STUDIES AND RESEARCH

Tiresias’ Gaze: Joyce, Rossellini and the Iconology of the Dead

Text focuses on the deliberation of transtextuality and literary/filmic feeling in The Dead by James Joyce and Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia 1953) by Robert Rossellini. Rossellini’s film, shot in Naples, staring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders in roles of the middle age couple Katherine and Alex Joyce, has only one scene that openly evokes The Dead. Despite that fact, the author points out that the theme of Rossellini’s film stemmed precisely from that segment, and that the author used Joycian intertext as the starting point from which he attempted self-reflexive meditation on the nature of memory and film image. Reading Voyage to Italy in the context of Mihail Iampolski’s theory of intertextuality, the author also wants to indicate that Rossellini’s deliberated quotation of Joyce encompasses and elaborates some of the themes of Joyce’s short story more dynamically that the other, more renowned adaptation, John Huston’s esteemed parting work from 1987, The Dead. Considering that it was a direct adaptation, Huston’s film The Dead lacks the intertextual resonance that marks Trip to Italy and his complexly nuanced connection with Joyce’s story, although the author does not consider Huston’s film to be aesthetically inferior to Rossellini’s. In his review, the author deals exclusively with the Italian film considering that its relation with The Dead had so far been unjustly disregarded, and that, contrary to Huston’s film, it distanced itself from Joyce so as to emphasize the game of transtextuality. Rossellini’s film uses The Dead as the origin for creative thinking about ideas from the story, and faithfully relates its spirit. Finally, the text is trying to show how deeply the phenomenon of transtextuality and emotions are interconnected, and reveal how quotation, as an endless concentric structure, multiplies the meanings of hypotext and hypertext.

Asbjorn Gronstad