James Joyce: Notes - Textual History [4/4 - “The Dead”]

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“The Dead”

‘The past is not past; it is present here and now.’ (Exiles; quoted in Gordon Bowker, James Joyce: A Biography, Hachette 2011) [epigraph to Chap. 1]

1] Dram. Pers: The story is set at No. 15, Usher’s Island was once home to Joyce’s maternal great aunts, who rented the top floors. Gabriel Conroy, a teacher of Modern Languages at Royal University [UCD], and a man of letters. Kate and Julia Morkan are his maternal aunts of Mary Jane is their neice and support since she ‘has the organ at Haddington Road’ [Catholic diocesian church]. Patrick Morkan, deceased, was their brother and the owner of a glue factory and a house in Stoney Batter where the formerly lived. The ladies are somewhat impoverished but Julia is still soprano at the Franciscan Church of Adam and Eve on the quays - though upsettingly the Dublin clergy mean to implement a Vatican decree about not permitting women to sing in church - while Kate, who is now much feebler than her sister, teaches beginners on an upright piano in the back room. Gabriel’s mother Ellen, who is dead, was a sister of Kate and Julia and is mentioned only once as having married a T. J. Conroy who worked in Port and Docks. Gabriel appears to be bereft of parents at the time of the story. Gretta Conroy is his wife whom his mother Ellen considered beneath him, while his brother Constantine Conroy is a priest. Mr Fulham is the owner and landlord of the house on Usher’s Island and ‘has the ground floor’, possibly using it as a residence and possibly for business since he has a caretaker on the premises. It appears to be thirty years since Patrick Morkan died and his sisters moved in at Usher’s Island. The girl called Lily who is acting as clockroom attendant at the party is called the unnamed ‘caretaker’s daughter’. She apparently acts as a messenger, bringing home ‘orders’ to the ladies from the shops and possibly as a household servant in that and other capacities too. She has been known to Gabriel for years. Molly Ivors is a teacher, like Gabriel, and a Irish-language revivalist and (presumably) a member of the Gaelic League. Unbeknownst to Gabriel up to the last moments in the story, she had a young suitor called Michael Furey when she was in Galway as a girl and he died of tuberculosis - causing her to weep when she remembers him. There is a parallel for this in Joyce’s wife Nora’s experience with a boy called Michael (“Sonny”) Bodkin who appeared at her window in an apparent love-tryst in mid-winter before dying of tuberculosis. Gabriel and Gretta have two young children called Tom and Eva Conroy who aren’t present at the party, which is takes place annually on Epiphany Night (Jan. 6th.) The other guests are Mrs. Malins and her drunken son Freddy, Miss Daly, Miss Power, Mr. Browne, Miss Furlong - all apparently pupils of Mary Jane at the Academy - Mr. Bergin, Mr. Kerrigan, and Miss O’Callaghan - who stays close to Bartell D’Arcy, a renowned tenor singer and somewhat the honoured guest, throughout the party. She and he are the last to leave, taking the cab with Gabriel and Gretta when the party ends in the early morning. (Gabriel insists on paying his share of the journey when it reaches the Gresham and actually overpays the cabby in a fit of generosity which the cabby takes as a seasonal gift.)

A Critical Bibliography of “The Dead” [in progress]

Gerhard Friedrich, ‘Bret Harte as a Source for James Joyce’s “The Dead,”’, in Philological Quarterly, 33:4 (1954), pp.447-48. Mary T. Reynolds, ‘Toward an Allegory of Art’, [chap.], in Joyce and Dante:The Shaping Imagination (Princeton: Princeton UP 1981) cp.181. Kevin Whelan, ‘The Memories of “The Dead”’, in Yale Journal of Criticism, 15:1 [Johns Hopkins] (Spring 2002), pp.59-97- as supra.] Boonie Roos, ‘James Joyce’s “The Dead” and Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy’: The Nature of the Feast’, in Yale Journal of Criticism, 15:1 [Johns Hopkins] (Spring 2002), pp.99-126 - supra.) Marjorie Howes, ‘Tradition, Gender, and Migration in “The Dead”, or: How Many People Has Gretta Conroy Killed?’, in Yale Journal of Criticism, 15: 1 (Spring 2002): 149-71. David Spurr, ‘Colonial Spaces in Joyce’s Dublin’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 37, 1/2 [Dublin and the Dubliners] (Fall 1999-Winter 2000), for remarks on conceptions of authentic ‘Irishness’ in “The Dead” - as attached. [...]

See Contents of Yale Review of Criticism (Spring 2002) - in RICORSO > Annual Bibliography - in this frame or attached.

Setting/Location: The story is substantially set at 15 Usher’s Island, Dublin 2, where the Morkan sisters live in rented upstairs accommodation. Gabriel and Gretta, among their guests, live in Monkstown but overnight at the Gresham Hotel, where the last scene is set. A film of The Dead was made by John Ford in 1987, using the house at Usher’s Island for the main (and perhaps the only) setting. In 2019, planning permission was granted to developers regarding its intended conversion into a youth hostel with 56 units involving with much partitioning of the interior. This was strenuously resisted by scholars and admirers of Joyce including David Norris, John McCourt and others. The Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street, where the Conroy’s over-night after the party, supplies the second location of the story, is still functioning as a hotel and a central venue in Dublin life. Joyce wrote “The Dead” while convalescing from rheumatic fever and completes it circa 6 Sept. [See Joyce’s Works: Chronology of Composition - as attached.]

Date of events: The liturgical calendar date of 6 January is a given in dating “The Dead”, being the Feast of the Epiphany. The year 1904 likewise suggests is suggested by the fact that the Pope Pius X issued his decree against the employment of women as church singers in Nov. 1903 while the (fictional) death of Julia Morkan is indicated Ulysses said to have already occurred before June 16th 1904, when Bloom reflects on the statue of Thomas Moore: ‘He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger. [...] There is not in this wide world a vallee. Great song of Julia Morkan’s. Kept her voice up to the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe’s wasn’t she?’ (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., 1960, pp.205-06.) In that novel the date of the Stephen ‘s mother ‘s death is said to have happened shortly before 26 April 1904 [err. 1903?] because she is buried on that day. Her death actually occurred on 13 Aug. 1903. The date of the events memorialised in Ulysses are those of events of 16 June 1904 commemorating Joyce ‘s first tryst with Nora Barnacle when, in his own words to her, she gave him ‘a kind of satisfaction [...] the recollection of it fills me with amazed joy’. [Biographical Joyce Family History - as attached.]

“The Dead” [2]: Epistolary evidence of composition and intentions:

Letters to Stanislaus:

1] ‘Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in [109] Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter ‘virtue’ so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe. I have not been just to its beauty: for it is more beautiful naturally in my opinion than what I have seen of England, Switzerland, France, Austria or Italy. And yet I know how useless these reflections are. For were I to rewrite the book as G[rant] R[ichards] suggests “in another sense” (where the hell does he get the meaningless phrases he uses) I am sure I should find again what you call the Holy Ghost sitting in the ink-bottle and the perverse devil of my literary conscience sitting on the hump of my pen.’ (Letters, Vol. II, 1966, p.166; Selected Letters, 1975, pp.109-10.

2] ‘This whole affair has upset me. I feel like a man in a house who hears a row in the street and voices he knows shouting but can't get ou to see what the hell is going on. It has put me off the story I was “going to write” - to wit, “The Dead”.’ (Jan. 1907 [being the date of the Abbey Playboy riot, viz., 26 Jan. 1907] (Letter to SJ, 11 Feb. 1907.)

—Quoted in John McCourt, Introduction to. McCourt, ed., Joyce, Yeats and the Revival (Roma: Edizioni 2015), p.9.

Vitor Alevato do Amara, ‘Death and the Snow: Translating an inconspicuous relation in James Joyce’s “The Dead”, in Cadernos de Tradução, 40:3 (Florianópolis Sep./Dec. 2020) - online.
“The Dead” is unmatched by any of the other Dubliners stories in its artistry. The transcendental beauty of the last paragraph, the thoroughly painted setting of the scene in the hotel room, the consuming doubts of Gabriel about his supper speech, the filmic party at the Misses Morkans’ house at Usher’s Island introduce an aesthetic dimension absent from the previous fourteen stories. Reading Dubliners, one has the impression that Joyce decided to take his time as he wrote “The Dead”. According to David Daiches (27), “The Dead” differentiates from the other stories because in this Joyce replaced “level objectivity” for “lyrical quality”. The critic also remarks that it “was added later, at a time when Joyce was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the problem of aesthetics”. [I]n his turn, Deane (33-34) affirms that it is with “The Dead” that Joyce becomes a “characteristically modernist writer” by “surrender[ing] [political] critique for aesthetics”. The critic also highlights the use that Joyce made of repetition in Dubliners: from granting it a “critical and disturbing function” in all the stories until “Grace” to a universalizing and aestheticizing application of it in the last story, where the political is aestheticized and lyricism prevails (Deane 35-36).
Bibl.
	Daiches, ‘Dubliners’, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners, Edited by Peter K. Garrett. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1986), pp. 27-37. Deane, ‘Dead Ends: Joyce’s finest moments’, in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge & Marjorie Howe (Cambridge UP 2000), pp.21-36. Magalaner & Kain, Joyce: The man, the work, the reputation (NY: Collier Books 1962).
—Available online; access 24.04.2021 [makes further points about the use of the verb “lay” [Port., repousava] with “snow”.]

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Distant Music [“I Hear You Calling Me”]: When Gabriel sees Gretta listening to “The Lass of Aughrim” on the stairs, he contemplates a possible painting: ‘Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.’ The phrase he chooses for the vignette derives from a contemporary song: “I Hear You Calling Me” by Harold Lake, a journalist on the Daily Express who gave expression to his feelings about a girl he loved who died of tuberculosis. The song was set to music by Harold Harford and published in London on 11 Feb 1908. John McCormack soon afterwards adopted the song as his signature - with one note changed - singing it first a month after publication and twice again in the same year. (See Raymond Foxall, John McCormack, London: Robert Hale 1963, p.56.) The three verses read:

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“The Dead” [4]: Of “The Lass of Aughrim”, the song that Michael Furey sang, Gerard Quinn remarks: ‘Could Gretta, listening to distant music from her dead lover be a symbol of Ireland, a bereft Ireland still in love with its former Gaelic cultural identity that has died?.’ (Quinn, op. cit. [supra] p.119.) He further quotes Joyce’s poem, “She Weeps over Rahoon” [as in Quotations, infra], whose implied speaker - in his reading - is Nora Barnacle-Joyce. Quinn notes that Joyce went to Galway in Aug. 1912 when, with Nora, he visited both the fictional grave of Michael Furey at Oughterard and the actual grave of Michael Bodkin (his original) at Rahoon. Finally, he compares the phrase ‘falls softly, softly falling’ [in that poem] with the last sentence in “The Dead”: ‘snow was general all over Ireland [...] falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.’ (Quinn, ‘Joyce, Nora and Sonny Bodkin’, in Blackrock Society Proc. 2004, pp.116-23., p.121; cf. Martin Dowling, ‘“Thought-tormented music”: Joyce and the Music of th Irish Revival’, in James Joyce Quarterly, Spring-Summer 2008, pp.437-58; espec. 450-51.)

Martin Dowling, ‘“Thought-Tormented Music”: Joyce and the Music of the Irish Revival’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 45, 3/4 [Biographical Joyce] Spring-Summer 2008, pp.437-58: ‘[...] As I argue elsewhere, traditional music is modern,but it was never suscptible to being modernist, emanating as it doesfrom class fractions other than those of what Eagleton calls the “radicalright”. How was this manifested in literary and musical fields?J. M. Synge’s adventures in the far west appear in this light tohave rather over-shot the mark in his search for dynamic, autochthonous,authentic culture, just as Miss Ivors has missed the target in her goadingof Gabriel to make a trip to the Aran Islands in “The Dead”.A similar problem is evident in the reception and interpretation ofthe song “The Lass of Aughrim”, both by the two main charactersin the story and by later readers. In an essay on “The Dead”,Kevin Whelan calls the tune “a folk song which summoned the deep,oral, Irish language, Jacobite, Gaelic past of the west of Ireland.”Here he replicates the mistake made by Gabriel in the story, ascribingto the mongrel song some essential characteristic of the West of Ireland,“the old Irish tonality” that Gabriel immediately identifiesonce the hall door is closed. Whereas Gretta’s response to thesong is authentic - a response she may share with Joyce himself - Gabriel’s reaction and, by extension, Whelan’s and many other interpreters[441] involve an illegitimate symbolic projection onto both the melodyand the lyric. The point is perhaps unintentionally highlighted in JohnHuston’s film depiction of the story, where the Scottish, not theIrish, version of the melody is rendered, as noted by Hugh Shields.’(pp.441-42; citing Whelan, ‘The Memories of “The Dead,”’, in The Yale Journal of Criticism, 15, Spring 2002, p.69, andShields, ‘History of the Lass of Aughrim’, in Musicologyin Ireland [Irish Musical Studies, 1], ed. Gerard Gillen & HarryWhite, Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1990, pp.58-73.) [Also cites Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, remarks on modernityand modernism in Ireland.]

Further: ‘Whereas Kathleen’s aesthetic moment is drowned out by the bickerings backstage in “A Mother”, in “The Dead”, the aesthetic moment is elevating, provoking the final epiphanies. The tender intimacy of the private but accessible time-space of the tenor’s rendition of “The Lass of Aughrim”contrasts with the tortured artificiality of the “Irish concert” [in “A Mother”]. The particular song is also important. Like the time-space of its performance, it is quite “traditional,” part of a semi-public field that exists beneath and is, as we have seen, misunderstood in the cultural field dominated by the Feis Ceoil Association. It was neither [450] collected nor published when Joyce wrote the story and is, therefore, outside the canon of “Irish” song-formed by Edward Bunting, Thomas Moore, George Petrie, and others-that was publicly handed down to the Irish Revival generation. In authentic ethnographic style, Joyce unearthed the song himself, coaxing Nora Barnacle’s mother to give him the verses while he sat at her kitchen table during a visit to Galway.’ (Ibid., pp.450-51; citing Ellmann, James Joyce, [rev. edn.] p.286).

Note - Ellmann here writes: ‘Most of the weekend [...] he sat at 4 Bowling Green with Mrs. Barnacle and talked of Nora. He got her to sing “The Lass of Aughrim”, including some of the verses that Nora did not remember. [...]’. In a footnote, he adds: ‘Donagh MacDonagh discovered that “The Lass of Aughrim” was a variant of “The Lass or Royal Rock”, No. 79 in F. J. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882-89, II, 224.) [Ellmann, idem; also gives an account of the substance of the ballad, in which the Lass of Aughrim with her child seeks entrance to Lord Gregory’s house, he being her former lover, is refused, and drowns herself in the lake.]

Nora and Gretta: Joyce wrote to Nora on 22 Aug. 1909, ‘Adorn your body for me, dearest. Be beautiful and happy and loving and provoking, full of memories, full of cravings, when we meet. Do you remember the three adjectives I have used in “The Dead” in speaking of your body? they are these: “musical and strange and perfumed. / My jealousy is still smouldering in my heart. Your love for me must be fierce and violent and make me forget utterly.”’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.163.)

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“The Dead” [5] - Sources of snow:

Homer: ‘The snow flakes fall thick and fast on a winters day. The winds are lulled and the snow falls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the planes where the lotus tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming seas, but are silently dissolved by the waves.’ (Noted by Richard Ellmann, q.source.) See David Norris, ‘A clash of Titans Joyce, Homer and the idea of epic’, in Studies on Joyce’s Ulysses, ed. Jacqueline Genet & Wynne Hellogouarc’h, in Etudes Irlandaises [Open Edition] (Lille 1991) - available online. [See Kevin Whelan on snow in “The Dead” - infra.]

Bret Harte - Joyce wrote to Stanislaus from Rome on 25 Nov. 2016 with the question amidst a long letter much of which was about money problems: ‘Do you think I should waste 2 lire on buying a book of Gissing’s - or ought I buy a volume of Bret Harte[?]’ (Letters, Vol. II, ed. Ellmann (1966), p.166; see further under Quotations > Letters - supra. [This is the letter in which he spoke of being too ‘harsh’ on Dubliners - written when he was living unhappily in Rome.]

See also Boonie Roos, ‘James Joyce’s “The Dead” and Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy’: The Nature of the Feast’, in Yale Journal of Criticism, 15: 1 (2002), pp.99-126.) - infra.

Gabriel Conroy (1875) - Reading Extracts [BS] [Opening:] Snow. Everywhere. As far as the eye could reach - fifty miles, looking southward from the highest white peak, - filling ravines and gulches, and dropping from the walls of cañons in white shroud-like drifts, fashioning the dividing ridge into the likeness of a monstrous grave, hiding the bases of giant pines, and completely covering young trees and larches, rimming with porcelain the bowl-like edges of still, cold lakes, and undulating in motionless white billows to the edge of the distant horizon. Snow lying everywhere over the California Sierras on the 15th day of March 1848, and still falling. [17] [...] They were so haggard, so faded, so forlorn, so wan, - so piteous in their human aspect, or rather all that was left of a human aspect, - that they might have been wept over as they sat there; they were so brutal, so imbecile, unreasoning and grotesque in these newer animal attributes, that they might have provoked a smile. They were originally country people, mainly of that social class whose self-respect is apt to be dependent rather on their circumstances, position and surroundings, than upon any individual moral power or intellectual force. They had lost the sense of shame in the sense of equality of suffering; there was nothing within them to take the place of the material enjoyments they were losing. They were childish without the ambition or emulation of childhood; they were men and women without the dignity or simplicity of man and womanhood. All that had raised them above the level of the brute was lost in the snow. Even the characteristics of sex were gone; an old woman of sixty quarrelled, fought, and swore with the harsh utterance and ungainly gestures of a [20] man; a young man of scorbutic temperament wept, sighed, and fainted with the hysteria of a woman. So profound was their degradation that the stranger who had thus evoked them from the earth, even in his very rags and sadness, seemed of another race. [20-21]   Grace was no logician, and could not help thinking that if Philip had said this before, she would not have left the hut. But the masculine reader will, I trust, at once detect the irrelevance of the feminine suggestion, and observe that it did not refute Philip’s argument. She looked at him with a half frightened air. Perhaps it was the tears that dimmed her eyes, but his few words seemed to have removed him to a great distance, and for the first time a strange sense of loneliness came over her. She longed to reach her yearning arms to him again, but with this feeling came a sense of shame that she had not felt before. [...] Grace sobbed herself to sleep! Poor, poor Grace! She had been looking for this opportunity of speaking about herself - about their future. This was to have been the beginning of her confidence about Dr. Devarges’s secret; she would have told him frankly all the doctor had said, even his suspicions of Philip himself. And then Philip would have been sure to have told her his plans, and they would have gone back with help, and Philip would have been a hero whom Gabriel would have instantly recognised as the proper husband for Grace, and they would have all been very happy. And now they were all dead, and had died, perhaps, cursing her, and - Philip - Philip had not kissed her good-night, and was sitting gloomily under a tree! [47; my italics - cf. Gretta in Joyce’s story.] 1876 American Publishing Co. Edn. - available in page format at Internet Archive - online; accessed 26.04.2021. See longer extracts from Bret Harte, Gabriel Conroy (1875; eds. 1876, 1882) in this frame or new window.

Adam Parks, ‘Moore, Snow and “The Dead”’, in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 42:3  (Greensboro 1999), pp.265-82: ‘James Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann has traced a line of influence that links the end of “The Dead” to George Moore’s novel Vain Fortune (1891). This work, Ellmann writes, is the source of the “dead lover who comes between the lovers, the sense of the husbands failure, the acceptance of mediocrity, the resolve to be at all events sympathetic, elements that Joyce redeploys and transforms in his early masterpiece.” Following Ellmann’s lead, other critics have developed both this particular comparison and broader connections, such as the relation between Joyce’s study of “moral paralysis” [sic] in Dubliners and Moore’s volume of stories The Untilled Field (1903), or that between Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man (1888). But no one has seen reason for dissenting from Ellmann’s remark that “Moore said nothing about snow.” On the contrary, this prenouncement has been taken as evidence that Joyce’s snow exemplifies the “significant amplification” of the material absorbed from Moore, all the more striking because such a heavy snowfall was (and is) extremely rare in Ireland.’ (p.265.) [in ProQuest LLC - online; accessed 24.04.2021. [Note that Kevin Whelan prints a title-page of Vain Fortune in his ‘Memories’ article (Yale Journal of Criticism, 2002) and gives details of the plot of the novel - somewhat with an air of new discovery.]

George Moore - The Lake (Heinemann 1905) - SNOW: Fr Oliver Gogarty writes to Fr. O’Grady and talks of a visit to Kilronan Abbey, ‘an old abbey unroofed by Cromwell [where t]he people have gone there for centuries, kneeling in the snow and rain’. (Chap. VII; p.36.) [Fr Oliver Gogarty to Miss Rose Leicester:] ‘Without a leader the people are helpless; they wander like sheep on a mountain-side, falling over rocks or dying amid snowdrifts. Sometimes the shepherd grows weary of watching, and the question arises if one has no duty towards one’s self. Then one begins to wonder what is one’s duty and what is duty- if duty is more than the opinions of others, - a convention which no one would like to hear called into question, because he feels instinctively that it is well for everyone to continue in the rut, for, after all, a rut means a road, and roads are necessary. If one lets one’s self go on thinking, one very soon finds that wrong and right are indistinguishable, so perhaps it is better to follow the rut if one can. But following of the rut is beset with difficulties; there are big holes on either side. Sometimes the road ends nowhere, and one gets lost in spite of one’s [43] self.’ (Available at Gutenberg Project & Internet Archive.)

[ See also Paul Jones: ‘As Ellmann put it, Joyce “found [Moore] a good man to improve upon” (Jones, ‘“A Tame Bird Escaped from Captivity”: Leaving Ireland in George Moore’s The Lake and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. in Joyce Studies Annual (2012), pp.154-73 [available online - 24.4.2021. ]

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“The Dead” [6] - Robert Browning: What is the quotation from Browning that Gabriel intends to include in his dinner speech? Gabriel hesitates to use the quotation he has chosen and considers whether something from Shakespeare or the Melodies [of Thomas Moore] might not be better suited to the minds of the guests whose ‘grade of culture differed so from his’. There is no evidence that he does quote Browning and it seems that he extemporises some sentences addressed to Miss Ivors about this ‘hypereducated generation’ which he would not have otherwise spoken. Apparently, however, there is a verbal remnant of the planned quotation in the description of the eventual speech. According to John Feeley, ‘a close look at Gabriel’s speech in the original headings that despite the putative limitations of his audience, he does not intend to abandon the Browning quotation totally and that his considerable verbal skill renders it unnecessary that he do so.’ For the solution, see John Feeley, ‘Joyce’s “The Dead” and the Browning Quotation’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 20: 1 (1982), pp. 87-96. [available online; accessed 24 March 2021].

“The Dead” [7] - W. B. Yeats: Heather Ingman compares Joyce’s liminality to Yeats’s in John Sherman: Sherman nodding off in his mother’s drawing room, experiences a liminal state similar to Gabriel’s [...] Telling revealing of the differences between the two writers, in Yeats such a borderline space is where imagination is nurtured’ in Joyce, Gabriel’s sleepy state expands his capacity for imaginative empathy. Though resisting Yeats’s national as another of the paralysing mechanisms weighing on his Dubliners’ lives, the ending of “The Dead” with the lyrical beauty of its prose and its themes of liminality and dissolution, begins to read like Joyce’s tribute to Yeats’ [mystical stories]. (A History of the Irish Short Story, Cambridge UP 2009, p.80; available in part online.)

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The Dead (1987) [the film, after Joyce’s story], dir. John Huston, distrib. Vestron Pictures / Zenith; duration 1.19.25. Cast incls. Donal McCann, Anjelica Huston, Helena Carroll; Cathleen Delany; Rachael Dowling; Ingred Craigie; Dan O’Herlihy Marie Kean; Donal Donnelly; Sean McClory; Frank Patterson [as Bartell Darcy]; music ed. Robert Silvi; dir of phot. Fred Murphy.

(Available on YouTube - online; accessed 24.03.2014.)

“The Dead” [8] - the living and the dead’ may be taken as an echo of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans where he writes: ‘For this end Christ both died, and arose, and revived, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.’ (Romans, 14:9; King James Authorised Version.)

“The Dead” [9] - remarks of Stanislaus Joyce: ‘The last story, which serves as the final chorus of the book, presents holiday life, the celebration of Christmas. In England and Ireland ghost stories are still told about the fire at Christmas time [...] The story “The Dead” is also, in its way, a story of ghosts, of the dead who return in envy of the living.’ (Recollections of James Joyce, 1950; quoted in Denis Donoghue, review of John Huston’s film of “The Dead”, in The New York Review, 3 March 1988.)