Discourse Analysis of Thomas Jackson Rice’s “Consuming High Culture: Allusion and Structure in ‘The Dead’”

“Such boon we accord in due measure. Life’s term                            “How my body stands in the world

We lengthen should any be moved for love’s sake                              I do not know. So privileged is this rim

To forego life’s fulfilment, renounce in the germ                                of Ptolomea, that often souls fall to it

Fruit mature – bliss or woe – either infinite.”                                      before dark Atropos has cut their thread.”

 --    Apollo and the Fates, Robert Browning                                           --    The Inferno: Canto XXXIII, Dante Alighieri

In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”, the main character Gabriel digresses for a brief moment to contemplate his decision to include a quote from a poem by Robert Browning, fearing its lines would “be above the heads of his hearers” (Joyce, 24). Eventually choosing not to include the quote, the reader is left challenged by Joyce to fill in the holes. In his New Historicist essay “Consuming High Culture: Allusion and Structure in ‘The Dead’”, Thomas Jackson Rice attempts to fill the absence Joyce has intentionally left by using textual evidence from “The Dead” itself, while considering Joyce’s other work Ulysses, Robert Browning’s poetry, and another important text, Dante’s Inferno, that may have influenced the thematic choices made by both Browning and Joyce. 

          In his essay, Rice chooses to place the thesis at the end of the second paragraph, stating:

Browning too hovers as an absent presence in the conclusion of “The Dead” and, more important, the identification of Gabriel’s unused Browning quote fills one very basic gap in the story: connecting the ostensible climax of Gabriel’s evening, his after –dinner speech, with the actual climax of the tale, Gabriel’s concluding vision of “the region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.” (245)

The thesis is specifically left out of the introduction paragraph so Rice can prove a point that Joyce has done this before: Joyce’s method of leaving out information, even if the information is not critical to understanding the plot, is a way for author to connect with reader, to hook them into making “an absence a presence” and find deeper meaning through what is not said (Rice, 245). As Rice asserts in his thesis, without identifying these “ghosts” the reader has no real connection between Gabriel’s speech and the ending of the story, which at first glance seem to be unrelated.  Rice suggests that by “applying the strategies of Ulysses criticism” to Joyce’s potential intended meaning of the story’s final pages with the Browning quote, and the vague influences of both Browning and Dante Alighieri's Inferno (Rice, 245).

            Rice then supports his claim with critical analysis, only he is refuting the work of another scholar, John Feeley, who has attempted to figure out which Browning poem Gabriel could have been considering quoting from. Rice states Feeley’s argument for the poem “Asolando” and the reasoning behind this choice, and then disputes Feeley’s idea by using the historical context of “The Dead” itself, showing that “Asolando” was written in 1889, and despite its “funereal symbolism” the poem has no other real connection to the short story (Rice, 246). He emphasizes his point by referencing the magazine Gabriel wrote for, The Daily Express, saying “Gabriel’s purported review of Browning’s [“Asolando”] would probably have been an essay on a recently published late volume, a far more plausible occasion for a review than the American reissue of a British collected volume” (Rice, 246). This context discredits Feeley’s claims and gives Rice the perfect transition into his own theory of the missing Browning quote.

            Rice then uses textual evidence from Browning’s volume of poems Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day to reveal the “thematic affinities between Browning’s prologue to his volume, titled ‘Apollo and the Fates,’ and Joyce’s ‘The Dead’” (Rice, 246). Rice gives the context of the poem and established the structural metaphor that enhances the themes of the tragic death of a lover for another, the extension of life, resurrection, egoism, and sacredness of hospitality, all of which connect back to prominent themes in “The Dead”. Rice reminds the reader of the allusions to mythology throughout “The Dead”, especially when Gabriel compares his aunts to the Graces, who are the light antitheses of the Fates, during his dinner speech.

            After listing off a few theories as to why Gabriel does not quote Browning in his speech, Rice delves deeper into a broader connection of both “The Dead” and “Apollo and the Fates” to Dante’s Inferno. Rice uses more historical context to affirm that Joyce was in fact influenced by Dante in that “during [Joyce’s] several months stay in Rome, in 1906-7, he was also renewing his acquaintance with Dante’s Commedia” (Rice, 247), connecting to the feeling of hostility towards the power of the Church. Since Joyce was writing “The Dead” around the same time as his reconnection with Dante, Rice points out the direct influences of Dante, “particularly in the symbolic setting of its last scene” (Rice, 247) which includes direct reference to the ninth circle of the Inferno, a lake of ice in which the dead never die, imbedded in ice for eternity, in which souls are condemned for their sins against hospitality, a large theme found in Browning’s “Apollo and the Fates”. He connects this back to Gabriel’s modification of his speech to include the condemnation of the Irish virtue of hospitality, a mistake that causes him to enter into his own personal circle of snow-covered hell.

            In the ending of Rice’s essay, he seems to have a two part conclusion, or at least one conclusion leads into the other. First, Rice concludes that without the context of the Robert Browning poem and the influence of Dante, the reader can never truly understand the mythological allusion structuring the connection between Gabriel’s speech and the ending of “The Dead”. This idea transitions Rice into a larger discussion of the reason for Joyce’s pattern of excluding seemingly unimportant information that only appears to the reader in afterthought during a deeper analysis of his work and the political subtext of this pattern by once again revisiting Ulysses. Despite finally giving the reader a specific poem, Rice never actually gives particular lines from “Apollo and the Fates” that he thinks may have been the lines Gabriel was thinking of. Even though Rice probably has certain lines in mind, he does state any specific ones, as to not steal away the opportunity for the reader to make the author-reader connection and discover a personal interpretation of “The Dead”.