Old Sleepy Hollow Calls Over the World: Washington Irving and Joyce's "The Dead"

Joyce's work seldom reflects the significance of America in the Irish cultural imagination of his day. This omission is most conspicuous in Dubliners, where, arguably, the presence of America as a western escape route would have worked counter to the atmosphere of arrest and enclosure, the sense of "paralysis," that Joyce wished to maintain in the book. America does not loom as the emigration possibility we might expect it to in the often cramped lives of Dubliners characters--as it does, for example, in the background of Máirtin Ó Cadhain's stories or Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, granted that those authors portray more western and emigration-inclined areas of Ireland. ¹ Eveline's romantic pass at escape in "Eveline" involves a ticket to Buenos Aires, not to Boston or New York. In "The Boarding House," flight to America never flashes across Doran's mind, even as a remote possibility, despite the bind he is in in Dublin. He does long to "fly away to another country," but the wish is vague and without conviction; no idea of specifically American passage, a strong tradition in the period for young Irishmen for whom Ireland had become too awkward, is entertained. ² While the emigré returning from America and looking askance at his homeland is a familiar figure in Irish experience, Joyce uses the British equivalent instead in the condescending Ignatius Gallagher back from London in "A Little Cloud," and the enticing foreign places about which Gallagher reminisces for Chandler's benefit are European, as all the dim geographical alternatives in Dubliners tend to be. The boy who narrates "An Encounter," to cite another example, relishes American westerns and detective stories, but, notwithstanding his declared wanderlust, like Doran, he never gives a real thought to going to the States.

The evidence of Joyce's writings overall, in fact, suggests a sense of America similar to that of the "Encounter" narrator: little intercourse with the United States in actuality, but a significant mythical, literary and popular-cultural fascination. Joyce is thought to have taken the name "Gabriel Conroy" and perhaps some of the snow imagery in "The Dead" from Bret Harte's 1871 novel Gabriel Conroy, for instance. ³ Another item from the same author appears in Ulysses: the "heathen Chinee," from a line of Harte's ballad "Plain Talk from Truthful James." ⁴ The American "Buffalo Bill Shoots to kill / Never missed and he never will" occurs in Ulysses too (U510), as does Buck Mulligan's quoting Walt Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself" (U14).

Terence Brown sees Bret Harte's article "The Rise of the Short Story," published in Cornhill Magazine in 1899, as another probable Harte influence on Joyce. Harte's piece argued that the strength of the American short story lay in a thorough and unapologetic American localism "with no fastidious ignoring of its habitual expression, or the inchoate poetry that may be found even hidden in its slang." Brown notes that

The remarkable similarity between this description of the short story's potential and Joyce's exploitation of the form tempts one to imagine that the young Joyce . . . had read this essay when he embarked on Dubliners. And it may indeed have been his memory of the fact that one of Harte's stories ("The Luck of Roaring Camp"), had, in Harte's own words, been 'objected to by both printer and publisher . . . for not being in the conventional line of subject, treatment, and morals'.. . that prompted him [Joyce] in 1906, as his own problems with a printer mounted, to enquire of his brother, 'Ought I buy a volume of Bret Harte.' . . . In 1920 the library which Joyce left behind him in Trieste contained two of Harte's books, Gabriel Conroy . . . and Tales of the West.⁵

Another American trailblazer of the short story form, Washington...