WordLit #4: The Dead Argumentative + Personal

From a distance, in <The Dead>, Gabriel’s dinner speech that people should not linger on the past may seem to contradict his later epiphany. Certainly, although he says he will leave the traces of the past and rejoice in the present in his dinner speech, he cannot evade the shadow of Michael Furey, a man killed by love. But if you take a closer look you will see that such contradiction does not exist. In Gabriel’s own speech he clearly says, “……still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.” He shows respect to the souls of the past and let them change his life, as Michael’s faithful soul leads Gabriel to epiphany. He never says he will totally ignore the past.

Then why would he have said that he will not remain in the past? Ultimately, his speech is a message to himself at the end of the story. The attitude described in his speech rescues him from irretrievable death in the course of epiphany. From the souls of the past, he realizes that he has been spiritually dead: he has been condescending in relationships with people, his nationality has been vain, and his love has not been truthful. However, he does not linger on his dead self that has been filling him until then. He does not despair remaining in his dead past, as “generous tears fills Gabriel’s eyes” for the sake of dead Michael and his reviving soul. The reflective and introspective tone of the last few paragraphs also indicates a course of maturation rather than complete desolation. Although snow might represent death, it does not last forever: it soon melts away when spring full of life comes. In short, his miserable epiphany does not lead him to absolute death, but rather provides a resurrection with a refreshed, vibrant soul, and this corresponds to exactly what Gabriel has said in his dinner speech. He lets the past souls to affect him, but he does not linger on his dead past, and accepts the renewal of soul at the present. In this sense, Gabriel’s dinner speech is perfectly consistent rather than contradictory to the last epiphany.

Personally, I was glad that I could have at least a slight grasp about what Modernism is, and how it is distinguished from Realism. At first I was uncomfortable that the story seemed to contain three separate stories (Lily, Ms. Ivors, Gretta) that do not have apparent link to each other, and that especially the first two did not have clear correlation with the death. However, I later found out that this misconnection is itself the very property of modernism. Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest Modernist writers, wrote “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” Modernist writers concentrated on reflecting the essence of life in literature work, and they thought that life does not essentially work as a thrilling plot of four clear steps: introduction, development, conversion, and summing up. Rather, life contains several episodes that eventually reach a conclusion, which is exactly how <The Dead> is structured.

The epiphany of the story also follows a trait of Modernism. Influenced by Freud, Modernist writers focused on the true nature of human psyche. By portraying how Gabriel’s state of mind changes and finally reaches a realization, Joyce could draw a deep insight on the internal world. Moreover, Joyce’s epiphany was usually about acknowledging the reality, the true substance of life. Basically, the epiphany in <Araby> was about the vanity of love along with religion, and that in <The Dead> was about human interactions, identity, love, and death. They are the abstract but essential cores of our life, exactly the interests of Modernism!

             I liked James Joyce’s <The Dead> because it clearly exhibited the characteristics of Modernism, which is distinguished from those of Realism in that Modernism deals about the essence of life, which leads to an episode-based structure and a focus on epiphany.