A man does not recognize a woman. At the end of a party, Gabriel―that is his name―doesn't recognize a woman standing at the top of the first landing of the stairs. "It was his wife!" cautions the narrator of the final story of Dubliners. How is it that a man doesn't recognize his own wife? He doesn't recognize her because there is no sexual relation and there is no The Woman. Whilst listening to a song, Gabriel begins to see Greta, his wife, transfigured. He notices something in her that he had never noticed before. Joyce opens a gap in time. Lacan would call it an encounter; the writer calls it an epiphany. The gap is not rhetorical; it is an enigma between the lines. Gabriel will try to decipher his wife, whom he perceives as the symbol of something. Joyce plays with fire until he extracts a phrase from him: "He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music." If he were a painter he would paint her and call the painting Distant Music.
For Gabriel, the instant of the encounter introduces a rupture in knowledge. He does not know who his wife is or what she might be thinking. He does not know what to do with Greta. But he doesn't back down, he wants to know, so he will have to talk to her, something he hasn't done at all in the story so far. Joyce writes the impossible conversation between the lovers. This brings us to our situation, "the mountain chalet", which will take place after the party in a hotel surrounded by snow.
In a room, a man and a woman are talking. Gabriel subjects his wife to an inquisitional interrogation, making her cry until she collapses exhausted onto a bed. Greta cries in bed while thinking about another man, Michael Furey, who used to sing the song that captivated her a few hours earlier on the stairs at the party. At 17, he died for her: her husband's rival is a dead man. The battle is lost before it begins, Gabriel is condemned to impotence. "He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love." But that's not all…
Greta falls asleep while her husband continues thinking… Suddenly, Joyce introduces a formal break in his story allowing Gabriel to open a window other than that of his fantasy. Without moving from the bed, he turns his head towards the window and writes a poem. What does he write? He writes about the snow, like Saer writes about the rain. What he writes is not exactly what he sees, his snow is not specular. In his poem there is a double effect of metaphor and hole. A metaphor, for that of his wife which escapes from him―like snow between his fingers, or better yet, like snow escapes the writer, leaving footprints. Something is written. Like the love letter, the snow poem comes in the place of the impossible to say.