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James Joyce
Victoria Lévêque
WANDERING NO-BODIES:
POSTURING AND IMPOSTURING IN ULYSSES AND MRS DALLOWAY

Joyce may have promised to give Dubliners “one good look at themselves in [his] nicely polished looking-glass.”(1) But behind the closed doors of the seminar room, in academic discourse at least, it has become something of a common notion that you can’t really see yourself in a mirror at all. It is with good cause that the critical reader peers with suspicion at the figure in the glass. It was just this suspicion - that the body-object seen as a sum of physical attributes clouded any apprehension of the subject more than it revealed it - which led Virginia Woolf to indict her contemporaries’ approach to characterization, which she criticized for its “materialism”. It is also what led her to pen an unforgiving portrait of the cinema of her day.(2) A predatory art, she claimed, the cinema “fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and [...] largely subsist[ed] upon the body of its unfortunate victim.” Attacking a Russian silent film adaptation of Anna Karenina, she held that the camera eye confined the character to her physical attributes. Of Tolstoy’s great heroine all that remained was black velvet, white teeth and a few pearls - a body-object in a mirror.(3) In a short story entitled The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection, she more radically fictionalized the limitations of such mirror-like mimesis, presenting readers with a minute description of the character’s empty room and her material belongings as seen in a mirror so as to further impress upon them the enigma of encountering in the mirror a body which is never really there.

The suspicion that a posturing impostor takes up residence in the mirror is hardly an arcane one. As early as Plato’s Republic, the mirror is presented as both the emblem of mimesis and the instrument of imposture, enabling a mere imitation of the natural world. In the King James Version of the Bible, the apostle Paul uses the mirror as a metaphor for the dim, erring vision of the disciple confined to the benighted realm of the flesh in contrast to the clarity of perception which he is promised in the spiritual realm: “[f]or now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”(4)

In an entirely different time and context, Gabriel Conroy catches sight of his reflection in what we can only assume to be a clear, body-length glass:

As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eye-glasses. (D, 218)(5)

The comparison is certainly as abrupt as it is risky - needless to say St Paul and Gabriel hardly have the same mental pre-constructions with which to look upon the image in the mirror. For one, Deborah Shuger has convincingly argued that the mirror predates self-consciousness, so that it is impossible to see oneself in a mirror at all before the concept of a single divisible, reflexive self has taken form.(6) Pre-modern viewers stood face to face with what they considered to be but a semblance of themselves and it was all they expected to find - a mere likeness, a resembling other as in a portrait, not a perfectly reliable, identical reflection of themselves. Furthermore, prior to the sixteenth century mirrors were small and convex, sending back only a miniature, distorted version of the viewer: it wasn’t until 1507 that a method for making clear, flat glass mirrors was discovered in Venice. Before that “they were made either of brass or of a greenish dark glass, both producing only a shadowy, imperfect reflection, as in Saint Paul’s “through a glass darkly.””(7) The archetypal metaphor for realist literature thus initiated as an instrument of imperfect reflection; distortion was one of the mirror’s intrinsic qualities and part of its identity, history and origin.

Although Saint Paul’s mirror metaphor conflates the mirror with a quest for knowledge, it is not so much self-knowledge which concerns him but rather ethical self-fulfillment - to be closer to knowing God. Shuger contends that if self-consciousness is conspicuously absent from early mirror-gazing, the latter frequently invited ethical self-scrutiny.(8) In the context of defending his Dubliners stories from accusations of obscenity and ensuing censorship, Joyce likened their “scrupulous meanness” to an unforgiving mirror which he presented as a necessary tool for ethical self-scrutiny, uncannily echoing in reverse Corinthians’ “through a glass darkly.” However, acts of mirror-gazing within Joyce’s fiction rarely lead to deeper self-knowledge or successful scrutiny. In this light, the question which Paul’s mirror-gazing raises is quite different from the epistemo-ontological questioning sparked by Gabriel’s self-conscious glance: who is that person in the mirror in relation to myself? This is simply because, contrary to Paul, Gabriel sees himself in the mirror. However, although he has the technical and conceptual means to see himself clearly, clairvoyance eludes him; just like Paul’s, his vision is shrouded by an epistemic darkness as his eyes set upon “the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror” (D, 218). However tenuous the connection, what the impaired line of sight which leads us from one onlooker to the next suggests resonates with Woolf’s reservations - the figure in the glass pane is hardly an accessible one; the body’s visibility is often troubled. In both instances, rather than being key to the discovery of the self, by allowing the viewer’s body to occupy his/her visual field, the mirror gives rise to an epistemic and ontological frustration. Paul’s dismissal of the figure in the mirror may imply a hierarchy subordinating the material to the spiritual, the mortal to the immortal, human blindness to divine enlightenment, but in doing so it hints at a dismissal of the body in its connection to the self - a dismissal which finds its way into Gabriel’s modern, secular bewilderment at the sight of his own body.

In Joyce’s clear, body-length mirror, confusion and opacity thus remain as the face in the glass stubbornly resists any clear reading. So that in some sense, it may be construed that the figure in the mirror is opaque not merely as a result of the technical limitations of early mirror-making or of a religious mistrust of the image but also because what finds itself in the mirror - the body - is liable to be only dimly apprehended, glanced askance, mistrusted. In both instances, metaphorically or materially, the mirror is a site of instability - whether it be moral, ethical, epistemic, ontological or all of these at once - because it is that place where the body enters and occupies the realm of the visual and is set in problematic relation to the self. Because it is where the divide between the self and the body - oft construed as that external envelope - is plied, stretched, narrowed, tested. Standing in front of a mirror, the observer faces not him/herself but the unresolved enigma of the self with its fluctuating boundaries, inevitably endorses a posture which may well be an imposture.

At this point I have merely circled a very simple notion - that in such instances what can be found in the mirror and what constitutes a mirror are not so easy to define. But what this reveals of body image and the posturing which it implies in Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses vividly interests me. In The Tell-Tale Brain, neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran recalls the following case study:

Humphrey has a phantom arm following an amputation. Phantom limbs are a common experience for amputees, but we noticed something unusual in Humphrey. Imagine his amazement when he merely watches me stroke and tap a student volunteer’s arm - and actually feels these tactile sensations in his phantom. When he watches the student fondle an ice cube, he feels the cold in his phantom fingers. When he watches her massage her own hand, he feels a “phantom massage” that relieves the painful cramp in his phantom hand! Where does his phantom body, and a stranger’s body meld in his mind? What or where is his real sense of self?(9)

In response to this pressing question, in the mid-90s, Ramachandran invented the mirror-box, a simple apparatus which was designed to alleviate phantom limb pain. The patient would insert both hands into a box divided by a mirror, so that the reflected image of the one hand would take the place of the absent phantom hand, providing the patients with physical relief through the illusion of having momentarily regained the mobility of their phantom hands.

Complicating the mere dismissal of the body in the mirror as key to the apprehension of the self, the mirror-box acts as a pied-de-nez to the assumption that the mirror radically polarizes corporeal existence. It attests to the failure of the very severing of the perceiver and the perceived, the phenomenological body and the body-image, posturing and pose, which it may seem its primary function to achieve. It is possible to couch this problem in phenomenological terms. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, the body is always “with” me never in front of me.(10)

Toying with Merleau-Ponty’s assertion, I wish to further explore the idea that the body-object finds its way into Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway both in the mirror and in the more general encounter with another’s body. What I mean to challenge is the idea that the body-object is a visible, static and finished form. It is no longer to be considered as an epistemologically tame key to identity. Neither can it be disregarded as a mere accessory. Rather, as the characters fail to truly find their image in the glass, to make sense of the body-object, it is the eloquent enigma which betrays both posture and imposture.

* * *

In both Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses characters are framed by mirrors albeit reluctantly, rebelliously so. They are equally wary of being confined to the mirrors which frame them. In “Telemachus”, Stephen eyes with suspicion and contempt the face in the cracked looking-glass and seeks to hold himself at a distance from this “dogsbody to rid of vermin”, which is how he feels others would seek to define him. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa sees her face “always with the same imperceptible contraction” (MD, 31) Doris Kilman suffers the affliction of the “unlovable body” which she can no more escape than her relative poverty and social class and, hemmed in by the fetishistic emblems of femininity in the Army and Navy Stores, seeks to flee her self-image until she runs straight into her reflection in a glass, illustrating quite literally - and with sharper irony - that Bloomian bit of wisdom: “think you’re escaping and run into yourself.”

She got up, blundered off among the little tables, rocking slightly from side to side, and somebody came after her with her petticoat, and she lost her way, and was hemmed in by trunks specially prepared for taking to India; next got among the accouchement sets and baby linen; through all the commodities of the world, perishable and permanent, hams, drugs, flowers, stationery, variously smelling, now sweet, now sour, she lurched; saw herself thus lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face, full length in a looking-glass; and at last came out into the street. (MD, 118)(11)

Doris Kilman is far from being the only character whose encounter with their own image is experienced as a sudden intrusion. Stephen suffers the image of his body to be foisted upon him by Buck Mulligan much as he suffers Buck’s intrusive hands to search his pockets for a handkerchief. But both acts may be seen as rebellious on Stephen’s behalf, as he refuses to acknowledge a physical intimacy which would identify him in relation to his body. It may be that by rejecting the body-object Stephen attempts to hold at bay a final dispossession - that of his sense of self, being no longer Stephen, no longer as I see myself but "as other see me (U 1.199).” For similar reasons Clarissa sees her own body as a threat to her selfhood and disengages from it, claiming it “seemed nothing - nothing at all” (MD, 9) Having passed the age of marrying and having children, she feels more fully the threat of her body becoming socially invisible, a no-body:

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway. (MD, 9)

Like the landscape which in Ulysses bears the stigma of colonization, morphing from the “sweet gray mother” of Swinburne to the cliffs of Elsinore, the body-object is a potentially dangerous site because it leaves the individual vulnerable to the eye of the beholder, in Stephen’s case the eye of the conqueror who would usurp his identity. Elizabeth, Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter, encounters a similar threat while waiting for an omnibus on Victoria Street. Under the mirroring gazes of various onlookers, she is simultaneously compared to “poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies,” “a fawn in the open,” and “a moon in the glade” (MD, 114-15). Like the colonized landscape which meets Stephen’s eyes in “Telemachus”, Elizabeth’s body undergoes a series of metamorphoses which usurp its identity. However, if they show her subjected to the gaze of Londoners passing-by also suggest freedom from form, a liberating shapelessness. But the “beautiful body” only appears at length cloaked in the simulacrum of its own metamorphoses: “the beautiful body in [a] fawn-coloured coat.” And as the final comparison flirts with metaphor Elizabeth’s body is progressively petrified by the collective gaze: “like the figure-head of a ship,” her cheeks suggesting “the pallor of white painted wood” and her eyes “the staring, incredible innocence of sculpture” (MD, 115). In this moment, as Elizabeth turns to stone, what is foregrounded is a mirrorless form of gazing which reduces the young woman to a position of a body perceived which she cannot escape, suggesting that the mirroring gaze inscribes the subject in the position of perceiver and preserves the body from finite object.

On the contrary, when Peter encounters his image in a glass it is he who divests his own body of its particularities. Upon his return from India Peter Walsh finds himself prey to echoes of his former emotions and feelings for Clarissa. His individual agency threatened, he is all too aware of the risk of becoming a tool at the mercy of her social circle upon which his survival depends. In this context, he finds his feelings of helplessness and insignificance magnified by the image he encounters in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in Victoria Street: “this effigy of a man in a tail-coat with a carnation in his button-hole coming towards him” (MD, 41). Puppet-like, Peter’s body as it is reflected in the plate-glass resists individuation, masks individual features, so that Peter is reduced to an “effigy of a man”, an empty envelope, a clothed scare-crow, much like the mysterious passante whom he encounters on the street, whose body is but an assemblage of the various commodities - fetishistic emblems of femininity - which feature in the shop-window displays she passes on her way:

On and on she went, across Picadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the darkness. (MD, 46)

The disappearing act which takes place in the mirror, through the foregrounding of a body-object and generic physical attributes, reveals something other than the objective image which could serve to define Peter’s self - it reveals his sense of self, the particular posture of a man “hollowed out” by his failures, “upheld by habit”, performing an act of imposture in order to continue to exist, to find a place in a society from which he is alienated (MD, 42). Likewise, his gaze mirrored in the passante’s mocking gaze, Peter finds himself reduced to that effigy of a man which he finds in the glass - an anonymous passant.

In the opening scene of Ulysses, instructed to look at himself in a mirror, Stephen peers with suspicion at the image of a body which is alien to him, an external envelope which resists recognition: “as he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too” (U 1.199-200) What strikes me here is not that the body in the mirror seems alien to Stephen because the mirror can only reflect the body-object, i.e. the external envelope alien to the artist who would like to create himself anew. It is that Stephen encounters no-body in the cracked looking-glass. Which is to say, on the contrary, the complication which arises from the fact that the body in the mirror is precisely not simply the body-object, but a body which fails to remain entirely object because it inescapably reflects not what is in front of me but what is with me, a vantage point or posture.

As Stephen gazes at his face in the mirror an alien agency infiltrates his perception of himself: “it asks me too.” So that in this moment the image on the pane returns him to his own position of perceiver, circling the perceived “it”, the anonymous elusive grammatical subject, which has somehow escaped in the process. In such a way, looking into the mirror, Stephen finds himself face to face with his own reticence to recognize the figure in the glass, the posture and imposture of a young artist in a colonized country seeking to escape the bonds of historical, biological and cultural paternity. What Stephen catches sight of in the mirror is the net as it is being thrown. As object, the body has flown, not without raising suspicion in its wake. The mirror has catalyzed an act of willful misrecognition, has captured Stephen posing as dispossessed.

Sitting at her dressing-table, as she looks into her mirror, Clarissa Dalloway deals differently with a similar dispossession. She ardently composes what she had earlier referred to as a superfluous adornment - “this body she wore.” But this composition is ambiguous. Contrary to Ulysses, in Mrs Dalloway there is a pervasive association of the body-object with a general composure which threatens the principle of individuation, so that we might even argue that in the act of composing her face, Clarissa is posturing in the attempt to attain a public significance which her status as a woman and her lack of stateliness deny her. But in so doing she is potentially erasing the individual significance of her body. Indeed, Clarissa’s contemptuous dismissal of her body as “nothing - nothing at all” echoes the paradoxical imposture which takes place in the mirror, and oft on the street, that of a turning into nobody in the act of composing a socially significant body. The imperative of constant composure far surpasses the boundaries of the mirror; it characterizes descriptions of the body-object as it appears mirrored in the public eye of public space, imbuing the body as it is perceived with a cadaverous rigidity (“stiff”), aligning any hope to exist within the public space with the imperative to take form, to conform to the structures of power which coordinate it. As the Queen’s car passes, Clarissa, like many others (it really is a noticeable chain reaction), stiffens on the curb. Well-dressed men align impeccably in front of White’s, the oldest and grandest of London’s gentlemen’s clubs. The most outwardly rebellious character in the book, Sally, Clarissa’s lesbian love, is constantly breaking out of the straight line of conduct. Never entirely upright, neither in body nor in mind, she runs naked through the corridors, cuts the heads off of flowers to set them floating in bowls, and Clarissa first recalls her posture, seeming to her at least morally and physically lax.

[S]he sat on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette [...] with that quality which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always envied - a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners than in Englishwomen. She claimed to have French blood. (MD, 28)

The stereotype need not be commented upon other than to point out the alignment between the linear conduct which Sally escapes and what is presented as a national, imperial posturing. Sally’s physical misalignment attests to her overflowing the boundaries of national identity. Conversely, Elizabeth shows her belonging to the social sphere of her mother, distancing herself from the marginal Miss Kilman, through her upright posture. Her bearing also conveys a stoical effort to maintain the link between the self and the image. Unlike Stephen, who rejects a cracked mirror in which it is impossible to be correctly mirrored, which would bind his body to history and further proclaim him a “server of a servant”, Clarissa can and does use the mirror to forge her own image. To domesticate the alien, she poses as a conception of herself; imposes recognition upon herself:

She pursed her lips when she looked into a glass. It was to give her face point. That was her self - pointed; dart-like; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre [...] (MD, 31-32)

However, the body-object is not what Clarissa finds in the mirror, it is what she puts there as a result of the blank, the erasure of her body which the mirror confronts her with. And for all the reasons aforementioned, there is a disquieting sense that Clarissa’s act of composure is haunted by her alignment with oppressive power structures which deface her. It is not an entirely pessimistic reading; I mean to underline rather that she can only make her own space, affirm her position as central, lend centrality to the marginal position which she occupies as a woman, by inscribing herself in a space of exclusion.

At times, even Bloom’s gazing at his own body may be more problematic than it seems, though he be far less at odds with his own embodiment than Stephen or Clarissa. Bloom’s contemplation of his own body floating in the bathwater at the end of “Lotus Eaters” seems to deny the conflict of embodiment entirely. In Bloom’s gazing, the déhiscence which Stephen’s or Clarissa’s hostility towards their body-image conveys gives way to a seductive embrace of the body-image, melding the perceiver and perceived.(12) “This is my body,” Leopold announces (U 5.3917). But the cataphoric function of the deictic “this” heralds the apparition of the body, perhaps a little too strongly, hinting at a mock annunciation of sorts, as the representation of Bloom’s body as object never truly materializes. What we have here is in fact a vision bodied forth by Bloom’s mind’s eye in an episode the general economy of which is to foreground a seductive but illusory retreat into sensuality. Earlier in the episode Bloom had anticipated the pleasure of masturbating in the bath; at the back of his mind is Molly’s perfume, a scented memory materialized by the token of the lemon soap and inside his pocket Martha’s letter. Bloom’s body language betrays a desire to lose himself in physical satisfaction which is consistently thwarted by his material surroundings, to the extent that the minor frustrations he experiences become symptoms of his embodiment. Looking at a shop window, his body presents no homogenous geography, and it is this discrepancy which betrays his thoughts: as his eyes read blandly the advertisings in the window display, his hand moves quickly to extract the secret letter from his hat and place it in his pocket.

In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets: choice blend, finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom Kernan. Couldn’t ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still read blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm morning. Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather headband inside his high grade ha. Just there. His right hand came down into the bowl of his hat. His fingers found quickly a card behind the headband and transferred it to his waistcoat pocket. (U 5.3202-3211. My emphasis.)

The fixed scheme or geography of the material body is thus disturbed or contaminated by the assertion of the phenomenological body-consciousness in this moment, and consistently throughout the episode the blindness of his hand exploring the dark pocket in a desperate attempt to see that which is the focus of his attention contaminates Bloom’s gaze which, fixed elsewhere, turned inward, become vacant. Further restrictions, such as McCoy’s interruption as Bloom tries to gaze at a passing woman boarding a tram, run counter to Bloom’s attempts to immerse himself in his own desires, to the extent that it is my view that “Lotus Eaters” builds up the illusion of relief, culminates in the staging of a state of satisfaction which hesitates between the actual of the present tense supported by a linking verb (“this is my body”) and a projection into the future, more certain than just any future, a prediction, a present perception inscribed in a moment to come: “he foresaw”. The final image of Bloom’s body borne by the waters of the bath, a mock Cabanel - Venus emerging in flowers from the waves - suggests quite obviously the fantasy of a return to the womb but perhaps more implicitly that of a moment of uninterrupted navel-gazing. But Bloom’s body as it thus appears in his mind’s eye bears the mark of his own confabulating: the floral imagery which has found its way from the letter to the body in the bath confuses any stereotypical expression of Bloom’s masculinity while hinting at his impotence; the lyrical quality of the passage which relies strongly on alliteration, rather than being solely sedating, also points to the more disturbing lifelessness of the body which corpse-like floats in its ointments, Bloom’s limp member no longer the anointed issue of life (the perpetrator of Abraham’s promised generations) but setting a disappointing end to the stream of life. What is reflected in these moments of self-contemplation is the elusiveness of the body-object, which hints at the possibility that embodiment may imply being simultaneously with and without a body and navigating the overlapping of the visible and invisible dimensions of corporality through acts of posing, posturing and imposturing.

* * *

And so my point is that the body which should be in the mirror is not; the body which one should be able to possess or clap eyes on escapes full apprehension. Confronted with the material body, the characters more often reveal themselves facing the enigma of a no-body which is to say not the strictly material, known, epistemologically tame manifestation of corporality in these texts. Rather it is always a problem, always escapes possession by the subject, is fundamentally at odds: it creates a conflict which makes of corporality the central, dynamic locus of the texts and it reveals embodiment as the site of posturing and imposturing.

In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz notes that “the limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical “container”, the skin [...] Its borders, edges, and contours are “osmotic”[...] incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange.”(13) In Non-lieux, Marc Auge relates this inevitable posturing to the concept of “non-places” which he sees as intimately linked to a representation of the real which would be delimited by individual fields of perception. In the first of Baudelaire’s “Tableaux parisiens”, “Paysage”, he notes the foregrounding of a “position, a posture, an attitude in the most material and common sense of the term” which occurs “as the result of a movement which empties of all meaning and content both the landscape and the gaze which becomes one with the landscape and the object of a second unassignable gaze - the same, another.”(14)

But I wish to imply more than that Joyce and Woolf illustrate that inward turn characteristic of modernist writing, which strongly relied on anchoring representation through the individual point of view. I want to suggest that, hollowed out, the figure in the mirror delineates a posture which consists both in excavating a place which the reader can inhabit and the constant challenging and reassertion of the boundaries of that space through confrontation with an enigmatic, resistant body-object. In response to Michel de Certeau’s inviting assertion that “walking is to lack a place” I venture a parasitic claim of my own: wandering is to be “with” a body, which intrinsically supposes being both here and there, neither entirely here nor there - in sum, a vital imposture.(15)

1 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, Vol. I, Stuart Gilbert (ed), New York: The Viking Press, 1957, p. 64.
2 Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Ms Brown” in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, Hoffman, Michael J. and Patrick D. Murphy (eds), Durham (North Carolina): Duke University Press, 1996.
3 "The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to the moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says “Here is Anna Karenina.” A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says, “That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.” For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind - her charm, her passion, her despair." Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema” (1926) in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, 1925-1928, Andrew McNeillie (ed), Wilmington: Mariner Books, 2008.
4 The Bible, KJV, 1 Corinthians 13: 12-13.
5 “The Dead” in James Joyce, Dubliners, Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (eds), New York: The Viking Press, p. 218.
6 Deborah Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (eds), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. In her extensive study of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet sees this as a consequence of a mind-body dualism characteristic of Western thought which conceives of the body as external to the true, subjective or spiritual self. “As long as the body was excluded from the subjective, true self, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katherine H. Jewett, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 5-6.
7 Deborah Shuger, ibid., p.21.
8 Deborah Shuger, ibid., p.33.
9 Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013, pp. 5-6.
10 "Dire qu’il est toujours prés de moi, toujours là pour moi, c’est dire que jamais il n’est vraiment devant moi, que je ne peux pas le déployer sous mon regard, qu’il demeure en marge de toutes les perceptions, qu’il est avec moi." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, p. 106.
11 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, David Bradshaw (ed), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
12 In Le Visible et l’invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the term déhiscence to speak of the paradoxical, chiasmic relationship which binds the perceiver to the perceived. The nature of embodied being implies a constant connection between the perceiver and the field of perception but as with a hinge, a gap subsists between the two which never fully coincide, so that being is determined by an ongoing interplay, a constant to-and-fro which binds the body to the world.
13 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 79.
14 "Les deux mains au menton, du haut de ma mansarde / je verrai l’atelier qui chante et qui bavarde. Charles Baudelaire, “Paysage” in Les Fleurs du mal. Roy Campbell suggests the following translation: High in my atticchin in hand, I’d swing / and watch the workshops as they roar and sing. Marc Augé remarks: “la mise en evidence d’une position, d’une posture, d’une attitude, au sens le plus physique et banal, qui arrive au terme d’un mouvement qui évide de tout contenu et de tout sens le paysage et le regard qui se fond dans le paysage et devient l’object d’un regard second et inassignable - le même, un autre" (my translation). Marc Augé, Non-lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Rouen : Editions du Seuil, 1992, p. 117.
15 Marcher, c’est manquer de lieu. C’est le procès indéfini d’être absent et en quête d’un propre. Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, Vol. I, Arts de faire, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, p. 155.