“[Gabriel's] 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” (D, 224). These final lines of the last short story in Dubliners, forming what is arguably one of the most lyrical passages in prose fiction, have established themselves as Joyce's signature piece. Their evocative power has resonated throughout the century, culminating in John Huston's visually stunning 1987 cinematic version. There Donal McCann as Gabriel Conroy is poised by the Gresham Hotel window, watching the snow drift down while Anjelica Huston as Gretta sleeps on the bed. In the words of film director Huston, “Joyce's 1907 story of a comic Christmas dinner party ending in a bittersweet revelation for the husband of a Dublin couple has become a classic: ‘The Dead’ contextualizes the fundamental challenges of contemporary life—love, alienation, passion, and death—in the quotidian landscape of middle-class Dublin, and forces its readers to distinguish between the profound and the banal in the most familiar of human interactions” (quoted in Walker, 1).

“The Dead” stands as one of the formative intellectual experiences for modern readers, “simply one of the greatest stories in the English language,” John Huston claims (quoted in Walker, 1). Because of its familiarity and depth, its features take on the power of familiar yet fascinating tropes, insinuating their way into the works of many of Joyce's literary heirs. In my essay, I will explore that effect by examining how three other Irish authors—Edna O'Brien, Mary Lavin, and Sean O'Faolain—build upon imagery of snow or fire in their short stories to present unrelievedly pessimistic world visions, far more bitter than Joyce's, that demonstrate their permanent loss of hope in a postlapsarian world.

Numerous critics have discerned Joyce's use of snow imagery as a death metaphor for a paralyzed Dublin, yet recapitulating those views can often produce insights that go well beyond critical commonplaces. Indeed, the most useful approaches have sought to derive new ways of reading from the tension created by contrasting interpretations. Kelly Anspaugh, for example, has recently cited Florence Walzl's discussion of melting snow as a baptismal symbol and evidence of possible regeneration, and then counters this position with the opposing viewpoint from Vincent Pecora: “Gabriel in no way overcomes or transcends the conditions of his existence. Rather, he merely recapitulates them unconsciously in this self-pitying fantasy” (quoted in Anspaugh, 3). For Daniel R. Schwarz the snow represents the “potential to become ice (death) and water (life). Obviously, as ice it also suggests the emotional sterility of a world reduced to social gestures, empty talk, and loveless relationships—a world where a tiny pathetic ‘I’ cannot connect to others to form a loving, passionate, tender couple …” (123). Most critics still interpret the snow-laden ending as a paralyzing image, but in a more recent trend readers like Michael Patrick Gillespie view Gabriel's epiphany with a studied ambivalence: “One comes away from Joyce's story with no prescription for interpretation but rather with an assurance of the poignancy of its closing lines” (Gillespie, “[S]he,” 121).

Even the most distinguished Irish writers to follow Joyce have proven to be as affected by his work as are the critics. One sees this particularly in the way Edna O'Brien, Mary Lavin, and Sean O'Faolain have found themselves falling under the Joycean influence when they use his snow imagery for their own imaginative needs.¹ These authors stand well aware of the debt all subsequent Irish writers owe to Joyce, yet they manage to acknowledge it with a self-possession that enables them to retain their own imaginative integrity.

Nowhere is this delicate balance more in evidence than in O'Brien's “Irish Revel,” the story of a young Irishwoman's disillusionment told in a muted fashion that nonetheless delicately invokes the experience of Gabriel Conroy. Seventeen-year-old Mary is invited to the party of a neighbor to be held at a local hotel. Mary is very excited, contemplating the fine dress she will wear and daydreaming of the possibility of meeting a handsome Englishman named John Roland. When Mary arrives at the party, however, she is surprised to discover that she has been asked there merely to serve as little more than one of the unpaid help: “Do this! Do that! They ordered her around like a maid” (182). She is kept busy throughout the party, and then is assigned a bed for the night with the other three maids/girls, only to be criticized in the morning for leaving early. On the way home, her bike's tire goes flat, as flat as the expectations Mary had for her first party.

In 1966, Fritz Senn was the first to see the influences of Joyce's “The Dead” on O'Brien, particularly in The Country Girls, and in 1974 Grace Eckley specifically cited “Irish Revel” as “a West of Ireland version of Joyce's classic, ‘The Dead’ …” (81), comparing the blanketing snow of Joyce's metaphoric ending to the frost that comes “like the descent of winter on Mary's heart” (82) at the end of the O'Brien story. O'Brien's diction and rhythm clearly acknowledge the influence of Joyce's story: “Frost everywhere; it coated the bare branches and made them like etchings, it starched the grass and blurred the shape of a plow that stood in a field, above all it gave the world an appearance of sanctity” (198).

At the same time, O'Brien employs the icy image for her own purpose. Joyce's repetition of “falling” seven times in the last paragraph of “The Dead” emphasizes the postlapsarian nature of the world Gabriel inhabits, but perhaps has never pondered until Gretta's revelation. In addition, the double chiasmus of “falling softly” and “softly falling” followed by “falling faintly” and “faintly falling” adds a softness, a lightness, to the discourse, muting the tragic tones, emphasizing the poignancy. O'Brien's passage, on the other hand, offers no softening elements. Nonetheless, in both versions the dominant worldview remains bleak, emphasizing “slime and ugliness” or a cynical “appearance of sanctity.”

Unlike the urban Conroys, Mary lives on “a mountainey farm” (177), and is not accustomed to attending parties. The one given by Mrs. Rodgers in the Commercial Hotel in honor of Mr. Brogan is to be the seventeen-year-old's first. Her mother hesitates about letting her go, claiming “too much to be done,” but eventually relents. Mary is elated, particularly thrilled that she is allowed to wear the black lace dress sent from America years ago. As she pedals to the Rodgers' party, she daydreams of John Roland, a self-proclaimed English painter who arrived on motorcycle two years previously. O'Brien swiftly undercuts Mary's adolescent, sentimental reveries with comic descriptions of the dung-covered main street: “There were cattle wandering around, mooing, the way cattle do when they are in a strange street, and drunken farmers with sticks were trying to identify their own cattle in dark corners” (179). Through this juxtaposition, O'Brien suggests without fanfare the disappointment that awaits Mary through equally mundane circumstances, for in a relatively short time her role of romantic heroine gives way to that of maid: “Quickly Mary realized that she was being given work to do, and she blushed with shock and disappointment” (181).

Instead of the equivalent of a Michael Furey or John Roland (who is married with children of his own), Mary is pursued by drunken O'Toole, who cannot even get her name straight, insisting on calling her “Doris.” Rather than reading about the relatively harmless and quite amenable Freddy Malins, we get an entire room of drunks, including the girls who have had their orangeade spiked with gin. In a pose analogous to Gretta standing in the stairwell, Mary stands by a window, looking out “at the dirtied streets”: “She moved toward the dark pane of window with a glass in her hand and looked out at the dirtied streets, remembering how once she had danced with John on the upper road to no music at all, just their hearts beating and the sound of happiness” (184). And instead of Gabriel Conroy carving the goose and thanking his aunts, the Morkan sisters, O'Toole pours Mary's gift of cream into the hollowed-out “carcass of the ravaged goose” (193).

After the party all four of the girls must share a bed. When Mary leaves early in the morning to help with the milking at her own house, the girls scold her for not being around to aid with the messy flood that O'Toole has made by leaving the bar's five porter taps on all night. And, as if all of these details did not recount enough misfortune for poor Mary (but a comic delight for the reader), O'Brien delivers the crowning indignity. Mary's bicycle tire has gone flat, and the weather has turned cold, again reminiscent of Joyce's ending: “The frost lay like a spell upon the street, upon the sleeping windows and the slate roofs of the narrow houses. It had magically made the dunged streets white and clean” (196). Half a mile from home Mary sits on a bank, and thinks of her lost sweetheart as she “cracked some ice with her high heel and watched the crazy splintered pattern it made” (197).

There is no epiphany for poor Mary, only a shattered ice mirror reminding us that her bad luck (and Ireland's) will not end here. (Parenthetically, it also reminds us of another Joycean echo—the opening of Ulysses where Buck Mulligan looks into his shaving mirror, irreverently performing his parody of the Mass.) For Mary the frost, like Gabriel's snow, is everywhere, but it only gives the “world an appearance of sanctity” (198), adding O'Brien's now caustic social commentary to an earlier comic story.

Nonetheless, it is important, however dark the ending vision, to remember that O'Brien's story is essentially filled with ironic comic touches that form the basis of a well-established Irish comic tradition, one that, in Michael Gillespie's words, “balance[s] censure with raillery” (“[S]he,” 111). Along the same lines, though speaking of another O'Brien story, “A Scandalous Woman,” Rachel Jane Lynch contends that O'Brien “renders the vicious and powerful local priest comfortingly ridiculous by noticing his prominent Adam's apple … diffus[ing] the menacing by noting the absurd” (74). In “Irish Revel,” too, O'Brien meliorates some of the pain by dwelling upon the comic foibles of the party's hosts, such as Mrs. Rodgers “tear[ing] the loose pieces” of goose flesh with her fingers (186), and by revealing the overly zealous thriftiness of the household: “There hadn't been a fire in that room since the day DeValera signed the autograph book” (188).

O'Brien's “Lantern Slides” tells the tale of another disappointing Irish party. As Michael Gillespie suggests of “Irish Revel” and “The Dead,” this story exhibits “the same general concern with ritual, celebration, sexual frustration, and social alienation …” (“[S]he,” 115). This party, Betty's surprise birthday party, occurs in the city rather than the country and has an odd assortment of guests whose connection to each other is tenuous at best. We are introduced to Mr. Conroy and Miss Lawless, who appear to be already acquainted. Mr. Conroy wishes for a lustful deepening of their relationship, while Miss Lawless reminisces about her lost lover of twenty-five years ago. Their adolescent longings recall Mary's daydreaming in “Irish Revel,” but Mary was seventeen. These two are clearly well advanced into middle age, and their fantasies border on the childish and inappropriate. Other party guests include Dr. Fitz and Mr. Gogarty (another Joycean reference—Dr. Oliver St. John Gogarty was the model for Buck Mulligan), who openly tease Sinead and Dot. Continuing this theme of dysfunctional sexuality, Mrs. Vaughan is infuriated when her husband's flirtatious letter to Miss Beale is exposed: “this beautiful lady—English, mark you” (207).

One senses O'Brien's mocking laughter and her impatience with these empty people who lack even the most fundamental empathy for one another. When Betty does arrive and her cake is cut, the long anticipated moment and the “spell” it casts have become anti-climactic. O'Brien undermines any sense of human community among these elite Dublin dinner “nobs” by comparing their desperate longings to a collection of projected slides, meaningless and disjointed.

From the opening paragraph of “Lantern Slides,” O'Brien's extension of Joyce's story is self-evident yet nuanced. Gabriel Conroy has become Mr. Conroy, some unimportant hotel worker. This Mr. Conroy's stories suggest that he is far less sophisticated than his Joycean counterpart. And while “The Dead” evokes lyrical images of faintly failing snow, “Lantern Slides” opens with imagery more reminiscent of a walpurgisnacht, where, in “a big limestone grate, a turf fire blazes.” The next few sentences confirm the story's setting: “The surround was a bit lugubrious, like a grotto, but this impression was forgotten as the flames spread and swagged into brazen orange banners. In the sitting room, a further galaxy of people—all standing except for a few elderly ladies who sat on a chintz-covered banquette in the middle of the room. Here too was a fire and the hum of voices that presaged an evening that would be lively, maybe even hectic” (186). Waiters move “like altar boys among the panting throngs,” while people ask “from time to time how this racket could be quelled, because quelled it would have to be when the moment came, when the summons for silence came” (186).

But no silence does come, unlike the beautifully haunting silence that ends “The Dead.” Instead, the openly flirtatious Dr. Fitz will not shut up, and the outrageously sexist Mr. Gogarty tells one insensitive joke after another. Even the chandeliers “seemed to be chattering, so dense and busy and clustered were the shining pendants of glass” (186). These “chattering” chandeliers set the tone of the story; we will judge and be judged by gossip, rumor, and innuendo, by the same kind of debilitating hearsay that destroys the small-town inhabitants in the collection's first story, “Oft in the Stilly Night,” or, arguably, in O'Brien's best known (or most frequently anthologized) short story, “A Scandalous Woman,” where the self-proclaimed knowledgeable narrator does not know Eily as well as she thinks she does.

Miss Lawless's lustful desires for the return of Peter Abelard, her lost lover of twenty-five years ago (who evokes the original Abelard, the twelfth-century scholar, monk, and lover of Heloise), replace Gretta's impassioned weeping for the lost Michael Furey. The Dantean vision of Gretta/Beatrice enshrouded in the “dusty fanlight” gives way in O'Brien's story to “patches of sea like diagonals of stained glass” (200), reminding us that the lantern slides are not infused with Dantean light, but clouded with mists of the sea, or shrouded in distant and disjointed memories. This vision conjures up no heartrending story of a rain-soaked young man beneath a window. In fact it evolves in quite the opposite fashion. O'Brien inflicts us with a room full of phony, flirtatious, heartless dinner “nobs.” Like Mary's John Roland, Miss Lawless's lost love is also married, but the narrative goes beyond sentimental recollection to offer a jaundiced glimpse of his garden, complete with “tiny shrunken apples that looked as if they had some sort of disease, some blight” (203). Whatever prelapsarian longings Joyce evokes with his story, O'Brien totally undercuts with hers.

At the story's end, O'Brien likens the dinner nobs' collective longings for fulfillment to the “rapid succession” of lantern slides: “You could feel the longing in the room, you could touch it—a hundred lantern slides ran through their minds; their longing united them, each rendered innocent by this moment of supreme suspense. It seemed that if the wishes of one were granted, then the wishes of others would be fulfilled in rapid succession” (223). These two-dimensional people, transparent as glass in their mundane, selfish wishes, project no mythic connection, only a distant, diffused, disjointed collection of meaningless slides, evoking no pleasant nostalgic moments, no warm family or friendly portraits, no poignantly human memories, emitting no light of any real sort, only shadows of a bygone era, of another Dublin dinner party.

The poignancy of Gabriel Conroy's newfound knowledge—that his love for Gretta has never approached the heights of Michael Furey's—is missing among O'Brien's guests. We care deeply for Gabriel and Gretta, especially in the story's final scene:

Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul.

(D, 222)

In contrast, nothing in the narrative of “Lantern Slides” evokes our concern for Mr. Conroy, Miss Lawless, or the birthday woman Betty.

Indeed, a permanent chill surrounds the story. While winter talk abounds—“a turf fire blazing” and “a nippy evening”—it is nearly spring in O'Brien's story: “Yet by looking through the window Miss Lawless could see that lilac was just beginning to sprout, and small white eggcups of blossom shivered on jet-black magnolia branches” (186). Nonetheless, while the calendar may announce the commencement of spring, O'Brien's Dublin is more dead than the snow-covered, winter world of the Morkans and their guests.

Mary Lavin's “The Will” takes up a more profound topic, for it is the sad saga of a daughter's desperate attempt to save the soul of her hubristic mother. The proud matriarch of the Conroy family is ashamed of her daughter Lally, who lives a poor, humble existence. Lally rushes to her dying mother's bedside only to arrive too late. In a gesture fraught with Lavin's typically ironic overtones, penniless Lally rushes to a priest to exhort him to quickly say masses (on credit) for the repose of her mother's soul before it exits this world on its descending journey to the next. For the reader, of course, it clearly is much too late. Mrs. Conroy's soul is beyond saving, and only saintly Lally is blind to this truth. Lavin's fine imagery proclaims that Lally's mother has died unrepentant for her inexcusably cruel alienation from Lally, and is, without a doubt, on her way to hell.

Joycean echoes ring loudly and clearly from the start of “The Will”; the Conroy family is gathered to bury the mother and to hear the reading of her will, which has left nothing to the oldest daughter, Lally. In short order, Lavin establishes the blind and arrogant nature of the mother and of Lally's three siblings, Kate, Nonny, and Matthew. Their snobbery knows no bounds as they express their irritation and shame over Lally's position in life—a “common” landlady taking in boarders, sending her children to free schools in the city, and wearing “ragged old clothes” (246). The choice of Lally as a name invokes Joyce's Lily, another proud proletarian. Indeed, Lally's family has misjudged her as profoundly as Gabriel Conroy misjudges the servant Lily in the beginning of Joyce's story:

—O, then, said Gabriel gaily, I suppose we'll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your youngman, eh?

The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:

—The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake.

(D, 178)

Instead of snow, Lavin's most persistent image is fire, and just as O'Brien's “Lantern Slides” portrayed the opening setting of hell, Lavin's story opens with a hellish image as Nonny, the youngest, recalls the dying mother's rage at the mention of Lally's name. With her stick (which she used to tap on the floor and summon family members to cater to her needs), the mother “began to bang the bed rail with all her force,” sending the lamp “reel[ing]” off the table, which could have been disastrous: the “house would have been burned down about [their] ears if the lamp hadn't quenched with the draught of falling through the air” (239). Nonny does not understand the full import of her words, but long before the story's end, we do. These people already live in hell, a hell of their own making, a world of fallen souls who know no forgiveness.

In sharp contrast to Gabriel's aunts, Lally's family exercises no compassion or generosity. Matthew, Lally's brother, calls her “obstinate” (246), but it is he and the rest of his family who are insensitively blind to Lally's generous nature. Despite Lally's desperate, hurried attempts to convince the kindly priest to extend credit and say a mass immediately for her deceased mother (to be paid for later through Lally's thrifty scrapping), we know her mother's soul is doomed, already condemned to the eternal flame:

The eyes that stared into the flaming heart of the fire were indeed filled with fear, and as a coal fell, revealing a gaping abyss of flaming fire, her eyes filled with absolute horror at the heaving reflection of her idea in the red flames of the fire. “She was very bitter.” Lally Conroy broke down for the first time since she had news of her mother's death. “She was very bitter against me for twenty or thirty years, and she died without forgiving me. I'm afraid for her soul.” She looked up at the priest. “You'll say them as soon as ever you can, Father?”

(252)²

Looking at her “shabby boots and the thick stockings,” the priest “humbly” agrees to her wishes.

And, lest we miss Lavin's vision of hell for the Conroy matriarch, the ending image of soot flakes, similar to Gabriel's snow flakes, clearly denies any hope of redemption for this Conroy. Gabriel is still young and alive with, perhaps, possibilities for change. (Those critics viewing Gabriel positively, as changed and open to more change, include Thomas Loe, Allen Tate, C. C. Loomis, and Florence Walzl. Critics viewing Gabriel negatively, as unchanged and probably not open to change, include Ruth Bauerle, Garry Leonard, and Joseph Valente.) This Conroy is already dead and unrepentant. Lavin leaves us with an unambiguous condemnation of the elder Mrs. Conroy's pride and stubbornness. The best Lally or we can hope for her is purgatory: “When flakes of soot from the engine flew past the carriage window, she [Lally] began to pray silently, with rapid unformed words that jostled themselves in her mind with the sheafs of burning sparks” (253).

By choosing the Conroy name and employing it on the family matriarch instead of the family patriarch, Lavin subtly comments upon the nature of Joyce's creation. Gabriel may be the best of the male figures presented in Dubliners, but he is definitely snobbish in his belittling of Miss Ivors and in his dismissal of the world of his wife's homeland, the West of Ireland. His lack of humility does not reach the unforgivably hubristic levels of Lavin's Mrs. Conroy, but he also falls far, far short of achieving the sort of goodly caring nature found in the selfless Lally.

Sean O'Faolain's “A Broken World” takes a more complex view of the fundamental tropes employed by the other writers, fusing the snow imagery of Joyce and the flame imagery of O'Brien and Lavin. “A Broken World” is the story of three travelers on a snowy day: a young narrator, an old priest, and an old farmer. As they traverse the countryside by train, the priest bemoans the lack of unity in the villages—a microcosmic reflection of the political division of the country. At first, the narrator does not know what to make of the odd priest and the pipe-smoking farmer, but O'Faolain's political irony eventually becomes apparent to the reader.

In O'Faolain's work, clearly echoing Joyce, the snow (here almost constantly falling) becomes the central metaphor for a dying, split Ireland:

I could not deny to the wintry moment its own truth … that under that white shroud, covering the whole of Ireland, life was lying broken and hardly breathing. His impress remained even when the train swished slowly into the city, where the arc lamps sizzled in the snow, and the sounds were muffled, and through every street a sharp, pure wind blew down from the Wicklow hills. Once their distant convex gleamed, far away, beyond the vista of a street. There were few people abroad, and as they walked against the wind with huddled backs they, too, seemed to be shrouding something within them that slept, and barely palpitated, and was hurt by the cold.

(93-94)

By the story's end the narrator, earlier as metaphorically blind as Gabriel Conroy, now wonders if there is any hope for Ireland, any chance for redemption. He understands the need for warmth, for resurrection:

What image, I wondered, as I passed through them, could warm them as the Wicklow priest had warmed us for a few minutes in that carriage now chugging around the edge of the city to the sea? What image of life that would fire and fuse us all, what music bursting like the spring, what triumph, what engendering love, so that those breasting mountains that now looked cold should appear brilliant and gay, the white land that seemed to sleep should appear to smile, and these people who huddled over the embers of their lives should become like the peasants who held the hand of Faust with their singing one Easter morning.

(94)

The possibilities for connection, for the “moral unity” the priest calls for earlier in this story, are already present in the coach but unrecognized by the representatives of the church, the land, and the young urbanite, investing this coach with, as Michael Neary says of another O'Faolain story (“The Kitchen”), “a sacredness, a sense of collective centrality” (Neary, 14). Only after the priest and farmer depart does the young narrator even begin to have a vision for the future, but O'Faolain hints that insight has come too late. We are left with only the “shriveling effect of the cold wind and snow” and “an empty coach” (94), as lonely an image as the story's opening, where the word lonely is repeated.

The Three Graces of “The Dead,” the representatives in that story of all that is good and considerate and hospitable, the Greek ideals of womanhood, have become in O'Faolain's narrative “three bits of separateness,” begging for a healing of this broken world. The glimmer of hope discernible to some at the end of “The Dead” is completely absent here, and the stakes for Ireland are much higher. While Joyce's story derides Gabriel's stubborn dismissal of Miss Ivors and the West, O'Faolain's story blatantly tackles the highly charged dissensions of the past. The contrast of beech trees versus pine trees—“amazing” in the eyes of the priest—fairly trumpets O'Faolain's comments on the pejorative effects of British imperialism without negating the multiple complexities: “And it was the trees that made me realize it. Beeches instead of pines. Great, old beeches with roots like claws on the double ditches. … They were so clean and old, not like the quick-growing pines of the mountains—dirty trees that scatter their needles into the shoots of the houses and block them up three times every winter” (87). Like the “claws” of the English, the beech trees have firmly taken root in the “good land,” relegating the poor Irish, “the pines” (the established icon of the United Irishmen's failed 1798 revolt), to the mountainous regions (87).

But while the priest decries the inaction of absentee landlords—“Owns ten thousand acres in Ireland / Address, Grosvenor Square London” (85)—he does not close his eyes to the faults of the Irish: “They were clean, hard-working, respectful. Too respectful—tipping their hats to everybody … a mendicant habit of centuries, I suppose” (86). A mass of contradictions, the priest quickly generalizes, blaming the poor for emigration and the boarding-out of their children: “No wonder the country is full of ruins” (86), never seeing his own share in the problem—the church's stand on contraception, his own hypocritical stand on children. At one point O'Faolain is purposely ambiguous in his use of the third-person pronoun. The farmer responds to the priest's apparently nonchalant proclamation: “‘I have two grown sons of my own’, says he, ‘and they're after joining the British Army’” (89). Is the farmer by adding “my own” for emphasis suggesting that the priest has sons? Is this a Catholic priest? Is there a suggestion of children? We are told later he was “silenced” (90). Does that mean that he was defrocked? Or is he an Anglican, casting this story in a whole new light, explaining the priest's disdain for the “dirty” pine trees, the Irish Republicans? O'Faolain leaves the ending ambiguous, but enough is said for the reader to doubt the veracity of this priest. He is clearly not a man of God for he is not a man of the people.

An earlier reference to “two so-called military roads” cutting across the moors “in ninety-eight” may escape the notice of a hasty reader. But upon reflection, one might ask, Why would the priest not admire the pine trees and the goal of the United Irishmen if he were silenced for wanting the people to have the gentry's land? The narrator questions the farmer, “But isn't that what ye want? Isn't that what the whole trouble is? Isn't that what the government wants?” The farmer responds, referring to the priest: “But he wanted it to be a sudden business” (91). In fact, the farmer reveals that the priest was the leader of his own band of Whiteboys and was silenced for it: “Sure, he took ten or twenty foolish young lads and, one night, he threw down the walls of Lord Milltown's estate” (91).

If the priest is “silenced” for an abundance of action, the old farmer is completely his opposite. In the coach he does little but smoke and spit and exclaim, “begobs.” The narrator makes “one last effort to shake him from his lethargic mood” (92), but is unsuccessful. He looks at the sleeping farmer, and compares him to “a rock.” Then he quickly corrects himself, explaining that the farmer “was like nothing on earth but himself, everything about him was so personal to him. Unless, because he was so much a random accumulation of work and season and all that belongs to the first human that was ever made …” (92). With this Edenic overlay, the reference to Adam, O'Faolain instantly elevates the story from the local to the political to the spiritual, underscoring the fragility of our human natures, the near impossibilities for connection in our fallen world. The farmer becomes a representative of the majority of the Irish, quietly accepting the unacceptable political subjugation in silence. The farmer should be a man of action; the priest, a man of prayer.

But what of the narrator? We are left with him staring out the window at the falling snow like Gabriel in Joyce's story, and perhaps, like Gabriel, there is hope for O'Faolain's narrator. He, too, is young, but, as he gazes out the train window, he finds a scene hardly as comforting as the one that Gabriel beheld: “the wind moaned in many keys, and the snow blew horizontally and stuck to the edges of the window” (92). And the narrator's thoughts are hardly optimistic, concentrating on “the snowy landscape, which above all other conditions of nature is so powerful to make life seem lonely, and all work futile, and time itself a form of decay” (93). Ultimately, O'Faolain leaves us with a lonely, silent, empty coach, with empty hopes for any repair of this country still split after hundreds of years: “In the morning, Ireland, under its snow, would be silent as a perpetual dawn” (94).

Joyce, O'Brien, Lavin, O'Faolain—all remind us of the clearly postlapsarian nature of the world we inhabit and have inherited. Nonetheless, two elements clearly emerge from these reworkings of Joyce's snow imagery. First, the snow (or soot) is general all over Ireland, though perhaps not achieving the simplistic unity of the sort that Michael Levenson claims to have found in his inflated political reading of “The Dead”: “An Ireland covered in snow, however one understands the symbolic valence, has achieved a unity that its colonial status has long blocked” (177). Second, the snow (or soot) image is repeated throughout these stories. John Paul Riquelme, in his discussion of “The Dead,” argues that this repeated image produces a wishful repetition on Gabriel's part, who hopes to “actualize the perfect repetition of the past,” but cannot (231). While we may find Riquelme's views rather limited, we can assent to this sense that the past cannot be repeated perfectly, when it is not understood. If Gabriel learns anything, it is that his version of the past is far different from Gretta's. Thus, the snow “establishes the limits of possibility as well as the shape of necessity in Gabriel's world” (Riquelme, 231) and, I believe, in the worlds of these other stories as well.

The falling snow of Joyce's self-absorbed love story/stories operates not simply as a death metaphor but rather as a means of demarcating boundaries, another image of Ireland's self-imposed sense of limit. If it seems to be mimicked in the three authors chosen here, the tone may be due more to the difference in talent than to hostility. Indeed, all are paying great honor to the achievements of James Joyce. The snow imagery of O'Brien's two stories is more decisively destructive than Joyce's, covering the social frailties and naivete in “Irish Revel” and the social and moral alienation in “Lantern Slides” with less affection than Joyce bestows on his Conroys. The “faintly falling snow” of Joyce is transformed into cascading soot flakes in Lavin's short tale, clearly the fallout of Mrs. Conroy's descent into hell, the ashy remains of her corporeal form as it burns in the eternal flame for the sin of hubris. And the snow that plummets only at the end of Joyce's story tumbles throughout O'Faolain's story, reminding us again and again of the ongoing tragedy of Ireland's political past, present, and, perhaps, future. Part of a continuing legacy, Joyce's falling snow sets the rhythm of his dinner party, reaching far beyond a single evening, far beyond a single man, far beyond a single story, and representing the political and spiritual fragility of a country still in peril.

Notes

1. Indeed, if one were to consider the names of outstanding Irish writers, these three names would arise frequently. With Lavin's recent death, it is a fitting acknowledgment of her excellent contributions to short fiction. An Irish-American who returned to Ireland for college in 1930, she had publications in major periodicals by 1942. In 1959 and 1961 she received a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 1961 she was awarded the Katherine Mansfield prize.

   O'Faolain's incredibly prolific career—eight short-story collections, four novels, four biographies, three travel books, one autobiography, and five miscellaneous volumes—has been extended by the prodigious talent of his daughter, Julia, now following in his footsteps, with her novel No Country for Young Men being a clear tribute to her father's politically charged story “No Country for Old Men.”

   Creating fiction since the 1930s (O'Faolain) and the 1940s (Lavin) right up to the 1980s, both these talented people have firmly established their literary reputations with finely crafted stories.

   Writing since the 1960s, O'Brien has shattered all the stereotypes of Irishwomen, frankly discussing female sexuality in a manner that rendered her first novel, The Country Girls, banned in her own country. Her most recent novel, Down by the River, fictionalizes the sensational and groundbreaking 1992 abortion “X” case. The two stories chosen here are from the acclaimed collection The Fanatic Heart (1984) and Lantern Slides (1990), which won the European Prize for Literature in 1994. Both are a continuing tribute to the writer she claims to be her greatest influence. In an October 1995 interview, O'Brien discussed her favorite authors with me: “I read and reread Faulkner [at the prompting of an earlier question of mine] and Joyce. They would be my two.”

2. Mark D. Hawthorne discusses the ironic role of the mother in another Lavin story, “Happiness,” where Vera, like Lavin herself, was left with the care of her three daughters and took them to Florence after her husband died. The similarities, however, end there (Hawthorne, 683).