A laughing criticism of James Joyce’s story “The Dead” and my similarity to a character in “Winnie The Pooh” books

A jar of honey which has not been emptied

Last night, I woke up in the middle of a dream about a multi-storey tower block constructed from the horizontal pages of books, all flapping in the wind while Benito Mussolini handed out prizes for art.

Benito Mussolini was confused.

So was I.

It is not uncommon.

I was confused a couple of evenings ago, when my eternally-un-named friend laughed at my daily blogs over the Christmas period.

Towards the end of yesterday’s blog, I mentioned that my eternally-un-named friend had, the previous day, laughed out loud at some of my blogs.

“I was creasing up this morning,” said my eternally-un-named friend, “at John’s blog about how he likes to be depressed at Christmas and…”

“A mis-representation,” I interrupted.

What actually happened was this…

She had got behind in reading my blogs over Christmas and read three at once. Then she started laughing hysterically.

“I didn’t think they were funny,” I told her, surprised. “Why are you laughing?”

She was reading my Boxing Day blog.

“At the end of your blog,” she laughed, “after writing about two other people’s diaries, you’ve said Samuel Pepys & his wife and James Boswell & Louisa are long dead…”

Then she started laughing again.

“That’s your contribution,” she said. “Having plonked in all these diaries from long ago, that’s your contribution… And you say you had  done virtually nothing and your Christmas Day was a comparatively miserable time and people are now dead while you’re living and you’re having a boring time!”

She started laughing again.

“You don’t even mention the Christmas pudding you cooked and these two guys hadn’t even cooked a carrot…”

She started laughing uncontrollably.

“On Christmas Day,” she laughed, “you’d had a phone call from the dead comedian… Okay… And Christmas Eve – Oh whoopee! – While the rest of us are thinking Oh! I wonder what we’ll get tomorrow. Oh! I wonder if he’s going to like that present and wrapping things and Oh! Something nice to eat! you’ve blogged The best-written paragraph in English was written by a short-sighted Irishman. And then there’s this miserable paragraph that’s unreadable and I dunno what’s going on. It sounds like someone’s lying next to someone who’s dead… And you say that reminds you of Christmas!”

She started laughing uncontrollably again.

“You’re just a miserable old wotsit!” she laughed. “You’re Eeyore!… Mind you, at least he was happy when he was given a balloon that had burst and someone else had given him an empty honey jar. Ooh! I can put the burst balloon into the honey jar!” And I suppose you would do the same. Do you know that story?”

“I don’t know Pooh,” I said.

“You don’t know Pooh at all?”

“I know shit about Pooh,” I replied.

“So,” explained my eternally-un-named friend, “it’s Eeyore’s birthday and he’s always so bloody miserable…” and she started laughing again. “Eating nettles!” she laughed. “Oh! My day! My life! Woe is me! And it’s his birthday and Piglet and Winnie-the-Pooh both think Oh, it’s Eeyore’s birthday. We’ll give him something! And Piglet thinks I’ve got a balloon! It’s a big red balloon. And he’s running along, excited to give it to him and he falls over and it bursts. And Winnie-the-Pooh thought I’ll give him one of my jars of honey. But he gets a bit peckish on the way and sits down and eats it.

“So, when they get to Eeyore’s field, they only have a burst balloon and an empty jar to give him. Oh, he says, well at least I can put my burst balloon into the empty jar – because it wouldn’t have fitted otherwise. So that was good all round. He saw the positive.

“There’s a book written – The Tao of Pooh – to follow the ways of Pooh with ‘attitude’ and the way to happiness is not to think beyond lunchtime. You miserable little sausage! People are going to be reading your blogs and thinking This guy is into emotional masturbation. The misery! It’s a slightly teenage kind of attitude. Oh, woe is me! I have nothing! which is easy to do.

“And this blog about your favourite passage in English! I’m not even sure if the woman he’s got in bed next to him is dead in whatever that book is.”

“The Dead,” I said.

“He gets into bed next to her,” my eternally-un-named friend continued, “and she hasn’t responded. I’m thinking she’s dead. And there’s something about her eyes that last saw… and she’d had to lock away the love of her life and looking at his eyes because he’d said he’d kill himself. I’m not sure which one was going to kill themselves of these bloody guys. Whether it was him and she hadn’t got off with the love of her life or the love of her life said he’d kill herself. Or he’d killed herself and she was left with this one who was in bed beside her while she’s dead. I have no idea.

“Meanwhile, he’s then blah blah blah – I have no idea what that was about – and something about the snow falling on the…”

“The Bog of Allen,” I suggested.

“…on the graves and the fences,” said my eternally-un-named friend. “And we saw Doctor Who which had snow in it.”

My eternally-un-named friend stopped laughing and blew her nose.

“And you say that always reminds you of Christmas,” she told me. “Not one word about Christmas. The snow might be, slightly, but…”

There was a long pause.

We both started laughing.

“So I read that,” she said eventually, laughing, “and felt I’d failed you by not giving you the wretched bones of a Pope or a photograph of a dead archbishop in Milan or something… Oh! I’ll give him a shrunken head next year… I’ll give you that. This was once a person. They had a bad time, you can say, but not as bad as mine! At least they’ve thrown off this mortal coil and they’ve lost weight.

“There’s no point me trying to say something comforting to you, because you want to be miserable. So what can I do to make you miserable? I could trim your eyebrows.”

The best-written paragraph in English was written by a shortsighted Irishman

James Joyce, shortsighted man, in 1915, the year after Dubliners was published

When I was young, I wanted to be a writer.

I took my early jobs because they would make me write a lot, on the principle that quantity might make me able to write as well as George Orwell and I might be able to write in any style on demand.

George Orwell was not a great novelist, but he was a brilliant communicator of ideas.

I would like to have thought I could write a book as well as George Eliot but, like several others, once I read Middlemarch, I knew this was not even a  distant possibility.

As for style, when I was young, I might even have hoped that one day I could write something as perfect as the final paragraph of The Dead, the last story in James Joyce’s book Dubliners. It is arguably the most perfectly-written paragraph in English literature… written, as it happens, by an Irishman.

The final paragraph always reminds me of Christmas. These are the final three paragraphs of The Dead:

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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. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. 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.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. 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. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His 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.

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So it goes.