D AV I D L E O N H I G D O N
From ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners, edited by Rosa M. Bollettieri Bosinelli and Harold F. Mosher, Jr. © 1998 by the University Press of Kentucky.
“A
t any rate, very careful composition,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her “Dalloway Notebook” on 16 October 1922, “[t]he contrast must be arranged. . . . The design is extremely complicated. The balance must be very finely considered” (quoted in Novak 226–27). She was, of course, mapping the structure of Mrs. Dalloway being generated by the eventual intersection of the lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. However, with equal appropriateness she could have been describing the structural features of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” for it, too, has an “extremely complicated” binary design whose “contrast . . . must be finely considered.” In many ways, though, this design has been inadequately recognized and largely undescribed because the thematic and psychological macrostructures have eclipsed the microstructures of the story, particularly the patterns wherein music and noise images coordinate with female and male worlds, microstructures whose subtleties make the story a rehearsal for the “Sirens” episode in Ulysses and for the “melodiotiosities in purefusion by the score” of Finnegans Wake (222). Stanislaus Joyce indicated as much when he wrote that “[t]here is a mastery of story telling in the skill with which a crescendo of noise and jollity is gradually worked up and then suddenly silenced by the ghost of a memory” (527; emphasis added).Virtually every critical discussion of “The Dead” has taken place within the intellectual boundaries inscribed early by David Daiches and Brewster Ghiselin. In The Novel and the Modern World (1939), Daiches very deftly established three guiding principles regarding Joyce’s story: its “expansive technique” (73), its self-conscious “working-out . . . of a preconceived theme” (74), and its “lopsided[ness]” (75) set it far apart from the other fourteen stories in the collection and make it a crucially transitional bridge into the ever increasingly complex novels, written “as it was at a time when Joyce was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the problems of aesthetics” (81). Daiches made clear that Gabriel Conroy’s encounters with three women— Lily, Molly Ivors, and Gretta Conroy—which mark the several stages in his journey toward self-knowledge, constitute the heart and soul of the story’s technique, theme, and pattern. In 1956, in “The Unity of Joyce’s Dubliners,” Ghiselin extended these areas into symbolic structure and “a pattern of correspondences” (75), such as found in Ulysses, and thus a critical template was firmly established in place.1
At present, most Joyce critics work almost exclusively in terms of these women and their roles in Gabriel’s evening. Regardless of the theoretical map, the destination seems the same. The 1994 Lacanian approach of Garry M. Leonard, suggestive and persuasive as it is, sees “the story as three attempts by Gabriel Conroy, with three different women, to confirm the fictional unity of his masculine subjectivity” (289) and differs little from Gerald Doherty’s 1989 Bakhtinian untangling of the metaphoric and metonymic dimensions of the text that leads to “Lily’s bitter comment about men,” “Miss Ivor’s aggression,” and Gabriel’s “brief tiff with Gretta” (227) as features of the metonymic plot line. Richard Brown (1985) and Edward Brandabur (1971) had already reached similar conclusions, the former observing that “the story . . . seems tailor-made for feminist interpretation. Gabriel’s evening consists of a succession of significant encounters with women” (92), the latter concluding that “throughout the story, personal encounters disturb [Gabriel’s] poise until he finally gives in to the annihilation he has not only anticipated but invited” (116).
The recent Daniel R. Schwarz edition (1994) for St. Martin’s very successful series “Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism” also takes us down this same familiar road whether the vehicle is psychoanalytic, reader- response, new historicist, or deconstructionist criticism. Schwarz sounds the familiar call in relating the autobiographies of Joyce and Conroy: “Gabriel expresses Joyce’s fear of betrayal—sexual, political, and personal” (104, emphasis added)—abstractions of the views of, wounds inflicted by, and temptations posed by the three women. These designs adequately describe the “encounter scenes,” but they rarely do justice to the sections separating them. By concentrating on the 618 lines in the encounters and essentially
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ignoring the structural significances of the remaining 1,042 lines, they fail to account fully for the “considerable formal differences” (O’Connor 305) between “The Dead” and the other stories and also overlook the subtle, complicated interplay of counterpointing rhythms, musical and sexual, among the scenes.
I propose that the Lily, Molly, and Gretta “encounter scenes,” dramatizing the comfortable illusions Gabriel harbored about himself and about most other men, alternate with inverted scenes in which individual men threaten to disrupt, if indeed not to overthrow, the harmony and melody usually bodied forth in dance, song, and performance by the women. The main offenders—Freddy Malins, Mr. Browne, and Bartell D’Arcy—are eventually joined by Gabriel himself as the Lord of Misrule dethroning harmony this winter night.2 Freddy’s drunkenness and unzipped fly, Browne’s coarseness
and defiance, D’Arcy’s rudeness and hoarseness, and Gabriel’s smug sense of superiority and condescension threaten the spirited, celebratory world created by the three Misses Morkan, but only Gabriel emerges from the evening enlightened in any way.
In other words, the grand tonal shifts occurring between the endings and beginnings of chapters in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, patterns so ably delineated by A. Walton Litz and Hugh Kenner, are fully anticipated and realized throughout “The Dead.” Litz argues that “each chapter ends on a tone of intense lyricism, corresponding to Stephen’s new-found hope; but then—as we move into the next chapter—there is an abrupt change in language which reflects the decline in Stephen’s resolution” (69), movement from lyrical triumph to Icarian plummet. This is a more sophisticated, more aesthetic observation on structure than Kenner’s remarks on the alternations between dream and reality, but both capture the binary clashes that generate structure. Thus, in “The Dead,” there is a constant juxtaposition of male/ female, past/present, public/private, and other binaries that cluster together around thematic and structural poles as the three scenes in which the female “wounds” the male’s self-image, leaving him pondering in silence how to respond and how to defend his ego—a pattern of exclusion, alienation, interior monologue, and silence alternating with a pattern of inclusion (whether in dance, song, or feasting), sharing, and sound. The female rhythm in this story directly points toward Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle.
Following the tightly designed opening scene (D 175.1–176.33) and Lily “encounter” episode (D 176.34–179.20), Joyce’s story appears to concentrate randomly for the next few pages on unrelated groups of characters at the party, giving first this man or that woman his or her moment of attention.3 The story’s structure thus alternates between the
private moments of Gabriel and a woman (first Lily, then Molly, and finally Gretta) and the public world of the party in which men boorishly endanger
the social balances, proprieties, and melodies—perhaps a hostess’s most serious but unvoiced fear. Gabriel is, of course, actually alone with both Lily in the “little pantry” (D 175) downstairs where he insults her with the improperly given tip and Gretta in the hotel. In one way or another, Gabriel consciously insults each significant woman in the story, and he clearly intends his words to wound, as when he reminds Gretta of her violation of clear social distinctions in her relationship with Michael Furey and even ventures to question her fidelity to him (D 219).
It has been less clear, perhaps, how he insults Lily. Of course, the scene lacks the complexity and significance of the other two “encounter scenes,” and Gabriel must be quick and more spontaneous in his response. The crux is the coin he gives Lily, which is less a muted sexual insult than it is a gross violation of the etiquette of his class and period. No houseguest would tip his or her hostess’s servant unless remaining in the house overnight, and never on the guest’s arrival. Redoubtable Elizabeth L. Post still firmly decrees, “No tip—ever—for servants in a private house at a dinner party” (403), and such measures would have been even more pronounced at the time of the Misses Morkans’ party, especially given the social pretensions of the family. Gabriel attempts to mask his act as one of generosity authorized by the season, but Lily sees beneath the mask an unmistakable rudeness and insensitiveness.
Although his encounter with Molly takes place on the dance floor, fellow dancers become aware of their conversation only after their voices are raised, an obviously intended effect since Joyce originally had Gretta remarking on “the row” Gabriel had had with Molly (Scholes 29). The private, male, illusioned world endangered by the female though is abruptly swept away by the roisterous, good-natured, public, female rhythms, and the two rhythms ultimately fuse in the final scene of the story.
In the first of the female-ordered worlds (D 179.21–187.18), the females triumph, even though the “pretty waltz” (D 183) with its accompanying “stamping and shuffling of feet” (D 177), the quadrilles announced by “a red faced young woman” (D 183), and Mary Jane’s showy concert piece, designed more to highlight her masterful technique than the work’s substance, could at any moment be disrupted. Aunt Kate fears that Freddy Malins is “screwed” (D 182), but he seems “hardly noticeable” as he crosses the floor “on rather shaky legs” (D 185). Browne threatens more serious disruption as he leads not one but three young ladies “into the back room” (D 182), drinks “a goodly measure of whisky” (D 183), and attempts “a very low Dublin accent” (D 183) in his coarse joke. In the rush to pair men and women for the quadrilles, however, Mary Jane and Aunt Kate avert further disruptions and sweep the guests up in dance, but not before Aunt Kate has satisfied herself that Malins is under control and has chastised Browne “by frowning and shaking her forefinger in warning to and fro” (D 185), thus leaving them
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alone and silenced in their own disorder and evading, for the moment, the disruptions that a habitual drunk and a socially displaced boor could inflict on the party.
Following Gabriel’s more serious encounter with Molly Ivors (D 187.19–192.27), the story moves to the second female-ordered scene (D 192.30–213.30), one much more highly fragmented and potentially disordered than the first; as might be expected, the men are again much more disruptive than the women. Browne escorts Aunt Julia to the piano so that she may treat her guests to a song. After she finishes the song, Freddy Malins continues applauding long after everyone has stopped and further embarrasses Julia with his overeffusive compliments. Unexpectedly, too, a near quarrel erupts among Malins, Browne, Kate, and Mary Jane. At fault is another man, Pope Pius X, who has declared that since “singers in churches have a real liturgical office . . . women . . . cannot be admitted to form part of the choir or of the musical chapel” (Gifford 119). Aunt Kate “had worked herself into a passion” (D 194), we are told, and the group has become “very quarrelsome” (D 195). At this point, Molly Ivors says her farewells, though not in the ill humor we might have expected after her exchange with Gabriel.
For a while, “a great deal of confusion and laughter and noise” (D 197) reigns as the dinner proceeds, and, as Warren Beck has pointed out, the guests’ “nearest approach to a common interest is not Irish nationalism but music, and more especially singers” (305; emphasis added). Talk of the Negro tenor at the Gaiety, though, soon has Freddy questioning “sharply” (D 198) and Browne speaking “defiantly” (D 199) and “incredulously” (D 200), as the talk eventually grows “lugubrious” (D 201), turns to monks’ coffins, and then lapses into silence. Gabriel’s speech, with its embedded insult to the now- absent Molly, follows, loudly interrupted several times by Browne’s effusive, noisy protestations (D 202, 203). Despite all of its compliments to his aunts and his cousin, it harshly judges the moderns for living in “a less spacious age” (D 203), and we sense its many hypocrisies because Gabriel had earlier dismissed the company for its low “grade of culture” (D 179) and his aunts as “only two ignorant old women” (D 192). The revenge Gabriel takes on Lily with his impolite tip and on Molly through insults shows how mean- spirited he can be and just how unfairly his patriarchal values enable him to treat servants, colleagues, and wives. Ruth Bauerle quite rightly perceives that “scarcely a woman has encountered Gabriel without being disdained, overruled, or interrupted” (117).
As the guests leave, again the men threaten disorder: Freddy with his “resounding knock” (D 208); Browne by holding the front door open far too long, letting in cold air, and creating confusion in the “cross-directions and contradictions and abundance of laughter” (D 209) as the cabdriver attempts
to sort out his fares’ wishes; Bartell D’Arcy with his shockingly rude, “rough” reply that takes the women “aback”: “ ‘Can’t you see that I’m as hoarse as a crow?’ ” (D 211). He, of course, also supplies the ultimate thematic and psychological disruption by singing the song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” which triggers Gretta’s tearful memories of Michael Furey and strips Gabriel of his last marital illusions. In light of these examples, it is difficult not to see Gabriel’s “wild impulse of . . . body” (D 215), his “desire to seize” Gretta (D 215; emphasis added), “the thoughts . . . rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous” (D 213; emphasis added), and his “keen pang of lust” (D 215) as being an attack on Gretta—“mate-rape,” Bauerle has called it; Gabriel does, after all, long “to be master of her strange mood” (D 217) and wish “to crush her body against his, to overmaster her” (D 217; emphasis added), phrases with very strong connotations of noisy action.
Throughout these six scenes, three voices, fully available to reader and author but not uniformly available to characters and narrator, dominate the story—a point considered in great technical detail by John Paul Riquelme (121–30), who finds in this medley “clearly the stylistic proving ground that makes possible the configuration of technique in the later work” (123). First, there is the voice of the individual character in dialogue, asking, responding, cajoling, offering, in ways that reveal what the character wishes to show forth to the world as well as what the author wishes to unveil. Second, there is the interior monologue voice of the characters, that aspect of the story so inadequately communicated to the audience in John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation, which are unavailable to the other characters. Indeed, lack of access to this voice creates some of the key misunderstandings within the story, as when Gabriel blunders so in his reading of Gretta’s thoughts and provokes such an “outburst of tears” (D 218) that he is left nonplussed by his own reflection in the mirror. The third voice, primarily available to Joyce and his reader, usually appears in such rhetoric as the adverbial speech tags and descriptive passages. For example, Gabriel mentions that the cab window “rattl[ed] all the way” (D 180), and the narrator that Gabriel went down the stairs “noisily” (D 182) and that Bartell D’Arcy spoke “roughly” (D 211), but only Joyce and the reader are intended to discern in these words the gradual evolution of a pattern in which certain actions, certain speeches, certain attitudes are associated with noise. In discussing Finnegans Wake, Clive Hart presciently notes that “there are unmistakable signs at least as early as ‘The Dead’ of the deliberate use of verbal motifs for structural and tonal effects” (162), and we can see that this deliberate use belongs largely to the third voice, which is fully capable of defining and exploiting the unique qualities of “The Dead” and also of creating complex symbolic relationships amongst melody, noise, and silence, available in the traditions of European literature since Pythagoras, who supposed the whole heaven to be a “harmonia and
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a number,” a medley fully exploited as early as Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The General Prologue.”
Numerous unifying patterns of images have been identified in the text of “The Dead,” and warnings concerning “denial of proportion” in relating imagery to the totality of the story have been firmly posted. Epifanio San Juan Jr., for example, has raised particularly sound objections against “the mistakes the formalist habitually commits, stemming from the denial of proportion by exaggerating the role of a part and making part and whole somehow equivalent” (215). If one turns to images of sounds, however, of which there are at least 345 in the text, one sees patterns develop in terms of harmony and noise, standing in direct relationship to the female and male divisions of the story.4 Determining just what constitutes a sound image is,
of course, subjective to a degree and thus probably admits no exact count. Quite obviously, words such as “scraping,” “squeaking,” “stamping,” and “shuffling” (D 177) gleaned from early in the story constitute sound images, as do the adverbial constructions “said gaily” (D 178) and “laughed heartily” (D 180). It is equally obvious that the first three images constitute noise or discord, whereas the latter suggest harmony or melody. Thus such speech tags as “nervously” (D 180), “almost testily” (D 181), “noisily” (D 182), “bluntly” (D 187), “lamely” (D 188), “warmly” (D 190), “moodily” (D 191), “coldly” (D 191), “loudly” (D 197), “defiantly” (D 199), “archly” (D 206), “roughly” (D 211), and “ironically” (D 219) have been grouped together as noise images with such verbals as “clanged” (D 175), “exploded” (D 185), “stuttered” (D 190), “tapped” (D 192), “coughed” (D 201), “puffing” (D 208), “shouted” (D 209), “muttered” (D 216), and “mumbled” (D 216) and such substantives as “bitter and sudden retort” (D 179), “sidling mimicry” (D 183), “habitual catch” (D 185), “a kink of high- pitched bronchitic laughter” (D 185), “loud applause” (D 193), “clatter” (D 200), “broken only by the noise of the wine and by unsettlings of chairs” (D 201), “shrill prolonged whistling” (D 206), “confusion” (D 208), “thumping” (D 215), and “sobbing” (D 221). On the other hand, “peal of laughter” (D 180), “lovely voice” (D 184), “opening melody” (D 187), “soft friendly tone” (D 188), “distant music” (D 210), “old Irish tonality” (D 210), and “merry-making” (D 222) have been categorized with the verbals “murmured” (D 181), “laughed in musical echo” (D 183), “singing” (D 199), “strumming” (D 206), and “call . . . softly” (D 214) as harmonic or melodic images, appropriate to this Twelfth Night celebration.
Consideration of the roles of music in Dubliners in general and in “The Dead” in particular would take us in several directions, some already well covered. We could look at the role of music in Joyce’s own life, especially as it relates to his great-aunts whose party was the source of the party in the story; we could look at the specific allusions to songs, operas, and composers
in Dubliners, material already more than adequately catalogued by Matthew J.C. Hodgart, Mabel P. Worthington, Zack Bowen, Timothy Martin, and others; we could look at the uses of music in relation to the characters and themes. All three approaches carry their own satisfactions.
Joyce’s contemporaries recall again and again that music reigned in his household. Jacques Mercanton remembered Joyce, sitting at a piano, “carried away by his own delight in [an Irish folksong],” singing and accompanying himself “in a voice melodious and vibrant, though a little ragged” (231). Robert Haas has shown how pervasive musical references are throughout Dubliners in the daily lives of the characters, references that finally “serve to enrich” (20) all the stories but especially “The Dead.” Bruce Avery has even successfully fused the biographical data with the textual allusions to demonstrate that the numerous “musical references in the text signal that ‘The Dead’ is concerned with hearing and sound in much the same way that ‘Araby’ concerns itself with vision and sight” (475). Indeed, Avery anticipated