Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 89
Is bowed with woe—for he is gone
Who would have wrought her destiny
They had their way: they laid him low.
But Erin, list, his spirit may
Rise, like the Phoenix, from the flames,
When breaks the dawning of the day
Oscar Wilde, another Irishman, said it would take a heart of stone to read
the death of Little Nell (in Dickens) without laughing. In 'Ivy Day in the
Committee Room," Joyce drenches the sentimentality of Joe Hynes in
mockery, producing exactly and precisely the bad poem Joe himself would
write if asked to collaborate on the story, and then proceeds to cap the
absurdity with Crof ton's doubly-ambivalent hypocrisy; but who can sneer
as the ghost of Parnell indubitably rises, even clothed in journalistic "verse,"
to haunt and afflict those who betrayed him? The dead and absent is
stronger than the live and present, and Joyce has vindicated his paradox.
That Joe Hynes is a man of "timid courage"—he has to be prompted
several times before he will consent to read his subversive poem—indicates
that another paradox from the 1902 lecture was still on Joyce's mind. Joe's
hesitation is not only motivated by the fact that he is the only loyal Parnellite
in the room, but is also necessary because he included a line (not quoted
above) about the "rabble-rout of fawning priests" that will not go down
smoothly with any Irish Catholic audience.
In "The Dead," the last story in Dubliners, Joyce returns to and enriches the
themes of death, absence and timid courage. Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist,
is an intellectual who is nervous, or timid, all through the story, because he
knows that his opinions are not shared by his middle-class relatives. Nonetheless,
he does state his opinions, even though hesitantly; and he has the
courage to commit the "social sin" of marrying a woman from Connacht,
even though Dubliners regard Connacht people as declasse. Courageous in
his timidity, Gabriel is timid in his courage, and when asked directly if Gretta
is from the West, he answers evasively that "her people" were.
The real hero of "The Dead," we only learn at the end, is not Gabriel but
Michael (the angelic names are no coincidence, anymore than the Phoenix in
the "Ivy Day" poem was an accident). Michael Furey, specifically, loved
Gretta before Gabriel did, and Michael even died for love—in a Romantic,
absurd, Irish way, of course. Michael Furey died of pneumonia, which he
caught standing all night in an Irish rainstorm singing love songs beneath
Gretta's window. It is he, not Gabriel, who has dominated Gretta's thoughts
and feelings all through the story: dead and absent, he is very alive and
present in her heart. The dead, Joyce is here proposing, cannot only
psychologically displace us but even metaphorically cuckold us.