A MOBILISED VIRTUAL GAZE

Joyce began writing Portrait in Trieste in 1907. After it was published in book form in 1916, H. G. Wells championed its shattering of formal moulds as ‘a mosaic of jagged fragments that does altogether render with extreme completeness the growth of a rather secretive, imaginative boy in Dublin’. He applauded its abrupt transitions indicating shifts in space, time and consciousness: ‘The technique is startling but on the whole it succeeds.’ Though objecting to the substitution of dashes for quotation marks, Wells framed this in equally cinematic terms: ‘one has the same wincing feeling of being flicked at that one used to have in the early cinema shows’. Other reviewers, while less keen on Portrait's innovations, related them to moving images too. The New Age's reviewer criticised Joyce's ‘determination to produce Kinematographic effects instead of a literary portrait’, so it seemed ‘a mere catalogue of unrelated states’. Consequently, Portrait has also long been regarded as a key stage towards the cinematicity of Ulysses, as Eisenstein recognised, particularly the subjective visuality of Joyce's interior monologue. While the technique does not yet appear in its culminating (i.e. first-person) form in Portrait, the novel nonetheless utilises a wide variety of techniques to visualise Stephen's stream of consciousness and ‘unfold the display of events simultaneously with the particular manner in which these events pass through the consciousness and feelings, the associations and emotions, of his chief character’, to borrow Eisenstein's terms. More recently, Robert A. Gessner has argued that Joyce's Italian film-going came out strongly in Portrait's flashback, cross-cutting and ‘editing of time and space with the intensity and concentration of the camera’. To Spiegel, this means that Portrait's ‘temporalised space’ comes alive, ‘as process, developing, changing, infinitely flexible, quick with advances and recessions, expansions and contractions, openings and closings, accumulations and dissolutions’. Similarly, Neil Sinyard considers that the four sections of chapter 1 constitute ‘one of the finest examples of montage in fiction’. Hence Stephen's feelings and thoughts are monstrated through ekphrastic images rather than narrative commentary, reflecting the methods of lantern shows and their remediation in silent films to emphasise the primacy of visuality in the novel.