ABSTRACT
This reading of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” examines an existential crisis at the heart of Irish identity between a Yeatsian, paleo-modernist, mythopoetic, sublime subjectivity of a haunted Irish Past and the rejection of that in favour of a dissociated, patriarchal self that over-identifies with the colonial language of English. The figure of Gabriel embodies this tension which is reflected in a subtle deconstructed narrative form.
The portrayal of a gradual defamiliarization of identity evoking this tension may be read via a paleo-postmodern reading of Joyce’s multivalent narrative. Paleo-postmodernism transcends postmodern nihilism through the identification of coherence between deconstruction and liminality. In Joyce’s short story, Jungian archetypes are bound up with Lacanian linguistic disruption presenting a complex existential self. Though Lacan‘s theories are different to Jung, the former offers a way of understanding Joyce’s archetypal imagery which are influenced by a Yeatsian mythopoetic vision. Utilizing Lacan’s linguistic rupture to comprehend Jungian/Yeatsian paleo-modernist metaphors provides a deeper understanding of Joyce’s analogical hermeneutical representation of the sublime self in his short story, “The Dead”.
