An Individuating Rhythm: Picturing Time in a Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

Focuses on Joyce’s interest in visual analysis of movement, another technological and scientific drive leading to film. Joyce’s ‘epiphany’ resembles the camera’s defamiliarising gaze. This tendency evolved through Portrait’s three versions. Its mobile, camera-eyed focalisation and ‘montage’ structure stem from speculations about picturing the ‘rhythm’ or ‘curve’ of a developing mind in his 1904 version. Portrait constituted a breakthrough into ‘stream of consciousness’ form through synergy with experimental photography: Muybridge’s ‘animal locomotion studies’ and Marey’s ‘Chronophotographie’. These captured transitory phenomena, picturing time and recomposing action as a series of moments to apprehend its reality. Muybridge’s sequences anticipate the filmstrip, eventually animating consecutive stills into a ‘fluid succession of presents’. Similarly, Marey’s overlapping shots liberated the ‘individuating rhythm’ of a moving body, as a rising and falling ‘curve’. Thus Joyce’s means of picturing the psycho-sensory movement of consciousness used such dissection and recomposition of physical motion as guiding metaphor. Portrait’s ‘mobilised virtual gaze’ and interiorised ‘rhythm’ are based on imagistic association overlapping present perceptions and memories, tracing a pattern towards Stephen’s vocational future, simultaneously the novel’s underlying topic and form and taking Joyce’s cinematicity into a new phase.