‘Building-Vision-Machine’: Ulysses As Moving Panorama

Deals with another influential medium: panoramas implied visual mastery and transmitted Britain’s colonial worldview by virtual teleportation. Its spectacle evolved into ‘scrolling’ forms as ‘moving picture’ events, incorporating ‘dioramic’ animations. Ulysses challenges their role in the media-cultural imaginary, typifying another category alongside their material forms: the ‘discursive panorama’ as textual representation. Erkki Huhtamo identifies three evolutionary phases in textual panoramas and the chapter demonstrates how they fed into Ulysses, bringing together other strands of Joycean cinematicity. The original tour d’horizon descended into the ‘moving panorama’ of the flâneur’s street-level viewpoint, often reflecting the medium’s vehicular simulations remediated in filmic ‘phantom rides’. Within this, there is a proto-Joycean sense of using characters as mobile ‘camera-eyes’. Hence the third phase explains how Ulysses added intensely subjective focalisation. Figuring perception and memory as moving panorama converged with the ‘stream of consciousness’. Hence images experienced by Joyce’s characters and replaying in their internal vision suggest moving panoramas, lantern shows or even early films. Ulysses’ triple-level method – panoptic, street-level and subjective - is demonstrated through ‘Wandering Rocks’ simultaneous impression of built, lived and thought environment, creating a model for Modernist urban ‘psychogeography’ in both fiction and film.