Snow was general…On Epiphanies in Memoir
My favorite short story to teach is James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Unlike so much of Joyce’s more experimental work such as the infamously challenging Finnegan’s Wake or the (to me) impenetrable Ulysses, “The Dead” is just a small domestic story, beautifully crafted, lyrical, full of symbols and images that flirt with melodrama.
“Flirting with Melodrama” would not be an inaccurate way to describe elements of my own innate writing and storytelling style, though I like what Charles Bramesco says of melodrama in his Colours of Film: The Story of Cinema in 50 Palettes, “There are those who think of ‘melodrama’ as a dirty word, a pejorative reserved for films with rafter-rattling overacting and exaggerated contrivances of plot. But ‘melo’ comes from the Greek melos meaning ‘song,’ as in melody, and suggests a more lyrical, florid slant on run-of-the-mill realism.” My friend Jen often tells me that my life has been cinematic, and I’m not sure if that’s because my life has actually been all that interesting or if the perception of its vividness can be chalked up more to my own “lyrical, florid” orientation to reality, which then inflects the telling. It’s an open question.
The protagonist of Joyce’s “The Dead” is a writer and teacher (like me) named Gabriel Conroy. All the events of the story take place in a single night at a party thrown by Gabriel’s doting aunts. Because he has been tasked with giving a small speech towards the end of the evening’s festivities, Gabriel spends most of the party nervously preoccupied with the anticipation of that public performance. Even his interactions with the other characters feel like small iterations of stage fright, and Joyce does an excellent job helping us enter Gabriel’s thoughts—he encounters several people at the party whom he presumes, for one reason or another, disapprove of him, and spends a great deal of time both trying to decide whether or not they are mad at him and then also trying to shake off the need for their approval.
Most of us, have at some time or other, spent the bulk of a social interaction having similar thoughts: Are you mad at me? Do you think I’m shallow? Do you think I’m boring? Was that a stupid thing to say? Why didn’t I say that in a more interesting way? Did I hurt your feelings? What if everyone is laughing at me? What if everyone feels sorry for me? If you’ve never found yourself feeling like that, like not even one time, we probably would not be buddies. I mean, I’d be civil to you, but we probably would not vacation together or arrange for frequent brunch dates.
In “The Dead,” the occasion for the aunt’s party is the holy day of Epiphany, and I am writing this on that same day. In the church calendar, Epiphany or Theophany marks the end of the Christmas season and the arrival of the Wise Men who followed a bright star to find the Christ child. Epiphany derives from a Greek root that literally means manifestation, but its constituent pieces “epi” (meaning on or around) and “phainein” (to bring to light, to manifest, to cause to appear) can essentially be interpreted as “to shine a light around.” Thus, we picture epiphany as a sudden moment of awareness often depicted as a single lightbulb coming on above a person’s head.
In ancient Greek theater, “anagnorisis” functioned similarly to epiphany. Anagnorisis is defined by the Oxford Reference as “the Greek word for recognition or discovery, used…to denote the turning point in a drama at which a character (usually the protagonist) recognizes the true state of affairs, having previously been in error or ignorance.” After the moment of Oedipus’s anagnorisis, he blinds himself because he cannot handle what the sudden epiphany has brought from the darkness of the unknown into the light of the known.
Leading up to the climax of Gabriel’s story in “The Dead,” we see him fully immersed in his “lyrical, florid” interpretation of reality. As he and his wife are leaving the party, they hear a snatch of absentminded song from one of the departing guests. It is a stanza of a song called “The Lass of Aughrim.” Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, appears deeply affected by the song and asks the singer to remind her of its title. All of a sudden, Gabriel is struck by how sweet his wife is, how emotional, how tenderhearted, and all along the walk, he brings to mind intimate moments they’ve shared together, and he can’t wait to get her back to the room and rekindle the flame of their relationship, which has been dimmed, as so many similar flames have been, by the tedium and minutiae of “run-of-the-mill-realism” (kids, bills, jobs, laundry, etc).
Gretta, however, as we soon discover, has been inhabiting an altogether different frame of mind. What Gabriel doesn’t realize is that as soon as she heard that song, it brought rushing back to her the memories of a young boy named Michael Furey who died at seventeen (who worked in the gasworks-I mean, at this point, someone passionate whose name sounds like fury who works in a literal gasworks and then flames out might even give the writers at Days of Our Lives pause, even Stefano DiMera might find that a little too on the nose—but I digress) and who used to sing “The Lass of Aughrim” to her.
As it turns out, Michael Furey was the great love of Gretta’s life, or as she allows when she confesses all this to Gabriel, she was “great with him” when they were young. We are meant to believe that Furey died because of this passion for Gretta (and also of a not-insignificant, co-occurring case of tuberculosis). Upon discovering that she was returning to her convent school away from Galway where they both lived, Furey comes out in the pouring rain to stand beneath her window to profess his love. When she begs him to return home and stay warm, he says (more or less) that he would rather die than live without her. And a week later, he does die.
After Gretta finishes her confession and then cries herself to sleep, Gabriel is left, on the Feast of Epiphany, staring out at a bright streetlight shining into their window. When they arrive in their room, Joyce writes, “A ghostly light from the street lamp lay in a long shaft from one window to the door.” Before Gretta begins to speak, “she walk[s] along the shaft of light towards him.” If you’re not getting the epiphany thing loud and clear here, again, we might not be simpatico, but I bear you no ill will.
As Gabriel lies down beside his wife, who has sobbed herself to sleep, the snow begins to fall hard outside, and Joyce gives us a sentence that I can’t even type without feeling tears well in my eyes, probably the most recognizable sentence in this very famous story: “Snow was general all over Ireland.” For Gabriel (or for Joyce, Gabriel’s creator), snow comes to symbolize the fact that we are all of us born to die—young, old, middle-aged—the most run-of-the-mill of all our realities is the one that we each encounter last. As he contemplates this reality, Gabriel pictures snow falling on the grave of the “delicate” Michael Furey and feels generosity well up unbidden towards this long-dead boy as well as towards Gretta, the long-ago girl who loved him. The moment of revelation has come, but Gabriel allows it to soften rather than harden him. No eye-gouging, literal or figurative, necessary.
When he looks at his sleeping wife, he feels neither the sentimental lust he’d felt earlier nor a harsh judgment either of her or of himself. He notices, as he ponders her sleeping face, that she has aged, and is full of “friendly pity” for the lines that have grown there and deepened. Slowly, as he lies in bed, watching the snow fall heavily in the shaft of streetlight, he enters a thin place: a place where the lines that separate living from dead, the lines that separate the transcendent from the everyday, grow porous. We see him calmly contemplating the reality that his beloved aunts will die, that he will die, and he pictures the snow, general over Ireland, falling peacefully on the land where Michael Furey has lain all this time.
In other words, somewhere in the midway between the florid and the ordinary, in that thinnest of places, Gabriel comes to gracefully accept this new knowledge. He doesn’t run from or towards anything in reactivity or violence. He simply falls asleep peacefully beside his sleeping wife, as snow falls before the streetlamp outside.
There are few pieces of writing advice I’ve heard more frequently than to never write about an epiphany. To never write about an anagnorisis. It’s too easy, you see. Too quick. It’s cheater storytelling. It bypasses the slow work of internal change. But the truth is, I had my own epiphany. Under the snow just like Gabriel. Under the actual lamppost pictured below, behind the Second Unitarian Church of Chicago, Illinois, as snow fell in December, and I sat on the back stoop of my apartment complex watching the residents of Briar Place wake up. I wrote my book because of that epiphany (I’m not going to TELL you what the epiphany was—you’ll have to wait until October). In the twenty-one years (and counting) that have elapsed since that night in December 2003, nearly every thing in my life has been altered because of that one moment, that one lightbulb’s shift from ignorance into insight, that one point from which I could have hardened, but I didn’t. It was the thinnest place I’ve ever been (and I’ve been to Iona Abbey, supposedly one of the thinnest of places—mostly I just remember blowing my nose a lot and trying to find the least inelegant ways to be a practicing mouth-breather because I had a horrible sinus infection at the time).
I have done my best to write a book that resists the worst of my own sentimental tug to the lyrical and florid (though some still remains). And yet, that really is what happened. I really was sitting under a lamppost in the softly falling snow (smoking a lit cigarette, no less-- sorry, Mom and Dad). And if that moment is cinematic at all, it’s no less real because of that. Not all reality is run-of-the-mill. And sometimes epiphanies really do jump-start the long, slow, circuitous work of internal change.
In Greek theater, the change that occurs after the moment of revelation is called the peripeteia. Transliterated, this simply means to turn around and is sometimes used to indicate the reversal of fortune for the protagonist. After that night in the streetlight, every single fact about my life changed: my marriage ended. I dropped out of the PhD program that had been my dream. I left my apartment. I left Chicago. But much more importantly, Grinch-style, my heart changed, and rapidly, that night. And if nothing else, the work of memoir, I believe, is to show how the mind and the heart can move. I’ve done my best to show that in writing, as I’ve done my best in my life to move and to make choices differently since that night the snow fell general above me.
After all these years of working alone, I can’t wait to share these stories with you. Thank you for reading this first little entry. I promise they won’t all be this long. 😊
Pictured here (this is an iPhone pic of the back stoop of my former apartment in Chicago and the lamppost behind the Second Unitarian Church on Barry Street—this is the Briar Place side of both). I took this photo while back in Boystown a few years ago for a StoryStudio writing conference at the Center on Halsted.
