[lit-ideas] Re: 70 years ago today ...
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:39:04 +0000 (GMT)
--- On Thu, 13/1/11, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Ah, but what is, or means, "like the descent of their last end"? What epiphany
>answers this?>
Redux: A full appreciation of the quoted passage, the finale of "The Dead" -
the last story in 'Dubliners', would have to examine Joyce's way of dealing
with the epiphanic moment as the extraordinary mingling with the ordinary - a
mystical idea not unrelated to Catholic notions of transubstantiation and such,
where the ordinary bread may be at once also the body of Christ [_literally_,
not just symbolically]. Joyce's language conveys this not just obviously by its
referencing of the "churchyard", and its "spears" and "thorns" symbolism of the
physical reality and spiritual transformation that is Christ's crucifixion, a
crucifixion that gives rise to "crooked crosses and headstones" that also
reflect a hope of redemption. What is distinctive about the language is how it
adopts and transforms the language of cliche in the service of this epiphanic
vision. This "The Dead" does from the off when it begins "Lily was literally
run off her feet" - a
colloquialism and cliche that is as vividly clear in tone and meaning as it is
"literally" nonsense (for no one can be "literally run off" their feet). The
opening line is a forewarning that within the seemingly trite may lie something
worth noticing.
An earlier story adapts and transforms the romantic cliche of "He would go to
the ends of the earth and back for her" by the ending "He would go to the end
of the street and back" - and not for her but, even more bathetically, to get
her the "daily meat" - language which points to an ordinary reality that mocks
and subverts the grandiose, expansiveness of the romantic cliche by reworking
it in everyday, materialistic and parochial terms. But bathos of this sort is
not the dominant effect of the end of "The Dead" even as its prose uses cliches
such as "His soul swooned softly" and even cliches [snow "falling softly"]
within a cliche - the cliche of the weather being emblematic of something else.
Joyce is able to do so partly because we have consciously or unconsciously
attuned ourselves to the way the language is akin, as with "literally run off
her feet", to spoken, personal language and the internal monologue of Gabriel.
It is this voice of Gabriel, not Joyce, who acknowledges "the newspapers were
right" and it is this voice that both makes forgiveable the near lapse into
cliche and also makes it poignant - for Gabriel is a man who has been observing
his small social world from a position of discontent with its limitations and
predictability, yet whose behaviour and language betrays similar limitations
and predictability: and in the story of Michael Furey he has had to confront
this fact, and the weakness within himself and how he has been cut off from his
wife by his own selfish thinking and sense of superiority. What Joyce leaves us
with is not Gabriel's attempt at epiphanic thought but with his epiphanic
feeling: ending on a sense of
resolution where what has been resolved is never itself resolved: "the descent
of their last end" is a phrase that is left hanging so it is unclear whether
"their last end" refers to the "last end" of the snow itself or of "the living
and the dead". But the epiphanic sense that is created depends on this lack of
resolution of what is sensed as resolved: the effect would be spoilt by seeking
clarification of "their", or of what is their "last end". The drifting sense of
unity that is felt as existing between seeming opposites is central to the
epiphanic feeling; and we sense the connection between the evanescent snow and
something eternal "through the universe", so that in explaining the passage's
effect it is beside the point to wonder whether the snow confers some deeper
meaning on the living and the dead, or they confer some deeper meaning on it,
or each other. There is a kind of mysticism evoked or expressed by the finale,
but its power would be
diminished if it tried to say what it tries to show.
"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."
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