Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue

15. Dead Again

❦ 343 15 Dead Again MARGOT NORRIS AND VINCENT P. PECOR A Our essays reflect the new theoretical perspectives we have acquired in the years since we each first published work on Joyce’s story “The Dead” some decades ago. However, we approached these new readings in slightly different ways. Vincent Pecora responded in a revisionist spirit to his own 1986 “PMLA” essay on the story, attempting to come to terms both with certain lacunae in that reading and with his own change in perspective after more than twenty-five years of teaching and reflection. Margot Norris began by specifically engaging with Pecora’s 1986 piece as a point of departure—and putting it into dialogue with her own early discussions of the intersection of aesthetics and gender in the work. Here she brings “Possible World Theory,” a branch of narratology, to bear on the question of Gabriel and Gretta’s relationship to narration and writing in order to address the figures’ motives and sensibilities insofar as they shape the reader’s engagement with the conundrum of their marriage. The conversation that ensued after we exchanged essays was very much a product of the Internet era: the authors began to correspond via e-mail, quite informally at first, and what is included here as an appendix is more or less the entirety of their dialogue . What is striking in retrospect is the degree to which the e-mail conversation , albeit accidentally, reproduces some of the characteristics of pretelephonic intellectual life, a life once recorded in voluminous epistolary debate. Of course, what was once true about such correspondence—the fact that it was often preserved in “hard copy” for decades, even for centuries—is generally speaking no longer the case. Today we routinely purge servers and hard drives of our written dialogues in ways that would make Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa” an 344 ❦ M A RG O T NOR R I S A N D V I NC E N T P. PE C OR A unimaginable work of art. Perhaps, though, we need to reconsider the enormous potential hidden in once again “writing,” rather than speaking, to one another, a “semantic potential,” as Jürgen Habermas might say, that for many years would seem to have been lost. The Inkbottle and the Paraclete, by Vincent P. Pecora The invitation to reconsider a story about which I first wrote more than twenty-five years ago has been an occasion for some personal reflection on the whole business of literary criticism, and especially on what I might call the irreducible vicissitudes of interpretation. That the things from which we derive meaning seem to change with time because we have changed is of course a truism, and this point applies to places and people just as much as to stories and poems. But at least on this occasion, I found it to be an interesting truism, full of possibilities. And so, like Wordsworth returned to Tintern Abbey, I found myself looking back on what I had written about “The Dead,” “with gleams of half extinguished thought, / With many recognitions dim and faint, / And somewhat of a sad perplexity.” It is the perplexity I felt on rereading both the story and what I wrote about it that I want to share in what follows—a perplexity much less sad than Wordsworth’s, but the consequence of recognitions dim and faint all the same. The story unfolds with the same nonjudgmental “scrupulous meanness ” of Flaubertian realism that distinguishes the earlier tales in the collection , with a heavy use of free-indirect discourse, though many have felt that it also marks a sort of departure for Joyce: it is a deeper, more developed piece of work; it points us toward the mature novels; and it seems to represent a reconciliation of sorts on Joyce’s part with an Ireland toward which, throughout the earlier stories, he had shown mostly bitterness and disdain. This last point, best argued by Joyce’s great biographer Richard Ellmann, albeit largely on the strength of a partial reading of one of Joyce’s letters, has been especially relevant for many critics, since Gabriel Conroy and his wife, Gretta, share characteristics of Joyce and his eventual wife, Nora, and since the narrative pattern of initial bitterness and disdain toward Ireland leading toward a kindlier acceptance seems to be repeated in Joyce’s subsequent Dead Again ❦ 345 A Portrait of the Artist...