The Gaze of Tiresias: Joyce, Rossellini and the Iconology of "The Dead"

This is an essay on transtextuality — the logistics of quotation — and literary/cinematic memory, though with a particular focus on their workings in James Joyce's "The Dead" and Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1953). Rossellini's film, shot on location in Naples and starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as the middle-aged couple Katherine and Alex Joyce, contains only one scene which overtly references "The Dead". Yet I am going to claim that the subject of Rossellini's film proceeds crucially from this particular segment, and that the director deploys the Joycean intertext as a starting point from which to attempt a self-reflexive meditation on the nature of memory and the film image, or what André Bazin called "the mummy complex" (Bazin 1967: 9). Secondly, by reading Journey to Italy in the context of Mikhail Iampolski's theory of intertextuality, I hope to show that Rossellini's judicious citation of Joyce in fact both captures and extends some of the themes of the short story more dynamically than does another, more well-known adaptation of "The Dead", John Huston's acclaimed swansong The Dead (1987). Thirdly, I shall support my initial contentions by drawing attention to a host of intertextual motifs deposited onto the text of Voyage to Italy, motifs that only become legible byway of Joyce's novella.

Bute's Finnegan's Wake (1965), Joseph Strick's Ulysses (1967) and (1979), Werner Nekes's Uliisses (1982) and Huston's The Dead. 1 Arguably, the most widely known title is that of Huston. Praised as both a faithful and a visually accomplished adaptation, the legendary director's 37* and last feature has received a substantial amount of criticism. Long held to be unfilmable, "The Dead" possesses a kind of canonicity which, as James Naremore has pointed out, "weighs heavily on an adaptation" (Naremore 1994: 199); in view of this, the success of Huston's movie was not a given even for a director famous for his numerous realizations of literary works. 2 Because it is a straightforward adaptation, however, Huston's The Dead lacks the intertextual resonance that characterizes Voyage to Italy, with its intricately modulated relations to Joyce's story. Notwithstanding these points, I will refrain from pursuing a comparative approach, and I see no reason to argue that Huston's film is in any way aesthetically inferior to Rossellini's. My emphasis throughout the following pages will be placed solely on the Italian film, since I believe its relation to "The Dead" has been unduly neglected, and since it -unlike Huston's movie -keeps a sufficient distance to Joyce to allow the play of transtextuality to come to the fore.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
In Voyage to Italy, sometimes described as the "first modern film" (Mulvey 2000a: 20-24), we meet Katherine and Alex Joyce, a British couple who have come to Naples to sell the house of a recently deceased relative. By contemporary standards Rossellini's film is virtually plotless, and rather than relying on a chain of dramatic events, the narrative structure is configured as a succession of revelatory excursions that in the course of seven days bifurcate and recon-verge. 3 At the relative's villa, Katherine happens to mention an old lover, the poet Charles Lewington, who during the war landed in Naples as an allied soldier. The memory of the poet occasions a marital crisis that eventually leads to reconciliation in the "miracle sequence" at the end of the film. Before this, Katherine and Alex embark on their separate transformative journeys which bring her to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, the Cumaean Sibyl, the Phlegraean Fields and the Fontanelle Cemetery, and him to Capri. The last of these journeys, the one to the excavation site at Pompeii, they undertake together. While being thus substantially anchored in real spaces, in natural geographies, Voyage to Italy is also quite unambiguously about metaphorical journeys into the uncharted topographies of memory and self. Last but not least, Rossellini's film can also be seen as a journey into a particularly transtextual topos, at which center a host of different fragments and references intersect.
Before we begin to unearth the architextual strata inscribed onto the film, I want to concentrate briefly on the troubled production history of Voyage to Italy. As with Joyce's "The Dead", autobiography impinges significandy on the film, blurring the boundaries between the fictional and the real. When shooting commenced in Naples in February 1953 (the film was not released until September 1954), Ingrid Bergman's marriage was falling apart, and George Sanders had recendy divorced Zsa Zsa Gabor. Rossellini decided to take advantage of his actors' real-life crises, which he deliberately exacerbated by having them work without a script (Bergman and Sanders were actors ill-prepared to handle improvisation), by isolating Sanders socially, and by generally behaving unpredictably and erratically. What Rossellini wanted was to forge the closest possible identification between the psychological state of the actors and that of their characters. As Laura Mulvey writes, "Bergman's and Sanders' off-screen situations are part of Journey to Italy s aesthetic on a level that goes beyond naturalistic characterisation or a director's megalomania" (Brunette 1996: 164). During the shooting of the film Sanders suffered several nervous breakdowns, and was at one point actually on the verge of suicide (Gallagher 1998: 402). It is difficult to ignore the importance of such contextually embedded inflections for a full appreciation of the sensibility of Rossellini's film.
In addition, the immediate public reception of the film became no less a scandal than its tortured making. First, as Tag Gallagher submits, the film "was not sellable even as an art film; it flies in the face of both convention and the conventions of unconventionality" (Gallagher 1998: 403). Italian film critics were outraged at what they perceived to be the film's relentless opacity and aimlessness, as well as at the director's abandonment of the Neo-Realist style with which he had become so closely associated. The savage idiom in which this domestic criticism was couched finally led the esteemed French film critic André Bazin to write a letter to the editor of the Italian journal Cinema Nuovo in which he defended the film. Bazin's journal, Cahiers du Cinema, praised the film for exhibiting "a style so new that it defies all definition" (Rohmer 1985: 206), and ranked Voyage to Italy the best film of the year (Hillier 1985: 285).
The allusion to Joyce's "The Dead" occurs early in the narrative, and is one of the film's two key scenes. As Katherine and Alex are sitting on the terrace of the villa, she recollects the memory of the poet, now dead, who had been so hopelessly in love with her: ALEX: Were you in love with him? KATHERINE: No. But we got on terribly well together. I saw a great deal of him at Copling Farm. Then he got desperately ill. I couldn't even visit him. For almost a year I didn't see him. Then on the eve of our wedding, the night before I left for London, I was packing my bags, when I heard a sound of pebbles on my window. Then, eh, the rain was so heavy that I couldn't see anyone outside. So I ran out, into the garden, just as I was. And there he stood. He was shivering with cold. He was so strange and romantic. Maybe he wanted to prove to me that in spite of the high fever he had braved the rain to see me. Or maybe he wanted to die. ALEX: How very poetic" Much more poetic than his verses! (Gallagher 1998: 409) As we recall, in "The Dead" it is Mr. D'Arcy's singing of "The Lass of Aughrim" that prompts Gretta to resurrect the memory of Michael Furey, which in turn triggers Gabriel's sudden emotions of humiliation and jealousy. Gretta's narration of the following passage is highly evocative of Katherine's story: -Then the night before I left I was in my grandmother's house in Nun's Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn't see so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering.
~ And did you not tell him to go back? asked Gabriel ~ I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. (Joyce 1992(Joyce [1914: 222) In Voyage to Italy it is Katherine rather than Alex who is moved to reflection by the memory of the dead lover. Laura Mulvey writes that in "The Dead", "jealousy and irritation give way to an intimation of universal mortality; in Journey Alex cannot escape from the jealousy and irritation which continue to haunt him" (Mulvey 2000a: 24). Not only does Rossellini reverse the spousal positions in terms of to whom insight is given, one might also claim that he begins his film at the narrative and perceptual point where Joyce chooses to end his story. The "Charles Lewington" scene in Voyage to Italy thus functions as a transtextual juncture from which the process of discernment in what Gerard Genette calls the hypotext is carried on in the hypertext (Genette 1982: 356). In Sandro Bernardi's view, the reference to "The Dead" in fact "explains the meaning of the whole film, which is a variant, or rather a continuation, of Joyce's story" (Bernardi 2000: 58). It is here that the disparity between Rossellini's film and Huston's adaptation with respect to their relation their relation to Joyce becomes particularly palpable. While Huston's dedicated reading, though still an interpretation, is content merely to transpose Joyce's narrative into a different medium, 4 Rossellini's film uses "The Dead" as a point of departure for a creative contemplation of the ideas encountered in the short story. Hence, though Huston is adept at capturing Joyce's story as story, it is Rossellini who most convincingly captures its spirit. This contention finds support in James Naremore's reading of Voyage to Italy, in which he maintains that the film is in some ways a more fundamentally modernist and Joycean project than John Huston'srespectful adaptation... Rossellini and his co-scenarist are cunning and strategically silent artists who acknowledge their sources through sly allusions, planting clues for the cognoscenti and then going on to fashion an 'autonomous' work expressive of the director's personal authorship" (Naremore 1994: 198) Unlike Huston's The Dead, of course, Rossellini's film is not an adaptation at all, but rather -as Bernardi has suggested -a sequel to Joyce's story (Bernardi 2000: 58).
Earlier I said that Voyage to Italy opens up onto what I referred to as a transtextual topos, 5 and by invoking the work of Iampolski I shall now attempt to clarify what I meant. In the first chapter of his seminal book The Memory of Tiresias (1998), the author carefully spells out the difference between iconographical and iconological forms of quotation. Relying on observations made by the art historian Erwin Panofsky, Iampolski notes that iconographic motifs in art -in contradistinction to iconological ones -convey a meaning that is essentially static. Such motifs, he writes, "do not participate in the production of new meaning; rather, they passively transmit significations from the past into the present" (Iampolski 1998: 10). For Panofsky, iconographical motifs were 'conventional' and 'secondary' elements of intertextuality, and these he opposes to iconological fragments, which are capable of engendering new significations (Iampolski 1998: 10). If we allow that an entire text may be considered one long intertextual entity, Huston's The Dead appears to function largely iconographically (Panofsky's own example, by the way, is the motif of the Last Supper, signified by the image of thirteen men seated in a particular way around a table).
Iampolski introduces his theory of intertextuality by relating the anecdote of the blind and androgynous prophet Tiresias, who came to possess "a memory that would not fade", and whose blindness "has retained the past and its images in the dark" (Iampolski 1998: 2). Because it is blind, the gaze of Tiresias implies a metaphorical mode of seeing, one whose address is the space of memory and whose mandate is the synthesis of the "disjointed fragments" of the texts of our culture (ibid.). The work of intertextuality may thus be said to be Tiresian, in that it preserves the memory of sources across texts. Where the gaze of Tiresias is absent is where the text becomes afflicted with amnesia, disconnected from any sources it goes blind. "It is the very darkness of memory", Iampolski points out, "that allows visual images to come loose from their contexts, forming new combinations, superimposing themselves on each other or finding hidden similarities" (Iampolski 1998: 3). Preserving memory by transforming it, intertextuality likewise lays text upon text and meaning upon meaning in an infinite chain of new permutations and constellations. Drawing on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Iampolski takes the anagram as his model for understanding how this process of textual superimposition occurs: 'The anagram permits us to see how another outside text, a hidden quotation, can both organize and modify the order of elements in a given text" (Iampolski 1998: 17). Iampolski's point, it seems, is that intertextuality is multi-directional; it does not have to involve the effect our knowledge of an earlier work has on our reading of a later work. In order to illustrate the logic of Iampolski's thinking here, I quote him at some length: a theory of intertextuality allows us to incorporate history into the structure of a text... 'history' began to seem less and less like a chronological sequence of events. By creating a specific intertextual field as its own environment, each text in its own way seeks to organize and regroup its textual precursors... in some way a later text can serve as the source of an earlier text. This reverse chronology is of course only possible from the perspective of reading, which is precisely the basis of an intertextual approach to culture (Iampolski 1998: 246).
Like Genette, Iampolski is concerned with what the French theoretician terms textual transcendence, which denotes "everything that brings [the text] into relation (manifest or hidden) with other texts" (Genette 1992: 81). It is the reader's transaction with the text that constitutes this virtual palimpsestic space; intertextuality and quotation are therefore not dependent upon artistic intentionality Iampolski 1998: 35). Iampolski furthermore appears to question the tendency in pundits like Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard to view the intertextual function merely as a random accretion of fragments and references (ibid.). Quoting Laurent Jenny, he grants that intertextuality may instead consist in '"the work of transformation and assimilation of several texts performed by a centering text which retains its position of leadership in meaning'" (Iampolski 1998: 36). While I agree that the intertext serves as an 'interpretant' conducive to the production of new meanings (Iampolski 1998: 247), it can also specify, contextualize, elaborate, and modify the present meanings which we have already intuited form the hypertext, to use Genette's term.
According to Iampolski's theory, intertextuality is a process "particularly active in moments of narrative rupture" (Iampolski 1998: 248), and in Voyage to Italy the Joycean allusion represents such a disruption in that the moment becomes a turning point, a metabasis, 6 in the progression of the film. The effect of the quotation is to fracture the linearity of the narrative and redirect its trajec- tory. In branching out into new directions concretized by Katherine's and Alex's excursions, the narrative comes to embody the potential for the kind of transfigurational insight that the characters experience at the end. Because it as a quotation destabilizes the text, the reference to "The Dead" stands out as what Iampolski calls a "textual anomal[y]" (Iampolski 1998: 30), a semiotic interstice where the process of signification produces a parallel discourse which does not function merely to advance the narrative. That is, the Joycean sequence participates in two chains of signification at once, in that it is both an enactment of a conversation from "The Dead" and a selfcontained part of Rossellini's story. As actors, Bergman and Sanders represent at the same time the characters of Gretta/Katherine and Gabriel/Alex. Semiotically, therefore, this sequence contains far more than is necessary for a straightforward comprehension of the narrative. Forming a part of the narrative syntagm of the film, the sequence is also simultaneously richly overlaid with an additional narrative that amplifies our appreciation of Rossellini's text.
The interspace to which the Joyce segment provides us access indexes a multilayered geology of sources and references, one which seems to require a non-linear mode of reading. Just as the text of "The Dead" extends cataphorically to Rossellini's and Huston's films, it also extends anaphorically to a number of precursor sources, some of which even can be found to connect with Voyage to Italy. It is of course well documented that the character of Michael Furey in "The Dead" is modeled after Nora Barnacle's sweetheart Michael Bodkin, whose grave Joyce visited in 1912, shortly before he composed the poem "She Weeps over Rahoon" in Trieste (Beck 1969: 310). Joyce also commenced work on "The Dead" while in Rome in 1906-07, a time during which, as Richard Ellmann has noted, "[Joyce's] head was filled with a sense of the too successful encroachment of the dead upon the living city" (Ellmann 1982(Ellmann [1959: 244). The co-existence of the dead among the living is of course a major subtext in Rossellini's film, as the critic José-Luis Guarner has noted (Guarner 1970: 60). The autobiographical sources aside, the ending of Joyce's story is partly lifted from George Moore's Vain Fortune (1892), in which, on a couple's wedding 7 Rossellini intended to adapt Colette's story, but had to abandon the project when he disovered that the rights had already been sold. See Gallagher,397. 242 night, news of a rejected lover's suicide provokes a sudden, melancholic insight (Ellmann 1982: 244). In Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's Duo (1934), from which aspects of Voyage to Italy derive, the protagonist's husband Michel, unable to cope with his jealousy of his wife's former lover, commits suicide. 7 It is worth noting that while the allusion to Colette was present in the film from the beginning, Rossellini never acknowledged his Joycean source, thus giving rise to speculations that his citation may have been inadvertent. Another source of Rossellini's narrative is Antonio Pietrangeli's script New Wine, which is about a quarreling English couple on holiday in Naples (Gallagher 1998: 397). Finally, as Bernardi remarks, Voyage to Italy also displays an obvious reference to Goethe's travels of 1786-87, published in 1816 as the Italienische Reise (Bernardi 2000: 58).
In our transtextual space there are a few more allusions in "The Dead" that periphrastically extend to Voyage to Italy. The title of Joyce's narrative has usually been attributed to one of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies (1846), "O, Ye Dead!" (Ellmann 1982: 244), in which in the second stanza the dead answer the living: It is true -it is true -we are shadows cold and wan; It is true -it is true -And the friends we lov'd are gone But oh! thus even in death, So sweet is still the breath Of the fields and the flow'rs in our youth we wander'd o'er, That ere, condemn'd, we og To freeze 'mid Hecla's snow, We would taste it awhile, and dream we love once more! more! (Moore 1846: 182-183) What particularly interests me in Moore's text is the reference to the Icelandic volcano and the implied juxtaposition of heat and cold, passion and tranquility, which animates the imagery. In Rossellini's movie, the second key scene takes place near Vesuvius -at the excavation site at Pompeii -where Katherine and Alex are present as archeologists discover two bodies preserved by the lava. Like the rest of the film, this sequence was wholly improvised, and as it turned out, the archeologists themselves did not know what would be uncovered until after Rossellini's camera had started recording (Gallagher 1998: 412). Katherine's despairing realization that "Life's so short" is thus in every sense a celluloid epiphany. 8 47 Evidently, there is no direct textual relation between the image of Hecla and that of Vesuvius, but Joyce's story becomes the connective tissue that places them in transtextual proximity of one another. Furthermore, as phenomena of nature textualized, there is a compelling though abstruse parallelism between the notion of the lethal volcanic matter which preserves the shapes of dead on the one hand, and the gentle snow falling down to cover the dead on the other. As Franz K. Stanzel has shown, the snowfall in "The Dead" may be "a symbol at once of death and rebirth" (Stanzel 1992: 119); a conjunction, or paradox, reminiscent of that produced by the symbol of the lava in Voyage to Italy. "While the eruption of the volcano means death, it also implies a rebirth of memory as facilitated by the preservational quality of the lava. Finally, the significance of the Pompeii sequence is further enriched by the lines that the dead poet Charles Lewington wrote while he was stationed in Italy during the war, lines which Katherine has memorized: .. .stemple of the spirit. No longer bodies, but pure ascetic images, compared to which mere thought seems flesh, heavy, dim 8 Katherine's exclamation is also emblematic of the death theme that permeates the film, and that culminates in the sequence so aptly described by Brunette in the following passage: "The parts begin to form themselves into a man and a woman; death has caught them making love, or at least wrapped tighdy in each other's arms. Suddenly, the museum, the catacombs, and the Cumaean Sybil all come together in one starding image: the physicality and rawness of the ancient world, the ubiquity of death in life, and love, however inadequate and flawed, as the only possible solution". Brunette,166. As Mulvey discerns, Katherine appears to be searching for a meaning to the poet's verse, one which she perceives eventually in "the image of death that pervades the film" (Mulvey 2000: 24). The couple that embrace in the lava no longer have bodies. They have become the sublimated, "ascetic images" of Lewington's poetry, shapes formed by igneous rock. In Godard's Le Mépris (1963), this image of the petrified lovers resurfaces as a quotation (Guarner 1970: 61).
The second indirect transtextual allusion for which Joyce' story provides the link is no less opaque than the Thomas Moore reference, but it is one, I believe, that a theory of iconology would allow for. Early in "The Dead", as Gabriel looks over the headings for his speech, the narrative becomes self-consciously entangled in questions of quotation. Gabriel plans to cite some lines from Robert Browning, but eventually decides against it, assuming that Shakespeare or Thomas Moore would be more suitable references for his audience. Had Gabriel known that Roberto Rossellini fifty years on would make Voyage to Italy, I am sure that he would have opted for Browning's "Love Among the Ruins" (1853)/ a text which by way of Joyce engages saliently with the thematic preoccupation of Rossellini's film. Browning's first two stanzas read: Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles, Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep Half-asleep Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop As they crop-Was the site once of a city great and gay (So they say), Of our country's very capital, its prince Ages since Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far Peace or war ' The poem is the first in the collection Men and Women (1855). Now -the country does not even boast a tree, As you see, To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills, From the hills Intersect and give a name to (else they run Into one), Where the domed and the daring palace shot its spires Up like fires O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall Bounding all, Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed, Twelve abreast (Browning 1995(Browning [1855: 5-8) It is generally conceded that Browning composed this poem in Italy, and it is quite possible that the ruins the tide refers to are those of one of the country's Etruscan cities. Etruria, however, was located in the northwestern region, and more important than the exact geographical placement are the subject and technique of the poem, which share a conspicuous affinity with Voyage to Italy. Like the film, Browning's poem imagines a meeting of two lovers in the context of an aesthetics of archeology and the past. Invented by the author himself, the curious stanza form is structured by the negotiation of past and present. One half of each stanza devoted to a particular temporality, the poem contrasts the topographical present with its respective past: "Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles... Was the site once of a city great and gay". Rossellini's main interest in the film, Mulvey writes, was "the visible presence of the past and its material legacy" and "the continued presence of the dead among the living" (Mulvey 2000a: 24). The latter also appears to have been a major concern in all of Joyce's fiction, as Ellmann has noted (Ellmann 1982: 244). Thus, an interaction between past and present materializes as Tiresian memory, a memory that rescues the dead from Lethean oblivion. Facilitated by transtextual readings, this memory performs the Bazinian work of embalming of which the cinema -fossilizing images on celluloid (Mulvey 2000a: 24) -becomes a supreme epitome.
Toward the end of his magisterial study, Iampolski concludes that a theory of intertextuality "is particularly effective in addressing narrative leaps, moments in which narrative logic gives way to discursive anomalies" (Iampolski 1998: 247). In this essay, I have attempted to read such an anomaly in Voyage to Italy with reference not only to "The Dead" but to other precursor texts for which the novella acts as a catalyst. One objective has been to show how the phenomena of what I call transtextuality and memory are intimately inter-connected, another to reveal how quotation, as a limbus structure, multiplies the meanings of both the hypotext and the hypertext. Adaptations in the stricter sense do not always accomplish that, probably because they tend to preclude the dialectic engendered by the confluence of two or more individual texts. All adaptations are evidently interpretations of a pre-existing source, sometimes even in the form of radical re-imaginings like Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991) or Roland Joffe's The Scarlet Letter (1995). However, unless we consider an adaptation a single, sustained quotationwhich some have done, but which to me seems counter-productiveadaptations are not involved in the kind of transtextual dialectics that establishes a new text on the ruins of other texts.