May 16, 1997, was not Bloomsday in San Diego. The day belonged to Gabriel Conroy, the chief protagonist of Joyce's “The Dead.” The five panelists discussing this famous short story sparked an electricity that jumped across to the warmly receptive audience.
Alice Jones, poet and San Francisco analyst, introduced the other members of the panel: Stanley J. Coen, a training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; Forrest Hamer, a candidate for the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and a poet; Jay Martin, Professor of Humanities and Government at Claremont McKenna College and faculty member of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute; and Paul Schwaber, Professor of Letters of Wesleyan University and faculty member of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute.
Jones portrayed analytically informed readers not as “passive sponges soaking up a book, but … readers who [bring] our own history and unconscious to each story.” She believes such readers permit writer, reader, and character to interact in an intersubjective world: “an intermediate place, in between fantasy and reality, [where] the writer begins to write and the reader can begin to perceive.” In this world, said Jones, “imagination comes to life, but unlike a dream, one is still conscious enough to create, to play around with the images and sounds one finds there.”
In this imagined universe, word and sound give life and nuance to characters originally created by the writer and recreated by the reader. Jones's poetic ear allows her to listen to the music in Joyce's text: “In the sounds of all the W's and the O's and the U's (warm, window, cool, would, to walk alone, through, snow, would, Wellington Monument), Joyce gives us not only water in various forms lapping over us, but snow as it layers and softens, half-deadened, no hard or biting sounds, nothing acute, but a muted music that works on us and joins the reader at a sensory level with Gabriel Conroy,” said Jones.
Schwaber believes that “one of Joyce's great contributions to modern literature is his portrayal of characters with detailed and believable psychologies, believable current dynamics, and internalized pasts.” Schwaber has made a study of characterology in Joyce's oeuvre. He applied his methodology to Gabriel Conroy.
“The Dead” develops around Gabriel Conroy's three tense interactions with women — the first with Lily, the maid; the second with Molly Ivors, a guest at the evening's party; and the climactic one with Gretta, his wife. Each further distresses him. Gabriel is shamed in each of these encounters, a shame which accelerates to deepening humiliation.
“How are we to comprehend Gabriel's anguish, his sweeping self-hatred and ridicule?” Schwaber asked. Gabriel's suffering suggests that he has some recurrent ancient hurt. From clues within the story, Schwaber concludes that Gabriel was excluded from the intimate relationship that Constantine, his older brother, enjoyed with his mother. In jealous desperation, Gabriel turns to women for reassurance when his self-esteem threatens to plummet. This has rendered Gabriel extremely vulnerable when he feels rebuffed by a woman. This again occurs in the last scene of the story, where Gretta is preoccupied with her memories of the dead Michael Furey as Gabriel is struggling with his unrequited passion for her.
Schwaber observed, “What deserves still to be said about Gabriel Conroy is that he moves through his grievous humiliation to humility … He weeps ‘generous tears’ for his poor wife and poor Michael Furey, and feels the union of the living with the dead, our condition of mortality, and the wisdom of living boldly in one's time.”
Martin contended that throughout the story Joyce argues with himself through Gabriel Conroy's voice. Like Joyce, Gabriel Conroy is torn between his creative strivings and his Irish identity, held captive by the English language, religion, and culture. Gabriel, like Joyce, dreads that he will fail “should he stay attached to his Irish roots and Irish life that he regarded as a living death,” said Martin. “Much as the monks at Mount Melleray sleep in their coffins, to remain in Ireland, a Dubliner, was, for [Gabriel], to live in death in the coffin of his Irish memories. In this story, Joyce's argument with himself burst like stars into a series of intensely realized images — scenes, symbols, epiphanies, explosions of vision.”
Gabriel argues with himself that three possibilities are open to him as an Irish writer. He can remain in Ireland and associate imaginatively with the Irish tradition. He can try to pursue an Anglo-Irish tradition as other Irish writers did. Or “he can go into exile — and artistic freedom — on the continent.” This is not simply a matter of geography, said Martin, “but a state of artistic intention and conditions of culture.” At least for Joyce, the first two alternatives Gabriel considers are unthinkable. The only acceptable solution is exile. “Ireland is all memory, a dead past and dead language,” reflected Martin.
The theme of a living death and paralysis in Ireland is fully realized in the imagery of the story. Descriptions of snow-covered stone statues remind the readers of their first glimpse of Gabriel.
A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toe-caps on the tops of his galoshes, and as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow stiffened freeze, a cold fragrant air from our of doors escaped from crevices and folds.
By remaining in Ireland, Martin said, “Gabriel is himself a stone man, a snow man, a statue, who often speaks coldly … and is himself emotionally attracted to the cold.” Joyce, in contrast, found life, passion, and artistic freedom when he left Ireland for Europe and an internationalist identity.
Morris L. Peltz is a training and supervising analyst for the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He manages the Program Committee's Program for Spouses.
Coen is one of a small but growing number of analysts who argue that the analyst's passionate feelings, his or her countertransference of love and hate, are inevitable and ultimately necessary ingredients of the analytic mix between patient and analyst. He took the same stance as he examined the text of “The Dead.”
“With [the story's] emphasis on repetition, sameness, circularity, restraint, decay, oppression, and dissatisfaction, a psychoanalytic reader could imagine The Dead' [as] a stalemated psychoanalysis,” Coen noted. “Glimpses of forward movement, change, passion, newness contrast with boredom and oppression by what is familiar.”
Coen deduced that Gabriel Conroy dreads intimacy and closeness, avoiding anxiety by becoming emotionally aloof. “Gabriel escapes from oppression by the familiar, a loathing of oneself and one's roots, though a flight away from one's origins leads to alienation rather than vitality. Too far apart or too close together can each spell emotional death,” said Coen. The task for Gabriel (as it is for all of us) is to find, through traveling back and forth, a safe place where he can experience love and passion (in Gabriel's case, for Gretta) without becoming desperately claustrophobic.
Coen suggested that Gabriel, in the final scene of the story, experiences an epiphanous moment when he can emerge from his deadness and isolation to experience love and compassion for his wife. “The answer to the meaning of ‘epiphanames’ in The Dead' is better left open to swing between the momentary and the transcendent, between transience and permanence, between the illusion of change and actual transformation, between life and death,” said Coen.
Hamer noted that during his early twenties Joyce was drawn to poetry. Five years before he wrote “The Dead,” he published a collection of poetry, Chamber Music. But Joyce turned from poetry because “he began to feel that verse was incapable of capturing the subtlety of emotion and imagination he was drawn to representing,” said Hamer. “He turned to writing the epiphanies, in which the rhythms were not so straitjacketed to stanza form.”
Hamer focused on the elegiac last paragraph of the story. “It is a beautiful stanza of prose poetry, a culmination of poetic musings by Gabriel coming late in the story,” said Hamer. He drew the audience's attention to “the rhythmic tensions between sentences of different lengths; the use of the image motifs of snow, dark and light, among them; the allusion to the west, suggesting both death and a return to a source of nurturance and vitality; as well as the hypnotic music created by alliteration, assonance, and the double-l sound of falling. Joyce is quite adept here in making this ending both epic and lyric; in doing so, he not only brings this story to a close but [engages] us in our reflections upon it and our common temporality.”
In his final comments, Hamer contrasted Gabriel's sense of mortality with Michael Furey's passion: The dead man's emotion lives on, as if to spite his early death, and makes “music poised to seduce a wandering love.”