For more than a century, readers have loved “The Dead” for its mingled threads of festivity and mourning
ALMOST EVERYONE who watches television in Ireland will have seen a Christmas commercial for Guinness—first aired in 2004—in which snowflakes drop softly over a variety of Irish landscapes. Although the writer got no credit from the advertising agency, this panorama of longing and nostalgia draws on James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. Joyce’s tale concludes with snowfall “general all over Ireland”.
“The Dead” unfolds at a family party in Dublin in the days after Christmas in 1904. One guest thinks that “Christmas is never really Christmas unless we have snow on the ground”—which, most unusually for Dublin, they do. Seasonal cheer and fellowship lighten the “dark gaunt house” on Usher’s Island, beside the River Liffey.
Gabriel Conroy, the Morkans’ intellectual nephew, feels torn between straightforward goodwill and a snobbish detachment from his family, Christmas jollity and Ireland itself. Miss Ivors, a firebrand nationalist, accuses Gabriel of being a “West Briton”: a pro-British sell-out. Yet he makes a speech of thanks to the sisters that recalls “those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day”. It is both an artful performance and a sincere tribute.
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