Edna O'Brien's "Lantern Slides" and Joyce's "The Dead": shadows of a bygone era

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Sandra Manoogian Pearce

In 1974, Grace Eckley noted the similarities between James Joyce and then-emerging Irish talent, Edna O'Brien. Eckley specifically cites O'Brien's "Irish Revel" as "a West of Ireland version of Joyce's classic, `The Dead'" (81), comparing the blanketing snow of Joyce's metaphoric ending to the frost that comes "like the descent of winter on Mary's heart" (82) at the end of the O'Brien story. O'Brien's diction and rhythm clearly bestow homage on Joyce: "Frost was general all over Ireland: frost like a weird blossom on the branches, on the river-bank from which Long John Salmon leaped in his great, hairy nakedness, on the ploughs left out all winter; frost on the stony fields, on all the slime and ugliness of the world' (in The Love Object 114).(1) The title story of O'Brien's latest collection Lantern Slides places O'Brien even more securely within the Joycean sphere, for now setting has moved cast to Dublin. Gone is the lush Irish countryside; gone are the proper Connor girls; gone are Cait and Baba. Gone, too, are the erotic but innocent prelapsarian longings of those protagonists reminiscent of Joyce's two West country women, Gretta and Bertha. In their stead is a dazzling display of Dublin's dinner "nobs." While richly resonant of Joyce's "The Dead," this party is not consumed with talk of politics, music, or lost loves, but rather with Gucci ties, tacky poetry, and lost lusts. O'Brien's feminist rewriting of "The Dead" is delightfully, searingly ironic, but the subtext is even more so, revealing a satiric pen that blots male and female alike with the same scathing ink, delivering an indictment that goes far beyond Joyce's.

From the opening paragraph of "Lantern Slides," O'Brien's extension of Joyce's story is glaringly apparent. Gabriel Conroy has become Mr. Conroy, hotel worker, whatever that means. Mr. Conroy's stories suggest that he is working in a brothel rather than a hotel. While "The Dead" evokes lyrical images of faintly falling snow, "Lantern Slides" opens with imagery more reminiscent of "Circe," in a "big hall" where in "a big limestone grate, a turf fire blazes." The next few sentences confirm the story's setting: "The surround was a bit lugubrious, like a grotto, but this impression was forgotten as the flames spread and swagged into brazen orange banners. In the sitting room, a further galaxy of people . . . . Here too was a fire . . ." (186). We are in Hell, the hell of Dante's Inferno, where not only flames assail the body, but also noise (remember the din of Satan flapping his wings?.). Waiters move "like altar boys among the panting throngs," while people ask "from time to time how this racket could be quelled, because quelled it would have to be when the moment came, when the summons for silence came" (186). But no silence comes, unlike the beautifully haunting silence that ends "The Dead." Here, openly flirtatious Dr. Fitz will not shut up; outrageously sexist Mr. Gogart), keeps on joking. Even the chandeliers "seem[ed] to be chattering, so dense and busy and clustered were the shining pendants of glass" (186). These `chattering'; chandeliers set the tone of the story: we will judge and be judged by gossip, rumor, innuendo, and association.

O'Brien replaces Gretta's impassioned weeping for a lost Michael Furey with Miss Lawless's lustftul desires for the newly resurrected appearance of a second Peter Abelard, her lost lover of 25 years earlier (and of course, invoking the original Abelard -- twelfth century scholar, monk, and lover of Heloise). The Dantesque vision of Gretta/Beatrice enshrouded in the "dusty fanlight" (evoked more fully in John Huston's movie version, in which Gretta stands earlier in the stained-glass stairwell) gives way in O'Brien's story to "patches of sea like diagonals of stained glass" (200), reminding us that the lantern slides are not infused with Dantean light, but clouded with mists of the sea, or shrouded in distant and disjointed memories. Instead of this vision conjuring up Gretta's heart-rending story of the young, rain-soaked Furey's stand beneath her window and its fatal consequences, O'Brien treats us to a panoply of twentieth-century soap operas. Miss Lawless's lost love is married, an adulterous bastard (a highly ironic allusion, considering the medieval Abelard's castration(2)) who would "embrace her but did not want to know anything about her," who would `introduce her to his wife at some party," who would even allow his wife to invite her to their home, where O'Brien gives us a glimpse of his garden, complete with "tiny shrunken apples that looked as if they had some sort of disease, some blight" (203). Whatever prelapsarian longings Joyce evokes with his story, O'Brien totally undercuts with hers. Indeed, even the Edenic moment of Ulysses -- Molly and Bloom on Howth -- is undermined in O'Brien's story. Mr. Conroy fantasizes stealing a kiss from Miss Lawless on the "Hill of Howth, with its rhododendrons about to burgeon," thinking she would not go "the whole hog," while she fantasizes about the old Abelard and how this new stranger is "enough for her" (212), brilliantly, exposing the totally separate lives of these two protagonists.