OOO as a Critical Approach to James Joyce's "The Dead:" by Jessica Maginity

Windows in James Joyce’s The Dead:

Looking Out, Looking In, and Caught Somewhere In Between

            What is a window?  That’s an easy enough question to answer.  A window is a sheet of glass stuck somewhere in the middle of a wall.  It is usually in the shape of a rectangle and if you live in a house with small children, it is probably characterized by smudges and occasional traces of finger paint (or that’s what you hope it is at least).  But, the truth is, we don’t really think of windows as they are – we think of what they do.  It at once connects and separates, reveals and conceals, dims and brightens.  Inevitably overlooked, you stare through it as you stare at it.  Less than a wall and more than a door, the window both blocks the outside and traps the inside.  It is defined entirely by what it reveals, by its function as both a barrier and as a conduit from the inside out and vice versa, and by how it separates the revelations from each other.  Windows play an interesting role in James Joyce’s The Dead, but it’s still easy to overlook them because of what they do.  They serve to separate the inside and the outside while still remaining as an uncomfortable reminder of both the other’s existence and the existence of a barrier.  They serve as reminders of barriers and as physical barriers for the inside and the outside in terms of time, political and national identity, and personal relationships; though it is easy to overlook the significance of their physical “thingness,” it is important also to remember their physical existence without the help of symbolism.

            I repeat my initial question: what is a window?  A window is a paradox – denies its own existence by functioning to reveal its environment.  Yet, this answer only works if we presuppose our position outside of the window, observing it for its functionality and not for what it is.  A window is perplexing to define except in terms of its relationship to its environment, though. It literally withdraws from its surface in the process of existing.  Though “if an object were absent from us, it would still be present to itself” (Harman 196), a window is simply a pane of glass without its relationship to inside and outside.  It is positioned uniquely to exist in two different realities at the same time, to mark the end and the beginning of each.  Its existence provides a barrier, and yet it is not a barrier – its relational existence requires that it function as one, but while its positioning permits its function, it is simply a window. 

The first explicit reference to a window in The Dead emphasizes the window’s physical being, establishing it as a thing apart: “Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window.  How cool it must be outside!  How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! . . . How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!” (Joyce 34).  The “cold pane of the window” exerts its influence by physically exerting its selfhood onto the special relationship between Gabriel and the outside.  Its relational influence is derived from its physical autonomy.  The influence, as I’ve mentioned, both separates Gabriel from the outside and defines the inside as something different from the outside.  The window takes on the outside’s attribute of cold, deceiving Gabriel into feeling a connection with the outside and the privacy he longs for.  Yet it still functions as exactly the opposite, as a barrier.  It makes Gabriel feel both inside and outside, and yet not entirely in either place because he is made to feel that he occupies that same limbo-state as the window, that in-between place which is neither one nor the other.  However, the very physicality of the window denies Gabriel that status, another indication of the influence exerted by the window as an autonomous object.

While Gabriel is preparing for dinner, he again fantasizes about being outside.  His first fantasy had been looking longingly outside; now, in a position of comfort and warmth, he imagines others looking inside: “People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there” (42).  His reversal of perspective is a product of his own state, with the inside changing from a place of discomfort to one of belonging.  Yet, the outside and the window remain the same.  The outside does not become a source of animosity because the inside has become a safe one – the inside is deprived of any power to influence the outside by the window.  Gabriel imagines outsiders looking in, not necessarily enviously, but curiously, listening for the sound of music.  The air remains pure outside; its appeal is the same.  Only Gabriel has changed and the window provides a boundary for the influence his internal state can have on his surroundings.

The window’s physical presence and its role as an in-between place makes it a boundary between internal and external states within Gabriel himself as well.  On the way to the hotel, Gabriel struggles with being overwhelmed by the physical “thereness” of his wife.  She, on the other hand, stares out the window looking tired.  Even though they are on the same side of the window, she draws toward the window, toward the outside, and away from him.  In doing so, she takes on the qualities of outside, becoming cold, distant, and abstracted.  Gabriel, on the other hand, takes on the qualities of the inside: warm, present, and involved, pressing his nose against the glass for a closer look at the woman on the other side.  Gabriel can see her, but seems incapable of touching her, even as they move into their hotel room.  He is frustrated by the disjunction between their emotional states, his warm, interior presence and her cold withdrawal from the present.  In order for them to touch, he needs her to come to him.

Interestingly, when Gretta fails to do this, Gabriel retreats to the window: “Gabriel threw his overcoat and hat on a couch and crossed the room towards the window.  He looked down into the street in order that his emotion might calm a little” (53).  The characters’ repeated reliance on the window to define their own interior state in relation to the exterior seems to be an extension of its influence as an object autonomous of relation.  It defines inside and outside as opposed to being defined by the juncture of inside and outside – it is quite literally the manifestation of the present, caught in between past and present, inside and outside, public and private, dead and alive.

We learn a few pages later that the separation is deeper than spatial – Gretta gazes through the window seeking the past as Gabriel finally inhabits the present.  The window is a physical reminder of barrier – she reminisces separated from her husband and from the imminent presence of the window – she is trapped on this side of time, but the window offers her the same illusion of in-betweeness, of being inside and outside, that it offered Gabriel in his awkward situation with Miss Ivors.  We don’t receive the context for her isolation until they arrive at their hotel.  She again returns to the window and “stood there, looking out” (54) before she tells the story of her past lover and his death.  The window’s role in separating past from present becomes explicit in this nostalgic scene.  The dead occupy the other side of the window; but it is just a window and outside is just the snow and Dublin and she surrenders to the present.  As she weeps, “Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window” (58).  He returns to his side of the window separating husband and wife, respecting the boundary between them by retreating to the physical reminder of the gap between them.

After Gabriel lies down next to his wife, he looks out the window a final time and we get the infamous closing of The Dead:

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, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. . . . 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.  (59)

There is a lot to unpack in this paragraph, so let’s begin at the beginning.  The passage is introduced with “a few light taps” on the window, again establishing the physical immanence of the window.  From there, it moves to the outside, describing the falling snow.  The snow covers everything that has defined the outside for Gabriel: the national identity of Ireland, the physical outside, the dead, and the past (as implicit in its present state, for example, Michael Furey implicitly is equivalent with Gretta’s past).  At some point in this prose poem of a conclusion, the element of boundary is dissolved: the snow “is general all over Ireland,” past and present, interior and exterior, etc.  I argue that this final dissolution of boundaries implies that the narrator achieves the in-between status of the window.  The physical fact of being a boundary would render boundaries meaningless to the window itself; it is inside and outside at all times because it simply is.  The sentence before this paragraph, “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,” (59) explicitly describes a process of transcending boundaries. 

Previous accounts of the window show that it takes on the qualities of inside and outside, past and present, isolation and company, and conveys the attributes from one side to another.  The window is precisely the paradox needed to comprehend this final paragraph, in which an individual identity is dissolved into a landscape, who at the same time internalizes this same landscape in his comprehension of it.  The window itself achieves this state throughout the story; it is the sole constant in the relationship between interiority and exteriority.  By occupying the space in between, it simultaneously enforces and breaks down the spatial and temporal boundaries between the characters and their worlds.

Part B.  Reflections:

OOO and The Dead

            My analysis of The Dead was informed by an object oriented ontological approach.  Before explaining why I chose to use an object-oriented theory to analyze Joyce’s work, I will give a brief account for what exactly it is.  Ian Bogost defines the term helpfully in his “What Is Object-Oriented Ontology?” thus:

“Ontology is the philosophical study of existence.  Object-oriented ontology (OOO for short) puts things at the center of this study.  Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally . . . In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism).  OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales. . . , and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves. (Bogost “What is Object-Oriented Ontology”)

So, object-oriented ontology contends that everything exists equally and should be treated as such.  A spoon should not be the thing that conveys soup from a bowl to your mouth, but a spoon – a physical entity comprised of something more than its usefulness to people.  That’s the bread and butter of the philosophy, but Graham Harman and Timothy Morton complicate it as they describe its usefulness in applying it to literature.  I won’t go into extreme detail, but before I explain why I found OOO helpful in reading The Dead, I should bring up a few of the points I took from their articles.

            In “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” Harman discusses the origins of OOO and contrasts it with other philosophies that require objects to be conceptualized by humans and positioned in relationship to humans in order to have significance.  OOO is a reaction against that branch of philosophy, declaring the autonomy of “things-in-themselves” (Harman 185).  He emphasizes the “non-relational” (188) aspect of things and the importance of discovering an object’s essence as a whole entity, not a part of a whole or a system of related objects and not solely the objects exterior utility.  The relational aspects of an object create a paradoxical element within existence itself: an object is both its appearance and its essence, it interacts with other things and yet recedes from its interaction to contradict itself.  Morton’s “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry” explains this “appearance” and its “essence.”  It’s appearance is its past: its physical reality has been shaped by past conditions; its essence is its potential, its meaning, its future influence: “Even the object itself is not an adequate expression of itself.  The object withdraws – even from itself.  There is a profound rift . . . between essence and appearance” (Morton 209).  The object itself, then, negotiates the two by existing physically in the present – just as the window exists between the outside and the inside. 

            In my analysis of The Dead, I used the idea of simultaneous projection of influence and withdrawal from access to describe the function of windows both autonomously and in relation to their environment.  By functioning as both a barrier and a…well, a window, the window as an object promotes this very dichotomy of influence and withdrawal between states of existence (inside and outside, etc.).  This trend of projection/withdrawal is not limited to my discussion of the window, however.  It also helps us to understand Gabriel’s relationship with people, especially his wife.  She is both physically, aesthetically there, yet essentially distant – as we see in the scene where Gabriel sees her standing at the top of the stairwell.  This is perhaps the most obvious example, but contact falling short of connection defines social relations throughout the dinner party.  In these instances, it is useful to think of  people as objects in order to fully explore the consequences of their relations.

I didn’t go quite this far in my analysis, however, because I was prevented by the stress which Harman puts on the non-relationality of objects.  This function of people-as-objects can only be demonstrated in relation to other objects, which contradicts his philosophy.  If this hadn’t been a concern, I might have been able to discuss how the ambiguous nature of the window as a border and a connection paralleled the ambiguous role of the narrator in the text.  As the window’s existence both defines the inside and outside of the house, the narrator’s position orients the “inside” and “outside” of our perceptions.  We are very much inside Gabriel’s mind; yet, at the same time, Gabriel seems very much out of tune with his surroundings.  And so our position as readers is determined by whether or not the narrative succeeds in negotiating that boundary between Gabriel’s perception and the reality of the situation.  Are we permitted to transcend, as he does in the end, or are we still limited to the status of outsider?

Morton is also a little more forgiving of the relational aspect of an object’s existence: “Matter requires some “observer” (whether they are sentient or not, human or not, is irrelevant) “for whom” matter is posited.  Moreover, matter implies the existence of at least one other entity from which the matter in question differs” (Morton 218).  I borrowed very heavily from this idea in my conception of the window as the in-betweenness between interiority and exteriority.  I also deviated in that it takes on the qualities of either one depending on the observer’s relationship to the window.

Overall, though, I found the approach to be very helpful in conceptualizing the overall structure of the story in terms of boundaries and transgressions.  The emphasis on physicality forced me to look at the role that the window plays in defining Gabriel’s relationship to his world and the relationship of what happens in the story to what is happening in Ireland in general.  The story takes place on the inside, but the awareness of the cold outside creates a tension.  The jovial occasion, the role of tradition, and the social cohesion of friends and families creates the warmth and comfort characteristic of the interior, but that comfort can be shattered easily with any intrusion of the outside political and religious tensions into that world.  The progression of that party is a negotiation of those two influences, resulting in tension for the narrator. 

            In conclusion, I find Object-Oriented Ontology compulsive as an approach because it deals with the reality of things in the most intimate terms possible: the simple fact of their existence.  It explores their significance and relationships to other objects, but it treats a poem and a spoon the same way: they both exist and have certain properties which are undeniably theirs.  OOO has a lot to offer literary criticism because of the way that it emphasizes a balance between relational and non-relational aspects of an object – it reconciles context with identity.  This is true when looking both at specific elements within a text and when looking at the text as a whole: it is necessary, as Harman says, to look at the properties that belong to the text itself and those that are influenced by it’s social/historical context.  OOO, instead of imposing a system of values onto a work, seeks to bring out the essence of the work itself.  Its very newness as an approach and its focus on paradox and existence helps it in this and makes it a flexible approach to any text.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. “What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Definition for Ordinary Folk.” Ian Bogost – Videogame Theory, Criticism, Design, 8 Dec. 2009. Web.

Harmon, Graham. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History (2013): 186-.Project Muse. Web.

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Daniel R. Schwarz. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1994. 21-59. Print.

Morton, Timothy. “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History (2012): 205-224). Project Muse. Web.