How James Joyce Recycles Popular Culture : References and Nods to Thomas Moore in “An Encounter” and “The Dead”

This paper explores the way in which James Joyce (1882-1941) revives Ireland’s “first pop star,” Thomas Moore (1779-1852) in his collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914). In line with the theories of “the culture industry” and “taste,” which are respectively discussed in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979), we will reconsider Joyce’s creative way of recruiting popular culture in the two stories, “An Encounter” and “The Dead,” both of which possess the haunting presence of Moore. In “An Encounter,” the old man (“queer old josser”) that the protagonist boy “encounters” at the end of the story refers to Thomas Moore, this being his favorite poet who was in fact “popularly produced” and “consumed” at the turn of the century from the 19th to the 20th. Influenced and bored at the same time by British magazines about “the wild west,” the bookish boy pretends to read Moore, which could be regarded as Joyce’s negative evaluation of his literary predecessor, still loved not only in Ireland but also in the UK. However, after a lapse of time, when Joyce begins to write the last story of the Dubliners collection around 1906, he becomes the true voluntary exile and rediscovers the cultural significance of Irish tradition. My hypothesis is that this autobiographical fact could overlap with the change of his “taste,” which proves that Joyce is much inspired by Moore’s poem, “Oh, Ye Dead ! ”, and that he incorporates into “The Dead” the theme that the deceased are never completely dead, as is shown in the case of Michael Furey’s “ghostly light,” but that they are haunting the living in many ways. Through this analysis, it is asserted that Joyce does not completely reject popular culture, being not to his taste, but recycles it effectively and allows its essence to provide the textual link between the past and the present for this Irish author who, after all, keeps writing about Dublin, the hometown that he loved and hated all his life.