I
have a crow to pluck (bone to pick) with James Joyce.

Joyce
has been credited with writing the greatest short story of the Twentieth
Century, “The Dead,” one of a collection of tales he compiled under
the title, “The Dubliners.” “The Dead” is also recognized
as one of the first and best examples of modernist
fiction, when writers began to use characters to look inward into themselves
rather than out at the world.

Okay,
don’t panic, or worse, yawn. I’m not
going to lead you through a class of Modern Fiction .101. It’s just, there is
something about “The Dead” that always rubs me wrong, despite that
it’s a marvelous story, on its face so simple and yet fraught with wry humor
and symbolism. After many years I recently reread it and, sure enough, it still
leaves me a tad irritated.

The
story revolves around a social gathering that takes place years before the
Irish rebellion hosted by three spinster ladies who are the queen bees of the
Dublin musical scene. Included in the company are locally known musicians, an
up-and-coming operatic tenor, an Irish nationalist and a token Protestant.

The
master of ceremonies is the nephew of two of the ladies, and cousin to the
other, Gabriel Conroy. Gabriel is portrayed as a nice enough guy by Joyce, but
a bit of a stuffed shirt, a music critic who feels his education and world outlook
elevate him intellectually several notches above the rest of the company. He
frets his speech/toast that he has prepared for the evening will go over their
heads.

By
the end of the story, Joyce arranges to have the wind taken out of Gabriel’s
sails, his ego deflated and his sense of place in the world utterly unmoored,
and in a way equally poignant and, I think, cruel.

Gabriel
is in a static, lackluster marriage with Gretta, a simple girl from the West of
Ireland, with whom he shared – he thought – an exuberant, lustful courting and
nascent wedlock, until children came along and ambition became his main focus.

Before
the party ends, he catches sight of Gretta at the top of a stairway, stock
still, in what he sees as a classic pose, such as a goddess rendered in a Greek
sculpture. She is rapt, listening to the tenor’s rendition of a popular Irish
ballad.

The
vision ignites in Gabriel a long dormant passion. He wants nothing more than to
hurry her to the hotel room he’s booked for the evening, a night away from home
and the kids. His heart swells with memories of the romance he experienced with
Gretta in their youth.

Later,
in their room, he’s watching her undress, and it’s all he can do to keep
himself from pouncing on her. He makes his overture, but he is rejected. She
just can’t … she’s too upset. The song that had so enraptured her was one a
young boy from her girlhood used to sing to her. His name was Michael and, she
sobs, he died out of love for her.

Gabriel
is at once amazed and angry. Gretta has never once told him of her previous
relationship. He begins to interrogate her and she explains that Michael was a
“delicate” young man, a euphemism for tuberculin. The night before
she was to leave her home in Galway to move to Dublin, she found him standing
outside her yard in the pouring rain. A week later, in Dublin, she learned he
had died.

Gretta
then cries herself to sleep, leaving her husband alone to contemplate life and
his place in it. An epiphany shatters his illusions about himself and life. He
realizes he has never inflamed the passions of Gretta, nor any woman, as the
dead Michael had. He finds himself envying the sickly young fellow now long
dead.

Despite
Gabriel’s shortcomings, his arrogance is a mild sort. He’s not a bad guy. In
the moments before his wife’s revelation, he was bursting with love and lust
for her, only to have that proverbial bucket of ice water poured over his
ardor.

Joyce
uses Gabriel’s story as a metaphor for Ireland at the time. He was impatient
for his homeland to get on with modernizing, but it was held back by quaint
tradition and notions. It seems contradictory then, that he uses Gabriel, who
looks outside of Ireland, for example taking his holidays on the continent.
Still, he’s also in a sort of stasis, benighted by notions of class and culture.

But,
those are the greater themes. I’m not so much affected by what he is supposed
to stand for, than as a sympathetic character who has just had his heart broken
to pieces.

And
perhaps that has always been the problem I’ve had with great literature. The BIG IDEAS never mattered as much as the small
and very human characters who make their way between them.