While reading Michael Levenson’s “Living History in ‘The Dead’” I wanted to focus on how well Levenson proved his claim that “the center of Joyce’s fiction is the relationship of history and life” (163). When I first read “The Dead,” I tried to find the purpose behind Joyce’s story but I struggled with coming to terms with the overall message that Joyce was trying to send to his readers. Why write a story about an upper-class party that doesn’t really have a discernable plot or climatic event? Levenson’s essay opened my eyes and made me think more closely at Joyce’s intention with writing this short story, so I’d like to explore the claims that Levenson made about what Joyce was trying to say as a result of writing “The Dead,” and to also look at the ways that Joyce wrote a story that was full of political digs without being explicit about his own political stances.
Levenson immediately turns to the passage from “The Dead” where Gabriel wants to tell Miss Ivor that “’literature was above politics’” but cannot do so on account of the fact that 1. Joyce is trying to stay out of trouble, and 2. Gabriel doesn’t want to undermine Miss Ivor’s intellect or success which such an assertive phrase (164). Levenson then goes on to explain that Joyce was writing “The Dead” at the height of the Irish struggle concerning “the collision of [literary and political] realms” and didn’t want to upset the already delicate issue with putting such a claim into his work (164). I think it’s interesting that Joyce wrote an entire piece of literature trying to make a statement about Irish politics, but he didn’t want to be so overtly obvious about what he was doing that he made sure a character within the novel had a thought that kept the work somewhat secretive and under the radar of any questionable motives.
With that context in mind, Levenson then alerts the reader to the fact that Joyce wrote “The Dead” with a strong commitment to “colonial Ireland” and the “resurgent nationalism of Sinn Fein” (173, 167). I found it extremely interesting to then learn about the ways in which Joyce used characters within the story to represent different aspects of the political turmoil that was occurring around him. Levenson remarks that “’The Dead’ renders its characters not as figures within a static social form but as participants in an inescapably historical process” which directly reflects Levenson’s own claim that Joyce wrote “The Dead” with political criticisms in mind. After reading Levenson’s essay I then found myself asking questions such as is a piece of literary work effective when it comes to making political statements? Do political connotations and undertones still have the same meaning to a reader not in the time period of that specific government? In my case of reading “The Dead” I would have to answer no for the last question, but maybe the experience was different for someone else!
