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The Dead (1914)

-ESSAY: Reading James Joyce Amidst Winter Snow, ‘Where Dwell the Vast Hosts of the Dead’ (Herman Goodden, 14 Jan 2022, Quillette)

The entire trajectory of Joyce’s career was played out in what I believe to be a largely unsuccessful attempt to shake off what he felt was the claustrophobic pressures of nation and church. But once he fled his Emerald-Isle roots to hunker down in various European locales to compose his three increasingly eccentric and abstruse novels of Christ-haunted Irish life, it became apparent that the only place this most restless of Catholic exiles ever really resided was deep inside the memory-soaked folds of his own brain.

While I bailed (along with so many others) on his final novel, Finnegan’s Wake, and can’t even claim not to have skimmed a few sections of the frequently exasperating Ulysses, I attended to every word of his first novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In doing so, I came to detest its unsavory egoism, even while admiring Joyce’s visionary powers.

The only one of his books I return to for pleasure is the volume of short stories he wrote before fleeing Ireland, Dubliners, and especially its masterpiece entry, The Dead.

-REVIEW: of The Dead by James Joyce (Kevin Maher, NPR)

Naturally, we hated them. Every one of them. Just agony. Like the worst kind of art-house movie you'd stumble across on a Saturday night on BBC 2 when your Mam and Dad were out at Uncle Jack's summer hoolie, and your sisters were in the kitchen flirting and smoking with Davey Riley from the youth club. No eye-gouging. No hanged puppies. No action at all. Just like, say, 10 pages about a funeral of this priest who had a mental breakdown before he died. Or two youngfellas bunking off school and meeting an oddball who's also a bit of a perv. Or this really posh bloke feeling sad because he's not as posh as the other blokes around him. Total rubbish. And we mostly skim-read them anyway, because we wanted to get to the biggie, or the Ne Plus Ultra, as McCarthy would say, which was the final story, called "The Dead."

And, oh my God, that was even worse. It was basically like all the most boring parties that your parents ever had, all rolled up into one, but set 100 years back in time, when there was no telly, and the climax of the Christmas season involved square dancing and talking about opera in a big Georgian house down by the Liffey, near Aston Quay, but way before the Virgin Megastore and the heroin addicts had moved in. It ends with the main character's wife, Gretta Conroy, bursting out crying because she remembers this little weedy fella from down in the bog who used to date her when she was young, and how he once stood outside her window in the rain as a sign of his love, like John Cusack in Say Anything, except without the boombox, and with consumption.

Me and the lads laughed it off, and said that it was arse and that Master McCarthy was cracked. But a line in "The Dead," one single line, wouldn't leave me. It described the hero, Gabriel Conroy, lying next to Gretta, on the bed in a darkened hotel room, after the big weep, and it said, "One by one, they were all becoming shades." The line stayed with me. Haunted me even. Me, a teenage boy who's father had cancer, and who covered with everyday humour the ineluctable fact that we were all, everyday, becoming shades. And it, that single line, made me return to "The Dead." And, eventually, relentlessly so. To see the beauty and depth within it, and in every line. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly ..."

Other than Mr. Godden’s grudging admiration for Artist, I find myself agreeing with both of the above, though even The Dead is only redeemed by its final scene and the rest of his oeuvre suggests Joyce didn’t learn much from the semi-autobiographical epiphany therein.

After several futile attempts to read the story, I listened to the audio from the great Classic Ghost Tales podcast on a walk. I drifted in and out until the end, where, after a dinner party attended by Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, the former sees his wife poised on a stairwell listening intently to a man singing and is consumed by physical desire for her. As they return home his passion grows until one almost fears he’s going to assault her. But she is so distracted that he instead starts grilling her about where her thoughts are. She reveals that the song, The Lass of Aughrim," had reminded her of a young man who had loved her back in Galway, but had stood outside her window in the rain when she was leaving and died of consumption and the exposure.

After the natural thoughts about whether she has ever truly loved him and whether he has ever actually loved anyone in such a way, Gabriel begins to view his sleeping wife differently and then the whole of existence opens up to him:

Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. 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. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

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.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

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.

You’ll find plenty of ruminations on the meaning of that epiphany generally and the snow in particular, but what seems most important is the universality of the vision. Joyce may have spent his life struggling against his Catholic upbringing, but that image of the snow falling on folk of every social tier, of every faith, on the living and the dead, has the effect of unifying all mankind in the most profoundly Christian sense. This is Joyce’s one surpassing moment.

(Reviewed:22-Sep-24)

Grade: (B-)

Websites:

James Joyce Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: James Joyce
    -TRIBUTE SITE: James Joyce: A one-stop bibliography website
    -ENTRY: James Joyce Irish author (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -INDEX: James Joyce (LitHub)
    -AUDIO INDEX: James Joyce (LibriVox)
    -AUDIO STORY: A Painful Case by James Joyce (The Great Stories, 27 March 2024)
    -
    -ESSAY: James Joyce Was a Complicated Man: Ireland rejected him; did he reject it back? (HENRY OLIVER, MAR 12, 2024, The Fitzwilliam)
    -ESSAY: A Book Club of Two: The Time I Started a James Joyce Reading Group in College: Kristopher Jansma on the Special Magic of Reading “Ulysses” (Kristopher Jansma, June 14, 2024, litHub)
    -ESSAY: Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: a new reading (Jeffrey Meyers, The Article)
    -ESSAY: James Joyce, John Senior, & the Illumination of the Modern World (R. Jared Staudt, November 17th, 2023, Imaginative Conservative)
    -ESSAY: James Joyce’s divine comedy: For the Irish, atheism will always be religious (TERRY EAGLETON, 8/30/22, unHerd)
    -ESSAY: The earned smugness of Ulysses readers: Not even Joyce’s biggest fans can say it’s an easy read (Mark Solomons, June 16, 2023, Spectator)
    -ESSAY: Misreading Ulysses (Sally Rooney December 7, 2022, Paris Review)
    -ESSAY: James Joyce’s divine comedy: For the Irish, atheism will always be religious (TERRY EAGLETON, 8/29/22, UnHerd)
    -ESSAY: On James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Irish Jewish Community: Jo Glanville Chronicles Her Family's Story in Ireland (Jo Glanville, August 17, 2022, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: ONE THINKS OF HOMER: OLIVER ST JOHN GOGARTY AND JAMES JOYCE (Tom Moran, 7/21/22, Antigone)
    -ESSAY: walking words, words walking: There’s never been a better to read James Joyce’s Ulysses (don’t be scared!) (COLIN FLEMING, 06/13/2022, Smart Set)
    -ESSAY: You Must Read This: Terence Killeen on the monumental rewards to be found in Ulysses (Terence Killeen, June 11 2022, Independent IE)
    -ESSAY: Spinoza’s shillelagh: Some thorny issues in the first words of Ulysses (Paul Muldoon, 6/17/22, TLS)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: Portrait of the artist’s politics: Ulysses at 100 (Emer Nolan, 6/02/22, TLS)
    -ESSAY: James Joyce’s Humanism: On its centenary, the classic Irish novel promotes tolerance over violent extremism. (Brendan Ruberry, 6/16/22, Persuasion)
    -AUDIO: : Listen to the first ever recording of James Joyce reading from Ulysses (Emily Temple, February 2, 2021, Lit Hub)
    -ETEXT: Read the Original Serialized Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918) (Open Culture, February 4th, 2022)
    -ESSAY: Borges Translates Joyce Who Translates Himself (Mark Harman, March 30, 2022, NER)
    -ESSAY: Every picture tells a story: When James Joyce and Italo Svevo played bowls (Riccardo Cepach, 1/15/21, TLS)
    -PODCAST: The Critic Books Podcast: 100 years of Ulysses: What has changed since Joyce’s novel was first published? (The Critic, 2/01/22)
    -SPECIAL EDITION: Ulysses at 100 (Our Editors, June 1, 2022, The American Scholar)
    -
    -
    -ESSAY: Portrait of the artist’s politics: Ulysses at 100 (Emer Nolan, 6/02/22, TLS)
    -ESSAY: What Joyce Got Wrong (About The Interior Monologue); An Interlude In The Language And Thought Series (David J. Lobina, 3/14/22, 3 Quarks)
    -ESSAY: Still Rejoyceing After All These Years (Thomas O’Dwyer, 2/14/22, 3 Quarks)
    -ESSAY: Dangerous, voyeuristic, transgressive, exciting: Anne Enright on James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100: My mother considered it a dirty text, but this profoundly democratic book has liberated female Irish authors (Anne Enright, 1/29/22, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: The Seductions of “Ulysses”: Since its publication, a century ago, James Joyce’s epic has acquired a fearsome reputation for difficulty. But its great subject, soppy as it may seem, is love. (Merve Emre, 2/14/22, The New Yorker)
    -TRIBUTE: Ulysses Turns 100!: Celebrating a Modernist Classic (Literary Hub, 2/02/22)
    -ESSAY: The Book in the World (Joe Cleary, February 2022, Dublin Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: Censoring Ulysses: In reviewing the UK Home Office files on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a historian found baffled officials afraid to bring more attention to it. (Livia Gershon February 2, 2022, JStor)
    -ESSAY: Ulysses at 100: ‘Joyce gets up people’s noses and that’s what a great writer should do’ (Kirsty Blake Knox, January 22 2022, Independent IE)
    -ESSAY: James Joyce, Nora and the odyssey of upheaval that led to a masterpiece: As the centenary of its publication approaches, we can see how Ulysses was shaped by a nomadic existence and strong women in the author’s life (Nuala O’Connor, February 02 2022, Independent IE)
    -ESSAY: The Ultimate Novel (Thomas Jones, 2/02/22, London Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: How Ulysses shaped the modern world: 100 years on, we still live in the shadow of James Joyce's masterwork. (Patrick West, 2/01/22, spiked)
    -ESSAY: A World of Waste, Stripped of Transcendence: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ at 100 (Jared Marcel Pollen, 31 Jan 2022, Quillette)
    -ESSAY: How to enjoy the greatest book you’ve never read: Ulysses by James Joyce has a reputation of being impenetrable and impossible, but there is a way to make it easier to understand, and appreciate, what is considered one of the best novels ever written (Robert Gogan, January 30 2022, Independent IE)
    -ESSAY: Deadline “Ulysses” (hilip Keel Geheber, 2/02/22, LA Review of Books)
    -
    -ESSAY: Dear Mr Joyce: an essay by Edna O’Brien: As Ulysses turns 100, O’Brien tries to pin down what its extraordinary author was really like (Edna O'Brien, 2/02/22, The Guardian)
    -
    -ESSAY: Eduardo Arroyo’s Dreamy, Abstract Illustrations of Ulysses: A Sneak Peek at a New Edition of James Joyce’s Classic (Literary Hub, January 27, 2022)
    -THE MILLIONS INTERVIEWS: An Unexpected Encounter: On the Illustrated ‘Ulysses’: The Millions spoke with Judith Gurewich about Arroyo’s legacy, the challenges of reading Joyce, and her international collaboration with Galaxia Gutenburg. (Sophia Stewart January 6, 2022, The millions)
    -ESSAY: Swift and Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Jeffrey Meyers, 1/05/22, The Article)
    -ESSAY: How to Read Ulysses By the Numbers: Breaking Down a Surprisingly Revealing Technique (Eric Bulson, January 11, 2021, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: The joy of Joyce’s Ulysses is that it isn’t intuitive at all: Though the classic book is considered a stream-of-consciousness novel, we should perhaps regard it as the opposite (John Scholar, 1/24/21, Independent)
    -ESSAY: Why James Joyce said he was a Jesuit (but rebelled against the Catholic Church) (Ray Cavanaugh, January 03, 2017, America)
    -ESSAY: 'You ought to allude to me as a Jesuit,' Joyce once remarked (Bruce Bradley, , Jun 14, 2004, Irish Times)
    -ARCHIVES: Joyce, James, 1882-1941 (Internet Archives)
    -REVIEW: of Ulysses by James Joyce (Edmund Wilson, New Republic)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: Dubliners: Reading Ulysses is a kind of strenuous dream (Anne Enright, 1/13/22, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: Ulysses Unbound: A Reader’s Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses by Terence Killeen (Jeremy-Noel Tod, The Prospect)
    -REVIEW: of Ulysses Unbound (Dermot Bolger, Independent IE)
    -REVIEW: of The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses Patrick Hastings & Ulysses, James Joyce: Illustrated by Eduardo Arroyo (JP O'Malley, Independent IE)
    -
    -REVIEW: of Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner (Colm Toibin, LRB)
    -WIKIPEDIA: The Dead (Joyce short story)
    -WIKIPEDIA: The Lass of Roch Royal
    -TRIBUTE SITE: Joyce's Dublin: An Exploration of 'The Dead' (A Digital James Joyce resource created for UCD by Athena Media)
    -ENTRY: The Dead (Encyclopedia.com)
    -ENTRY: The Dead (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -AUDIO: The Dead by James Joyce (Classic Ghost Stories, 18 November 2022)
    -AUDIO: Nollaig na mBan: The Dead by James Joyce, read by Stephen Rea (RTE, Friday, 6 Jan 2023)
    -AUDIO: The Dead (LibriVox)
    -AUDIO PLAY: The Dead by James Joyce (The RTÉ Rep, RTE: Drama on One)
    -ETEXT: The Dead by James Joyce
    -ETEXT: The Dead (Internet Archive)
    -ETEXT: The Dubliners by James Joyce (Project Gutenberg)
    -VIDEO DISCUSSION: The Culture of Encounter in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (Georgetown Future of Humanities Project, February 12, 2024)
    -PODCAST: The Dead (The Great Stories, 1/04/21)
    -PODCAST: The Dead (Blooms and Barnacles, 11 January 2023)
    -PODCAST: The Dead (StoryWeb)
    -ESSAY: When James Joyce Wrote the Best, Most Depressing Christmas Story Ever (Allen Barra, Dec. 31st, 2021, Daily Beast)
    -ESSAY: How Much Did James Joyce Base “The Dead” on His Own Family?: Colm Tóibín on the Greatest Short Story Ever Written (Colm Tóibín, October 30, 2018, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: Reading James Joyce Amidst Winter Snow, ‘Where Dwell the Vast Hosts of the Dead’ (Herman Goodden, 14 Jan 2022, Quillette)

The entire trajectory of Joyce’s career was played out in what I believe to be a largely unsuccessful attempt to shake off what he felt was the claustrophobic pressures of nation and church. But once he fled his Emerald-Isle roots to hunker down in various European locales to compose his three increasingly eccentric and abstruse novels of Christ-haunted Irish life, it became apparent that the only place this most restless of Catholic exiles ever really resided was deep inside the memory-soaked folds of his own brain.

While I bailed (along with so many others) on his final novel, Finnegan’s Wake, and can’t even claim not to have skimmed a few sections of the frequently exasperating Ulysses, I attended to every word of his first novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In doing so, I came to detest its unsavory egoism, even while admiring Joyce’s visionary powers.

The only one of his books I return to for pleasure is the volume of short stories he wrote before fleeing Ireland, Dubliners, and especially its masterpiece entry, The Dead.

Naturally, we hated them. Every one of them. Just agony. Like the worst kind of art-house movie you'd stumble across on a Saturday night on BBC 2 when your Mam and Dad were out at Uncle Jack's summer hoolie, and your sisters were in the kitchen flirting and smoking with Davey Riley from the youth club. No eye-gouging. No hanged puppies. No action at all. Just like, say, 10 pages about a funeral of this priest who had a mental breakdown before he died. Or two youngfellas bunking off school and meeting an oddball who's also a bit of a perv. Or this really posh bloke feeling sad because he's not as posh as the other blokes around him. Total rubbish. And we mostly skim-read them anyway, because we wanted to get to the biggie, or the Ne Plus Ultra, as McCarthy would say, which was the final story, called "The Dead."

And, oh my God, that was even worse. It was basically like all the most boring parties that your parents ever had, all rolled up into one, but set 100 years back in time, when there was no telly, and the climax of the Christmas season involved square dancing and talking about opera in a big Georgian house down by the Liffey, near Aston Quay, but way before the Virgin Megastore and the heroin addicts had moved in. It ends with the main character's wife, Gretta Conroy, bursting out crying because she remembers this little weedy fella from down in the bog who used to date her when she was young, and how he once stood outside her window in the rain as a sign of his love, like John Cusack in Say Anything, except without the boombox, and with consumption.

Me and the lads laughed it off, and said that it was arse and that Master McCarthy was cracked. But a line in "The Dead," one single line, wouldn't leave me. It described the hero, Gabriel Conroy, lying next to Gretta, on the bed in a darkened hotel room, after the big weep, and it said, "One by one, they were all becoming shades." The line stayed with me. Haunted me even. Me, a teenage boy who's father had cancer, and who covered with everyday humour the ineluctable fact that we were all, everyday, becoming shades. And it, that single line, made me return to "The Dead." And, eventually, relentlessly so. To see the beauty and depth within it, and in every line. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly ..."

    -REVIEW: of The Dead (The Sheila Variations)
    -REVIEW: of The Dead (Friends of Words)
    -REVIEW: of The Dead (Mae’s Food Blog)
    -REVIEW: of The Dead (Travel Gourmet, Richmond Book Club)
    -REVIEW: of The Dead (Suzette Sherman, Seven Ponds)
    -REVIEW: of The Dead (Camilla Papers)
    -REVIEW: of The Deead (Élodie Gaden, Lettres et Arts)
    -REVIEW: of The Dead (Sitting Bee)
    -REVIEW: of The Dead (Hogglestock)
    -REVIEW: of The Dead (Nigelleaney, Medium)

FILM:

    -WIKIPEDIA: The Dead (1987 film)
    -FILM: The Dead (Facebook)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: The Dead (1987) (IMDB)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: James Joyce (IMDB)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: John Huston (IMDB)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: The Dead (Rotten Tomatoes)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Roger Ebert)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Denis Donoghue, NY Review of Books)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead Vincent Canby, NY Times()
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Spirituality & Practice)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (desson Howe, Washington Post)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Hal Hinson, Washington Post)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Philip French, The Observer)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Jaimie Russell, BBC)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Joseph Jon Lanthier, Slant)
    -FILM REVIEW: The Dead (Motion Pictures)

Book-related and General Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: The Dead (Joyce short story)
    -WIKIPEDIA: The Lass of Roch Royal
    -TRIBUTE SITE: Joyce's Dublin: An Exploration of 'The Dead' (A Digital James Joyce resource created for UCD by Athena Media)
    -ENTRY: The Dead (Encyclopedia.com)
    -ENTRY: The Dead (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -AUDIO: The Dead by James Joyce (Classic Ghost Stories, 18 November 2022)
    -AUDIO: Nollaig na mBan: The Dead by James Joyce, read by Stephen Rea (RTE, Friday, 6 Jan 2023)
    -AUDIO: The Dead (LibriVox)
    -AUDIO PLAY: The Dead by James Joyce (The RTÉ Rep, RTE: Drama on One)
    -ETEXT: The Dead by James Joyce
    -ETEXT: The Dead (Internet Archive)
    -ETEXT: The Dubliners by James Joyce (Project Gutenberg)
    -VIDEO DISCUSSION: The Culture of Encounter in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (Georgetown Future of Humanities Project, February 12, 2024)
    -PODCAST: The Dead (The Great Stories, 1/04/21)
    -PODCAST: The Dead (Blooms and Barnacles, 11 January 2023)
    -PODCAST: The Dead (StoryWeb)
    -ESSAY: When James Joyce Wrote the Best, Most Depressing Christmas Story Ever (Allen Barra, Dec. 31st, 2021, Daily Beast)
    -ESSAY: How Much Did James Joyce Base “The Dead” on His Own Family?: Colm Tóibín on the Greatest Short Story Ever Written (Colm Tóibín, October 30, 2018, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: Reading James Joyce Amidst Winter Snow, ‘Where Dwell the Vast Hosts of the Dead’ (Herman Goodden, 14 Jan 2022, Quillette)

The entire trajectory of Joyce’s career was played out in what I believe to be a largely unsuccessful attempt to shake off what he felt was the claustrophobic pressures of nation and church. But once he fled his Emerald-Isle roots to hunker down in various European locales to compose his three increasingly eccentric and abstruse novels of Christ-haunted Irish life, it became apparent that the only place this most restless of Catholic exiles ever really resided was deep inside the memory-soaked folds of his own brain.

While I bailed (along with so many others) on his final novel, Finnegan’s Wake, and can’t even claim not to have skimmed a few sections of the frequently exasperating Ulysses, I attended to every word of his first novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In doing so, I came to detest its unsavory egoism, even while admiring Joyce’s visionary powers.

The only one of his books I return to for pleasure is the volume of short stories he wrote before fleeing Ireland, Dubliners, and especially its masterpiece entry, The Dead.

Naturally, we hated them. Every one of them. Just agony. Like the worst kind of art-house movie you'd stumble across on a Saturday night on BBC 2 when your Mam and Dad were out at Uncle Jack's summer hoolie, and your sisters were in the kitchen flirting and smoking with Davey Riley from the youth club. No eye-gouging. No hanged puppies. No action at all. Just like, say, 10 pages about a funeral of this priest who had a mental breakdown before he died. Or two youngfellas bunking off school and meeting an oddball who's also a bit of a perv. Or this really posh bloke feeling sad because he's not as posh as the other blokes around him. Total rubbish. And we mostly skim-read them anyway, because we wanted to get to the biggie, or the Ne Plus Ultra, as McCarthy would say, which was the final story, called "The Dead."

And, oh my God, that was even worse. It was basically like all the most boring parties that your parents ever had, all rolled up into one, but set 100 years back in time, when there was no telly, and the climax of the Christmas season involved square dancing and talking about opera in a big Georgian house down by the Liffey, near Aston Quay, but way before the Virgin Megastore and the heroin addicts had moved in. It ends with the main character's wife, Gretta Conroy, bursting out crying because she remembers this little weedy fella from down in the bog who used to date her when she was young, and how he once stood outside her window in the rain as a sign of his love, like John Cusack in Say Anything, except without the boombox, and with consumption.

Me and the lads laughed it off, and said that it was arse and that Master McCarthy was cracked. But a line in "The Dead," one single line, wouldn't leave me. It described the hero, Gabriel Conroy, lying next to Gretta, on the bed in a darkened hotel room, after the big weep, and it said, "One by one, they were all becoming shades." The line stayed with me. Haunted me even. Me, a teenage boy who's father had cancer, and who covered with everyday humour the ineluctable fact that we were all, everyday, becoming shades. And it, that single line, made me return to "The Dead." And, eventually, relentlessly so. To see the beauty and depth within it, and in every line. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly ..."

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The Dead (1914)

Websites:

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