Introduction: Having Some Fun with a Modernist Climax

“A Little Death is parody project in which I rewrite the same passage of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ again and again (and again and again), in various styles, in an attempt to reveal the secrets of one of the 20^th century’s most influential short stories, while also exploring other writers and forms through the imitation of style.” — Vijay Khurana

I. In the style of Henry James

reflections

The narrator takes the reader by the hand (“if we may approach”; “our friend’s condition”) and even (perhaps ironically) defends the verisimilitude of the scene. Something that comes to mind is what John Gardner and others have called psychic distance, that is, the perceived distance between the reader and the character. A Jamesian narrator places more distance between us and Gabriel. We are watching Gabriel, rather than being with him.

And what does this say about some of Joyce’s own choices, like “she who lay beside him”? There is certainly distance in that, as a man’s description of his wife (more so than in, say, “one by one, they were all becoming shades”). Perhaps Joyce is being more fluid in his use of psychic distance, zooming in and out, so to speak. The effect it has in the example of “she who lay beside him” is to emphasize the distance Gabriel feels in that moment between himself and his wife. It’s a wonderful contrast to the physical closeness of their bodies, even as—literally—it describes exactly that.

And of course, Gabriel Conroy isn’t “Gabriel” in the parody—in James he could only be “Conroy” or “our friend”, which again emphasizes the distance between character and narrator, and brings an irony to the passage, inviting us to make fun of Gabriel’s suffering.

The exaggeration of James’s verbose throat-clearing (“might not, at last, then…”) manipulates our desire for meaning in a sentence: as with a “shaggy dog” joke, the longer we are kept waiting for meaning, the more exasperated we become, and the more we may tend to doubt that the meaning, when it comes, will be fulfilling.

The euphemism “lachrymal event” is stolen from Ben Lerner, who could easily himself have stolen it from James. Again, this has something to do with obscuring meaning, and thus making light of the emotional intensity of Joyce’s scene. What about the original “generous tears”? Is Joyce mocking the self-centred magnanimity Gabriel has displayed through the evening, from giving money to Lily to worrying about whether his friends will understand the references in his speech? Does Joyce’s decision to make even his tears “generous” aim at a similar effect to what the James parody is doing?

II. In the style of Samuel Pepys

reflections

There is more than a little melancholy in Pepys’s voice, especially in the combination of mundane events and the matter-of-fact expression of emotional pain. This might provide an opening into the Creative Writing debate of showing vs. telling. In a general sense, Pepys tells us about pain (“greatly vexed in my mind”) where Joyce shows it. The received wisdom is that the latter carries more emotional weight for the reader. Yet there may also be something powerful in the quotidian recount Pepys gives us, especially when you consider the necessary solitude of the diarist, and how closely it resembles Gabriel’s own solitude at the end of Joyce’s story.

The nature of Pepys’s diary entries, essentially recounts of his day, drove me to give the entire plot of “The Dead” in précis here, rather than just rewriting my sample paragraph. This was an interesting opportunity: what would stay and what would get cut in order to create a brief, Pepysian entry?

Pepys’s own concerns led me to focus largely on food and sex (or the lack of it in this case)… does the fact that his speech and his writing are not mentioned in the parody tell us something about Joyce’s Gabriel and his potential dilettantism?

Pepys gives us a Gabriel whose primary concern at his wife’s unhappiness is the thwarting of his own sexual desire. As caricatures tend to do, this emphasizes one aspect of the original text, leaving it exposed above the others.

“Great with melancholy” is interesting: it echoes the phrase “great with child”, which does appear in Pepys. Gretta’s sadness is something she has borne since her youth and perhaps it is brought into the world on this night. This idea fits well with Gabriel’s perceived sense of injustice, that Gretta’s feelings are the manifestation of infidelity.

Changing “she who lay beside him” to “while lying by myself” is also sexual, I think. There’s a biblical euphemism in the latter, implying that Gabriel is worried Gretta may be thinking of Michael Furey while having sex with him, her husband. Alternatively, “lying by myself” is just a preposition away from “lying to myself”. This is what Gretta has done when she “locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes…”

“And so to bed” is Pepys’s famous sign-off. I deliberately put it in the middle of the paragraph here, not the end, to show that Gabriel doesn’t get the luxury of switching off and drawing a line under his day. Bed for Joyce’s Gabriel is a continuation of anguish, or perhaps even an intensification of it. If a bed is a place for restorative unconsciousness and sexual satisfaction, Gabriel receives neither. Perhaps I had earlier considered the significance of the bed in Joyce’s story in terms of its potential for sex, but I don’t think I’d realised its Pepysian connection with the end of the chapter, comfort at the end of a trying day. Bed brings no real resolution, and neither does the end of Joyce’s short story; this seems an important point to make in terms of the form’s history: Dubliners came at a time when the short story was increasingly moving away from the 19^th century form—which often allowed characters a certain amount of resolution—and instead leaving its characters high and dry in the midst of a crisis or trial.

Similarly, the present tense used by Pepys (“great tears then filling my eyes…”) implies a kind of ceaselessness, a relentlessness to Gabriel’s pain. To say, “Great tears then filled my eyes” might be to acknowledge that the crying eventually stopped, but Pepys’s style doesn’t take us in that direction.

III. In the style of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man

reflections

What happens when the passage is set out as an argument with a perceived (or imagined) interlocutor, as is the case with part one of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground? Giving Gabriel unwritten challenges to respond to (“You are asking why…”) gives his thoughts voice, turns them into a sort of dramatic monologue.

Transposed to Joyce, Dostoyevsky’s references to “Gentlemen” expose a chauvinism in Gabriel’s way of thinking, with Gretta reduced to something akin to the “ball and chain” of a certain type of anecdote, or the object of comedian Henny Youngman’s chauvinistic one-liner, “Take my wife, please!”

Perhaps there is a third style coming through, something between Joyce’s Gabriel and Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man: the archetypal hapless male comic, who relives and exaggerates his misfortunes in order to earn laughs and a living.

Once again, Joyce’s “generous tears” proves a fascinating phrase in transposition. In Dostoyevsky the tears become “voluptuous”, which hints at the contradictions in Notes between self-loathing and arrogance, pain and bliss. In turn, that says something interesting about Gabriel’s self-pity: there is a certain amount of self-centred enjoyment in it, surely, even in Joyce’s original.

Letting “cold shoulders” collide with “melancholy” and “inertia” caricatures the way Joyce uses the physical chill of the room to emphasise Gabriel’s mood. With its comedic use of the “rule of threes”, this might be a rare moment in which a parody critiques Joyce himself, for his use in “The Dead” of pathetic fallacy, which has since become a well-worn storytelling trope.

IV. Rewritten as a Shakespearian Sonnet

reflections

This parody becomes a cyclical game, as Gabriel’s torment, brought on indirectly by the sentimental folk song “The Lass of Aughrim” in the original, is itself reduced to light verse. The conventions of the sonnet are clearly a challenge to the earnestness of Gabriel’s thoughts, yet this tempted me to aim at some of the darkest aspects of his consciousness, and especially his masculinity.

It might have been tempting to use the sonnet’s volta to end with the story’s revelation, the snow falling upon the living and the dead, etc. Instead I decided to use the final two lines to revisit Gabriel’s ritual performative act of carving at dinner, with its traces of the old male role of hunter, one who enacts violence for the sake of his family’s wellbeing. A wonderful contradiction when seen against Gabriel’s feeling of impotence (“fade and wither dismally with age”). This raises interesting questions about how maleness is dealt with in Joyce’s story.

It was a conscious choice to use violent words: pain, unconscious, merciless, etc., and to put a stress on the three main interactions Gabriel has with women in the story. While many of the other parodies tend to lean towards making Gabriel a figure of fun, this one I think is darker; it hints at his capacity to do violence, and his readiness to blame women for his situation. Is “The Dead”, then, a story about toxic masculinity?

The iambic rhythm forces constraints on certain lines. For example, in line two, hospitality required an unstressed syllable to precede it. That led me towards words like “what” or “such”, which in turn changed the tone of the line to one of sarcasm: “Such hospitality!”

This may well be only a slight exaggeration of Gabriel’s actual feelings about his aunts’ hospitality in the story (and in particular, in his speech).

V. Restructured as a Pantoum 

reflections

Some pleasing things occur here through the pantoum’s repetitions and recombinations. Joyce’s “One by one, they were all becoming shades” becomes “And lay down / one by one / beside his wife / they were all becoming”—as though Gabriel is comparing his wife’s looks to those of other women.

Some envelopes allow themselves to be pushed: “wither” can become “whither?”, “her lover’s eyes” returns as “her lover’s sighs”, etc. I don’t think these changes bring anything wholly new to Gabriel’s crisis; if anything they simply emphasise his disturbed thoughts of sex and death.

The pantoum’s demand for the repetition of phrases seems to make it a perfect fit for the emotional intensity of the original passage. It suggests a recursive thought process, the mental feedback loop of extreme anguish. I wonder if Joyce is doing this too, albeit in a far subtler way, with his repetition of “eyes” in the final two sentences.

It’s worth comparing that to the more overt uses of repetition in Ulysses, where prose becomes prose-poem in Bloom’s consciousness: “Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me. Me. And me now.”

VI. In the Style of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 

reflections

It was too tempting to rename Gretta “Regretta”, while Gabriel himself is a “conned boy”, or at least this is how he feels, having discovered his wife’s secret.

Crying is a novel of many lists, which tend not to have definitive endings, but to trail off or drift into other thoughts. In the parody, the list has the effect of making light of the piling up (the snowball effect?) of melancholy on poor Gabriel as the story progresses.

It’s interesting that in this parody, Gretta hears Gabe’s song just as she heard Bartell D’Arcy singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ earlier in Joyce’s original. Gabe’s is as melodramatic as one by Pynchon’s “Paranoids”, which might be a fair description of how Joyce’s Gabriel comes across when he learns about Michael Furey.

Regretta’s reaction to the song couldn’t be more different from Gretta’s in the original.

I’d noticed Pynchon’s use of dialogue tags in Crying, without quite knowing what it might suggest. As well as the ubiquitous “said” and “told”, and “wondered”, “smiled”, etc., as verbs complimenting dialogue, Pynchon also gives us less usual tags like “brooded Oedipa”, “winked jolly Oedipa”, “summarized a boy holding a passkey”, “invited one of the other Paranoids”, “Metzger leaped”, “it occurred to her”, etc.

These choices fit in with Pynchon’s distinction between the meaning within information and the meaning to be found in its packaging, e.g. Oedipa’s discovery of an important clue on the outside of an envelope she receives containing a letter from her husband (“It may have been an intuition that the letter would be newsless inside that made Oedipa look more closely at its outside, when it arrived.”). Pynchon’s dialogue tags are competing with the dialogue over which provides the reader with more meaning.

In the parody, the tag “he wallowed” characterises Gabe’s mood while belittling his troubles, while “indulged” gives Regretta something of a patient, maternal role, as though she is used to his melodramatic crises and knows they are not worth regaining consciousness for.

VII. As Annotated by Charles Kinbote in Vladamir Nabokov’s Pale Fire

reflections

This leans quite heavily on a literary coincidence, but it’s a fun one. I discovered that the real-life inspiration for Michael Furey, the cause of Gabriel’s melancholic epiphany, really was called Michael Bodkin (see for example Richard Ellmann’s Joyce, OUP, 1982, p243), eerily close to the “Botkin” who pops up in Pale Fire as a playful twist on “Kinbote”. After that, coincidences began to fall like dominos. The viewing of snow through a window, the reference to galoshes, Browning, the death of a child… Doesn’t the dumb luck of these parallels say something about Pale Fire, that the clues Kinbote follows through Shade’s (another impeccable coincidence) poem are perhaps not so unequivocal as they seem? Patterns are easy enough to find if we are determined to find them.

It’s interesting, too, to compare the verbosity of my Kinbote to that of Henry James. To what extent is Kinbote a Jamesian narrator taken to the next level, insisting on his own importance to the story? Here, the “narrator” is given flesh and motivation. Kinbote’s ironic equivocations half-veiling his own desires (“…which I urgently needed for a personal project”) could be compared to Jamesian euphemism. Could the argument then be made that Kinbote’s narration is itself a decent parody of James’s?

While parodying a novel of “sly little games”, it was fun to attempt to play some myself, e.g. referring to scholars of Joyce’s story as “necrologists”, and the reference to Joyce’s and Barnacle’s scatological letters as “pneumatic correspondence”. I like to think Kinbote would approve.

VIII. In the Style of Claire-Louise Bennet’s Pond

reflections

In Pond, Bennett often uses words and phrases like “in fact”, “of course”, “definitely”, “actually”, “frankly”, “quite”, etc. They seem to serve a dual purpose, being emphatic as well as digressive. As with Dostoyevsky’s “gentlemen”, there is a perceived interlocutor whose identity is unclear and possibly internal.

The combination of formal language and colloquialisms (“an inconspicuous if not necessarily graceful little post-party vom”) echoes Joyce’s own flexibility of register.

This line of the parody also characterises the snow as a release, something that should ameliorate pain or discomfort. It’s interesting to note a semantic difference between “I cried quite outrageously there in the dark” and “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes”: the crying in the parody can reasonably be read as a release of fluid from the body, but tears filling the eyes (as in the original) cannot, at least not technically. Joyce then denies Gabriel this catharsis.

The “diaphanous” chill points to Bennett’s often unusual adjective-noun combinations, e.g. “simpering huts” or “elastic gloom”. There is a sense of freedom in the narrator’s associations that is I think part of the overall mood of Pond, off-setting any perceived negative connotations regarding the solitude running through the book. She may be alone, but she is free to think.