For a very long time, I have been avoiding that great Irish writer, James Joyce (1882-1941) even though I have a thing for Irish authors (Sebastian Barry, John Banville, Colum McCann, Kevin Barry, Sara Baume, each with a wonderful lilt to their writing, and each more accessible than Joyce).
Take McCann’s emotional short story, “Everything in this Country Must,” that touches on North Ireland’s tumultuous 30-year conflict between Catholic and Protestant. Or Kevin Barry’s lyrical “Ox Mountain Death Song” that introduces us to an Irish rascal:
He had been planting babies all over the Ox Mountains since he was seventeen years old. Well, he had the hair for it, and the ferret grin, and there was hardly a female specimen along that part of the Sligo-Mayo border that hadn’t taken the scan of his hazel glance . . . .
My attraction to Irish writers is genetic—after all, the McAmis clan were Ulster Protestants who immigrated from Northern Ireland to Tennessee in the 1700s, then migrated to Texas, so out of a familial loyalty, I tackled Joyce. He was an innovator, experimenting with literary style, coopting classical forms, coining his own words, and creating a complex set of symbols. Even when he delved into the “interior” of his characters, there was little warmth.
His three major works are A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922)—both autobiographical—and Finnegan’s Wake (1923), a complex, nonlinear view of civilization, totally inaccessible because of its oblique stream-of-consciousness digressions and a myriad of literary allusions that serve as ciphers.
He made my head hurt, and admittedly I did not get very far in to any of these three novels, but I did read some of the short stories in Dubliners (1914). The final story “The Dead,” touches on human emotions, and has earned a place in many literary textbooks.
In “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta attend the annual holiday dinner/dance hosted by his favorite aunts. Throughout the evening, we see Conroy’s stony exterior, his “properness” in society.
We see a crack in the façade at the end of the evening when Gabriel experiences sudden tenderness toward Gretta, but he waits too long to act. The emptiness of his life crashes in when Gretta begins to talk about her first love, Michael Furey.
“The Dead” reference in the title is a symbol of Gabriel’s cold life and his lost opportunity for love. The imagery is repeated with a notation of Furey, who also missed an opportunity. I could feel Joyce’s rare sadness for both men in the conclusion:
“It had begun to snow again . . . . 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.”
POST SCRIPT: If you are braver than I, and want to access the major works of James Joyce, they are in the public domain—just follow this link:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59785/59785-h/59785-h.htm
Image from The New Yorker –illustration by Byron Eggenschwiler.
My Writerly Life 
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