SOURCE: "Metastasis; or Dumas, Joyce and the Dark Avenger," in English Studies in Africa: A Journal of the Humanities 31, No. 2, 1988, pp. 119-27.

In the following essay, MacLennan identifies evidence of The Count of Monte Cristo 's influence on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

The count bowed, and stepped back. "Do you refuse?" said Mercédès, in a tremulous voice. "Pray, excuse me, madame," replied Monte Cristo, "but I never eat Muscatel grapes."¹

It is obvious that Joyce read and digested Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo, and that he selected Monte Cristo (Edmond Dantès) as an archetypal hero, a model on which the unheroic Stephen² initially models his personality and whom he unconsciously adopts as a catalyst for his ultimate rebellion. Both novels are about revenge: Dumas's lengthily, Joyce's concisely and anti-climactically, as nobody in the novel...