Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
in the realism, when Gabriel tells the anecdote of the old horse that went round and round the monument? Next, the topic becomes that of every-which-way (we are still undecided), as the cabman is given conflicting directions by different members of the party. “The confusion grew greater and the cabman was directed differently by Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne, each of whom had his head out through a window of the cab. The difficulty was to know where to drop Mr. Browne along the route, and Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia and Mary Jane helped the discussion from the doorstep with cross-directions and contradictions and abundance of laughter.” Finally, “the horse was whipped up and the cab rattled off along the quay amid a chorus of laughter and adieus.” We are en route, so far as realistic topics are concerned. But Gabriel and his wife have not yet left. And the development from now on is to concern them. Tableau: A man is singing; Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, is listening attentively, standing on the staircase, “near the top of the first flight”; Gabriel, below, is looking up admiringly. And “he asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadows, listening to distant music, a symbol of.”
Previously we mentioned the form of the Theaetetus: how, every time Socrates had brought things to an apparently satisfactory close, each such landing-place was found to be but the occasion for a new flight, a new search, that first seemed like an arrival, then opened up a new disclosure in turn. We believe that the remainder of this story possesses “dialectical form” in much that same sense. You might even call it the narrative equivalent of a Platonic dialogue. For from now on, Gabriel goes through a series of disclosures. Each time, he thinks he is really close to the essence; then another consideration emerges, that requires him to move on again. Let’s be as bluntly schematic as possible. It is not our job to regive the quality of the story; for that, one should go to the story itself. The stages, schematized, are these:
(1) As against the familiar but not intimate relations we have already seen, between Gabriel and his wife, here is a new motive; Gabriel sees “grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something.” And later, just before she asks the name of the song, at the sight of her flushed cheeks and shining eyes “a sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart.”
(2) They had arranged to spend the night in a nearby hotel. Hence, passages to suggest that he is recovering some of the emotions he had felt at the time of their honeymoon. (“Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls’ tender fire,” a reflection growing out of realistic reference to a literal fire.)
(3) Crossing a bridge, amid talk of the snow on the statue, while “Gabriel was again in a cab with her, galloping to catch the boat, galloping to their honeymoon.”
(4) Building up the sense of Gabriel’s possessiveness (“happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage [. . .] a keen pang of lust [. . .] a new adventure,” etc.).
(5) But, after the porter has assigned them to their room and left, the moment does not seem right. Gabriel’s irritation.
(6) She kisses him, calls him “a generous person.” His self-satisfaction. “Now that she had fallen to him so easily, he wondered why he had been so diffident.”
(7) Then the disclosures begin. He finds that he has misgauged everything. She has been thinking of that song. (Gabriel sees himself in the mirror) .
(8) At first taken aback, he next recovers his gentleness, then makes further inquiries. Angry, he learns that the song reminds her of a boy, Michael Furey, who used to sing the song. His jealousy. (Thus, up to now, each step nearer to her had been but the preparation for a more accurate sense of their separation.)
(9) On further inquiry, he learns of the boy’s frail love for her. “I think he died for me,” Gretta said, whereat “A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.’’ 5 He died for her? Died that something might live? It is an arresting possibility.
(10) After telling of this adolescent attachment, she cries herself to sleep.
So, we have narrowed things down, from all the party, to Gabriel and Gretta, and now to Gabriel alone. The next two pages or so involve a silent discipline, while he brings himself to relinquish his last claims upon her, as specifically his. The world of conditions is now to be transcended. Gretta had called him “generous,” in a passage that Gabriel had misgauged. Now we learn that “generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes.” The transcending of conditions, the ideal abandoning of property, is stated in Joyce’s own words, thus: “His own identity was falling out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, dissolving and dwindling.” For “his soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.”
Understandably, for if the world of conditions is the world of the living, then the transcending of conditions will, by the logic of such terms, equal the world of the dead. (Or, Kant-wise, we contemplate the divine; for if God transcends nature, and nature is the world of conditions, then God is the unconditioned. )
Psychologically, there are other likely interpretations here. Gabriel, finally, loves his wife, not even in terms of his honeymoon (with its strong connotations of ownership), but through the medium of an adolescent, dead at seventeen. With this dead boy he identifies himself. Perhaps because here likewise was a kind of unconditionedness, in the Gidean sense, that all was still largely in the realm of unfulfilled possibilities, inclinations or dispositions not yet rigidified into channels? There is even the chance that, in his final yielding, his identification with the dead boy, he is meeting again his own past adolescent self, with all its range of susceptibilities, surviving now only like a shade in his memory.
In any case, once we have been brought to this stage of “generosity,” where Gabriel can at last arrive at the order of ideal sociality, seeing all living things in terms of it, we return to the topic of snow, which becomes the mythic image, in the world of conditions, standing for the transcendence above the conditioned.
It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. 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 the living and the dead.
“Upon the living and the dead.” That is, upon the two as merged. That is, upon the world of conditions as seen through the spirit of conditions transcended, of ideal sociality beyond material divisiveness.
The Kenyon Review 12.2 (Spring 1951): 173–92. © The Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. Used by permission.
One observer analyzing the Portrait, noted that among the body-spirit equations were grease and gas, grease being to body as gas is to spirit. Hence, on learning that Michael Furey “was in the gasworks,” we assume that his spirituality is thus signalized roundabout, too. But we don’t quite know what to make of the possible relation between “Gretta” and “great” in these lines:
“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.
“I was great with him at that time,” she said.
Probably nothing should be made of it. But we do believe that such correlations should be noted tentatively. For we would ask ourselves how methodic a terminology is. Correspondences should be noted. But they should be left at loose ends, except when there are good reasons for tying such ends together.
3 The Language of Poetry, “Dramatistically” Considered6
In the first section of this paper, partially following and partially departing from Cicero’s “three offices of the orator,”