Contents Reduction in James Joyce's The Dead - Essay Example

Joyce's short story goes step by step through a dancing dinner party held by two spinster sisters and their niece to which the main character, Gabriel Conroy, is an honored guest (and favorite nephew). Throughout the evening, Gabriel is just as lost as the reader as to what is really going on. This confusion starts as Mr. Conroy enters the house and is greeted by the housemaid, Lily. As she helps him with his coat, he attempts to make a connection with her, remembering a time when she was a little girl playing with dolls as he says, "I suppose we'll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man.

" However, he is quickly and firmly turned away from such a connection as she responds, "the men that are now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you." This response denies any connection between the two characters at the same time that it causes the reader to question the intentions being expressed. Perhaps Mr. Conroy was trying to be flirtatious instead of just family? It is difficult to know for certain, thus calling into question whether this short story is communicating in a conventional way.

As Gabriel goes upstairs to talk with the people there, he eventually meets up with a fellow university instructor, Miss Ivors, and she teases him about his clandestine writings for a conservative newspaper, calling him a West Briton and forcing him to admit he is sick of Ireland. When Miss Ivors leaves the party suddenly, "Gabriel asked himself was he the cause of her abrupt departure. But she did not seem to be in ill humor: she had gone away laughing." He continues to be confused until the end of the story when he learns that his wife, who was transfixed by a song sung as they were leaving, is still missing an old lover she had before him who died after taking a chill waiting outside her window.

This ending leaves the reader as perplexed as to the character, trying to puzzle out what the meaning was intended to be and where the attention should have been focused.In much the same way, "Deep in the very heart of Africa" is a painting that provides very little context as to where the viewer is supposed to look. The artwork presents what seems to be a diagonal maze stretched across a rectangular field of vision. The black lines are jagged, as in Native American weavings, and there is no particular pattern to emerge from the way they are arranged or bent.

Only when one steps back away from the artwork a bit to take a second or third look do new patterns begin to emerge, somewhat superimposed on the others, like the hidden messages of Joyce's story. Slowly, individual squares begin to pop out, each with their own rhythm and role. At times, entire strips combine to create horizontal or vertical bands through the painting. Although MoMA says the painting is based on compositions, no letters can be discerned within the painting. MoMA explains that it is an example of Contents reduction of text to algorithmic visual codes.

What this painting tells us is that there are layers upon layers of meaning coexisting and interacting with each other all the time, sometimes hidden, sometimes visible. Because of the quickness with which the painting reveals its secrets, and in our expectations that visual art communicates somewhat differently than narrative art, the painting communicates in a much more convenient way than Joyce's story. With Joyce's story, one must read to the end to discover there is a secret to be found but has been plagued by unresolved secrets throughout.

In this way, Joyce never gives us all the information we need to resolve the questions. Cointet confronts us straightforwardly, telling us there's a secret and leaving us to puzzle out the answer for ourselves, but he also doesn't tell what the secret is.