“The Ineluctable Literary Allusion in James Joyce’s Ulysses“
College essay by Brandon James, 2007 (Disclaimer)
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a maze of a novel. Full of literary allusions, Joyce politely requests of his readers that they have an excellent understanding of a large body of literary texts, and a solid memory. Luckily for those of us with college student schedules, scholars before us have created annotations to the countless literary allusions in Joyce’s novel, many of them a few times thicker than Ulysses itself. Because of my minor in German, one of the allusions that immediately caught my eye in the Proteus chapter was the reference to the German words nacheinander and nebeneinander in the second paragraph. As the Joyce-based character Stephen is walking along the beach with his eyes closed, these words amuse him and he reflects on the “ineluctable modality of the visible” (Joyce 2200).
According to an annotation of the allusions in Ulysses, the reference to nacheinander and nebeneinander is a reference to work Laokoon (or Laocoön) by the German aesthetician Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Thornton 42). I remember learning about the famous marble sculpture Laocoön and His Sons in an introductory Art History course. According to Thornton, “[Lessing’s Laokoon distinguishes] between poetry, which deals with objects one after another in time (nacheinander…), and sculpture and painting, which deal with objects next to one another in space (nebeneinander)” (42). Stephen Dedalus is a poetic soul who I believe at this moment is contemplating the difference between poetry and the more visible, physical arts. Stephen distinguishes between what we hear, the poetry of the nacheinander, or the “ineluctable modality of the audible” (Joyce 2200) with his eyes closed, and earlier on the “[i]neluctable modality of the visible” (Joyce 2200), or the nebeneinander. According to another annotation, literal translations of nacheinander and nebeneinander are “One after another…Side by side” (Gifford and Seidman 45). The nacheinander, according to Gifford and Seidman, describes subjects that are appropriate to poetry, and the nebeneinander describes subjects appropriate for painting or sculpture (45). While walking blindly and considering what is ineluctable about sight and hearing, Stephen is reminded, according to the Norton Anthology footnote on 2201, of the Demiurge, a “supernatural being who… made the world in subordination to God… who writes his signature on [all things].” The nacheinander and the nebeneinander, the vision of the world and the hearing of the world, how each allows one to know that the world exists, Stephen contemplates this while listening to the sea and “crush crackling wrack and shells” (Joyce 2200) beneath his boots.
During this chapter, Stephen is obviously walking along the beach in a very contemplative mood. He harbors guilt over his mother’s death and wonders if his refusal to pray for her may have contributed to her demise. I think that what is going on in this chapter is that Stephen is avoiding the subject of his guilt by questioning the existence of change through what he can sense: “[T]hought through my eyes” (Joyce 2200) and then, voluntarily, through only what he can hear: “Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?” (Joyce 2201). He’s meditating on the differences between the abstract, the poetic, the ideal, and the concrete, the real, the nebeneinander, objects existing in physical space like his mother and the fact that she is dead. He chooses to be blind to escape from the concrete realm of visual perception, and exists momentarily in the world of the abstract, of audio. Instead of seeing the turbulent sea, he only listens to the waves and the shells cracking under his boots, distancing himself from the realm of the real, of the nebeneinander.
Stephen is a character with a poetical, fantastical mind. He chooses to deal with the death of his mother in a very metaphysical way. The world is ineluctable, and he would rather experience it through poetry, through the nacheinander, where his mind is rather than where his “two feet in [someone else’s] boots… nebeneinander” (Joyce 2200-1) are going. He exists and changes ineluctably.
Works Cited
Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. U of
California Press: Berkley, 1988.
Joyce, James. “From Ulysses.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 8th
ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006.
Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List. U of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill,
1961.
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