joyce: sixth sense or city montage

marries montage to the city by a compression of its layers in time and space. the inhabitants of the city are in joyce, bedevilled by the paradox of oneness and estrangement as they encounter the badlands of modernity. in his lament against the debasement of the modern world, ts elliot praises joyce’s use of the ‘continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ describing it as a ‘mythical method’ … ‘it is… a step towards making the modern world possible for art’ 

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the inner life of the mind is juxtaposed with metaphoric material description. not narration but streams of consciousness direct from the thoughts (of stephen daedalus) contrasted with short, contained clipped snapshots of action. these jump cuts between images compressing space and time, so the actual experience of the reader reading, directly equates with the psychology of the main character.

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the history of ireland interpreted as a ‘succession external shocks’ was paralleled in the literary montage of ulysses with its denial of narrative progression, its emphasis on the contingency of ‘seemingly unconnected’ details and the cascading sequences of ‘dream-like’ images making up the stream of consciousness. it recalls eisenstein’s theory of montage with its systematic use of conflict between images. his ‘ montage of attractions’, ‘utilises every aggressive moment in it, that is, every element that brings to light in the spectator those senses or that psychology that influence his experience – every element that can be verified and mathematically calculated to produce certain emotional shocks in a proper order within the totality:’ but for colin maccabe, joyce exceeds eisenstein, by using a ‘montage of discourses, without at any time offering us a final meta-language (an author’s impersonal voice)’. he reassigns part of the creative role of the work to the reader as brecht does to the audience. this is nothing less than the elimination of the narrator and the elevation of the reader/author to the role of collaborator.

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>whenever i am obliged to lie with my eyes closed l see a cinematograph going on and on and it brings back to my memory things i had almost forgotten.< james joyce, letters i 216. it is in this sense that montage has the potential to recover memory that is lost or hide… as if awoken from a deep sleep.

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the inherent character of modernity is always looking backward to primeval history and is derived from the metaphysical ambiguity that form capitalist social relationships and products. this ambiguity expresses itself in a montage that is fast frozen, a utopic image that seeks its origins in archaic forms holding up fragments of pre-history and running them up against the grain of capitalist modernisation. this is benjamin’s dialectical image where the fragments of prehistory are propelled into the present as an after image – a double exposure constructing a prescient vision of present events.

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 in using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity; mr joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him … it is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history … psychology … ethnology, and the golden bough [the study of magic and religion using darting juxtapositions and cross referencing] have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. instead of narrative method we may now use the mythical method. it is, i seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art.’ ts elliot on ullyses and myth. ts ellott1 923

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