The Poetics of Mourning: The Tropologic of Prosopopoeia in Joyce's "The Dead"

"One mourns less for what was than for what can no longer happen now."

—Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions

In his pioneering rethinking of received attitudes about autobiography, Paul de Man (1984) lays bare the tropological structure of referentiality operative in, and constitutive of, every autobiographical discourse. The logic of tropes, while being potentially restorative, is, de Man expounds, incurably privative; and prosopopoeia, the trope of autobiography par excellence, threatens to undermine the very restorative task it is called upon to accomplish. While being "the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter's reply, and confers upon it the power of speech" (75-76), prosopopoeia "cannot fail," de Man cautions, "to evoke the latent threat that inhabits [it], namely that by making the death [sic] speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death" (78). Perhaps de Man's is ultimately too bold a speculation, but I would like to suggest that it gains conceptual sanction if seen in the light of Joyce's "The Dead"—the last and greatest story in Dubliners (1914), most of which was written in the early years of the twentieth century and completed by 1907, but was not published, because of bitter disputes with publishers, until seven years later.

De Man's conceptualization of prosopopoeia as a composite trope involving not only the personification of the dead but also the simultaneous reification of the living is conducive to a psychoanalytic reflection on the nature and possibility of remembering and mourning. ¹ Furthermore, such a definition illuminates the narrative structure of "The Dead." By virtue of its symmetrical logic, prosopopoeia shapes the plot while hollowing out its thematic core. As its title implies, Joyce's story extends a narrative gesture to the dead via the emplotment of prosopopoeia. Yet the ending is sufficiently unresolved to suspend, if not to frustrate altogether, the very tropologic that the beginning has set in motion. Thus, while exhibiting the duplex nature of the trope, the story not only interrogates its alternating mode of operation, but also tests its power to carry out the latent threats of reification.

In this paper, I shall first seek to expound the correlation between the structure of prosopopoeia and the plot of "The Dead." When one remembers and mourns the deaths of others, I shall argue, one inevitably anticipates and mourns his or her own death. The logic of prosopopoeia thus merges with the experience of mourning and survival in such a way that one might speak, at least provisionally, of a therapoetics of prosopopoeia. Second, I shall explore the psychic and emotional impact of prosopopoeia on the characters who—lured by its conjuration of the dead as well as by the promise of reuniting with them—fall prey to the pretension of the trope to cure, and are thus victimized by its fundamental impotence. In this respect, I will try to articulate the emotional turmoil in which the effects of prosopopoeia leave both Gretta and Gabriel Conroy. While Gretta is jolted by an evocation of her dead childhood boyfriend, Gabriel is unsettled by an empathic involvement with Gretta's memories. Third, I shall argue that the prosopopoeic moment of remembering and mourning overlaps with Gabriel's ascendance into maturity. I thereby pave the way to contend that the figure of prosopopoeia in Joyce's story operates to thwart not only the Freudian work of mourning, but especially de Man's prophecy that "the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death." I conclude that "The Dead" leaves the subject held in automourning, suspended in a present without potentiality: past the end, yet at the same time bereft of it.

Conjuring up the Dead

The first movement of the story, which runs from the arrival of the...