Theorizing about aesthetics in part 5 of A Portrait,
Stephen distinguishes between spatial and temporal arts: "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." Instead of describing the two kinds of
art, he then analyzes the "esthetic image" more generally,
applying several aesthetic terms from Aquinas to define it in broad
formalist terms. But he is still thinking of the two
categories of art, and before turning to literature and
describing modes of writing that he calls lyric, epic, and
dramatic he speaks of painting and sculpture. In transitioning
from the visible arts to the audible ones he alludes to a
famous work of aesthetics by the German poet, playwright,
critic, and philosopher Gotthold Lessing: "Lessing, said
Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to write of.
That art, being inferior, does not present the [Aquinian]
forms I spoke of distinguished clearly from one another."
Lessing's Laocoon (1766) opposes the ekphrastic
tradition of likening poetry to painting, arguing instead that
the two arts involve very different modes of sensory
apprehension. Poetry presents things in successive moments of
time while painting presents them in adjacent regions of
space. It would seem, then, that when Stephen speaks of
"visible" and "audible" modes of perception at the beginning
of Proteus he might be returning to the aesthetic
speculations he undertook in A Portrait. But in fact
he shows none of Lessing's interest in separating the two
modes and assigning them to different arts. His subject here
is perception, and his emphasis is on the inextricable
interactions of spatial and temporal modes of apprehension,
which he expresses memorably in the phrase, "A very
short space of time through very short times of space."
This distinction between Stephen's theorizing in
A Portrait
and in
Proteus carries over, interestingly, into the
work of identifying the source of Joyce's two German terms. For
many decades, starting in the 1960s, it was widely assumed that
he derived the words
nacheinander and
nebeneinander
from Lessing's
Laocoon. That attribution, first made
by Fritz Senn in an article titled "Esthetic Theories,"
JJQ
2 (1965): 134-36, was repeated by Thornton (1968) and Gifford
(1988), by authors of briefer annotations like Kiberd (1992),
Johnson (1993), and Slote (2012), in an earlier version of this
note (2013), and by many critics relying on one annotator or
another. But in fact Joyce was reading an entirely different
German-language author.
As Slote and his collaborators observe in their newer and fuller
Annotations (2022), the supposed allusion to Lessing
always came with a caveat: "A problem, which Senn notes, is that
while Lessing uses the term
Nebeneinander, he generally
prefers
Aufeinander over
Nacheinander. Senn
posits that Joyce might have derived his information from some
secondary source which employed the word
Nacheinander"
(xxxix). But it has recently become clear that Joyce was
consulting a different source altogether: "Going through one of
Joyce's preparatory notebooks, Wim Van Mierlo has discovered
that Lessing was not at all Joyce's source for
Proteus.
Instead, these words came from a book by the anti-Semitic writer
Otto Weininger" (xxxix). Joyce copied onto a page in one of his
notebooks this sentence, along with others, from Weininger's
Über
die letzten Dinge: "Space...contains in juxtaposition (
nebeneinander)
what can only be experienced in temporal succession (
Nacheinander)"
(xl). The terms, Slote observes, are not unique to Weininger,
but fairly common in German philosophy.
(It should be noted here that though Weininger wrote about
Jewishness in highly critical ways he was himself Jewish. His
reputation as simply "anti-Semitic" owes in great measure to
the dishonest readings that Nazi propagandists gave to his
philosophy.)
Weininger's sentence is about modes of perception rather
than modes of artistic creation, just as Stephen's thoughts in
Proteus are, and like this slightly older Stephen he
describes space and time as mutually implicated frames of
sensory experience rather than as a binary opposition.
Although Stephen is not drafting aesthetic theories when he
thinks of the nacheinander and the nebeneinander,
his new way of thinking about spatiotemporal apprehension does
hold relevance for Joyce's aesthetic designs in Ulysses.
The new novel concerns itself not only with temporal arts
like rhetoric, poetry, and music but also with spatial arts
like sculpture, photography, and cartography. Rather than
opposing the visible and the audible it weaves them together
in marvelously multifarious modes of apprehending reality. The
supreme expression of this approach is the tenth chapter, Wandering
Rocks, where spatial and temporal modes of perception
intersect. The episode is laid out on an intricately detailed
fabric of space-time, and like a movie camera it jumps back
and forth across points in both dimensions.
