Old Sleepy Hollow Calls over the World: Washington Irving and Joyce's "The Dead"

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Old Sleepy Hollow Calls over the World: Washington Irving and Joyce's "The Dead"Author(s): Jack MorganSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 93-108Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557778 .

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Jack Morgan

Old Sleepy Hollow Calls Over the World:

Washington Irving and Joyce's "The Dead"

Joyce's work seldom reflects the significance of America in the Irish cultural

imagination of his day. This omission is most conspicuous in Dubliners, where,

arguably, the presence of America as a western escape route would have worked

counter to the atmosphere of arrest and enclosure, the sense of "paralysis," that

Joyce wished to maintain in the book. America does not loom as the emigration

possibility we might expect it to in the often cramped lives of Dubliners char

acters?as it does, for example, in the background of M?irtin ? Cadhain's sto

ries or Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, granted that those authors portray

more western and emigration-inclined areas of Ireland.1 Eveline's romantic

pass at escape in "Eveline" involves a ticket to Buenos Aires, not to Boston or

New York. In "The Boarding House," flight to America never flashes across

Doran s mind, even as a remote possibility, despite the bind he is in in Dublin.

He does long to "fly away to another country," but the wish is vague and with

out conviction; no idea of specifically American passage, a strong tradition in

the period for young Irishmen for whom Ireland had become too awkward, is

entertained.2 While the emigr? returning from America and looking askance at

his homeland is a familiar figure in Irish experience, Joyce uses the British

equivalent instead in the condescending Ignatius Gallagher back from London

in "A Little Cloud," and the enticing foreign places about which Gallagher rem

inisces for Chandler's benefit are European, as all the dim geographical alter

natives in Dubliners tend to be. The boy who narrates "An Encounter," to cite

another example, relishes American westerns and detective stories, but, notwith

standing his declared wanderlust, like Doran, he never gives a real thought to

going to the States.

The evidence of Joyce's writings overall, in fact, suggests a sense of America

similar to that of the "Encounter" narrator: little intercourse with the United

i. Outside the fictional frame of Dubliners, however, Joyce cast the matter along more famil

iar lines referring to those Irish "unable to find courage or money enough to undertake the voyage

from Queenstown to New York" Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford Uni

versity Press, 1983), p. 256.

2. James Joyce, Dubliners: Text and Criticism, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (New York:

Viking, 1996), p. 68; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (D 68).

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEw/lRIS ?IREANNACH NUA, 5:4 (wINTER/GEIMHREADH, 200l), 93~108




States in actuality, but a significant mythical, literary and popular-cultural fas

cination. Joyce is thought to have taken the name "Gabriel Conroy" and per

haps some of the snow imagery in "The Dead" from Bret Harte's 1871 novel

Gabriel Conroy, for instance.3 Another item from the same author appears in

Ulysses: the "heathen Chinee "

from a line of Harten ballad "Plain Talk from

Truthful James."4 The American "Buffalo Bill Shoots to kill / Never missed and

he never will" occurs in Ulysses too ( U 510), as does Buck Mulligan's quoting

Walt Whitman s "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself"

(1/14). Terence Brown sees Bret Harte's article "The Rise of the Short Story," pub

lished in Cornhill Magazine in 1899, as another probable Harte influence on

Joyce. Harte's piece argued that the strength of the American short story lay in

a thorough and unapologetic American localism "with no fastidious ignoring of

its habitual expression, or the inchoate poetry that may be found even hidden

in its slang." Brown notes that

The remarkable similarity between this description of the short story's potential and Joyce's exploitation of the form tempts one to imagine that the young Joyce ,.. had read this essay when he embarked on Dubliners* And it may Indeed have

been his memory of the fact that one of Harte's stories ("The Luck of Roaring

Camp"), had, in Harte's own words, been ^objected to by both printer and pub lisher ... for not being in the conventional line of subject, treatment, and

morals'.. that prompted him [Joyce] in 1906, as his own problems with a print er mounted, to enquire of his brother, 'Ought I buy a volume of Bret Harte/.,.

In 1920 the library which Joyce left behind him in Trieste contained two of Harte's books, GabrielConroy... and Tales of the West5

Another American trailblazer of the short story form, Washington Irving, would seem to have been a yet more significant influence on Joyce* Images and

motifs echoing Irvings 1820 classic The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent?

especially, as might be expected, its "Rip Van Winkle" and "The. Legend of

Sleepy Hollow"?are discernible throughout Joyce's work. He may have been drawn to Irvings Hudson River tales because the somnolent Sleepy Hollow, a

listless backwater antithetical to the bustling, expansionist America of Irving's day and the drowsy village of rural bystanders set among "Tarry mountains** from which Rip Van Winkle hails, afforded an ironic analog to the provincial Ireland of Joyce's lifetime, one he described as home to athe most belated race

3. This connection was first noted by Gerhard Friedrich in "Bret Harte as a Source for Joyce's

tTheDea?:>PhilobgicalQtianerly,33{OcM>eryi9S4)r4^'44.^^^ 4. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Gabler (New York; Viking, 1986 Vp. 6$; hereafter cited par

enthetically, thus: ( U 65).

5. trence Brown, Introduction to Duhlmers (Newark Pemgnfn, 199%% P9* A riirii .

'

94 ".-.'



Washington Irving and Joyce's aThe Dead"3

in Europe."6 Rip is a significant figure in U/ysses, appearing in "Nausicaa"?

"Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow. All Changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew" ( U309)?and in the "Circe" episode ( U 442). In the latter, following upon the line "Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the world,"

Leopold Bloom, cum Rip, appears "in tattered moccasins with a rusty fowling piece, tiptoeing, fingertripping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond panes." And Joyce's utilization of Irving, a friend of Thomas Moore and biographer of Oliver Goldsmith, ranged to Sketch Book pieces other than

"Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle." Don Gifford notes, for instance, a trace

of Irving's "The Broken Heart," a Sketch Book piece which deals with the death

of the Irish hero Robert Emmet, in the parodie account of Emmet's execution

in "Cyclops."7 And Leopold Bloom, on the verge of his return to Molly, remem

bers some literary motifs of return: "Quite a number of stories there were on

that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic, Enoch Arden and Rip Van Winkle and

does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc O'Leary... "

( U 510). The 1984 Gar

land edition of Ulysses, followed by the Gabler 1986 edition, correcting the ver

sion on page 382 of the 1934 edition, added yet another Rip Van Winkle allusion

in restoring Joyce's original "Nausicaa" line: "Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan

Winkle red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return.. "

(U312). Some of the implications of Irving's tale in Ulysses, and the story's embedded

ness in the novel's plot, were suggested by Daniel R Gunn in a 1987 note address

ing the recent line restoration:

... Bloom had remembered signaling "Rip Van Winkle" in the game of charades

at Dolphin's Barn; breadvan was one of the clues... Rip van Winkle is often seen

as a type of the henpecked husband in Ulysses, but the conjunction of these

phrases makes it clear that... Rip is also an image of the wandering hero, an

Odysseus who wanders "through years of dreams" rather than heroic Mediter

ranean spaces.... The new language... confirms Brook Thomas's reading of the

Rip van Winkle story as one of several "variations in the Odyssey theme'1: it also

underscores the story's significance as a version of the return pattern which

Thomas sees as pervasive in Ulysses.8

6. Joyce? "The Day of the Rabblement "

Critical Writings (New York: Viking, i959)VP? 68. The

belatedness of the up-river New York Dutch is of course broadly satirized in "Rip Van Winkle"; they

read only old newspapers "that by chance fell into their hands from some passing traveler" (772), and

so forth. This story and "Sleepy Hollow" as well as being literary classics? had long since become

popular cultural items, which would arguably have enhanced their appeal to Joyce. Regarding the

role of popular cultural in Joyce's work see Cheryl Herr's Joyce's Anatomy of Culture ( University of

Illinois Press, 1986).

7. Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated; Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses (Berkeley: California Uni

versity Press, 1998), p. 333.

8. Daniel P. Gunn/'Rip Van Winkle's Return," James Joyce Quarfer/y/24 (1987), 218-19,

95




Though Joyce's extensive use of Irving's Sketch Book is documented, how

ever, there has been no critical attention paid to the collection*? possible con

tributions to Joyce's earlier, shorter works?only to Ulysses and Finnegans

Wafe?despite the American author's strong identification with the short story

form. A comparative and contrastive reading reveals conspicuous parallels

between "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and Joyce's "The Dead," ones that

would justify the thesis that Joyce's story has "Sleepy Hollow" in mind somewhat

as Ulysses does Homer's Odyssey, and that Irving's story, in fact, subtly plays into

this culminating narrative in Dubliners?

Before considering "Sleepy Hollow," though, another Sketch Book piece

would seem to bear immediate scrutiny in terms of "The Dead": Irving's "The

Christmas Dinner," which, like Joyce's story, is devoted in great part to the culi

nary and celebrational details of a Christmas season banquet?its songs,

speeches, toasts, conversations, and repast. Part of a subset of five Christmas

pieces in the Sketch Book, the story begins, not unlike "The Dead," in media res,

with the mustering for the holiday feast, the bustle of the servants and arriving

guests.

As Joyce would do in "The Dead" Irving in "The Christmas Dinner"

addressed the issue of a fading cultural respect for fellowship, hospitality, cus

tom, and ceremony?matters brought to the fore by the nostalgic atmosphere of Yuletide gathering, its extravagant board and "the gorgeous utensils of good

companionship."10 Irving's piece is a tribute to the kind of old-fashioned virtues

of graciousness and decorum, the ancient charms of hospitality tha?, in their

contemporary Irish contextuare the theme of Gabriel Conroy's holiday dinner

speechVMichael Levenson's characterization of the Morkan party in "The Dead"

would aptly describe the Squire's party in Irving's piece: **a matrix of rituals and

discourses: it has its own cherished values... its own well-entrenched customs ... its own mythology v.. its own reassuringly familiar scapegrace. ;. ?w|} The

9- Such a use of "Sleepy Hollow" would be in keeping with Joyce's practice which* as Richard

Ellmann notes, involved an Eliot-like "imaginative absorption of stray material" {James Joyce 250). His use of the Odyssey in Ulysses thus represents the rule in his work* 00t the exception? and the

intensive borrowing that characterizes "The Dead" may mark the story as transitional between

Joyce's earlyttnaturalistfcw work and his kter "symbolic* work Another dement in the raterteilu

ality of "The Dead" noted by Ellmann is the incident at the hotel which concludes the story. Gabriel's learning of his wife's love for Furey and much of die surrounding detail appears to be a

recasting of material from George Moored Vain Fortune, a book fayce had mentioned ^mmbly in

his early essay "The Day of the Rabblement" Mmann, p. aso. 10. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book m Irving; ?kimy, Taim and Skewhrn (Hew York:

Library ofAmerka, 1983), p. 9^ 11.

MichaelLevenson?"LivingHistorym'TheDead^CO^),

9*



Washington Irving and Joyce's "The Dead3'

latter reference is to Freddy Malins, whose scapegrace counterpart in Irving's story would be the slightly disreputable and over-imbibing Master Simon,

whose transgressive behavior, unlike Malm's, extends beyond drinking to pay ing inordinate attention to young girls at the party (SB 956-57).

To many authors, the extended and meticulous treatment of a dinner would seem improbable material for a "story"?but not to Irving, whose literary forte

was descriptive exposition, and whose privileging of festive occasion in its own

right is one of his defining literary characteristics. "Fain would I pause to dwell

upon the world of charms that burst upon the enraptured gaze of my hero," the

eccentric narrator writes in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," preparatory to one

of his lengthy, mouth-watering passages celebrating the "ample charms" of a

Dutch country spread. The plot in "Sleepy Hollow" is given less space than matters relating to the feast, and something comparable, though more

restrained, is evident in "The Dead," where the dinner as such is extraordinar

ily detailed. "I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves," Irv

ing's narrator states, ironically underscoring his penchant for descriptive elab

oration and decrying, tongue in cheek, his own "hurry" and supposed plot concern: "I... am too eager to get on with my story" Irving was quite ready to

ignore the conventional entitlement afforded action in popular reading in favor

of his inclination toward?and considerable talent for?sensuous and tangible

descriptive detail. "The Christmas Party" would have provided Joyce with the

idea for a detailed, unhurried rendering of an Irish Christmastide as a story

premise, a premise that might have otherwise seemed unpromising,

Joyce's interest in The Sketch Book?though he obviously shared Irving's

predilection for the mock-heroic, too?may have derived especially from Irv

ing's almost unexampled narrative prose facility and gracefulness. Irving was

arguably one of the few prose technicians whom Joyce could look to for exam

ples of what he wished to achieve in the prose passages of 'The Dead." Frank

O'Connor, noting that Joyce was "a student of rhetoric" rightly identified Pater

and Flaubert as rhetorical influences on "The Dead," but he was perhaps too

Anglo-European in focus to consider Irving, another consummate stylist, in this

regard.12 Irving's evocative descriptive portions of text can have the vitality of

action scenes, and more?the plot in "Sleepy Hollow," for instance, trails off

inconclusively, as if it never had been the narrator's main preoccupation, and

first-time readers of the story are often surprised at how little of the tale is given

over to the familiar action found in cartoon and abridged versions. For both

Joyce and Irving, in fact/exposition is rarely employed in the ordinary sense;

12. Frank O'Connor, "Work in Progress" {D 293-94);

^ '-.:




rather, it implies an extraordinary sense of prose workmanship, a meticulous

discourse laced with irony, voices, humor, suggestion, and symbolism. Allen T?te

noted in the prose of "The Dead" what could, again, equally be said of Irving:

Joyce's "making active those elements that had hitherto remained inert, that is,

description and expository summary,... "i3

Irving is aware, however, of the objections impatient "graver readers" might raise to pages of uninterrupted exposition and in "The Christmas Dinner"

anticipates their complaint: "To what purpose is all this?how is the world to be

made wiser by all this talk?" (SB 961). "Talk" here refers to the narrator's abun

dant "talk" rather than to dialogue, of which there is in fact little in the story. But

Irving recognized, as Joyce does in "The Dead," that talk and banquet, as Bakhtin

argues, are inseparable functions?"one would be tempted to seek the origin of

this connection of food with the spoken word at the very cradle of human lan

guage"14 The complaint of the "graver readers" Irving mentions stems from

their insensitivity to ritual, festive tradition. Their objection is not unlike the

ones unsympathetic or imperceptive undergraduates sometimes raise in con

nection with "The Dead": its slowness and lack of obviously dramatic action

(which many fainter hearts than John Huston's thought precluded its filming). A reader must, in effect, sit through the entire party cycle?the whole dinner, the table conversations, the formal speech, the specifics of the meal presentation, the dance and entertainment, and so on. But this objection reflects the modern

hurry and inattention to gracious detail which "The Dead" "The Christmas

Dinner" and "Sleepy Hollow" pointedly disavow. Irving's narrators observa

tions on the grace said before the dinner are in the spirit of Gabriel Conroy's

carefully crafted after-dinner talk: "It was not a short familiar one, such as is

[common] ... these days; but a .. >' courtly, well worded one, of the ancient

school" (SB 950). The "these days" versus "ancient school" juxtaposed in "The Christmas Din

ner" of course recall a major motif in "The Dead"?the divide between then and

now; the living and the dead, "the men that is now that is only all palaver and what they can get out of you," and the men of yore who are presumed to have

been more chivalrous and refined (D178). The Squire in Irvings piece, like Gret a in Joyce's, is moved by a song to remember friends of his youth amany of

vhom, poor lads, are now in their graves!" (SB 951). It is difficult not to think of "The Lass of Aughrim

" of Gretta Conroy and Michael Furey, and the concern

in "The Dead" with the intrusion of the sanctified deceased with their ghostly

13. Allen late, "The Dead" (D3&9-90).

14, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and Mis World (Bloomington: ?xt?km Uaiver??y Press? 19S4)* p.283.

9?




advantage into the living sphere, when reading the following from another of the Sketch Book chapters, "Rural Funerals":

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. ...

Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety ...

yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure_No, there is a

voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to

which we turn even from the charms of the living, ...It buries every error?covers

every defect-From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. (SB 873; emphasis added.)

Richard Ellmann reflects briefly on what might have given Joyce the notion of

using a song as he does in "The Dead," but offers no answer more probable, I

think, than this occurrence of the motif in an Irving piece Joyce would access

again, as noted above, in "Cyclops."15

"The Dead" and Michael Furey come to mind as well in reading Irving's ear

lier mentioned Sketch Book piece "The Broken Heart "

which deals with the

Robert Emmett-Sarah Curran romance and Sarah's inexorable decline after

Emmet's 1803 execution. Irving regards the Curran story as evidence that some

one's dying of a broken heart is no mere romantic conceit but, in fact, is a com

mon reality. If that premise was not sufficient to pique Joyce's interest, Irving

goes on to argue that such mortal disconsolation as Sarah suffered is confined

to women and is not to be found in the case of men. Joyce may have found that

proposition so challenging that he undertook to controvert it in "The Dead,"

Michael Furey's lovelorn demise there paralleling Curran's, Certainly, what Irv

ing wrote with reference to the Curran-Emmet romance would fit as well for the

Michael Furey-Gretta Conroy one: "Shall I confess it??I believe in broken

hearts and the possibility of dying of disappointed lover (SB 802; emphasis

added). Perhaps a further parallel between the two star-crossed romances lies in

the fact that after Emmet's death Sarah Curran married unromantically, for

practical considerations, due to "her sense of her own destitute and dependent

condition," though "her heart was unalterably another's" (SB 806).16 This would

not, of course, literally match the terms of the Gabriel Conroy-Gretta marriage,

but it would come close to Gabriel's morose imagination of his marriage when,

at the Gresham Hotel, he is at his most suspicious and self-pitying (D 222),

15' Ellmann notes the probable bearing of one of Thomas MooreV/nsfr Mdocfe "G> Ye Dead,**

on the story. Ellmann, p. 242.

16.. Sarah Curran was rejected by her father after the revelations of her involvement with

Emmet; she had to accept the charity of a Quaker family in Cork who gave her refuge until she mar

ried, Robert Emmet, Education Facsimile 194 (Belfast; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland,

M , .

99



Washington Irving and Joyce's uTke Dead"

Irving's fondness for the venerable theme of banquet relates the Sketch Book to

"The Dead" in another, rather uncanny way?one having to do with the signif icance of the Famine in Joyce's story* It has been common to remark the pauci

ty of references to the Great Hunger in Joyce's work; Terry Eagleton does so in his

1995 Heathcliff and the Great Hunger* for instance.17 So does Margaret Kelleher

in her The Feminization of Famine^ remarking that "explicit [ Famine] mention is

... strikingly absent from the work ofJoyce" But, typical of recent criticism, she

modifies her generalization, emphasizing the qualifier "explicit "iB Kelleher notes

a current literary tendency toward "a wider definition of what constitutes

famine' material," one that discovers an oblique, marginal presence of the

Famine in texts where it was previously overlooked. Nor, in feet, are overt famine

references entirely lacking in Joyce*s work. In his Trieste lecture "Ireland, Island

of Saints and Sages "

he observes: "Ireland is poor because English laws ruined the

country's industries.., because the neglect of the English government in the

years of the potato famine allowed the best of the population to die from

hunger.., "I9 His remarks in this lecture often are only slightly less fervent than

those of the citizen in Ulysses who recalls the Famine: "They were driven out of

house and home in the black '47. Their mudcabins ,. * were laid low by the bat

tering ram and the Times rubbed its hands and told the whitelivered Saxons there

would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in America" (U 270}.20 And

there are other famine images in Ulysses, notably in the third chapter when

"from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people" run into

the shallows to get the meat of stranded whales ( U 38), "Famine, plague, and

slaughter," Stephen remarks?and is the characterization "Jerkined dwarfs" not

an ironic reference to the jerkined dwarfs in "Rip Van Winkle"?21

Clearly mindful of the Famine, then a mere forty years since, Joyce was

aware as well, it would seem, of banquefs potential resonance as a fertility

trope and symbolic opposition to famine as, for instance, the M?rkan guests pass plates of goose, ham, and spiced beef around the table (D197). Food is fore

17. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (Hew York: Verso.

1995) p. 13.

18. Margaret Ke??eher, 77ie JfewJwzBr^

Duke University Press, 1997) p. 113.

19. See the-excerpt-in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day, 1991}, III: 9* 20. Richard Ellmann correctly cautions against reading the Citizen's sentiments as mere satire,

noting their proximity to Joyce's own expressed views. EUmann, p. 258. 21. The first "short, square built old fellow* Rip meets wears % cloth jerkin strapped round the

waist" Others wear "jerkins with long knives in their belts'* {SB 774-75). The **}erkined dwarfs*

Stephen observes carry "flayer's knives"

lo?




grounded as early as the story's second paragraph, in which it is remarked that the Morkans, while living modestly, "believed in eating well; the best of every

thing: diamond-bone sirloins, three shilling tea and the best bottled stout"

{D176). The possibility that banquet imagery from "Sleepy Hollow" marks a

Famine-related strategy in "The Dead" is suggested if we entertain an hypoth esis advanced by W. J. McCormack in a plenary lecture at the 1995IASAIL con

ference at University College, Cork?the year Terry Eagleton's Heathcliff and the

Great Hunger appeared in which Eagleton ventured to argue the possibility of

viewing Wuthering Heights in the context of the Irish Famine. McCormack

undertook, similarly, to set forth the idea that the Famine might likewise be

found lurking subtextually in "The Dead." He proposed that an argument could

be made for a crypto-famine theme there if the story is interrogated in terms of

its preoccupation with dinner formalities and lush holiday board set against the

Irish rural poverty and starvation of a half century earlier figured in the ema

ciated, symbolic image of Michael Furey. Michael Levenson's then recent study

"Living History in 'The Dead5" (1994) had asserted, though without citing the

Famine, that "The Dead" "forcibly brings the question of history inside the

terms of its personal narrative."22 Levenson noted that, since lohn V, Kelleher's

1965 essay on "The Dead" in The Review of Politics, "no reading of the story can

afford to ignore its high historical specificity.23 Kelleher and Levenson remain

among the few critics to have historically contextualized the "private" lives and

relationships in the story, identifying the importance of the narrative's cultur

al and historical dimensions, which Levenson calls "the complex social thought of "The Dead." 24 How "The Dead" could, in fact, not somehow refer to the

Famine seems an appropriate question. Eagleton's accurate framing of that his

toric calamity would have been even more acutely compelling at the annual din

ner celebrated in "The Dead" than it is now. He refers to

the mind shaking fact that an event with all the pre-modern character of a

medieval pestilence happened in Ireland with frightening recentness. This death

ly origin then shatters space as well as time, unmaking the nation and scattering

Irish history across the globe. That history will of course continue; but as in

Emily Bronte's novel there is something recalcitrant at its core which defeats

articulation.,. a voracious desire,';. which could find no place in the symbol

ic order of social time and was expunged from it, but which like the shades of

Catherine and Heathcliff will return to haunt a history,,., moving onwardsand

upwards25

22. Michael Levenson, "Living History in 'The Dead" (D 422),

23. /'Living History in 'The Dead" (D 437).

24/"Living History in'The Dead" (D 438).

25. Eagleton, pp. H~i5v

';. xox .:-.



Washington Irving and |ti)?s "The DemF

Do shades of the Famine haunt the social setting of'The Dead" and intrude

into the story's overall narrative? McCormack's reading would suggest so, lend

ing a darkly ironic Famine resonance to the closely described circulation of food

and to comfortable lines like Gabriel Conro/s, uNow if anyone wants a little

more of what vulgar people call stuffing let him or her speak** (D198). Leven

son remarks the unwillingness of those at the party to acknowledge "the polit

ical provocations that circulate in their festive midst" It might be argued, along the lines McCormack does, that the Famine is prominent among the repressed

political content bearing on the story leading to a situation in which "even at the

moments of fond mutual regard and common exultation, the stresses are

ineradicable"26 McCormack would seem to be proposing an Iserian dynamic, with the very centrality of the luxuriant feast in "The Dead" evoking the mem

ory of Irish starvation, and the vulgar Famine dead, unremarked on the story's

surface, becoming a significant absence, a "blank,* or perhaps more appropri

ately here, a ghost, in the narrative.27

Irving's "Sleepy Hollow" which presents some of the richest evocations of

harvest plenty and lush board in all literature? may well have suggested to Joyce antithetical images of feast and prosperity to use as a foil to the submerged Famine remembrance in "The Dead

" The middle-class Dublin Irish of winter,

1903, can afford to worry points like whether roast goose requires applesauce or

not.28 But the hearty nourishment described in such fine detail in "The Dead"

occurs disturbingly set against the fierce, destructive poverty that had recently

prevailed in Ireland. That poverty might well tontextualize? McCormack pro

poses, a scene like the following: "White Gabriel and Miss Daly esrhanged plates of goose and plates of ham and spiced beef Lily went from guest to guest with a dish of hot flowery potatoes wrappedin a white napMn" (D197). The potatoes, here set in a ceremonial and even sacramental presentation, constitute a com

munal icon bearing a fertility-symbolic significance in a feast spread where?

26. Levenson (D 433).

27. W, J. McCormack, "EntertainingTheory: Joyce?The Dead,*and the Famine" lecture pre sented at International Association for Study of Anglo-Irish Literature? University College* Cork,

1995. As of the present writing, McCormack's paper has not appeared in published form, so I have

to hope that, working in the oral tradition, as it were, and from sketchy notes* I am representing his

argument accurately. 28. One might see this m?d disagreement between Kate and her niece about applesauce as one

of the story's many small details situating historical lines of stress~~here a famine subtext? and

reflecting a sense of guilt in the Irish consciousness of the period. Kate's remark that *roast goose without apple sauce had always been good enough for her and she hoped she might never eat worse"

{D197) is the kind of censure that occurs in a postfamine contact, o?pedaiiy $$ m this case* on the

part of an older family member toward a younger one. For Mary lane, yet unborn during the Famine years, the Great Famine is not in "living memory**

im




within living memory, the potato had figured in the, to quote Eagleton, "great est social catastrophe of nineteenth century Europe."29 The returning dead in

this reading of Joyce's story would not function on the level of Gabriel's personal narrative only, but would include as well the returning shades of the historic

Irish Famine. Even the shadowy figure of Michael Furey, standing thin and

consumptive in the Western rain may, as McCormack noted, function in part as

a shadow reference to the victims of the mid-century affliction. Ellman observes

that the West in the story is "paradoxically linked . . . with the past and the

dead."30 The present argument would note the story's linkage of the Famine to

the West as well?to that past and to those dead.

Irving's usefulness to Joyce in this regard, would have been to provide a tour

de force prose rendering of the harvest and banquet archetype situating what

Bakhtin terms "the mighty aspiration to abundance."31 The setting of "Sleepy Hollow" is, significantly, one of spectacular American plenty, a celebration of

various "fertile nooks" like the prosperous Van Tassel farm?"the fat meadow

lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the

orchards burdened with ruddy fruit..." (SB 1069). Irving's eloquent celebration

of rich harvest, one might argue, is echoed in Joyce's presentation of the

Morkan's Christmas party and allows Joyce to recall ironically in "The Dead,"

deepening its thematic structure, the harvest failure that more than anything else defined modern Ireland.32 There is, in fact, a trace of similar, though much

less serious, irony in "Sleepy Hollow" itself wherein Ichabod Crane?whose

name has virtually become a word for gauntness?is described as a man who,

seen striding the hills on a windy day, might be mistaken "for the genius of

famine descending upon the earth" (SB 1061). Ichabod's famine-figure thinness

is counterposed in the tale to the plumpness of the Dutch wives and their well

fed broods as well as to the anything-but-faminesque plenitude of the New York

Dutch farms and fields.

Even aside from Famine considerations, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" which,

like "Rip Van Winkle, was itself a Joycean recasting of earlier literary material,

29. Eagleton, p. 42.

50. Ellmann, p. 249.

31. Bakhtin, p. 278.

32. This might not have been the first time Irvings story had been influential upon Irish

Famine literature. Darby Skinadre, the miser in William Carleton's The Black Prophet (1847) is

described as being of "lank and sallow appearance... like the very genius of Famine." "Lank" is vir

tually the first adjective Irving employs to describe Ichabod Crane, and "Sleepy Hollow" was pop

ular schoolroom reading when Carleton as well as Joyce was growing up?as likely to have been

familiar as the original "genius of famine" reference in Shakepeare's 2 Henry IV, where "lank" does

not appear in Falstaff 's discourse upon Justice Shallow's thinness concluding Act 111.

103



Washington Irving and Joyce's "The Dead'"

would appear to be implicit in "The Dead" in the story's very conceptualization

and basic design.33 Both are ghost stories, for example, and Ichabod Crane and

Gabriel Conroy are antih?ros, creatures "driven and derided by vanity" to bor

row a phrase from "Araby" Both ingratiate themselves with women generally and

both are pedagogues, men of letters (Irving so describes Crane), hypereducated

for the context in which they find themselves and a little more proud of their

social positions than their modest jobs would justify. And each tale eventually

pivots on this agon of male pride in the central character. Each finds himself per

force "orating to vulgarians" (D 220), Ichabod to his recalcitrant charges at the

schoolhouse, Gabriel to his fellow party goers whose "grade of culture differed

from his" and whom he fears will not be up to his quoting Robert Browning (D

179). While he warmly praises the Morkan sisters in his speech as a means of sub

tly castigating Miss Ivors, on another occasion in his private thoughts his aunts

are "two ignorant old women?" (D192). Both protagonists, in addition, have their

hearts elsewhere than in their present circumstance; Ichabod looks forward to

taking to the west in a wagon; Gabriel's valence is more Joycean?eastward toward Europe, to bicycling in France, Belgium, and Germany, though ulti

mately, of course, his journey's direction is reversed. Each, however, relishes the

comfortable decorum of the domestic feast and likes nothing better "than to find

himself at the head of a well-laden table" (D197). The stories also share a sense of tension between a mispresumed sophisti

cation and rural provincialism. As Ellmann notes, Gabriel "in spite of his uxo

rious attitude towards Gretta... is a little ashamed of her having come from the

west of Ireland."34 Gabriel's urbane sensibility cannot share in what Allen T?te

terms "the cpeasanf richness" of Gretta,35 nor can Ichabod's in the peasant rich

ness of Katrina and the Sleepy Hollow world, Katrina is a means to an end for

the Connecticut-bred schoolmaster; he is condescending toward her, and sees

Sleepy Hollow as a small pond in which he, already a rather big fish? is destined to become yet bigger. He views the village as Gabriel tends to view Ireland, espe

cially in its peasant expressions; as a place he is in, but not of. Each hero is, as

T?te describes Gabriel, "wrapped in himself"56 Ichabod is a Yankee among the

Dutch as Gabriel is something of a West Briton among the more nationalist

33- "Rip Van Winkle" is heavily indebted to a tale in Otmar's Volssagen, and *The Legend of

Sleepy Hollow" to Burger's Der wilde J?ger and one of the R?bezahl tales. See Robert E, Spiller et al

Literary History of the United States (New York Macmillan, 1963), p. 247. Irving's way of working? at least in the case of the two Hudson river tales, involved, like Joyce's method, drawing extant lit

erary material into the vortex of his own memories and observations. Irving mixed imaginatively "the German romance of Otmar, stones heard from, the lips of Dutch friends* memories of the shad

owy Catskills and of the blue Hudson" Spiler, p. 248. 34. Ellmann, p. 248.

35. T?te (D 391).

36. Tate(D392).

;; 104 '

"..




Irish like Molly Ivors. Ichabod is alien to "the primitive, untutored, impulsive

country"?an Ellman characterization of Gabriel.37 Each hero loses his fair

lady, a country lass, to what he would regard as a country bumpkin. Gabriel's

crestfallen questioning of Gretta at the hotel, Ellmann notes, is a kind of wish ful effort on his part to cast Michael Furey in as poor a light as possible relative to himself in his wife's estimation: "cWhat was he' he asks, confident that his own profession of language teacher... is superior; but she replies, 'He was in the

gasworks,' as if this profession were as good as any other."38 Ichabod similarly loses out when his presumed social inferior, Brom Bones, proves quite good

enough in Miss Van Tassel's estimation and in the end conducts "the blooming Katrina in triumph to the altar..." (SB 1086). Ichabod's plans for his first hon

eymoon fail to pan out, as do Gabriel's for his second one. In both stories there

is what Ellmann remarks in "The Dead" : "that basic situation of cuckoldry, real

or putative ... found throughout;"39 Katrina falls to Bones, a rural roughneck, Gretta to Michael Furey, a West of Ireland country boy.40

Each protagonist ends up the fool of the piece?Crane in the reader's eyes,

Conroy in his own hypersensitive perception?undergoing a rude awakening that shatters his erstwhile self-satisfaction. Daniel R. Schwarz's comment regard

ing Gabriel, if one did not know better, could be mistaken for an apt character

ization of Ichabod: "Because of his pomposity and patronization, [he] is

reduced to a bundle of quirks and tics."41 Both stories concern a spirit-haunt ed misadventure, a failed attempt at romance. Gabriel had no clue that anyone other than he had figured significantly in his wife's life. Ichabod Crane is like

wise complacent about his prospects as regards Katrina, setting out confident

ly toward the virtually certain fulfillment of his romantic aspirations: "The

Gallant Ichabod now spent at least an extra half hour at his toilet, brushing and

furbishing up his best, and indeed only suit of rusty black, and arranging his

looks by a bit of broken looking glass, that hung up in the school house"

(SB 1073).42 In both stories the festive atmosphere of banquet begets a eupho

ria in the hero, creating unfounded romantic optimism. As Gabriel anticipates a revitalized sexual union with Gretta initiating "a new personal history within

37- Ellmann, p. 249

38. Ellmann, p. 248,

39- Ellmann, p. 252, Neither protagonist is literally cuckolded, in fact?

40. Brom is the ghost to whom Ichabod loses out?the persona behind the headless horseman

figure.

41. Daniel R; Schwarz, "Gabriel Conroy's Psyche; Gharacter as Concept in Joyce's 'The Dead.'

The Dead, ed, Daniel R. Schwarz (Boston: Bedford, 1994), p. 106.

42. The mirror is a motif in "The Dead "

a marker of Gabriel's troubled introspection, and the

cracked mirror which appears early in Ulysses is much remarked critically?Buck Mulligan's cracked

shaving mirror, lifted from a servant's room, which Stephen says is a symbol of Irish art.

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Washington Irving and Joyce's "Tlie Dead"

which to locate the events of his marriage,"43 it being only a matter of the car

riage ride and getting settled in the hotel. Ichabod, too, has his "sugared sup

positions" as he approaches Katrina's, his "soft anticipations" conflating culinary

and sexual appetites?in his case the former predominating:

He beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their

leafy coverlets, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty pudding; and the

yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the

sun.,. and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields, breathing the odour

of the bee hive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of

dainty slap jacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey and treacle, by the del

icate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel. (SB 1074-75)

Like Gabriel Conroy, Ichabod is riding blissfully toward a fall Neither's wooing will culminate as he expects. In each case, the dead will intervene?the ghost of

a boy from Galway, and the ghost of a Hessian horseman.44 Gabriel's disen

chanted self-evaluation at the end of "The Dead" is a harsh one, shadowed, it

might be argued, by the personality of his intertextual alter-ego, the fatuous Ich

abod: "He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts,

a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his

own clownish lusts... pitiable, fatuous fellow..." (D 220).

There are, thus, ample parallels suggesting that Joyce conceived his story to a

greater or lesser degree working off Irvings earlier classic. There may even be a

negative parallel in the fact that the physical robustness and aggression of Icha

bod's competitor Brom is so stressed in "Sleepy Hollow" while in "The Dead"

Michael Furey's delicateness is emphasized* And there is dose phrasing similar

ity, for instance, when Ichabod, near the denouement of "Sleepy Hollow," is

"approaching the very place where many of the scenes of the ghost stories had

been laid" (SB 1081). In Gabriels case on the other hand,"His soul approached the region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead" (D 223},

The most striking commonality between the two stories remains the extra

ordinary attention to banquet largesse already referred to and the treasures of an

elaborate table, in which regard "The Dead" rivals the painstaking, enthusiastic

celebration of sumptuous fare found in "Sleepy Hollow" Joyce's description of

the Christmas dinner at the Morkan's is stocked with echo's of Irving's tribute to

what his narrator terms "the ample charms" of American-Dutch country fare.

Here is a passage from "Sleepy Hollow":

There was the doughty doughnut.., the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and shortcakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes.

43' Levenson, 435*

44. In both cases the ghosts also intrude initially during the after dinner festivities?the singing in "The Dead" (D 211-12) and the storytelling in "Sleepy 'Hollow* (551078)*

io6




And then there were apple pies and peach pies and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted

chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy ,.. with the motherly tea pot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst....

(SB 1076}

And here is an Irvingesque passage from "The Dead," so akin, in fact, as to sug

gest an element of homage:

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of

creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham ... peppered over

with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin_Between these rival ends

ran parallel lines of side dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shal low dish full of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a

stalk shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds. ... In the center of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit stand which

upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned

decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry? On the

closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind

it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals drawn up accord

ing to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red

labels, the third and smallest squad white..,. (?> 196-97)45

In both cases the patient narration of the feast is notable, as is the animation

of the inanimate, especially loyce's employment of military metaphor?uni formed "squads" of bottles in regimental colors, decanters as "sentries." The lat

ter recalls an earlier passage in Irving's story in which Ichabod views Van Tas

sel's wealth of barnyard fowl as candidates for the dinner table?they are a

"squadron" of geese, "fleets" of ducks, "regiments" of turkeys (SB xo66). Still ear

lier in "Sleepy Hollow" there is the similarly military table-setting trope, "a

supernumerary dish of cakes.,. the parade of a silver teapot" (SB 1063). Irving's

story apparently provided Joyce with a means to evoke the Great Famine iron

ically, through its opposite?the cornucopia, the plentiful table. But whether or

not we choose to construct "The Dead" in terms of Famine reference, irving's

bearing on the story seems evident

The tales part company, of course, in their endings, but not before shared

images of the rather giddy atmosphere and spirit of post-dinner leave taking*

Irving describes the close of the Van Tassel's party:

45- Another suggestion of "Sleepy Hollow" influence in the "The Dead" might be Patrick

Morkan's eccentric old horse "Johnny" reminiscent of Ichabod's likewise intractable "Gunpowder."

And Mary Jane's piano playing, which "had no .melodyw(?)i86)> might reflect that of the harpist in

Irving's "The Christmas Dinner" who plays with "more power than melody" (SB 949).

m




The revel now gradually broke up. The old farmers gathered together their fam

ilies in their wagons, and were heard for some time rattling along the hollow

roads, and over the distant hills. Some of the damsels, mounted on pillions

behind their favorite swains, and their lighthearted laughter mingling with the

clatter of hoofs, echoed along the silent woodlands, sounding fainter and fainter

until they gradually died away.... (SB 1080; emphasis added.)

Like the departures from the Morkan party, lighthearted laughter mingles with

the clatter of hoofs; Freddy Malin is "speechless with laughter" as he and Mr.

Browne offer contradictory directions to the cab-man, and "Aunt Kate, Aunt

Julia, and Mary Jane helped the discussion with cross-directions... and abun

dance of laughter." Ultimately, "the horse was whipped up and the cab rattled off

along the quay amid a chorus of laughter... "

(D 208-09; emphasis added). But this conviviality at departure marks the last of good cheer in the respec

tive narratives. It only remains for the heroes, each diminished by his failed gal lantries, to encounter a somber epiphany in a ghostly landscape (SB 1081). What

Ellmann observes regarding Gabriel could as well be said of Ichabod?that

"the revelation on this night is rude to [his] whole being"46 Ichabod is a comic

caricature, of course, one over which the more subtle character of Gabriel is

arguably constructed; his encounter with a spirit, unlike Gabriel's, is farcical in

nature and his coming down to earth is carnivalesque degradation in a simple form. Ichabod's mirror, before which he primps for the Van Tassel party, is not

self-revelatory and accusing as is the mirror for Gabriel in "The Dead" (D 220).

Though brought down and perhaps chastened, Ichabod at the tale's conclusion

remains the hubristic antihero; his fall to earth from his horse is neither fortu nate nor Pauline.47 Gabriel is brought to the ground in a more significant and

psychological sense. Like Ichabod, he has been on an extended ego-journey,

altogether too proud of himself, and the snow falling, general and indiscrimi

nate, traces his humbled return earthward?a "corrective to individual idealis tic and spiritual pretense" to borrow Bakhtin's phraseology.48 The cosmopolite

must come to terms with, among other things, the deeper grain of Irishness that tracks westward. Perhaps now, impelled upon a journey in that direction,

Gabriel is less Ichabod Crane than Raftery the poet, who likewise sets out

toward the West, "feeble and tired / to the end of the world."49

^UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-ROLLA

46. Ellmann, pp. 251-52.

47. I am ignoring living's ambiguous "Postscript," a bothersome eighteenth-century literary

convention that he retains in "Sleepy Hollow."

48. Bakhtin, p. 22.

49. Douglas Hyde's translation.

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Old Sleepy Hollow Calls over the World: Washington Irving and Joyce's "The Dead"

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