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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Would you publish The Dead?

You're an editor of a literary magazine and a 60-page story comes into your inbox by an unknown author about a long party during which people argue politics, sing, dance, and at the end walk back to a hotel through the snow and the main character surmmises that his wife was truly in love with a young man who died a tragic early death. Do you publish James Joyce's The Dead? I'd like to say yes, of course, it's a great story, an entire novel, an entire society, compressed into one evening's reading - and yet, it's not set in New York or LA, not much really happens at least on the surface, it's not particularly funny, it's not groundbreaking - wouldn't you, or I, be more likely to pass? Looking back as I re-read The Dead, I can see that it is, in fact, groundbreaking - another great example of Joyce's open form of story-writing, not compressed into an arc of a plot of a twist of an ending but just flowing along easily with the events of a period of time - a later, final version of literary naturalism, which had, till Joyce (and maybe Chekhov?) seems more like a form suited for the expansiveness of the novel. It's a very European story - about characters trying to fit in rather than to break away, about conventional people and their foibles rather than oddballs and their eccentricities. Gabriel, the protagonist, is one of the most conventional and self-conscious of all literary heroes. It's hard to say, half-way through, why the story is so powerful, but several scenes and moments to remain in the mind: Gabriel's eager assumption of the task of carving the goose, his pompous preparation for his after-dinner speech, his strange sense of guilt when upbraided by the self-righteous woman who taunts him as a "West Briton," Mr. Browne's foolish jocularity and his sense of isolation as the only protestant in the crowd. Gabriel's wife does not really emerge as a character - yet.

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