"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."
I want to read these lines as positive, as epiphany and affirmation.
Right away, the ending makes me mistrust all Gabriel's insights that came earlier. He admits, or realizes, that he had never loved his wife and that her story represents the first time has been privy to true emotion. The material world, the politics and poverty that have pervaded the collection, entrapping every character so far, starts to slip away. Gabriel seems open to true knowledge of himself and the world around him.
We could so easily view what he sees as depressing. Snow, drifting frozen water freezing the corpses and trapping the living, falling all the way through time. Death coming to paralyze all men in all times, a reminder of loss and a promise of its recurrence. Even the repetitive language, "falling faintly...faintly falling," seems to dictate hopelessness.
But that's not what I think it means, not what I what it to mean. Gabriel's "soul swooned slowly." Swoon means to "faint from extreme emotion," and so it physically means his falling asleep. So what do we make of Gabriel's "soul" doing the swooning? Even further, what do we make of the implication that Gabriel remains aware of all this, through the use of "their last," that the thoughts seem to belong to him?
It seems to me that the essentially arrogant Gabriel encounters a moment of extreme humility in these closing lines. He becomes cognizant of a grand cycle of sorts, the falling of the snow and his own inevitable passing through life, which opens him to redemption. Arrogance, in many forms, has been, in retrospect, maybe more of an aspect of the collection than we have talked about, but its arrogance of a people trapped by pettiness and poverty. Gabriel's humiliation occurs on the grandest scale, "through the universe." A moment of unity, too, occurs, as the snow subsumes his consciousness. I think the snow may actually offer positive connotations of purity and unity.
But it's the language that convinces me, the "falling faintly...faintly falling." Joyce regularly repeats words in lieu of varying his diction, and the motif of repetition in connection with paralysis has occurred throughout the collection. Here, he alters the phrase and the persistence of the snow's falling shifts slightly, falls a little differently. I think, even if subtle and small and wildly misread, this detail turns the last phrase into one of hope, of the potential for Gabriel's redemption and the salvation of "all the living and the dead."
Jack, I totally agree with you that these last lines should be read as positive and life-affirming. As I discussed in my post, we see how Gabriel is lacking throughout the rest of "The Dead" and only these last lines are truly representative of his true character. Another point that i found interesting was the distinct change in writing style we see in the final few lines. In the rest of the collection Joyce writes in a very direct and logical style. Yet, when we read these final few lines we see how Joyce begins to use flourishes such as the chiasmus you noted. With these stylistic changes we can see a return to the emotional or passionate side of life, supporting the conclusion that Gabriel will be changed in the end.
ReplyDeleteI think the word "swoon" is an interesting one in that last line, though. The second definition on Merriam-Webster is "droop, fade." This would seem to say that Gabriel isn't actually being revitalized.
ReplyDeleteIf Joyce is using it in the more traditional view of fainting, I think it's more likely to be a positive image. But even then, it seems as though fainting is more similar to the state of dying. This compounded with the image of snow being one of falling upon the living and the dead, implies a connotation of death in the scene.
Could this ambiguity be intentional? Joyce doesn't really know the direction Ireland will go in and so he leaves it open to interpretation.