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“One mourns less for what was than for what can no longer happen now.”
In his pioneering rethinking of received attitudes about autobiography, Paul de Man (1984) lays bare the tropological structure of referentiality operative in, and constitutive of, every autobiographical discourse. The logic of tropes, while being potentially restorative, is, de Man expounds, incurably privative; and prosopopoeia, the trope of autobiography par excellence, threatens to undermine the very restorative task it is called upon to accomplish. While being “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter's reply, and confers upon it the power of speech” (75-76), prosopopoeia “cannot fail,” de Man cautions, “to evoke the latent threat that inhabits [it], namely that by making the death [sic] speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death” (78). Perhaps de Man's is ultimately too bold a speculation, but I would like to suggest that it gains conceptual sanction if seen in the light of Joyce's “The Dead”—the last and greatest story in Dubliners (1914), most of which was written in the early years of the twentieth century and completed by 1907, but was not published, because of bitter disputes with publishers, until seven years later.
De Man's conceptualization of prosopopoeia as a composite trope involving not only the personification of the dead but also the simultaneous reification of the living is conducive to a psychoanalytic reflection on the nature and possibility of