"Ulysses," Film and Visual Culture by Philip Sicker

Abstract

Reviewed by: "Ulysses," Film and Visual Culture by Philip Sicker Garry Leonard (bio) "Ulysses," Film and Visual Culture, by Philip Sicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. x + 267 pp. $105.00. After nearly a century of Joyce criticism, I propose that we Joyce scholars take up the challenge Karl Marx proposed for himself: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, the point is, to change it [sic]."1 Mind you, I don't mean "change" anything about the remarkable fiction Joyce has bequeathed to the world, but, whenever and wherever possible, I would like to see more paradigm shifts that re-align the fiction with the speed, motion, and confusion that has continued as a way of life from 1904 to the present. To be sure, paradigm shifts have occurred on a steady basis in [End Page 186] Joyce criticism—see the introduction of feminist, post-colonialist, deconstructionist, eco-criticism, psychoanalytic, Marxist, queer, and other readings of Joyce. With this book, theories of visual culture, as they pertain to the inter-dynamics of Joyce's fiction, are all, as Gloria Swanson puts it memorably in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard "ready for their close-up."2 Innovative as Philip Sicker's readings are, the study of Joyce, cinema, and visual culture more generally would be difficult to conceive without the pioneering work of Cheryl Herr, R. B. Kershner, and Jennifer A. Wicke, all of whom were among the first to shine the spotlight of cultural studies on Joyce; quickly, in the wake of their discoveries, one could open the cover of Ulysses and hear the boisterous sounds of the music hall, peek at the naughtiness of the mutoscope, and muse about the hitherto unsuspected profundity of "throwaway" items of all sorts–advertisements, postcards, magazines, soap, potatoes, kidneys, newspapers, and cheap paperbacks.3 At an empirical level, the hunt was on for the "originals" of any and every disposable thing in the mundane world that had undergone a metempsychotic transmigration into Joyce's fiction. The momentary became momentous, the trivial profound: the Plumtree ad, posters of the Araby Bazaar, the status of the Magdalene laundry (featured so unobtrusively in "Clay"), Ruby: Pride of the Ring, The Sweets of Sin.4 Such discoveries and discussions were a bit like looking at a stilllife scene from a movie—full of detail, easier to see the lighting and composition, but also frozen, like a photograph: the missing dimension is motion and, beyond that, montage, wide-angle shots, and close-ups, all done in such a way that many earlier viewers of cinema experienced it as speed or, in Walter Benjamin's famous analogy, "the dynamite of the tenth of a second."5 Joyce was one of them. Writing to Stanislaus from Rome in 1907, Joyce described the vertiginous feeling Rome gave to him and the way a trip to the cinema could, for want of a better word, tamp down his "heightened emotiveness" by speeding it up and infusing it with pathos: "[H]eightened emotiveness which satisfies itself in the sixty-miles-an-hour pathos of some cinematograph."6 Indeed, by 1907, cinema was making halting steps toward narrative constructs best described as genres, and the type of genre Joyce references is closest to melodrama. Sicker's book puts in motion the many stills in Ulysses, and this is because he is primarily interested in the scopic regime of Dublin as a whole, from Nelson's Pillar to a glance of a prostitute walking past. Sicker—and this is the brilliant part—explores the interstitial crisscrossing of the interrelation between the visual dynamism of the cityscape and the emotional hope and despair of the different characters. Certainly the book is about Joyce and cinema, but it also concerns [End Page 187] something much more sweeping, something of which cinema is only a part (albeit a dominant one). Shortly before the advent of cinema, and for a brief while afterward, other devices came on the modern scene: the stereoscope, the magic lantern, the diorama, the kaleidoscope, the zoetrope, the kinetoscope, and the mutoscope. The scopic regime of modernity constitutes, in Sicker's concise observation, "a break from a monocular model of visual representation derived...