What Falls Upon the Living in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that, though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland’s capital city, he had not managed to render its famous, unrivaled hospitality. His efforts to rectify this omission resulted in “The Dead,” the book’s final story. It takes place chiefly at a party in the home of the elderly Morkan Sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany, and fittingly its central character, the Morkans’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, will have his own epiphanic experience by the story’s end. Gabriel preaches about Irish hospitality in his after-dinner speech but does not realize that he will grapple with a stranger of sorts later that night. How might the virtue of hospitality include the need to incorporate difficult feelings about our families, our homelands, and ourselves? And is the story’s ending, with its incorporative vision of snow falling on both the living and the dead, hopeful or hopeless? Wes & Erin discuss. Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Buck Mason. To get a free t-shirt with your first order, head over to buckmason.com/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection, Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland's capital city, he had not managed to render its famous unrivaled hospitality. His efforts to rectify this omission resulted in the Dead, the book's final story. It takes place chiefly at a party in the home of the elderly Morkan sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany. And fittingly, its central character, the Morkan's nephew, Gabriel Conroy, will have his own epiphanic experience by the story's end. Gabriel preaches about Irish hospitality in his after dinner speech, but does not realize that he will grapple with a stranger of sorts later that night. How might the virtue of hospitality include the need to incorporate difficult feelings about our families, our homelands and ourselves? And is the story's ending with its incorporative vision of snow falling on both the living and the dead, hopeful or hopeless? Today we're discussing James Joyce's the Dead, published in 1914. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I've read in multiple places that a lot of people, including T.S. eliot, consider this possibly the finest story in the English language. I'm wondering what you think about that honor, and does this story deserve it, in your opinion? 1:37 Wes: Yeah, I think this story is a good. Is a good candidate and I guess we can try to say why. I don't know if you agree, but it's a story personally that I find very touching and I guess I've read it a few times, so maybe it's because I know what's coming, you know, the famous epiphany. Right. But I find it hard to put down. It's kind of, you know, with the little episodes within the story, they're very well thought out and there's a rhythm to the story. The buildup is pretty perfect. And then I think what's going on beneath the surface is really fascinating as well, which will get into. 2:25 Erin: Yeah, I agree. I think it's kind of funny that presumably the whole purpose of the story, which is to render this. This party at the Morkans' house is. Is really just set up for the final scene in the hotel. And so that's a little bit unexpected to me, I guess every time or not that what happens at the Morkans' party isn't consequential. And doesn't you Know, as you say, perfectly set up, what comes later, 2:51 Wes: you 2:51 Erin: know, it's a story in which not very much happens and everything that is occurring is occurring on a kind of subterranean level. And the central drama of the story is not even happening inside the character that we're following, at least not until the very end. Right. I think it's the central drama is occurring inside Gretta, and the main character, Gabriel, that we're following isn't aware that this drama is going on until the very end. And so every time there's a kind of twist, a surprise. So though it doesn't have this sort of obvious, like an O. Henry style plot twist, it's really surprising and satisfying to me. 3:35 Wes: Yeah, in a way, I think there are two climactic moments in the story. One is his speech, right. Which in a way, according to his, I think, preconception for the narrative of the evening. Right. That is going to be the climactic moment. And that's the thing that he's worried about. But of course, that ends up being kind of a. It's not entirely a false flag because I think it's intimately related. And the whole question of nationalism as well, and hospitality versus hospitality is related to what's going on with his wife and the epiphany he has about his wife. But in a way, Right. That climactic moment turns out not to be the end of things. And then we get this really wonderful poignant vision of his wife in a way that also leads to a kind of disappointment. So I think, you know, your question of whether there's something hopeful there at the end will be interesting as well. But, yeah, there are those two high points and the, you know, in the beginning, I think if you want to think about the inciting incidents of the story, you know, when they arrive, as you pointed out, you know, it begins with the bustle around this annual dance with the aunts and the niece and the servant Lily. And then there's the question of where Gabriel and his wife Gretta are. Right. Have they arrived yet? So I guess that's the first point of suspense. And the second one is whether Freddy Malins is going to turn up drunk. 5:07 Erin: There's actually no suspense there. 5:10 Wes: Yeah, exactly. You know, and then when they do arrive, when Gabriel and Gretta do arrive, it's. There's the kind of friendly or, you know, who knows? But there's the marital teasing back and forth. His wife took too long to dress, that's why they're late. And then she's making fun of him for the galoshes There's a whole interaction a little bit later on having to do with him being more cautious and concerned about health. But we'll. We'll get to that. And then the other, you know, the other thing that's really, in the beginning, sort of telling. The first thing that disconcerts, or the word is discomposed. The thing that gets to Gabriel is Lily, who. He makes some comment about how he'll see her married soon. And she basically says that all men suck and they only want sex. That's pretty much the upshot of what she. She says. What does she call them? Palaver. Palaver. I don't know how you pronounce it. 6:04 Erin: They're full of palaver. Yeah. 6:06 Wes: Yeah. And they only want to get something out of you or something like that. 6:11 Erin: They're all for what they can get out of you, I think, is what she said. 6:14 Wes: Yeah. 6:15 Erin: You know, the moment of teasing that you mentioned, I think can be read a lot of different ways. The marital teasing. I think there is a humorous note there, but I think that also it can be read a little bit more sinisterly. You know, he. Gabriel has an iron grip, we'll say, on his household, demanding, you know, what people will wear. And so you can see it. I think it's really clever this way. I think you can see it as a moment of teasing about a good natured husband who cares about his family's welfare and their health. Or you can see it as a guy who has to be in control, who considers himself very smart and very up on things. Right. And who has to sort of force his family into alignment with his own conception of the world. I suppose. So I think that need for control is something that we see later in the hotel room. And so the groundwork is very subtly laid from the first moments that we see Gabriel and Gretta. We see that they have, you know, a good marriage and that he loves his wife, but also that there's this lack of understanding or maybe a point of slight contention between them that is released in this. In this teasing and could be read in a lot of different ways, this interaction with Lily. I mean, like I was thinking last night about Gabriel's name being Gabriel and how he has this sort of, like, annunciation that he wants to deliver to everyone, his speech over the course of the night. But then he's sort of visited by these three. These three women who all, you know, have messages for him, I guess. And Lily's is maybe the most confusing in a way. I think what she's responding to. You know, correct me if I'm wrong, is his infantilization of her. Is that right? 8:04 Wes: You think she's unhappy with him? 8:06 Erin: No. Well, yes, yes and no. 8:10 Wes: So she's complaining about boys. 8:14 Erin: I think that his interaction with her has spurred this feeling, this negative feeling. And so she may be responding to this kind of infantilization by way of, like, these negative feelings about men. She may not know that she's responding not only to the content of what Gabriel is saying, but to sort of his manner of putting things right, assuming that she's still in school. And that sort of everyone is following this narrative trajectory towards marriage, which at the time was a really complex subject matter for the Irish because of the fact that Ireland had the lowest marriage rate in Europe, like a shockingly low marriage rate at that time. And as we see with the Morkan sisters and with Mary Jane, it's very common for a woman to end up alone. So the assumptions and the kind of liberties and the infantilization that Gabriel takes spurs this reaction in Lily. And maybe she gives a kind of a stock answer, but I think it's important that it's been provoked in the way that it has. 9:18 Wes: Let's see. So Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll. So to her, he's much older at this point than her and he's known her as a child. And he's. So there is an element of fatherliness and I don't know how old she's supposed to be. Pretty young. I don't know if it's a teenager or early 20s, but. But yeah, she could be that. That point in life where she wants to say, don't. Don't treat me like a child anymore. Which is not the way I was reading it, although I think that's a possibility. So his words exactly are, I suppose we'll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh? Regardless of whether it's infantilizing or good natured. That's always the sort of thing that can get you into trouble because you love life is often a sore spot with a lot of people you don't know. It's like saying, you know, I suppose you're gonna be going on a vacation to Paris with all that. With all that money. There's. There's an element of luck in here which he's not acknowledging. So when she responds, the men is now only all palaver and what they can get out of you. I think so I took this purely as her cynicism about this sort of thing. And I think he, you know, he ends up being surprised, I think in part because he doesn't expect that cynicism out of her, perhaps because she's still young. Right. She hasn't really had that much time to become that cynical. And I don't know if this is a comment on the way values are changing. You know, there's always that possibility things have become more socially unstable or more liberal, or the moral fabric has compromised in some way and that her response could reflect that. But I think what you're suggesting, which I think is a possibility, is that she is also saying, I'm not just a little girl who's dreaming about my wedding. I already know what men are all about. 11:19 Erin: Well, no, not quite. I mean, I think that. I don't think I put this very well, but I think that what Gabriel is assuming about her is infantilizing and it provokes, you know, it's assuming that she's not old enough to have a realistic view of her prospects for romance or that she has had no negative experiences with men and that she's full of this youthful hope and a kind of blindness at this point. So I think that it's not like she's saying, hey, don't think of me as a little girl. I think that his mode of addressing her is infantilizing. And she's not. It's not like she's saying, hey, take me seriously, or something like that. I think that it's provoking bitterness from her because of his assumption and his mode of talking to her so that she's not aware. 12:06 Wes: I think this is a good assumption in like a normal way that someone his age would talk to someone that age. So I don't see it as inherently infantilizing. 12:17 Erin: I think it's a good assumption too. But I think that it has the unintended consequence of doing that. 12:22 Wes: Yeah. So I think he doesn't know something about her, obviously, which she's much more jaded than he expected. 12:29 Erin: Right. And that's the thing. He doesn't seem to know her very well at all. 12:33 Wes: And it's interesting, it's right after that that I like this word discomposed by, you know, he's discomposed by her retort. And that sends him into a kind of worried rumination about the speech he's going to give and a kind of self attack. So this, you know, your idea here, that he doesn't know her very well. He starts to worry in a way that he doesn't know his audience very well. So their grade of culture is different than his. It'd be ridiculous to quote poetry in front of them. He would just be kind of showing off with his superior education. So these are, in a way, they're at the same time condescending thoughts. Which kind of supports your reading of the interaction with Lily. Because now we kind of get the extension of the condescension beyond the relationship with Lily to basically his relationship with anyone, with all of them. It reflects that his education has sort of created this distance between him and his. His family. But on the other hand, he's quite self critical about that distance and his. His inevitable condescending relationship to people because of his education. 13:47 Erin: You know, his whole interior monologue is ultimately kind of silly. Right. I mean, he's just giving a speech at his aunt's house that he gives every year. And it's kind of funny in the end. I mean, it's a great speech in a lot of ways, but it's kind of funny that, you know, the whole night he's sort of consumed with the speech when it's really kind of a low stakes enterprise. And it's really important. I think it's important emotionally to his aunts and Mary Jane and they are obviously really moved by it. And it's a beautiful experience for the people at the party. But it's also. It's not like he has to speak before parliament or something like that, Right? 14:23 Wes: Yeah, but I would feel the same way. I mean, if I had to speak in front of any audience, because I've done it. I just do nothing but worry about it all night until it's done. 14:33 Erin: That's true. But it seems to me to be more of an issue of. Sorry, Less of an issue of public speaking and more of an issue of what he's going to include in his speech potentially as a way of reproach or his motives for including certain things from the beginning are not entirely clear to me. Like he wants to include Browning, I think because he's just written this review and what he sort of thinks that his audience is going to take out of it is a bit unclear. 14:59 Wes: Yeah. And I think we should talk about the speech and what it's doing because it has actually a bunch of different sections. Right. Which he tells us before we even hear the speech. We get the outline of the speech. So one theme is Irish hospitality, one is sad memories, one is the three graces which turn out to be the, you know, his aunts and Mary Jane, is she his cousin? 15:23 Erin: I think so, basically. 15:25 Wes: So one is the Three Graces, who turn out to be his aunts and his cousin who are hosting the party. And then he lists Paris as if that's a separate section, which it's not. It's part of the Three Graces section. And as we'll talk about, it's kind of a sinister allusion. Paris as in the Trojan, not Paris, the city. And then finally there's the Browning quote. So he lays out those sections of the speech. Not long after he has had the interaction with Ms. Ivors, which is someone who presumably he has a lot in common with. Right. And they've both been teachers, but she basically comes at him with a quote, unquote crow to pluck, because he's written something for the Daily Express and therefore must be a quote, unquote, West Briton. Right. Which I take it to mean that he's a Anglophile or something like that. He's not loyal to his own country and his own culture. So that's an interesting interaction because part of what he's going to say in the speech in a way, is a response to that kind of nationalist sentiment which has been pre. Written into the speech. But he thinks later on he'll think of a. A way to sharpen up that attack because he thinks that Ms. Ivors is actually going to be there and so he can, he can get revenge for her from this interaction. But I love this little conflict between them. 16:54 Erin: Yeah. The charge of West Briton is like a really serious and consequential one in a way. But also this is another moment where, you know, everything is kind of filtered through Gabriel's perspective. And so it's hard to tell how serious Ms. Ivors is being. Like, she could be just tweaking his nose and being a little bit ironical in her name calling of him, or she could be like, actually kind of salty about. About this. Right. But I don't get the impression that she's being super serious. And then when she leaves the party before Gabriel's speech, he takes it as potentially she's so upset over her interaction with him that she's leaving or something, which is like, definitely not true. 17:36 Wes: Um, well, I, I'm not sure about that, really. 17:38 Erin: Okay. 17:39 Wes: She may not know that. She may not consciously be upset, but it's leaving early. Like that is a. It's a communication or it's. Who knows? But it's not. I don't see it as an outlandish guess, but I think you're, you know, so there's an ambiguity to their interaction where he feels attacked right in the beginning and right. He. In responding to her. This is another moment where he has to think carefully about how he's going to respond. He says, you can't risk a grandiose phrase with her because, you know, so she's on his level. Right. Unlike the others. And he's not just gonna superior his way out of this. She can kind of get him, you know, she can kind of punch back just as hard. So the grandiose thing he wanted to say was that literature was above politics. But what he ends up saying to her is that he doesn't see anything political in writing book reviews, whatever the political alignment of the paper. He wasn't writing a political column, he was just writing a book review. And he loves books. He even gets a little bit in, just a love of newly bound, newly printed books. And so he sees himself. This is an important theme in the whole story, right? The story, in a way, is also about nationalism. And it's not. It's a topic that will turn out to be interestingly related to the question of hospitality, but we'll get to that. And she, in his mind, at least, is the representative of nationalism. He'll make a very rude comment in his mind about her later on, saying, had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism? I think he comes to this interaction probably with some preconceptions about her and her politics, and then feels attacked. And she'll. Of course, you know, as you point out, there's this ambiguity because she'll say she's only joking. So she kind of. The way it comes across. And again, we. We see everything through his eyes. So we don't know how reliable everything is, but the way it comes across to him is that he's been attacked. And then she goes, oh, I'm just joking, and come on this vacation with me. And no, I'm not going to. I can't. I've got a cycling tour. And then there's this whole interesting thing about he's going to be in France or wherever, and she's, why not visit your own land? And I want to keep my languages up. Why not your own language? And he says, irish is not my language and I'm sick of my own country. And. And then she teasingly, right, presses his hand and then teasingly says, West Briton again before she ends the interaction. So it's hard to tell who's more politically serious there or who's more obsessed with the politics of this right, is she the hardcore nationalist or is he the hardcore anti nationalist? What's going on in this interaction? Although she does make those remarks. And this is a time of fervent nationalism in Ireland, and Joyce is definitely anti nationalist. So. And it's funny, I thought of, you know, with the whole, Irish is not my language. I thought of being in, you know, when I was in Dublin as a kid, they made us learn Gaelic, and I was just always like, what the hell? What are we doing? You know, we're never going to be able to speak it. It's just like an exercise in. A kind of futile exercise in cultural pride is what it felt like even to me as a kid. So. But there's, you know, there's still that strain in Ireland of cultural preservation, which I think Joyce is rightly associating with nationalism. It doesn't have to be. Exactly. But in this case it is. 21:09 Erin: Well, and by nationalism, do you mean home rule? Because I think Joyce is in favor of. Of home rule. 21:15 Wes: No, I mean this whole idea that he can't be an Anglophile. So the way Orwell defines this is patriotism is one thing, right? We can love our country and we can love a certain way of life, a certain form of life, and want to preserve that, you know, American ness, let's say, if there is such a thing, or Irishness. But if we are devoted to those things in the sense of wanting to identify with them as superior, Irish culture is superior. We should stick to our own in order to get our own sense of superiority. It's that kind of fervent nationalism associated with a closedness and unhospitality to make the connection a, you know, being closed off to other cultures and nations. Hey, don't go to France. Stay in your own country. That's what I think is the. 22:07 Erin: Is the problem, right? Oh, and I think that Gabriel has kind of the opposite problem, right? Like he's closed off to his own country. I'm sympathetic to the idea of people learning Gaelic and of certain. Certain elements, maybe of Ms. Ivor's platform, if we can call it that. I think that Gabriel maybe represents the other end of that extreme, right. When Ms. Ivors asks him to go to this tour of the Aran Isles. This is the west of Ireland, which of course, like Yeats, has made the association that the west is sort of the true Ireland, right? The original Ireland. And Ms. Ivor says, oh, you know, your wife is from there, isn't she? And Gabriel says, what? Her people are in a sort of impatient way, or he says it, what is the word her people are, said Gabriel shortly. And so there's a kind of, I think, desire on his part to separate him and by extension his wife from this wellspring of Irish culture because he is sick of his own country for reasons that are maybe understandable, considering all of the talk about it going on at that time. But there's also a sense, I think, that he's maybe divorced himself from his identity in a way, whether this be literal, that he's not in tune with Irish identity, or rather figurative, that he sort of cut himself off from some sort of original wellspring, a feeling or sort of innate nature or whatever that might be. Right. That could be literalized in his desire to separate himself from the tradition of the west and the true Ireland. 23:40 Wes: You know, he's a representative of cosmopolitan and elite education. The references he's going to make in his speech are to ancient Greek mythology and to an English poet, a liberal English poet, Browning. So whatever his relationship to Irish culture, which I don't presume necessarily, it's explicitly negative. 24:02 Erin: Well, he says he's sick of his own country. 24:04 Wes: Yeah. Although in that moment he's trying to. I think what he's trying to say is I'm sick of people like you, but sick of nationalist, that sort of nationalist sentiment, which can become very simplistic and narrow. So for instance, the other thing I remember learning about in schools, you know, how great the Celts were, the glorious, glorious culture of the Celts, which even at that age felt a bit heavy handed, like, is this propaganda or am I learning history? Spent a little too much time on the Celts. But anyway, so it's a very, as Orwell points out, it's very difficult to know where the line is between being culturally anchored. Right. Not being unmoored from one's culture, not being unpatriotic, which are negatives, I think, and Orwell does too, but the line between that and simply having a more nuanced relationship to one's own culture, which isn't jingoistic or bigoted or nationalistic, however you want to put it, the line between patriotism and nationalism is actually unclear. And people, I think can cross back and forth without knowing they're doing it right. And even people in the United States who think they are the last thing, they would think of themselves as patriotic and are, when push comes to shove, you could elicit some patriotism from them and you could even elicit some, some nationalism from them if they thought America were in Danger, for instance. So I think people have these deep feelings about their country, which, as the more liberal they become, the more cosmopolitan they come, or, you know, the more they become a citizen of the world and world culture, the less aware they are of that deep connection. But it's inevitably there. It's like a connection to one's parents. It's undeniable and it's. It's deep and it's visceral, but it can get covered over in the same way that our vitality in life can get covered. Covered over by too much intellectualism. 26:05 Erin: So you don't take this idea of the west or of Gabriel's desire to escape this heritage as being sort of cut off from those kind of elemental emotions. I'm reading it in a symbolic way. 26:17 Wes: I'm not so sure he wants to escape his heritage, but I think there's always that danger of being too reactionary in a way. Right. So I don't want to be a nationalist, therefore I'm going to say I'm sick of my country. It's unclear to me that that's exactly the way he. He feels in this. Right, that he's not also interested in Irish culture and Irish writers. He's an intellectual. Right. It'd be surprising if he weren't also interested in the best of Irish intellectual history. But very clearly he's also interested in the ancients and. And it's Browning and probably world literature and all that stuff. So. And. And in the speech, like I said, nothing Irish per se comes up, right? Except for Irish hospitality, which is something that comes from something decidedly not intellectual, something he can associate with his uneducated family members. 27:11 Erin: Like I said, I am a little bit sympathetic to, not necessarily to Ms. Ivors herself, who might be a little bit insufferable, but to that righting of the ship, as it were. I think it's important to understand the Irish desire to celebrate the Celts and to learn Gaelic and celebrate their own traditions in light of the tremendous amount of the denigration of their culture that they were receiving at the hands of people who had no. No right to rule over them. 27:40 Wes: I think it's understandable, but it can easily become pernicious. It can become jingoistic and nationalistic. 27:46 Erin: I think that this question of nationalism in light of hospitality comes up perhaps in the figure of Mr. Brown, who's another guest at the party and whom Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate have invited in and are kind of allowing to take a little bit of control over the party. I think there are Warnings on both sides. I think that hospitality can also leave you imperiled. It can leave you open to attack or to the stranger who does not have your best interests in mind. And though the figure of Mr. Brown. 28:20 Wes: He's the Protestant, right? 28:22 Erin: He's the Protestant. Yeah. Is a pretty benign one. We also see the ways in which he is. 28:29 Wes: He's an invader. He is the English invasion. 28:33 Erin: Well, he represents the illegitimate authority of the oppressor. 28:37 Wes: Right, Absolutely. 28:38 Erin: And this takes shape in several different ways. I mean, we encounter it even in a sort of, like, vague sexual kind of threat that he poses against the young girls at the party. Like, he's sort of playing like the dirty old man. Right. But also this kind of, like pantomime that he plays where he sort of adopts this low Dublin accent. And at the end of the party, we see him leave in a green coat. Right. He covers his brownness in greenness. He's sort of playing the part of 29:06 Wes: English brownness covered in Irish green. Yeah. 29:09 Erin: Right. And so. 29:11 Wes: Or really orangeness. Right. William of Orange, but the color is. 29:16 Erin: We'll call it terracotta and split the difference. Yeah. And he assumes this paternalistic role or even like the role of a defender, de facto host when he leads Ms. Julia into the dinner, you know, and everyone is allowing him to do this. They're deferential to him in ways that suggest that, you know, like many Irish people and Joyce is, I think, you know, deliberately trying to point to this, they've sort of embraced their own oppression in sinister ways. 29:45 Wes: Yeah. Brown condescendingly calls her my latest discovery. Right. And then says something about her voice having improved. 29:52 Erin: And there's a lot of presumption there. At the same time, he's harmless. He's part of this comic duo with Freddy, and he does see and appreciate other points of view. You know, he even says some positive things about Catholic monks. And he's not sort of single minded or a caricature, but he represents the dangers of maybe not having a strain of a little bit of Ms. Ivors and a little bit of standing up for yourself and for your own. And I think that this question of patriotism and how much allowance one should give to the outsider is a really fraught one when you don't have control of your own house and are trying to take that back. So I am sympathetic to her and I do think that there's something in her reproach of Gabriel because. And he must know it. 30:44 Wes: Right. 30:45 Erin: Because he. I mean, he's a sensitive guy. He's really affected by the encounters that he has over the course of the night. But the fact that Ms. Ivor's statement hits him so hard must mean that he suspects this of himself, right? Or that there's something in her criticism which is true. 31:00 Wes: I think part of the epiphany he has with his wife will turn out to say something about his relationship to Irish culture, right? Because what puts her in her kind of reverie is listening to this, this old Irish song, which she does, you know, she associates with this boy that she loved, but it creates all these feelings in him, you know, And I think that's directly related, right, to his sort of indirect relationship to his own culture. It's mediated in, in some way. We can talk about that more when we get to that. So I want to take a break now to talk about the sponsor for this episode, Buck Mason. We all have our favorite go to's, right? Shirts, sweaters, jeans, the stuff you wear all the time. Well, our sponsor, Buck Mason is the perfect brand for those go to's. Its clothes are second to none. They're timeless and never go out of style. Everything I have from Buck Mason fits great right out of the box and I wear it all the time. Buck Mason makes all the essentials. Jeans, shirts, jackets, and much more. I love the tailored look and fit of their T shirts. 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This kind of lends itself to your point about the dangers of hospitality when 33:15 Erin: it brings to mind, oh, I never made this connection before, but they have on the wall, you know, talk about, like accepting your own oppression. They have on the wall that image of the princes in the Tower. Right. So maybe there's something in here with a connection to that. That princely failing means that the, you know, the rightful rulers are imprisoned. And Mr. Brown, as Richard III is, you know, running wild over the landscape. Anyway, sorry. 33:40 Wes: This is a patriotic sentiment, right? And it's potentially type of thing which could become a nationalist sentiment. You know, when someone says, this is unique among nations, hey, we're the best at hospitality. But he's putting that in the service of anti nationalism. Because the next moment, and this is where he's thinking of Ivors. You know, there's a new generation, sincere but skeptical, and he uses that phrase, that cool phrase that he wanted to use the. The thought tormented age. But he worries that they're hyper educated, lacking in humanity, lacking in hospitality. And I think he's. Again, he's specifically thinking of nationalism. And he's interestingly trying to turn a certain kind of Irish pride and hospitality, put that in the service of tempering it before it goes too far, before it becomes a nationalist sentiment. On the one hand, he wants to say something about the hospitality of his family, but he can't avoid politicizing it in this way, even as he wants to criticize people like Ivors for politicizing everything. Everything's propagandizing to them. 34:52 Erin: I'm just curious because I've never really considered this before. You think that any statement which would cast a country or its people as being the best at something culturally, you think is a nationalistic statement or sentiment? 35:05 Wes: Yes, but I'm. 35:07 Erin: So you think it's always negative? 35:09 Wes: I do. Some of that may be benign. And I'm just. I think it's dangerous whether or not maybe it's. Sometimes it's benign. You know, some of it obviously is benign. Hey, the Irish are uniquely hospitable. That's a fine sentiment by itself. But of course, all of that can always be put to nefarious uses. I mean, we're seeing it now in what's going on in Russia, right? It's the greater than, less than thing. It's the other people are lesser than. And Russia is a unique and glorious nation, and it's been severed, it's been split up and amputated, and it must be restored to its glory. So I'm going by Orwell, wrote a famous essay called Notes on Nationalism, which is very influential on me. And I liked his distinction there between patriotism and nationalism. The difference between celebrating a form of life, a way of life, a culture, between that and saying this makes us superior to other Peoples in some way. So I think you're right. Kind of call this out. It's not a firm distinction, Right. One could benignly say, oh, I think Italians make the best pizza. Sorry, that might just be a bigoted thing to say. Italians are the best opera singers. 36:21 Erin: I think if they didn't make the best pizza, that would be a problem. 36:24 Wes: Yeah, they're not the best fighters, but they're lovers, not fighters. But anyway, right. 36:29 Erin: I see the opposite side of this as being a problem of homogeneity and of no culture at all. Like, if you can't celebrate anything, um, or if you can't stand up for your own or. Or even assert your own superior. And. And I. I don't know necessarily that I agree with what I'm saying. I'm just sort of like, rehearsing this argument, Right? Like, standing up for your own superiority in a certain regard has to do with what makes your culture unique and what makes it different, just on a very simplistic level, from other cultures. I think that, you know, homogeneity would be the result of having no cultural sentiment, and then everything would just be the same, which maybe is the way that we're tending now as a world, but some kind of complexity or sort of local color and flavor and all that is lost in the process. 37:18 Wes: This is why I like Orwell's distinction. When he says patriotism, he means that broadly, it doesn't just apply to nations. And nationalism, for him, doesn't just apply to one's relationship to one's nation. It could be one's relationship to any social group, including one's political party or one's religion. So for Orwell, there's such a thing as pacifist nationalists. People who aren't just pacifists, but believe who everyone isn't. A pacifist is less than. Is inferior. So patriotism in that context is just. I embrace the ideal of pacifism. I think that's great. And that's what I want to see. That's the idea I want to see furthered in the world. Or as an American or someone who lives in a liberal democracy, one might want to say, I embrace Americanness or the idea of liberalism. That's the idea I want to. That's a way of life that I want to see preserved and furthered. I don't want to see it destroyed. I want to defend it. I want to enhance it. That's the patriotic way of relating. But for Orwell, that nationalism happens when that kind of degrades into rah rah, rah. My country is better than yours. My in group is better than your out group. And as you're pointing out, the distinction is inexact. Right. We find there's a lot that happens at the border and sometimes it's very hard to tell which one it is. And this is Orwell's whole thesis, is that it's hard to tell on a personal level and it's hard to tell on a political level. When do we want what is good for our culture or our country or way of life or for some particular social group or even for myself? And when is it about pride, essentially? When is it pride in the pejorative sense? When is this about some kind of nationalist sentiment in which I use my membership within a certain nation or group as a means to feel powerful and superior to some other group? Not only is the line between those two things inexact, they're sort of interpolated in complicated ways where. And this is what Orwell means by doublethink. We can think two contradictory things, you know, on the nationalistic end of the spectrum and the patriotic end of the spectrum, or the good and the focus on power versus the focus on the good. We can grab both of those in very, very contradictory ways and we allow for those contradictions because we are willing to strongly conflate the good with the superior, the powerful, and. And so on. So I'm reading it. Sorry for the long speech. I'm reading it through that lens and through the lens of my own strongly anti nationalist sentiments. But I think you're right, it's easy to go too far in the other direction. Orwell points out in the essay, there's such a thing as anti nationalist nationalism. Right. One can become too. This is Gabriel's whole problem with feeling superior to people and feeling condescending. 40:17 Erin: Right. 40:17 Wes: It's the nationalism of the intellectual. That's his loyalty, and more than a loyalty. Right. It's a way of feeling superior. So it's very hard for any of us to escape it, even when we're in the mode of thinking that we're rejecting it. 40:30 Erin: Right. And in the case of Irishness, there's an interesting blurring of the boundary between what we might call nationalism or what we might call the right to exist as one's own nation, which I think is more of what's at stake here. 40:45 Wes: Well, this is the thing, right? Yeah. There's the legitimate fight for the right to exist as a nation, but even a just cause can produce stupidity and people and really unsavory notions. So people go too far in the other extreme. It's understandable, right? It's why it happens. And to your point, you know, he kind of adds the caveat to his speech that we should cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone, great ones, whose fame the world will not willingly let die. Like you've pointed to this very complicated problem of how we would distinguish nationalist and patriotic sentiment or celebration of our culture and the positive sense from one that goes into the pejorative sense. And he's struggling with that in his speech. He wants to say, nevertheless, you know, despite his worries about lack of humanity and hospitality and by implication close mindedness, we still want to cherish the dead and the great ones. I see the stories about culture per se as well, right? The dead rule over us in a really significant and interesting way. Everything that we are, that we've been constructed culturally to be, come from all these people who are long gone, they're long gone as individuals. But their ideas and their ways and their customs and their culture, those aren't gone. They live on in us. And we are subject to that. And the question is, is that a form of oppression, right? Is it almost like being infected with a kind of cultural virus that compromises our individuality and autonomy or is that heritage a prize? It makes us what we are and it's the only means to be truly happy and to be truly fulfilled as individuals, right? We can't just be autonomous individual units. We have to be embedded in some sort of culture like that. So like the question you've been asking about. Well, you know, if we're anti nationalist, we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. That's precisely this. It's a very difficult question about whether culture per se is oppressive. And not just culture, but our formative influences, right? Our parents, everything that makes us who we are. Are those formative influences oppressive or are they good? Are they both? You know, obviously they're both. But when are they one and when are the other? Or can we have one without having the other? So to call this story the dead is to it makes it a little bit sinister, right? It's unclear how sinister it is, but the idea is that we are ruled by the dead and that's representative of culture. And then to that caveat that I've been talking about, he adds a another caveat, which is that, yes, let's remember the great ones of the past. But, and this speaks to again, the problem of, is the existence of culture Oppressive or not. So we got to remember them, we got to allow their influence, but also we have to live in the present. You know, he's thinking specifically about lost loved ones, but this applies culturally as well. If we brood on them, if we are. Let ourselves be entirely captive to them, we, quote, could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have living duties and affections. 44:03 Erin: Yeah. We have the idea of deadness or of the dead sort of ruling over the scene in these conversations or that sort of preference, the past over the present. Right. Based on the singers that the party guests and Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate have heard in their youth and being better than any, like the tenor Parkinson as being better than anyone that you can hear today. Or Mr. Brown mentions all of these Italian tenors or Italian singers that have come to Dublin and preferences the past over the present. 44:39 Wes: D'Arcy won't have any of it. 44:40 Erin: Right. There's a tenor sitting right there that, 44:44 Wes: you know, we're just as good today as they were back then. But. 44:48 Erin: Yeah, right. Well. And interestingly, like, D'Arcy doesn't, you know, he has a cold and he doesn't sing, so he is kind of voiceless until this really crucial moment where he does finally sing. And it has a huge effect. I mean, like, on the one hand, his voicelessness is kind of proving everybody's point. Like, oh, look at this little. This tenor who's. So. It reminds me of conversations at baseball where, like, now everybody's injured all the time. Like, you know, nobody used to get injured before. Now everybody's so precious, they're getting injured. You know, D'Arcy won't sing. Don't make me sing. And then the opposite is proved when he does sing. And all of these sort of live and immediate emotions crop up in Gretta, who is hearing it and has an experience that maybe when she's Aunt Kate's age, she's going to look back and say that D'Arcy was the greatest tenor that she ever heard. But it seems that subjective experience, I think, seems related to this idea of what one heard in one's youth or at a particular moment, which chimes with one's sort of intention. Individual experience, which is, you know, the concerns of the living are extremely subjective. And this maybe provides an interesting counterpoint to the idea of the snow that falls generally over all of Ireland. The subjective versus the objective seem to be warring with each other in this idea of what is living and what is dead for each one of us. 46:13 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it's like the anxiety of influence problem. Right. So I think there's a connection here between cultural nostalgia and individual nostalgia and romanticism. And so our connection to the past, does that make us more alive? You know, she's having all these deep feelings in relation to the chip, to that song. And then it's also inducing something in Gabriel. Is our connection to the past and to the dead. Is that, in a way, a key to our aliveness? Or does it trap us in a kind of idealization that prevents us from living in the present? And I think it can do both. It's like the scholar who can't do anything original because they sort of get crushed under the stack of all their references. They can't take the influence and become alive enough to do something new with it. It just becomes like collecting scraps or being a stamp collector. Hey, look, I'm collecting all these quotations. But it doesn't live in me, and I don't produce anything new of it. I haven't developed any particular talent because of those influences. In Greta's case, Gabriel feels humiliated by the fact that he's looking at her lovingly and lustfully and. And with pride and all these different emotions, and she's thinking about someone else. And even worse, his feelings are aroused by the spectacle of her thinking about someone else. Because her state of mind, the state of mind that produces such a beautiful, graceful figure that arouses him that night, is created by her relationship to that song and to her memory of Michael Furey. In other words, is she neglecting her current love relationship because she's caught in an idealization of someone who's dead and gone? And, of course, there's the cultural parallel that I've just mentioned. Or is that inevitable and necessary in a way? 48:09 Erin: Well, I think that Gabriel. Part of his epiphany is realizing that he has not felt or loved as deeply as Gretta and this young man, Michael Furey. You know, we see the ways in which he abstracts her. When she's standing on the stairs listening to the song. He says, you know, what is a woman standing on the stairs? A symbol of. Or something like that. Right. And he doesn't see her as a complete person. He quite literally, like, objectifies her. He makes it. And this is out of admiration and, you know, his mental. 48:41 Wes: He's objectifying it, though, as someone. Something sacred. 48:44 Erin: No, Maybe. You seem to want to give him a lot of credit. I'm inclined to be a little harder on him. Because his relationship to her does not come, as he discovers at the end of the story, from a kind of wellspring of real emotion, but from a kind of abstraction. And he says Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. The title of the painting really doesn't even have anything to do with her. It's about this sort of abstract song that she's listening to. And music is itself an abstract art form. So the question of whether or not he's even really engaging with her as a person is, I think, one that Joyce wants to introduce into our minds. 49:25 Wes: He's idealizing her, which is an inherently objectifying state of mind. 49:29 Erin: But is he idealizing her? 49:31 Wes: Right. 49:32 Erin: Or is he not really engaging with her at all? 49:35 Wes: He's engaged with the vision, you know, the sight of her at the top of the stairs. And, you know, there's a substantial history between them. And, you know, as will happen as you know someone for a long time and you live with them, or you're in a marriage or a relationship, kind of mundanity sets in. And those moments of ecstasy, those moments of being in love, there are moments of that, but that doesn't define the whole relationship. The whole relationship is much more mundane. If you're 17 years old and you have a moment of ecstasy with someone and then they die, that's like capturing that in amber forever. Mundanity never sets in. And all you have is that perfect idealizing memory. So she idealizes Michael Furey, to my point of view. And it's the spectacle of her idealizing this guy who she didn't obviously know very well. And this is young love. When he says, you know, he's never known love like that. You know, I think he gives too much credit to that type of infatuation. But we could talk about that. 50:35 Erin: Well, he says he's never known love at all. 50:38 Wes: Yeah. 50:39 Erin: Which makes me think that he's not really engaging with her, if we take that seriously. 50:44 Wes: Yeah. So we're not going to agree on that. I mean, I see what he's doing is actually very loving. Loving can often be. Especially there's the love of infatuation and the ecstatic moment, which is often unrealistic and idealizing. And then there's just love as represented in a relationship that's unfolded over years. And intimacy and knowing each other well, which they, in my mind, seem to have. I don't look at their relationship as skeptically as I think as. As you are. I take that as just sort of something pretty ordinary. You know, I don't see him as terribly controlling or them as loveless or. 51:25 Erin: Well, I don't see it that way. 51:27 Wes: Okay. 51:27 Erin: I take Gabriel seriously when he says that he. He's never experienced this feeling, but it must be love. I think that by the end of the story, he does love her by empathizing with her fully. But I think that they have a very good marriage and that prior to this experience when he is sort of like expecting to have this rendezvous, this really romantic experience with her in the hotel, what he thinks about her is so romantic and so beautiful that the thunderclap of the realization that maybe he hasn't really loved her properly is, I think, shocking for us. Maybe we're not supposed to take that entirely seriously. Or maybe it's just a different kind of love. 52:07 Wes: Clearly, he's been infatuated with her. I mean, you know, moments of their secret life burst like stars upon his memory. Her first letter, for instance, and the feeling that produced in him. That's a very touching moment. Right. You know, to my mind, he's pretty clearly been infatuated with her at various points and had ecstatic moments with her at various points. So it's not like he hasn't had feelings for her that are similar for the feelings that she and Michael Furey had for each other, except that time and memory have not for her. And Michael Furey never got a chance to set in. 52:41 Erin: Oh, I see. 52:42 Wes: Yeah. So when he's self critical in the end about not having loved in the 52:48 Erin: way she's loved, he says he had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. Yeah, that's pretty bold to me. 52:59 Wes: So the feeling of saying I don't want to live. Right. That's what he's impressed by, is Michael Furey is sick. But he's willing to go out in the cold and say, I don't want to live, and then die a week later because of the woman that he's loved. So this is a more. Maybe that's right. Whatever moments of infatuation he's had, he never put his life on the line. Right. For someone. Or died by definition, obviously, but died for someone. And perhaps that's a deeper emotion. So my view on that is yes and no. Young infatuated love between 17 year olds. It's both deeper and not deeper. A lot of it is predicated on illusion. You don't know the person. It doesn't represent the kind of love that happens in a real relationship over time. Someone you really, really know. But on the other hand, there's a depth to it. The feeling is unbeatable. The amount of passion that's involved is unbeatable. But unfortunately, I think that passion is associated with idealization and objectification. So I put. I think I locate objectification at those moments of idealizing infatuation. 54:06 Erin: I suppose what I'm curious to know is where you think that infatuation and love intersect. Because to me, love is tied up in the idea of loving the whole person and the idea of sacrifice. And therefore, the sacrifice of Furey's life for this kind of love is, to me, a very noble thing. And Gabriel recognizes that it's different from his relationship to his wife hitherto. I think that he is infatuated with her. And I think that that's really beautiful for a long married couple. That he does kind of, like, have the hots for his wife and really want to go back to this hotel room because he is so infatuated with her. But there's something, I think, very noble in the love between Gretta and Michael Furey, which involves sacrifice and a kind of a deeper love, which you think is kind of teenage infatuation. And I think that there's something on the line for Michael Furey that is not on the line for Gabriel and his relationship to his wife. You know, he doesn't know this story until this night. He doesn't really know or access this part of his wife's consciousness. Prior to this, she's never mentioned this experience, which seems so important and formative for her. I think his moments when he is in the room with her, when she's kind of distant from him mentally, are both very relatable to us. Like, we want to have a certain experience with a person. Like, how come they're not on our wavelength. But they're also expressed sort of in terms of control. He's not really accessing her as a whole person, maybe until these last moments when I think he does really see her as a full person and love her in that way. You know, he's not accessing her past, which is obviously, like, tied up with her identity as someone from the west, as someone from a Maybe a less intellectual background, but maybe a more authentic one than his. Authentic in quotes. And Michael Furey, you know, the fury of his passion is more live. Gabriel discovers and has more stakes in it than his own limited love for Gretta until this final moment. That's how I'm reading this. So I read their marriage as a very good one. And I read his feelings for her as being incredibly romantic. The description in the cab when he's thinking about their life together, like, you know, brings tears to my Eyes. So I wouldn't characterize my feelings for Gabriel as being anything less than really complicated in his relationship to Gretta. 56:29 Wes: One of the really cool things about the story is that the kind of flurry of different emotions that she creates in him. Or that he gets, you know, from just the sight of her in a state of listening. Or as I think Joyce will call it at some point, a riot of different emotions, including, ultimately, lust. And so we see him in the hotel room. You know, we see elements where he wants to kind of grab her and ravish her. And then other moments where he's relating to her as a whole person. So I think those different moments are. You know, often we're not relating to people as whole people. So that we find those moments where we can do that, where we can genuinely empathize and get into their heads. Because often we are worried about what we want. And even in a state of infatuation. I don't see the infatuation as particularly empathetic, actually, again, because it's idealizing. I don't see infatuation as being related to a whole person. Like, I want to have my cake and eat it, too. Which year with the whole. Is the love of a Michael Furey? Is that the real thing, the deep thing? Or is it not? And I. You know, I was trying to say yes and no in different senses. But I think your points about sacrifice and the level of passion are very important and good. Nor should we just abandon idealization and infatuation. Those are important emotions. 57:52 Erin: I don't know that I agree that, like, I don't know how I feel about these things personally. This is just my reading of the way that Joyce is presenting it, you know, So I don't know how I feel about the relationship between infatuation and actual love. I haven't really worked that out. But I think that Joyce seems to be making this distinction. I do think that there's something deeper and more sacrificial that's, like, inherent in a marriage. That, like, for a successful marriage, there has to be this level of love that's about sacrifice and about a willingness to die for the other person. Which, when Gabriel admits that he doesn't feel. It could be because he's never had, you know, the opportunity to feel that way. Or it could be because he seems to be cut off from certain emotions or sort of views of himself or views of Gretta that he has to, like, welcome into his own heart. Right. Like, I see the final scene as being. Gabriel is learning to love Gretta. And also Learning to be hospitable to himself in a way, to his own complicated feelings about things, to this other man who makes up a part of Greta's past and who therefore represents a part of Gretta that is. That is unavailable to him and that he has no control over. And I don't mean that in that he is only relating to her in a kind of controlling way, but I think that we all have, you know, when we love someone, we. We want to, you know, obliterate their past and not necessarily make friends with certain elements of people that don't kind of fit our view of them or our standards even. And like, part of, I think true love is letting that go and embracing all those being hospitable to all those elements of the other person. In the same way that I think, you know, he has to learn to be hospitable in a way to his own. His own country. Like he's kind of made himself a stranger to Ireland and he has to maybe learn to integrate and incorporate those elements of Irish culture, you know, as represented by Gretta and her girlhood, as being part of his own identity as well. I think that that's really important for his growth at the end. 1:00:00 Wes: Yeah, I think the cultural parallel is very important here. As you've pointed out, there's this suggestion of a disconnect from a passionate relationship with his own culture and too much abstraction, too much of being an intellectual and in a way, I think too much. And you've given one reading of hospitality, but I'm going to give another here just too much hospitality in the sense of the kind of hospitality that invites a brown in or even the kind of hospitality that makes him feel like he's just. When he's being self critical about being a penny boy for his aunts, right. Just being in this humiliating position. So the suggestion is that there's something missing. And I think you're. You're right about this. You know, there's something missing from. If you are cut off from a deep love of your own culture or you are cut off from the passion, right, the kind of passion represented by Michael Furey, then that's a problem. But again, on the other side of that lies nationalism and idealizing and all that stuff. So it's just a difficult. Ultimately there has to be some balance, but it's a difficult balance to get. So Michael Furey, I think is pretty. Is a reference to the Furies. And if we didn't pick up on that, then Joyce kind of tries to make sure we do by basically saying he feels persecuted by this figure. I'm trying to find that. Do you remember where that is? 1:01:28 Erin: Yeah. A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if at that hour, when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him. 1:01:39 Wes: In its vague world, that terror is elicited by the. When Gretta says, you know, he died for me, and this is before she tells the whole story. So the Furies were, in ancient Greek mythology, were agents of vengeance. Right. So famously, they chased down Orestes. Orestes killed his mom because she killed his dad. And then he got punished for it by being chased by the Furies. So basically, they're punishing people for crimes, and in this case, specifically for the crime of matricide. So what do we make of that? 1:02:17 Erin: I have no idea. 1:02:20 Wes: You know, I think the punishment might have something to do with just the sort of thing that you were talking about, which is his disconnection to passion, whether culturally or romantically. Right. So that, in a way, you know, Orestes, in a way, was trying to vindicate the paternal over and against the maternal. And you could see that roughly as what Gabriel, in a way, is doing in the disavowal of passion. And so the story of Michael Furey becomes kind of the natural punishment for that. All right, shall we end it there? 1:02:54 Erin: Sure. 1:02:55 Wes: Okay. Thank you. 1:02:57 Erin: Thank you. 1:02:58 Wes: Thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com to listen. Com.