Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction

P. Salvan, G. Salas, J. Heffernan, P. Salvan, G. Salas, J. Heffernan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137282842
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book focuses on the imaginary construction and deconstruction of human communities in modern and contemporary fiction. Drawing on recent theoretical debate on the notion of community (Nancy, Blanchot, Badiou, Esposito), this collection examines narratives by Joyce, Mansfield, Davies, Naipaul, DeLillo, Atwood and others.

1

Organic and Unworked Communities in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Pilar Villar-Argáiz

Introduction

James Joyce believed that insular notions of Irish identity threatened the writer’s freedom. He feared an artist could lose his integrity “while being involved with a community’s enterprise” (Deane 35). The artist’s loneliness and apartness was, therefore, a prerequisite for creativity. Joyce’s preference for exile and cosmopolitanism—both in his life and in his works—responds to his desire to safeguard artistic independence. As Edna O’Brien explains in her biography of Joyce, he left Ireland “so he said, for fear he might succumb to the national disease which was provincialness, wind-and-piss philosophising, crookedness, vacuity and a verbal spouting that reserved sentiment for God and for the dead” (17). This explains Joyce’s scathing critique in his work of all forms of saturated communities and his attempt to visualize alternative, non-essentialist communitarian forms.

This essay analyzes James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” from the perspective of the theories proposed in the 1980s by Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. My main objective is to examine Joyce’s literary representation of the two possible models of community discussed by these two French thinkers: an operative community “with fixed laws, institutions, and customs, accepted and acted on by all its members” (Miller 84) and a community that unworks the first, making it inoperative, what Nancy calls the “communauté désoeuvrée” (Inoperative 15), and Blanchot the “unavowable community” or “the community of those who have no community” (56, 88).

Accordingly, I explore Joyce’s synecdochic portrayal of Dublin, in particular the Misses Morkan’s party, as a communitarian representation of Ireland. I particularly identify and examine the five organic communities that Joyce depicts within his native country: the Catholic community, the nationalist community, the Dublin bourgeoisie, Gabriel’s family and finally his matrimony. All these operative communities overlap, intersect and are variously represented at the party by means of different characters. Joyce emphasizes the essentialist rituals upon which these communities are based; in the process, he also highlights the instability and fallibility of the tropes of fusion and communion. The third section of this chapter looks at Joyce’s ruthless critique of all forms of stable communities by carefully analyzing the characterization of Gabriel and other destabilizing motifs. I particularly focus on the open-ending of the story, which envisions, in its uncertain future, a new unworking community that unsettles the organic ones. Drawing on Heidegger, theorists such as Nancy, Blanchot, Esposito and Agamben suggest the existence of a truer community at a pre-ethical, ontological level. Their alternative communitarian proposal is composed of finite singularities which are exposed to the finitude of others. One such inoperative community is envisaged at the end of “The Dead.” Joyce is interested in exposing otherness and finitude through moments of death; indeed, the title itself, “The Dead,” evinces the short story’s close association with finitude. In the moment that Gabriel comes to terms with his own finitude, false organic communities collapse and he glimpses a truer communication between singularities.

Johnny Morkan’s horse circling the past: organic communities in “The Dead”

In “The Dead,” Joyce portrays a saturated community of Dubliners whose immanence is based on communitarian delusions such as religion, the homeland, shared origins, the purity of the race, the family and the idealization of alterity or otherness. Generally speaking, we could identify five organic communities in this story, which reveal themselves as in concentric circles, from the biggest to the smallest: the Catholic community, the Irish nationalist community, the bourgeois community of Dubliners emblematically represented in the party, Gabriel’s extended family of parents, aunts and cousins, and finally Gabriel’s matrimony. This section analyzes Joyce’s critical portrayal of all these forms of communal organicity. As we will see, he is very interested, not only in describing their tropes of fusion and togetherness, but also in focusing on the many fissures opening within these supposedly cohesive communities.

Brown argues that Joyce’s depiction in Dubliners of the provincial world and trivial details of ordinary life in Dublin “serves as a kind of metaphor for the spiritual condition of the Irish nation as a whole” (“Introduction” xxxvi). As the writer himself contended: “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” (Letters 134). Dubliners certainly exposes the spiritual paralysis of a society imprisoned by the provincialism of Irish life, the conservatism of tradition and above all, the dogma of the Catholic Church.

Indeed, one of the most prominent organic communities in “The Dead” takes shape around the axis of Catholicism. To start with, the party occurs on the night of the Feast of the Epiphany, and the name of the two most important male characters in the story, Conroy and Furey, are loaded with Biblical connotations—the Archangels Gabriel and Michael. Other religious references in the story include the discussion held between Mary Jane and Aunt Kate regarding the Pope’s decree that women should not be members of the Church choir (“The Dead” 195), Gabriel’s idealization of his wife as a Madonna (211), and the allusions to the crucifixion of Christ in the final paragraph, in which snow is falling on the “crosses” of headstones, on the “spears” of the gate and the “thorns” (225). The meal itself has the symbolic connotation of the sacrament of the Eucharist, with the Archangel Gabriel presiding over the ceremony. One of the salient features of Catholicism that Joyce identifies in this short story is its romantic ideal of collective unity. Indeed, scholarly work has stressed the interest of Irish Catholicism throughout the last two centuries in creating an all-encompassing communal identity with which to counteract the threatening influence of British Protestantism (O’Brien Joyce 102; White 50). This collective notion of selfhood fostered by Irish Catholicism is reflected in the Christmas banquet scene, described as a climactic moment in the Morkan sisters’ party. Around the table presided over by Gabriel, all the party-goers sit and eat in communion. The organic bond between the members assembled there is reaffirmed by the ritual unity of their movements. In this setting, everything seems to be arranged according to a pre-established pattern dictated by dogma and tradition. After the Archangel Gabriel takes “his seat boldly at the head of the table” and plunges “his fork firmly into the goose” (197), a pre-arranged dinner-party ritual ensues: Gabriel and Miss Daly exchange plates of goose, ham and beef, while Lily serves potatoes from guest to guest and Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia serve the drinks (198). It is the synthesis of their actions that promotes the self-definition of this organic community. The religious connotations of this meal are also foregrounded through Gabriel’s playful resort to the sacramental formula of marriage: “Now, if anyone wants a little more of what vulgar people call stuffing let him or her speak” (198). A similar organized ceremony follows while serving the desserts (201).

From this perspective, Joyce’s banquet scene could allegorize the Christian myth of “communion” at the base of organic communities, a communion which “takes place, in its principle as in its ends, at the heart of the mystical body of Christ” (Nancy Inoperative 10). As Blanchot claims, any sort of saturated community always “propose[s] itself as a tendency towards a communion, even a fusion” of its members, in order to create the illusion of “a unity” or “supra-individuality” (6–7). The party banquet duly represents this illusion of “supra-individuality.” As the members assemble around this dinner table, Joyce offers detailed descriptions of the dishes which are served. Food imagery symbolizes the ritual of sacrifice at the heart of the Eucharist, and those summoned around the table recall the original community of the apostles at The Last Supper. Furthermore, the dinner scene is charged with military associations. The display of the dishes and drinks in the table is compared to the arrangement of soldiers in a battle formation: between the “fat brown goose” and the “great ham” (described as “rival ends”), there are “parallel lines of side-dishes;” in the centre of the table, there stand, “as sentries,” two glass decanters; and on the piano, there are “three squads of bottles” of drinks “drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms” (197). The military terminology employed in this scene suggests the strong intertwining of religion with politics in Ireland. The Roman Catholic ritual is infused with images which symbolize rebellion and revolutionary fervour, recalling the religious dimension of nationalist uprisings in Ireland. Indeed, this strengthening nexus between Catholicism and Irish nationalism has been studied by many scholars, who coincide in identifying religion as one of the most distinctive elements of Irish national identity (Girvin 3–14; Abbottsmith 141–2).

By describing the Morkan’s dinner party as a ritualized event and not as a relaxed encounter among friends, Joyce depicts an Irish society immobilized by the dogma of the Catholic Church. The destructive spiritual tyranny exerted by Catholicism on the Irish is apparent in Aunt Kate’s description of the monks of Mount Melleray, who “never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins” (201–2). The image of the monks lying in their coffins seems to cast an oppressive shadow over the members of the party. Here, as Kiberd claims, Joyce is pointing out to “[t]he danger of nationalist [and I would add religious] culture” in “its tendency to petrification and its martyr cult” (292).

Kiberd’s comment leads us to the second most important saturated community to be found in “The Dead:” the Irish nationalist community, forged around the communitarian delusions of homeland, the trope of a discernible origin and racial purity. In the years in which the story “The Dead” is set, we can recognize two nationalist movements in Ireland. The first one is usually identified as the “Irish Ireland movement.” Led by figures such as Arthur Griffith, who founded Cumann na nGaedheal, this movement fostered a deliberate Hibernicization of the country through the revitalization of the Gaelic language. The second movement was the Irish Literary Revival, with figures such as Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge. It sought to bring back “an ancient Celtic spiritualism by means of an English language literature which might rekindle the authentic national fire” (Brown “Introduction” xxvi). This second movement usually relied on the literary use of Celtic myth, the idealization of Irish rural life, and the portrayal of the Western countryside as an idyllic place where “true” Irishness was to be found.

Joyce could not commune with the cultural projects promoted by either nationalist movements. On the “Irish Ireland movement,” he is reported to have said: “If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognise myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one” (Joyce Critical Writings 187; qtd. in Brown “Introduction” xxvi–vii). Joyce was also critical of the Irish Literary Revival movement. Although he recognized Yeats’s talent, he could not identify with his idealization of the heroic Celtic past. As he asserted: “Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead. Its death chant has been sung, and on its gravestone has been placed the seal” (xxviii).

In “The Dead,” Joyce shows contempt towards both nationalist movements by means of the character of Gabriel, who, like Joyce, cannot commune with the organic tropes of homeland and language around which Irishness has been founded. This opposition is reflected in Gabriel’s confrontation with Miss Ivors, a woman at the party who stands for the Irish Ireland Gaeilgeoir. When Miss Ivors invites Conroy to go to the Aran Isles, a place quintessentially symbolizing the “true” pre-colonial Ireland, he declines the offer, as he has already planned “a cycling tour” on the continent (189).

Drawing on Rousseau’s theories, Nancy explains how organic communities largely depend on the ideal myth of “a lost community” which needs “to be regained or reconstituted” (Inoperative 9). This feeling of “nostalgia for a more archaic community that has disappeared” (10) is explored by Eugene O’Brien in Examining Irish Nationalism (2002). In this study, O’Brien argues that there is always a myth of origins, an “ur-beginning,” from which the history of the Volk is written (10). This narrative of creation, which is “part of the kernel of the nationalist imaginaire” (15), is intrinsically bound up with an essentialist appropriation of place and language. The Aran Isles epitomize this “Rousseaunian” dream of an “Edenic” place where a pastoral, uncontaminated Gaelic community exists. The very act of going there on holidays becomes an ideological statement of self-identification with Irishness, as it is in this specific place “where the ethnie can be validated in terms of power and ownership” (O’Brien Examining 32). Thus, Gabriel’s refusal to go to western Ireland symbolizes his anti-nationalist inclinations.

Miss Ivor’s confrontation with Gabriel exemplifies the puritan zeal of Irish nationalism. She severely rebukes him for knowing nothing of his “own people” and preferring instead to visit other European places, to which he suddenly retorts: “O, to tell you the truth, . . . I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (190). Gabriel’s thought that literature is “above politics” reflects “Joyce’s quarrels with the propagandistic aims of the Irish revival” (Norris “Stifled” 481). Similarly, Gabriel’s refusal to consider Irish as his native language mirrors Joyce’s opposition to the political programme set by the “Irish Ireland movement” of reviving the Gaelic language.

As Joyce did in his critique of the religious community, he depicts nationalism as a decaying and paralyzing movement founded on communitarian delusions. To start with, Miss Ivors is different from all the other women at the party. Although her appearance is stereotypically Irish (she has “a freckled face” and wears Celtic jewellery, 187), she dresses differently to the other women (“She did not wear a low-cut bodice,” 187) and her serious personality sets her apart from the cheering ladies gathered there. Furthermore, the party members do not take part of the nationalist drives that Molly Ivors epitomizes, because she is portrayed as an independent woman, or, as Gretta defines her, “the comical girl” (196). It is also interesting to note that she leaves early from the party, declining to take part in the communal rites of the dinner party. In this sense, Miss Ivors’s nationalism coheres poorly with those assembled at Misses Morkan’s house.

Gabriel’s wife also symbolizes the romantic drives of Irish nationalism. When listening to The Lass of Aughrim, her hidden secret passion for Michael Furey, a boy she met in Galway, is suddenly reawakened. This song, sung in the “old Irish tonality,” bears connotations of an authentic Irish identity harboured in the romanticized west of Ireland. Gretta’s claim that Michael had died for her (221) is a simplistic version of the past: Michael most likely died of tuberculosis as he stood out sick and in the rain beneath her window. In this sense, Gabriel’s wife epitomizes the sentimentalism of Irish nationalism, in its tendency to idealize the past and foster a martyr culture. As has been extensively analyzed, the Irish nationalist imaginaire has been largely constructed around the saturated tropes of blood sacrifice and martyrdom (Cruise O’Brien 35; Abbottsmith 132). Gretta’s emphasis on the sacrificial nature of Michael’s death resembles this expression of nationalistic goals in religious terms. From this perspective, Gretta embodies allegorical traits of W.B. Yeats’s old woman in his 1902 nationalistic play Cathleen Ni Houlihan, a female personification of Ireland for whom the patriot died at the end.

This idealization of death gives us important clues for a comprehensive understanding of Joyce’s portrayal of religious and nationalist communities. Joyce depicts Ireland as a country excess...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Togetherness and its Discontents
• 1 Organic and Unworked Communities in James Joyce’s “The Dead”
• 2 “Two Grinning Puppets Jigging Away in Nothingness:” Symbolism and the Community of Lovers in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction
• 3 “A Panegyric Preached Over an Empty Coffin:” Waugh, or, the Inevitable End of Community
• 4 “Being involved:” Community and Commitment in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American
• 5 Doomed to Walk the Night: Ghostly Communities and Promises in the Novels of Alex La Guma
• 6 The Secret of Robertson Davies’ Cornish Communities
• 7 When Strangers Are Never At Home: A Communitarian Study of Janet Frame’s The Carpathians
• 8 Communal “Openness” to an Irreducible Outside: The Inoperative Community in Edna O’Brien’s Short Fiction
• 9 “A Political Anxiety:” Naipaul, or the Unlikely Beginning of Community
• 10 “Longing on a Large Scale:” Models of Communitarian Reconstitution in Don DeLillo’s Fiction
• 11 “I Am Not a Herald of Community:” Communities of Contagion and Touching in The Letters of J.M. Coetzee
• 12 Immortality and Immunity in Margaret Atwood’s Futuristic Dystopias
• Index