ReJoycing by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 1 Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), reproduced by permission of The National Gallery, London.

Our own position as readers engaged with the vacillations of free indirect style at the story’s end can overlap with Gabriel’s suspended position caused by his experience of falling within the socially defined hierarchies of self-representation. We have the opportunity to recognize that ordinary, conventional perspectives—such as apparently reliable, determinate third-person reports of thought or the geometrically defined perspective of realistic painting—can be made visible for what they are, constructions that create only the impression, not the reality, of a well-ordered, intelligible, controllable world. And with that recognition our own stance as the spectator who possesses knowledge and control is destabilized. The reader’s deluded sense of stability corresponds to Gabriel’s pose of knowing and controlling. Rather than indicating a loss of autonomy, the destabilized position embodies the risks attending the discovery that autonomy is neither absolute nor limited to ourselves. At issue in the closing style of “The Dead” is something like the curiously double or multiple form of the anamorph, a figure that, as the word’s etymology suggests, is always forming anew. Joyce’s free indirect style is anamorphic in its frequently dialogical character, its simultaneous evocation of two possible sources, the teller and the character. It resembles the anamorph in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (Fig. 1), which Lacan uses to sketch his concept of the gaze.

The painting includes full-length portraits in conventional perspective of two diplomats with accoutrements apparently relevant to their station in life. But it contains in severely altered perspective beneath their feet a representation of a skull. Once the viewer recognizes the death’s head within the depiction of the conventionally presented pair of living diplomats, an interference is set up between two geometrical and interpretative perspectives, neither of which can be ignored. The portrayal of life and achievement has become unexpectedly and indissolubly linked to an image of death. The would-be “normal” perspective of the frontal plane is recognized for its constructed character, as the spectator oscillates between the conventional representation and the skull that is always beneath and always distractingly visible. With a crucial, revealing twist, we see ourselves as dual in the painting understood as a conceptual mirror that reflects the spectator’s connection to the ambassadors. The situation resembles that of Dorian Gray, who sees himself always as double and antithetical once he comes into possession of his portrait and it comes into possession of him. As with The Ambassadors, the picture of Dorian Gray gazes back at the spectator who recognizes a true but unpleasant self-image in the portrait.

In the frontal plane of Holbein’s painting, we recognize something of ourselves in the conventional social beings who are the ambassadors, defined by the trappings that culture provides in order for its members to know and present themselves as conventional. In the angled plane beneath the ambassadors’ feet, we see an image that is both ours and the ambassadors’. The monarch that we and these ambassadors serve is death itself. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.