Song, Snow, and Feasting: Dialogue and Carnival in The Dead

Abstract

Joyce's The Dead illustrates Bakhtin's idea that meaning is a living, dialogic phenomenon, where words struggle to capture potential meaning in a fluctuating context. At the same time, Bakhtin's dialogic methodology is itself enriched when Joyce's text anticipates, figures and sometimes resists its Bakhtinian intertext. A Bakhtinian Joyce offers readers an “epiphanic” perception of the openendedness of the heteroglossic “arguments” that take place throughout the text between inside and outside, life and death, voices (narrative and characters’voices) and silence. The “grace notes” in Aunt Julia's song and its depiction are no mere embellishment: they enact heteroglossia, and reveal potential textual manipulations of the reader. “Snow” - a focusing agent in the text - brings forward cultural and literary intertexts, while the feasting, like traditional carnival, permits subversive “unofficial truth” to be spoken. Like Joyce's “impersonal” artist and Bakhtin's “third party” author, the snow manages to express an impulse toward neutrality as it blankets the meanings it exposes, Yet the word “snow,” like a self-contradicting Bakhtinian voice, dialogically and repeatedly breaks through to potentially renewed meaning.