Gabriel Conroy (Bret Harte)
Item
Title
Gabriel Conroy (Bret Harte)
Description
Harte’s novel recounts the story of a pilgrim party trapped by a snowstorm in the Sierra mountain range in California and is, in part, inspired by the historical details of the Donner Party, a group of migrants who – trapped by snow in the Sierras on their journey West in 1846/7– reverted to cannibalism to survive. Joyce names his protagonist in ‘The Dead’ after the titular character of Harte’s novel, but there are further resonances between the two works. The novel opens with a dense and vivid passage describing a blizzard, “Snow. Everywhere. As far as the eye could reach […] and still falling.” Snow and snowfall play both a tonal and thematic role in Joyce’s short story, too. At the close of ‘The Dead’, in one of the most acclaimed prose passages in literature, Joyce employs an image of a dense blanket of snow that, in its faint but insistent falling, comes to absorb and occlude all of the characters and historical events referenced within the story. Gerhard Friedrich, who first drew attention to the allusion to Harte, highlights the resonance between the passage that opens Harte’s book and the passage which closes Joyce’s story. More recently, digging deeper into the resonances that Joyce may have wished to elicit from Harte’s novel, Bonnie Roos makes a compelling argument that Joyce alludes to Harte’s tale of cannibalisation in order to address obliquely the oppressive historical spectre of the Famine. Similarly, Nikhil Gupta argues that – in alluding to Harte – Joyce’s target is the nationalist sentiment of the day and its romantic exoticisation of ‘the West’.
Subject
Intertextual Reference in 'The Dead'
Date
1882
