‘I Bar the Magic Lantern’: Dubliners and Pre-Filmic Cinematicity

Demonstrates the importance of the magic lantern to Joyce’s ‘media-cultural imaginary’ and the cinematicity of his techniques and themes. The lantern provided a major cultural and technological context giving birth to film. Despite appearing to ‘bar’ its influence, Dubliners alludes widely to lantern motifs, genres and techniques, explaining how Joyce’s innovations appear modernistically cinematic before film developed equivalent techniques. Chapter 1 demonstrates the fundamental part lanternism played in Joyce’s ekphrastic method: in projection effects and multi-layered intrusions of images from one context into another, but also in ‘dissolving views’ transitioning in space, time and consciousness. Lanternism sheds light on Joyce’s use of ‘flashback’ form several years before film editing, because it represented ‘multi-spatiotemporality’ by superimposing or inserting images visualising thoughts or fantasies, presenting dynamic narrative transformations in photographic ‘life-model’ sets, the predecessors of film features but also a parallel influence on Joyce. The lantern also had a reputation as a ‘technology of the uncanny’, Joyce evoking its ‘phantasmagoria’ for the uncanny vision climaxing Dubliners, a verbal ‘dissolve’, in which a moving ghost world replaces mundane reality. Thus Dubliners’ cinematicity references film’s inheritance from lanternism and anticipates its narrative futures.