Hollywood Dubliners become personal: Joyce’s Gabriel morphs to John Huston in The Dead

Abstract

Literary adaptation has been both intriguing and challenging for directors especially when it comes to complicated modernist writers like James Joyce (1882–1941) who is commonly considered unadaptable. First approached by John Huston (1906–1987), Joyce’s famous short story, “The Dead” (1914) came to Hollywood (1987). Unitizing the views of different scholars in the realm of adaptation studies, this paper reveals why the director has changed the emotional features of the main hero, Gabriel, in his last movie. The main gap in adaptation studies is mostly associated with analyzing the works in relation to their main sources rather than scrutinizing them individually. We try to fill this gap by focusing on the film and Huston’s personal life. It is concluded that Huston, the product of a troubled childhood and marital life, recreated Gabriel to portray his personal dilemmas.

Keywords:

• adaptation studies
• The Dead
• personal life
• John Huston
• James Joyce

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

Literary adaptation has been both intriguing and challenging for directors especially when it comes to complicated modernist writers like James Joyce who is commonly considered unadaptable. First approached by John Huston, Joyce’s famous short story, “The Dead” (1914) came to Hollywood (1987). Unitizing the views of different scholars in the realm of adaptation studies, this paper reveals why the director has changed the emotional features of the main hero in his last movie. The main gap in adaptation studies is mostly associated with analyzing the works in relation to their main sources rather than scrutinizing them individually. We try to fill this gap by focusing on the film and Huston’s personal life. It is concluded that Huston, the product of a troubled childhood and marital life, recreated Gabriel to portray his personal dilemmas.

1. Introduction

Traditionalist critics considered adaptation as derivative and unoriginal; however, in 21^st century, adaptation is the topic of many discussions all over the world (e.g., Aragay, 2005; Cartmell & Whelehan, 2013; Hutcheon, 2006; Hutcheon & O’Flynn, 2013; Leitch, 2003), 2007; Sanders, 2006). The popularity of adaptation studies in academia is associated with the use of film adaptations in educational settings, their economical lures, and the matter of saving time, mostly regarding the adaptation of long novels.

John Marcellus Huston (1906–1987) has been a successful American film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is famous in the realm of adaptation especially for his six movies in his directorial resume: Stephan Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951), C. S. Forester’s The African Queen (1951), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1956), The Bible (1966), Flannery O’Connor Wise Blood (1979), and The Dead (1987). Huston’s last adaptation is The Dead (1987), based on James Joyce’s (1882–1941) short story with the same title. This film adaptation is very faithful to the adapted text, long held to be unadaptable, because of its modernist techniques such as interior monologue and epiphany.

James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914) is concerned with the life story of a young couple, Gabriel and Gretta, who come to their aunts’ dance ceremony and, gradually, the readers find out their incongruity especially at the end of the party when Gretta confesses her obsession with a young lover, who died years ago under the window of her room. Death, the central theme of the short story, is directly transferred to the movie besides other significant elements in the plot and setting.

Except for some slight alterations in the characters’ dialogues and one additional character to the plot, the movie is considered as one of the most faithful adaptations. However, some of the dialogues have been increased or decreased in length in order to add to or subtract from the prominence of secondary or foil characters. Furthermore, the fundamental imageries of the short story have been mostly transferred to the film. However, because of one implicit change, Huston’s Gabriel cannot win the audience’s compassion like Joyce’s Gabriel: detachment.

Methodologically speaking, we smoothly move from the context—director’s personal life—to the comparative analysis of Joyce’s text and Huston’s movie to analyze the reason and significance of the alterations. The possibility of the intrusion of Huston’s personal life with Joyce’s Gabriel, leads us to the path, where the director, as an adapter, changes the directions. Consequently, the movie fails to convey one part of the adapted text or characteristics of the protagonist, Gabriel. This is challenging because this modification plays an influential role in altering the essence of the adapted text. Although judging a movie according to fidelity criterion is considered as fallacy (Leitch, 2003), p. 161), it is still interesting to discover what elements have been influential in adding to or subtracting from the adaptation since they lead to the decrease or increase in the cultural and political implications (Leitch, 2003), p. 161). Considering four main scenes in the plot of the story, benefitting from adaptation theory and John Huston’s biographical information, this paper tries to discover why these changes ever occurred.

Moreover, this study tries to reveal how Huston’s reworking of the film’s source material is mostly based on directorial choices, rather than actor’s technique or the fundamental process of adaptation for the screen. The movie may seem like Joyce’s “The Dead” stylistically based on the plot and faithful adherence to the text but the delivered message narrates a differ story: it is Huston himself on screen under the veneer of adaptation.

2. Huston’s adaptation through the lens of critics

Although several researchers have approached Huston’s adaptation of Joyce’s “The Dead”, none of them has tried to analyze the movie, in relation to the literary text. Most of them either appreciated the high fidelity of this movie or Huston’s endeavor to adapt a work with modernistic techniques. Nonetheless, one important feature that has been ignored in all prior research is the fluctuations in modes of representation, movie’s dialogues, and facial expressions of the actor who plays the role of Gabriel. The seemingly trivial change plays a crucial role in the way the audience sympathizes with Gabriel. This paper will discuss the neglected aspect of this American film adaptation.

In John Huston’s Filmmaking, Brill (1997a) discussed Huston’s various works, including his film adaptations, the last of which is James Joyce’s “The Dead”. This movie shares the same themes prevalent in Joyce’s short story (Brill, 1997b, p. 208). Most of the images in the story, such as snow, cabs, the road, etc., appear in the adaptation as well. Furthermore, the speech of Mr. Grace and the “romance between Bartell D’Arcy (Frank Patterson) and Miss O’Callaghan” have been added to the plot of the movie (Brill, 1997b, p. 208).

“The Gaze of Tiresias: Joyce, Rossellini and the Iconology of ‘The Dead’” (2002), compared and contrasted Huston’s The Dead with a loose, Italian adaptation. Grønstad (2002) believed that being known for a long time as an unadaptable text, James Joyce’s “The Dead” had an aura of mystery for the moviemakers. He related Huston’s adaptation to Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1953) that “deploys the Joycean intertext as a starting point” to delineate our definition of memory (Grønstad, 2002, p. 233). He criticized the lack of intertextual flavor in Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, as compared to Huston’s adaptation (Grønstad, 2002, p. 234).

Corseuil (2001) censured the American movie’s focalization and viewpoint by claiming that the frequent vicissitudes of focalization and point of view slowed down the process of story and made it rather boring for the audience. The movie does not present the description of scenes, related to the development of the plot or characters; for instance, one can mention the longshot view of the house both in the beginning and in the middle of the movie. In other words, Huston’s camera-eye chose to neglect “human dimension of the characters. Their feelings are not explored when the camera intrudes the privacy of Julia’s rooms to show her belongings” (Corseuil, 2001, p. 72). From this point of view, the camera shifted to Gabriel’s focalization as well. However, the depiction of Gabriel’s emotions and the impact of director’s choice were not discussed. This paper, by focusing on Gabriel’s characterization, aims at bridging the gap in the adaptation studies, especially the literature concerning “The Dead”.

3. Towards theoretical framework

Every adaptation, as a product, involves two processes: “transcoding” and “transposition”. Transcoding “involves a shift of medium (a poem to a film) or genre (an epic to a novel), or a change of frame and therefore context: telling the same story from a different point of view” (Hutcheon, 2006, pp. 7–8). The other process, “transposition”, involves a shift in the essence of the work, for instance, from a factual account to a fictional one (Hutcheon, 2006, pp. 7–8). Looking at adaptation as a process, we can call it a “(re-) interpretation and then (re-)recreation”, which also is known as “appropriation and salvaging”, based on the perspective from which the audience perceives the adapted text. As a process of reception, adaptation can be called one form of intertextuality. This paper will benefit from Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, with the focus on the adapters’ role in adaptation.

In sum, adaptation refers to the changes in the modes of representation, including “showing”, “telling”, and “interactive modes” (Hutcheon & O’Flynn, 2013, pp. 22–25). Needleless to mention that some critics and directors claim that the adaptation of modernist works is difficult, mainly because they are concerned with the interior aspects of human personality that is hard to depict (Hutcheon, 2006, p. 56). Thus, the “difficulty” in Joyce’s adaptation was one of Huston’s motivation (Grønstad, 2002, pp. 233–238). That is why beside the “economical lures” and “legal restraints”, personal motives of the director can pave the way for the adaptation of a literary work (Hutcheon, 2006, pp. 89–92). Some critics and Huston’s biographers discussed the reciprocal relationship between his personal life and his movies (Brill, 1997b, p. 220). Accordingly, it seems that the personal motives play the most influential role in adapting “The Dead”. Among the plethora of factors used for analyzing adaptation, the paper will probe into the changes in the modes of representation and the impact of the role of adapter, mainly the director, in the movie alterations.

4. When the director recreates Joyce: John Huston as the adapter

The shift from telling to showing mode—text to movie—burdens adapters with utilizing alternative techniques to transfer the materials from one mode to another. Since adaptation is not a reproduction but a reinterpretation, great changes may be applied to adaptations, even to those with high degrees of fidelity. This section addresses the basic challenge of Huston’s adaptation: the seemingly faithful plot and movie script is not narrating the story of Joyce’s Gabriel but mirroring the director’s personality. Although not completely obvious, Huston metamorphoses Joyce’s Gabriel to a different character, who may not be completely at the service of the short story’s themes of loneliness, alienation, and emotional barrenness. The audience’s sense of sympathy and self-identification is consequently decreased because of the subtraction of these themes. In several scenes where Gabriel confronts women, his emotions, varying from surprise, affection, or passion, are either marginalized or entirely silenced. These scenes include, Gabriel’s encounter with Lily (the house’s caretaker), in the beginning of their arrival at the party and Gabriel’s dance with Miss Ivors (one of Gabriel’s friends). Furthermore, in the interaction with his wife in two significant scenes, Huston downgrades the modern theme of alienation: when she is allured by an Irish music and when he listens to his wife narrating the story of her first and last true love in the hotel room.

4.1. John Huston as the Gabriel Conroy

John Huston, one of the most acclaimed Hollywood directors, has introduced many masterpieces to world cinema. His oeuvre, famous for the adaptations of unadaptable writers, such as James Joyce, has great diversity. He is also known for resorting to canonical works, exploring the human nature and its conflicts in The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The African Queen (1951), Moby Dick (1956), Wise Blood (1979), The Dead and even his most audacious movie, The Bible (1966) (Tracy & Flynn, 2010, p. 3). Yet, among all his works, it is The Dead where he is most obsessed with self-portrayal.

The interference of Huston’s character in the story’s protagonist is very likely, regarding the fact that his family has collaborated with him in the process of adaptation. Advertently or inadvertently, Huston modifies the main character of “The Dead” in a way that fits not only his own problematic, loveless life but also his style. Some critics have labeled his style a “masculine” one, especially in terms of characterization and setting (Brill, 1997a, p. 1). The paucity of academic writing describing the masculine qualities of Huston’s artistic creation poses as a challenge to this article. Therefore, we focus on what is stereotypically labeled as “masculine style” like objective point of view, emotional detachment, homogeneity of the neutral colors and the control of the protagonist, especially the male one, over the narrative and the plot (Collins et al., 1993, pp. 1–7; Bruzzi, 2013, pp. 40–47). Hence, masculine film narratives strive to abolish the complications and are hardly chaotic and fluid in the form. This cliché is continuously challenged in literature by late modernist and postmodernist artists, nevertheless, the twentieth century Hollywood cinema, follows this trend.

Though the narrative of Joyce’s “The Dead” is not as complicated as that of Ulysses, Huston tunes Joyce’s complication to the minimum. Huston portrays the complexities in the psychological life of the characters and marginalizes the stylistic aspects related to the form and structure of the movie. The structure of The Dead looks clear and unambiguous giving the male hero, Gabriel, the full control over the story. Furthermore, the bare mise en scène with minimalist ornamentation and neutral colors amalgamated with the sense of aloofness of characters, especially Gabriel’s, is in line with this claim. The Dead masters portraying emotionless and indifferent characters and silencing any clues that are stereotypically associated with femininity. The more the movie is narrated through the camera-eye and the director omits the character’s point of view, the more the audience is detached from characters’ emotions and beliefs. Not only the lack of emotions and the intentional avoidance of feminine symbols like flower, water and any natural element but also the absence of warm colors, family-gathering vivacity and the nonappearance of any strong female character can justify this claim.

To add more to the masculine inclination of his style, Huston have co-written the script with the help of his son, Tony Huston. Angelica Huston, John Huston’s first daughter, explains the whys and ways of winning the role of Gretta Conroy in the Dead, her father’s final movie (Huston, 2001, p. 20). While John Huston has stayed in a hospital for eye surgery, she came to visit him. There, he informed her of a script beside his bed asking his daughter to read it aloud. She claimed, “I don’t think he even asked me, I think that was his understanding” (Tracy, 2010, p. 18). Though his daughter has immensely contributed to his father’s vision for Gabriel, she could not win the acknowledgment like her father or brother.

Another fact that contributes to this claim is Huston’s long history of eliminating both feminine and feminist elements. This exclusion is seen not only in Joyce’s “the Dead” but also in every adaptation since his first successful work, The African Queen (1951). He marginalized the role of the female character, by removing “the powerful feminist element of Forster’s novel” and decreasing the “impact of its protagonist through the use of … clichés” (McFarland & King, 2017, p. 117). Unconsciously, Huston marginalizes female characters and depicts an independently formed, male character.

Yet, Huston’s masculine style in The Dead should not be overstated because it is not the only reason for the bare setting and cold colors. This adaptation is Huston’s last movie and he had directed the film mostly on wheelchair, while he was suffering from cataract and melancholia (Tracy, 2010, p. 18). Since the director was struggling with blindness and despair, one may logically conclude that it affected his artistic creation. That might be another reason for the prevalence of nutral colors, deficient emotions, the taciturnity, indifference, bitterness, and despondency in the atmosphere magnifying the “masculine” inclination in the style that more than being a gender issue, is a matter of personal feeling and the attitude of the director.

In Joyce’s “The Dead” Gabriel Conroy is depicted as a loner, who has no intense emotional or mutual contact with other characters, especially the female ones. All throughout the story, his struggles to build a meaningful emotional bond are doomed to failure. Although received well by his aunts and the caretaker’s daughter, Lily, he is embarrassed by what she says in response to his anticipations about her marriage (Joyce, 2000, p. 231). Furthermore, his friend, Miss Ivors, expects him to be ashamed of himself, because he betrays his Irish identity by writing for the British enemy in The Daily Express (Joyce, 2000, p. 232). This encounter pinpoints his alienation and isolation. The sense of alienation reaches its climax, when his relation with his wife is portrayed for the readers. The man, feeling alienated all through the story, comes to a hotel with his wife to spend a calm night; yet, he is faced with the bitter reality of his wife’s obsession with the memory of another man, with whom she had been in love years ago (Joyce, 2000, p. 272).

Gabriel’s being labeled as “West Britton” because of writing for The Daily Express (Joyce, 2000, p. 232) reveals Joyce’s view toward the identity crisis of his protagonist. It is claimed that Irish literary output has been constantly involved in identity crisis, “particularly in the modernist period” (Corcoran, 2011, p. 57). The conflict appears mostly in Joyce’s Dubliners, in which the search for identity is explored, with respect to the role of family and religion in the formation of identity. In “The Dead”, the characters fail to meet the expectations and perceive the anticipations of their society. Similar to Gabriel’s portrayal, identity crisis and its connection with language is also evident in the life of Joyce, since some of his artistic creation hovers between English and Irish language intensified by his diasporic life.

Joyce directly refers to Gabriel’s threatened identity: “His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling” (Joyce, 2000, p. 277). Drawing on such rich imagery, Joyce tries to depict the moment of Gabriel’s revelation, regarding death and life. Here, the border between the dead and the alive is blurred. Gabriel feels more powerless than the dead, i.e. Gretta’s former lover. Just like Gabriel, James Joyce resorts to “English and continental literature and culture”, yet in some of his works, including Dubliners, he discusses the sense of loss in those who privileged a foreign country’s culture and lifestyle over their own (Backus, 2001, pp. 124–125). That is why it is believed that utilizing epiphany in Joyce’s stories represents “the fight for Irish identity” (Corcoran, 2011, p. 57). “War for independence” and the quest for “collective national identity” are the two central themes of these epiphanies. Besides, Dubliners goes further than these issues to identify “through everyday examples, the root structures in society which contribute to a crisis in identity” (Corcoran, 2011, pp. 57—58).

In Huston’s movie, the isolation of Irish identity, under the threat of English language and culture, is meticulously portrayed; nevertheless, rather than national identity crisis, it is mostly focused on personal side. The alienation and isolation, the key features of Gabriel Conroy’s life, pervades both the family and marital life of the director. Despite the fact that some critics call Huston’s style impersonal, others label his perspective “intensely personal” albeit “multifaceted” (Tracy & Flynn, 2010, p. 3). In The Dead, the impact of the director’s personal life seems to be evident resulted from the director’s identification with the protagonist, Gabriel. His personal life has been full of traumas, especially when his parents divorced and he was forced to “shuffled back and forth between his father, playing the vaudeville circuit, and his mother, living at a series of different hotels” (Long, 2001, p. xv). Huston reinterpreted Gabriel’s alienation and his view towards his aunts. The emotional restrain of Huston’s Gabriel is too serious that he does not show any tendency to initiate a conversation with old friends and family members. Huston’s marital life was, also, full of troubles. He married five times and in four cases, the marriage collapsed into divorce. He had been “consistently unfaithful, rough on his wives and children” (Meyers, 2011, p. 87). In the same vein, Huston’s Gabriel looks “rough”, emotionless, and detached considering his relationship with the wife.

Furthermore, while for the most of his life, he lived in the United States, he moved to Ireland in 1952 and ten years after that, he became an Irish citizen. He tried hard to establish a national Irish film industry. Besides, he never knew himself an expatriate in this country (Huston, 2001, pp. 20–40). The other common feature which draw parallel lines between Huston’s personal life and Gabriel’s characterization is the “quest for identity”, to the extent that Brill (1997a) claims that “quests for identity and love” is the pervasive theme of Huston’s films (p. 8). Furthermore, Monterrey (2011) believes: he “relied extensively on authentic and autobiographical material for [The Dead], ranging from his correspondence with his wife Nora to the actual snowy weather conditions” (p. 63).

Therefore, the omnipresence of the director affects the representation of the main character and, consequently, the way audience recognizes and identifies with him. Huston’s sense of loneliness has reinterpreted Joyce’s Gabriel. Apparently insignificant to Huston, Gabriel’s emotions like shame, surprise and hostility, prevents the audience from realizing the alienation of the protagonist but at the same time, by jeopardizing Gabriel’s humanization, it frustrates the audience’s sympathy. In the next section, we explore these omissions in four significant, central scenes in the plot of the story/movie: Gabriel’s entrance into the aunts’ house, his dancing with Miss Ivors, and his encounter with his wife, Gretta, in two scenes. The significance of these scenes, her being absorbed in a traditional Irish music and confessing her love to another man, lies in the fact that they demonstrate Gabriel’s alienation, especially among women, and help readers eventually track the main theme of the story. Joyce’s Gabriel is too artistic, fragile, and noble for his society whereas Huston’s Gabriel is too emotionally barren and pessimistic to portray these calamities in his society.

4.2. Huston’s Gabriel vs. Joyce’s Gabriel

The first scene is portrayed in the beginning of the movie, when Gabriel and Gretta arrive at the party. Serving as the introduction of Gabriel to the audience, his encounter with Lily reveals his attitude towards women. In this scene, Gabriel and Lily speak about such topics as their late arrival, Lily’s marriage, and snow (7ʹ: 20”). In the course of this dialogue, Gabriel expresses different, varying emotions, including embarrassment, coyness, and gentleness (Joyce, 2000, pp. 219–277).

In general, the audience sees no change in the facial expressions of Donal McCannin (1943–1999) who plays the role of Gabriel. Instead, he treats Lily as a simple servant. Huston marginalizes Lily’s role in the movie. In the short story, after Lily pronounced Gabriel’s family name in an unusual manner, he “smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and glanced at her” (Joyce, 2000, p. 219), while in the movie all emotional details are omitted and Gabriel’s embarrassment is absent. Even in answering Lily’s negative attitude towards marriage and young men, Huston’s Gabriel continues with the next dialogue without interruption or any emotional disturbance. However, Joyce’s Gabriel is “coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, […] flicked actively with his muffler at his patent leather shoes” (Joyce, 2000, pp. 219—220).

The second significant scene depicts Gabriel’s dance with Miss Ivors, one of the family’s long-time friends in the middle of the movie (25ʹ: 26”). In this scene, they talk about different matters; however, while Miss Ivors tries to reproach Gabriel politely, he is hardly doing his best in maintaining his decency and decorum (26ʹ:31”). Again, Huston’s Gabriel is presented as the target of his friend’s sarcasm and rather than defending himself or wash off the accusations and derogatory labels like “West Briton”, he passively embraces the blame to the extent that the audience is baffled by his taking it for granted to be unjustly reprimanded by the closest friends. While Joyce’s Gabriel is embarrassedly “smiling at [Miss Ivors’] solemn manner” (Joyce, 2000, p. 232), Huston’s Gabriel remains indifferent and emotionless. Furthermore, when she asks him “Who is G. C.?”, Gabriel was “coloured and was about to knit his brows, as if he did not understand, when she said bluntly” (Joyce, 2000, p. 232). Again, the same expression of indifference, rather than anger and embarrassment, is revealed in the face of the actor. Huston’s Gabriel fails to convey the sense of alienation, miscommunication, and pedantic care for decorum.

Joyce’s Gabriel, in response to Miss Ivors’s sarcasm about his writing for The Daily Express, answers calmly (Joyce, 2000, p. 232). When she blamed him, “he continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books” (Joyce, 2000, p. 233). This sense of failure and weakness in Gabriel and the “look of perplexity” (Joyce, 2000, p. 232) are totally absent in the movie. Miss Ivors and Gabriel’s conversation gradually becomes friendly and the tension is partly solved, while the movie adaptation eliminated the whole process:

When they were together again she spoke of the University question and Gabriel felt more at ease. A friend of hers had shown her his review of Browning’s poems. That was how she had found out the secret: but she liked the review immensely. (Joyce, 2000, p. 233)

Perhaps, this change of atmosphere by Miss Ivors is significant, because not only does Joyce show the hypocrisy, mendacity and shallowness of friendship but also he reveals Gabriel’s deep sense of alienation and his constant struggle to build a conversational bridge with old friends. Huston’s Gabriel, does not even try to show any human emotion. In “The Dead”, Gabriel tried to cover his agitation by “taking part in the dance with great energy”; he avoided Miss Ivor’s “eyes for he had seen a sour expression on her face” (Joyce, 2000, p. 235). The alienation and avoidance are absent in the dialogues and the facial expressions or manner of the actor. Actually, he remains indifferent and serious, all through this conversation. Thus, the audience is deprived of feeling the anguish and isolation of Joycean protagonist.

The other two scenes are probably more important, since they show Gabriel’s relationship with his wife. His feeling of alienation and loneliness is tragically augmented in his encounters with his wife in two noteworthy scenes—one in the middle and the other in the end of the story. In general, Joyce’s Gabriel seems more attached to his wife and more in want of her affection than Huston’s Gabriel, who almost through all the scenes appear gloomy and indifferent, even towards his wife. In contrast to the story, the film adaptation highlights the absence of Gabriel’s sexual and metaphoric love that has built the climax of Joyce’s “The Dead”.

The third scene depicts Gabriel’s gaze at Gretta while she is listening attentively to a traditional Irish song. In the short story, this scene reminds the reader of the Greek mythological figure, Pygmalion who fell in love with his own creation, the statue he carved.

There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (Joyce, 2000, pp. 260 – 261)

On the other hand, Huston’s Gabriel has almost an empty look and such a long passage describing his attitude is neither portrayed visually nor through Donal McCann’s voice-over. The scene is cut short in the movie, while in the short story, one more long passage is dedicated to Gabriel’s attention to his wife and the song she is absorbed in. This is the first time that he implicitly feels the probable presence of another person in the mind of his wife. Thus, by minimalizing this scene, Huston has pushed one of the most crucial moments of the short story to the margin. Joyce’s Gabriel finds grief and uncertainty in the song that was reflected in his wife’s facial expression:

Gabriel said nothing but pointed up the stairs towards where his wife was standing. Now that the hall-door was closed the voice and the piano could be heard more clearly …. The song seemed to be in the old Irish tonality and the singer seemed uncertain both of his words and of his voice. The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief. (p. 261)

The last scene is concerned with the couple’s return to the hotel room. Gabriel is so sexually obsessed with and attracted to Gretta to the extent that he wants to make love to her instantaneously. However, since he is gentle, caring, and coy, he patiently waits for Gretta’s consent that ends up in her tragic confession. More than the omission of this humane intricacy in Gabriel’s characterization, another important feeling is absent in the actor’s facial expression, or voice-over: his sense of shame and humiliation, because of being compared with his wife’s dead lover.

A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a penny boy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead. (Joyce, 2000, p. 273)

For the first time, here, he has to face the bare truth. By looking at the mirror in the moment of epiphany, Joyce’s Gabriel reveals the feeling of degradation and degradation because of the presence of dead lover in his marital bed. Yet, this crucial moment of self-realization and revelation is absent in the movie. Experiencing several divorces in life and numerous accounts of unfaithfulness (Meyers, 2011, p. 87), for Huston, similar to his Gabriel, this event seems quotidian and thus not as excruciatingly agitating as it is for Joyce’s Gabriel. Maybe that is why he tried to show the audience that the marriage is terminated even before Gretta’s love story is revealed. However, Joyce’s Gabriel, who through all scenes, thought to be loved by his wife and aunts, now, he finds his own image as merely a shattered illusion. The face of reality seems clear as daylight and he feels shame, frustration, disappointment, and ludicrousness, which he tries to hide from his wife (Joyce, 2000, p. 273). Thus, Huston recreates an already-disillusioned character, whereas for Joyce, the process of disillusionment is real the tragedy.

Huston eliminates another crucial moment from Gabriel’s life: where he is terrified at the sight of Gretta’s great grief and adoration for her dead lover. Again, instead of showing these emotions, Huston’s Gabriel mechanically recites the next dialogue, without interruption:

Gabriel [in a monologue]: How poor a part I have played in your life … we have never lived as man and wife, not being like then. [Pause] for me your face is still beautiful, but it’s no longer the one for which Michael Furey braved death. (1: 11ʹ: 50”)

While Huston highlights Gabriel’s inaction and lost faith, Joyce tries to reveal Gabriel’s keenness in understanding the deepest human emotions even if they were directed at his rival:

A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again for he felt that she would tell him of herself. (Joyce, 2000, p. 274)

Based on Sanders (2006) distinction between adaptation and appropriation, an “adaptation signals a relationship with an informing source text or original”, while the appropriated text or texts are not always as “clearly signaled or acknowledged as in the adaptive process” (p. 26). Thus, although the whole story of the movie, its imagery, theme, and even its name acknowledges the source text, it drastically and perhaps inadvertently depicts a completely different Gabriel who is too similar to Huston’s personality that consequently, fails to inform the audience of Joyce’s message.

5. Conclusion

There was the possibility that Huston, identifying with Gabriel, has modified the characters accordingly. Huston, known for a masculine style, eliminated the feminist elements from his movie adaptations. By focusing on the main character in Joyce’s and Huston’s The Dead, Gabriel Conroy, this article scrutinized how the reasons for most of the alterations and revisions of the source material were rooted in directorial choices rather than the process of adaptation or actor’s resume. Considering four fundamental scenes in Joyce’s “The Dead”, Gabriel’s encounter with Lily, Miss Ivors, his wife and the dead lover, the audience found a different Gabriel in Huston because of the changes applied to Joyce’s Gabriel and his emotions. Senses such as shame, surprise, happiness, humiliation, anger, and isolation were mostly eliminated from the movie.

In Gabriel’s first scene with Lily, when her opinions about men bothers him, no emotional expression is portrayed in the face or actions of Huston’s Gabriel. When Joyce’s Gabriel dances with Miss Ivors, he is embarrassed by her sarcasms about his problematic Irish identity; yet, only emotional detachment was depicted by the actor and the tone of his voice. The same was true in the other two scenes in which Huston’s Gabriel was in contact with his wife. The actor’s facial expressions neither revealed his admiration of his wife when she was bewitched by the old Irish music nor did they disclose his sense of humiliation and anguish once his wife’s confession about her seventeen-year-old lover was heard. In the absence of these emotions, the depth of Gabriel’s isolation was not well depicted, resulting in the audience’s identification with Joycean Gabriel. On the other hand, just like Gabriel, John Huston had been alienated both in his family life, because of his parents’ divorce, and his marital life, after four divorces.

Although critics claim that The Dead is an acclaimed masterpiece, an adaptation with a high degree of fidelity to Joyce’s story (Tracy & Flynn, 2010, p. 1, Brill, 1997a, p. 6), Huston’s movie has not succeeded in depicting the main idea of Joyce’s short story regarding its protagonist.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Azra Ghandeharion

Azra Ghandeharion, a faculty member of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, is the youngest Associate professor of English literature and cultural studies in Iran. Her interest in research includes contemporary Middle Eastern art and culture. Her emphasis is on “Otherness” issues, media studies, body politics, and literature of diaspora. She presented numerous articles in international congresses involving social sciences, humanities, and art. Her recent publication includes: “Governmental Discourses in Advertising on Iran’s State Television,” “Iranian Advertisements: A Postcolonial Semiotic Reading”, “Ideology behind the Bestselling Book Covers in Iran: Female Narrators of War Literature”, “Homi Bhabha and Iranian-American Literature of Diaspora”, and “Recasting James Bond in Iran: The Voice of Masculinity at the Cost of Silencing Women”

Roya Abbaszadeh holds MA in English Literature from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad.