Ghosts, Memory & Metaphor in Gabriel Conroy's Ireland

Hello! Welcome to my Senior Thesis Blog. Here you can read my thesis and learn more about the various topics that relate to it, including “The Dead” by James Joyce, the history of Ireland, cognitive theory, metaphor, and memory. And, of course, the most interesting topic of all: me!

June 16th is one of my favorite holidays–Bloomsday! To celebrate the life and work of James Joyce, events from his novel Ulysses, set on June 16th, 1904, are relived around the world. The Bloomsday Central website provides a listening of Bloomsday events worldwide. Click here to read more!

On April 19th I presented my thesis at the Macaulay Research Symposium and enjoyed listening to everyone else’s presentations. My mother attended and learned what “memes” are. Congratulations to all involved!

…is a slow, painful process. The earlier posts can give you some idea of the steps in that process. Writing a proposal, an annotated bibliography, an abstract, and a working introduction, were all essential in making the final product.

The content found in my proposal, abstract, and working introduction does not really reflect what my thesis was ultimately about. Like the vast majority of students writing their senior thesis, I tweaked my topic quite frequently.

I would be thrilled if you skipped right to the final product. But I’ve left the past posts up just in case anyone is interested and wants to glimpse some of the steps involved in the lengthy (yet rewarding!) process that is thesis-writing.

In March I presented at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in Utah along with plenty of bright, young scholars from across America. I had a great time and was incredibly impressed by the other presenters. A big thanks to Andrew Adair for organizing the trip! Below are some photos from the event, mostly from when a group of us went on a hike and got lost in the mountains.

Above I pose with two other NCUR precentors, both of them scholars of the highest caliber.

That's me! In Utah!

We hiked to a waterfall!

We left the waterfall. The sun began to set, and we had no idea where we were.

We found our way out of the mountains, and took amusing photographs to celebrate.

We didn’t just go hiking, but you’ll have to take my word for it, because I didn’t take any photos of the conference itself.

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.

Although extensive criticism has focused on James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the story has yet to be examined through the lens of cognitive science. 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. Memory plays a central role in “The Dead,” one that can be illuminated by our improved scientific understanding of the process of memory. The character’s memories and the collective national memory of Ireland are illuminated through the use of ghosts and haunting. In “The Dead” a ghost is not a non-existent or supernatural entity but rather an absence. The story reveals not only the ghost, or absence, of Michael Furey—but also the ghost of Ireland and the absence of Irish identity, language and independence. Memory is brought out through the character’s sensory experiences. The music evokes the ghost of Michael Furey, and the feast evokes the starvation engrained in Ireland’s national memory. The complexity of memory, how it changes over time and colors the present, is demonstrated particularly by the different nature of Gretta’s sudden memories of Michale Furey when she hears The Lass of Aughrim, and Gabriel’s memories of his “secret life” with Gretta. Literary criticism of “The Dead”, cultural history of Ireland and scientific studies on memory will be used to reveal the way memory functions within the story, and what the story can tell us about memory. Freud’s explanation of the ‘uncanny,’ and instances where the familiar is made unfamiliar, often through the character’s memories, will also be examined. My text-based analysis will use our contemporary understanding of memory and the conscious mind to further explore one of the most renowned short stories of the 20^th century.

Gazzaniga, Michael S., Richard B. Ivry, and George R. Mangun Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind 3^rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009

Learning is the process of acquiring new information and it results in memory. Learning/memory is generally divided into 3 stages: A) Encoding – the process in which new information enters to be stored, two steps: acquisition and consolidation. Acquisition registers inputs of sensory information/sensory analysis; consolidation “creates a stronger representation over time” (313) B) Storage – a ‘permanent’ record of the information, C) Retrieval – “utilizes stored information to created a conscious representation or to execute a learned behavior such as a motor act” (313). Many neurologists are fond of explaining remembering as “mental time travel” – that is to say, the past is experienced in the present. But not all memories are created equal. Memory is usually distinguished as sensory memory, short-term memory or long-term memory. Sensory memory has a lifetime of milliseconds to seconds, short-term memory lasts seconds to minutes, and long-term memory lasts days to years. In 1968 cognitive psychologists Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin created one of the first memory models. In their modal model, information is first stored in sensory memory and “items selected by attentional processes can move into short-term storage” (315) and then “once in short-term memory, if the item is rehearsed it can be moved into long-term memory” (315). The Akinson and Shiffrin modal model suggests, “at each stage, information can be lost by decay (information degrades and is lost over time), interference (new information displaces old information), or a combination of both” (315). This model has been debated and expanded upon—particularly whether a long-term memory must first be a short-term memory—or if a short-term memory is simply a temporary activation of the long-term mechanisms

Later findings supported the idea that “short-term memory might not be required in order to form long-term memories” and that sensory memories can be registered immediately as long-term memories (316). A new theory emerged that “short-term memory is supported by activation of the same neural networks that are involved in storing long-term memory, but not in precisely the same fashion or to the same extent” (317). The concept of working memory was developed to extend the concept of short-term memory.

Working-memory “represents a limited-capacity store for retaining information over the short term (maintenance) and for performing mental operations on the contents of this store (manipulation)” (317).  Working memory contains “information that can be acted on and processed, not merely maintained by rehearsal, although such maintenance is one aspect of working memory” (317). There are 2 kinds of long-term memory – declarative (explicit) and nondeclarative (implicit). Declarative memory “is knowledge to which we have conscious access, including personal and world knowledge” and nondeclarative memory is “knowledge to which we have no conscious access, such as motor and cognitive skills (procedural knowledge), perceptual priming, and simple learned behaviors that derive from conditioning, habituation, or sensitization” (321). Declarative memory includes episodic and semantic memory; what we recall about our own lives and factual information. Nondeclarative memory includes procedural memory (learning to ride a bike/read), perceptual representation system (perceptual priming), classical conditioning (conditioned responses between two stimuli) and non-associative learning (habituation, sensitization). The medial temporal area includes the amygdala, the hippocampus, the entorhinal cotex and the sourrounding parahippocampal and perirhinal cortical areas. The hippocampus is crucial in forming long-term memories—and in recalling them. Functional-MRI studies have shown the it is active when new information is encoded (subjects are typically given items and asked to remember them while their neural activity is measured by an fMRI) and later they are asked to remember the items. The hippocampus was active during the encoding and the remembering.

When our memory fails, we usually forget—“sometimes, however, something more surprising occurs: We remember events that never happened” (350) Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott at Washington University presented subjects with a list of words “(e.g., thread, pin, eye, sewing, sharp, point, haystack, pain, injection, ect)”, “in which all the words are highly associated to a word that is not presented” in the case above – needle. “When subjects are asked subsequently to recall or recognize the words on the list, they show a strong tendency to falsely remember the associated word that was not presented” (350). The “”memory illusion is so powerful that “participants are willing to claim that they vividly remember seeing the non-presented critical word in the study list” (350). Yet “when participants are interrogated carefully about the conscious experience associated with remembering items from the list (true items) and the critical non-preented words (false items), they tend to rate true items higher than false items in terms of sensory details (Mather et al., 1997; K.A. Normal & Schacter, 1997)” (350). We believe in illusory recollections but are able to distinguish them from genuine recollections in terms of sensory detail.

There is a dissociation between two of the medial temporal lobe regions. In the hippocampus bilaterally, “false items elicited more neural activity than did new items; whereas in the left parahippocampul gyrus—a region surrounding the hippocampus—false items elicited about the same amount of activity as new items and significantly less activity than true items” (350). The hippocampus responses in more or less the same way regardless of whether or not the item is true or false. Yet the parahippocampal gyrus responded more strongly to the true items. True and false items are similar when it comes to semantic content but differ when it comes to sensory content. The hippocampus recalls semantic information and the parahippocampal gyrus recals sensory information.

There is a distinction between recollection and familiarity in the retrieval of long-term memories—one for “recognition based on the recollection of episodic (source) information involving the hippocampus and posteriror parahippocampal cortex, and the other for supporting familiarity-based recognition memory in the entorhinal cotex” (349). The hippocampus plays a role in encoding and retrieving episodic memories that are recollected. The areas outside the hippocampus (particularly the entorhinal cortex) support recognition based on familiarity” (351). This is because “the neocortex gives different types of information to different subregions of the medial temporal lobe. When we process “what” an item is, it enters the entrohinal cotex while information about “where” something is located enters a different part of the entorhinal cortex” (352)

I will need to understand the structural workings of memory, although I am not sure what aspects I will refer to specifically. I will be writing about the differences between Gretta’s memories of Michael Furey (invoked by sensory input) and Gabriel’s memories of Gretta. I will also be talking about the national memory of Ireland—not in terms of a structural neurology of memory, but rather by paralleling phenomena in individual memory with phenomena in national memory, particularly how memory relates to identity.

Henigan, Julie “’The Old Irish Tonality’: Folksong as Emotional Catalyst in ‘The Dead’” New Hibernia Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2007) pp. 136-148

Although most critics address why the song “The Lass of Aughrim” was used in the story. Most critics, Henigan claims, have examined “the lyrics, the narrative and…[connections] between its images or events and those of the story (136). She refers to the song, backed by another critic, Séamus Reilly, that the song triggers “the moment of remembering Joyce wishes to depiect” (Reilly). The reason the story is used, according to Henigan, lies “less in the ballad’s lyrics than in the song’s overall impact, both lyrically and musically, the emotion it evokes by virtues of the qualities inherent in traditional song itself” (141). She also points to biographical information from Joyce’s life and his connection to the song. Since I will be looking at music in general and its role in memory, Henigan’s investigation of the song, not as a poem, but as music, will be relevant because I can point to its overall qualities.

Kelleher, John “Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’” The Review of Politics Vol. 27 No. 3 (Jul. 1965) pp. 414-433

Kelleher claims that there are 3 subsidiary levels in the story which “provide an eerie, ominous, reverberation as between present and past, passing life and all-devouring death, mundane reality and myth” (418). These levels are: 1) a symbolic level (Mr. Browne = death), 2) reference to the historical time period, early 19^th C Catholic Dublin, 3) References to the Old Irish Saga ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’. Although Kelleher gives several insights into the text’s symbolic and historical levels, he spends most of the essay on the last and weakest level. I can use this essay in my own research because Kelleher discusses a number of different aspects of the story. I can use his various claims either as support for my own claims or as a platform from which to disagree or partially disagree. He convincingly argues that consideration should be given to the opinions of Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus Joyce, on The Dead in his book Recollections of James Joyce.K elleher claims that “The Dead” is not primarily a ghost story, but rather naturalistic. He claims that “there is no reason to assume that Michael Furey is actually a ghost” but is instead only a memory. I argue that the role of memory is central to the story. Kelleher disagrees with Ellmann’s view that the famous ‘westward journey’ line refers to a trip westward to Galway. He claims that it in fact refers to death. I believe that the line is purposefully ambiguous and could easily refer to both.

Lehrer, Jonah Proust was a Neuroscientist First Mariner Books: Boston (2008)

Lehrer investigates the cross section of science and art by looking at what certain artists have told us about human thought and how their claims correlate to those of contemporary neuroscientists. Lehrer looks at the influence of philosopher Henri Bergson on Marcel Proust and Proust’s ability to examine his own remembering process. Proust explores how time “mutates” memory (81). Proust believed that our recollections are largely false. Lehrer writes that “in order to investigate the reality of our past, in order to understand memory as we actually experience it, scientists needed to confront the specter of memory’s lie” as Proust did (83). Lehrer references Santiago Ramon y Cajal who claimed that memories exist as “subtle shifts in the strength of synapses, which makes it easier for neurons to communicate with one another” (84). This allows us to take in a stimuli, process it, and relate it to a previous intake of the stimuli which in turn relates it to a memory. He also references a study by Karim Nader, Glenn Shafe, and Joseph LeDoux at NYU in 2000, who claim that the act of remembering also changes the person, and “a memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes” (85). The experiment revealed memory “as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information…any time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, a process called reconsolidation” (85). He also references a study by Dr. Kausik Si, in the journal Cell that investigates the structural level of memories. I will be formatting my paper in a similar way and will be reading the three studies on memory that Lehrer uses an summarizing them separately.

Roos, Bonnie “James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy: The Nature of the Feast” The Yale Journal of Criticism Vol. 15 No. 1 (Spring 2002) pp. 99-126

Roos parallels ‘The Dead’ with Dante’s story of Ugolino and with Bret Harte’s novel Gabriel Conroy while focusing on the role and nature of of the feast. Roos argues that Joyce’s writing, or lack of writing, about the Famine is more complicated than previous criticism has understood and that “The Dead” is a critique of Ireland’s national and political complicity in its colonization. Roos examines the theme of cannibalism—how it relates to “the Morkan feast”, linked with its opposite, starvation—and to Ireland’s colonization. Roos writes that Joyce was writing, in part, about the famine and its aftermath. Roos writes that in Ireland, the population was incredibly low, both due to the famine and the large number of people, especially men, who were leaving. Gabriel’s speech failed, according to Roos, in part because Gabriel’s role as a leader was false; his position in life is due in large part to the fact that other men have died or left. His speech then “highlights an Irish nationalism that he does not feel, articulated in language that is not Irish, and emphasizes an Irish self-sacrificing hospitality which he does not willingly abide.” Gabriel “covers up the truth of Irish experience with sentimental ideals”. Many of Roos’ points, especially about the role of what is absent yet invoked throughout the story will relate to what I plan to write relating to identity and ghosts.

Whalen, Kevin “The Memories of ‘The Dead’” The Yale Journal of Criticism Vol. 15 No. 1 (Spring 2002) pp.59-97

Whelan offers an “excavation of the historical layers—biographical, literary, historical, geographical, musical” of The Dead, specifically looking at the story’s references to the Famine. He claims that post-Famine Ireland gravitated towards Modernist writing because it was a country coping with an identity crisis and already conscious of language. Whalen spends most of the essay exploring Ireland’s past and its influence on writers of Joyce’s time, often focusing specifically on The Dead. ‘The Irish past, like Michael Furey in ‘The Dead’,” he writes, ‘can only return to the present as an absence: the Irish language, love, a national community have all been consigned to the spectral” (Whalen, 2002 p. 66). For Whalen, Michael Furey can be seen as a “symbolic of a vibrant, passionate life which has vanished” from Ireland (Whalen, p. 70). Although Whalen does an excellent job of providing a historical and biographical context for “The Dead”, viewing it through several lenses, and not just a historical one, will advance literary knowledge about narrative technique. Literary critics have yet to explore “The Dead” through a cognitive lens, but the narrative technique explores and plays with human thought.

 Cognitive Reading of The Dead by James Joyce

As our knowledge of cognitive science expands, many are asking what cognitive science and literature can reveal about each other. Although many have viewed the two as separate fields, new scientific discoveries and insights can tell us about literature, and literature has been telling us about human thought all along. Although the body of literary criticism of James Joyce’s “The Dead” is extensive, it has yet to be examined through the lens of cognitive science. Doing so would enrich our knowledge both about Joyce’s narrative technique and advance the application of cognitive science to literary criticism.

The role of haunting, in the larger context of memory, and its relationship with the senses, are an integral part of The Dead and compliment what we know about the neurological functions of memory, self identity and our experience of the passage of time. Joyce’s narrative technique, and the theme of haunting, illustrate how human thought functions. His insight into the mind of Gabriel Conroy, and Gabriel’s epiphany about his wife’s innermost thoughts, provides insight into how the mind, and specifically memory, works.

In his 2002 essay ‘The Memories of The Dead’, Kevil Whelan offers an “excavation of the historical layers—biographical, literary, historical, geographical, musical” of The Dead, specifically looking at the story’s references to the Famine. He claims that post-Famine Ireland gravitated towards Modernist writing because it was country coping with an identity crisis and already conscious of language. Whalen spends most of the essay exploring Ireland’s past and its influence on writers of Joyce’s time, often focusing specifically on The Dead. ‘The Irish past, like Michael Furey in ‘The Dead’,” he writes, ‘can only return to the present as an absence: the Irish language, love, a national community have all been consigned to the spectral” (Whalen, 2002 p. 66). For Whalen, Michael Furey can be seen as a “symbolic of a vibrant, passionate life which has vanished” from Ireland (Whalen, p. 70). In his 2002 essay ‘The Memories of The Dead’, Kevil Whelan offers an “excavation of the historical layers—biographical, literary, historical, geographical, musical” of The Dead, specifically looking at the story’s references to the Famine. He claims that post-Famine Ireland gravitated towards Modernist writing because it was country coping with an identity crisis and already conscious of language. Whalen spends most of the essay exploring Ireland’s past and its influence on writers of Joyce’s time, often focusing specifically on The Dead. ‘The Irish past, like Michael Furey in ‘The Dead’,” he writes, ‘can only return to the present as an absence: the Irish language, love, a national community have all been consigned to the spectral” (Whalen, 2002 p. 66). For Whalen, Michael Furey can be seen as a “symbolic of a vibrant, passionate life which has vanished” from Ireland (Whalen, p. 70). Although Whalen does an excellent job of providing a historical and biographical context for “The Dead”, viewing it through several lenses, and just a historical one, will advance literary knowledge about narrative technique.

To conduct this study, I will be using literary criticism, such as Whalen (2002), cultural history and scientific studies. I will be researching how memory and self-identity work, as well as how humans construct time as well as cognitive science’s explanation as to why we experience the supernatural.  In his popular book Proust was a Neuroscientist (2007), Jonah Lehrer writes about how Marcel Proust wrote accurately about memory in his fiction, foreshadowing contemporary scientific understanding of how memories form. I will be using Lehrer’s book and Imagining Minds by Kay Young, a book that uses cognitive theory to conduct close readings of 19^th century novels, as potential models for the study.

Investigating “The Dead” through the lens of cognitive science will, of course, have several limitations. Primarily that there is rarely only one theory and, since many of those theories are incomplete and changing, the study may be quickly out of date. As Lehrer writes, we still don’t entirely understand memory. Yet, our understanding of human thought and, by extension, the fiction we read will inevitably shift as cognitive science becomes increasingly central to our understanding of ourselves, and the world. Literary critics have yet to explore “The Dead” through a cognitive lens, but the narrative technique explores and plays with human thought.

Bibliography

Henigan, Julie. “’The Old Irish Tonality’” Folksong as Emotional Catalyst in ‘The Dead’” New Hibernia Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 2007): 136-148

Kelleher, John V. “Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.” The Review of Politics, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul. 1965): 414-433

Lehrer, Jonah. Proust was a Neuroscientist. Boston: Mariner Books, 2007.

Whelan, Kevin. “Memories of The Dead.” The Yale Journal of Criticism, Volume 15, No. 1  (2002): 59-97

Young, Kay. Imagining Minds.