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James Joyce, theCinematographic ModernistEric Paul Meljac aa Indiana University of PennsylvaniaPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Eric Paul Meljac (2009) James Joyce, the CinematographicModernist, The Explicator, 67:4, 279-283, DOI: 10.1080/00144940903250300

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is causing the confusion) complicitous in dismissing the Africanist presence inthis novel, but a great many students are expected to be complicitous as well.In order to end this complicity, the Africanist presence must be acknowledged,and I believe Morrison’s method of analysis will be helpful toward that end.

—TAMARA POWELL, Kennesaw State UniversityCopyright C© 2009 Heldref Publications

KEYWORDS

Africanist presence, Kate Chopin, economy of stereotype, fetishization,metonymic displacement

WORKS CITED

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 1899. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1970. Print.Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.

James Joyce, the Cinematographic Modernist

In David Trotter’s impressive chapter on James Joyce in Cinema and Mod-ernism, the author points to James Joyce having “long made a habit out of moviegoing” (88). As Trotter points out, Joyce opened the first cinema in Dublin (88).From this, Trotter makes observations regarding Joyce’s cinematic gestures inUlysses. Indeed, the critic makes reference to Joyce’s use of automatism in nar-rative, particularly in “The Wandering Rocks” chapter of Ulysses. For instance,Trotter points out the Blazes Boylan scene at the fruiterer:

The scene bristles with presence-effect, with objects and actions which de-mand attention both from Boylan and from the narrator whose job it hashitherto been to describe in detail whatever occupies the consciousness pre-siding over any scene or event. The process by which Boylan selects items forthe basket is the process by which the narrator selects items for description.Each description of an item has the colour of the purpose which Boylan hasinvested in that item. (115)

Trotter’s observation is a keen one. In this scene, Boylan selects fruit, and inorder to capture the scene automatically, as a camera would capture the scene,the narrator is obliged to record, with some degree of detail, those pieces offruit that Boylan lifts. Further, Trotter argues that the pieces of fruit, and theircolors in particular, are representative of the mood, or purpose, of the narrative.Trotter writes, “there is a kind of collusion of colour, of colourfulness, of

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gold and pink, between Boylan and the shop-girl, and between them and thenarrator” (115). More importantly, however, is what Trotter notices (that thenarrator also notices) going on in the background of the scene. Trotter remindsthe reader that H.E.L.Y.’s sandwichboard men pass in the background and thattheir “presence in the background raises the question of who notices what, fromwhere, and why” (115). He goes on, “And their mechanical passage and lack ofcolour are rather strikingly at odds with the glowing gold and pink complicity”(115). It is here that Trotter’s argument comes to fruition. The observation ofthe sandwichboardmen in the background, and their mechanical passage inparticular, reveals Trotter’s argument that Joyce, though writing in the 1920s,really wishes to draw on the “entirety” of the cinema of 1904, rather than hiscontemporary cinematic movement of “entirety to essence.”

Joyce’s cinematic sources from 1904 would have included many single shots,much like the Lumiere one-reelers of the 1890s, in which a single, fixed camerain deep focus would capture the scene, thereby allowing the viewing of not onlythe primary action, but also any other action that may (or may not) be occurringin the near or far background. Indeed, films from 1904 include scenes ofindustry, single-shots in deep focus that capture the entirety of a scene. Forexample, the known film archive for 1904 includes several short films suchas scenes shot at the Westinghouse Air Brake company which show factoryworkers in single rooms performing tasks requisite to their labor (casting,moulding, etc.). Such films are not films of essence. They are films of entirety.Whereas films of essence use a scene to depict a mood or expression, films ofentirety capture the scene as it is, as a kind of tableau, without evoking a mood.That is, these films have the distinct mechanical quality of documenting anentire scene, from what may be going on near the camera to the man walkingacross the factory at the far back of the scene. The entire scene is captured as ithappens. Even perhaps the most famous 1903 film The Great Train Robbery,notable for being one of the first films to employ cross cutting to propel anarrative, was a film of mechanical entirety (Dirks). The Edison Company one-reeler depicts the narrative of a train robbery, complete with all the action wehave come to expect in Western films, gun battles included. Close-ups all butabsent, the fight in the express car in scene three is shot capturing the entiretyof the scene. The action occurs before the audience, unfolding bit by bit, withactivity at once happening in the background and around the main action.Consider for example, the dynamiting of the safebox in scene three of the film.All at once the audience sees one of the robbers placing the dynamite, anotherrobber moving back and forth by the door, guarding them from detection,and in the background the scenery whipping by as the train zooms along thetrack. This is a scene of entirety, all of the possible action in a single room, asingle shot, occurring before the camera. There is no essence; there is simplymechanically reproduced reality.

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Trotter points out that much of “Ulysses resembles the films in the Liv-ing Dublin series” even though Joyce made no pointed effort to “reproducethe effects of these films in his novel” (95). This resemblance, though, is ofgreat import when considering Joyce’s apparent desire to reproduce mechanicalvision in the form of prose narrative. The Living Dublin film series showedDublin as Dublin. Deep focused shots of scenes around the Irish city enter-tained audiences by teasing them with the possibility of seeing someone knownto them walking across a bridge, down the street, or leaving a building (95).Everyday Dublin is reproduced by a machine and projected on a screen. TheLiving Dublin series reveals Dublin as it is presently, reproducing all of theaction of the city as it is (or was) for a time (94–5).

Borrowing heavily from Trotter’s argument, one can see how in UlyssesJoyce’s desire to represent Dublin in a 24-hour period, with action occurringas it would on any day in the city, certainly serves to remind one of the cinemaof 1904. The laterally-tracked scan of the cemetery in the “Hades” chapter, forexample, simulates the kind of camera action, in deep focus, that would havebeen seen by theater-goers in 1904:

Paltry funeral: coach and three carriages. It’s all the same. Pallbearers, goldreins, requiem mass, firing a volley. Pomp of death. Beyond the hind carriagea hawker stood by his barrow of cakes and fruit. Simnel cakes those are, stucktogether: cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits. Who ate them? Mourners comingout. (99)

In this scene (or shot, if one prefers) the reader tracks laterally along thecemetery, seeing what Mr. Bloom sees, but unnaturally so. The reader movesfrom the coach, down the line of pallbearers, to the back of the procession,and then to the mourners pouring out. Not only does the scene track laterally,the reader also sees the thoughts of Mr. Bloom, sees his thoughts of a paltryfuneral and his wondering of who ate the simnel cakes. What Joyce captureshere is a mechanical reproduction of the scene as a scene, a tableau of sorts inwhich every detail is visible, from the carriages to the thoughts of the character.Not only is every detail visible, the overwhelming clutter of detail (in one shortparagraph the reader sees carriages, mourners, a requiem mass, the pomp ofdeath, a hawker, simnel cakes, the dead, a pallbearer) has a sense of actualityrather than essence. The essence of a paltry funeral is not known by virtueof the carriages or requiem mass. The fact that the funeral is paltry is knownbecause that thought itself is captured as well by the narrative camera.

Even Joyce’s earlier work has shades of such mechanical reproduction. Notefor example the opening paragraph of “Araby” in which the narrator describeswhere his home sits:

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hourwhen the Christian Bothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited houseof two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square

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ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them,gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. (39)

While one might argue that these lines from “Araby” are more Flaubertianthan mechanical, one must recognize, at the very least, the snapshot-like qualityof the scene as it is presented to the reader. Additionally, looking at a shortwork by Flaubert will reveal the differences between the master of realismand Joyce’s emerging mastery of modernism. Flaubert writes in A SimpleHeart:

This house had a slate roof and stood between an alley and a lane that wentdown to the river. There was an unevenness in the levels of the rooms whichmade you stumble. A narrow hall divided the kitchen from the “parlour”where Mme. Aubain spent her day sitting in a wicker easy chair by thewindow. Against the panels, which were painted white, was a row of eightmahogany chairs. On an old piano under the barometer a heap of woodenand cardboard boxes rose like a pyramid. (5–6)

In A Simple Heart, as in “Araby,” a setting is placed before the reader, butone should notice the differences here, and they are cinematic in nature. WhileFlaubert works in a mode of realism that seeks to create a home in the mindof the reader, Joyce’s setting is set before the reader as a single shot mightbe in a film. Here is the street, Joyce says. The street looks this way, and thehouses face one another. Over on that side is another abandoned home. Thenthe shot ends. The scene is shown in entirety, as a Lumiere shot might be, for itis (re)produced as though the writer is a machine, recording the scene as scene,not inventing the scene bit by bit, as one sees happening in Flaubert.

The results of Joyce’s innovation are obvious, to some degree. In a sharpbreak with the realists and naturalist that come before him, Joyce manages totransfer a scene to text in a form reminiscent of mechanical mediation. WhereasFlaubert, for example, worked with form in an effort to create a mood by wayof situating a scene in terms of detailed (and drawn-out) description, Joycemanages to reduce the form to a kind of pureness that only the mechanicalobserver can manage. For Joyce, the goal is recreate the scene as it is, not asit is imagined. Thus, in cinematic terms, Joyce records, or films, his scenesfor the page, capturing the entirety of a single shot, many times paragraphby paragraph, to show Dublin as Dublin, not Dublin as he (or his narrator)imagines it.

—ERIC PAUL MELJAC, Indiana University of PennsylvaniaCopyright C© 2009 Heldref Publications

KEYWORDS

cinema, James Joyce, Ulysses

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WORKS CITED

Dirks, Tim. “The Great Train Robbery (1903).” AMC Filmsite. American Movie Classics Co. 2009.Web. 5 Aug. 2009.

Flaubert, Gustave. A Simple Heart. Trans. Arthur McDowall. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print.Joyce, James. “Araby.” The Portable James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. New York: Penguin, 1976.

39–46. Print.———. Ulysses. 1914. New York: Random House, 1946. Print.Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. Print.

Section 29 of Oppen’s OF BEING NUMEROUS

“Of Being Numerous” opens with the following lines taken from RobertBrumbaugh’s Plato for the Modern Age: “There are things / We live among‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves’” (New Collected Poems 163). Thepoint is that understanding others is crucial to the comprehension of one’sself, and for forty sections, the poem explores the process by which one mightnegotiate—by continuously encountering and re-encountering images one’sself in relation to the world’s objects and characters—a space for the singularindividual. In light of the negotiation and re-negotiation of the self, the subjectof parenting becomes especially complex:

29

My daughter, my daughter, what can I sayOf living?

I cannot judge it.

We seem caughtIn reality together my lovelyDaughter.

I have a daughterBut no child

And it was not preciselyHappiness we promisedOurselves;

We say happiness, happiness and are notSatisfied.

Tho the house on the low landOf the city

Catches the dawn light

I can tell myself, and I tell myselfOnly what we all believe

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