Refining themselves into existence: Reading Portrait with Terence Davies' filmic portraiture

Abstract

James Joyce’s Ovidian epigraph to <i>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i> (Joyce, <i>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>. Ed. Seamus Deane, Penguin, 1992) not only foregrounds Stephen Dedalus’ mythic link to the figure of the artificer who is able to translate intellectual striving into artistic expression, but also promises a theory of the aesthetic as applied to the novel’s objective form. However, little attempt has been made to read the novel as adumbrating a Joycean visual praxis which moves beyond cinematic stylistics towards thematic resonances between narrative progression and a phenomenological understanding of the filmic image. This essay will read Joyce’s novel with Terence Davies’ cinematic portrait of his family and social background <i>Distant Voices, Still Lives</i> (Davies, <i>Distant Voices, Still Lives</i>. DVD, British Film Institute, 1988), in order to demonstrate how both novel and film undertake a crucial aesthetic sublation in which artistic vision is produced out of the materiality of existence. Through a reading of the aesthetics of temporal selfhood embodied in the literary and filmic media of both, I argue for a comparative analysis of narrative which evokes and sustains modes of understanding that demonstrate the important connection between temporality and identity.