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James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ fell into the hands of two of the most celebrated filmmakers of the twentieth century, Roberto Rossellini and John Huston, who made, respectively, Voyage in Italy (1953) and The Dead (1987). This essay seeks to measure some consequences of their re-working for cinema of the material structures of Joyce’s complex written text. Joyce’s story has an extraordinary narrative structure: it is almost 20,000 words in length, and of that total only the last 2,500 cover what readers find to be the ‘real’ story, that is the story of Gretta and Michael Furey and its revelation to Gabriel. The American writer and critic Allen Tate was one of many to notice this when he wrote: ‘The [Furey] incident is one of great technical difficulty, for no preparation, in its own terms, was possible’ in the first nine-tenths of the story.1 For a filmmaker such a narrative structure is, in John Huston’s phrase, an ‘extravagant’ challenge. Huston was not the first to take up the challenge and to adopt ‘The Dead’ for the screen. In 1953 Roberto Rossellini was looking for a script after his bid for the rights to a Gertrude Stein novel had failed.2 Stein’s novel Duo (1934) is another account of the ‘happily married’ couple whose marriage is falling apart under the pressure of a previous love. With Stein’s text off-limits, Rossellini decided to work with whatever came to hand, blurring the outlines of the Stein novel with the contours of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. He asked no-one for the rights and he gave Joyce no credit. But Rossellini litters the film with clues. The couple at the centre of the film (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) are named Mr and Mrs Joyce, Alex and Katherine. Their voyage in Italy gives the movie its title. And, in one more gesture of recognition to Ulysses, Joyce’s Dublin Odyssey, this Joycean voyage in Italy has for its motive a visit to the villa of a dead uncle: Uncle Homer. Given the more direct relationship between Joyce’s text and John Huston’s The Dead, this essay will have more to say about Huston’s work 149 10. Tracing Joyce ‘The Dead’ in Huston and Rossellini KEVIN BARRY than that of Rossellini. However, a juxtaposition of both directors’ takes on Joyce reveals the distinctiveness of each cinematic adaptation. Let us look briefly at how Huston and Rossellini manage the climactic moment of Joyce’s story: the sudden desolate revelation by a wife to her husband that in the past a man died for love of her. Huston, who set himself the task of appearing faithful to Joyce’s narrative structure, places this revelation at the end of the story. Rossellini, under no such constraint, places it in the middle. Rossellini transforms the Irish scene into quite another idiom with his Mr and Mrs Joyce being emotionally calibrated in quite a different manner to Joyce’s Gabriel and Gretta. When Katherine, employing the same phrases as those of Gretta about Michael Furey below her window, recounts to Alex the death of her young poet Charles, her husband’s lack of compassion is accentuated by the sudden imprint on the soundtrack of a tuneless whistling off screen. The contrast with Huston’s conception of the story is strong, not only in the narrative structuring of Joyce’s climactic revelation and Gabriel’s response, but also in the management of dislocation by Rossellini’s soundtrack. By contrast with Rossellini’s offkey score, we find in Huston’s film a serenity that is ensured by a heavily coded use of musical instrumentation. The piano corresponds to ceremony without sensibility, as in Mary Jane’s performance and also the quadrilles at the moment of Gabriel’s row with Miss Ivors. Passionate sensibility is marked in the film by two different kinds of music: bowed stringed instruments and the singing voice. The structural encoding of different kinds of instrumentation is consistent across both diegetic (piano and human voice) and extra-diegetic music (bowed stringed instruments and harp). In the extra-diegetic instrumentation viewers of the film may notice the sudden surge of strings when Aunt Kate finishes her ecstatic words about Parkinson, or the continuation of Bartell D’Arcy’s singing voice into a warm brief surge of strings as Gretta (Anjelica Huston) gathers herself and descends the stairs. These strings continue into the carriage shared by Gretta...

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