Happy New Year!

James Joyce’s classic story, “The Dead”, takes place at a New Year’s dinner-dance in Dublin in 1904. It is filled with colorful personalities, and is a glimpse of a bygone era.

The hostesses of the annual dinner are the Misses Kate and Julia Morkan, frail elderly aunts of the story’s central characters, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta, the crisis in whose marriage provides the dramatic through-line of this deeply emotional story.

“The Dead,” is the final work in Joyce’s famous collection of short stories, Dubliners, depicting the lives of different people living in and around Dublin, Ireland at the turn of the 20th century. In it, Joyce conveys a broad societal image of a generation and its values and traditions and holiday rites, and, at the same time, he centers it all on an intense and intimate portrait of one couple, the Conroys.

Shorts literary commentator Hannah Tinti notes that “Joyce is known as a master of the “epiphany”—a culmination of plot twists that lead to a single moment of revelation. Nearly every story in Dubliners has one of these moments of understanding, and the epiphany at the end of “The Dead” is one of the most famous in all of literature.”

This program features Part 2 of “The Dead,” and we rejoin the story just as the sumptuous festive meal is underway and Gabriel Conroy is preparing to make his traditional after-dinner speech in praise of his hostesses and their vanishing generation. The show includes period music by one of Joyce’s favorite singers, the Irish tenor John McCormack, and a performance of another song with narrative significance in the story, “The Lass of Aughrim.” The performers are Rene Auberjonois, Fionnula Flanagan and Isaiah Sheffer.

Can’t get enough James Joyce? Isaiah hosts Bloomsday on Broadway at Symphony Space every year on Bloomsday.

To hear the show, find your local station or subscribe to the podcast.

Photo credit: SNC11054 by bradleypjohnson via Flickr