Review by
Katharina Rajabi
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich)
Philip Sicker. Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture. Cambridge UP, 2018. x, 276 pp. $105 hardback. $84 ebook.
Joyce’s weak eyesight and lifelong eye troubles are well known and consistently invoked to constitute the analytical framing in scholarly works on visuality in his texts (and this review is no exemption). This research into visual perception and media, steadily increasing since the “visual turn,” has repeatedly interpreted the previous relative lack thereof in the vast field of Joyce studies in the light of a possible misconception that Joyce’s poor sight resulted in the privileging of the acoustic over the visual in his writing. In contrast, scholars underlining the importance of the visual invert this conclusion, suggesting instead that Joyce’s ocular ailments indeed caused a preoccupation with perception and visuality that is undeniably present in his works.
Philip Sicker, too, begins his study by drawing on this correlation, arguing that “Ulysses, composed as Joyce’s vision deteriorated […], is his ultimate act of capturing and preserving the eye’s encounter with reality, a transaction conducted via the gazes of Stephen and Bloom and through a multitude of refractory narrative lenses” (2). His aim, then, is to illustrate the significance of visual perception, recognized as being markedly embodied and mediated, as well as of those visual media themselves and their structures and regimes, showing in detail how Ulysses is informed by optical media techniques and practices. In Joyce’s text, Sicker argues, perception and “technologies of sight” (10) constitute an epistemological mode, a specific way of accessing reality: “Far from alienating subjects from the object world and one another, the perceptual habits shaped by visual technology sometimes enable Bloom and Stephen to organize and penetrate reality more deeply” (19). His analysis of visuality in Ulysses thus focuses on its epistemological, rather than its “socioeconomic” (9) implications – in contrast to preceding studies that considered visual phenomena in context with their examinations of commodity culture in Joyce.
Each chapter of Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture centers on a different figuration of the visual. Although the title suggests a study primarily on Ulysses and film, Sicker’s monograph provides a much more far-ranging exploration. While film is certainly central to the author’s argument, the two chapters dedicated to film (chapters five and six), based on previous articles, are supplemented and framed with – in effect even more inspiring – in-depth analyses of visual media from the diorama to the stereoscope, of the text’s philosophical reflections on the conditions of vision, and of perceptual figures and constellations from the flaneur to the act of seeing as an intersubjective experience. Building on existing scholarship and incorporating relevant theoretical positions, Sicker thus delivers, for the first time, a comprehensive account of visuality in Ulysses.
The opening chapter, “Ineluctable Visuality: Stephen’s Ways of Seeing,” analyzes the way visual perception is conceptualized and reflected on in the first three episodes of Ulysses, with reference to optical media including the diorama and the panorama. Focusing, in particular, on “Proteus,” Sicker delineates how the discourse on perception, manifested in optical experiments and meditations on philosophical theories of vision, centering on the subject of vision and the ontological status of the perceived object, is negotiated between idealist and materialist notions.
The second chapter, “Stephen in the Gaze of Others,” in turn, examines the reflexivity of sight, the “condition of being watched” (15), an experience central to modernist explorations of vision, incorporating the theories of Lacan and Sartre, and the panopticon as a medial figuration of this perceptual constellation, as well as placing this within the context of religion. While Sicker acknowledges that Bloom, too, constantly finds himself in the gaze of others, he does not pursue this aspect further, choosing instead to focus entirely on Stephen. Even if understandable with regard to the structure of his argument, this nonetheless seems like a regrettable omission, since the consideration of Bloom – himself famously ruminating on the gaze of the other and seeing “ourselves as others see us” – would not only be interesting in this context, but would actually support Sicker’s argument regarding the reflexivity of vision. The constellation Bloom – Boylan, especially at the end of “Lestrygonians,” or the perceptual structure of “Cyclops,” for example, would be worth further analysis against this backdrop.
Chapter three, “Snapshots from the Pavement: Bloom as Modernist Flâneur,” turns to Bloom, reading him, with Benjamin, as figuration of the flaneur. Focusing on flanerie as an “observational practice” (13), Sicker traces its connection to commodity culture and equates it with a form of “photographic perception” (19). The fourth chapter reads “Wandering Rocks” against the backdrop of Futurist aesthetics, demonstrating how the text is influenced by Futurist conceptions of mechanics, simultaneity, perspective (from bird’s eye view to fragmentation and close-ups), movement (photodynamism), and the employment of visual analogies. In doing so, Sicker delivers inspiring new findings, as Ulysses’ connection to Futurism has not really been previously explored.
Chapter five and six focus on film: While chapter five provides a reading of “Nausicaa” informed by psychoanalytic film theory (Mulvey, Metz) which emphasizes the constellation of gazes, their inherent power structures, and the connection of sight and pleasure with regard to the mutoscope, chapter six traces the influence of George Méliès’s trick cinema with its transformations, continuous references to dreams and its spectacle-like quality on “Circe.” Although this connection has been examined by Joycean scholarship before, Sicker, very interestingly, adds the aspect of self-watching and visual reflexivity as a common thread. The last chapter follows this up by exploring Bloom’s and Stephen’s intersubjective perception in “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” with reference to phenomenological approaches (Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Lévinas), parting from their shared gaze at Molly’s photograph. Sicker also retrospectively identifies moments of parallel perception earlier in the novel, thus connecting this final chapter of his study to the first one that had focused on Stephen’s gaze and conceptualization of seeing. This clever framing indicates a new accentuation of the question of perception: Instead of thinking about visual perception solely in terms of subject and object of sight, the emphasis on visual reflexivity brings into focus the act of seeing as well as the intersubjective moment. This proves to be a very interesting and productive approach, and, supported by Sicker’s very detailed, thorough, and intent reading and analysis of the text, a major strength of his study.
Because of its admirable all-encompassing conception, however, the study in other regards sometimes tends to remain on the surface and to tie in its observations too neatly with the theory, where at times reading it against the grain would perhaps have resulted in unexpected insights. This becomes especially apparent in Sicker’s analysis of “Nausicaa” where his application of Mulvey’s and Metz’s propositions does not resolve the question of Gerty MacDowell’s agency that he himself had asserted in an earlier reading (see Sickler, “Unveiling Desire”), and instead smooths over the complexity of the optical power structures in the episode. With regard to the gendered aspects of visual media – the commodification of women through pictures and the consequences this entails for desire – following up on the political and economic implications, too, would have been interesting, even if beyond the declared scope of Sicker’s more epistemological approach to the visual. Furthermore, the problem of vagueness arising from a “metaphorical” understanding of optical media that reads them as techniques or practices at times becomes evident, especially in reference to photography. The notion of identifying Bloom with the figure of the flaneur is indeed argued very compellingly, but its subsequent equation with the photographer remains somewhat debatable given the chosen examples from the text. While the mnemonic functionalization of optical impressions and the use of close-up techniques Sicker points out in his analysis provide persuasive evidence, most often it is not clear in what sense exactly Bloom’s perceptions can be termed “pictures.” In the case of photography this is particularly perspicuous, since it does appear in the text explicitly as Sicker himself writes, and so the question arises, why the actual medium is not discussed more thoroughly in this context. Although chapter seven provides a brief analysis of Molly’s photograph, the focus lies more on the act of looking at the picture than on the implications of the medium itself.
This, however, does not away take from the immense quality of Sicker’s study that, crucially, considers the various visual media in connection with visual perception itself, thus addressing the novel’s examinations of sight in-depth for the first time, emphasizing the “ineluctable” importance of the visual in Ulysses. Identifying the turn of the text’s perceptual discourse away from “static” configurations of the status of subject and object of vision and toward an examination of visual reflexivity and intersubjectivity, is a particularly valuable finding.
Smartly structured and engagingly written, Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture closes a gap in Joyce criticism and brings valuable contributions to modernist studies with its detailed and comprehensive approach. Bringing together and structuring existing findings under the focal point of visual perception, it delivers new insights and inspiring readings of the text and will be the basis for further research into Joyce and visuality.
Works Cited
Sicker, Philip. “Unveiling Desire: Pleasure, Power and Masquerade in Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa’ Episode.” Joyce Studies Annual, vol. 14, 2003, pp. 92-131.
Katharina Rajabi (katharina.rajabi@germanistik.uni-muenchen.de) is a PhD candidate in comparative literature and research associate at the University of Munich. Her dissertation project examines the writing of photography in literary modernism, with a special emphasis on James Joyce.
