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Christmas story: James Joyce wrote a carol to remember

Christmas is tradition and ritual. The most important traditions and rituals are specifically religious, but families have their own custom-made versions marginally religious or not religious at all. In the family I grew up in along the Chena River, every year we sent holiday cards, made sure the string of bubble-up lights on the tree bubbled, ate canned plum pudding to end Christmas dinner, and gorged on holiday music, "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas" being my personal favorite. "I yust go nuts at Christmas that yolly holiday …" ersatz Swede Yogi Yorgesson lamented. You have to be old enough to receive Social Security to remember Yogi.

As an adult, I have retained some of what my parents did at Christmas, while adding my own practices. One of mine is re-reading James Joyce's story "The Dead," during the holiday season. I wouldn't call turning to Joyce a tradition or ritual. It's an act of renewal of my admiration for Joyce (1882-1941) as a writer and my appreciation of the story, 57 pages in the edition I have.

[With home far away, a Christmas present brings memories of Christmas past]

This edition of "Dubliners" is the only one I have read. I bought the four-inch-by-seven-inch forest green hardcover in Madison, Wisconsin, for 75 cents in 1965; it has followed me around for more than half a century. There's an inscription inside the cover that I have often pondered: "November, 1944 May we know you when you are three times the age! Salud! Mama, Edward, Jos and Eleanor." Sounds like a birthday gift but who were these people?

"The Dead" is a straightforward narrative, unlike Joyce's famous experimental novels "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake."The story is set in Dublin at Christmas, about 1905, and unfolds as follows. The Morkan sisters, elderly music teachers, are holding their Christmas party, a tradition for 30 years or more. Enter Gabriel Conroy, their nephew, who will become the central figure as events unfold, and his wife Gretta. Many other guests arrive to produce a packed house of friends and neighbors. Music, singing, and dancing fill the house before a late dinner. There is also a lot of talk — or in a story, dialogue — that reveals the relationship between Gabriel, an intellectually ambitious and perhaps pretentious teacher of about 40, and his aunts, his wife, his friends, and others attending the party. Gabriel is not a first-person narrator; the story of what Gabriel sees, does and feels is told by the omniscient author, Joyce.

"The Dead" ends in a moment of revelation when Gabriel and Gretta are alone in a hotel room and she explains that, long ago, a young man, Michael Furey, courted her in her country town, well before she met Gabriel. Eventually, the young man became sick and died, although as Gretta tells her husband "I think he died for me" after he came to her home, obviously ill, to plead his love shivering in the cold rain. Gabriel is stunned by his wife's admission and falls asleep next to her contemplating how little he knew about her, how fleeting life is.

Snowflakes patter the window as Gabriel drifts off. The snow was general all over Ireland, Joyce says, falling on the living and the dead, falling "too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns."

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This may seem lugubrious Christmas reading. Christmas is the season celebrating a birth that in the Christian faith saved the world. But we know from our own experience that, as another Irishman, Benedict Kiely, put it "The dead hover over the living" — and for some of us, they hover mighty low at Christmas. The parents and siblings who celebrated Christmas with us, gone, the friend of yesteryear who sat next to the tree gesticulating wildly amid her favorite story, gone, the neighbor who came over Christmas Eve to offer a late gift, gone.

For that matter, public places we enjoyed going when young, even churches, gone.

The dead are present throughout Joyce's story, not just in the final scene. In the course of the evening, Gabriel Conroy's mother, father, grandfather and even the grandfather's eccentric departed horse, Johnny, are mentioned. Plus over dinner, the guests conduct a lively discussion of popular singers who once performed in the Dublin music halls.

The reader is touched to realize that life is fragile and evanescent even when it comes at you in the form of the warmth, gaiety, and good will of the Morkan Christmas party or the wondrous voices that filled Dublin's theaters.

"May we know you when you are three times the age. Salud! Mama, Edward, Jos and Eleanor" says the inscription in my copy of "The Dead." I hope this came to pass.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser.

Michael Carey

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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