Passing boldly into that other world of holes: narrativity and subjectivity in James Joyce's "The Dead."

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Sean P. Murphy

I believe theorists of narrativity support essentialist readings of culturally constructed gender roles and of biological functions.(7) This explicit or implicit endorsement of essentialist ideologies presupposes that biological functions exist apart from the symbolic, when in fact these functions are determined by, interpreted through, and constituted in the symbolic. Rooting any articulation in the female body and its biology is a misled and misleading proposition because the symbolic materializes real systems of oppression and marginalization using representations and explications of biological functions to legitimize thesc very systems. In other words, the biological differences between males and females do not matter as much as the interpretafions of those differences and the uses of those differences in positioning women in neglected loci within a multitude of symbolic networks, networks structured according to the dictates of a rigid binary logic.

The critical impulse to gender and/or biologize narrative forms closely parallels the model of subjective unity that readers of the classically constructed narrative hope to reclaim. Of course, the unified linear text is an illusion that must repress the reality of the fragmented word, sign, and subject in order to succeed in interpellating the reading subject into a position of "symbolic ecstasy," as I call it, rather than into a position in which readers can interact with a textuality that neither depends upon residual and retroactive meanings nor advocates totalized and totalizing narration. The desire to master the text and colonize meaning, to deny fragmentation and textual ambiguity, is not universal, but rather, is part of a system of binarity informing Western discourse and preserving the status quo. Conservative critics affirm the law of linearity via their delegitimization of indeterminacy, an act that validates systems of thought dependent upon what Wolfgang Iser calls "the `gestalt' of the text" (390).

Even with recent postmodern and poststructuralist theories of the narrative circulating among the critical community, one common denominator of literary studies is the supposition that some "meaning" resides in the language comprising a narrative, regardless of its "gendered" or "biologized" form. For instance, critics agree that the narrative of "The Dead" follows the trajectory of temporality outlined by Brooks, wherein the esteemed "end" delivers the meaning to the reading subjects. Gerald Doherty contends, for example, that "the narrative [of "The Dead"] seems to follow the traditional plot trajectory of classic realist texts" (225). Similarly, in "The Gender of Travel in `The Dead,'" Earl Ingersoll maintains that "[e]vents [in the narrative] are linked or associated with each other on the axis of succession, moving in a linear fashion toward their end, towrd closure . . ." (43). And, indeed, I do not think one would claim the narrative of "The Dead" challenges the temporal "norm" of succession, as Gabriel arrives at the Morkans' holiday dinner dance, interacts with some of the guests, carves the goose, delivers his speech, leaves the party, discovers the source of Gretta's distraction, and ponders the contingent meanings engendered by love, marriage, life, and death. However, from the discussion of thc lincar narrative paradigm as it relates to "The Dead," and from a certain pattern discernible in the story's critical recepfion, two questions arise that descrye discussion: first, why does the narrative appear to be constructed as a "whole" entity? Second, if the narrative of "The Dead" reflects temporal movement in its construction, what "truth" or "meaning" does the story illuminate at the "end -- particularly, what "truth" does Gabriel Conroy come to recognize at the "end" of his tale?