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I would like to argue in this essay that Ulysses conveys a Merleau-Pontian model of perception, which is heavily influenced by early cinema. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘the philosopher and the moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world’.1 As I shall show, Joyce shared this philosopher/moviemaker’s viewpoint. In Cinema and Modernism (2007), David Trotter presents a Walter Benjamin and Christian Metz-inspired analysis of Ulysses; he argues that Joyce was primarily interested in the ‘neutrality’ and objectivity of film.2 In contrast , I contend that Joyce was interested in film’s ability to blur the subjectivity/objectivity binary. In Phenomenology of Perception, MerleauPonty asserts: ‘When I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world.’3 Ulysses expresses a similar idea of embodied, intersubjective seeing and being, and this model of perception is articulated through Joyce’s use of cinema. The film allusions in Ulysses take three main forms: parody, illustration and emulation. In ‘Nausicaa’, Joyce parodies conventionalised and objectifying early erotic films and, in doing so, prefigures Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the self and intersubjectivity. The hallucinatory world of ‘Circe’ is enlivened if readers recognise allusions to various trick films; these magicinspired films act as illustrations for phenomenological ideas. ‘Wandering Rocks’ emulates early-1900s local actuality films and parallels Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reciprocity. This essay shows how Joyce’s three types of film allusions work together to express a protoMerleau -Pontian model of perception and being. Joyce, phenomenology and cinema Before beginning my analysis of Ulysses, it seems appropriate to elucidate the link between Joyce, Merleau-Ponty and early cinema. In ‘Cyclops’ 8.‘See Ourselves as Others See Us’ Cinematic Seeing and Being in Ulysses CLEO HANAWAY 122 Bloom is described as a ‘distinguished phenomenologist’ (U, 12.1822). Merleau-Ponty was also a phenomenologist, in the sense that his philosophy bears a close relation to that of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who coined the term ‘phenomenology’ in 1907. As a Dubliner in 1904, Bloom may not have been able to recognise himself as a ‘phenomenologist’ in this specific, Husserlian, sense, but there is no historical impediment to Joyce understanding and using the term in this way. And, as Merleau-Ponty suggests , ‘phenomenology can be practiced [sic] and identified as a manner or style of thinking’ that ‘existed as a movement before arriving at a complete awareness of itself as a philosophy’ (Merleau-Ponty’s italics).4 Merleau-Ponty describes phenomenology as ‘the study of essences’, particularly the ‘essence of perception ’ and the ‘essence of consciousness’; phenomenology ‘also offers an account of space, time and the world as we “live” them’.5 As Dermot Moran notes, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was heavily influenced by Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), despite neither philosopher being a fully fledged ‘phenomenologist ’ in the Husserlian sense.6 Joyce’s Trieste library contains two of Bergson’s major works: L’évolution Créatrice (Creative Evolution) and The Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict.7 And, in Paris, in 1937, Joyce attended lectures organised by Gabriel Marcel (JJ, 699). These lectures took place fifteen years after the publication of Ulysses, so cannot have influenced the text; however, Joyce’s attendance suggests that he already had an interest in Marcel’s philosophy, which could have developed earlier on. So Joyce appears to have been part of a phenomenological protoMerleau -Pontian milieu. However, the extent to which Joyce was directly influenced by these philosophical ideas is of little importance here; what is of interest is the ways in which Joyce and the proto-Merleau-Pontians were influenced by the emergence of film. Early film had a profound impact on proto-Merleau-Pontian thinkers, especially on Bergson and Marcel. In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson is critical of cinema; film technology represents a lower, less philosophical mode of perception: the ‘mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographic kind’ (Bergson’s italics).8 According to Bergson, film synthetically separates moments in time and discourages viewers from fully engaging in the reel world: in un-philosophical thinking – and in cinema – ‘[i]nstead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially’.9 While Bergson contrasts cinematic seeing and being with philosophical seeing and being, for Marcel cinema is decidedly philosophical. Marcel firmly believed that philosophical ideas could be...

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