Prose off: The famous and revered close of James Joyce's "The Dead" versus passage from Fleming's "Dead Thomas"

Sunday 5/3/26

This will be a different kind of prose off, but the results will be the same.

The ending of James Joyce's story, "The Dubliners," is often cited as being the best writing, the best prose, in the history of the English language. You could, as they say, look it up and will find many instances in which people say as much.

Ready? Here we go. This is that famous prose from James Joyce's "The Dead," which is part of his story collection, The Dubliners.

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. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. 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 all the living and the dead.

You've seen that, now see this. It's from my "Dead Thomas," which is part of There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, which isn't a story collection, but rather a book, and a book unlike any other, one that is entirely about women and girls, written by this man. Ready? Buckle up.

“My heart is Skittles” was something Rachel would say in her Rachel way when she acted like my pain was her pain. Skittles meant pieces. It was how she told you she was heartbroken and would do anything to share whatever she had with you the same as she’d insist I take the last few pieces of candy every time when we were little. Death would have been meant one thing to her. What my father said, another.

Certain people focus on what they call the big ideas. Life, death, light, dark, here, not here. For others, it’s interaction. The back and forth. The listening. What gets said, what needs to be, what isn’t, what doesn’t. What gets said best without any words or because they weren’t quite perfect. Touch. That’s where the love is for them. Where the pain is. The life, the death, the light, the dark, the here, the gone away.

I guess it’s kind of the same for each group, save with the one the big stuff is out there, and for the other it’s at ground level. Maybe it’s the difference between looking up and walking. She’d have believed me. Unquestioningly. If I added, “I’m not lying,” all she would’ve said was, “I know.” I understood what those words that my father communicated to me would mean to her. But I wanted Rachel to be Rachel. And not like me, a girl with less of herself left. 

 “I’m sorry I can’t help you,” my dad said with the final flickering of his life as he flew through the air in that last flash before hitting the ground—it was nip and tuck—and I knew he was gone.

We didn’t get a call that night. They don’t call anyway. They come to your door. I think they try to make the knock polite but firm. A friendlier knock starts you off with a better resting heart rate so there’s less chance that the news you’re about to be told kills you.

But when they came and said what must be said by someone, I heard those words like I already knew what they were and had only been waiting for the news to be made official.

That’s what I mean by he reached out to me.

“’Sup,” Thomas would say when we passed each other in the hall, which I gathered isn’t how people from the 1940s spoke, but you adopt the parlance of those around you. That’s how accents happen and it’s no different with the dead and the living, which are confusing terms that happen to get used like everyone knows exactly what they mean.

They say that no matter what situation you’re in, no matter how hard, you’ll eventually act like you did before the new situation started. Show the regular signs of life. Which doesn’t mean totally. But your pain won’t be shot though every word that leaves your mouth. You won’t walk around crying. People in prison smile and laugh, including the falsely convicted. Even people in worse things, like concentration camps.

I saw a picture in history class. Two girls at a fence on a winter day you could tell was colder than cold. Their fingers poking through the holes. The only parts of them that were ever going to get out even for a moment. I know, because on the next page you learned what happened to them. Each girl had on a single torn mitten. They must have had only two between them so they shared. A mitten for you, a mitten for me. And there they were, laughing.

I wonder if Thomas felt the same way. He became one more boy, another boy, with the taking of each test or the latest reminder from Ms. Kathleen that Shakespeare was funny whether we knew it or not, groundlings that we were, except he was the boy that people said made you think.

They didn’t say about what. I thought about where something ends and something else begins. Lives, loves. The unholy, holy why-ness of it all. The officially unofficial dividing lines.

It’s like when a year gets off to a rocky start because a few bad events happened early and someone says, “Going to be a hell of a year.” They make it sound as if the beginning has ordered for all the other days before they got to the restaurant. Except a new year finishes every day. And starts every day. Today is the day a thousand years came to a close and another thousand years began. Yesterday could have said the same. Just like tomorrow. It isn’t where anything begins and stops, but where you’re counting from. If that’s what you want to be doing.

I selected a mostly random passage from my story (I say mostly, because being able to select something that also concerned the living and the dead, I did so). I could have done this with any passage from it. How would one describe how much better the excerpt from "Dead Thomas"--which the publishing world will not allow the world to see because there is a person, a single person, able to create such a thing, who isn't like the people of that system artistically, intellectually, morally, and that isn't allowed--is than the excerpt from "The Dead"?

The best writing and prose ever is here, and it wasn't composed by the person from Ireland.

There it is. And that's the person who must not be allowed to advance or have his work seen, never mind celebrated. And oh yeah...he's also our best sports writer, our best film writer, our best essayist, our best diarist, our best opinion writer, our best music writer, and so forth.

That's not close, man.