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To what extent does Joyce privilege the visual over
other narrative means in Dubliners?
The correlation between the art of the painter and that of the novelist exists in the fact that both attempt to represent reality with an “uncompromising visual focus” (Doherty 49), as life is, after all, experienced through the eyes. This paper will explore this focus on the “visual” by arguing that Joyce’s attention to descriptive detail (especially of the body) is not for the sake of realist embellishment but as a means of communicating the visual, to get across an accurate depiction of the image Joyce aims to represent, an image that is as fixed and unmovable as that of a painting. As such, I maintain that Joyce privileges objective sight and the visual over other, more subjective, narrative means that “magnify an awareness of the self” (Olson 3) (such as epiphany, internal monologue etc.) because it allows the reader to experience reality and the ordinary in the novel through the eyes rather than through the mind of the narrator. Pound comments that Joyce “gives us things how they are” and had “a sharp eye for seeing life as it is” (28), I argue that he transfers that observation of life into straightforward images ready for the reader’s consumption. Whereas other modernist narrative techniques obscure a text’s “commitment to the ordinary” (Olson 3) (such as streams of consciousness) by filtering reality through opinion (and therefore blinding the reader to ‘the way things really are’ in front of us), Joyce functions as the visual catalyst through which we see his Dublin and gives us a “painterly, discursive order of visual representation” (Knowlson n.p.). My argument will focus on two main points by addressing Joyce’s deviations between realism and imagism and the limits these impose and then, leading on from ideas of “images” of people, by addressing his role as “portrait” artist, in connection with Baudelaire’s idea of “the Painter of Modern Life”.
I contend that Joyce, by choosing to objectively represent the ‘real’ through vivid images and movements such as “the swing of his burly body” (45) or “frank rude health glowed in her face” (49), is on the cusp of both realism and imagism, which, I argue, serves to emphasise his allegiance to writing a visual experience of life, separated into instant moments or images, rather than favouring a growing tendency to reflect subjectively upon thoughts. It is argued that Joyce is a realist because he represents all the “sordid and harsh aspects of human existence” (Norris 3), but I argue that Dubliners also embraces, to some extent, imagism because he selectively privileges separate images of the city and its inhabitants over a more modernist tendency of dwelling on one’s place in the city, avoiding what Joyce’s Gabriel calls “a thought-tormented age” (204). Although Joyce ignores Pound’s instructions to not “be descriptive, remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can” and “use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation” (Imagisme, 94-6), I argue that what Joyce does by both being descriptive and privileging the visual is write an image as one would recognise it in a moment of time. It is not over-simplified nor is it elaborated upon, it is recognisably visual. He effectively captures a ‘freeze-frame’ (echoing the paralysis in Dubliners) which cannot possibly represent every aspect of reality at once, but then again the reader “can no more catch every texual detail than he or she can be cognisant of every element of everyday life” (Olson 35). Pound praises Joyce “because of his more rigorous selection, because of his exclusion of all unnecessary detail” (Letters 28), from which I argue that Joyce privileges the visual in order that the reader can accurately picture, say, the “brown imperturbable faces” (21) of Dublin’s brick houses, without making them out to have a significance that they do not.
Leading on from this, I argue that the matter of description is where Joyce diverges from Pound’s ideas on the “direct treatment of things” (Imagisme 94), and I aim to draw parallels between description in the written word and its likeness to detail in the painted picture, and between both painter and writer, who share the role of “passionate observer” (Baudelaire). I argue that both mediums embody the “freedom from sloppiness” for which Pound praises Joyce (Letters 27): the visual image, in any form, is a sharp, defined depiction of life as it is and how we see it as we walk round Dublin’s “crowded footpaths” (89). If Joyce wanted to use “detail, incident and image … [to] establish a vision of life in the capital” (Brown xxxvi, own emphasis), or in his own words let the Irish people “have a good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass” (Letters 64) then it seems obvious that Dubliners intends to privilege the visual as a “vision” seen in a “mirror”. I contend that Dubliners can be nothing else but a focus on what we see: an exact depiction of reality. Even when contemplating the “dead”, Joyce’s description of “their wayward and flickering existence” (224) transforms the unseen into something visual. This theory is supported by the statement “if there are exact sciences there are also exact arts, and the grammar of painting is much more definite” (James 746); Joyce strives to privilege the grammar of the visual because it is a much more exact form of expression to describe the sights of “gaily coloured crowds” (43) or “the bustle and rush of our everyday routine” (205). The following passage, taken from The Dead, is a good example of the links between visual art and the written image, and harks back to realist still life paintings of banquets (see Cornelis De Heem, Abraham van Beyeren, George Lance to name a few):
“A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and a the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with parsley, lay a great ham […] between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow […] a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle […] and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale” (197)
Joyce’s portrayal of the dinner table is situated only in the visual sphere, presented as descriptive fact; we do not receive any of Gabriel’s opinions upon the nature of the food, despite the fact that The Dead is read through his eyes. One would presume that a writer would turn to facts to comment on the reality of things but “Joyce recognised that facts can neither adequately reconstitute the world nor totally ‘sum up’ experience” (Olson 34). In order to construct a true representation of life and “experience” as we see it before our eyes, facts have to be visually transformed into an image, so the reader can easily graft their own visual representations onto the words Joyce chooses. Therefore we see Joyce’s Dubliners privileges the visual through evidence of his factual, opinion-free presentation of what characters see, in the same way that what an artist paints can is nothing other than the visual facts they witness. In his essay The Art of Fiction, James presents this similarity as being a “community of method of the artist who paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel” (746); Joyce and the artist share the same aim, for although writing itself is not visual, it has the ability to conjure a picture in our minds. It also implies a reciprocity between the acts of reading and viewing. Baudelaire talks about Constantin Guy’s sketches of the Crimean War: “I have seen a considerable quantity of these drawings… and thus I have been able to read, so to speak, a detailed account of the Crimean campaign” (). I maintain that to see a painting allows one to read into the story it paints; to read a book allows a picturing of the visual images it describes in language.
It is important again to draw upon this idea of a catalyst, I argue, to emphasise how the visual plays a more passive and objective role in describing reality than other forms of narration. Kelly writes that “the artist is the catalyst, which it is important to point out, has no intention” (73). Joyce, considering that much of the Irish literary zeitgeist at the time was one of “xenophobia and an aggressive puritanical nativism” (Brown xxviii), could have furthered his own political or personal beliefs about the nature of contemporary Dublin. He could have commented upon the religion of the dying priest in The Sisters, or could have criticised the consequences of drinking culture in the lower classes in Counterparts, but I argue that Joyce, in privileging description over judgement, succeeds in writing a vision of Dublin that is handed to the public, like a painting, as a complete image, and leaves critical observations for his reader/viewers.
I contend that Joyce’s descriptive powers are particularly prevalent and noticeably visual in his painting of people, and suggest that Joyce has stronger links to the portrait artist, rather than painters of landscapes. Almost all of those in Dubliners are defined by their physical appearance, and Joyce pens their characters as writing their portrait like a map of a face. This listing of features becomes almost a routine for Joyce, to the extent it “forms an automatized part of character delineation” (121). Reverend Flynn’s face is “truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils” (6); Corley’s “when the waves of expression had passed over it, had a ravaged look” (43); Farrington’s is “the colour of dark wine or dark meat” (84); Aunt Julia’s is “grey also, with darker shadows”, while her sister Kate’s is “all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple” (179). I also contend that the attention Joyce pays to facial expression is significant because the face is the foundation of the eyes, without which vision from the characters’ perspective would not be possible; Lenehan’s “gaze” and “curious eyes” (45) in Two Gallants embody eyes as the judge of body/reality like they are the judge of artwork. Gabriel too offers us a comparison between writer/artist/observer. He embodies Joyce in his role as writer/painter by describing Gretta in terms of portraiture in his imaginary painting of ‘Distant Music’: “if he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness” (211). The extent to which Joyce privileges the visual is justified insofar that it mimics the descriptive terms that are used to describe painting, and more specifically portraiture, which are in themselves an attempt to get to the reality and innerness of a subject.
I argue that in prioritising a visual representation of characters, rather than focusing explicitly on their qualities or thoughts, Joyce not only presents the reader with a clear image of their appearance, but also is more likely to portray the reality and essence of that character. Barthes argues that a “dubious fate overwhelms the visual: it too takes shape as the ‘anatomical cataloguing’ of body parts, which, blended together, go to make up the conventional portrait” (60-61), likewise Doherty calls this “anatomical catalogiong” a “pure pictorial pastiche – a journalistic report on an artwork – not the real thing, but a verbal copy” (51). However I challenge these views, both of which seem to imply a negative attitude towards Joyce’s routine description of faces and bodies. By privileging the visual, Joyce offers us an insight into their character, as opinions are formed on appearances. James writes that “the only reason for the existence of the novel is that it does attempt to represent life… the same attempt that we see on the canvas of the painter” (James 745). If we take this to be true, then I contend that Joyce’s privileging of appearance, being far from tedious as Doherty implies, represents life and people ‘as they are’, as “life” is experienced through the eyes and not the mind. I argue to what outcome does describing a character’s anger bring us, if we cannot accurately picture the face upon which the anger is inscribed?
Moreover, aside from Joyce’s visual cataloguing of faces, I argue that there is evidence in Dubliners of portraits that reveal more about a character, and therefore the visual serves as a better tool for representing reality than narrative techniques that actually strive to describe just internal features. Olson puts forward the view that Joyce chooses to “dwell on the detail not as some synecdoche for some larger ideal, but as a source of realism” (24). Although I have already established that Dubliners does strive towards realism, I contest the opinion that that is all visual detail gives us. I argue that the visual is a tool for painting the interior as well as the exterior of a character. The description of Freddy Malins is one of the few that we can outwardly describe as ugly: “”his face was fleshy and pallid […] he had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, timid and protruded lips” (184-5). From the outset, the reader is led to mistrust Malins, based on his appearance , and our suspicions are confirmed when the rest of the party seem to distrust him. The “ideals” Olson argues against do not, I propose, have to be grand but it is clear that the visual does simply reveal something else about the character.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print.
Brooker, Joseph. Joyce's Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2004. Print.
Brown, Terence. Introduction. Dubliners. Ed. James Joyce. London: Penguin Books, 1992. vii-xlvii. Print.
Doherty, Gerald. Dubliners Dozen: the Games Narrators Play. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Pr, 2004. Print.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.
Kelly, Joseph. Our Joyce: from Outcast to Icon. Austin, TX: Texas UP, 1998. Print.
Norris, Pam. Realism. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.