What The Dead Tell Us

James Joyce’s, (1881–1942), story ‘The Dead’ concerns a dinner party held in Dublin, just before the feast of the Epiphany, January 6, celebrating the divinity of Christ manifesting itself to the Magi, and this is appropriate, by the end of the tale an epiphany is precisely what one of the guests experiences; Gabriel Conroy, who arrived at the party with his wife, Gretta. Gabriel is a typical Joycean character, an intellectual, or at least very calculating, (Leopold Bloom in ‘Ulysses’ is a notable exception to this, of course). His is an intellectualizing consciousness, endeavouring to find liberation through thinking, not always successfully.

Gabriel delivers a speech at the party, praising the hospitality of the hosts, and lamenting the present age. He says:

‘A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear, that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day’.

But, Gabriel happily maintains, there’s no point lingering on the past and the dead, we should live and rejoice in the present, with the living. This is so much affected intellectualizing.

But why is this story called ‘The Dead’? John Huston’s, (1906–1987), film version encourages us to see in Joyce’s tale a sentimental nostalgia for Edwardianism; this is a Simmel-esque interpretation, one might say, (Georg Simmel, (1858–1918), sociologist and philosopher, author of ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, i.e., everything interacts with everything else, in some manner; individual consciousness is downplayed, or rather, the individual struggles to maintain independence against the weight of social norms, historical heritage, culural traditions… ‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, as Karl Marx, (1818–1883), said).

But this is not how I read it, or it is at least not the most important theme. It is Gabriel’s individual consciousness that is of interest, it is he who is feeling dead by the end of the story, after hearing the tale of a young man, now actually among the dead, Michael Furey, who had a crush on Gretta many years ago. Towards the end of the party Gabriel notices Gretta standing transfixed by a song that had been sung by Bartell D’Arcy:

O, the rain falls on my heavy locks,
And the dew wets my skin,
My babe lies cold…

Back at the hotel, Gretta tells Gabriel about Michael Furey, who had a thing for her many years ago in Galway, and he used to sing that song. ‘I think he died for me’, she says, though this is romantic sentimentality, actually he died of tuberculosis, at 17, but his condition was not helped once he discovered that she was leaving Galway, and he waited outside her window in the rain, claiming he did not want to live.

The story affects Gabriel deeply. While Gretta sleeps:

‘Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that towards any woman but he knew such a feeling must be love ….. 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 gray impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling’.

Gabriel, a ‘thought tormented man’, to modify a phrase from his speech, hoping for an affective intimacy, had constructed another person, Gretta, to be the object of that intimacy, but at that moment Gretta’s feelings were directed towards something else, the dead. It is an unnerving experience, this loss of identity, perhaps Gabriel himself had closed off his emotions, together with any opportunities for resolution… but now that he has heard from the the dead he sheds generous tears, suggesting a kind communion with the living.

The story ends with the fall of some heavily symbolic snow:

‘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’.

At the end of D. H. Lawrence’s, (1885–1930), ‘Women in Love’, Gerald Crich dies freezing to death in the snow, in the Alps, the snow symbolizing a drifting into indifferentiation… …. …. … :

‘He slithered down a sheer snow slope. That frightened him. He had no alpenstock, nothing. But having come safely to rest, he began to walk on, in the illuminated darkness. It was cold as sleep… He had come to the hollow basin of snow, surrounded by sheer slopes and precipices, out of which rose a track that brought one to the top of the mount. But he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he went to sleep’.

The title ‘The Dead’ was perhaps suggested to Joyce by a poem by Thomas Moore, (1779–1852), appearing in ‘Irish Melodies’:

Oh, ye Dead! oh, ye Dead! whom we know by the light you give
From your cold gleaming eyes, though you move like men who live.
Why leave you thus your graves,
In far off fields and waves,
Where the worm and the sea-bird only know your bed,
To haunt this spot where all
Those eyes that wept your fall,
And the hearts that wail’d you, like your own, lie dead?

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s, (1821–1881), story ‘Bobok’ the dead speak to each other in their graves, to be overheard by the narrator, Ivan Ivanovich, an aspiring writer, (a friend had told him: ‘Your style is changing… it is choppy: you chop and chop — and then a parenthesis, then a parenthesis in the parenthesis, then you stick in something else in brackets, then you begin chopping and chopping again’. A good description of the narrator’s presentation to us of his seemingly random thoughts, rapidly succeeding one another, ….. perhaps anticipating the modernist’s use of stream of consciousness?).

But Ivan is a typical Dostoyevskean character, intense, darkly motivated, resentful, brooding, and a little deranged:

‘Something strange is happening to me. My character is changing and my head aches. I am beginning to see and hear strange things, not voices exactly, but as though someone beside me were muttering, ‘bobok, bobok, bobok!’

What’s the meaning of this bobok? I must divert my mind’.

He seeks diversion through attending a funeral of a distant acquaintance. Later, while hanging around in the graveyard, (‘I looked into the graves — and it was horrible: water and such water! Absolutely green, and … but there, why talk of it!’), he hears the dead speak to each other:

‘…. a great many woke up at once; an official — a civil councillor — woke up, and began discussing at once the project of a new sub-committee in a government department and of the probable transfer of various functionaries in connection with the sub-committee — which very greatly interested the general. I must confess I learnt a great deal that was new myself, so much so that I marvelled at the channels by which one may sometimes in the metropolis learn government news. Then an engineer half woke up, but for a long time muttered absolute nonsense, so that our friends left off worrying him and let him lie till he was ready’.

As it happens, the philosopher among them is not so talkative, as they explain:

‘Platon Nikolaevitch is our homegrown philosopher, scientist and Master of Arts. He has brought out several philosophical works, but for the last three months he has been getting quite drowsy, and there is no stirring him up now. Once a week he mutters something utterly irrelevant’.

‘To the point, to the point!’

‘He explains all this by the simplest fact, namely, that when we were living on the surface we mistakenly thought that death there was death. The body revives, as it were, here, the remains of life are concentrated, but only in consciousness. I don’t know how to express it, but life goes on, as it were, by inertia. In his opinion everything is concentrated somewhere in consciousness and goes on for two or three months… sometimes even for half a year…. There is one here, for instance, who is almost completely decomposed, but once every six weeks he suddenly utters one word, quite senseless of course, about some bobok, ‘Bobok, bobok,’ but you see that an imperceptible speck of life is still warm within him’.

‘It’s rather stupid. Well, and how is it I have no sense of smell and yet I feel there’s a stench?

‘That … he-he … Well, on that point our philosopher is a bit foggy. It’s apropos of smell, he said, that the stench one perceives here is, so to speak, moral — he-he! It’s the stench of the soul, he says, that in these two or three months it may have time to recover itself … and this is, so to speak, the last mercy…. Only, I think, baron, that these are mystic ravings very excusable in his position …’

[Бобок, bobok, is a little bean, we may assume by this Dostoyevsky justs means nonsense. This is, after all, the story that includes his often quoted passage (and note again, the lamenting on times past): ‘The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays. In old days, once a year at any rate a fool would recognise that he was a fool, but nowadays not a bit of it. And they have so muddled things up that there is no telling a fool from a wise man. They have done that on purpose’].

The dead keep themselves amused through revealing all of the shameful details of their earthly lives. The stench of death is really the stench of immorality, pettiness, vice, debauchery. As the narrator concludes:

‘Depravity in such a place, depravity of the last aspirations, depravity of sodden and rotten corpses — and not even sparing the last moments of consciousness! Those moments have been granted, vouchsafed to them, and … and, worst of all, in such a place! No, that I cannot admit.

I shall go to other tombs, I shall listen everywhere. Certainly one ought to listen everywhere and not merely at one spot in order to form an idea. Perhaps one may come across something reassuring.

But I shall certainly go back to those. They promised their biographies and anecdotes of all sorts. Tfoo! But I shall go, I shall certainly go; it is a question of conscience!’

In Philip K. Dick’s, (1928–1982), ‘Ubik’, the dead also speak to each other, while the living speak to them also, as the dead are kept in a state of ‘half-life’, a kind of cryonic suspension, or ‘cold-pac’, in the Beloved Bretheren Mortuary, which allows a limited consciousness to the deceased, including the ability to communicate.

The book is primarily told from the viewpoint of Joe Chip, a typical Dickian character: a debt-ridden technician, ‘haggard and hungover and more than usually glum… looked, in fact, about as always, the glumness excepted… He had a peculiar defeated quality hanging over him and yet, underneath, he did not seem to have given up. A vague and ragged hint of vitality lurked behind the resignation;… it seemed… that Joe most nearly could be accused of feigning spiritual downfall… the real article, however, was not there’.

After a bomb explosion, through which Joe Chip and others of his team apparently survive, it later transpires [**spoiler alert**] that they may be dead after all, or at least in a state of ‘half-life’. For strange things are happening in Joe Chip’s reality, such as the regression of time. Stanislaw Lem, (1921–2006), gives an interesting account of this:

‘Joe Chip, hav[ing] come close to meeting with a violent end and hav[ing] regained consciousness imagine[s] that [he has] escaped death, whereas in fact [he is] resting in a moratorium…. [and] if the world of the frozen person’s experiences is a purely subjective one, then any intervention in that world from outside must be for him a phenomenon which upsets the normal course of things. So if someone communicates with the frozen one, … this contact is accompanied in Chip’s experiences by uncanny and startling phenomena’.

So, are the living trying to communicate with a dead Joe? Lem continues:

‘But, to go a step further, is not contact also possible between two frozen individuals? Might not one of these people dream that he is alive and well and that from his accustomed world he is communicating with the other one — that only the other person succumbed to the unfortunate mishap? This too is possible. And, finally, is it possible to imagine a wholly infallible technology? There can be no such thing. Hence certain perturbations may affect the subjective world of the frozen sleeper, to whom it will then seem that his environment is going mad — perhaps that in it even time is falling to pieces!’.

And it certainly gets much worse for Joe Chip. It turns out [**spoiler alert**] that, like Gabriel Conroy and Michael Furey, (the infatuated 17 year old), it is a dead 15 year old, Jory Miller, (an immature adolescent, but whose ‘cephalic activity is particularly good’), that is the source of Joe’s nightmare, disrupting his tenuous negotiation with the reality of his world, causing yet again an unnerving sense of a loss of identity… as Jory, who eventually appears in person, tells Joe:

‘It’s hard to explain, but I’ve been doing it a long time to lots of half-life people. I eat their life, what remains of it. There’s very little in each person, so I need a lot of them. I used to wait until they had been in half-life awhile, but now I have to have them immediately. If I’m going to be able to live myself. If you come close to me and listen — I’ll hold my mouth open — you can hear their voices. Not all of them, but anyhow the last ones I ate. The ones you know’.

If there is a moral to any of this it could be:

‘Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them’, (George Eliot (1819–1880)).

Or maybe:

‘There are some dead who are more alive than the living’.

‘No, no! It would be more true to say that there are some who are more dead than the dead’.

(Romain Rolland (1866–1944)).

But especially:

‘Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l‘autre; vous êtez foutus’. (Gilles Deleuze, 1925–1995).