The Dead: Indisputably Ireland’s greatest work of Christmas art

The 12 days of Christmas commence tomorrow and draw to a close on Friday, January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany (or, if you prefer, Nollaig na mBan). It’s the time of year when I tend to bend the ear of anyone foolish enough to listen to my thoughts on James Joyce’s Epiphany-set masterpiece, The Dead, and also (if they haven’t escaped yet) on John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation, on which I worked in a very junior capacity. Perhaps unwisely, the Irish Film Institute has asked me to say a few words at its annual screening of the film this January 6th.

Both film and book contain multitudes – far too many to explore here – but on this Christmas Eve it seems worth reasserting one simple, indisputable fact: The Dead is Ireland’s richest and most memorable piece of Christmas art. Eat your heart out, Shane MacGowan.

The events that take place during and after the party at the Misses Morkans’ on Usher’s Island can be described as a Christmas ghost story, a Christmas weather story, a Christmas nostalgia story, arguably a Christmas feminist story and, of course, a story about a Christmas party. And it wouldn’t be a proper Irish Christmas story if it hadn’t generated a heated political argument.

“The end of The Dead is a political Rorschach blot for Joyceans,” wrote Elizabeth Butler Cullingford. “Joep Leerson agrees with John Wilson Foster that the journey westward is deathly, Michael Furey another Count Dracula, and the past a nightmare from which no one can escape ... But Seamus Deane endorses the views of [Vincent] Cheng, [Luke] Gibbons and [Emer] Nolan ... when he claims that ‘an actual space for liberation opens in the west of Miss Ivors and Michael Furey.”

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More recent critiques treat the party as a sort of postcolonial performance, and therefore more valid than the supposed “authenticity” of that assigned to the west of Ireland.

I like to think Joyce would have delighted in these ideological knife fights. The text of The Dead, with its unstable narrative and constantly shifting perspectives, invites multiple reading, rereadings and misreadings.

[ When James Joyce met Marcel Proust ]

Who are we to say which is which (although I’m in the Count Dracula camp)? But all of these interpretations are anachronistic, as is Huston’s film, which among other things inserts a mention of James Connolly that would have mystified Joyce at the time. Anachronism is impossible to avoid; we cannot do anything but look through the eyes of our own time.

To understand the interplay between the 1907 story and the 1987 film, I turn to Prof Kevin Barry’s brief, lucid 2001 study, published by Cork University Press. Barry teases out the subtle but important amendments, additions and excisions that Huston made to Joyce’s text while never losing sight of the fact that the finished film is first and foremost a part of the canon of one of the great Hollywood figures of the mid-20th century. He reminds us too that Huston performed an important service in redirecting the attention of readers and viewers away from those extraordinary, beautiful closing paragraphs and back to Joyce’s original intention that The Dead should redress what he felt was an unrelieved bleakness in his depiction of his native city in the other stories in Dubliners.

“Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh,” Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attractions 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.”

Huston, in turn, saw the opportunity to recreate and celebrate a particular sort of Irish sentimental hospitality that he had experienced during his years living in Galway, and which he felt was fast disappearing. It was an anti-heroic world, very much at odds with the Irish stereotypes promoted by Hollywood films such as The Informer and The Quiet Man, where revolutionary violence and simple rural virtues were the order of the day.

[ House of The Dead: What to do with Joyce’s literary landmark? ]

“Huston’s film, with its surprising restraint, its urban politeness, its unspectacular action, represents the Irish not as violent men and women, but as experts in small-scale conflict resolution.,” writes Barry “And it represents Ireland as a place of social custom in which wilderness romances, such as that of Michael Furey, are remembered only on those occasions when an old ballad is sung at the end of a long night.”

An ingenuous, insular, hospitable Christmas to you all.