The "woman of no appearance": James Joyce, Dora Marsden, and competitive pilfering

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Thaine Stearns

The writings of Joyce and Marsden present a complex dialogue about visuality, the image, and time and space. While neither writer acknowledged the other in their published writing, the evidence for their exchanges can be found in their letters and in how each of their texts implicitly cite the other. Finding an adequate language to represent philosophical complexities was a manifest concern for both, as indicated by Joyce in the opening chapters of Ulysses. The metaphysical problem that confronts Stephen as he walks along Sandymount Strand in the "Proteus" chapter is the question of perception: how does one conceive the world if not through the eyes? The visible world is an "ineluctable modality"--providing signs to read (or "signatures") even in natural flotsam and jetsam: "seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot" (3:2-3). (9) To test whether one can perceive the world without using language invested in visual metaphors, Stephen tells himself to "shut your eyes and see." As he walks along, eyes shut, he is forced to think about a language to express his perception:

   You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time.
   A very short space of time through very short times of space.
   Five, six: the Nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable
   modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over
   a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the Nebeneinander
   ineluctably. (3:11-15)

Stephen imagines that with his eyes shut the world becomes only audible, a place where objects are only perceived in time (nacheinander) and communicated through speech. It is a complicated matter, however, to excise his sense of space altogether. Later, when Stephen recalls this moment of his day in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter, he thinks: "Space: what you damn well have to see" (9: 86). For him the sense of space can only be derived through the eyes. Even with his eyes closed back on Sandymount Strand, though, Stephen imagines the "space of time" and the "short times of space," and, as he envisions himself toppling over an eroded edge of the bank, he sees himself in his mind's eye as an object falling through space (nebeneinander). As a modern artist but with limitations not shared by Joyce, his creator, Stephen still understands his world bifurcated into separate realms of time and space. Voluntarily blinded to the idea that his subjectivity includes both, he finds himself on the brink of falling into a new conception of art and existence.

His walk on Sandymount Strand is not the first time Stephen Dedalus ponders the philosophical and aesthetic implications of time and space. Gifford and Seidman (45) gloss nacheinander and nebeneinander as concepts derived from Lessing's Laocoon, the famous eighteenth-century philosophical essay concerning the limits of painting and poetry, which is directly referred to in Stephen's discussion with Donovan and Cranly about aesthetics in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. In Joyce's first novel, published initially as a serial in Marsden's and Weaver's journal the Egoist from 1914 to 1915, Stephen paraphrases Lessing's genre distinctions regarding painting as a spatial art and poetry as a temporal one, proclaiming them to Cranly as his own: "An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space" (212). Following this, Stephen's ruminations about nacheinander and nebeneinander in the "Proteus" chapter of Ulysses reflect the same aesthetic grounding; in Finnegans Wake these ruminations are developed into a general parody of the modernist debate about time and space. This debate proceeds in part out of Lessing's argument, which prescribes a separation of the sister arts into their "proper" categorical realms: poetry is a temporal art, while painting is spatial.