Dead: Story and Film, The

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Singer, Irving

More than one reviewer has said that John Huston's terminal film looks like the work of a man who was himself close to death. I am not sure that I know what this means, since not all people who think they are dying react to that circumstance in a similar manner. It is true that during the making of The Dead Huston needed an oxygen tank in order to breathe, but he could and did direct as he normally would have. His filming of Joyce's long short story, which was adapted for the screen by his son Tony Huston, can therefore be studied apart from his knowledge of his own imminent demise. For one thing the movie positions itself at the outset as a representation of the past and not the present or the future. It proffers what Huston's friend Orson Welles characterized as a "myth of the past," which Welles sought to investigate in several of his own films.

Huston's version begins with an introductory card that reads "Dublin 1904." That was more or less the year that Joyce wrote this novella about his city as he saw it at the time he was writing. The manuscript was completed in 1907 and was added on to earlier stories of Dubliners, which had been published in 1904. As Joyce intended them, all the entries were not about the past but about present-day life in Dublin.

Can there be a "myth" about the present? We may occasionally think of it in rosy terms, as speculators did recently during the time of the dot-corn bubble, and yet that is not the same. For an experience or an epoque to take on mythic proportions, it usually needs the reverberating perspective of cherished memories that we may have about departed possibilities. Whatever it really was before, the past always remains amenable to that employment, much as a gilded frame does in helping us to see a historical painting as an aesthetic object. For a literary realist such as Joyce, who wished to depict the sensory texture of thought and feeling that constitutes a human life, whatever is depicted must be shown in its own current actuality. The past as Joyce envisaged it can be evoked as a persistent and even powerful residue in what is now present; but it will not be idealized or mythically glamorized. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, his autobiographical character, says that history is the nightmare from which he is trying to awake. Though characters in "The Dead" may be prone to nostalgia, a common response in men and women, the story is not. Being a consummate realist, Joyce reports what he observes and then nonchalantly pares his fingernails, as Stephen suggests in the speculative remarks at the end of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.

In that novel and in its earlier draft entitled Stephen Hero,]oyce formulates the principle of what he calls "epiphany." It is a showing forth. In the mystical traditions the whole of reality is said to be that through which divinity shows itself. From the very beginnings of cinema, many film theorists have asserted that their chosen art is inherently epiphanous, more so indeed than any of the other media. These theorists believe that the photographic image, above all in motion pictures, is uniquely revelatory. And surely it does project what is real in a reproduction unlike that of any other art form. Whether they record common appearances, as in the movies of Lumiere, or are freely fanciful, as in those of Melies, films have the power to make us apprehend reality beyond any literary description or theatrical representation. The concomitant artificiality of cinema may impose an unreal filter upon the ordinary, but through that filter the world can be seen to reveal itself with beguiling immediacy.

Though we are always part of some reality, we are usually unable to appreciate or retain its visual and sonic aspects. They are forever transient and overly rich for our meager capacity of assimilation. Goethe's Faust drops dead when his questing spirit envisions an actual moment of true beauty and he wills it to "Verweile doch, du bist so scho" (Stay then, thou art so fair). As T. S. Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality-whether or not it is beautiful. In cinematic media, this all-too-human frailty is somewhat overcome. The real and beautiful is renewed in a lively simulacrum through which its enduring properties can shine forth without losing their own essential quality.

Even the unrealistic tricks that occur in Méliès's films-or in the animation and special effects that are familiar to us nowadays -are readily accepted because they instigate a feeling of something that we know as factual and available to direct perception. Far from defeating or curtailing our sense of reality, the formalistic elements in film enable us to watch and to understand a great deal that would otherwise elude us as our consciousness moves in whatever trajectory it may follow from day to day.

The realist ontology or aesthetics defended by thinkers like Andre Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and others is therefore very plausible within its limits. These writers, and those who interpret the nature of film as they do, recognize the role of epiphany in the creation and enjoyment of film. In elaborating their philosophical vision, they use varied terminology; but it generally remains fairly uniform with respect to the notion of a showing forth by means of cinematic art which they deem definitive to it. The Joycean concept is thus attuned to the realism of film as well as literature. Though Joyce was primarily concerned with the latter, he treats it as itself analogous to what occurs in photography and motion pictures.