“A vision . . . sprang up before him” (P 89): Filmic Assaults on Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom

This essay identifies two hallucinatory moments in A Portrait and Ulysses as bearing the emblems of what Gilles Deleuze calls “timeimages,” which are scenes in film that paralyze the viewer, who is also in some sense a scene participant. This ambiguity of identity, of the nature of “being” in a time-image, invites encounters with the uncanny. The first scene the essay considers is Stephen’s vision in a Cork schoolroom of boys etching the word “Fœtus” into a desk; the second is the apparition of Bloom’s son, Rudy, at the end of “Circe.” “‘A vision’” argues that, while words can give rise to traumatic timeimage situations, they can also save the viewer/spectator (Stephen and Bloom, respectively) from such assaults as Joyce imagines them.