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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 suggestiveness 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
By contrast with the current interest in the cinema's influence on literature, modernism's literary heritage in the field of visual representation 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 "cinematographic" techniques.7 One admirable exception to the critical propensity 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...