Meeting Kevin Barry in the bar of a Cork hotel to talk about James Joyce and film, we are, appropriately enough, forced to flee by a combination of Jesuits and television. The very loud set in the corner is tuned to Donald Taylor Black's documentary about Clongowes Wood College, and we seek refuge in the sanctuary of an empty dining room.
Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Barry has written the first, fine book in "Ireland into Film", a new series that examines notable adaptations of Irish literary texts. Also published this month are studies of December Bride and the little-seen This Other Eden, but it seems reasonable to suggest that Barry got the pick of the crop, in writing about John Huston's richly textured 1987 film of Joyce's short story The Dead.
"It certainly would always have been my choice," he says. "It's a very unusual situation to find oneself completely free of the question of which is better than the other, or whether the film is a good enough representation of the book. That question is answered by my own and the public's enjoyment of the film. You're dealing with two things that have passed the test."
I confess an interest in Huston's film, on which I worked in a menial capacity for the Irish unit - the interiors were shot in California, and Huston was too ill to travel to the Republic.
When Gretta and Gabriel Conroy's cab pulls up outside the dark gaunt house on Usher's Island, that's me waltzing very badly behind the net curtains. As the camera pans down onto the mutinous Shannon waves - actually Killiney Bay - I'm the one sprinkling dried potato flakes in front of the lens to mimic the softly falling snow.
It was wonderfully exciting, but even at the time I was wondering how Huston, in what everyone knew was his swansong, would translate the famous last few beautiful, ambiguous pages of Joyce's story to the screen. Seeing the finished film, this seemed less important. What was most striking was the beautifully achieved ensemble playing of the party scene; the closing scenes were more like a coda than a climax.
"It's very interesting," says Barry. "What is The Dead known for? It's known as the story of Gretta Conroy and Michael Furey. And yet Joyce, when explaining why he wrote The Dead, said it had everything to do with the milieu; it was about a certain kind of hospitality that Dublin offered, certain kinds of courtesies. That world of good behaviour is something that's deeply important to Joyce, and he gives it an enormous amount of attention, but readers have gone instead for the romantic kick at the end, which isn't read as if it throws the rest into relief, but rather as if it simply wipes it out.
"Huston's movie is a wonderful reinterpretation of Joyce's story by giving credit to the whole world of the party. It's interesting that in rescuing that world, Huston also manages to rescue Joyce's original intention. Huston had a similar intention: he wanted to publish the fact to the wider world that Ireland was a place of civic courtesies, the things that are scarcely worth talking about but that form the fabric of society."
Barry points out that contempt for the bourgeoisie in intellectual circles probably has something to do with the way in which Joyce's story was read - "against the grain", as he says - as being about Michael Furey and Gretta Conroy. "And the film has also been written about by some people who continue to insist that the viewer must have a cynical or contemptuous relationship towards the small behaviours of these middle-class, middle-aged characters.
"It seems to me that, where people have condemned that, they have sought to idealise some other political venture which they seem to discover in the story. They can then identify that with the west of Ireland, or with a culture, represented by Michael Furey, which has resisted colonisation. In this view, the west is awake at the story's end, and the sociality of the party is its contemptible counterpart."
This skewed perspective has led to some wilfully blinkered readings of Huston's film. The bible of Irish film studies, Cinema And Ireland, says of the famous "snow was general" final sequence: "The words in their original form summon up memories of private grief, but in the film the flight westward is given a wider political interpretation. Headstones may signify death, but monuments in nationalist iconography are signs of a new beginning, harbingers of a political and cultural awakening.
"Gabriel's earlier refusal, as an urban cosmopolite, to accompany the nationalist Miss Ivors on a visit to the west of Ireland means that he is cut off not only from the enigma of his wife's inner life, but also from his own repressed cultural identity. In Huston's version we are allowed a glimpse of Joyce's political as well as his personal unconscious."
The crude reductionism of this analysis gets short shrift from Barry. "It implies that some act of detection has now occurred," he says drily, "which tells us what neither Huston knew nor Joyce knew, but that the film's images of round towers and broken crosses reveal, because these are nationalist monuments. This is a reading which is completely tendentious."
According to Barry, who edited Joyce's Occasional, Critical, And Political Writings, Joyce was in the process of changing his mind about nationalism and imperialism in Ireland at the time when he wrote The Dead, in 1907. "He had held a very anti-nationalist view when he was living in Dublin and in Paris. When he went to Italy, his mind changed almost completely."
But what interested Barry more "was the question of what a writer does when he makes a fiction which dramatises his own change of mind, of being in two minds". This dualism is clearly dramatised in The Dead - between east and west, between Gabriel and Michael, in the symmetry between Gretta and Molly Ivors. "But it's also complicated by the fact that Gretta Conroy, who is idealised in many respects, is actually the person who has visited most destruction within the story," says Barry. "It is she who has refused Michael Furey, and if he is made to equate with Irish native culture, then she must equate with that which has destroyed or refused that culture."
While on the surface Huston remains faithful to the story's structure, he says, "on the micro level he takes remarkable liberties. The film is a powerful misreading of the story". The story's accruing layers of symbolic allusion are replaced by a more filmic structure, broken into two- or three-minute sequences in which unease leads to tension, which is then broken by a ceremonial intrusion - the serving of food or drink, the start of a song, an entrance or exit.
Barry also identifies the ways in which Huston integrates his thematic concerns - male failure, the importance of friendship - into the film without doing excessive violence to the original. A scene in which Freddy Malins (Donal Donnelly) confesses to Gabriel (Donal McCann) that he has never been able to urinate in public came from a story McCann told about his father.
Different perspectives on social class are provided by the greater prominence in the film of Lily, the maid, while Molly Ivors's departure from the party is given a post hoc, anachronistic political charge: in the story, she's going home; in the film, she's going to hear James Connolly speak at a trade union meeting.
Most important, perhaps, the key transition in the story - the white space on the page between Gretta's revelation and Gabriel's melancholic reflections - is erased. In the book, the couple are undressed and in bed; in the film, he is still dressed and standing by the window.
"Gabriel has been seen as a sexless character, in contrast to Michael Furey's youthful, burning passions," says Barry. "Actually, if one reads more carefully, one sees how lustful and volatile and aggressive he is feeling. But Huston finds it OK to go along with that critical reading of Gabriel, standing there by the window in his black tuxedo, looking out into the cold snow with his summary of his own inadequacy and the inadequacies of life.
"Because, if there had been the almost certain implication that intercourse had happened, that would have implied a moment of decisiveness, of something transformative in the narrative."
What the film cannot do, though, and never could have done, is achieve the level of ambiguity and multiple meaning that the final two pages deliver. Huston and his collaborators puzzled over how to end the film, considering the possibilities of bringing in a narrator to read the words and of just using music. In the end, they settled on the simplest and most expedient solution, with McCann speaking the last few lines over that tableau of images.
Barry expresses relief that the film wasn't "trivialised" by a shot of Michael Furey at the end, but he agrees that narrative film cannot create the same relationships of uncertainty between reader and text. "The movie has to adopt speech as its legitimisation of the meaning of the words," he says. "But the text on the page, as an act of writing, is able to leave it indeterminate as to whether these words were spoken, or by whom they are spoken or whether, in fact, we're moving between speech and written text.
"Because the film is an American movie, with its own specific structures, which are quite different to those of any literary text, and also because of the way we watch a movie in time, it all means that our expectations and pre-conceptions are thrown out of kilter and out of focus. Therefore, we're forced to readjust, and we begin to see some of the limitations of the ways in which we've read the story.
"That's always marvellous when it happens, but because the story is, on its terms, so wonderfully good, and the film is, on its terms, so marvellously strong, there is an enormous degree of pleasure in these acts of rereading and reconstruction and reordering of our expectations of what Joyce is all about."
The Dead, by Kevin Barry, is published by Cork University Press in association with the Film Institute of Ireland, €10.00/£7.88
