By Franco Graaff Jordao de Magalhaes
Snow blankets James Joyce’s The Dead, serving not only to differentiate life and death but also bridge the divide between them. The text’s central figure, Gabriel, wrestles with this liminal space throughout the text. In “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,” T.S Eliot situates the poem and Prufrock himself as caught between opposed and overlapping emotional conflicts. Prufrock’s struggle through self-doubt and anxiety and the liminal space between life and death James Joyce’s protagonist finds himself in both reflect an underlying alienation of self.
Joyce introduces the protagonist as already tinged by death, depicted by a layer of snow that clings to him as he makes his way inside an annual dinner party. Entering the home, Gabriel brings with him the persisting coldness of an Irish winter: “A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toe caps on the toes of his galoshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold, fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds” (Joyce 2). Here, the manner in which Joyce characterizes snow and coldness more broadly is already likened to death through imagery connoting paranormal activity—an invisible, insidious element seeps into Gabriel’s person and makes itself known as it rises from the depths. Through this imagery of snow, Joyce establishes the idea that even in life, death maintains a cold grip on both the mind and the body. This is further revealed through Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, who represents the lasting impression of death on the living. Gabriel prophecies her climactic encounter with death as he remarks that “she’d walk home in the snow if she were let” (Joyce 4). Unknowingly, death mediates Gabriel’s thoughts and actions.
In Eliot’s poem, Prufrock’s plight is introduced in the first stanza as he traces his path through “streets that follow like a tedious argument / of insidious intent” that ultimately lead to an “overwhelming question” that Prufrock refuses, or is unable, to answer. Essentially, Prufrock is stuck in a state of perpetual stasis that impedes his ability to move forward, in both the figurative and literal sense. This parallels Montefeltro’s sentiment as depicted in the epigraph, as he is burdened with a guilt he can’t escape from, and is thus condemned to bear witness to it for eternity. In the same way, Prufrock’s intrusive, self-destructive mode of thinking places an insurmountable chasm between himself and reality, illustrated by allusions to figures such as John the Baptist, Lazarus, and Hamlet, and other mythic works. Prufrock is trapped in his own hell by his own doing.
In The Dead, the home acts as a refuge from the perpetually falling snow, serving as a temporary, fleeting source of sustenance to the partygoers in the vast expanse of winter that surrounds them. Joyce treats life in a similar manner: a temporary aberration in an all-encompassing death. In this way, the divide between the living and the dead grows narrower: the living are lurching towards death, where they will simply be reunited with those who have already arrived there—an inevitability that makes it so that they are united in their fate. The dinner guests ponder this narrow divide as their conversation turns towards Mount Melleray and the monks that reside there, who engage in a practice where they “never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins” (Joyce 20). A guest at the party, Mary Jane, suggests this ritual of symbolic death is practiced as a reminder of their “last end” (Joyce 20). Essentially, the monks lead lives centered on dying. As the guests leave the dinner and head back to the hotel, they physically near this blurred line—the snow settles on them in the same way it does on the dead, universally.
Joyce treats life as purely conditional. As Gabriel notes, it is an amalgamation of the “living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavours” (Joyce 22). He goes on to describe life simply as “our work among the living,” reducing life to be nothing more than a laborious chore we are temporarily tasked with (Joyce 22). In this way, Joyce is able to construct a conception of death that is infinitely more powerful and consuming than life. Nowhere is this more clearly exemplified than through the character of Michael Furey, the late lover of Mrs. Conroy in her youth, who maintains a lasting grip on her actions and emotions. As they make their way home, Gabriel notices Gretta seems overcome with emotion. He questions her, and she is brought to tears as she thinks back to the song performed last at the dinner, “The Lass of Aughrim”—a song Furey used to sing. She describes him merely as “a young boy [she] used to know,” and yet, still, his memory brings her to tears (Joyce 34). Gabriel, witnessing this outpouring of emotion, realizes Furey’s presence and, by extension, his love, is more eternal and real than Gabriel can even aspire to. Life, which at first seems more tangible and certain than death, Gabriel sees reduced to a “solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, [that is] dissolving and dwindling” (Joyce 37). Snow furthers this notion, as it settles indiscriminately on the living and thus paints both the living and the dead in the same image of a “grey impalpable world” (Joyce 37).
If snow is the physical manifestation of death, hardship, and numbness, it seems fire would stand in opposition as the force of life, lust, and love. Still, Joyce asserts that fire is unable to stand in clear opposition of the snow—that life is unable to outlive death. As they depart from the party, and Gabriel reflects on the life he has led with Gretta, he asserts that his fondest affection is attached to “the tender fire of [...] their life together” (Joyce 30). Yet, even he is able to recognize it as something “no one knew of or would ever know of”—these moments are fleeting instances in “the years of their dull existence together” (Joyce 30). On the other hand, Michael Furey’s love for Mrs. Conroy is enshrined in her memory, frozen in time. Gabriel, desperate to confirm a sign of his love for Mrs. Conroy, resorts to fire once more, proclaiming to himself that “their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls’ tender fire” (Joyce 30). The most archetypal characteristics of life—raising children, artistic creation, and the maintenance of a home—thus become hindrances to the love Gabriel wishes to realize. Gabriel draws nearer to the realization that his living condition cannot overpower that of death, which makes Furey’s love eternal. The fire Gabriel wishes to harness in order to expel the cold dwindles, and he begins to consider it “better [to] pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age” (Joyce 37). Gabriel submits to the cold grip of death.
In T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,” the conflict illustrated is not so much that between the living and the dead as it is between hypervisibility and invisibility. Prufrock’s bouts of rage, confusion, and grief, though experienced inwardly, have been memorialized by T.S Eliot in the poem. Consequently, Prufrock’s inaction becomes what defines him, rather than the faith he seemed to place in the hope that “there will be time” in the future for him to pursue life and love, and amend the days he spent unable to to move forward. Similarly, Montefeltro is misguided by Dante and reveals his deepest shame under the guise that Dante was constrained to hell alongside Montefeltro, making it so that this guilt he was burdened with would thus never be revealed to the living world. The epigraph itself is testament to this deceit, as the reader is made aware of Montefeltro’s guilt despite his efforts to conceal it.
The text culminates as the invisibility both characters thought shielded their emotional turmoil is betrayed by the authors themselves, who enshrine both characters through their writing. In this way, the epigraph illuminates the poem by foreshadowing both the inner turmoil the protagonist will struggle through and how that conflict will be memorialized for all to see at the hands of the author.
As the The Dead closes, Gabriel seems to find comfort in the fact that he cannot hope to counter the inevitable death that awaits the totality of the world. As if to confirm this realization, it begins to snow again,
“falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon [...] every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried...[Gabriel’s] soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (37).
The coldness Gabriel attempted to assuage by attending the dinner party, and then, later, by asserting his love to his wife, is perpetual. Whether he succumbs to it or not, the snow falls and will continue to fall. Yet, Joyce frames this closing image, and Gabriel himself, with an almost quiet fulfillment. Joyce alludes to the same reasoning Mary Jane provided for the monk’s coffin ritual—as an approach towards their last end—and stretches it to encompass not just the monks but all the living and the dead. Gabriel, viewing this image of snow Joyce has painted, is finally able to reconcile the two under a single, cosmic condition.
Ultimately, in both The Dead and “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,” the authors reach for the highest limits of alienation—Gabriel is alienated from his own living condition, and Prufrock casts himself away from the very reality he despises. Joyce employs the symbol of the snow in an effort to build a liminal space between life and death where the two converge. Even as Gabriel is undoubtedly alive, the death that awaits him and that has already taken his wife’s late lover maintains a lasting impression on him. The snow acts to level life and death into a single plane where the living have no choice but to encounter the death that envelops them, and, in some ways, even constitutes them. In Eliot’s poem, Prufrock’s own eventual demise arises from the self-constructed fiction in which Prufrock has trapped himself—once he finally makes contact with reality, he drowns.
Works Cited
Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Dubliners. New York, N.Y. :New American Library, 1991.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Poetry 6.3 (1915): 130-135.