiseach an bháis’ or the improvement in condition or lucidity that happens just before death to enable recollection and repentence. If you have seen or read Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh the Irish Priest (Niall Tobín) at the deathbed of Lord Marchmain explains. It was the sign that Charles Ryder sought.
the divil in the room

The moiedered old woman comes to her senses and passes on the wedding gown to her niece. The garment has kept her chained to this plane but when the perfect moment has come she can let go. Fear of death in both the young woman and the old is vanquished. It’s a perfect story translated in so many ways, out of the grrreat Miiind as Yeats would say Out of the Grrreat Miiind . Indeed.

The Dead by James Joyce

You will be told that the short story depends on the pivotal event; ‘something happens as a result of which everything changes’ is the expression that has lodged in my memory and is therefore probably false but it’s near enough to the intent and to its contrary which is that the Irish short story is one in which nothing happens as a result of which nothing is changed. .  That’s true enough to be significantly false.  Just being written of in that close allusive familial world of the Irish who live in a small country that is constantly being written about draws  into the light familiar mysteries.

Now you’ve said it’.
'Amn’t I tellin’ ya’.

Have you noticed how many doors there are in the Morkan residence on Usher’s Quay?  I count 24. They are both portals and vistas.   We are invited to look from one room into the other.  Gabriel Conroy is both aloof and locked out and in the end when he crosses the river to his hotel there is an acceptance of the ultimate limen, that bourne from which no traveller returns.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

There are subtle changes in the authorial voice which drop like filters over a spotlight.  It is at first clichéd and familiar.  Individuality is smoothed out till what is left is a tone of voice, an intonation and an emphasis that is of the family and the class.

LILY, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. ...... It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also......That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day.

This is your old comfortable aunt speaking.  The Morkan sisters Kate and Julia are firm women like herself.

They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.

But Julia is failing a little:

Though she was stout in build and stood erect, her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. 

You can see that we are invited to complete the cliche - where she was or where she was going is just near enough to - she didn’t know whether she was coming or going; a usage that is often accompanied by a tug with both hands on the lapels of a cardigan. Psychic self-assembly how are you!

I was amused to read in the latest L.R.B. about cool Lady Chat who crept out of the abode of her husband in her sneakers that were soled with latex in its natural unvulcanised state. cf. Lady Chatterly’s Sneakers by David Trotter. Gabriel Conroy has got for his wife
galoshes which as may be expected have little downstram erotic benefit:

"And what are goloshes, Gabriel?"
"Goloshes, Julia!" exclaimed her sister "Goodness me, don't you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your... over your boots, Gretta, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Conroy. "Guttapercha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the Continent."
"O, on the Continent," murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly.

There is more flourish in the introduction to Gabriel Conroy:

The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead, where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes.

He waits outside the door of the drawing room and also culturally outside:

He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl's bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers.

He is also locked out from the cult of Gaelic culture represented by Miss Ivors looking as he does towards London and the continent for his culture and his absurd footware. He turns down Miss Ivors invitation to join her in a trip to the Aran Isles. Gretta his wife would like to go and later when he learns the reason she is crying he suspects that she wants to see the boy that loved her once again. But he is dead and it was just a song that he used to sing, The Lass of Aughrim
Lass

The precise and exact modulation of the diction from the clichéd familiar to the elevated is accomplished by 'that queer thing, genius’. Like a conductor Joyce evokes the grand themes not with the irruption of bad art but with an absorption into the music itself.

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 faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.