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 characters—as it does, for example, in the background of Máirtin Ó Cadhain's stories 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 without 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 emigré 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 reminisces for Chandler's benefit are European, as all the dim geographical alternatives in Dubliners tend to be. The boy who narrates “An Encounter,” to cite another example, relishes American westerns and detective stories, but, notwithstanding 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 States in actuality, but a significant mythical, literary and popular-cultural fascination. Joyce is thought to have taken the name “Gabriel Conroy” and perhaps 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 Harte's 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 [Ulysses] 510), as does Buck Mulligan's quoting Walt Whitman's “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself” (U 14).

Terence Brown sees Bret Harte's article “The Rise of the Short Story,” published 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 publisher … for not being in the conventional line of subject, treatment, and morals’ … that prompted him [Joyce] in 1906, as his own problems with a printer 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, Gabriel Conroy … and Tales of the West.⁵

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 Irving's 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 Irving's 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 “fairy 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 “the most belated race in Europe.”⁶ Rip is a significant figure in Ulysses, appearing in “Nausicaa”—“Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow. All Changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew” (U 309)—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 parodic account of Emmet's execution in “Cyclops.”⁷ And Leopold Bloom, on the verge of his return to Molly, remembers 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 Garland edition of Ulysses, followed by the Gabler 1986 edition, correcting the version 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 …” (U 312). Some of the implications of Irving's tale in Ulysses, and the story's embeddedness in the novel's plot, were suggested by Daniel P. Gunn in a 1987 note addressing 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 Mediterranean spaces. … The new language … confirms Brook Thomas's reading of the Rip van Winkle story as one of several “variations in the Odyssey theme”: it also underscores the story's significance as a version of the return pattern which Thomas sees as pervasive in Ulysses.⁸

Though Joyce's extensive use of Irving's Sketch Book is documented, however, there has been no critical attention paid to the collection's possible contributions to Joyce's earlier, shorter works—only to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake—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.⁹

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 culinary 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, custom, 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 that, in their contemporary Irish context, are the theme of Gabriel Conroy's holiday dinner speech. Michael 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 … its own reassuringly familiar scapegrace. …”¹¹ The 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 Malin's, extends beyond drinking to paying 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 extraordinarily detailed. “I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves,” Irving's narrator states, ironically underscoring his penchant for descriptive elaboration 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 Irving's almost unexampled narrative prose facility and gracefulness. Irving was arguably one of the few prose technicians whom Joyce could look to for examples 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; rather, it implies an extraordinary sense of prose workmanship, a meticulous discourse laced with irony, voices, humor, suggestion, and symbolism. Allen Tate 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. …”¹³

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 [Sketch Book] 961). “Talk” here refers to the narrator's abundant “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 language.”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 connection 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 narrator's observations 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 Dinner” 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 (D [Dubliners] 178). The Squire in Irving's piece, like Gretta in Joyce's, is moved by a song to remember friends of his youth “many of whom, 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 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 earlier 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 someone's dying of a broken heart is no mere romantic conceit but, in fact, is a common 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 Irving 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 love!” (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).

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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 significance of the Famine in Joyce's story. It has been common to remark the paucity 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 of Joyce.” But, typical of recent criticism, she modifies her generalization, emphasizing the qualifier “explicit.”¹⁸ 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 fact, 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. …”¹⁹ 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 battering 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 banquet's potential resonance as a fertility trope and symbolic opposition to famine as, for instance, the Morkan guests pass plates of goose, ham, and spiced beef around the table (D 197). Food is foregrounded 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 everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three shilling tea and the best bottled stout” (D 176). The possibility that banquet imagery from “Sleepy Hollow” marks a Famine-related strategy in “The Dead” is suggested if we entertain an hypothesis advanced by W. J. McCormack in a plenary lecture at the 1995 IASAIL conference 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 emaciated, symbolic image of Michael Furey. Michael Levenson's then recent study “Living History in ‘The Dead’” (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 John 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 cultural 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 historic calamity would have been even more acutely compelling at the annual dinner 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 deathly 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 symbolic 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 onwards and upwards.²⁵

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, lending a darkly ironic Famine resonance to the closely described circulation of food and to comfortable lines like Gabriel Conroy's, “Now if anyone wants a little more of what vulgar people call stuffing let him or her speak” (D 198). Levenson remarks the unwillingness of those at the party to acknowledge “the political 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 memory of Irish starvation, and the vulgar Famine dead, unremarked on the story's surface, becoming a significant absence, a “blank,” or perhaps more appropriately 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 contextualize, McCormack proposes, a scene like the following: “While Gabriel and Miss Daly exchanged plates of goose and plates of ham and spiced beef Lily went from guest to guest with a dish of hot flowery potatoes wrapped in a white napkin” (D 197). The potatoes, here set in a ceremonial and even sacramental presentation, constitute a communal icon bearing a fertility-symbolic significance in a feast spread where, within living memory, the potato had figured in the, to quote Eagleton, “greatest 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.

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Even aside from Famine considerations, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” which, like “Rip Van Winkle, was itself a Joycean recasting of earlier literary material, 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 antiheroes, creatures “driven and derided by vanity” to borrow 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 perforce “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 subtly castigating Miss Ivors, on another occasion in his private thoughts his aunts are “two ignorant old women?” (D 192). 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 ultimately, 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” (D 197).

The stories also share a sense of tension between a mispresumed sophistication and rural provincialism. As Ellmann notes, Gabriel “in spite of his uxorious 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 Tate terms “the ‘peasant’ richness” of Gretta,³⁵ nor can Ichabod's in the peasant richness 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, especially in its peasant expressions; as a place he is in, but not of. Each hero is, as Tate describes Gabriel, “wrapped in himself.”³⁶ Ichabod is a Yankee among the Dutch as Gabriel is something of a West Briton among the more nationalist 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 wishful effort on his part to cast Michael Furey in as poor a light as possible relative to himself in his wife's estimation: “‘What 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 honeymoon 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 regarding Gabriel, if one did not know better, could be mistaken for an apt characterization of Ichabod: “Because of his pomposity and patronization, [he] is reduced to a bundle of quirks and tics.”⁴¹ Both stories concern a spirit-haunted 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 likewise complacent about his prospects as regards Katrina, setting out confidently 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 euphoria in the hero, creating unfounded romantic optimism. As Gabriel anticipates a revitalized sexual union with Gretta initiating “a new personal history within which to locate the events of his marriage,”⁴³ it being only a matter of the carriage ride and getting settled in the hotel. Ichabod, too, has his “sugared suppositions” 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 delicate 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 disenchanted 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 Ichabod: “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 Irving's earlier classic. There may even be a negative parallel in the fact that the physical robustness and aggression of Ichabod's competitor Brom is so stressed in “Sleepy Hollow,” while in “The Dead” Michael Furey's delicateness is emphasized. And there is close phrasing similarity, 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 Gabriel's 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 extraordinary 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. 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 suggest 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 shallow 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 according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white. …

(D 196-97)⁴⁵

In both cases the patient narration of the feast is notable, as is the animation of the inanimate, especially Joyce's employment of military metaphor—uniformed “squads” of bottles in regimental colors, decanters as “sentries.” The latter recalls an earlier passage in Irving's story in which Ichabod views Van Tassel's wealth of barnyard fowl as candidates for the dinner table—they are a “squadron” of geese, “fleets” of ducks, “regiments” of turkeys (SB 1066). Still earlier 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 ironically, 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:

The revel now gradually broke up. The old farmers gathered together their families 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 abundance 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 respective narratives. It only remains for the heroes, each diminished by his failed gallantries, 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 fortunate 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 indiscriminate, traces his humbled return earthward—a “corrective to individual idealistic 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

Notes

1. Outside the fictional frame of Dubliners, however, Joyce cast the matter along more familiar 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 University 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).

3. This connection was first noted by Gerhard Friedrich in “Bret Harte as a Source for Joyce's ‘The Dead’,” Philological Quarterly, 33 (October, 1954), 442-44.

4. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Gabler (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 65; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (U 65).

5. Terence Brown, Introduction to Dubliners (New York: Penguin, 1992), pp. xli, xlvii.

6. Joyce, “The Day of the Rabblement,” Critical Writings (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 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 University Press, 1998), p. 333.

8. Daniel P. Gunn, “Rip Van Winkle's Return,” James Joyce Quarterly, 24 (1987), 218-19.

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, not the exception, and the intensive borrowing that characterizes “The Dead” may mark the story as transitional between Joyce's early “naturalistic” work and his later “symbolic” work. Another element in the intertextuality 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 the surrounding detail appears to be a recasting of material from George Moore's Vain Fortune, a book Joyce had mentioned favorably in his early essay “The Day of the Rabblement.” Ellmann, p. 250.

10. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, in Irving: History, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 949; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (SB 949).

11. Michael Levenson, “Living History in ‘The Dead’” (D 430).

12. Frank O'Connor, “Work in Progress” (D 293-94).

13. Allen Tate, “The Dead” (D 389-90).

14. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 283.

15. Ellmann notes the probable bearing of one of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies, “O, 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 married. Robert Emmet, Education Facsimile 194 (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1976).

17. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (New York: Verso, 1995) p. 13.

18. Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Durham: 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. Ellmann, p. 258.

21. The first “short, square built old fellow” Rip meets wears “a cloth jerkin strapped round the waist.” Others wear “jerkins with long knives in their belts” (SB 774-75). The “jerkined dwarfs” Stephen observes carry “flayer's knives.”

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. 14-15.

26. Levenson (D 433).

27. W. J. McCormack, “Entertaining Theory: Joyce, ‘The Dead,’ and the Famine,” lecture presented 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 mild 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” (D 197) is the kind of censure that occurs in a postfamine context, especially, as in this case, on the part of an older family member toward a younger one. For Mary Jane, yet unborn during the Famine years, the Great Famine is not in “living memory.”

29. Eagleton, p. 42.

30. Ellmann, p. 249.

31. Bakhtin, p. 278.

32. This might not have been the first time Irving's 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 virtually the first adjective Irving employs to describe Ichabod Crane, and “Sleepy Hollow” was popular 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 Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV, where “lank” does not appear in Falstaff's discourse upon Justice Shallow's thinness concluding Act lll.

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 Jäger and one of the Rübezahl 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 literary material into the vortex of his own memories and observations. Irving mixed imaginatively “the German romance of Otmar, stories heard from the lips of Dutch friends, memories of the shadowy Catskills and of the blue Hudson,” Spiller, p. 248.

34. Ellmann, p. 248.

35. Tate (D 391).

36. Tate (D 392).

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; Character 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.

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” (SB 1078).

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 melody” (D 186), might reflect that of the harpist in Irving's “The Christmas Dinner” who plays with “more power than melody” (SB 949).

46. Ellmann, pp. 251-52.

47. I am ignoring Irving's ambiguous “Postscript,” a bothersome eighteenth-century literary convention that he retains in “Sleepy Hollow.”

48. Bakhtin, p. 22.

49. Douglas Hyde's translation.