The Dead

A mother.

grace and finally the dead and our treatment of a mother and grace will be brief so as to leave most of the discussion about the dead which is the longest the final and arguably the most existential of the stories and However, as always, they are connected.

And really, after we get to the end of the dead, it's easy to see how all of these stories are connected.

They're connected by the motifs that we've discussed, the gnomons, simony, paralysis, but they are connected in other ways as well.

So let's get started.

So if we recall, a mother and grace are part of the stories that deal with public life.

They're about institutions, but the dead, it's separate.

It's existential, like you said, in nature.

Yeah.

Uh, 'cause of so many music nights, and we've got, we've a murder mystery thing coming up with J- James Joyce's The Dead in January.

We're doing, uh, Whiskey Wars, which is a one-woman play.

Um, loads of things like that.

And how do you follow it so that you look at...

I mean, I guess James Joyce's The Dead is the all-time great party scene, and then there are great party scenes in Anna Karenina.

So you just take a party scene and you go, "Okay, how did," you know, what's the camera eye, in a way, following people around this party scene, and who's talking and when are they talking, and how do you know when the guests arrive, and how do you know? So you just use them as models.

I mean, the, the, those how to write books, you know, in general, how to write things.

Can you tell me more about party scenes? What makes for a good party scene?

[laughs] Well, since I mentioned Anna Karenina, you know, Anna is dancing with Vronsky, right? She's met Vronsky on the train, and there's this instant attraction, and, and Kitty, who is in love with and, I guess at that point, s- still engaged to Vronsky, is, uh, is the one who would most notice the two of them are dancing.

So wisely, Tolstoy chooses to write big parts of the scene from her point of view because no one else at that party is really particularly interested in the, that particular couple dancing, but she's the one who would focus in on it, right? I mean, the Joyce's The Dead is more a sort of cacophony of voices, but, but pretty soon you learn who everybody is.

I mean, y- you know, again, without going through the story line by line, it would be pretty soon you learn who everybody is, and you learn what the concerns are, and also this story's called The Dead, you know, so you know there's some, [laughs] you know there's something going on having to do with death and, and, and of course the hostesses are ancient, so everyone at the, everyone at the party is m- at some point thinking, uh, how many more of these parties are they going to give? And then there are all these sort of themes that are going through the party like Ireland, Irish history, I- Irish politics, music, um, religion.

promenade theatre stuff.

You go to James Joyce's The Dead, don't

you? Yes, in

January.

This is in Dublin, isn't it? It's not a play, but you walk around with it, but they perform extracts from James Joyce's brilliant short novel, The Dead.

Brilliant film as well.

So that's coming, isn't it?

Pollock plus Rothko.

Yeah, if you did a book called, say, Still Life Painting in Ireland, you know those wonderful Dutch paintings where you have the dead hair, the grapes, the cheese, and, you know, the beautiful piece of cutlery.

Zuberan.

And it just doesn't exist.

I think that writers love this idea of the greatest short story ever written.

It's such a cliche.

You know, The Dead by James Joyce is the great, the Chekhov, the lady with the, I always call it the lady with the laptop, but it's the lady with the lap dog by Chekhov.

You know, people, this idea of the greatest short story ever written.

It's still not as scary as The Monkey's Paw, but it is, but Henry James is one of the greatest of writers.

James Joyce the Dead.

Also a wonderful story.

And if you can't read Ulysses, if that's too hard for you, The Dead is a wonderful, straightforward story.

It has one of the great last paragraphs in history.

Got to give it an S.