Forget “A Christmas Carol”—“The Dead” is the greatest Christmas story

ALMOST EVERYONE who watches television in Ireland will have seen a Christmas commercial for Guinness—first aired in 2004—in which snowflakes drop softly over a variety of Irish landscapes. Although the writer got no credit from the advertising agency, this panorama of longing and nostalgia draws on James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. Joyce’s tale concludes (freakishly, in purely meteorological terms) with snowfall “general all over Ireland”. His snow unites past and present, memory and desire, as it blankets “all the living and the dead”.

“The Dead” is among the finest short stories in the English language. Astonishingly, it came from the pen of an impoverished and insecure 25-year-old language teacher in Trieste. In that Italian city, ruled then like the Dublin he had left by a haughty imperial power (Austro-Hungary rather than Great Britain), the self-exiled Joyce lived and wrote. He sought for years to find a reliable publisher for the collection eventually released, in 1914, as “Dubliners”. Written in 1907, “The Dead” displays all the virtuosity of an author who can already do anything he wants in conventional fiction. Like Pablo Picasso, his near-contemporary, Joyce would soon break all the rules of the art he had so precociously mastered.

For more than a century, readers have loved “The Dead” for its bittersweet melancholy and its mingled threads of festivity and mourning. It inspired John Huston’s film of 1987, the great actor-director’s poignant swansong. Stage adaptations have included a recent production at the Irish Historical Society’s mansion in New York, written by the husband-and-wife duo of poet Paul Muldoon and novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. Yet Joyce’s tale has not yet quite had its due as the ultimate Christmas story for grown-ups haunted by the past.

“The Dead” unfolds at a family party in Dublin in the days after Christmas in 1904. One guest thinks that “Christmas is never really Christmas unless we have snow on the ground”—which, most unusually for Dublin, they do. Seasonal cheer and fellowship lighten the “dark gaunt house” on Usher’s Island, beside the River Liffey.

Here the musical Morkan sisters, Julia and Kate, live with their niece, Mary Jane. Annually, the Morkans entertain family and friends with songs, dancing and a table groaning under hearty fare that Joyce evokes in a grand pastiche of a Dickensian festive blow-out, from the “fat brown goose” to the “pyramid of oranges and American apples”. Yet in spite of her still-lovely voice, Julia is dying. Spectres of the family’s departed also hover around the holiday scene.

Gabriel Conroy, the Morkans’ intellectual nephew, feels torn between straightforward goodwill and a snobbish detachment from his family, Christmas jollity and Ireland itself. Miss Ivors, a firebrand nationalist, accuses Gabriel of being a “West Briton”: a pro-British sell-out. Yet he makes a speech of thanks to the sisters that recalls “those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day”. It is both an artful performance and a sincere tribute. Joyce’s Gabriel stands, wonderfully, for anyone who at this time of year has partaken of a ritual meal with unbearably mixed feelings.

Then, in his masterstroke, Joyce brings Gretta, Gabriel’s country-born wife, into the foreground. The couple return in the small hours to the hotel where they have booked a room. Indifferent to her husband’s tipsy desire, Gretta has a lost one of her own to mourn: her childhood sweetheart, Michael Furey. Back in the rural west of Ireland, this frail lad died of thwarted love for her. The festive season has summoned every weeping ghost.

Gabriel realises “unresentfully” (the story’s key word) that Gretta and he will never share such love. The time that, supposedly, draws couples and families together has laid bare the gulfs that separate them. Bonhomie alone cannot erase the past pain that still severs Nationalist from Unionist, Catholic from Protestant, old from young, even wife from husband. Grief and loneliness endure, yet “all over Ireland”, the snow “falling faintly through the universe” will wrap everybody in a kind of peace.

As always, Joyce’s expansive imagination grew out of local soil. The party takes place at a specific Dublin address: 15 Usher’s Island, a Georgian townhouse where developers now intend to build a 56-bed hostel with a “cultural facility” attached. Protests against the plans have included a letter signed by writers such as Edna O’Brien, Colm Toibin, John Banville, Sally Rooney and Salman Rushdie. Ireland’s minister of culture, Josepha Madigan, has now lent her support to the cause, saying that the current hostel scheme “cannot be contemplated”. A previous attempt to preserve the whole of the fictional Morkans’ home as a Joycean shrine came to nothing. It would be a shame if the historic building that inspired this enchanting story were to number among its phantoms, too.