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OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS
General Editors
PAULINA KEWES LAURA MARCUS
PETER MCCULLOUGH HEATHER O’DONOGHUE
SEAMUS PERRY LLOYD PRATT
FIONA STAFFORD
James Joyce and the
Phenomenology of Film
CLEO HANAWAY-OAKLEY
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Bibliography 123
Index 141
List of Illustrations
3.1. Still from One A.M. (1916), dir. Charles Chaplin. Reproduced
with thanks to the BFI and the Charlie Chaplin Archive 64
3.2. Still from Le Mélomane (1903), dir. Georges Méliès.
Reproduced with thanks to the BFI 66
3.3. Still from The Floorwalker (1916), dir. Charles Chaplin.
Reproduced with thanks to the BFI and the Charlie
Chaplin Archive 73
4.1. Advertisement for the hand-held ‘Holmes-type’ stereoscope
(1869), from Boston Almanac. Reproduced, with permission,
from a copy held by the Boston Medical Library in the Francis A.
Countway Library of Medicine. This image is in the public
domain and can be viewed online at <http://collections.
countway.harvard.edu/onview/items/show/6277> 87
4.2. Stereocard by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company;
series 106, no. 11 (1904). Reproduced with permission from
a private collector who sold the cards via eBay 93
4.3. Stereocard by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company;
series 106, no. 6 (1904). Reproduced with permission from a
private collector who sold the cards via eBay 93
4.4. Anaglyph of the moon (1924), from the Illustrated London News.
Reproduced with kind permission from the Mary Evans
Picture Library 98
4.5. Still from Explosion of a Motor Car (1900), dir. Cecil Hepworth.
Reproduced with thanks to the BFI. 108
List of Abbreviations
D. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008)
FW James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Penguin
Classics, 2000)
JJ Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. edn (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983)
LI Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, vol. I (New York: Viking
Press, 1966)
LII Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, vol. II (New York: Viking
Press, 1966)
LIII Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, vol. III (New York: Viking
Press, 1966)
P. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
U. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986).
(References appear as episode number plus line number.)
A Shared Enterprise
Joyce, Phenomenology, Film
1
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’ (1945), in Sense and Non-
Sense, trans. and ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press, 1964), 58; Sens et non-sens (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996).
2
For further thoughts on the relationship between literary modernism and Edmund
Husserl’s phenomenological practice of epoché, see Ariane Mildenberg, ‘Openings: Epoché
as Aesthetic Tool in Modernist Texts’, in Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg
(eds), Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 41–73.
2 James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
was dismissive of the psychoanalytic obsession with the inner workings of
the human mind; he was more interested in our immediate, sensuous
comprehension of life as it is lived: ‘Why all this fuss and bother about the
mystery of the unconscious?’—‘What about the mystery of the conscious?’,
asks Joyce, rhetorically.3
To complement Bloom’s cat-focused reflection, Joyce undertakes a
parallel phenomenological project: he attempts to show his readers Bloom’s
direct conscious experience of the cat’s utterance. Bracketing the custom-
ary, ingrained interpretation of cat noise (‘miaow’ or ‘meow’), Joyce gives
us ‘Mkgnao’, ‘Mrkgnao’, and ‘Mrkrgnao’ (U. 4.16–32). In doing this,
Joyce highlights the fact that sounds, like sights and other perceptions, are
always already filtered through human subjectivity; the world, with all
its disparate phenomena, is shaped by us—‘miaow’ is a human-filtered
version of ‘Mkgnao’. ‘Mkgnao’ is, of course, also human-filtered, but—by
bracketing out our usual way of representing cat noise—Joyce gets closer to
a direct apprehension of the sound-as-it-is-heard. Keeping in mind this
desire for direct perception, if we adhere to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s own
characterization of phenomenology, quoted at the beginning of this intro-
duction, there is little distinction to be made between the enterprises of
Joyce and phenomenologists: both are concerned with showing, rather
than explaining, the ‘inherence of the self in the world’. Joyce does not
describe an objective, neutral world, bereft of the human self. He presents
human engagement with the world: he depicts the hearer hearing and the
seer seeing. Joyce is, like Merleau-Ponty, interested in exploring the
conscious perception of the world-as-it-is-lived, not the world-as-it-is-
customarily-characterized or the world-as-it-is-if-we-break-it-down-
into-subatomic-particles.
In their introduction to Beckett and Phenomenology (2009), Ulrika Maude
and Matthew Feldman note that literary studies has tended to shun phe-
nomenology while, in film studies, ‘phenomenological enquiry has proved
vibrant and prolific’.4 The claim for phenomenology’s ‘prolific’ presence in
film studies is somewhat overstated, but Maude and Feldman make a
pertinent point; while a cluster of film scholars has wholeheartedly embraced
the phenomenological ideas of Merleau-Ponty in particular, literary scholars
have been less keen to grapple with phenomenology.5 Mindful of this
3
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1960), 320.
4
Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman, ‘Introduction’, in Ulrika Maude and Matthew
Feldman (eds), Beckett and Phenomenology (New York and London: Continuum, 2009), 4.
5
Some scholars have started to employ phenomenology in literary modernism studies, but
the practice remains fairly uncommon. In terms of book-length studies focusing specifically on
the relationship between phenomenology and modernism, alongside Maude and Feldman,
A Shared Enterprise 3
discrepancy, this book brings the phenomenology of film—that is, the
phenomenological analysis of film and film spectatorship—into dialogue
with literary modernism studies, using James Joyce’s work (Ulysses, in
particular) as an apt case study. The aptness of Ulysses lies in its preoccupation
with concerns that are relevant to the phenomenology of film: perception,
embodiment, subjectivity, relationships, and, of course, cinema and proto-
cinematic devices. By putting James Joyce’s literary work into dialogue with
both early cinema and phenomenology, I seek to elucidate and enliven not
only texts and films but, also, phenomenology.
Despite Ulysses’s allusions to films and cinematic technologies, and
Joyce’s well-documented interest in cinema,6 my book is not concerned
with pointing out analogies of technique between cinema and Joycean
modernism. Nor is it preoccupied with finding direct lines of influence
between specific early films and certain passages in Joyce’s texts or between
Joyce and particular works of phenomenology. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty,
the main phenomenologist I draw upon, could not have influenced Joyce
directly, as his main works were published after Joyce’s death.7 Instead,
I seek to uncover and illuminate parallel philosophies latent within early
cinema spectatorship, within early films themselves, and within Joyce’s
texts and the experience of reading Joyce’s texts. The insights of phenom-
enology, and earlier proto-phenomenological ideas, help to illuminate
these parallel philosophies.
My parallels-based approach has affinities with the models provided by
David Trotter and Andrew Shail. Trotter argues that modernist literary
texts and early films are best ‘understood as constituting and constituted
one can cite: Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg, Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, and
Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art
and Literature (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007).
6
As is now widely known, James Joyce briefly ran a Dublin cinema, between December
1909 and April 1910. Joyce’s letters, and others’ anecdotes, portray the writer as someone
with a sustained interest in film. For a collection of essays on Joyce and cinema, see John
McCourt (ed.), Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (Cork: Cork University
Press, 2010).
7
It may, however, be possible to establish a line of influence in the opposite direction. It
is likely that Merleau-Ponty read Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ as he was listed as a subscriber
to transition, where Joyce’s later work was published (transition subscriber list c.1936, Box
60, Folder 1402, The Maria and Eugene Jolas Paper, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts
Library, Yale University). We also know that Merleau-Ponty commissioned a review of
Stephen Hero to be published in his journal, Les Temps modernes (Box 3, Folder 55, Letter to
Eugene Jolas from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Maria and Eugene Jolas Paper, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University). These connections are explored
further in my ‘ “Mirrors of Reciprocal Flesh”: James Joyce and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, in
Ariane Mildenberg (ed.), Understanding Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism
(London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Many thanks to Cathryn Setz for bringing these archives to
my attention.
4 James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
by parallel histories’.8 Like Trotter’s seminal Cinema and Modernism
(2007), this book is concerned with unearthing shared ideas and outlooks.
These parallel ideas may happen to stem partly from direct influence, and
may entail the use of analogous techniques, but they are just as likely to
originate in a collective cultural history. Making a similar point, Shail
articulates a broad form of ‘influence’ that marries Trotter’s idea of
‘parallelism’ with an acknowledgement that impact and inspiration can
sometimes be indirect and unacknowledged: this ‘version of influence
concerns changes in the everyday mental landscape of whole popula-
tions, changes in such basic conceptions as the substance of thought, the
function of the senses, the nature of time, the dividing line between
consciousness and matter’.9 Ultimately, I take my cue from Merleau-
Ponty’s assertion that art, technology, and philosophy inhabit the same
intellectual and cultural climate, so it is not surprising that they exhibit
similar interests and ideas: ‘if philosophy is in harmony with the cinema
[ . . . ] it is because the philosopher and the moviemaker share a certain way
of being, a certain view of the world which belongs to a generation’.10
This book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 begins with a
consideration of the previous ways in which literary scholars have used
film theory in their interpretations of Ulysses. Joyce scholars have tended
to favour the psychoanalytic film theories of Christian Metz and Laura
Mulvey, employing them in their analyses of the relationship between
Gerty and Bloom in the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses. While these
theories help to illuminate the cinematic nature of Gerty and Bloom’s
encounter, and offer a model for unpicking the complex series of looks
between the couple, the film theorists’ ultimate reinstatement of the
seer/seen and subject/object binaries makes more nuanced interpret-
ations difficult. Phenomenology is offered as an alternative approach,
as a way of seeing beyond the seemingly rigid binaries of seer/seen,
subject/object, absorptive/theatrical, and personal/impersonal. Starting
from Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The Film and the New Psychology’ (1945), then
moving on to consider the ideas of contemporary film phenomenologists
(such as Vivian Sobchack, Spencer Shaw, and Jennifer Barker), the
second half of the chapter outlines the insights provided by phenomen-
ology, focusing on the reciprocity of cinematic perception and the
embodied nature of film spectatorship.
8
David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub-
lishers, 2007), 3.
9
Andrew Shail, The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism (Abingdon: Routledge,
2012), 1.
10
Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, 59.
A Shared Enterprise 5
Chapter 2 situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its his-
torical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and
embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-
Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max
Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei
Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated
from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and
Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined
with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film-
viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in
which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through
the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the
ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund
Husserl.
Chapter 3 presents an alternative to the popular critical vein, which sees
Joyce’s Ulysses and early cinema as conveying a mechanical, impersonal
view of the world. It is argued that Ulysses and certain genres of early
cinema were engaged—naively or otherwise—in a revaluation of Carte-
sian dualism, involving the reappraisal of mind/body and human/machine
binaries. The physical comedy of Bloom and Charlie Chaplin is analysed
with reference to phenomenological ideas on prosthesis and the machine–
human interface, while other genres of early cinema, such as Irish melo-
drama and trick films, are considered in the light of phenomenological
theories of gesture and embodiment. By comically mocking mind/body
separation and depicting the inseparability of subjectivity and corporeal-
ity, Joyce and the early film-makers go beyond the ideas of Bergson and
anticipate Merleau-Ponty’s later notion of the ‘body-subject’.
Chapter 4 considers the relationship between the seer and the seen.
Stephen’s musings on the pre-cinematic ‘stereoscope’ are discussed in
relation to Bloom’s contemplation of parallax and his mention of the
‘Mutoscope’, an early film-viewing machine. The three-dimensionality,
tangibility, and tactility of stereoscopic perception is analysed alongside
Bloom and Gerty’s encounter in ‘Nausicaa’ and the Merleau-Pontian
concepts of ‘flesh’ and ‘intercorporeity’. The bodily effects of projected
cinema—achieved through virtual film worlds, virtual film bodies, and the
intercorporeity of film and spectator—are discussed through reference to
panorama, phantom ride, and crash films. The dizzying effects of some of
these films are compared to the vertiginous nature of the ‘Wandering Rocks’
episode of Ulysses; these cinematic and literary vestibular disturbances are
elucidated through gestalt theory and the phenomenological concepts
of ‘intention’, ‘attention’, and the ‘phenomenal field’. This chapter ends
6 James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
with a consideration of the relationship between the self and the other,
through a discussion of cinematic mirroring in Ulysses and in Mitchell and
Kenyon’s fin de siècle Living Dublin films.
This book ends by briefly turning to Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake
(1939). Joyce’s cacophonous ‘book of the dark’ forms the centre of a
discussion of the emergence of sound film. The importance of touch in
both silent and sound film is restated through reference to Chaplin’s City
Lights (1931), and the complex interrelationship between sound and
image is contemplated through gestalt theory. I conclude by returning
to Ulysses, to consider the never-produced Reisman–Zukofsky screenplay
and the ways in which the film would, and would not, have affirmed a
phenomenological reading of Joyce’s text.
1
Reciprocal Seeing and
Embodied Subjectivity
The view that the perceiving subject is voyeuristic and detached still
dominates in both film studies and literary modernism studies.1 Accord-
ing to this prevailing thesis, the film or text presents a complete totality;
it is the job of the onlooker—the spectator, reader, perceiving character,
or narrator—to comprehend this totality. This popular proposition is
grounded in psychoanalytic theory, often expounded with reference to
seminal works on spectatorship by Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey.
For Metz, cinema ‘is only possible through the perceptual passions: the
desire to see (= scopic drive, scopophilia, voyeurism)’.2 Drawing on psy-
choanalytic theory, Metz argues that ‘the “perceiving drive”—combining
into one the scopic drive and the invocating drive—concretely represents the
absence of its object in the distance at which it maintains it’.3 The spectator
is, for Metz, always a voyeur, always a non-reciprocated seer. In film-
viewing, the perceived object needs to remain absent and detached in
order for the ‘perceiving drive’ to be satisfied. If the perceived object marks
itself as present, through acknowledging the gaze of the seer or, in some
other way, revealing its own subjectivity, the drive cannot be sated and
pleasure cannot be derived. The spectator must remain the active subject
(the ‘constitutive instance’) by ensuring that the film is the object; this
is the point that Metz is stressing when he declares that ‘it is I who make
the film’.4
1
There are, of course, some exceptions. See, e.g., in film studies, Wheeler Winston
Dixon, It Looks at You: The Returned Gaze of Cinema (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1995). And, in literary modernism studies, Rochelle Rives, Modernist Imper-
sonalities: Affect, Authority, and the Subject (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
2
Christian Metz, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen, 16/2 (1975), 14–76, at 59.
3 4
Ibid. 60. Ibid. 51.
8 James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
Like Metz, Mulvey draws on psychoanalytic theories—especially
scopophilia and voyeurism—in her analyses, stating that film spectators
find ‘pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation
through sight’.5 The phrase ‘male gaze’ is often used as shorthand for this
voyeuristic, fetishized objectification, which, according to Mulvey, is
routinely practised by film spectators: the ‘determining male gaze projects
its phantasy on to the female figure’; ‘women are simultaneously looked at
and displayed [ . . . ] so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-
ness’.6 As in Metz’s account, in Mulvey’s thesis absence is a crucial part of
film spectatorship, but this absence is less metaphorical, directly referen-
cing its carnal Freudian roots: ‘the meaning of woman is sexual difference,
the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on
which is based the castration complex’; ‘the woman as icon [ . . . ] always
threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified’.7
For Thomas Burkdall, the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses perfectly exem-
plifies Laura Mulvey’s theory of film spectatorship. Burkdall—via Mulvey—
sees Gerty as an object for both Bloom and herself; like Hollywood’s
leading ladies, Gerty has no discernible subjectivity.8 Like Burkdall, Daniel
Shea argues that ‘Nausicaa’ is a detached, inhuman episode: ‘we come to
recognize the cinematic perspective as an inherently mechanical and dehu-
manizing one, denying a sense of authenticity to the subject’.9 For Shea, a
‘genuine gaze would have involved Bloom’s recognition of Gerty’s separate
and authentic existence; instead he reduces her to the status of a sex object’.10
Prefiguring Burkdall and Shea, in his 1999 James Joyce Quarterly article
‘Alone in the Hiding Twilight’, Philip Sicker notes ‘a striking resem-
blance’ between ‘Nausicaa’ and the spectatorship theories of Metz and
Mulvey: ‘Bloom’s auto-erotic excitement clearly depends upon his main-
taining the male subject/female object dichotomy.’11 According to Sicker,
‘Bloom craves the scopic regime of the early cinema’, where each male
viewer is like ‘Peeping Tom’ (U. 13.794):12 by ‘temporarily suppressing
his sense of Gerty as a gazing subject, Bloom can even enhance his
5
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16/3 (1975), 6–18, at 10.
6 7
Ibid. 11. Ibid. 13.
8
Thomas Burkdall, Joycean Frames: Film and the Fiction of James Joyce (London:
Routledge, 2001), 81–90.
9
Daniel Shea, ‘ “Do they Snapshot those Girls or Is it All a Fake?”: Walter Benjamin,
Film, and “Nausicaa” ’, James Joyce Quarterly, 4/3:1–4 (2004–6), 87–98, at 87.
10
Ibid. 90.
11
Philip Sicker, ‘ “Alone in the Hiding Twilight”: Bloom’s Cinematic Gaze in “Nausicaa” ’,
James Joyce Quarterly, 36/4 (1999), 825–51, at 825–6.
12
Ibid. 829.
Reciprocal Seeing and Embodied Subjectivity 9
pleasure’.13 Sicker argues that even ‘indirect evidence that the glimpsed
female has become aroused through a reciprocal glance is sufficient to
induce castration panic in Bloom’.14 For Maria DiBattista, this detached
way of seeing is characteristic not just of ‘Nausicaa’ but of Ulysses as a
whole: ‘Bloom and the reader [ . . . ] become watchers summoned into the
voyeuristic regime of cinema itself ’.15
In a later article entitled ‘Unveiling Desire’ (2003), Sicker nuances his
argument by focusing in on Gerty; while Bloom maintains the subject/
object binary, asserts Sicker, Gerty blurs it. Contrary to his earlier article,
here Sicker argues that the film theories of Mulvey and Metz are too
essentialist to be used in a comprehensive reading of ‘Nausicaa’; Joyce’s
ideas on sexuality and subjectivity cannot be explained through these
reductive theories. Sticking with psychoanalysis, Sicker employs the
ideas of Jessica Benjamin, a current feminist theorist who—through
revisionary readings of Freud—argues that relationships are grounded in
intersubjectivity rather than objectification. For Benjamin, relationships
necessarily involve a ‘subject who could find pleasure with another
subject’.16 For Sicker, Gerty is such a subject, but Bloom is not; so their
encounter is not truly reciprocal.
Taking things a step further towards true reciprocity, like Sicker,
Katherine Mullin argues that ‘Nausicaa’ defies Mulvey and Metz, as the
episode features ‘reciprocal voyeurism’ and ‘mutual longing’.17 Marco
Camerani outlines this reversible voyeurism in his article on peeping:
Bloom ‘peeps at Gerty who knows she is being peeped at; moreover she
plays with Bloom by glancing back at him and performing a sort of strip
tease’.18 Like Gerty’s friend Bertha Supple, who peeps at her lodger while
he views erotic pictures (U. 15.706–7), Gerty is a voyeur just as Bloom
is.19 For Mullin and Camerani, the male-subject/female-object binary is
challenged, as both Bloom and Gerty are subject-voyeurs. However, the
subject/object binary is not completely dissolved, as voyeurism—whether
reciprocal or not—involves seeing the other purely as an object. According
13 14
Ibid. 831. Ibid. 837.
15
Maria DiBattista, ‘This Is Not a Movie: Ulysses and Cinema’, Modernism/Modernity,
13/2 (2006), 219–35, at 230.
16
Philip Sicker, ‘Unveiling Desire: Pleasure, Power and Masquerade in Joyce’s “Nausicaa”
Episode’, Joyce Studies Annual, 14 (2003), 92–131, at 125.
17
Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 156–65.
18
Marco Camerani, ‘Joyce and Early Cinema: Peeping Bloom through the Keyhole’, in
Franca Ruggieri, John McCourt, and Enrico Terrinoni (eds), Joyce in Progress: Proceedings
of the 2008 James Joyce Graduate Conference in Rome (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2009), 116.
19
Ibid. 119.
10 James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
to Mullin’s and Camerani’s interpretations, each character fails to see the
other as a fellow subject, even though the reader is shown that both
practise subjective looking—so the seer/seen binary remains intact.
It is clear from reading the work of these different Joyce scholars that
there is a desire for more nuanced interpretations of ‘Nausicaa’ and of the
visual dynamics throughout Ulysses. There is clearly an openness to film
theory, but the theories the scholars choose are invariably psychoanalytic
or, at least, focused on voyeurism and the objectifying gaze. Even when
attempting to move towards a reading that favours reciprocity over object-
ification, the scholars cited here frame their arguments in overt opposition
to psychoanalytic film theories (usually those of Mulvey and Metz) or plump
for the ideas of revisionist psychoanalysts (such as Jessica Benjamin). To
avoid reaching an interpretative impasse, drawing on non-psychoanalytic
film theory seems a sensible next step.
The theories of Metz and Mulvey are based on Jacques Lacan’s revisions
of Freud. Joyce scholars have something of an affinity with Lacan, owing
to Lacan’s own interest in Joyce. Lacan’s fascination with Joyce developed
in the 1960s, partly because of the influence of his then-assistant, Hélène
Cixous, who was writing a book on Joyce. In the mid-1970s, Lacan gave a
series of seminars, published under the title Le sinthome, which drew
heavily on Joyce’s life and work.20 As well as being inspired by Joyce,
Lacan was influenced by Merleau-Ponty; his ideas on the gaze, developed
in the mid-1960s, are indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the
Invisible (published in France in 1964). On 19 February 1964, as he
walked into his seminar, Lacan declared: ‘It is not by mere chance [that]
this very week I have received a copy of the newly published, posthumous
work of my friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty.’21 Lacan shared Merleau-
Ponty’s interest in the relation between perception and selfhood, so was
keen to read his innovative work.
20
For further discussion of the Joyce–Lacan connection, see Luke Thurston, James Joyce
and the Problem of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Roberto
Harari, How James Joyce Made his Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston
(New York: Other Press, 2002); Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the
Subject of Literature (New York: Palgrave Press, 2001); Christine van Boheemen-Saaf, Joyce,
Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sheldon Brivic, The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan,
and Perception (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), and Joyce through Lacan and
Žižek: Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Jacques Aubert, Joyce avec Lacan
(Paris: Navarin Editeur, 1987).
21
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Split between the Eye and the Gaze’ (1964), in The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978),
67–78, at 68.
Reciprocal Seeing and Embodied Subjectivity 11
Lacan appropriates elements of Merleau-Ponty’s model of reciprocal
seeing: ‘the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer
know which sees and which is seen.’22 For Merleau-Ponty, the relation-
ship between the seer and the seen is reversible and indeterminate. Lacan
adopts this idea of reversibility, but goes only halfway; he veers away from
full indeterminacy.23 For Lacan, being seen and, therefore, being an object
is reversible, but seeing and being a subject is not—the ‘object’ position is
primary and is crucial to Lacan’s Freud-inspired ‘scopic drive’. In other
words, the condition of being seen—the objectification associated with
voyeurism—always takes precedence in Lacan’s account of the gaze. The
satisfaction of a woman, according to Lacan, is grounded in this type of
reversibility; she ‘knows that she is being looked at’, but the looker must
‘not show her that one knows that she knows’ or else the satisfaction will
not be realized.24 For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, reversibility
dissolves rather than merely transposes the seer/seen positions, and,
because of this, a person is continually oscillating between ‘subject’ and
‘object’; the relationship between self and other always involves an
embodied, enworlded form of radical intersubjectivity.25
If scholars want to provide a reading of Ulysses’s visual dynamics that is
more attuned to true intersubjectivity and reciprocity, Merleau-Ponty’s
ideas are a good place to start. Reciprocity was, in fact, a key component of
the early films that captivated Joyce and his contemporaries. As Erik
Schneider notes, early ‘cinema was not merely a passive “looking at” but
a powerful interactive experience’.26 The cinema of Joyce’s youth had not
yet internalized the anti-theatric indifference to the spectator that was
codified in classic Hollywood cinema; interactivity between the viewer
and the film was actively encouraged. In 1904 Joyce and his partner Nora
attended a travelling film show—Lifka’s Bioscope—while in Pola. Nora
was particularly enthralled by one of the films: Joyce describes the viewing
experience vividly in a letter: ‘In the last [scene] Lothario throws
[Gretchen] into the river and rushes off, followed by a rabble. Nora
said, “O, policeman, catch him”’ (LII 75).
22
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed.
Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139.
23
For an in-depth analysis of Lacan’s appropriation of Merleau-Ponty, see Charles
Shepherdson, ‘A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s Reading of The Visible and the Invisible’,
Diacritics, 27/4 (Winter 1998), 70–86.
24
Lacan, ‘The Split between the Eye and the Gaze’, 75.
25
Merleau-Pontian reversibility is explored in more depth in Chapter 3.
26
Erik Schneider, ‘Trieste, James Joyce, and the Cinema: A History of Possible Worlds’,
in Trieste Film Festival Guide (Trieste: Alpe Adria Cinema, 2009), 157.
12 James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
As if to highlight the interactive and affective nature of early cinema,
films were often referred to as ‘living pictures’.27 As film historians Kevin
and Emer Rockett note, the history of cinema is the history of ‘living
pictures’, and these living pictures ‘can be related back to the Greek myth
of Galatea (or the myth of animation and of statues coming to life through
art and divine intervention)’.28 But it was not just the pictures that were
living; the audience were also animated, brought to life by the moving
images in front of them. The term ‘living pictures’ described films that
engaged the audience and prompted a powerful—often physical—
reaction. A review of ‘living pictures’ shown at the Rotunda, Dublin—
published in the Irish Times on 28 August 1906—describes ‘exciting
incidents’ that ‘produce hearty laughter’; according to the reviewer,
there was ‘not a dull moment during the performance’ and there was
‘no doubt that the audience thoroughly appreciated the excellent pro-
gramme’.29 Throughout the review, there is a clear focus on the animate
nature of both the films and the audience; the actualities are praised for
their realism and the comedies for their ability to provoke laughter.
One particularly interactive form of early cinema—‘local actuality
films’—prompted a very direct form of the reciprocal gaze through
showing the audience images of themselves on the screen. Film crews
would record footage of people going about their daily business then show
the films in a local venue, such as a theatre or town hall. People were able
to see themselves as others see them (as objects), while also recognizing
themselves as subjects, thus engaging in a feedback loop of reciprocal
seeing involving the recognition of both themselves and others as both
subjects and objects simultaneously.30 Phrases such as ‘see yourself
as others see you’ were used by early film promoters to entice viewers,
27
My term ‘living pictures’ embodies several of the elements that Tom Gunning
identifies in what he calls ‘cinema of attractions’. However, whereas Gunning is interested
in the ‘cinema of attractions’ as a non-narrative precursor to later films in which narrative is
bought to the foreground, I am interested in ‘living pictures’ in themselves, as a form of
cinema that prompts audience engagement, non-cognitive reflection, physical sensations,
and/or the feeling of immersion. For more on the ‘cinema of attractions’, see André
Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Le Cinéma des premiers temps, un défi à l’histoire du
cinema?’, in J. Aumont, A. Gaudreault, and M. Marie (eds), Histoire du cinéma: Nouvelles
approches (Paris: La Sorbonne nouvelle, 1989); Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions:
Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker
(eds), Early Film Space Frame Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), and ‘ “Now
You See It, Now You Don’t”: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions’, in Richard
Abel (ed.), Silent Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
28
Kevin Rockett and Emer Rockett, Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture
Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), 12.
29
Review of films at the Rotunda, Dublin, Irish Times, 28 August 1906, p. 7.
30
Local actuality films and reciprocal seeing is discussed in depth in Chapter 4.
Reciprocal Seeing and Embodied Subjectivity 13
by offering people the opportunity to engage in reversible, reciprocal
seeing.31 One advertisement for actuality films at the Empire Palace
theatre, Dublin, published in the Irish Times on 31 July 1907, promotes
local-actuality films of ‘Dublin’s chapel congregations’ using the tag lines
‘marvellous living portraits of everybody’ and ‘see yourselves as others see
you’.32 Similar phases are used in Ulysses and in Merleau-Ponty’s work. In
the ‘Nausicaa’ and ‘Lestrygonians’ episodes of Ulysses, Bloom ponders
what we learn when we ‘see ourselves as others see us’ (U. 13.1058,
8.662). In Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, when ‘I see myself as others
see me’, I am able to understand more about myself and about the other.33
In all three contexts (early cinema, Ulysses, phenomenology), the phrase
offers a reciprocal way of seeing, self-reflection, and the chance to con-
template the relationship between self and other, subject and object.
As well as helping to elucidate the dynamics involved in reciprocal
seeing, phenomenology’s interrogation and melding of binaries can cir-
cumvent the stalemate that is often reached when attempting to nuance
the absorptive/theatrical distinction. This distinction is most clearly
articulated by art historian Michael Fried: ‘absorption’ is used in reference
to artworks that do not acknowledge the beholder—they are detached and
impassive so must ‘absorb’ the beholder into their private world; ‘theatri-
cality’ is applied to artworks that recognize their own to-be-looked-at-ness
and, thus, can engage directly with the spectator.34 This binary—and its
associate dualisms—has a long critical lineage: in film studies, it has been
taken up and allied with the narrative/spectacle binary while,35 in literary
modernism studies, it has been investigated via the related impersonality/
personality dualism.36
31
I would like to thank Andrew Shail for first pointing out this association to me in
2008, when I had just began work on this project.
32
Advertisement for films at the Empire Palace Theatre, Dublin, Irish Times, 31 July
1907, p. 6.
33
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge, 1994), 435.
34
See Michael Fried: Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1998); Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in
the Age of Diderot, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Courbet’s
Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Manet’s Modernism, or,
the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
35
See Richard Rushton: ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theat-
ricality’, Screen, 45/3 (2004), 226–44, and ‘Absorption and Theatricality in the Cinema:
Some Thoughts on Narrative and Spectacle’, Screen, 48/1 (2007), 109–12.
36
See studies such as Daniel Albright, Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf,
and Mann, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), and Maud Ellmann, The Poetics
of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987).
14 James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
There is one film critic who is frequently referenced in analyses of these
binaries, in both film studies and literary modernism studies: André Bazin,
an influential French theorist writing in the 1940s and 1950s. His think-
ing is allied with the absorption/narrative/impersonality side of the binary.
For film critic V. F. Perkins, Bazin elucidates cinema’s capacity to ‘possess
the natural world by capturing its image’ and ‘resist the ravages of time
by “fixing” the image of a single moment’.37 For Bazin, then, cinema is
primarily a recording device: it captures and fixes reality, creating a discrete
and rigid mimetic image. Alan Spiegel links this Bazinian view of cinema as
‘a nonliving agent’ to Joyce’s literary ‘estrangement’, to his texts’ ‘spiritual
separateness that begins with a passive, affectless eye and will never permit
the observer total rapport with his visual field’.38 David Trotter sees Bazin’s
view of cinema reflected throughout literary modernism: ‘what fascinated
modernist writers about cinema was the original, and perhaps in some
measure reproducible, neutrality of film as a medium.’39 Michael North
evokes Bazin in his assertion that modernist literature and the cinema
‘lumber the modern world with an ever-increasing stack of recorded
corpses’,40 and Julian Murphet quotes Bazin at length, placing particular
emphasis on his assertion that ‘it is the novel that has discovered [ . . . ] an
almost mirror-like objectivity’.41
For these scholars, Bazin’s absorptive cinema is linked to impersonality,
via estrangement, separateness, passiveness, neutrality, mimetic reproduc-
tion, and objectivity. On the other side of the binary, opposite Bazinian
cinema, lies personality, engagement, activity, partiality, authenticity, and
subjectivity. Cinema, according to this dualistic reading, is objective—it
is devoid of subjectivity. This is what literary modernists liked about the
medium; they appreciated its impersonality. As a model of the relationship
between cinema and modernist literature, this dualism is undoubtedly
useful: it enables scholars to move from literary estrangement to cinematic
neutrality, and back again, via parallels based on a well-defined and
illuminating binary. However, this precise definition and structure is
37
V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Boston: De Capo
Press, 1993), 28.
38
Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern
Novel (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 67.
39
David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub-
lishers, 2007), 4–5.
40
Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 11, 210–11.
41
André Bazin, ‘In Defence of Mixed Cinema’, in What Is Cinema?, i, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), quoted in
Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 32.
Reciprocal Seeing and Embodied Subjectivity 15
also a disadvantage; the dualism too neatly divides the binary opposites,
making more refined or subtle interpretations difficult to achieve.
Some readings of Bazin are less clear-cut—they examine the knotty
intricacies of his cinema theory, dismantle the apparent binaries (absorp-
tion/theatricality, impersonality/personality, and objectivity/subjectivity)
and, in doing so, bring Bazin closer to the phenomenological theories of
cinema discussed in Chapter 2. According to Philip Rosen, for Bazin, ‘the
special character of cinema is not reducible to a technologically deter-
mined objectivity but derives also from a drive of human subjectivity’.42
Further, Rosen explains that, in Bazin’s philosophy of film, ‘cinema
enables a model of transaction between the world and its apprehension,
between the inhuman and human, between the physical and value,
between object and subject’.43 This idea that cinema actually breaks
down binaries is reflected in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological film
philosophy: ‘the movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the
union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in
the other.’44 In fact, as Dudley Andrew notes, Bazin was known to have an
interest in phenomenological theory and had ‘actual encounters’ with
several phenomenologists, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel,
and Merleau-Ponty.45 These phenomenology-inflected readings of cinema
suggest that subjectivity can, in fact, intervene in a seemingly neutral and
impersonal medium. There are three avenues for this intervention:
through a form of phenomenological reflection based on cinema’s repro-
duction of reality; through the subjectivity of the spectator mixing with
the inherent subjectivity of the film-maker; and through the spectator
sharing the embodied subjectivity of film, either through using the film-
maker’s subjectivity as a surrogate, or by entering into an intersubjective
encounter with the film images and apparatus.
The first intervention dismisses the presupposition that the ‘absorption’
required for non-theatrical engagement is private subjectivist introspec-
tion. As Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei notes, ‘mimesis challenges the viewing
consciousness, alienated from its quotidian familiarity with the appearance
of ordinary objects’.46 The mimetic nature of cinema (its capacity to make
a copy of reality) causes the spectator to question the nature of reality and
perception: if I am not perceiving reality, what am I perceiving on the
42
Philip Rosen, ‘Belief in Bazin’, in Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin
(eds), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory & its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 111, 109; emphasis in original.
43
Ibid. 111. 44
Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, 58.
45
Dudley Andrew, ‘A Binocular Preface’, in Andrew and Joubert-Laurencin (eds),
Opening Bazin, p. xi. I discuss the phenomenology of film in more detail in Chapter 3.
46
Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian, 223.
16 James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
screen?; what am I experiencing at the cinema? Spectators are obliged to
step outside their ordinary perceptual stance in order to see things afresh.
This process is similar to phenomenological reflection. Unlike introspec-
tion, which involves the contemplation of thoughts and ideas about a
particular experience or object, phenomenological reflection is concerned
with the comprehension of experience in itself.47 As Ariane Mildenberg
explains, phenomenological reflection is designed to ‘put out of play
preconceived objectivity, uncover the world’s essential structure and pro-
vide an exact description of things as these [are] met with in immediate
experience’.48 Thus, the spectator can engage with the film through
examining their immediate (subjective, yet not subjectivist) experience
of cinema.
The second intervention dispels the myth of cinema as a purely object-
ive medium; the camera may be mechanical, but the camera operator is
human, and, thus, the captured image is imprinted with his or her
subjectivity. Bazin hints at this point himself, in his discussions of cine-
matic mimesis and mimicry. As Thomas Elsaesser notes, Bazin employs
the terms ‘trace’ and ‘imprint’, rather than truth and likeness: ‘Bazin’s
ontology of cinematic realism is above all a theory about the inscription
and storage of time, rather than what we usually understand by image,
namely mimesis and representation.’49 This subtlety is missed, or glossed
over, by those who employ Bazin in order to advance an interpretation of
cinema as an impersonal recording device.
Whereas, for Trotter, Charlie Chaplin is the epitome of traditional
mimesis and mechanical reproduction, for Bazin, Chaplin offers an apt
analogy for his spatial model of mimesis as ‘imprint’. In Shoulder Arms
(1918), in order to escape capture, Chaplin impersonates a tree. For Bazin,
Chaplin’s action is ‘a form of mimicry’, rather than a form of reproduc-
tion; one ‘might go so far as to say that the defense reflexes of Charlie end
in a reabsorption of time by space’.50 Bazinian mimesis involves the real
becoming part of the image; like Chaplin, the real must imprint itself (or
leave a trace of itself) in the image (or the tree, in Charlie’s case). As Tom
Gunning explains, Bazin contrasts pseudorealism, which involves ‘dupli-
cating the world outside’, with true realism, which aims to present ‘the
47
For an in-depth discussion of the differences between introspection and phenomeno-
logical reflection, see David R. Cerbone, ‘Phenomenological Method: Reflection, Intro-
spection, and Skepticism’, in Dan Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary
Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
48
Mildenberg, ‘Openings’, 42.
49
Thomas Elsaesser, ‘A Bazinian Half-Century’, in Andrew and Joubert-Laurencin
(eds), Opening Bazin, 7.
50
André Bazin, ‘Charlie Chaplin’, in What Is Cinema?, i. 149.
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