To recycle an idea from a previous posting, common practice
among literary critics is the reduction of a work to a word, say ‘jealousy’ in
the case of Othello or ‘ambition’ in the case of Macbeth. If I was going to
carry out the same reductio on “The Dead” by Joyce, the word I would choose is
‘vanity’. This story describes a
psychological attitude I believe is near universal. “The Dead”, the most famous
short story by perhaps the greatest writer of the twentieth century, is
wonderful and so I hope my readers will forgive me for going all high-culture
for a bit and critiquing it. To
employ my favourite terms ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’, I would propose that the
antithesis asserted by “The Dead” is ‘Vanity is a insupportable pretence that
can only make one a fool in the eyes of others”. The thesis is “Vanity is
necessary for life”.
“The Dead” is set, mostly, at “the Misses Morkan’s annual
dance” that they hold in their “dark gaunt house in Usher’s Island”; the
story’s protagonist is Gabriel Conroy, the nephew of the three spinsters who
host the party, and it is his vanity that the story principally describes.
Gabriel’s vanity is a kind of self-importance, an almost unshakeable belief
that he is of more significance to others than he actually is, that he is the
centre of the world. His vanity expresses itself in self-consciousness and a
panicky fear that he might make or have made a mistake and have put his foot in
it – a natural consequence of his feeling that his actions have more
consequence than they actually do. The circumstances of the party only serve to
aggrandize his vanity: he is adored by his aunts and entrusted by them with
tasks such as bringing the boozed Freddy Malins upstairs. It is Gabriel who
carves and serves the goose and Gabriel who delivers the after-dinner speech,
the centrepiece of the evening. Gabriel is (at least in his own eyes) the star
of the night.
Joyce was a master of narrative voice, usually credited with
inventing stream-of-consciousness in Ulysses, and in “The Dead”, performs a small miracle, writing a third person
subjective account that almost passes for third person objective. Despite
appearances, aside from the very beginning, the whole story is tinted by
Gabriel’s consciousness. Early on, when Gabriel feels he has accidentally
affronted Lily the housemaid, Joyce writes of Gabriel “He coloured as
if he had made a mistake” (italics mine). A
little later, Joyce says “Gabriel knitted his brows as said, as if he were slightly angered…” (italics again mine). The
effect of such slight equivocations, which reoccur throughout the story, is to
create a gap between the real Gabriel and his performance. Not only does this
lend an air of mystery to Gabriel and create interest in him and suspense, it
serves to suggest Gabriel’s perspective on the world. We are seeing the world
as Gabriel sees it and Gabriel is continually trying to see himself as others
see him.
The key idea is performance. The whole party is a kind of a
performance. “Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone
off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember.” The three aunts are
singers and piano teachers and perform pieces to the crowd (some of who fake
their appreciation); among the guests is a tenor Bartell D’Arcy and a
discussion ensues at one point about the relative merits of various opera
singers from the past and whether the contemporary pack are as good as their
predecessors. All of the guests are performing, performing when they try to
crack jokes or recount stories, and performing with varying degrees of success.
More often than not they fail.
The consummate performer, though, is Gabriel. The secret to
his performance is the gap between the authentic Gabriel (if it exists) and the
role he plays. After he delivers his speech, ostensibly in praise of his aunts
for their hospitality and grace but really an excuse for pompous
self-aggrandizement, the guests sing “For they are jolly gay fellows” with the
key refrain, “Unless he [Gabriel] tells a lie”. Is Gabriel lying or not? Such
vanity, such self-consciousness, can be a burden. After he has carved and
served the goose, Gabriel says, “Kindly forget my existence, ladies and
gentlemen, for a few minutes” - a joke, to him, because, of course, how could
they? On occasion, Gabriel longs to be outside in the snow. This reflects a
kind of death-wish, to relinquish his “thought-tormented” vanity and stop
playing to the audience.
To fail in one’s performance is a wound to one’s vanity, an
indication that one is not the centre of the world. A number of the guests are
far less concerned with how others see them than Gabriel – or are rendered
incapable of making a good impression by prejudgements. Such a one is Freddy
Malins, an inveterate drunk introduced, not coincidentally, at the same time as
Gabriel. The word Joyce uses for Freddy’s compulsive habits such as eye-rubbing
is “mechanical” – having no say in how others see him has reduced him to the
status of an automaton. Freddy’s opinions at least have the ring of authenticity
(there is no reason for him to lie) but no one takes him seriously. In a way,
Freddy is all performance – there is no other hidden self behind it. In a way,
Freddy is dead.
Gabriel’s vanity is founded on successfully performing his
role. It is also highly ego-centric. The idea that others might have secret
selves he knows nothing about and which do not concern him is a threat to his
self-centredness. The minor incident between Gabriel and Lily at the beginning
is the result of her hint that she has a romantic life to which Gabriel is not
privy. Later Gabriel dances with Miss Ivors, a staunch Irish nationalist who
exposes Gabriel as a “West Briton”. To be confronted by someone who is both
authentic and utterly Other to him distresses Gabriel. “She had tried to make
him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit
eyes.” Gabriel’s reaction to this existential threat is to deprive her, in his
mind, of a true self – “Was she sincere? Had she really any life of her own
behind all her propagandism?” Later, Miss Ivors leaves early. “Gabriel asked
himself was he the cause of her abrupt departure. But she did not seem to be in
an ill humour: she had gone away laughing. He stared blankly down the
staircase.” When trying to understand situations that don’t directly relate to
him, for someone so ostensibly smart Gabriel can be very stupid.
These encounters with women foreshadow the last part of the
story, which deals with the relationship between Gabriel and his wife Gretta.
At the party, Gabriel may be anxious and self-conscious but, with his wife he
can ‘be himself’, secure in the knowledge that he is the centre of her world
and that she has no secrets from him. Before they leave the party, Gabriel sees
her standing listening to music and imagines himself painting a picture of her
in that posture. Paintings are all surface, they have no hidden depth; the
artist’s prerogative is always to play God. On the way home, enflamed by
desire, Gabriel recalls their shared past. “Moments of their secret life
together burst like stars upon his memory.” His desire for her is captured in
images of flame. But when they get home she seems “abstracted” and yet “He
longed to be master of her strange mood”. Then something entirely unexpected
happens – she reveals herself to be thinking of something that has nothing to
do with him at all, the song to which she was listening, and bursts into tears.
“As [Gabriel] passed in the way of the cheval glass he caught sight of himself
in full length, his broad, wellfilled shirtfront, the face whose expression
always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering giltrimmed
eyeglasses.” At this vital crux, the self-consciousness he felt at the party
has reappeared.
Gretta tells him about a boy who was in love with her, who
had died of consumption perhaps because of her. At first Gabriel’s reaction is
a sense of failure: “A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him.
He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous
wellmeaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own
clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the
mirror.” For a moment, Gabriel has been made acutely aware of his own vanity –
an insight stung into being by a realization that his own wife had a life of
her own before she met him. Even if no one else knew, Gabriel knows that his
performance that night had been a failure.
And yet… Soon enough, Gabriel’s essential vanity reasserts
himself. “So she had had that romance in her life. A man had died for her sake.
It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played
in her life.” Self-pity is also a form of vanity. “Better” Gabriel thinks “to
pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade
and with dismally with age.” This is Gabriel’s epiphany – that everyone dies in
the end. But it is a false epiphany because it is a way of evading the central
problem, the Otherness of other people.
I read somewhere that Joyce was inspired to write “The Dead”
because his wife Nora Barnacle had similarly told him about a past love. Is it
so far fetched to say that, by writing this story, he was exorcising that demon
and finding a way to reinforce his own vanity, the vanity any ambitious writer
needs? Perhaps, right? Perhaps not?
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