Media & Mercy: The Dead

The dead matter.

If you’re still in a position to be taking Lit classes, you might want to remember that. It’s the essential point of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” 15,000 words into a 16,000-word story, Gabriel Conray comes to a dreadful realization. 

It might be one of the most famous scenes in English literature. Shortly after giving a mike-dropping speech at his aunts’ Epiphany party, Conroy finds himself unable to keep his wife’s attention for longer than six seconds. Confused, he asks what’s on her mind (which, it should be mentioned, is the first time that he’s posed such a question within the past 15,000 words). Tearfully, she confesses that the song they’ve just heard makes her think of Michael Furey, her lost first love. 

Not only is this the first thing that Gabriel’s heard about anybody named Michael Furey; it’s the first time that he’s been forced to recognize that his wife led a life beyond his own. Suddenly, the elaborate speech he just gave seems unforgivably shallow. He realizes that, while he’s been “acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts,” his wife has been mourning for Michael, a “figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks.” 

If the story ended there, it would probably be pretty depressing. But Joyce pushes it further. Once past the initial surge of self-pity, Gabriel is able to feel sympathy for Michael Furey. The more he thinks about Michael’s relationship with his wife, “Generous tears [fill] Gabriel’s eyes…he [knows] that such a feeling must be love.” The story ends with Gabriel’s “soul [swooning] softly 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.” 

It might be James Joyce writing, but nevertheless—the divine language of this last section is no accident. It’s only once he comes to a sense of his connection with the dead (and, indeed, his connection to all things) that Gabriel is able to achieve the insight that he’s been chasing for the entire story. He might be a good speaker, but it isn’t his skill with words that makes him important. He’s important—he matters—solely by virtue of being a child of God, and the same thing can be said about everyone else that’s ever walked the earth. It’s only because he learns how to bury the dead—by coming to an appreciation of the tissue connecting everyone that has ever lived, and everyone that will ever live—Gabriel finally becomes capable of truly loving another person.

Teresa de Mallorca is the pseudonym of a neophyte who just completed the RCIA program at Holy Name

Share your thoughts below or on social media, tagging Holy Name Cathedral and using #SeasonOfMercy.