Anatole France, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce A Queer Genealogy of “The Dead”

Abstract

This essay re-situates James Joyce’s story “The Dead” in the alternative intellectual genealogy of late-nineteenth-century European religious skepticism, its reexamination of the historical origins of Christianity, and its fresh reinterrogation of the epochal transition between the pre-Christian and the Christian worlds. Taking a cue from Richard Ellmann’s suggestion that it was Anatole France’s “The Procurator of Judea” that inspired “The Dead”, the essay argues that just as France had written a revisionist story about the disappearance of Jesus from the history, so did Joyce write a similar story, about a failed Annunciation and the death of God. Further, the essay identifies Oscar Wilde’s Salome as a twin text of France’s and triangulates it with France and Joyce, showing how Wilde’s play had excavated this same territory and provided a recent Irish precedent for restaging a New Testament dialogue, for redramatizing the contest between female pagan voice and prophetic Christian voice, and for reviving a sustained pagan rhetoric of “the dead”.