Showings forth: Dubliners, photography, and the rejection of realism.(photography as an influence on James Joyce's Dubliners)(Critical Essay)

This essay asks what Dubliners may owe to a realism derived not from literary realism's models, but from a photographic realism newly emergent as photography moved, during Joyce's youth, out of the studio and into the street. Employing a distinction from Lyotard's early work, it claims for late nineteenth-century photography a disruptive figural force that erodes a prior, painterly, discursive order of the photographic, and traces this figurality in Dubliners.

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A visitor to Joyce's apartment alluded to a picture on the wall as a 
photograph. In mentioning the fact to me, Joyce said: "Now I couldn't 
see anything ridiculous in that. It isn't the usual word, but surely 
light-writing is a beautiful word to apply to a painted picture."-- 
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses 

In 1960, William York Tindall brought out a collection of photographs of Joyce sites titled The Joyce Country. The seventy-eight black and white Dublin photos document a city composed in shades of grey, where the women dress as the Queen dresses still, Nelson stands on his pillar, and the Martello Tower is found in Kingston rather than Dun Laoghaire. For Tindall, to walk the streets of Dublin taking pictures is to follow in Joyce's footsteps. There is something essentially Joycean in recording, in this way, that city:

 
    Devoted to externals, Joyce walked the streets of Dublin, noting 
    shop, pub, church, and brothel, and every plasterer's bucket. [...] 
    He prided himself in exile on his ability to list the shops of 
    Talbot Street in order, down one side of Mabbot and back along the 
    other. His devotion to such details, whether ugly or beautiful, 
    seems all but naturalistic. So Zola must have walked the streets of 
    Paris, notebook in hand, noting stinks and solider objects. [...] 
    The camera's eye might seem adequate to such vision. (Tindall, 
    Preface n.p.) 

That Joyce's early work owes something to photography is an idea that seems easily and obviously true. The stories of Dubliners, mostly composed in 1904 and 1905, take a coldly objective, scrupulously true view of their objects, accomplish a vivid and swift capturing of a single, seemingly accidental moment, and lack an explanatory authorial voice (a caption) that might pin down a specific meaning: a lack that perpetually frustrates students who expect a definite, readable meaning to a tale. Dubliners re-presents, rather than represents. Its "lofty impersonal power" might be that of a camera lens, its epiphanic "showings forth" a kind of flash bulb.

Joyce himself indicated the photographism of his early work: the epiphany takes a picture. In Stephen Hero, Joyce's early draft for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen calls Cranly's attention to the Ballast Office clock: "Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised" (Joyce, Stephen 211). To photograph Dublin is to do what Joyce did, but for Tindall, that is not all. For him, Joyce's work cannot be merely photographic, because it is not the work of a machine, but of an artist. Ultimately, Tindall renders Joyce not as photographer, but as painter, one who imbues his representation with his own unique vision: