)ODXEHUW-R\FH9LVLRQ3KRWRJUDSK\&LQHPD

6FDUOHWW%DURQ

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 2008, pp.
689-714 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1567

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v054/54.4.baron.html

Access provided by RMIT University Library (27 Jan 2016 17:37 GMT)
 Baron 689

f
flaubert, joyce: vision,

photography, cinema

Scarlett Baron

Behind. Perhaps there is someone.

—James Joyce, Ulysses1

When James Joyce's Ulysses was published in 1922, an early

reviewer was prompt to describe the novel's style as being "in the
new kinematographic vein, very jerky and elliptical" (Burkdall 23).
Since this analogy was first drawn, a number of studies have been
devoted to the relations between Joyce's writing and the emerging
medium of film.2 These enquiries are not just a matter of critical
fashion.3 They are justified by ample evidence of Joyce's intense
interest in the movies. It was Joyce who led the commercial venture
to set up Ireland's first cinema in 1909. It was he who expressed the
belief that Ulysses may translate better into film than into any other
language.4 In 1929, Joyce and Eisenstein met in Paris and discussed
the similarities between their respective artistic practices and the
possible intersections between them (Ellmann, James 654).5 The sug-
gestiveness of these extratextual indications of Joyce's interest in film
is compounded by the "kinematographic vein" discernible within the
works themselves. Among those features that have attracted critical
notice, there are the headings of "Aeolus," which Susan Barzagan
has convincingly likened to the subtitles of early silent cinema, and
the wild transformations and apparitions of the "Circe" episode. The
latter are most accurately described as "cinematographic" because
no stage, however sophisticated, could approximate the seamless,
frenzied metamorphoses that take place in Joyce's Nighttown.6

MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 54 number 4, Winter 2008. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
690 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
By contrast with the current interest in the cinema's influence
on literature, modernism's literary heritage in the field of visual rep-
resentation has remained something of a critical blind spot. Studies
of the influence of the cinema on Joyce's works by and large ignore
or occlude the importance of nineteenth-century literary "cinemato-
graphic" techniques.7 One admirable exception to the critical pro-
pensity to disregard such antecedents is Alan Spiegel's 1976 study,
Fiction and the Camera Eye, which traces these writing patterns
back to the mid-nineteenth century. Flaubert, he argues, heralds the
advent of cinematographic techniques in novelistic writing. Critical
silence on such literary precedents does not stand to reason: those
early filmmakers who set out to explore the new medium's expressive
and narrative possibilities—with no cinematographic forerunners for
guidance—naturally turned to nineteenth-century artistic traditions
for inspiration. While we, as readers of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, tend to see the cinema as a crucially influential
element, the modernity of which spread into literature, filmmakers of
the early twentieth century looked to earlier art and entertainment
forms for models.8 Sergei Eisenstein openly acknowledged cinema's
debt to nineteenth-century literature: the proto-cinematographic
literary heritage, as he saw it, was to be found mainly in the works
of Flaubert and Dickens.9
This essay—drawing on Spiegel's outline of a nineteenth-century
cinematographic tradition in literature, but focusing closely on the
specificities of the Flaubert-Joyce connection—retrieves a specifically
literary strain of cinematographic visual representation. My aim is to
show that Joyce's reading of Flaubert may well have been as influ-
ential as early cinema with regard to his adoption and development
of cinematographic techniques.10 A survey of Flaubert and Joyce's
(often related) views of vision and photography, and of Joyce's lit-
erary relations with the cinema, make possible an examination of
some of those Flaubertian cinematographic techniques that have
close counterparts in Joyce's works that reveal a substantial technical
intertextuality between the two oeuvres.

Vision
Flaubert was prone to comment on vision as an essential com-
ponent of his art. In a letter to his lover, Louise Colet, he assures her
that "I can see things and I see them as the myopic do, down into
the very pores, because our noses are thrust right up against them"
("To Louise Colet" 16 January 1852, 169). In Flaubert's perspective,
short-sighted vision is an asset because it is, paradoxically, related to
the extreme acuity of microscopic vision. This desire for microscopic
 Baron 691
vision is in fact an aspiration to observe surfaces intensely, so as
to see what lies within: the essence of the object. This grasp of the
object's essence is, in Flaubert's view, as much a matter of style as
a matter of vision. Both of these depend on a complete identifica-
tion with the depicted object. In a famous letter to Hippolyte Taine,
Flaubert records the full extent of his psychosomatic identification
with his characters: "My imaginary characters overwhelm me, pur-
sue me—or rather it is I who find myself under their skins. When I
was writing Madame Bovary's poisoning scene I had such a taste of
arsenic in my mouth, I was so poisoned myself, that I had two hours
of indigestion one after the other, and they were quite real because
I vomited up all my dinner" ("To Hippolyte Taine" 20 November
1866, 316). The ending of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, more
than any letter, expresses the delirious desire to see from within, to
enter through the pores of every surface, to be everything in order
to be able to describe everything. The ecstatic closing incantation
emphasizes vision:

O joy! O bliss! I have beheld the birth of life. I have seen the
beginning of motion! My pulses throb even to the point of
bursting. I long to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl.
Would that I had wings, a carapace, a shell,—that I could
breathe out smoke, wield a trunk,—make my body writhe,—
divide myself everywhere,—be in everything,—emanate
with all the odours,—develop myself like the plants,—flow
like water,—vibrate like sound—shine like light,—assume all
forms—penetrate each atom—descend to the very bottom
of matter,—be matter itself! (Temptation 190)

The use of the verb "to see" ("I have seen") in this passage blurs the
boundaries between figurative and literal meaning: this apocalyptic
ending emblematizes the relations established by Flaubert between
vision and being, vision and identification, vision and writing.
Vision is a permanent preoccupation in Joyce's works as well. The
meanderings of many minds in Ulysses bear testimony to Joyce's in-
terest in the scientific discoveries and technical innovations that were
taking place in the fields of optics at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Ulysses is full of allusions to devices that were revolution-
izing human ways of seeing the world—permitting reproductions of
images captured from reality and enabling visions that the human
eye, unaided, could not provide. "[B]inocular fieldglasses" (11: 492),
"telescopes" (16: 767), "microscopes" (16: 1227), "X rays" (10:
753), "kaleidoscopes" (11: 572), "mutoscopes" (13: 794–96), "ki-
netoscopes" (16: 766–68),11 "cameras" (10: 420), "daguerreotypes"
(8: 174; 17: 1875), "magnesium flashlight photographs" (15: 1588),
692 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
and "snapshots" (1: 686; 13: 795) are just some of the many optical
devices and artifacts scattered among the pages of Ulysses.
This interest in vision and the workings of the eye is manifest
even in Joyce's earliest attempts at fiction. In Stephen Hero, Stephen
articulates his theory of the epiphany in strikingly photographic terms:
"Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual
eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus" (216). The
sentence is fascinating in its progression from the "glimpse"—that
most transient, least concentrated of visual acts—to "gropings"—
a word that conjures up blind fumbling in the dark, the need to
remedy inadequate vision by resorting to the sense of touch—and
finally to "vision" and "exact focus"—these closing words emphasiz-
ing the gaze's painstakingly achieved precision and intimating the
possibility of a conscious adjustment of human vision to its object.
Understanding the sentence requires the kind of serial double-take
the words describe: even when the dynamics of the "apprehensive
faculty" have come into focus, further intellectual effort is required
to remind oneself that it is not simply ocular vision that is at stake,
but rather a mental, almost metaphysical grasp of the essential,
ontological nature of the scrutinized object (217). The eye Stephen
is concerned with is the "spiritual eye."
The visual sensation Stephen describes, of an object coming
into clearer view, is one with which most twenty-first-century readers
will be familiar from their experience as film watchers (or from the
handling of photographic apparatus, such as hand-held cameras).
Stephen's reference to "the mechanism of esthetic apprehension"
a few lines later suggests that Joyce's use of photographic termi-
nology may not be accidental—that it may, in fact, be deliberate,
self-conscious, and allusive (217). Film as a medium has, from its
very earliest days, exploited the expressive possibilities related to
variations in photographic focus, to suggest clarity or blurriness
of vision, whether these be interpreted metaphorically or literally.
The kinds of variation in visual clarity enabled by the media of film
and photography inform the dual nature of Stephen's hazy vision
in Ulysses: having broken his glasses (as his younger avatar in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had done, with similar visual
consequences),12 he goes about his morning activities with only an
imprecise visual grasp of what is going on around him. In "Proteus,"
philosophically-minded and partially-sighted, Stephen treads cau-
tiously and wonders: "I will see if I can see." (3: 26). It is significant
that Bloom also has glasses on his mind on the morning of 16 June
1904. In "Lestrygonians," he thinks to himself: "Must get those old
glasses of mine set right. . . . Might chance on a pair in the railway
lost property office" (8: 554–56). In a moment that provides the
 Baron 693
reader of Stephen Hero with a gleeful sense of recognition, Joyce has
Bloom test his eyesight by gazing at a clock (which he thinks of as a
watch) situated at the top of a nearby city building: "There's a little
watch up there on the roof of the bank to test those glasses by. His
lids came down on the lower rims of his irides. Can't see it. If you
imagine it's there you can almost see it. Can't see it" (8: 560–63).
Intratextual echoes of this kind add to the reader's sense of Joyce's
texts as intensely visually-minded works.
The vision Stephen has in mind in Stephen Hero (and, less pre-
meditatedly, the eye test Bloom submits himself to in "Lestrygonians")
is of a very specific kind: it is not a generalized, wide-angled vision,
but a vision that has taken as its object a specific, circumscribed
object—in this instance, "the clock of the Ballast Office" (216). This
exclusion of extraneous material is carried through into Stephen's
visual acts in A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. The Stephen of
Joyce's first published novel is more emphatic than his predecessor
about the need for aesthetic tunnel vision. Explaining his theory of
beauty to Lynch, Stephen fences off a single object from all sur-
rounding matter: "Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's
boy had slung inverted on his head. . . . In order to see that basket,
said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the
rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase
of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be ap-
prehended" (178). Stephen's focus on an individual object is intensely
cinematographic. The emphasis is on the zooming function, on fram-
ing or prise de vue. On the other side of Stephen's apprehension of
the basket is his dismissal of all that surrounds it, of the butcher
boy who carries it and of all the appertaining social implications that
Stephen chooses to ignore. Thus, extreme spiritual clarity of vision
involves social blindness, as Margot Norris has argued in Joyce's Web
(18). Similarly, in "Two Gallants," the text, referring specifically to
the street lighting homes in on the coin that rests in Corley's hand,
thereby creating an effect analogous to cinematographic zoom. All of
Corley's "gallant" maneuvering—the coin's sordid history—gradually
falls out of view, but not—such is the effect of Joyce's ending—out
of mind. Like Stephen's occlusion of the working reality to which
the basket belongs, the epiphanic ending of "Two Gallants" raises
more questions than it answers: "Corley halted at the first lamp and
stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a
hand towards the light, and smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of
the disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm" (Dubliners 54–5).
This ending, like Stephen's disquisition on the epiphany in Stephen
Hero, acts as a stark reminder of the elements of choice, arrange-
ment, and synecdoche, which pertain to all the arts—not least, of
course, the cinema.
694 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
Stephen mobilizes scientific as well as photographic terminology
to convey his aspiration to a new kind of literary vision. Stephen may
have been thinking of Flaubert and of his injunction to impart to art
"by a pitiless method—all the precision of the physical sciences" ("To
Leroyer" 248), when he declares to Cranly that "The modern spirit
is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can
conceive. . . . The ancient method investigated law with the lantern
of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern
of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they
transform and disfigure. The modern method examines its territory
by the light of day" (Stephen Hero 190). Stephen's conception of
literary vision sees itself as going beyond primitive cinematographic
devices such as the magic lantern, which is imaged here by the rap-
prochement between "lantern" and "magical." Stephen's conception
of vision, like Flaubert's, involves going beyond surfaces: his aspira-
tion is also to see what lies within. In "Circe," Joyce in fact uses all
those methods Stephen banishes in Stephen Hero (lighting in the
dark, magic, transformation) to "vivisect" the unconscious. Not for
nothing does Mrs. Bellingham, adding her voice to those of Bloom's
many accusers (but sounding also like the self-conscious voice of the
text) cry out: "Vivisect him" (15: 1105).

Photography
Flaubert's passionate sense of the need to get to the heart of
matter ("descend to the very bottom of matter") goes some way
towards explaining his hatred of photography. Flaubert lamented
its crude mechanics, its resistance to an imaginative, symbolizing
recreation of the world in art. Born in 1822, Flaubert was 17 when
the daguerreotype was invented in 1839. Between 1849 and 1851,
Flaubert travelled to the Middle East with his friend Maxime Du Camp,
who used new photographic technology to document their travels.
He returned to France with 150 calotypes13 representing all man-
ner of scenes from the Orient, for which he was granted the French
Legion of Honor in 1853. Flaubert's attitude for most of the journey
seems to have been one of quiet support and occasional admiration:
"Maxime's days are entirely absorbed and consumed by photography.
He is doing well" ("To his mother" 5 January 1850, 109). Ecstatic
about their visit to the Sphinx, Flaubert is even prepared to admit
that no drawing can convey anything of the majestic sight as well
as Du Camp's photograph: "No drawing I have seen renders it fully,
except an excellent print Maxime got out of the photographe" ("To
Louis" 570; my translation). But Flaubert's dislike of the medium
becomes clear in a bitterly ironic letter in which he reacts to the
 Baron 695
honors bestowed on Du Camp for his photographic work: "These
are fine times we are living in . . . we decorate photographers and
exile poets; how many pictures do you suppose a painter would have
to produce to be made an officer?" ("To Louise Colet" 15 January
1853, 180). Later that same year, Colet offered to send Flaubert
a photograph of herself. His response—an outraged rejection of
the mechanics involved in photography, as well as of its claims to
truth—was adamant: "don't send me that photograph of you. I hate
photographs in the same measure as I love the originals. I never find
them true. . . . That mechanical process, especially if applied to you,
would irritate more than it would please me" ("To Louise Colet" 14
August 1853, 195). Years later, Flaubert's contempt for the medium
was still strong enough to inspire its extremely negative depiction in
A Sentimental Education via the preposterous character of Pellerin:
"After going in for Fourierism, homeopathy, table-turning, Gothic
art and humanitarian painting, Pellerin had become a photographer"
(461).This passionately held opinion did not, however, prevent Flau-
bert from appreciating ways in which photography could be useful to
him.14 The surprises it could provide were sometimes fertile: "Think
of our surprise when confronted with a photographic print. That is
something we have never seen" ("To Hippolyte Taine" Late November,
96). Above all, Flaubert was incensed by claims that photography was
truer than other arts: "This mania for thinking you've just discovered
nature, and that you're more true than your predecessors, exasper-
ates me. A storm in Racine isn't a wit less true than one described
in Michelet. There is no 'True'. There are only ways of perceiving. Is
a photograph a likeness ? No more so than an oil painting, or about
as much so» ("To Léon " 266). Flaubert's rejection of photography's
claims to superiority is philosophically-grounded: no medium, in his
view, is intrinsically truer than any other.
Whether or not Joyce had read these specific letters and whether
such a reading may have influenced his own views on photography
can only be a matter of speculation.15 But his early dismissal of pho-
tography as an art is founded on the same objection to the mechan-
ics of the process. In his 1902–1903 "Paris and Pola Commonplace
Book," Joyce defined art for himself as "the human disposition of
sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end." The statement is
followed by a question, "Can a photograph be a work of art?" and a
dismissal: "A photograph is a disposition of sensible matter and may
be so disposed for an aesthetic end but it is not a human disposition
of sensible matter. Therefore is it not a work of art" (qtd. in Scholes
and McKain 55). This acknowledgement and this objection—that the
photograph can achieve aesthetic ends, but that it is not art because
it does not allow for an imaginative, densely evocative recreation of
696 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
the world—are in line with Flaubert's passionately held views on the
subject.
The stasis inherent in the photograph, as much as its mechani-
cal aspect, seems to have motivated Joyce's low esteem. In his early
essay "A Portrait of the Artist" (1904), Joyce advocates fluidity in
representation—a mode of narration that espouses subtle develop-
ments rather than confining itself to static vignettes. The past must
be represented as what it is, "a fluid succession of presents" with
an "individuating rhythm," delineating "the curve of an emotion"
(211). Photography, by contrast, is frequently associated with stasis
in Joyce's work. In Dubliners, photography seems connected to that
Dublin paralysis that the stories were written to castigate. Just before
her expected departure for Buenos Aires, Eveline contemplates the
photograph that has hung on the wall through all her years of near
confinement. It is by this frozen image, and that of her religious duty,
that she will presumably sit for many years more: "during all those
years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing
photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside
the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary
Alacoque" (30). "The Dead" begins by depicting a similarly stagnant,
stultifying environment. The antiquated quality of the middle-class
family gathering is suggested by a number of allusions to static arti-
facts: during the party Gabriel gazes at pictures of "the balcony scene
in Romeo and Juliet," "the two murdered princes in the Tower," and
at a photograph of his mother and brother years ago (186–87).
References to photography in Ulysses are often couched in
similarly ironic terms. In "Circe," for instance, frenzied movement is
instantly arrested (to great comic effect) by the taking of a photo-
graph: "The lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the throng, leaps
on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation.
A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken. Babes and sucklings
are held up" (15: 1586–89). In "Nausicaa," when Gerty MacDowell
remembers a group photo her family was to have had taken, she
highlights the careful preplanning these events required, as well as the
clichéd language the activity had already assimilated: "Her mother's
birthday that was and Charley was home on his holidays and Tom
and Mr Dignam and Mrs and Patsy and Freddy Dignam and they were
to have a group taken" (13: 316–18). The other photographs the
novel mentions do little to relieve the impression of photography as a
medium riddled with clichés. "The Bath of the Nymph" over Bloom's
bed, "[g]iven away with the Easter number of Photo Bits" is not, per-
haps, the "splendid masterpiece in art colours" the magazine makes
out (4: 369–70). Equally clichéd and mass-produced, the "2 fading
photographs of queen Alexandra of England and of Maud Branscombe"
 Baron 697
and the "2 erotic photocards" that Leopold Bloom keeps in his drawer
confirm photography's infamous status as a mass medium devoid of
creative value (17: 1778–79, 1809). Even the "faded photo" of Molly
that Bloom shows Stephen in "Eumaeus," though treated with a more
complex irony than the photographs evoked elsewhere in the book,
is clearly tinged with suggestions of contrived, static posing: Molly
features "in evening dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion . . .
standing near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which
was In Old Madrid" (16: 1425–32).
Flaubert's letters betray a similar aversion to the static. The
description of some usually comical or farcical scene is often followed
by the ironic exclamation: "Tâbleau!" In a letter to his lover Louise
Colet, he describes with derisive disgust a scene of women bathing
in the sea: "I spent an hour yesterday watching the ladies bathe.
What a sight [tâbleau]! What a hideous sight [tâbleau]!" ("To Louise
Colet" 14 August 1853, 195). Scenes of greeting seem to have been
particularly prone to unleash scathing comments. This is how Flau-
bert describes a chance encounter between Maxime Du Camp and an
old acquaintance: "Maxime recognized the doctor for having sailed
with him before: recognition, embraces, tableau" ("To his mother" 3
November 1849, 522; my translation).Years later, the same word is
used for another, even more laughable, encounter: "Wednesday was
a farcical day. . . . I open the door and what, oh dear God, do I see?
Tableau: handshake to him, two kisses to her. They were coming to
visit me" ("To his niece" 692; my translation). Each use of the word
"tableau" is loaded with Flaubert's systematic and acerbic critique of
the set-piece sameness—and often the set-piece hypocrisy—of most
social encounters.
It is perhaps not entirely a matter of chance that the word "tab-
leau" appears twice in Ulysses. Indeed, both Gerty and Bloom think
the word in "Nausicaa." Gerty's exclamative and italicized one line
sentence is strikingly similar to Flaubertian usage. It freezes Cissy
Caffrey's (merely imagined) tumble into a photographic still: "It would
have served her just right if she had tripped up over something ac-
cidentally on purpose with her high crooked French heels on her to
make her look tall and got a fine tumble. Tableau!" (13: 484–86).
Immediately another French word with obvious photographic con-
notations confirms the associations between fixity and photography,
and between photography, nudity and ridicule: "That would have been
a very charming exposé for a gentleman like that to witness" (13:
487–88). When the word reappears in Bloom's interior monologue a
few pages later, its meaning is again related to fixity, to the clichéd
double-facedness of chance encounters: "Tableau! O, look who it is
for the love of God! How are you at all? What have you been doing
698 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
with yourself? Kiss and delighted to, kiss, to see you. . . . Sister souls.
Showing their teeth to one another" (13: 815–19). The similarity
between this passage and Flaubert's depictions of this kind of scene
in his letters, is again, strongly suggestive of a connection inspired
by Joyce's reading of the correspondence. The irony that pertains to
all these static images suggests a favorable opinion of their contrary:
images in motion, rhythm, cinema.
Joyce does more than highlight the stasis (the predictable pos-
ing, the careful staging, the sealed fixity) that pertains to photography.
Joyce's treatment of the medium gestures towards later developments
involving motion—his allusive history of photography, in other words,
adumbrates a prehistory of its successor: the cinema. It is in "Grace,"
perhaps, that the earliest Joycean reference to the contemporary
world of cinema may be found. At Kernan's bedside, the mention of
Pope Leo XIII's poem regarding "the invention of the photograph"
leads to an admiring discussion of the new technology: "isn't the
photograph wonderful when you come to think of it?" (Dubliners 167).
Soon after, Kernan's rejection of Catholic candles for the retreat—"I
bar the magic-lantern business" (171)—constitutes a shadowy allusion
to the 1879 apparitions that were thought by some Catholics to have
taken place at Knock. Skeptics dismissed contentions of supernatural
manifestations by invoking the likely use of slides and projections
from magic lanterns in the contrivance of an elaborate optical trick.
This primitive form of cinematic display (magic lanterns, after all,
involved the projection of images in succession) rings in tune with
the motto mistakenly attributed to Pope Leo: his phrase "Lux upon
Lux" acts as a legible reference to the Lumière brothers, whose name
was widely associated with the inception of the cinema.16 There is a
sense, in "Grace," that the photograph, about which the assembled
men still marvel, is already being superseded by devices enabling
the reproduction of motion itself.
In the "Lestrygonians" episode of Ulysses, Bloom's thoughts
about his father and daughter and the "hereditary taste" for pho-
tography that seems to run in the family reminds him of one of the
earliest photographic processes: "Now photography. Poor papa's
daguerreotype atelier he told me of" (8: 173–74). Earlier on, we had
heard of Milly (Bloom's daughter) and her attachment to Bannon in
connection with one of the newest developments in the field, the
snapshot: "Photo girl he calls her.—Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure"
(1: 685–6).In "Proteus," Stephen's thoughts about the stereoscope
bring us one step closer to motion (though he himself thinks of the
stereoscope, by comparison with his normal eyesight, as a freezing
device): "Click does the trick" (3: 420). The click, that is, moves the
image forward. In "Lotus-Eaters," Bloom's eager attempts to keep the
 Baron 699
woman on the other side of the tram lines in view leads to an implicit
analogy between the cogs of the tramline and the cogs of a mutoscope
machine (not least because the woman herself holds a "steel grip" of
the kind mutoscope users turned to set their show in motion): "The
tram passed. They drove off towards the Loop Line bridge, her rich
gloved hand on the steel grip. Flicker, flicker: the laceflare of her hat in
the sun: flicker, flick" (5: 138–40). The onomatopoeic "flicker" of the
tram seems to imply a link between the modernity of new modes of
transport, such as trains and tramways, and that of those (essentially
analogous) mechanisms that were making images move. A more ex-
plicit reference to the mutoscope comes in "Nausicaa," where Bloom's
enquiring mind wonders about the relationship between snapshot
photography and its related, dynamic medium: "Mutoscope pictures
in Capel street: for men only. Peeping Tom. Willy's hat and what the
girls did with it. Do they snapshot those girls or is it all fake?" (13:
794–96). These developments towards film seem to be what the
text of "Ithaca" is referring to when it breaks Bloom's actions into a
sequence of images (suggestive of a cartoon strip or cinema story-
board). The language is too suggestive of cinematographic devices
not to be self-conscious: "What discrete succession of images did
Stephen meanwhile perceive? . . . he perceived through the trans-
parent window panes a man regulating a gasflame of 14 CP, a man
lighting a candle, a man removing in turn each of his two boots, a man
leaving the kitchen holding a candle of 1 CP" (17: 108–12). Windows
doubling up as screens—screens on which light and movement are
potentially discernible—have already appeared several times by this
stage in Ulysses, and read as self–conscious references to the world
of cinema. In "Nausicaa," a newspaper seller passes "By screens of
lighted windows" (13: 1173). Towards the end of "Ithaca," Bloom
and Stephen peer up at a partially lit window, which is turned by its
blinding and by a trick of lighting into a screen. As Briggs has noted,
the terms of the description are clearly suggestive of cinema (145).
The impersonal narrator of the episode asks: "What visible luminous
sign attracted Bloom's who attracted Stephen's gaze? . . . the light
of a paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen or
roller blind supplied by Frank O'Hara, window blind, curtain pole and
revolving shutter manufacturer, 16 Aungier street" (17: 1171–76). In
fact, this kind of screen imagery appears in Joyce's work long before
Ulysses. One of the adolescent sketches Joyce collected under the title
Silhouettes, if remembered correctly by his brother Stanislaus, reveals
a remarkable predilection for the cinematic setup (the proclivity is
all the more remarkable because it finds expression in Joyce's writ-
ing years before he could have attended a cinematographic display).
Stanislaus sums up the sketch in the following terms: "two figures in
700 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
violent agitation on a lowered window blind illuminated from within,
the burly figure of a man, staggering and threatening with upraised
fist, and the smaller sharp-faced figure of a nagging woman. A blow
is struck and the light goes out" (104).The very first of the Dubliners
stories, "The Sisters," opens with a screen as well: "Night after night
I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted
square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the
same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see
the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two
candles must be set at the head of the corpse" (1). The boy is looking,
then, for signs of Lux upon Lux—the light of candles superimposed
upon the already "lighted square of the window." Collectively, these
textual moments constitute a repertory of those developments in
photographic technique that were gradually instilling movement into
an originally exclusively static mode of representation.

Cinema
The dynamic17 aspect of cinema (so fundamentally opposed to
the stasis and singularity of the isolate photograph, which it integrates
and transforms) seems the likely root cause of the medium's appeal
for Joyce. Eisenstein's essays on film form repeatedly emphasize
the fact that the single cinematographic shot (the be all and end all
of photography) is but a "cell" in cinematic creation, a unit that can
be "treated"(28, 84)18—that is: combined with other such cells in an
infinity of different patterns to produce a potentially infinite number
of artistic impressions. Eisenstein's eulogy of montage rests on an
acknowledgement of the limitations of the individual shot or frame.
The single shot, according to Eisenstein, is more resistant than granite
(again this is related to stasis, "immutability"): "The shot's tendency
toward complete factual immutability is rooted in its nature. This
resistance has largely determined the richness and variety of mon-
tage forms and styles—for montage becomes the mightiest means
for a really important creative remoulding of nature" (5). Those last
words—"a really important remoulding of nature"—are precisely what
Flaubert saw as art's mission, art's definition.
What mattered to Eisenstein, Flaubert, and Joyce was that art
should be complex, resulting from choice and combination. And that
is precisely what cinema, as a process whereby units are combined
for aesthetic effect, allows and what photography cannot. The rela-
tionship of shot to film achieved by montage satisfies the need for
rhythm outlined by Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
"Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to
part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts
 Baron 701
or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part" (171). It is
this power of combination that Eisenstein claims as the great artistic
achievement of cinema—an achievement that he sees as representa-
tive of the choices and combinations that are the essence of artistic
creation in all media: "the cinema is able, more than any other art,
to disclose the process that goes on microscopically in all other arts"
(5). The desirability of complexity and combination seems to have
been at the forefront of Joyce's mind from his earliest experiments
in writing. In Stephen Hero, the protagonist experiments with the
permutation and combination of the smallest linguistic units available
to him—the letters of the alphabet: "He read Blake and Rimbaud
on the values of letters and even permuted and combined the fine
vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions" (37). This interest
in manipulating the smallest units of a medium to create effective art
goes some way towards explaining Joyce's interest in the cinema—
his sense of the cinema, for instance, as an art complex enough to
approximate some of the effects of Ulysses.
Joyce's interests in vision, animated images, and the cinema
may be related to his use of certain Flaubertian narrative techniques
that strike twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers as quintes-
sentially cinematographic. Camera-eye styles of narration make it
possible for a narrator to give exceptionally close attention to the
surfaces of objects as well as to render these surfaces from the point
of view of a particular character. They enable Flaubert to convey the
contents of his vision through that unique combination of words—
style—that correspond exactly to the object or scene observed, and
to do this from within another object of his own fiction—a protago-
nist—through the medium of free indirect style. In other words, they
allow for a complex, protean mix of realistic surface and vivisective
point of view. Which are those specific Flaubertian cinematographic
techniques that Joyce puts to use in his fiction?
The most obvious of these techniques results directly from
Flaubert's development of style indirect libre, that direct forerun-
ner to Joyce's own experiments with narration and point of view:
focalization, the "Uncle Charles Principle," interior monologue.19
The cinematographic technique related to these focalizing novelistic
procedures consists in presenting scenes and events as a character
would see them—in positioning the narrative eye within a character's
mind. Visual content is included in the narration only if it is congruent
with the point of view adopted by the text. This is, in other words,
a technique that subjectivizes the visual description of the outside
world. Pierre Danger, noting its prevalence in Flaubert's works, refers
to this technique as "caméra subjective" (218). This is precisely what
happens at the beginning of "Herodias," the last of the three short
702 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
stories in Flaubert's collection of stories, Three Tales (1877). The
description of the territories surrounding the citadel of Machaerus,
where the story is set, is focalized through Hérode, with the verb
"looked" announcing both the focalization and the cinematographic
quality of what follows. The narrator draws attention to every camera-
like movement in the character's gaze, enabling a description that
is at once subjectivized and panoramic: "The Tetrarch looked away
to the right to gaze at the palm trees of Jericho" (Three Tales 71).
A similar effect is produced at the end of "The Dead." The figurative
camera-eye in this instance is situated in Gabriel's mind.20 Gabriel's
imaginative movement outwards and westwards, which sweeps
over Irish landscapes before homing in on Michael Furey's grave, is
analogous to a camera's panning out and zooming in, and the con-
cluding words, with their lullingly repetitive cadences—"the descent
to their last end," "the living and the dead" (225)—are suggestive of
a cinematographic fade to black.
Other cinematographic techniques impact more strikingly on the
narration. In "A Simple Heart"—the first of the three short stories in
Three Tales—Théodore, Félicité's one-time gallant, kisses her for the
first time. The event, instead of being recounted, is suggested only
by such an obvious evasion—an image substitution—that the reader's
mind (taking nineteenth-century rules of propriety on board out of
moral sympathy with Félicité) is quick to fasten onto the likeliness
of some impropriety as the cause of the cover-up. The trick is quint-
essentially cinematographic: instead of showing the kiss, Flaubert
suddenly substitutes the image of the horses drawing the carriage
Théodore is driving. The vehicle takes an inexplicable turn, and from
this we infer that the driver has been distracted by his attentions
to Félicité: "Then, unbidden, they turned off to the right." Théodore
kisses Félicité again, and this time, another typically cinematographic
trick, the fade to black, is drawn out of the hat: "He kissed her again.
She vanished into the darkness" (6). It is not only later writing that
Flaubert is anticipating here. What happens to Félicité out of our view
foreshadows a staple joke of early cinema. This is how Tom Gunning
describes Porter's What Happened in the Tunnel (1903):

A fade-out to black leader covers a kiss made in the dark-

ness of a tunnel, but in the second shot the man discovers
the women in the compartment have changed places and
he is now kissing the wrong girl . . . this was a widely imi-
tated gag in early cinema, finding its prototype in two 1899
British films by Smith and Bamforth, both entitled A Kiss
in the Tunnel, and a later French version, Flirt en Chemin
de Fer (Pathé, 1903). (90)
 Baron 703
This image substitution or blackout effect can also be related to fo-
calization (though the story is only intermittently focalized through
Félicité). The lack of visual content here, the lack of any information
at all, in fact, apart from the aberrant trajectory of Théodore's cart,
reflects Félicité's own (presumably entirely preverbal) bewilderment
and confusion.
Something very similar happens in Joyce's "An Encounter." The
(mis)direction of the narrator's gaze (to which numerous references
are made in the buildup to the story's central incident) leads to a
complete omission of what, by the sounds of it (the technique of
letting the sound run on while refusing to move the camera eye is,
again, typically cinematographic), constitutes a confirmation of the
narrator's (and the reader's) unrest: "I continued to gaze towards the
foot of the slope, listening to him . . . without changing the direction
of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us . . . I say! Look
what he's doing! As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony
exclaimed again: I say . . . . He's a queer old josser" (18). The de-
termination of the narration by the gaze leads to this baffling visually
blank strip of narration.
The camera-eye style of narration can (as illustrated in the ex-
ample from "A Simple Heart" above) entertain ambiguous relations
to a character's point of view. Thus, the onset of cinematographic
techniques in the text does not necessarily coincide with the use of
style indirect libre (which enables an author to move in and out of
a character's consciousness at will). It can, on the contrary, signal
a rupture in focalization—Raymonde Debray-Genette has referred
to this phenomenon as "focalisation externe" (163–64). Again two
instances are representative. In Flaubert's "La Légende de Saint
Julien l'Hospitalier," the second of the three stories in Three Tales,
this effect occurs after the parricide, when Julien attends his parents'
funeral. For several paragraphs already, Julien's first name (the nar-
rator's usual mode of reference to the protagonist) has given way
to the personal pronoun "he." We see Julien take leave of his wife
coldly, in "a voice unlike his own." But nothing prepares the reader
for the disorientating effect produced by the switch to what one might
call a "caméra objective" mode of narration, whereby the narrator
withdraws from his character, observing him from an entirely exter-
nal point of view, even, it seems, affecting not to recognize him: "A
monk, with his cowl pulled down over his face, followed the cortege,
at a distance from everyone else, and no one dared to speak to him"
(63). But the narrator's gaze continues to focus on the estranged
protagonist, describing his movements and demeanor at his parents'
funeral. The gaze follows him—in a move that has become common
in filmmaking—until he disappears out of sight: "After the burial,
704 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
he was seen taking the road which led to the mountains. He turned
round several times, and finally disappeared" (64). The concluding
verb adds to the suggestion of a final fade to black. The fade to black
is narrative—as the story has reached an important turning-point—
but also psychological. Indeed, as in the case of Félicité in "A Simple
Heart," it is too simple to read these sentences as signifying a com-
plete divorce between the narrator and his protagonist. As much as
the narrator's distance from his character, the linguistic indicators of
estrangement reflect Julien's own extreme self-alienation, the chaos
of his own shattered selfhood.
An exactly analogous estrangement of the narrator from his
character occurs in Joyce's story "Counterparts." For much of the first
part of the narrative, set in the office, Farrington is referred to by the
narrator simply as "the man," and this in spite of the fact that other
characters refer to him and address him by his surname. The move
to the pubs of Dublin seems to instigate a new intimacy between the
narrator and his character. Farrington is referred to by name and more
frequently by the pronoun "he," which helps blur the boundaries be-
tween the narrator's discourse and instances of free indirect discourse
or the Uncle Charles Principle. With a new change of setting, which
takes Farrington off the streets and home to his family, the narrator
reverts to the estranged mode of narration of the opening. It is as
though the camera-eye reporting the beating of the young child were
adjusting its focus to the actions carried out by the protagonist. The
return to the use of "the man" effects a coldness suggestive of the
narrator's efforts to maintain distance and detachment, with possibly
even a slight hint of condemnation: "The man jumped up furiously
and pointed to the fire . . . the man followed him and caught him by
the coat" (94). In both these cases, the "caméra objective" mode of
narration signals the character's confusion and dehumanization, as
well as a distancing of the narrator from his protagonist.
The external focalization that governs these instances can also
explain the cinematographic summaries that fast-forward the plots
of both the Flaubertian and the Joycean stories, acting as stark re-
minders of an external agency organizing the narratives. On several
occasions in "A Simple Heart," years are summed up in a single
sentence: "The years went by" (25). Similarly, in "A Painful Case"
the paragraph following the breakup of the Duffy-Sinico relationship
begins: "Four years passed" (108). In "Eveline," a blank space (after
which the narrative picks up in a new, peculiarly unindented para-
graph), analogous to a momentary cinematographic fade to black,
cuts out the interval between Eveline's meditation and the moment
of final decision, maximizing the dramatic impact of the final scene.
Marcel Proust, commenting admiringly on an abrupt cut in A Senti-
 Baron 705
mental Education, referred to such breaks in the narrative in terms
of blank, white space: "In my view, the most beautiful thing in A
Sentimental Education is not a sentence but a blank" (Proust 205;
my translation). In "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," and "Grace,"
the procedure becomes more self-conscious, as narrative blanks are
figured in the text by lines of dots separating one scene from the
next (Little Chandler's encounter with Gallaher from the scene at
home with his wife and child, for instance). The increasing frequency
of these more obvious cinematographic cuts within Dubliners (and
the use of similar features, such as the headings of "Aeolus" and
the asterisked section breaks in the "Wandering Rocks" episodes of
Ulysses) suggests a heightened self-consciousness on Joyce's part
regarding the use of such cinematographic techniques.
Another kind of novelistic cut that has an exact correlative in film
is the cut that establishes simultaneity—the alternating depiction of
two simultaneous strands of action or dialogue. Flaubert, in Madame
Bovary, inaugurated the literary technique (long before the cinema
came into existence) in that scene in which Rodolphe's seduction of
Emma Bovary is spliced with the speeches of the dignitaries at the
cattle fair. In "Through Theatre to Cinema" Eisenstein identified this
particular episode as crucial to later cinematographic developments,
paying tribute to Flaubert and singling him out as the father of mon-
tage and film editing: "it was Flaubert who gave us one of the finest
examples of cross-montage of dialogues. . . . This is the scene in
Madame Bovary where Emma and Rodolphe grow more intimate. Two
lines of speech are interlaced: the speech of the orator in the square
below, and the conversation of the future lovers." Eisenstein places
Flaubert at the origin of a trend: "literature is full of such examples.
This method is used with increasing popularity by Flaubert's artistic
heirs" (12). It is reasonable to suspect that Eisenstein might well
have had Joyce in mind as one of "Flaubert's artistic heirs." The man
who so highly lauded Ulysses as "the highest point one can reach
in bourgeois literature" (139), recommending the study of Joyce's
techniques against the claims of those who attacked such a course
on political or aesthetic grounds, was well aware of Joyce's develop-
ment of cinematographic simultaneity in his works (140). The most
striking example of this is arguably the "Wandering Rocks" episode of
Ulysses, in which eighteen episodes unfold in parallel. Indeed when
Molly Bloom's arm flings a coin out of the window,21 the reference
is to Madame Bovary, which in two significant instances describes
the flinging of an arm out of a window. In the first instance, Emma
Bovary's naked hand is flung out of the carriage in which she and
Léon are making love: "One time . . . a bare hand appeared under
the yellow canvass curtain, and threw out some scraps of paper that
706 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
scattered in the wind" (177). The second instance occurs on Emma's
last journey back from Rouen before her suicide. Again, the gesture
takes place in a carriage, but this time Emma extends a whole arm
out of the window to toss a coin. The coin's recipient, as in "Wandering
Rocks," is a beggar:22 "Emma, overcome with disgust, threw him a
five franc piece over her shoulder" (219). These two instances seem
to merge in Molly's (twice-narrated) gesture in "Wandering Rocks."
Simultaneity occurs on a smaller scale at many points in Ulysses.
In "Hades," for instance, the narrator cuts from the dialogue of one
set of characters to another or from Bloom's interior monologue
("One must go first: alone, under the ground: and lie no more in
her warm bed") to dialogue unfolding at some distance ("How are
you, Simon? Ned Lambert said softly, clasping hands.") (8: 454–57).
This discrepancy between outer and inner worlds, emphasized by
juxtaposition (the closest literature—necessarily sequential—can
get to simultaneity) is highly reminiscent of a kind of vision that is
pervasive in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the earlier
novel, Stephen's thoughts constantly interrupt the description of ex-
ternal events, whether he be in bed at school looking forward to the
Christmas holidays, in the infirmary imagining his own and Parnell's
death, or at the Whitsuntide play seeing childhood scenes unfold
before his eyes as he sings the Confiteor for Heron and Wallis: "a
sudden memory had carried him to another scene called up, as if by
magic, at the moment when he had noticed the cruel dimples at the
corners of Heron's smiling lips" (65). These visions trick the reader,
as if by magic (which, like metamorphosis, holds a special fascination
for Stephen), into thinking he or she is suddenly somewhere else
entirely, so that it always comes as a surprise to be equally suddenly
returned to the scene from which the vision originally arose. The viv-
idness of these (usually remembered) scenes belies their status as
mere visions. Each conjures up a world that, for its entire duration,
completely supplants the circumstances from which it has arisen.
In this, they are eminently cinematographic and fulfill precisely that
suspension of disbelief typical of the cinema, which, in Briggs's terms,
"confirm[s] our sense of a realistic spatial and temporal continuity
in the very act of producing the impossible" (149). In this respect,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man harks back to Flaubert's A
Sentimental Education—whose hero Frédéric Moreau is as liable to
flights of fancy as Stephen Dedalus—and especially to The Tempta-
tion of Saint Anthony—of which Joyce purchased a copy in Trieste in
1913 (Ellmann, James Joyce 779).
In The Temptation, the eponymous saint experiences a relent-
less series of vivid hallucinations. People and objects ceaselessly
metamorphose into something else in the crazed and frenzied world
 Baron 707
of Antoine's imagination. One example succinctly illustrates the way
in which these continual transformations are naturalized in Flaubert's
text, as though they were the least surprising process in the world:
"The rocks fronting Anthony have become a mountain" (142). Visual
props (if objects whose tangibility is so much in doubt may be so
called) form part of a continuous chain of metamorphoses:23 "At the
same moment objects become transformed" (21). Objects bearing no
obvious relation to each other appear and pass in succession within
Antoine's field of vision, only to be suddenly dematerialized by the
"narrative voice" of a stage direction that refers to them as mere
"images" standing out like cut-outs against the black of night. The
cinematographic effect is extremely striking: "These images appear
suddenly, as in flashes—outlined against the background of the night,
like scarlet paintings executed upon ebony." The passage continues,
describing the images and their pageant in terms that constitute a
startling anticipation of cinematographic language: "Their motion ac-
celerates. They defile by with vertiginous rapidity. Sometimes again,
they pause and gradually pale and melt away; or else float off out
of sight, to be immediately succeeded by others" (22). It is difficult,
when reading of such amazing light and cut-out contraptions not to
think of Joyce's Silhouettes. Joyce starts with those very light and
marionette effects that make Flaubert most strikingly visual and
cinematographic.
The "Circe" episode of Ulysses takes all these hallucinatory
cinematographic effects to a much further extreme than A Portrait
and seems more unmistakably indebted to The Temptation. As with
"Wandering Rocks," the hypothesis of a self-conscious Flaubertian
cinematographic undercurrent in "Circe" is supported by some indu-
bitable references to Flaubert's text. As Jesus's face appears in the
disk of the sun in the closing sentences of The Temptation,24 so, in
a brilliant Circean transformation, "The freckled face of Sweney, the
druggist, appears in the disc of the soapsun" (15: 340–41). Likewise,
the Queen of Sheba, who makes an appearance in "Circe," is an im-
portant character in Flaubert's text. Moreover, the technical parallels
between The Temptation and "Circe," to anyone who has read both
texts, are numerous and glaring. Like The Temptation, "Circe" looks
like a play but unfolds as something quite different and thoroughly
unstageable. Lighting and motion are, as in The Temptation, repeat-
edly emphasized. In one instance, the "morning hours," at first a
mere effect of light, turn into characters (15: 4054). This kind of
transformation—which is also typical of The Temptation—would in
fact stretch even the cinematographic medium to its limit: "From a
corner the morning lights run out, goldhaired, slim, in girlish blue,
waspwaisted, with innocent hands" (15: 4054–55). Images of projec-
708 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
tion are often blatantly cinematographic: "The image of the lake of
Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on
the wall" (15: 986–87). Cinematographic fade-ins and fade-outs are
frequent. Mrs Breen, for example, "fades from [Bloom's] side" (15:
577). And at the close of the episode, Rudy appears as if by fade-in:
"Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven,
a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and
a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand" (15: 4956–59). As
in silent cinema, Rudy "reads . . . inaudibly" and "gazes, unseeing
into Bloom's eyes" (15: 4959, 4964).
The "Technics" listed for the "Circe" episode in the Linati and
Gilbert schema, "vision animated to the bursting point" and "hal-
lucination" respectively, are equally applicable to The Temptation
(Ellman, Ulysses 194). The term "hallucination" is interesting for
several reasons. First, it is a relatively frequently used term in Flau-
bert's letters, as he himself suffered from a nervous condition which
brought on hallucinations. In a famous letter to Hippolyte Taine (1
December 1866) Flaubert describes his own experience of halluci-
nation as inextricably linked to memory (again, a conception that
seems an apt description of "Circe"): "an instantaneous irruption
of memory, for hallucination properly speaking is precisely that, at
least in my case. It is a malady of the memory . . . there's no time
to look at these internal images that go marching past at a furious
pace" (qtd. in Wall 318). The word "hallucination" also suggests a
link to another potentially crucial intertext, which would establish a
relationship between "Circe" and the work of the "magician" film-
maker of early cinema, George Méliès.25 Méliès was a professional
magician by training, which may have something to do with the fact
that the "Art" listed for "Circe" in the Gilbert Schema is "magic." Many
of Méliès's films bear the word "hallucination" in their title. Two of
these—L'Hallucination de l'alchimiste (1897) and Les Hallucinations du
Baron de Münchausen (1910)—antedated the writing of Ulysses. It is
particularly significant that Méliès made a movie called La Tentation de
Saint Antoine (1898).26 As in Flaubert's book, Antoine's temptations
appear in the strangest of places and the strangest of guises, thanks
to Méliès's trademark method of stop motion substitution. Flaubert's
work may have led Joyce to Méliès's film, or the film may have led
Joyce to Flaubert's work. Either way, the Temptation seems to have
had a strong cinematographic influence on Joyce's writing.
"Ineluctable modality of the visible" (15: 3630–31) thinks
Stephen at the beginning of "Proteus;" "there are only ways of per-
ceiving" exclaims Flaubert in an impassioned letter about the nature
of truth ("To Léon" 266). The works of Joyce and Flaubert display a
constant concern with the representation of the visual in literature.
 Baron 709
The similarities between Joyce's references to, and many of Flau-
bert's statements about, vision and photography are unlikely to be
entirely coincidental. The fact that many of Flaubert's cinematographic
techniques appear to have direct counterparts in Joyce's works adds
weight to these suspicions of a literary influence. All this is neither
to deny nor to belittle the likely role of the cinema in the shaping of
Joyce's "kinematographic vein." It is, however, to illuminate an over-
looked element among Joyce's formative influences and to suggest
that the cinema and Flaubert most likely worked their visual magic
together in Joyce's creative crucible.

Notes
1. All references to Ulysses are to the Gabler edition and are cited in
the following form: (episode number: line number).
2. The most significant of these analyses include works by Thomas
Burkdall, Susan Barzagan, Philip Sicker, Gösta Werner, and Austin
Briggs. In August 2006, the Zürich James Joyce Foundation devoted
its annual workshop to the theme of "Cinematographic Joyce"—see
Scarlett Baron. It is from a paper given on the occasion of this Work-
shop that this article is derived.
3. David Trotter recently commented on the current "intensification of
interest in literary modernism's relation to cinema": "cinema", he
stated, "is a principle active . . . according to an already voluminous
scholarship, throughout the work of James Joyce" (237–38).
4. Richard Ellmann reports that Joyce made a statement to this effect
in 1924: "At first he had thought, as he told Daniel Hummel, that
the book could not be translated into any other language, but might
be translated into another medium, that of the film" (561).
5. Joyce is reported to have read from Ulysses, played a gramophone
recording of "Anna Livia Plurabelle," and given Eisenstein a signed
copy of Ulysses. He is also said to have expressed a keen interest
in seeing Eisenstein's recent masterpieces, Potemkin (1925) and
October (1927). An extensive account of the meeting, based on
Eisenstein's memories of the encounter, can be found in Gösta Wer-
ner's essay, "James Joyce and Sergej Eisenstein."
6. As Austin Briggs has pointed out, "[f]or all its ingenuity, the stage
machinery of traps and flaps and pulleys cannot begin to duplicate
the instantaneous appearances, disappearances, and transformations
of cinema" (149).
7. The term "cinematographic" is, of course, anachronistic in the context
of any text written before 1895 (the year in which the cinematograph
was invented), but there is no more suggestive word to describe
710 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
techniques that are often remarkably analogous to methods that we
have come, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to think of
as quintessentially cinematographic.
8. Tom Gunning coined the phrase "cinema of attractions" (the word
"attractions" is borrowed from Eisenstein's reflections on theatrical
terminology) to refer to this earliest wave of films, which were often
set up to look like the theatre or the circus (59).
9. In "Through Theatre to Cinema" Eisenstein notes: "Strangely enough,
it was Flaubert who gave us one of the finest examples of cross-
montage of dialogues, used with the same intention of expressive
sharpening of idea" (12). In "Dickens, Griffith, and The Film Today"
he refers to Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth and declares: "From
here, from Dickens, from the Victorian novel, stem the first shoots
of the American film esthetic" (195).
10. There is evidence of Joyce's early reading of Flaubert. A copy of
L'Education sentimentale (1901) and of Madame Bovary (1900),
both signed and dated ("1901" and "June 1901" respectively) by
James Joyce, survive to this day. In "The Day of the Rabblement"
(1901), Joyce refers to Flaubert and to Madame Bovary in particular
(Occasional 51). In Stephen Hero, and A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, Joyce attributes the "beauty as truth" theory of art
to Plato, thus replicating a mistake made by Flaubert in a letter of
18 March 1857 to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie. It is from that same
letter that Stephen quotes when he declares in A Portrait that "The
author, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond
or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indiffer-
ent, paring his fingernails" (181). Ellmann reports that in 1913 Joyce
purchased the two first volumes of Flaubert's Premières Oeuvres (4
vols, 1913–1919), as well as a copy of La Tentation de saint Antoine
(edition unknown) (James Joyce 779). In 1920 Joyce's Triestine
library included two other books by Flaubert: an English translation
of Madame Bovary (n.d) and a French edition of Salammbô (1914).
(Ellmann, Consciousness 108–9).
11. The kinetoscope is not mentioned but shadowed by Bloom's jumbled
thoughts about Thomas Edison, its inventor, in "Eumaeus." Bloom
mistakenly associates Edison's name with the invention of the tele-
scope (which was in fact invented by Galileo in 1609): "to invent
those rays Röngten did, or the telescope like Edison, though I believe
it was before his time, Galileo was the man I mean" (16: 766–68).
12. Confirmation of this appears in "Circe," and the revelation casts Ste-
phen's "Proteus" meditation on the visible world in a new light: "Must
get glasses. Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The
eye sees all flat. . . . Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable modality of
the visible." (15: 3628–631).
13. Talbot's "calotype," patented in 1841, enabled the photographer to
draw negatives of his light impressions. This in turn made it possible
to develop several copies of any photograph.
 Baron 711
14. Anne Green shows that Flaubert's response to photography was
more complicated than is often supposed, arguing that A Sentimental
Education makes manifest the author's fascination with the idea of
the photographic image.
15. It is clear from references in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
that Joyce had read at least some of Flaubert's letters—see note
11.
16. The Lumière brothers had demonstrated the cinematograph in Paris,
at the Salon Indien du Grand Café, on 28 December 1895. The title of
one of the projected films also bore their name: "La Sortie de l'usine
Lumière à Lyon."
17. I use the word "dynamic" to avoid the adjective "kinetic," which is
used by Joyce (in quite a different sense than I intend) in the pas-
sage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which Stephen
Dedalus dismisses "kinetic" art as improper: "The feelings excited by
improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. . . . The arts that excite
them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts" (172).
As Lynch's (in A Portrait) and Bloom's (in Ulysses) erotic interests in
classical statuary and photography make clear, Joyce was well aware
of even high art's incapacity to forestall responses of this kind.
18. See in particular "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram"
(28–44) and "A Course in Treatment" (84–107) in Film Form.
19. As defined by Hugh Kenner, "The Uncle Charles Principle entails
writing about someone much as that someone would choose to be
written about" (21). Dorrit Cohn has provided the fullest discussion
of the various ways writers have used to represent consciousness
in the novel in her meticulous study, Transparent Minds. John Paul
Riquelme follows Cohn's categorization in his specific discussion
of narrative techniques in Joyce's work, The Teller and The Tale in
Joyce's Fiction.
20. Stephen's description of a "spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its
vision to an exact focus" seems an apt description of Gabriel's ex-
perience in this highly visual section of the story.
21. The gesture is recorded twice in the text. On the first instance it
reads: "a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung
forth a coin" (10: 222). And on the second: "A plump bare generous
arm shone, was seen, held forth from a white petticoatbodice and
taut shiftstraps. A woman's hand flung forth a coin over the area
railings" (10: 251–3).
22. The beggar in Madame Bovary, "l'Aveugle," is blind whereas the
beggar in Ulysses is lame.
23. The Temptation began as a project for the stage: in 1845 after see-
ing Brueghel's painting of The Temptation of Saint Anthony for the
first time, Flaubert wrote excitedly to his friend Le Poittevin of his
idea "of arranging the subject for the theatre" ("To Alfred" 31).
712 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
24. "Even in the midst thereof, and in the very disk of the sun, beams
the face of Jesus Christ" (191).
25. In a recent paper, "Early cinema: Nausicaa/Circe," Marco Camerani
(University of Forlì) made a strong case for the likely influence of
George Méliès's works on Circe. The research presented in the pa-
per forms part of a wider Ph.D research project entitled "Tecniche di
montaggio tra letteratura e cinema: Joyce," which was defended at
University of Bologna in June 2007. It will be published in book form
later this year as: Joyce e il cinema delle origini: Circe (Florence:
Cadmo, 2008).
26. The film was banned by the French police for constituting an affront
to religion—not a fact to displease Joyce.

Works Cited
Baron, Scarlett. "'Lux upon Lux': A Report on the 2006 Zürich James Joyce
Foundation Workshop." James Joyce Quarterly 44 (2006): 13–17.
Barzagan, Susan. "The Headings in 'Aeolus': A Cinematographic View."
James Joyce Quarterly 23 (1986): 345–50.
Briggs, Austin. "'Roll Away the Reel World, the Reel World': 'Circe' and
Cinema." Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Sympo-
sium. Ed. Morris Beja and Shari Benstock. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio
State UP, 1989. 145–56.
Bruneau, Jean, ed. Correspondance. 5 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1973–
2007.
Burkdall, Thomas. Joycean Frames, Film and the Fiction of James Joyce.
New York: Routledge, 2001.
Camerani, Marco. "Early cinema: Nausicaa/Circe." Cinematographic Joyce.
James Joyce Foundation Workshop. Zürich. 6–12 August 2006.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds, Narrative Modes for Presenting Con-
sciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
Danger, Pierre. Sensations et objets dans le roman de Flaubert. Paris:
Colin, 1973.
Debray-Genette, Raymonde. "Du mode narratif dans les Trois Contes."
Littérature 2 (1971): 39–62. Rpt. in Travail de Flaubert. Ed. Gérard
Genette and Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 1983. 135–65.
Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. and trans. Jay
Leyda. London: Dobson, 1951.
———. "Dickens, Griffith, and The Film Today." 1944. Eisenstein 195–
255.
———. "Through Theatre to Cinema." 1934. Eisenstein 3–17.
Ellmann, Richard. The Consciousness of James Joyce. London: Faber,
1977.
———. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.
———. Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber, 1972.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Paul de Man with Patricia K.
de Man. New York: Norton, 1965.
 Baron 713
———. A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man. Trans. Douglas
Parmée. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
———. The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Trans. Lafcadio Hearn. Ed. Mar-
shall C. Olds. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
———. Three Tales. Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer .Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
———. "To Alfred Le Poittevin." 13 May 1845. Steegmuller 2: 30–31.
———. "To Hippolyte Taine." 20 November 1866. Wall 315–16.
———. "To Hippolyte Taine." Late November 1866. Steegmuller 2:
96–97.
———. "To Léon Hennique." 3 February 1880. Steegmuller 2: 266–67.
———. "To Louis Bouilhet." 15 January 1850. Bruneau 1: 567–76.
———. "To Louise Colet." 15 January 1853. Steegmuller 1: 179–80.
———. "To Louise Colet." 14 August 1853. Steegmuller 1: 195–97.
———. "To Louise Colet." 16 January 1852. Wall 169–72.
———. "To Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie." 18 March 1857. Wall. 247–48.
———. "To his mother." 5 January 1850. Steegmuller 1: 107–09.
———. "To his mother." 3 November 1849. Bruneau 1: 521–23.
———. "To his niece." 2 August 1873. Bruneau 4: 691–93.
Green, Anne. "Ecriture et photographie chez Flaubert." Flaubert et la théo-
rie littéraire. Ed. Tanguy Logé and Marie-France Renard. Bruxelles:
Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 2005. 197–205. 
Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators
and the Avant-Garde." Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed.
Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker. London: British Film Institute,
1990. 56–63.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
———. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Ed. Kevin Barry. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2000.
———. "A Portrait of the Artist." Poems and Shorter Writings. Ed. Rich-
ard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson. London:
Faber, 1991. 211–18.
———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Jeri Johnson. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2000.
———. Stephen Hero. 1944. Ed. Theodore Spencer. London: Cape,
1969.
———. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus
Melchior. New York: Random House, 1986.
Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper. Ed. Richard Ellmann. London:
Faber, 1958.
Kenner, Hugh. Joyce's Voices. London: Faber, 1978.
Norris, Margot. Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism. Austin:
U of Texas P, 1992.
Proust, Marcel. Chroniques. Paris: Gallimard, 1927.
Riquelme, John Paul. The Teller and The Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating
Perspectives. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1983.
Scholes, Robert and Richard McKain, eds. The Workshop of Daedalus:
James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1965.
Sicker, Philip. "'Alone in the hiding twilight:' Bloom's cinematic gaze in
'Nausicaa.'" James Joyce Quarterly 36 (1999): 825–51.
714 Flaubert, Joyce:Vision, Photography, Cinema
Spiegel, Alan. Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in the
Film and the Modern Novel. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1976.
Steegmuller, Francis, ed. and trans. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert. 2
vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.
Tall, Emily. "Eisenstein on Joyce: Sergei Eisenstein's Lecture on James
Joyce at the State Institute of Cinematography, November 1, 1934."
James Joyce Quarterly. 24 (1987): 133–42.
Trotter, David. "T. S. Eliot and the Cinema." Modernism/Modernity 13
(2006): 237–65.
Wall, Geoffrey, ed. and trans. Gustave Flaubert: Selected Letters. Lon-
don: Penguin, 1997.
Werner, Gösta. "James Joyce and Sergej Eisenstein." James Joyce Quar-
terly 27 (1990): 491–507.