Spring 2006

June Dwyer :: Feast and Famine: “The Dead”, A Portrait of the Artist, and the Politics of Food.

You’ve probably heard the joke that goes: What’s an Irish seven-course meal? Answer: A six pack and a potato. Like most jokes, this one says a good deal about the culture that it is poking fun at. The Irish are indeed famous for drinking a lot and not eating very well. For over a hundred years, alcoholism and the Potato Famine of 1845—52 (I’m using Christine Kinealy’s dating here) have vexed Irish politics and disturbed Irish writers. When the Irish Literary Revival got going at the end of the nineteenth century, authors were willing to deal with use of alcohol by the people, but they were practically mum on the Famine. Not only did they not discuss the Famine, food itself was rarely on the table (as it were) in the well known Revival texts.

Therefore when a meal is served up in Irish Revival literature, it is an event worth examining. James Joyce’s work boasts two well known holiday season dinners: one, the bourgeois extravaganza at the Morkan sisters’ annual party in “The Dead” (1914), and the second, Christmas dinner at the Dedalus house in chapter one of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). A third meal, a disorderly tea time at the Dedaluses that is rarely commented on in chapter four of A Portrait, provides a telling commentary and something of a solution to the dilemma of how the Irish should approach the politics of famine and food. In this article I would like to take an admittedly brief and narrow look at the strategies of Famine denial in the national literature and at the crucial link that emerges between food and the death—or the revival—of the Irish national culture.

Once Irish critics started talking about the Famine in the 1980s, they began to look back and offer explanations about the unwillingness of nationalists and Revival authors to have confronted their national trauma. In his 1997 book, Strange Country, Seamus Deane suggests that “the Famine ended the possibility of Ireland’s conceiving of itself as a distinct nation in the traditional sense, since one of its most remarkable effects was to alter the national character, and with that, the whole question of the national territory and language.” By nearly wiping out the Irish language and culture—especially in the West—and by driving so many of its people to emigrate, the Famine “cast the Irish, as if by destiny, in the role of a traditional people who had failed to survive in the Malthusian, Darwinian universe of economic law. . .” The post-Famine Irish, Deane concludes, were “overtaken by catastrophe and bypassed by progress in equal measure, their absurd claims to exceptionalism now finally chastised” (50).

During the Famine many of the members of the nationalist Young Ireland group had written compulsively about what was happening in publications such as the Nation. But several of these older poets (among them James Clarence Mangan) died from the Famine, and the younger generation that survived, either out of exhaustion or relief, quickly became quite conservative. According to Vincent Comerford, “By 1856 most of the leaders of the Young Irelanders had become pillars of respectability, and not many of them represented even a verbal threat to the constitutional position of Ireland” (quoted in Morash 134). A generation later, the reaction of many Revival thinkers and writers to the ugliness of the past was to ignore Ireland’s colonial history entirely and instead to base the nation’s claim to identity on folklore and legend. Or, as James Joyce did, they sought to recast Irish character and language according to their own cultural vision.

Nevertheless, Joyce comments quite tellingly, if obliquely, on the politics of food in his country by reenacting both feast and famine in his first two major works, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The feast, a Christmas holiday party at the Morkan sisters in the climactic story of Dubliners, denies the embarrassment of the Famine by ignoring it. As for the nation’s subsequent inability to assert its independence, that, too, is effectively masked by the characters’ claims to bourgeois self-sufficiency. Appropriately, the feast takes place, on Usher’s Island in Dublin, for indeed the story is all about insularity. The Morkan sisters and their nephew Gabriel Conroy have isolated themselves from the ugly past and from the activities that point toward an uncertain nationalist future. They do so by remembering only positive Irish traditions and by living circular, repetitive lives. The sisters make their own benign tradition by giving their party every year. And Gabriel pointedly refuses to deal with the Irish nationalism espoused by his university colleague, Molly Ivors. When she invites him to join a group on an excursion to the Aran Islands for the following summer, he recoils, saying he is “sick of” (190) his own country. Instead, he has plans to visit Europe where, appropriately, he will go on a cycling tour. Gabriel walks in circles (209), gestures in circles (203), and tells a story about a man whose horse circles King William’s monument (209). Both he and his aunts insulate themselves from the past and the future by moving in their own tight “routine” (205)—another word Joyce uses suggesting circularity.

Food plays a heavily symbolic role in the static and insular world of Gabriel and his aunts. We are told very close to the beginning of “The Dead” that though the aunts’ “life was modest, they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best-bottled stout” (176). The food and drink at their party is catalogued in loving detail, reflecting its fetishized role in keeping any memory of pain or of lean years at bay. Indeed the lengthy description of the feast set out on the dinner table is laced with military metaphors suggesting food’s active role in Famine denial: a ham and a turkey are at “rival” ends of the table; decanters of port and sherry act as “sentries” guarding a pyramid of fruit; on the sideboard, pudding “l[ies] in waiting” and behind it are “three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colors of their uniforms” (196-7).

The bourgeois insularity of the aunts is mediated in Joyce’s mind by their interest in music and their own musical talents. Aunt Julia, despite her advanced age, sings before the meal in a voice “strong and clear in tone,” not missing “even the smallest of the grace notes.” Her performance indicates that a part of her transcends her narrow middle class existence. “To follow the voice,” the narrator observes, “without looking at the singer’s face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure flight” (193). Aunt Kate, too, is sufficiently motivated by her love of music and her sense of its importance, to strike out at no less a personage than the pope for his turning women out of the choirs “and put[ting] little whipper-snappers of boys over their heads.” “I suppose it’s for the good of the Church if the pope does it,” she says, “[but] it’s not just…and it’s not right.” Kate’s niece Mary Jane tries to quiet her aunt by suggesting that she feels as she does because she is hungry, “and when we are hungry, we are all very quarrelsome” (194). But Mary Jane misses the point entirely: Kate is not hungry; she is well fed. It is to her credit and entirely appropriate that her revolutionary, “quarrelsome” notions are fed by her love of music (rather than by her grocer) and that they have not been stilled by her life of plenty.

It is Gabriel, however, rather than his aunts, who is most deeply mired in the mundane, middle class present—out of touch with both Irish art and Irish life. He is not moved by music and so has shut himself off from the emotion and the freedom that it can provide. On the subconscious level, Gabriel seems to feel the dissonance in his life, wishing momentarily to be out walking alone in the snow instead acting as his aunts’ host at the party. “How much more pleasant it would be there,” he thinks, “than at the supper table!” Yet when he goes in to supper, and takes his place at the head of the table, he immediately feels “quite at ease…for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than finding himself at the head of a well-laden table” (197). Letting his petty talents and bourgeois satisfactions overlay and mask what is truly troubling him, Gabriel remains unaware of what he needs to bring himself into harmony with his society.

This dissonance in Gabriel’s life is coded into his eating habits. He is described early on as “a stout tallish young man” (178) which indicates a fondness for food. And, as he “sets to” his supper after making sure everyone else is served, the servant girl Lily brings him “three potatoes which she had reserved for him” (198). There is no reminder of famine in his life—potatoes are plentiful. However, Gabriel bypasses dessert, having celery rather than pudding, as, on his doctor’s orders, he “never [eats] sweets” (200). Gabriel’s mealtime posture mirrors his larger social pose: he thinks that he is in charge of his life, but he is actually in limbo, willfully isolating himself from both family and country. His fixation with his own well-being, but not with that of his country, is unhealthy, shortsighted, and cowardly. In eating a lot Gabriel is denying the Famine, essentially saying, “See, I have plenty of food.” In denying himself dessert, he is at the same time suggesting that a similar crisis could never happen again, essentially saying, “See, I have taken control over my health.” But this, of course, is a calculus of folly. Being stout now does not erase the hunger that haunts the past, and eating celery for dessert will not perpetually ward off disease and death that just as certainly lie in the future. Gabriel thinks he knows what is good for him, but his appetites are clearly misdirected. He, like the segment of Ireland that he represents, is both overfed and overconfident, denying the ugly deaths that haunt his past and trying to hold off the inevitable deaths—his own included—that lie in the future.

At the end of “The Dead” Gabriel finally recognizes that he has been afraid to confront both his own and his country’s life and death. In the story’s final paragraph he acknowledges his timidity and makes a decision: “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward” (223). By deciding on a linear journey from Dublin to the West (rather than a cycling tour in Europe), Gabriel is acknowledging the futility of his defensively circular life. As the term “gone west” in Ireland specifically means to die, by using the expression, Gabriel is finally acknowledging that part of his life that he has so carefully denied—its end. But he is also, in turning westward, acknowledging his participation in the life and near death of his country. For the West of Ireland was the site of the worst of the Potato Famine; between 1846 and 1851 the majority of the indigenous Irish speakers died, and with them a good part of their language, custom, and folklore.

But the West later was, fifty years later, also a major source of the Revival. The West became the virtual site of Irish nationhood not only on account of its archaeological and folkloric riches but also because it was so far removed from an Anglicized Dublin. Its people, both the old and the young, in their open, frank ways also provided a distinct contrast to the reserved, buttoned-up English and to the Anglicized Dubliners who imitated them. Gabriel’s wife Gretta, who is from the West of Ireland, embodies all that Joyce sees as positive in the Irish character. Besides being passionate, open, and caring, she has a sense of humor and is tremendously responsive to music. She is what Gabriel needs to revive his static existence, and she is also what Ireland needs for its Revival. What Gabriel discovers at the story’s end is that although he is married to Gretta/Ireland, he has neither known nor fully appreciated them. However, in choosing to turn his back on Europe and to face the West, he is beginning to properly orient himself.

If the meal in “The Dead” is an exercise in denial of the Famine, the Christmas dinner at the Dedalus house in chapter one of A Portrait of the Artist is an unconscious reenactment of it. The camaraderie of the get-together quickly deteriorates into a political row, pitting two of the family guests against each other. Mrs. Riordan (called Dante) holds the conservative line, defending the Catholic Church against Mr. Casey, a radical nationalist, who is furious over the Church’s role in the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Anglo-Irish champion of Irish Home Rule. Young Stephen Dedalus, the artist in the book’s title, who is participating in his first Christmas dinner with the grown-ups, discovers that being a grown-up in Ireland means fighting over food. And it also means feeling helpless while those, who ought to be working together to solve a problem, squabble amongst themselves. Although there is plenty of food at the Dedaluses—a plump turkey, sauce, and a plum pudding for dessert—the participants cannot enjoy it because of their frustrations over the state of their nation. Family members either eat little or tear into their food as if it were their enemies. The dessert is never served—indicating that neither the dinner nor the discussion has had a satisfactory resolution. When Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, half way through the meal and the argument, observes, “Well, my Christmas dinner has been spoiled anyhow” (32), he is highlighting the readiness of the several Irish factions to sink into peevishness rather than to work actively at finding a resolution to their mutual problems.

Mrs. Dedalus’s comment, “For pity’s sake and for pity’s sake, let us have no political discussion on this day of all days in the year” (30), makes plain that disruption of meals because of politics is a common occurrence in turn-of-the-century Ireland. Her desire for a truce on Christmas day fails, as her husband and her guests simply cannot refrain from baiting one another and casting blame. Even though the Famine has been over for two generations, the Irish can still not eat peacefully. And this time, the culprit is not England, under whose colonial domination they are still suffering, but rather themselves because of their inability to unite. While the Irish had no control over the Famine and England’s response to it in the 1840s, by 1891, the year of Parnell’s death, they did wield a fair amount of political power. Yet, as the Christmas dinner at the Dedaluses indicates, this time around they are complicit in their failure to nourish themselves and their nation.

The dissonance at the Morkan sisters’ party and the disunity at the Dedaluses’ Christmas dinner open up a third way for the Irish to receive the Famine and to counter the country’s inept moves towards a new national identity. This third way is figured in a brief episode in chapter four of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when the now college-age Stephen Dedalus comes home after an interview with a priest who has asked him to consider joining the Jesuit order. Interestingly, Stephen has decided to refuse the cold, ordered, and isolated life that awaits him in the Church in favor of the “disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house” (176). He is not abandoning himself to chaos, but instead embracing those elements of his nationality that have been disciplined by the Church, derided by the English, and internalized as a cause of disgrace by the Irish themselves.

The scene Stephen comes upon in his own house is not a full-fledged vision of what Ireland and the Irish should be so much as it is the raw material with which the Irish artist (at least in Joyce’s eyes) should work. Initially it appears to be a picture of squalor and want:

A group of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table. Tea was nearly over and only the last of the second watered tea remained in the bottoms of the small glass-jars and jampots which did service for teacups. Discarded crusts and lumps of sugared bread, turned brown by the tea which had been poured over them, lay scattered on the table. Little wells of tea lay here and there on the board and a knife with a broken ivory handle was stuck through the pith of a ravaged turnover. (176)

Poor? Yes, the Dedaluses have become poor, yet this scene is by no means another reenactment of the Famine. The lack of food, the lack of cups for tea, the lack of even enough tea has neither depressed nor angered the Dedalus children. Unlike the insular middle classes and the fractious partisans for the Irish Church and the Irish State, they show no signs of rancor. They even joke good-naturedly when answering Stephen’s queries about why their parents (who are about to be evicted for non-payment of rent—shades of the Famine!) have gone to look for new lodgings. They have cause for despair, but they will not play the victim. Instead, they mitigate their weariness with hope. And they sing:

The voice of his youngest brother from the farther side of the fireplace began to sing the air Oft in the Stilly Night. One by one, the others took up the air until a full choir of voices was singing. They would sing so for hours….[Stephen] waited for some moments, listening, until he too took up the air with them. (176)

Conspicuously absent from this tea time at the Dedaluses are alcohol, adults, and argument. Although these entities enabled the Irish to survive under British rule, they also retarded the country’s revival as a nation. By bringing to the table children who are responsive to Irish song, Joyce seems to be suggesting that the emerging Irish nation needs artists to listen to the younger generation’s voices, artists who will then amplify these young people’s strengths and their concerns. Although in the past alcohol and argument have allowed the Irish a sense of freedom and autonomy, they have essentially been false friends. Drink encourages talk, which is then mistaken for action. Or it leads to localized, misdirected violence. And talk—with or without drink—often acts as a safety valve, defusing rather than encouraging action.

Although the meagerness of the fare at this third Joycean meal could be made an issue of, it is not. Joyce’s young Ireland seems uninterested in using food either as a pacifier or an excuse. Food for the Dedalus children is neither fetish, nor bone of contention. They eat it; they need it—but it is music, not food that sustains them. What Ireland needs—Joyce seems to be saying—is to be remade through cultural politics. It needs an artist who will hear the people’s singing, who will then transcribe and magnify their message. By the chapter’s end, Stephen has decided that such a task must be his.

All of this puts one in mind of another Irish joke—the one about the new disease called Irish Alzheimer’s—those who succumb to it forget everything but the slights. The Dedalus children, in eating their meal without using food to either insulate or inflame their anger over the past, are demonstrating their immunity to Irish Alzheimer’s. In singing Irish songs, they are suggesting another route to nationality. The older generation of holiday guests at the Morkans has indulged itself in selective forgetting, and the guests at the Dedaluses Christmas dinner have remembered only the slights. But the younger generation in Ireland—Stephen and his siblings—are in good health, at ease with the past and hopeful about the future. They provide if not a happy ending, at least a new beginning.

 

This article appeared in a slightly different form in Proteus (Spring 2000)

 

 

 

Works Cited

Deane, Seamus. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Kinealy, Christine. This Great Calamity: the Irish Famine 1845-52. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994.

Morash, Christopher. Writing the Irish Famine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.