Cannibal Joyce

4. Consuming High Culture: Allusion and Structure in “The Dead”

4 Consuming High Culture Allusion and Structure in “The Dead” May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our industries . Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue. —U 2.324–30 Readers familiar with Ulysses will instantly recognize this paragraph from the Nestor episode as the text of the first half of Mr. Garrett Deasy’s letter on the foot-and-mouth disease, although it is quite clearly not the text as written by Deasy. Deasy assures Stephen Dedalus “I don’t mince words, do I?” (U 2.331), immediately following this very “minced” version of his letter’s opening. I will return to this passage and consider the implications of Joyce’s mincing of text in my final chapter. For the present, however, let us consider the readers’ likely response to the assortment of sentence fragments, undeveloped allusion , and, for most readers, unfamiliar references to mid-nineteenth-century Irish politics and economics in Deasy’s letter. The first-time reader of Ulysses could be pardoned a “classical” confusion at this early point in the novel. What has happened to Deasy’s letter is that it has filtered rapidly through the reading mind of Stephen, a reader much better placed than the reader of Ulysses to anticipate and absorb what Deasy has to say; Stephen’s attention is only momentarily arrested by the substantives and the stylistic quirks (clich és, circumlocutions) of the letter—and these are all that remain in Ulysses’s text. The reader is challenged to fill the gaps, to complete the sentences, perhaps to research the references, to note the “classical allusion,” and thus to digest and create a plausibly coherent narrative out of this minced text. In 62 / Cannibalizing Literature effect, this is what the reader has to do throughout Ulysses; so, reading Mr. Deasy’s letter becomes an exercise in the necessary strategies for reading the novel that contains it, much as the famous letter becomes a model of the text within the text of Finnegans Wake. To borrow Brook Thomas’s term, the reader of Ulysses is compelled to make the “ghosts” of the book materialize, filling its Leerstellen, those inevitable gaps that exist in a text. In James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Book of Many Happy Returns, Thomas describes how such absences become a form of “presence” in Joyce’s novel. Through a Brunonian reconciliation of opposites, Thomas argues that Joyce’s “art of writing [. . .] seems to have the power to turn absence into presence, sundering into reconciliation, escape into return” (97), and proceeds to show how Stephen, Joyce, and the readers are mutually engaged in this process, turning and returning to the text, fashioning meaning by filling the gaps in texts. Leerstellen such as when exactly did Molly say “at Four”? whathappenedattheWestlandRowstation?andwhomovedthefurniturein Bloom’s parlor? have provoked more than one analysis of Ulysses. But it is also clear that this process of identifying and materializing the ghosts of a text applies to Joyce’s earlier fiction as well, and, as Wolfgang Iser has argued, to the reading of all texts. Conspicuous absences abound in Dubliners, for example, absences that constitute a kind of presence. The readers are irresistibly drawn to these gaps, challenged to fill them, to make an absence a presence, and thus to complete the exasperatingly unfinished sentences of the stories. Interpretations of Dubliners routinely do this: completing Old Cotter’s sentences one way or another in “The Sisters,” speculating about what the “old josser” (D 26) actually does in “An Encounter,” paraphrasing the subtext of the boy’s apparently inconsequential conversation with the shopgirl in “Araby,” examining Frank’s possible motives in “Eveline,” explaining what Corley and the slavey have been up to in “Two Gallants,” describing Farrington’s abject apology to Mr. Alleyne, or identifying the “soft wet substance” (D 105) touched by Maria in “Clay.” For the most part, the readers complete the “parallelogram” of these “gnomonic” texts with ease (see D. Weir 343–60); however, with the growth of Joyce’s artistry in “The Dead” there comes a multiplication of the gaps in the text and an increase in their complexity and suggestiveness: what...