[Gabriel’s] face as he remembered her sullen opposition to his marriage” (Joyce 2006: 2178).This ghost is revitalized by a looming picture in focus:

Her photograph stood before the pier glass. She held an open book on her knees and was pointing out something in it to Constantine who, dressed in a man-o’-war suit, lay at her feet. It was she who had chosen the names for her sons for she was very sensible of the dignity of family life (2178).

-Patrick Morkan, Julia’s and Kate’s dead brother, and, obviously, his horse’s farce, already mentioned, inserted as a phantasmal narrative or recollection (“flashback”), illustrating the stagnant living:

Out from the mansion of his forefathers, continued Gabriel, he drove with Johnny. And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy’s statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue (2191).

-Kate Morkan and Freddy Malins and, above all, the fleeting and passing Julia Morkan, are related to traits of lethargy, decadence, decomposition, minimized vigor and delayed or obsolete presence of the agonizing generation (our emphasis):10

Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve’s, and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room (2172).

His aunts were two small plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour (2174).

In fact right behind her Gabriel could be seen piloting Freddy Malins across the landing. The latter, a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel’s size and build, with very round shoulders. His face was fleshy and pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips. His heavy-lidded eyes and the disorder of his scanty hair made him look sleepy (2177).

In contrast, different from the vanishing characters at the party, Gabriel’s appeal seems to be characterized by an almost radiant and vivid physicality, nothing but a mask, however, hiding what is finally revealed, a fragile and calamitous inside, as well as his ultimate meeting with the doleful fate he seems to foretell (our emphasis):

He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes (2173-4).

-Freddy Malins’ mother is also part of this gathering of mummified and withered characters made resilient (our emphasis):

When the lancers were over Gabriel went away to a remote corner of the room where Freddy Malins’ mother was sitting. She was a stout feeble old woman with white hair (2180).

-Even Lily, a girl who is not in her blooming days but, instead, stands as a manifestation of dried essence and regression, very much like the rag doll he is identified with (our emphasis):

She was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still paler. Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll (2173).

-The hypothetical presences outside the window, assumed and inferred in the cold, representing Gabriel’s desires, his yearning for escape from the warm but stiffened inside, “a counter-image to Gabriel’s nervousness” (Boysen 2007: 410) and a “contemplative refuge” (ibídem 410) for the spectator. These specters within the temporary daydreaming state could also parallel the culminating image of the phantasm in the story, that of “Michael Furey in the rain and darkness of the Galway night” (Ellmann 1969: 384):

Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasurable it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much pleasurable it would be there than at the supper-table! (Joyce 2006: 2182).

Windows and mirrors are, in fact, essential in the projection and elicitation of phantasmagoria in “The Dead”. Both framed materializations also exemplify the major dynamics dismantling the binary opposition dead/living to bring their convergence and embedding. Mirrors show the spectral image which replicates Gabriel’s essence – repetition as fossilization, like the representation of dead habit and tradition – and dynamizes his introspection to forge his assertive individuality and life. Windows, on the other hand, legitimate transparency to transcend the dead past and present – the focalizer’s own life – so as to invoke the contemplated ghosts of life renewal. Both dimensions meet through looks from within and from without:

The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed steward over the white field of Fifteen Acres (2187).

-Once outside, the cabman who drives Gabriel and Gretta to their final stage, stands as a messenger of death welcoming them to the other side, connecting both dimensions. He exhibits a depersonalized, almost synthetic speech, repetitive and dead to its core, like Mr. Browne’s, showing the approaching communion of the living and the dead:

—Do you know Trinity College?
—Yes, sir, said the cabman.
—Well, drive bang up against Trinity College gates, said Mr Browne, and then we’ll tell you where to go. You understand now?
—Yes, sir, said the cabman.
—Make like a bird for Trinity College.
—Right, sir, cried the cabman (2191).

-Gabriel’s vision in O’Connell Bridge, connecting a white form suddenly crossing the scene with the inanimate statues spreading all over the city’s landscape, a paramount symbol of paralysis and the inability to progress. The snow and its colour advance the picture of mutuality at the end of the story:

As the cab drove across O’Connell Bridge Miss O’Callaghan said:
—They say you never cross O’Connell Bridge without seeing a white horse.
—I see a white man this time, said Gabriel.
—Where? asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy.
Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand (2194).

-The porter at Gresham Hotel, a dormant metaphor of decay, an initiator who holds the torch as a bleeding symbol of “unstable” life leaking through the never:

An old man was dozing in a great hooded chair in the hall. He lit a candle in the office and went before them to the stairs. They followed him in silence, their feet falling in soft thuds on the thickly carpeted stairs. (…) The porter halted on the stairs to settle his guttering candle. They halted too on the steps below him. In the silence Gabriel could hear the falling of the molten wax into the tray and the thumping of his own heart against his ribs. (…) The porter led them along a corridor and opened a door (2195).

Gabriel rejects the “ghost candle” (Bauerle 1988: 122) in his determination to face darkness on his own. He means to interpellate the repressed and hike into the secrets behind the ballad “The Lass of Aughrim” – the silence of meditation and illumination – so as to restore a natural light to his past, consequently opting for the prospect of a second chance.

These are all figurations of the usurping past and the haunted present which anticipate, as we have suggested, Michael Furey’s rising, the nuclear ghost in the story reconciling both temporal dimensions and modes, that communion of the living and the dead finally resting together, after fallibility and the transience of life have been assumed. Once the foundational song and invocational lyrics are unleashed, the distant music turns into an explicit and personalized wording and a sequence of proleptic signs immediately marks the scene, precognizing the end:

It’s the weather, said Aunt Julia, after a pause.
-Yes, everybody has colds, said Aunt Kate readily, everybody.
-They say, said Mary Jane, we haven’t had snow like it for thirty years; and I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland.
-I love the look of snow, said Aunt Julia sadly (Joyce 2006: 2193).

In fact, D’Arcy’s wailing chant – “O, the rain falls on my heavy locks/And the dew wets my skin/My babe lies cold” (2192) – deciphers and interprets the pattern of transitivity, the vertical agents  – rain and snow- acting on the horizontal ones, modelling the two conflicting layersinto a unique mold, the convergence of life and death as a horizontal scenery of mutuality in the coda. A static and coarse spot at the beginning – “the snow-stiffened frieze” (2173) –, the snow is activated as a fluent trail of falling flakes, infecting the dysfunctional generation. In this way, the orchestration of natural elements such as the snow, the rain and the wind, illustrates an inertia impossible to deviate from, a general wide spreading of the disease and, consequently, a fate the characters cannot escape, as it is already clear from the onset of the narrative:

–Is it snowing again, Mr Conroy? asked Lily. She had preceded him into the pantry to help him off with his overcoat. (…)
–Yes, Lily, he answered, and I think we’re in for a night of it (2173).

Gabriel’s awakening to lust takes place before the final act and his discourse becomes more fragmented, more immediate, more “staccato” – like, when he focuses his attention on Gretta’s movements – suddenly revitalized and dynamic, assertive beyond the enshrined model – through the darkened city. Driven from introspection towards prospection, after facing the ghosts of the past and the present, his mind is actively splattered with guessing at what may happen, assaulted by jealousy since he faces the possibility of losing control of her wife, projecting imagined and so phantasmal scenes of restored love. This contemplated existence – also merging with the past – is built upon quicksand like the breaking and condescending light of dawn against the last sigh of darkness:

The morning was still dark. A dull yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending. It was slushy underfoot; and only streaks and patches of snow lay on the roofs, on the parapets of the quay and on the area railings. The lamps were still burning redly in the murky air and, across the river, the palace of the Four Courts stood out menacingly against the heavy sky.

She was walking on before him with Mr Bartell D’Arcy, her shoes in a brown parcel tucked under one arm and her hands holding her skirt up from the slush. (…)

She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory (2193-4).

This is desire at work turning the retrospective and introspective inertia into revitalizing prospection and will, a logical step forward to make up for the state of paralysis. Emerging from that spectral and distant music gradually taking form during the hotel séance, Michael Furey’s ghost becomes the totemic reminder of the ultimate fall and possible resurrection, the point of entry of the shades and shadows to be, a unique identity for both the memories of the dead and the abducted dead living. The lethal projection of the snow enters the death chamber, both as “a ghostly light from the street lamp” (2195) and, as a breath of cessation, this precipitating a phantasmatic transfiguration, the tabula rasa on which to materialize the confluence:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades (2199).

It is the fatal draft which had already shattered and ruined physicality as the announcement of decomposition and disfigurement at the very beginning of the story, standing as “a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors”; that which “escaped from crevices and folds” (2173) and, as a “piercing” menace, that which had also led Aunt Kate to warn about death attempting to invade the location under siege: “Close the door, somebody. Mrs Malins will get her death of cold” (2190). Phantasmagoria, then, flows like contagion from the past into the present and into the future, the latter emulating back the past – a circular and nihilistic configuration that mimetizes the narrative inertia in Dubliners, a “symbol for Dublin paralysis and entrapment” (Wright 2006: 258), though, in “The Dead”, the deconstruction of dichotomies will grant a way out since “the dead reconcile the living… to life itself” (Beck 1969: 357). Michael Furey and the music attached become a round and recoverable image of yesterday to be later reduced to invisibility and silence, where the dead and the living merge. Significantly characterized by descriptors of compulsion – his fixable though doomed eyes and expression –, Furey’s lamenting figure infects the present, as imagined by Gabriel –“in the partial darkness (…) the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree” (Joyce 2006: 2199) – after Gretta regrets “I can see his eyes as well as well! (…) standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree” (2198). A motif of endurance himself, Furey’s ghost brings awareness to persist and transcend the evanescent state and embrace redemption, this being another exemplary assertion of life and death conciliation. In fact, as Benstock (1969: 168) affirms, the two angels, Gabriel –the angel of annunciation (Werner 1988: 68) – and Michael –the angel of death – “were never intended to be antagonists but in harmony with each other” (our emphasis):

A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindicative being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again for he felt that she would tell him of herself. Her hand was warm and moist: it did not respond to his touch but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that spring morning (Joyce 2006: 2198).

Joyce’s intention is to make the reader focus now on the prospective phantasmagoria, the dead and ghosts resulting from retrospection and introspection. Not a gallery like the panoramic presentation at the party, this stands as a close up of two characters in chiaroscuro, representing the conflicting binary opposition to dismantle effectively and definitely into only one term, two contested but conjoined entities, “looking through the same frame” (Ryan 2012: 167). Defamiliarized for each other, Gabriel’s and Gretta’s marriage epitomizes paralysis, although his swooning away and her breakdown in reveries of regret embody the models of the potential deceased illustrating the combination of the past and the present. In fact, the dying process towards transubstantiation cancels the opposition dead versus living assuming both traits as compatible to assert the final configuration of the ghost in the story. Dissolution of physicality must precede. In a desperate attempt to redirect their energy, both Gabriel and Gretta partially undress  – deprivation of visibility to deepen into spiritual magma – and look for the light of their new identity under phantasmal influence:

Gabriel threw his overcoat and hat on a couch and crossed the room towards the window. He looked down into the street in order that his emotion might calm a little. Then he turned and leaned against a chest of drawers with his back to the light. She had taken off her hat and cloak and was standing before a large swinging mirror, unhooking her waist. Gabriel paused for a few moments, watching her, and then said
– Gretta
She turned away from the mirror slowly and walked along the shaft of light towards him (Joyce 2006: 2195).

Death as a revelation shows Gabriel and Gretta they have evolved independently, like the opposite concepts of life and termination, legitimized center and ancillary term according to convention, about to be combined now, in fusion. Paralleling the deconstructive process at work, this transitory awakening has the moribund strangers approaching and touching their senses in consumption. Gretta is exorcised and purged in tears to assert lucidity at the same time her textuality fades away while Gabriel faces his own truth through a cathartic and self-loathing reflection, losing physicality at this moment, entrusting form and delimitation to the mirror:

While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a penny boy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead (2197).

In phantasmal and grotesque abstractions Gabriel also comes into terms with assertiveness. In fact, this projection is more sophisticated, more precise and distilled than his first ghastly and puzzling ideation on the mirror:

As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses (2196).

After restlessness and desire, shame and self-degradation follows. Meeting the monster within by means of “extimacy” (Lacan 1978: 71) implies retrospectively and introspectively unleashing the other to assert the new essence. The confirmation of these last departures or rehearsals of death closes the circle and puts an end to the global and universal burial in progress from the very beginning of the story. This is explicitly materialized in another example of contemplated and prospective death, Gabriel’s sinister foreshadowing of Julia Morkan’s passing away. The scene – the presentation of her deathbed mourning – is dramatically embellished and deprives the immediate reality of its validity through a displacement to the figured dominions of mental phantasmagoria:

Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon (Joyce 2006: 2199).

In conclusion, three mediums focus and expel the resonant signs of phantasmagoria in the story. Two of them are more invisible, Gretta, shattered into a mystified icon, possessed by Michael Furey’s remembrance – in fact, he may be no more than just a “memory” (Kelleher 1965: 424) –, as well as the omniscient narrator, who controls the scene from the very first moment, when Lily welcomes the guests and recovers prominence when, phantasmatically, Gabriel leaves the stage (in that parenthesis during which he manages to help Freddy, as well as at the very end). The most arresting medium, however, is Gabriel himself. He paraphrases phantasmagoria and delirium through the paralyzed actants, performing an act of fossilized resilience through language, until he enters the dimension of the real, “those regions of the mind that escape language and, therefore, can never be verbalized” (Monterrey 2011: 73). It is then when he lapses into nothingness, becoming a sign of absence, following the inertia of everything deriving into dissipation. Expected at the party onset –  “it was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife” (Joyce 2006: 2172-3) – and momentarily missing at given moments, the protagonist, the legitimized point of view within the story, is deprived of agency once the authoritative voice of the narrator recovers prominence and prompts alienation so as to frame the deadened and animistic stage. Possessed and exposed to the limit, Gabriel loses his wording power and immediacy to fall into the hypodiegetic and delayed level, his weakening thoughts and sensations being an epitaph in free indirect speech, an ambiguity of voices which “prevents the reader from readily deciding who speaks the final phrase” (Riquelme 1994: 222) and so resulting in another index of phantasmagoria: the phantasmal narrator. Deprived of name and vision – distorted by tears and decay –, the focalized entities – the past and the present – similarly stand unidentified as the final convergence in transubstantiation approaches:

Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling (Joyce 2006: 2199).

After the automatized dynamics of dialogues and Gabriel’s monolithic speech at the annual dance, after Gretta is screwed and exorcised in intimacy, at the sound and eliciting tempo of that melody within,words are silenced, the lyrics of truth fade away, and another kind of phantasmagoria arises, a “calculated verbal music (…) highly rhetorical” (Peake 1977: 50), a “plaintive music” (ibídem 54) which emulates the falling snow embodying Gabriel’s impalpable sensations and feelings at the throes of dissolution and possible rise. The whole construct resumes a ghost which mimetizes collapse and besieges light, “falling obliquely against the lamplight” (Joyce 2006: 2199), within and through, in a transcendental ritual marked by a trail of mirroring and resonant sounds, a machinery of alliterations, repetitions and parallelisms aligned to hypnotize and lead both the protagonist and the reader to an “inorganic, falling state” (Riquelme 1994: 226) disturbing “the realistic illusion” (ibídem 221). The vertical and dynamic agent, the burying and oppressive action –“falling” is echoed seven times, in an elegant variation sequence –, finally lapses into that permanent state of the snow laying “thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns” (2199). This shroud of pessimism over erect sinister silhouettes and remnants – somehow irregular –, symbols possibly suggesting a connection with Christ’s crucifixion, connotes an antidote against perennial death-sleep and validates a potential resurrection. As Ghiselin theorizes, the falling snow at the denouement of “The Dead” represents an “enlargement and liberation”, as well as “an achievement of true beauty” (1969: 60).

Phantasmagoria is, then, materialized through a vision backwards, the dead fighting their way back through the annual dance’s commemoration and celebration, as well as through Gabriel’s and Gretta’s mind or “subconscious” (Gibbons 2015: 124), a framing within and without (the partygoers, the silhouettes and mannequins dancing around but departing from the present, into the snow, into the dark). Wandering the moribund city, Gabriel and Gretta’s transient fading into the dimly-lit hotel room implies an exile beyond, an anticipation, a musing  forward to finally fall deeper within (awareness in the hotel room and realization of the self). Evidently, Gabriel’s gaze toward the West, his epiphany and revelation, is also a contemplation and evocation of the dissolving and renewal without, a definite and universal illumination which cancels the conflict between life and death at the climax (Attridge & Howes 2000: 36).

3. Suspended Over and Under Solid Ground: Conclusion.
Bound to a sequence of ephemeral acts and scenes, piercingly descriptive but oneiric and ineffable to the limit, Joyce’s “The Dead” undermines the decipherable and automatized visibility to encode the unearthing of the repressed and excluded. In this way, the narrative creates a common ground for the living and the dead, the present and the past, cancelling this nuclear dichotomy of existence. Paralleling a countdown to extinction, Joyce’s “novella” constantly recollects, states and foretells death to embed it with life through spectral renditions, in the same way it illustrates Gabriel Conroy’s process of self-discovery through detachment, elusiveness and ultimate awareness of collapse to assert a renewal of prospects. The three axes of phantasmagoria mingle at dawn, the moment of revelation: the ghosts of retrospection – Michael Furey, back in his grave at Oughterard, together with the past generation –; introspection – the dying guests of the present, already extinct, after the sequence of departures into the cold11 –and prospection – every contemplated dead now confirmed as such, losing tangibility and presence –, the duality of the living and the dead being finally reduced to mutuality:

Under its canopy, all human beings, whatever their degrees of intensity, fall into union. The mutuality is that all men feel and lose feeling, all interact, all warrant the sympathy that Gabriel now extends to Furey, to Gretta, to himself, even to old Aunt Julia (Ellmann 1969: 385).

In his climactic reverberation, Joyce offers a closer approach to the snow, a more specific portrait and touch of this polysemic or cumulative concept at the center of the discourse. The flakes are “silver and dark” (Joyce 2006: 2199), bright and macabre, so implying the duality and unity of contraries. The amalgam is also explicit in terms of style, as exemplified in that inversion “falling softly”/“softly falling” dynamizing a parallelistic pattern or “chiasmus” (Riquelme 1994: 227) which equals and unifies both modes in only one essence, a never ending cycle of death and renewal, of renewal and death:

It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves (Joyce 2006: 2199).

Our vicarious and cautionary reading of the protagonist’s intimation with the dead, through the dilating projection of phantasmagoria and the summoning of the distant music, allows us to redeem our fallibility and accept life as mortality. In doing so, we enter the symbolic and dismantle the opposition, once we have confronted death and otherness as the fundamental condition of life (Boysen 2007: 412). Being a necessary “process of self maturation” (Monterrey 2001: 72) and emancipation, exile in “The Dead” is an imperative, alienation and unconsciousness validating Gabriel’s path towards identity and realization (Ghiselin 1969: 57), “from insularity and egotism to humanitarianism and love” (Walzl 1966: 21). Among the different interpretations of this rite of passage and spectralization, there are those considering Gabriel’s confrontation with the gallery of ghosts grants a life-affirming renewal or “a transcendental reshaping of his own self-hood” (Balsamo 2005: 46). According to this view, his journey westward derives into a mere sleep trance (Peake 1977: 51) and denotes a resurrection through sacrifice, a “rebirth through inner perception” (Billigheimer 1988: 472), legitimizing a hibernating “capacity for greater life, which may be exercised when he, a dead man, shall have risen from among the dead” (Spoo 1993: 102). In contrast, others read Gabriel’s end as a capitulation in a “self-pitying fantasy” (Pecora 1986: 242) and, consequently, “a concession, a relinquishment (…), a kind of death (…), a self-abandonment” (Ellmann1966: 381), an irretrievable and resigned fate (Kenner 1955: 55-6). Finally, and opting for the balance of both readings, as we try to justify in these lines, there are those claiming for an “alternating” or “trembling” meaning (Ryan 2012: 172) as the best interpretation for the narrative’s potential, an ambiguity which cancels the opposition of death paralysis and liberation, this resulting in the symbolic crossover of the living and the dead in the west, a site of life “where passion takes place and boys die for love” (Burgess, quoted in Beck 1969: 357). It was surely Joyce’s intention to haunt the “novella” on the basis of phantasmal undecidability and the preservation of conflicting interpretations at the core of the story, as he also did in Ulysses, urging an orchestration of challenges for the reader. In his own words:

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality (Quoted in Ellmann 1982: 521).

It seems clear that, activating a dialogism – and ultimate combination – between the latent ethereal or invisible dimension of the unconscious – past – and the dysfunctional configuration of reality – present –, “The Dead” invokes a peculiar ghost story of defacement in which a whole country, Ireland and its traditions, its present and its past, represent the haunted victims, passiveness, metaphorical starvation or apathy being the victimizers. Gabriel is the last to leave and dissolve in a magmatic stream of consciousness, after predating and extinguishing both Gretta and even Michael Furey, together with his surroundings. What remains? Nothing but the window – no indoor space, neither the Morkan’s nor the hotel’s room –, an abyss with no physical limits and the snow coming to the fore. The gallery of paralysis is finally spread out and confirms the collapse of every living signifier, sharing a common ground of suspension with the dead, as an access to a new mode of life, a spiritual improvement and escape (Ludwig 1969: 159; Trilling 1969: 156). In the end, the center of meaning is not, consequently, a bifurcation or conflict empowering either the living or the dead anymore, but a mystified and ghostly mutuality legitimizing both the living and the dead in that “etherealized” state (Deane 2000: 33) achieved through assimilation to epiphany and the “elegiac mode” (Spurr 2000: 29), a sublimation which integrates and contains the polarized concepts in question.

“The Dead” marked a hallmark in Joyce’s corpus, a determination to resort to opaque, more complex, absorbed and phantasmal ideations that would have an improved echo and spell in his oneiric Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). The everlasting debate pivoting around the cryptic writings and craftsmanship in this story, an inscrutable void, turns the text itself into that relentless ghost of indeterminacy haunting us after decades.