Military Occupation in ‘The Dead’

Abstract

Stephen Dedalus’s tripartite formulations in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man encapsulate the nature of those forces that are in conflict for the possession of Irish selfhood. The three forces of the Church, Irish Nationalism and British Imperialism also colonize all levels of the text of ‘The Dead’, erupting in the heat of conversations which provide a more or less naturalistic context for their appearance, but emerging also in the bias of descriptive passages which coat with a sometimes religious, sometimes militaristic, patina the appearance of objects or the character of actions which only a certain amount of wilfulness on the part of the writer and of credulity on the part of the reader will create a sanction for. It isn’t a question of the writing investing objects and actions with a symbolic significance that they are basically compatible with, but of its overloading them with a metaphorical burden that they would be incapable of sustaining if readers were to judge the texture of the prose in the light of naturalistic relevance or irrelevance. It is as if what is focused on as an issue in certain parts of the text splays out into neighbouring parts without respect for the semantic integrity of individual sentences and paragraphs.