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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”
(Letters 28), I argue that he transfers that observation of life into straightforward images ready
for the reader’s consumption. Whereas other modernist narrative techniques (such as streams
of consciousness) obscure a text’s “commitment to the ordinary” (Olson 3) 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. 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 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
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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 to “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 what it is. 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 textual 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), 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 priorities 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. James
writes that “the grammar of painting is much more definite” (746); Joyce strives to privilege the
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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
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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 for 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
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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.
Taking this idea of the inner 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, as in a painting. 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 cataloguing” 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” (745). If
we take this to be true, then I contend that Joyce’s privileging of appearance, being far from
dubious as Barthes 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
mental 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 as a whole 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
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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.
I have argued that Joyce’s Dubliners presents both characters and their surroundings
and experiences, in such a way that images are presented to the reader objectively, and without
interference of subjective narration or opinions. We can effectively read into this text as a written
painting, intended to present reality as it is experienced in everyday life in a way that is
“perfectly controlled… [with] complete clarity and simplicity” (Pound, Letters 28), but without
depriving the reader of detail, as I argue it is the detail paid to faces in particular that privileges
the appearance of the Dubliners after whom this text is named.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print.
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life”. The Norton Anthology of Criticism.
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. viixlvii. 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.
Olson, Liesl. Moderism and the Ordinary. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Print.
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Pound, Ezra. Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on
Joyce. Ed. Forrest Read. New York: New Directions Books, 1967. Print.
Pound, Ezra. "Imagisme." Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Oxford: Blackwell,
2005. 94-97. Print.
Works Consulted
Beasley, Rebecca. Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.
Print.
Bell, Michael. The Sentiment of Reality: Truth of Feeling in the European Novel. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1983. Print.
Knowlton, Eloise. "Showings Forth: Dubliners, Photography and the Rejection of Realism."
Mosaic 38.1 (2005): 133-50. Print.
MacPhee, Graham. The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture.
London: Continuum, 2002. Print.
Stein, Gertrude. "What are masterpieces, and why are there so few of them?" Oxford. 1936.
Web. 4 Mar. 2012.
Wagner, Linda. ""The Sun Also Rises": One Debt to Imagism." The Journal of Narrative
Technique 2.2 (1972): 88-100. JSTOR. Web. 5 Mar. 2012.
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