Ghosts, Memory & Metaphor in Gabriel Conroy's Ireland

Ghosts and Memory in Gabriel Conroy’s Ireland

A Cognitive Reading of James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Introduction

Karl Marx described history as something that “haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost” (Marx 118). This is certainly true for James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the final short story in Dubliners. In “The Dead” a ghost is not a non-existent or supernatural entity but rather an absence. As Kevin Whalen writes, both Ireland’s past and Michael Furey “can only return to the present as an absence: the Irish language, love, a national community have all been consigned to the spectral” (Whalen 66). The story’s annual Morkan dinner party takes place in 1904, just 52 years after the Great Irish Famine (1845-52), a crisis that resulted in mass emigration and an estimated million deaths (Ross 2002). Ireland’s past fits all too well into Marx’s portrayal of history as a ghost.

Some scholars, such as John Kelleher, claim that “The Dead” is not primarily a ghost story and that “there is no reason to assume that Michael Furey is actually a ghost” but rather only a memory (Kelleher 424). What Kelleher’s claim fails to realize is that ghosts in “The Dead” are memories—internal, psychological ghosts exist within the confines of individual and collective memory. Collective memory is the pool of memories shared by a group and often passed through generations. Though the noun ‘ghost’ never appears in the short story itself, Joyce described “The Dead” as a story of ghosts in his personal letters (Whelan 2002). A ghostly incident occurs when Aunt Julia wonders slowly into the room “looking behind her at something.” Her sister asks anxiously, “Who it is?” Aunt Julia is surprised by the question and assures her that only Freddy Malins and Gabriel. And yet the idea that someone either unseen or uninvited, someone whose presence would cause anxiety, is present has been introduced. Each character’s memories and the national memory of Ireland are illuminated through the use of ghosts, revealing not only the ghost of Michael Furey but also the ghost of Ireland and the absence of Irish identity, language and independence.

The role that memory plays in “The Dead” can be better understood by considering what is known about memory as a cognitive process. As neuroscience expands and shapes our understanding of the human mind, its use as a tool in analyzing texts has become a growing trend in literary studies. Viewing memory in this way further highlights the absences that remain unspoken in the story but also complicates the term. There are many different types of memories, many of which are at work in the narrative. Collective memory and individual memory, namely Gabriel’s altered memories and Gretta’s involuntary memory of Michael Furey, shape the story.

The dark memories that permeate the merriment of the Morkan’s party and the snowy night make these familiarities unfamiliar as described by Sigmund Freud in “The Uncanny.” Understanding memory’s relation to the sensory experience of the present, and the distinct consciousnesses of the characters, helps demonstrate why music evoked the ghost of Michael Furey and why the feast evokes the starvation engrained in Ireland’s national memory.

Readings of “The Dead”

When writing about “The Dead,” many scholars focus on the story’s parallels to the life of its author—and it is hard not to. As Richard Ellmann describes in Backgrounds of the Dead, a young woman from Galway named Nora Barnacle was “great” with a boy named Michael Bodkin, who, like Michael Furey, was in the gasworks. He became ill with tuberculosis but when he discovered that Nora would have to go to Dublin to live, he came to her one rainy night to say goodbye. Not long afterwards, he died and Nora went to Dublin, where she met and eventually married James Joyce. For Joyce, it was not easy to know “that his companion’s heart was still moved by the recollection of her dead sweetheart” (Ellmann 508). Ellmann, the author of an acclaimed biography of James Joyce, writes that Nora’s romantic past was not easy for a jealous man like Joyce to cope with. Joyce shares many other similarities with Gabriel Conroy. They have the same profession and both the character and the author wrote book reviews for the pro-English Daily Express (Ellmann 1958). Additionally, Joyce grew up amid Irish hospitality—one of the few qualities of Ireland that he truly admired—while attending festive parties at the home of his great-aunts. The two women lived beside the river Liffey, taught music classes, and with them lived Joyce’s cousin Mary Ellen. At these parties, Joyce watched his father carve the goose and make a speech—Gabriel’s speech, according to Joyce’s brother, was an accurate imitation of their father’s style (Ellmann 513). One of Joyce’s aunts had a son named Freddy who ran a Christmas card shop and another of Joyce’s relatives married a Protestant named Mervyn Archdale Browne (Ellmann 514). Joyce began writing “The Dead” in Rome, a city that he disliked for its ruins and sense of death—a city that reminded him of Dublin, another place “prehensile of its ruins, visible and invisible” (Ellmann 510).

Memory clearly played a crucial role in writing “The Dead.” Joyce not only drew upon his own memories, but upon the memories of his wife. Nora’s memories became Gretta’s, as shared and perceived by Gabriel. The narrator only ever dips into the consciousness of Gabriel, creating a significant distance between those memories and the narrative. Yet despite this distance, these memories manage to shape the story along with the collective national memory of Ireland.

Whelan offers an “excavation of the historical layers—biographical, literary, historical, geographical, [and] musical” of “The Dead” to unearth “the buried history of the Famine embedded at its center” (Whalen 59). As Whalen observed, though it was one of the most important and devastating events in Ireland during the modern period, the Famine has rarely been represented in the Irish Literary Revival, and almost never in proportion to the catastrophe itself (Whalen 2002). It is not mentioned in “The Dead” but still manages, through the mechanism of memory, to play an important role in shaping the narrative. Just as Michael Furey, who obviously does not attend the dinner party, is evoked throughout the feast, the feast itself evokes the national memory of starvation (Roos 2002). Whalen was quite right in saying that the past returns to the present as an absence—and how it does so is through memory.