University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Joyce-Bergson Correspondences In The Theory And Time Structure Of 'Dubliners,' 'A Portrait,' And 'Ulysses'

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Joyce-Bergson Correspondences In The Theory And Time Structure Of 'Dubliners,' 'A Portrait,' And 'Ulysses'

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Content This dissertation has been
microfilmed exactly as received
69-13,090
TOTH, J r ., Alexander Stephen, 1936-
JOYCE-BERGSON CORRESPONDENCES IN THE
THEORY AND TIME STRUCTURE OF DUBLINERS,
A PORTRAIT. AND ULYSSES. " ~
U niversity of Southern California, Ph.D., 1968
Language and Literature, modern
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
C opyright © by
ALEXANDER ST E PH E N TOTH, JR.
1969
JOYCE-BERGSON CORRESPONDENCES IN THE
THEORY AND TIME STRUCTURE OF
DUBLINERS, A PORTRAIT, AND ULYSSES
by
Alexander Stephen Toth, Jr.
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 19 6 8
UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, C ALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, w ritten by
A 1 s x a n d e r _ _ t e _ p _ h e n _ _ _ A o t h j.... J r ......
under the direction of /li.S... D issertation C o m
mittee, and a p p r o v e d by all its m em bers, has
been p resented to and a ccep ted by T h e G r a d u
ate School, in p a rtial fu lfillm ent of req u ire
ments fo r the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Date... AugUS.tJ . . . . 1 . . 9 . 6 8
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
v J Chairman
,. - Y- -
/
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION.................................... 1
II. BERGSON ON TIME AND RELATED NOTIONS........... 22
III. TIME STRUCTURES................................ 52
Dubliners................................... 60
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ... 66
Ulysses...................................... 73
IV. JOYCE ON TIME AND RELATED NOTIONS............. 91
V. COMPARISON OF BERGSON AND JOYCE ............... 135
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 155
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Scientists and philosophers have long described time in
much the same way as they have space, but near the beginning
of the twentieth century they became aware of the unique
nature of time. Their increased concern with time soon
$
spread to writers. A. A. Mendilow observes:
We have mentioned that the art of fiction in particular
reflects this obsession [with time] very clearly, and that
most of its practitioners of importance have notably
busied themselves with the various concepts and values of
time, both for their intrinsic interest and for the influ
ence they exert on the conditions of their art. . . .
Time affects every aspect of fiction: the theme, the
form, and the medium— language.1
To call emergent uses of time "an obsession" seems an exag
geration in a society where most people wear watches and
most public rooms display clocks, where work and play are
ruled by the rigid, moving arms of measured time. It seems
appropriate— natural even— that literature should reflect
modern man's consciousness of time because, as Hans Meyer
hof f points out,
Literature— like music— is a temporal art; "for time is
3-Time and the Novel (London, 1952), pp. 30-31.
1
2
the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life."
And "once upon a time" is the "timeless" theme of every
story told by man, from 'the fairy tales to the opening
sentence of the Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. To
be engaged in literature, therefore, quite naturally leads
to questions about the meaning of time for the art form
itself. . . .
This is borne out in the writing of our own age. Time
has become, as Wyndham Lewis was perhaps the first to
point out [in Time and Western Man] an over-all predomi
nant theme in recent literature.^
The fiction writer is concentrating on his milieu when he
uses time as a motif. Temporal succession is a part of
man's daily experience; his thoughts and conversation inter
mingle reminiscences, present business, and anticipation.
Man can find himself, can probe his own nature, in a
number of ways. In religion he explores his relationship
with God, the eternal, the unchanging. Or he can examine
himself in order to find unity through the enduring "I."
While perhaps oversimplifying, Meyerhoff suggests the close
relationship between time and man when he writes:
What is man, if he is nothing but a victim of temporal
succession and change? What, if anything, endures
throughout the constantly changing stream of consciousness
of the individual? The question, what is man, therefore
invariably refers to the question what is time. The quest
for a clarification of the self leads to a recherche du
temps perdu. And the more seriously human beings become
engaged in this quest, the more they become preoccupied
and concerned with the consciousness of time and its mean
ing for human life. (p. 2)
Like Marcel Proust, whose novel Meyerhoff alludes to, James
Joyce is among the foremost of the modern writers who
^Time in Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955),
p. 3. The quotation is from Thomas Mann's The Magic Moun
tain (New York, 1949), p. 541.
concern themselves with the nature of time. His fiction
presents the difference between clock time, which moves un
ceasingly forward with regularity, and psychological time
which stretches and compresses, unmeasurable by sun, moon,
tide, season, or mechanical means.
Scholars and critics have not been remiss in attempting
to explain what time and space mean to Joyce. To further
understand and to interpret the limited clues in Joyce's
writing and correspondence, scholars have ferreted out the
names of psychologists and philosophers whose ideas may have
influenced his thought. Some critics conclude that Joyce's
space and time are unique. Others find similarities to
eastern myth, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas,
SjzSren Kirkegaara, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, William James,
Alfred North Whitehead, Albert Einstein, Giordano Bruno,
Giambattista Vico, and Henri Bergson.
Critics examining Joyce's use of time and space encoun
ter two problems, one of defining Joyce's concept of time
and space and the other of determining the influence of or
correspondences with philosophers, scientists, or psycholo
gists. Fiction does not present a philosophical system as
such. Rather, the writer presents those aspects of reality
most important to his world view as attitudes and as scenes.
^Literary scholars have suggested these sources with
varying amounts of proof. Later in this chapter I will pre
sent the scholars' statements of philosophers' influence on
Joyce.
The more carefully an artist works, the less easily discern
ible will be the elements of his philosophy because he will
integrate the philosophy into the content and organization
of the work. Moreover, where the writer is an educated man,
his perceptions result from myriad influences which may be
direct, when he knows firsthand and accepts a particular
philosophical system, or indirect, when he becomes ac
quainted with ideas through conversation or other sources
such as literature embodying or reflecting the ideas. Indi
rect influences are popular ideas often described as "in the
air." An artist may consciously adopt popular ideas or they
may become a part of his thought without any systematic
evaluation or reconciliation with his complementary or con
flicting ideas on the same subject. Identifying or evalu
ating influences therefore becomes a difficult pursuit.
A further difficulty in determining a writer's sources
arises when he is reluctant to identify those he has found
useful. Joyce usually does not discuss influences, and when
he does identify one, the confidant is not certain whether
or not to take Joyce seriously. For example, in a conversa
tion with an unidentified American scholar Joyce spoke of
Edouard Dujarain's Les Lauriers sont coupes as the inspira
tion or source for his stream-of-consciousness technique.
Mary Colum, with Joyce at the time, was certain that he was
misleading the young scholar as a joke. On this occasion
she asked why he didn't identify the important sources like
5
Jung and Freud. Mary Colum's attitude reflects her knowl
edge that Joyce was more concerned with creating an interest
in his work than in identifying sources. But that scholar
and many others who took Joyce at his word with rega_rd_jto
Dujardin's novel are in this instance probably correct in
believing Joyce because Frank Budgen reports that Joyce told
him he took the stream-of-consciousness technique from Du-
jardin.^ And recently published letters support the opinion
that Joyce was not cruelly playing with the elder novelist.^
A second instance— one which bears an important rela
tion to this study--occurred when Joyce acknowledged the
influence of Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history.
In a letter concerning Finnegans Wake Joyce writes,
I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories
[Vico's] beyond using them for all they are worth, but
they have gradually forced themselves on me through the
circumstances of my own life.^
When looking at the first part of the statement--which ap
pears alone in some quotations--the reader finds it may mean
that an analysis of Joyce's work based on Vico's theories is
worthless, worth a little, or worth a great deal. Joyce
4James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses" (London,
1934), p. 92.
^One of the letters to Dujardin asks where Joyce may
purchase another copy of Les Lauriers sont coupes because
his copy was in another city.
^A. M. Klein, "A Shout in the Street: An Analysis of
the Second Chapter of Joyce's Ulysses,” New Directions in
Prose and Poetry (Norfolk, 1951), XIII, 324.
wrote this information to a friend and probably meant it as
taken— that the study of Vico gives valuable insight into
the structure of Finnegans Wake.
A third problem in determining the influences on
Joyce's thought is bibliographical. Before his eyes'went
bad, Joyce read widely. Scholars know he read Thomas
Aquinas but not how much or which books. Although his debt
in aesthetics has been documented, the debt in cosmology— if
any— is not clear and has not been demonstrated. Carl Jung
treated Joyce's daughter for her mental illness, but Joyce
may or may not have been familiar with Jung's views on the
role history plays in man's behavior. Joyce read Bruno
while still at the university, but it is doubtful he knew
Bruno's cosmology. Joyce mentioned many authors and philos
ophers in Finnegans Wake, but in many cases there is no way
of determining whether he was name dropping or whether he
knew their writings only by repute, superficially, or in
depth. Joyce scholars, then, have no easy task in identify
ing sources. And even when they think they see similari
ties, critics are frequently remiss in identifying terms
like "time" or "space" or in giving the descriptions of
important terms supplied by the philosophers they identify.
Unfortunately, reading Joyce criticism leads me to sus
pect that in this happy hunting ground a critic can find
verification for nearly any idea. Some document their opin
ions well; others assert without giving textual proof or
their reasoning. Some suggest Joyce worked from a single
source; others name a number of influences. Some trace ele
ments found in his first work through his latest; others
read backward, searching for earlier indications of things
they find in Finnegans Wake. As a result, attempts to
determine Joyce's idea of time and space are frequently
frustrated by contradictions and partial answers. A sam
pling of critical commentary on Joyce's use of time and
space will help demonstrate the problem.
Interest in Joyce's idea of time came early. In 1929,
an essay by Marcel Brion says that "with Joyce as with
Proust time is a dominant factor." He claims that Joyce
developed his own dimensions of time and space.7 Later, in
contrast to most who viewed Joyce's art as temporal, Harry
Levin says:
Wyndham Lewis was rash enough to cite Ulysses as an exam
ple of our morbid "time-consciousness". . . . It was
Joyce's life-long endeavor, when all is said and done, to
escape from the nightmare of history, to conceive the
totality of human experience on a simultaneous plane, to
synchronize past, present, and future in the timelessness
of a millennium. Time is spatialized, a mere auxiliary to
the other three dimensions. Space is curved, boundless
and finite, the same anew.8
7"The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce," Our
Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of
Work in Progress, ed. Samuel Beckett (London, 1961), pp. 28-
29. _
^ James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Norfolk, 1960),
p. 19 81 Because Levin does not 'define his terms here, it is
difficult to determine his meaning. If "spatialized" time
here means time measurable, Levin appears to contradict him
self, for "timelessness" usually depends on a qualitative
view of time.
Levin, like Brion, appears to consider the search into time
theories irrelevant. Mircea Eliade in Myth of the Eternal
Return suggests that "the work of two of the most signifi
cant writers of our day— T. S. Eliot and James Joyce— is
saturated with nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition
and, in the last analysis, for the abolition of time."®
Eliade's book develops the thesis that primitive man used
archetypes to escape history, memory, and the past, to
devaluate them. In filiade's view, the repetition of actions
and Joyce’s use of myth and archetypes discredit the theory
that time was at the core of his writings. But most crit
ics, both early and more recent, argue that Joyce works not
toward timelessness but toward a particular sense of time.
Critics identify affinities to a number of philoso
phers' cosmologies in Joyce's fiction. J. Mitchell Morse
views Bloom as "a true, or nonmedieval, Aristotelian." He
sees Bloom's "hold to the now, the here, through which all
future plunges into the past" as "a clear echo of Augus
tine's De Immortalitate Animae. . . . This in turn seems to
owe something to the discussion of the 'now' in Aristotle's
Physics. Agreeing somewhat, William York Tindall
asserts, "Stephen's thoughts about time, space, and etern
ity, about accident (color) and body, about subject and
^Trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1954), p. 153.
-^The Sympathetic Alien: James Joyce and Catholicism
(Washington Square, 1957), pp. 35-36.
9
object are based on Jacob Boehme and Aristotle."H Jacob
Boehme holds a cyclical theory of history, but Tindall does
not say why he thinks Joyce is indebted to Boehme rather
than others with cyclical theories. William T. Noon in
Joyce and Aquinas does not indicate any correspondences
between their time and space theories.
Arnold Goldman's The Joyce Paradox presents a relation
ship between Joyce's ideas and those of S^ren Kierkegaard.
Aware of the difficulties in ascribing influence, Goldman
builds his argument around a number of possible correspon
dences .
To my knowledge there is no direct proof that Joyce
read much Kierkegaard, either in the original— though the
Dano-Norwegian he learned in order to read Ibsen would
have enabled him to— or in translation or criticism. To
be sure, there are a handful of allusions in Finnegans
Wake to Kierkegaard’s name and to the titles of some of
his" works, but only one_of them implies any relation
between Kierkegaard's world and Joyce's own: when, near
the end of the Wake, HCE's cyclic "rebirth" is being pre
dicted, he--and by implication all mankind— is described
as "sorensplit and paddypathced." The implications of
this pun have been my pillars of cloud and fire.12
Margaret Church echoes Mary Colum's suggestion of the
possible influence of Freud in Time and Reality, adding that
"A Jungian sense of the persistence of the legendary past is
1
the most obvious of approaches to time in Ulysses.
•^A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (New York, 1959) ,
p. 146.
l2(Evanston, 1966), pp.. vii-viii.
12(Chapel Hill, 1962), p. 39. The author gives no
footnote or bibliographical reference to the probable
sources of Jung's influence on Joyce.
10
Melvin Friedman's Stream of Consciousness proposes another
contemporary psychologist, William James, as having a part
in forming Joyce's literary expression,
Joyce's Ulysses is probably the final realization of this
suggestion of William James that stream of consciousness
strikes us chiefly by "this different pace of its parts."
Joyce practices this on two levels: he varies his stylis
tic usages and borrowings from the other arts, and at the
same time he builds the structure of Ulysses on various
parallels and analogies. . . . The Principles of Psychol
ogy is the first genuine attempt to process this new
dimension of time, often referred to, in this connection,
as the "specious present."14
Edmund Wilson sees affinities to Whitehead and Ein
stein. In discussing the relationship of events in Ulysses,
he says:
Joyce is indeed really the great poet of the new phase
of human consciousness. Like Proust's or Whitehead's or
Einstein's world, Joyce's world is always changing as it
is perceived by different observers and by them at differ
ent times. It is an organism made up of "events," which
may be taken as infinitely inclusive or infinitely small
and each of which involves all the others; and each of
these events is unique.15
This "new phase" of human consciousness relates also to the
stream concept on which William James and Bergson agree.
Where usually only one or two critics connect Joyce
' with the philosophers, psychologists, and scientists already
mentioned, a more widespread agreement on Giambattista
Vico's influence exists. At first this acknowledged influ
ence was seen only in Finnegans Wake, but scholarship soon
1^(New Haven, 1955), pp. 76-77.
- -^Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature
of 1870-1930 (New York, 1959), p. 221.
11
perceived cyclical foreshadowings in Joyce's earlier fic
tion. Some critics view the adoption of Vico's ideas as a
refutation of Bergson. Others see both influences side by
side. Margaret Church, who elsewhere observes correspon
dences with Bergson and Jung, writes:
Another theory of time which must be mentioned here is
that of Vico. Joyce saw Vico's cycles in terms of the
various inner stages of individual men and of mankind. In
the psychological life of each of us there is the Divine
Age (the age of the parents), the Heroic Age (the age of
the sons), the Human Age (the age of the people), and the
Recorso. This pattern may be repeated many times in a
single life span. (p. 25)
Where Church considers Vico's influence as psychological,
Hans Meyerhoff suggests Joyce used Viconian Cycles for
aesthetic or for mythical purposes.
Thus it makes "sense"--aesthetic, mythical sense— for
Joyce, reviving the cyclical theory of Vico, to invoke the
image of the mythical Daedalus at the end of the Portrait
of the Artist As a Young Man, or to rediscover Odysseus of
Ithaca in Leopold Bloom of Dublin, or to tell the tale of
H. C. Earwicker ("Here Comes Everybody") as a parable and
myth of Everyman. (p. 81)
He disagrees with Mircea filiade, claiming that "Myths may
convey a sense of temporal continuity and structural unity
for the 'self' of man" (p. 82). Joyce's use of myth would
suggest "continuity"— perhaps historical— rather than cyclic
regeneration.
William T. Noon also speaks of Joyce's use of Vico as
chiefly poetic, as a unifying symbol.
If Joyce found in Giambattista Vico . . . a philosophic
spirit congenial to the poetic aims which he set for him
self in regard to the treatment of history and the symbol,
language and the myth, there is no necessary reason to
suppose that his poetic sensibilities were therefore being
"reconstructed". . . .
Nothing is more evident in regard to Joyce's indebted
ness to Vico than that he found in Vico's theme of the
corso-recorso movement of history, as developed in the
Scienza Nuova, a very spacious symbol which could be con
veniently taken over for the rehabilitation of history.16
A. Walton Litz says in The Art of James Joyce that
"Many of the Wake's important themes are foreshadowed in
Ulysses, most notably Vico's cyclic view of history.
Although Litz does not pursue the idea here, other writers
do.. Ellsworth Mason's doctoral dissertation develops the
theory that Joyce changed the sequence of episodes from The
Odyssey for the purpose of attaining cyclic organization.^-®
A.nd more recently A. M. Klein's excellent study breaks the
"Nestor" episode into thirty-six Viconian cycles. Explain
ing Vico's theory, Klein says:
Vico's doctrine is thus a paradoxical one. His method
of arriving at it also deviates from the usual norms of
research. It is not a study of chronology— here, says
Vico, all is dark and obscure— but from philology, an
analysis of the origins of basic words,— that he comes to
his conclusions. (p. 329)
Klein then proves his point, developing his analysis of
cyclical recurrence of the Viconian ages by the repetition
of words and incidents.
^ Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, 1957), pp. 127-128.
^(New York, 1961), p. 76.
-*-®" Joyce' s Ulysses and the Vico Cycle," unpubl. PH~. D.
dissertation (Yale, 1948). Discussed in Robert Humphrey,
Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1955), p^ 99.
13
Litz indicates the relationship between Giordano
Bruno's writing and Vico's, asserting that both "were famil
iar to Joyce from his early reading in Dublin and Trieste
. . (p. 76). Other references to Joyce's interest in
Bruno appear in The Critical Writings of James Joyce.
Robert Humphrey in Stream of Consciousness in the Modern
Novel considers the Viconian cycles structurally useful. He
writes:
There are . . . devices for gaining symmetry which Joyce
employs in Ulysses. Two of these involve utilization of
theoretical cyclic schemes. One is the Viconian theory of
historical cycles; the other is the sonata form of music,
(pp. 98-99)
Hugh Kenner20 and Herbert Gorman2- * - further attest to Joyce's
interest in Vico, but they do not claim this interest pre
vents Joyce from, using other time theories as well.
Joseph G. Brennan asserts that Joyce's use of Vico is a
refutation of any relationship with Henri Bergson. He
argues:
James Joyce's "concept of time" has been compared on occa
sion with Bergson's. The fact that Joyce's time-machinery
has nothing whatever in common with Bergson's duration or
Einstein's or Whitehead's time either, but is on the con
trary a throwback to the most unprogressive Greek and
medieval time notion, might encourage us to believe in the
need to create a job for a philosopher trained to spot
such misreadings. But it was, after all, a critic and
scholar of literature who picked it up. Harry Levin
^Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds. (New York,
1959), pp. 132-134.
2^Publin's Joyce (London, 1955), pp. 321-326.
2-*-James Joyce (New York, 1940), p. 332.
14
spotted the misinterpretation (or one very much like it)
and gave it a line c>r two in his book on Joyce. Which may
be all it deserves.22
Brennan does not elaborate on his position that Joyce's time
machinery has "nothing whatever" in common with Bergson's,
nor does he explain his contention that Joyce's work
reflects the thought of the ancient Greek and the medieval
philosophers. He later adds:
There is nothing at all Bergsonian in Joyce's cyclical and
archetypal chronometrics. True, Joyce plays on time as on
an accordian. . . . The characters in Ulysses are rather
anxious about the time of day. . . . But insofar as
Joyce's working metaphysic of time is archetypal, cyclic,
Viconian, and the metempsychotic, it stands in flat con
tradiction to the premise on which Bergson's philosophy
(and Whitehead's too) is based. That premise is time is
time is real and cannot be abolished. (pp. 39-40)
Brennan is not the only critic who clearly denies any
influence by Bergson on Joyce's writing. He overstates
Harry Levin's rejection of Bergsonian correspondences in
Joyce's work because Levin is aware of Bergson's position
that the intellect spatializes (p. 112). Levin recognized
the importance of time in Joyce's work.
Joyce's efforts to achieve immediacy lead him to equate
form and content, to ignore the distinction between things
he is describing and the words he is using to describe
them. In this equation, time is of the essence. Events
are reported when they occur; the tense is the continuous
present. (p. 87)
This, with the description of Joyce's concept of time quoted
on page 7, a description that sounds remarkably like Berg
son's theory, makes me suspect that a semantic problem is
22Three Philosophical Novelists (New York, 1964),
p. iv.
15
causing Levin's rejection. In his daybook for James Joyce, .
Louis Gillet, like Brennan, denies Bergson's influence.
The central theme of Joyce's thought is a mystical con
ception of the idea of time. His work, like Proust's, is
based on a metaphysical view of duration, but the resem
blance ends there. Proust's time is Bergsonian durie,
while Joyce's is the absolute non-temporal and monumental
time of the famous Giambattista V i c o .23
A number of critics believe that Joyce's work illus
trates a view of time similar to Bergson's. And evidence
indicates that Joyce was aware of Bergson's ideas, evidence
beyond references to Bergson in Finnegans Wake, the rather
tenuous link Goldman uses for the Kirkegaard affinities.
Stuart Gilbert, a close friend of Joyce, corroborates
Joyce's acquaintance with Bergson's philosophical theories
in a letter to Shiv Kumar.2^ More important, Marvin Maga-
laner and Richard M. Kain state that the unpublished note
books Joyce kept while working on Exiles reveal that he knew
the work of Bergson.2^ But just as Joyce neglects to iden-
tify most other possible sources of influence, he does not
refer to Bergson in any published letters or interviews.
And knowledge of Bergson does not prove influence or even
correspondences in thought. _
J
22Trans. Georges Markow-Totevy (London, 1958), pp. 49-
50 .
2^Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Conscious
ness Novel (New York, 1963), p. 104.
25Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (Washington
Square, 1956), pp. 139-140.
16
Margaret Church speaks of changes in Joyce's alle
giance, but she is not clear on why the influences she sug
gests are necessarily the correct ones or why each new
influence must carry with it the rejection of the former.
She links Joyce with Jung, Freud, and Vico; she speaks of
the relationship between Joyce and Bergson in several places
since Bergsonism is one of the primary philosophical view
points her book presents. At one point Church says, "In
Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique and in the evoca
tion of the past of his characters, there is evidence of a
sense of la duree" (p. 52). Later she asserts that "Joyce
saw in Viconian cycles a corrective to the uncontrolled flux
of life" (p. 53). In another place she claims that Finne
gans Wake comes close to Bergson's dur£e r^elle (p. 18), yet
in discussing Bergson's influence on writers, contrasting
man's time with eternity, she states,
It is clear then why T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley in
their search for an eternity outside time reject Bergson
and why Joyce, after he had adopted the time of Vico, a
system exterior to man, calls Bergson Bitchson. (p. 9)
There appear to be a number of contradictory of paradoxical
statements about Bergson's influence in Time and Reality.
In 1925 Bernhard Fehr's early study likens the person-
2 6
ality perspectives in Ulysses to Bergson's philosophy.
And Wyndham Lewis' book published shortly afterward makes
^"James Joyce's Ulysses," Englische Studien, LX
(1925), 180-205. Discussed in Magalaner and Kain, p. 201.
17
his position clear.
Without all the uniform pervasive growth of the time-
philosophy starting from the little seed planted by Berg
son, discredited, and now spreading more vigorously than
ever, there would be no Ulysses, or there would be no A la
Recherche du Temps perdu. There would be no "time-compo-
sition" of Miss Stein; no fugues in words. In short, Mr.
Joyce is very strictly of the school of Bergson-Einstein,
Stein-Proust. He is of the great time-school they repre
sent. His book is a time-book, as I have said, in that
sense.27
Wyndham Lewis means this statement to be an indictment, a
condemnation of the novel. He finds a way in his book to
criticize most of the time and space-time philosophies as
under the Bergsonian banner. Allan Thompson's recent dis
sertation supports Joyce's Bergsonism but concludes "that
Joyce is not Bergsonian in the manner Wyndham Lewis claims.
t i 2 8
• • •
When discussing his own technique, Lawrence Durrell
found it important to distinguish Bergsonism from Einstein-
ian relativity.
Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have
turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker
novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition.
This is not Proustian or Joycean method— for they
illustrate Bergsonian "Duration" in my opinion, not
"Space-Time."29
Where Durrell separates Bergson and Einstein, Melvin Fried-
2^Time and Western Man (New York, 1928), p. 89.
2S"Space-Time in James Joyce's Thought: A Study of the
Role of the Artist in History" unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation
(Syracuse, 1960) Dissertation Abstracts, XXII (1961), 265.
^ Balthazar, A Novel (New York, 19 60) opening pages.
18
man recognizes the relationship between Einsteinian space
time and Bergsonian space-time. He apparently disagrees
with Durrell when he says,
In the case of Bergson one finds the seeds of the new
[stream-of-consciousness] method applied to the modern
novel. . . . The altered time-space relationship is per
haps a direct literary application of Bergsonism. . . .
The new time sequence in the modern novel may . . . be
traced directly to Bergson. (pp. 89-90)
Conservative, Friedman does not "insist on an influence nec
essarily" but suggests there is at least parallel develop
ment.
Leon Edel explains that we must look to others— not to
Freud— for influence on Joyce's subjectivity.
When Proust, Joyce, and Dorothy Richardson began to write,
the influence of Freud was only beginning to be felt; and
it is to Bergson, in his influence on Proust (and to some
extent on Joyce) and to William James, in his account of
thought-experience, that we must look as the creators of
the intellectual atmosphere in which the novel of subjec
tivity came into b e i n g . 30
The connection between William James' and Bergson's thought,
alluded to here, is also discussed by Hans Meyerhoff who
agrees that "It is easy to understand why Bergson's philoso
phy has exercised so profound an influence on literature"
(p. 10). A. A. Mendilow reinforces the opinion that Bergson
influenced stream-of-consciousness novelists, saying, "The
stream-of-consciousness novelists it is clear owe a debt to
Bergson and his school as great as that they owe to Freud"
•^The Modern Psychological Novel (rev. ed.; Philadel
phia, 19 64)~ r pT 28 .
19
(p. 153). His description does not contradict Edel's be
cause Mendilow is speaking of the later stream-of-conscious-
ness novelists as well as of the earlier. Shiv Kumar adds,
Bergson's philosophical theories of time, memory, and con
sciousness provide a more useful clue to the understanding
of the new technique [stream of consciousness]. The
emergence of time as a new mode of artistic perception in
the contemporary novel would alone justify the Bergsonian
approach as being more aesthetic than the mechanistic
treatment of psycho-analysts. (p. 4)
Critical commentary for the past forty years identifies
Joyce's writing with Bergson's theory of time. A preponder
ance of critical commentary refers to his influence on
stream-of-consciousness techniques, but much refers to use
of Bergsonian ideas outside stream sections.
I have shown that literary criticism identifies a wide
variety of influences or affinities between philosophers,
psychologists, and Joyce. Aside from assertion that his
time and space are unique, writers indicate that Joyce was
influenced by eastern myth, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St.
Thomas Aquinas, Kirkegaard, Jung, Freud, Whitehead, Ein
stein, William James, Bruno, Vico, and Bergson. And while
correspondences to most of these are not widely supported in
Joyce scholarship, the Vico and Bergson similarities are
well established.
In this study I determine to what extent the ideas and
time structure in Joyce's fiction illustrate Bergsonism.
Joyce's wide reading eliminates the possibility of a single
influence that explains all his time and space use in all
20
his fiction. Critical opinions with regard to influence by
other philosophers on Joyce's writing may or may not be sup
ported by this study. Where the ideas of other philosophers
are in agreement with Bergson's theories, I freely label the
ideas Bergsonian and grant the critical contention that they
are also Jamesian or Einsteinian, or whatever. Where
Joyce's fiction does not correspond with Bergsonism, I call
it non-Bergsonian without attempting to determine which if
any of the philosophers or scientists named by critics holds
a similar view.
After briefly discussing the nature of space and time
with their basic terminology, in Chapter II I summarize and
explain Henri Bergson's theories of time, duration, space,
relativity, the past, present, and future, memory, history,
and recurrence. In the third chapter I present an examina
tion of the time structure in Dubliners, A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. After I determine the
ways Joyce makes use of time in the structure of his fic
tion, the fourth chapter presents the statements about time
and space which Joyce makes either as narrator or through
characters. The specific areas I describe and explain are
time, space, relativity, memory, the past, present, and
future, history, and recurrence. While describing these
topics I use the explanations by critics which help clarify
Joyce's ideas or attitudes in the fiction. In the last
section of this chapter I determine the correlation between
21
Joyce's structural use of time and his statements regarding
it. I conclude the study by determining the correspondences
between Bergsonian theory and Joyce's ideas and fictional
techniques.
CHAPTER II
4
BERGSON ON TIME AND RELATED NOTIONS
The nature of time and space, a question still
unsettled - i n - philosophy, has received increased attention
since the late nineteenth century when Henri Bergson pre
sented the thesis that time is essentially different from
space and therefore cannot be explained in the same terms.
Both time and space have certain basic qualities on which
philosophers substantially agree. One of these--the dimen
sionality of space, that is, its capacity for measurement,
for quantitative description— remains unchallenged. A sec
ond is that some relationship whether real or as a mental
construct exists between time and space. R. M. Maclver
describes other features of the essential nature of time and
space.
We know time . . . as a dimension, a co-ordinate of the
universe. To put it in the roughest terms, space is the
dimension in which things exist, and time is the dimension
in which things change. Whatever other role time may play
in the grand scheme of nature, it has always one specific
operation: it makes change possible. Without change,
without process, we would not even know time.l
^The Challenge of the Passing Years: My Encounter with
Time (New York, 1962), p. 4.
23
Note that Maclver's last statement does not say time would
not exist if there were no process but that we would not
apprehend its existence. Where space is accepted as dimen
sion, time is accepted as a flow, a progression. Hans
Reichenbach describes it in this way:
We are placed in the center of the flow, called the pres
ent; but what now is the present slides into the past,
while we move along to a new present, forever remaining in
the eternal now. We cannot stop the flow, we cannot
reverse it or make it come back; it carries us along
relentlessly and does not grant us a delay.^
Time is accepted as a continuity,.a^succession of moments
described as now. From these basic notions, philosophies
posit different varieties and relationships for time and
space.
A number of terms are usually associated with a study
of time: pace, process, endurance, continuity, recurrence,
succession, transience, clock time, and psychological time.
Time itself is described as a process which may be slower or
faster in relation to another process. Therefore, it would
be inappropriate to speak of time itself as having pace; it
has no natural speed of its own. Clock time is the mechan
ical measure that corresponds to a widely experienced pro
cess measured mechanically. Clock time indicates common
aging but not the highly varied processes of change. Hans
Reichenbach describes mechanical time as "the objective
^The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley and Los
Angeles^ 1954) , p^ 144.
24
structure of the time relation" (p. 144). its application
is seen as a coordinator for personal time and social activ
ity. With regard to cycles, Maclver says that the broad
types of situations do frequently succeed one another in a
certain order, but "the clock of history never, it would
seem, turns back to where it was before" (p. 25).
As usually defined, endurance has to do with time's
quality of lasting, so endurance is relative to transience
which is a short span when compared with other processes.
Maclver describes continuity as having the qualities of
recall and evolution among the modes of time, succession as
meaning ideas of series or of cycles, and recurrence as
indicating the reappearance of a process without any causal
connection (pp. 21-25). Psychological time, le temps
humain, is the awareness by the human consciousness of time
as it affects human lives. This time is private, personal,
subj ective.
Awareness of this personal aspect of time, the time of
process apart from mechanical measure, led Henri Bergson to
the revolutionary theory enunciated first in his Essai sur
les donnges immediates de la conscience (Time and Free
Will), his doctoral dissertation first published in 18 89.
Professor Bergson followed the Essai with a number of later
books and essays which clarified and in some cases adjusted
the emphasis of some aspects of his theory. He said from
the beginning that his is a preliminary investigation, not a
25
system. As his investigation continued he refined or clari
fied his theories.
As with Joyce, I describe and explain Bergson's ideas
about time, space, relativity, the past, present, and
future, memory, history, and recurrence. Other aspects of
his thought having a necessary connection with these receive
only enough explanation in relation to the above to eluci
date Bergson's position. Although Bergson published widely
after Time and Free Will, these nine aspects receive com
plete explanation in Matiere et m^moire (Matter and Memory,
1896), Le Reve (The World of Dreams, 1901) , L'Evolution
cr^atrice (Creative Evolution, 19 07), and Dur§e et simul
taneity (Duration and Simultaneity, 1922).^
Bergson saw that quantities are related to magnitudes—
space— and intensity is purely qualitative. The multiplic
ity of conscious states is qualitative; the multiplicity of
spatial elements is quantitative. The former multiplicity
makes up duration, an interpenetration of heterogeneous ele
ments which is successive but so complex that recurrence is
impossible. Clock time (abstract time) is quantitative,
spatial, a mental construct, and not real time even though
■^After the first citation, where sources of pagination
are not otherwise identified, "TFW" precedes page numbers
for Time and Free Will, "MM" for Matter and Memory, "WD" for
The WorXd~of Dreams, ^CE" for Creative Evolution"," and "DS"
for Duration and Simultaneity.
26
it is representable as such.4 This distinction is of the
utmost importance. As F. L. Pogson says,
Indeed, the whole of Professor Bergson's philosophy cen
ters round his conception of real concrete duration and
the specific feeling of duration which our consciousness
has when it does away with convention and habit and gets
back to its natural attitude. At the root of most errors
in philosophy he finds a confusion between this concrete
duration and the abstract time which mathematics, physics,
and even language and common sense, substitute for it.->
The first task, then, is to view Bergson's concept of
abstract time and duration (dur£e).
In Time and Free Will Bergson describes duration sever
al times. First, he explains that duration involves
refraining from the separations toward which our intellect
tends. He writes:
Pure duration is the form which the succession of our
conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live,
when it refrains from separating its present state from
its former states. For this purpose it need not be
entirely absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for
then, on the contrary, it would no longer endure.
(p. 100)
Succession here means undivided series; it is preoccupation
with the present, but not exclusively. At least a sense of
the past must be with the succession for endurance, that is,
for a lasting quality as opposed to transience. At first
this conception of succession is somewhat troubling because
4Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity with Refer-
ence to Einstein's Theory, trans. Leon Jacobson (New York,
1965), p. 63.
^F. L. Pogson, trans., Time and Free Will: An Essay on
the Immediate Data of Consciousness, by Henri Bergson (Lon
don, 1913) , p^ vii. 13
27
we have become habituated to separating moments in our way
of speaking about time. Bergson is criticized for taking a
view contrary to common sense by obliterating these divi
sions, for claiming they do not exist, but it is essential
to see the divisions as an intellectual convenience to
understand his conception of dur£e. He further explains:
We can . . . conceive of succession without distinction,
and think of it as a mutual penetration, an interconnexion
and organization of elements, each one of which represents
the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it
except by abstract thought. Such i.s the account of dura
tion which would be given by a being who was ever the same
and ever changing, and who had no idea of space. (TFW,
p. 101)
There are several key ideas here. First, Bergson says that
each of the heterogeneous interconnected elements represents
the whole. He later describes these elements as "in one
another" as opposed to the conception of them as side by
side, a spatial conceptualization (TFW, p. 101). And the
fact that each of these moments represents the whole sug
gests the presence of the past, an essential concept in
durge. In order to overcome the mathematical conception,
the spatial view of moments as successive and side by side,
Bergson stresses from the beginning that duration is quali
tative :
In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a
succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and
permeate one another, without precise outlines, without
any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one
another, without any affiliation with number: it would be
pure heterogeneity. (TFW, p. 104)
In later works Bergson's conception of duration remains
2 8
essentially unchanged. In Creative Evolution he presents
the concept graphically as "the continuous progress of the
past which gnaws into the future and swells as it advances.
And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no
limit to its preservation." If anything, the concept
becomes more dynamic; because of the enduring qualities, the
person is ever renewed, ever new, ever creating.
The object may remain the same, I may look at it from the
same side, at the same angle, in the same light; neverthe
less the vision I have of it differs from that which I
have just had, even if only because the one is an instant
older than the other. My memory is there, which conveys
something of the past into the present. My mental state,
as it advances on the road of time, is continually swell
ing with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on
increasing— rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the
snow. {CE, p. 2)
Professor Bergson's stress on duration continues throughout
his later works. He is particularly fond of using musical
analogies to describe the fluidity of duree, stressing that
even here the distinctions between notes and beats must be
effaced if the "multiplicity without divisibility and suc
cession without separation" are to be conceived (DS, p. 44).
Opposed to this continuity of inner life is abstract
time, that is, time as measured, discontinuous, homogeneous.
When these moments are conceived as linear (either side by
side or vertically contingent), they are spatialized concep
tions of time when we think of the moments as distinct. In
^Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur
Mitchell (New York, 1911), p. 4.
29
Time and Free Will Bergson considers this spatial view a
popular and philosophical misconception. He writes:
But familiar with . . . [the idea of space] and indeed
beset by it, we introduce it unwittingly into our feeling
of pure succession; we set our states of consciousness
side by side in such a way as to perceive them simultane
ously, no longer in one another, but alongside one anoth
er; in a word, we project time into space, we express the
duration in terms of extensity, and succession thus takes
the form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of
which touch without penetrating one another. Note that
the mental image thus shaped implies the perception, no
longer successive, but simultaneous, of a before and
after, and that it would be a contradiction to suppose a
succession which was only a succession, and which never
theless was contained in one and the same instant. (p.
101)
This misconception of time as simultaneous, as side by side,
interferes with the true conception which does not have
separate or distinct instants. It is essentially this idea
— the idea of separateness— that Joyce attempts to counter
act in the structure of his later works. When conceived as
measurable and linear, time is spatialized because it takes
on— or would appear to take on— extension, dimensionality
like space. Bergson pursues this difference between the
external— the spatial— and the internal.
When I follow my eyes on the dial of a clock the move
ment of the hand which corresponds to the oscillations of
the pendulum, I do not measure duration, as seems to be
thought; I merely count simultaneities, which is very dif
ferent. Outside of me, in space, there is never more than
a single position of the hand and the pendulum, for
nothing is left of the past positions. Within myself a
process of organization or interpenetration of conscious
states is going on, which constitutes pure duration. It
is because I endure in this way that I picture to myself
what I call the past oscillations of the pendulum at the
same time as I perceive the present oscillation. (TFW,
pp. 107-108)
30
It is, then, the consciousness that connects what appear to
be instants of memory. The instants themselves in abstract
time are frozen like snapshots. Bergson's stress on the
individual consciousness in the perception of time at first
appears to be subjectivism in that only the enduring "I"
gives spurious mental endurance to measurement which exists
separately in space. This linking of spatial instants is
not durSe; Bergson rejects subjectivism because dur^e is
real and as such it exists outside the mind. In Duration
and Simultaneity Bergson clarifies that it is not the expe
rience of duration we are speaking of when we talk of time.
In popular usage, "time" means its measurement, clock time.
Duration refers to the nature and qualities of time; dura
tion is ever flowing, indivisible and unmeasurable, the
reality of time. The difficulty experienced in conceiving
real time stems from an intellect that handles quantity more
readily than quality; we can't measure real time directly.
What the intellect does is see the relation of the flow of
durde to motion, see the motion as in space, and then work
from there with spatial tools of measurement. The result is
clock time.
Because Bergson stresses that duration is apprehended
by the consciousness, because clock measure is merely a
coordinator of personal and social time as Reichenbach sug
gests, real time appears to be a purely subjective thing.
But Bergson dispels this misconception. The descriptions of
31
duration as identical with the continuity of our inner life
and known by intuition Bergson calls "immediately perceived
duration"; he contends that without this we would have no
real idea of time. But then he continues with an inductive
description of how we come to at least a tentative vision of
a dur£e outside ourselves.
How do we pass from this inner time to the time of
things? We perceive the physical world and this percep
tion appears, rightly or wrongly, to be inside and outside
us at one and the same time; in one way, it is a state of
consciousness; in another, a surface film of matter in
which perceiver and perceived coincide. To each moment of
our inner life there thus corresponds a moment of our body
and of all environing matter that is "simultaneous" with
it; this matter then seems to participate in our conscious
duration. Gradually, we extend this duration to the whole
physical world, because we see no reason to limit it to
the immediate vicinity of our body. The universe seems to
us to form a single whole; and, if the part that is around
us endures in our manner, the same must hold, we think,
for that part by which it, in turn, is surrounded, and so
on indefinitely. Thus is born the idea of a duration of
the universe, that is to say, of an impersonal conscious
ness that is the link among all individual conscious
nesses, as between these consciousnesses and the rest of
nature. (DS, p. 45)
This consciousness would be able to perceive the various
rhythms of the other consciousnesses and to see where they
are simultaneous. Though the method is inductive, the
external reality exists and is enduring. This conception is
real time, real universal duration, and the perception of
real space, so Bergson's dur§e cannot be subjectivism.
Moreover, Jacques Chevalier, explaining how for Bergson the
human mind can transcend time and space though not able to
get free of time, says that for Bergson "... There is Be
ing, which absolutely transcends time; the unique and uni
32
versal Being for whom, and for whom alone, time is unique
and universal. Duration, then, is both personal "immedi
ately perceived duration" and also a feature of the enduring
universe. Time when considered extensively may be called
space-time because, as Bergson says, it is spatialized, a
"symbolical image of real duration" (TFW, p. 125). Time
must be spatialized to be measured because the multiplicity
of elements can be conceived only in space. Each instant of
clock time corresponds to a spatial-position of a perceived
motion. Thus their simultaneity is the hyphen between space
and time; it relates the two.
To more fully explain duration and its central position
in Bergson's thought, I will relate it to multiplicity, con
sciousness, movement, and memory. At present just the rela
tionships will be noted; later I will explain the individual
concepts. First, multiplicity in so far as it relates to
number--quantity— belongs to space which is reducible to its
measurement, but time is not. "Growing old and duration
belong to the qualitative order; no analysis, however exten
sive, can reduce them- to pure quantity."’ ®' The consciousness
is our means of immediately apprehending durie and our
inductive means to know the duration outside ourselves. Our
^Henri Bergson, trans. Lilian A. Clare (New York,
1928), p. 319.
®Henri Bergson, Purge et simultangjte, a propos de la
thgorie d1Einstein (Paris, 19 22), p. 241.
33
consciousness doesn't perceive time in units, nor does it
perceive measure. Note, for example, its activity in dreams
or what we commonly call daydreams in which we release con
scious controls. Social measure plays no role in the rela
tionships between dream events. And even though at first
this next concept may seem startling, for Bergson movement
itself is not extensive in space. Science reduces movement
to the space it covers, thus making it measurable and a
means of measuring time. But "Duration and motion," Bergson
writes, "are mental syntheses, not objects. . . . Motion it
self has nothing to do with a line" (TFW, p. 120). Memory
is the connecting link between two simultaneous instants in
space perceived as motion in space. . . It is impossible
to imagine or conceive a connecting link between the before
and after without an element of memory and, consequently, of
consciousness" (DS, p. 4 8). After he links memory and con
sciousness by having the former an activity of the latter,
Bergson discusses the close relation of memory to duration.
To tell the truth, it is impossible to distinguish between
duration, however short it may be, that separates two
instants and a memory that connects them, because duration
is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists
into what does exist. This is real time perceived and
lived. (DS, p. 49)
Memory, consciousness, and duration are inextricably bound;
multiplicity, space, and space-time are closely related con
cepts. In discussing each of these separately, I will
attempt not only to give Bergson's description of the con
34
cept under consideration but to show how it fits in with the
related theories.
From his earliest work Bergson distinguishes two forms
of multiplicity, the one quantitative and the other qualita
tive. He writes:
We should therefore distinguish two forms of multiplic
ity, two very different ways of regarding duration, two
aspects of conscious life. Below homogeneous duration,
which, is the extensive symbol of true duration, a close
psychological analysis distinguishes a duration whose
heterogeneous moments permeate one anotheir; -below the
numerical multiplicity of conscious states, a qualitative
multiplicity; below the self with well-defined states, a
self in which succeeding each other means melting into one
another and forming an organic whole. But we are gener-
ally content with the first . . . (TFW, p. 128)
Professor Bergson, then, sees two kinds of multiplicity.
The first is that of material objects related to number.
The second is multiplicity of states of consciousness which
are not numerical but qualitative. Any measurement here
would be symbolic, a spatializing activity. This first
relates to clock time, the second to durge.
Bergson defines space in Time and Free Will as "an
empty homogeneous medium" (p. 95). He continues,
. . . It is scarcely possd-ble to give any other defini
tion of space; space is what enables us to distinguish a
number of identical and simultaneous sensations from one
another; it is thus a principle of differentiation other
than~that of qualitative differentiation, and consequently
it is a reality with no quality. (p. 95)
Space is homogeneous, that is, a kind of medium which con
tains quantitatively perceived objects and permits them to
be separated, distinguished, or added together. With space
defined as homogeneous and unbounded, consisting of the
absence of every quality, there can be no way of distin
guishing between forms of homogeneity. Thus Bergson con
cludes that every homogeneous and unbounded medium will be
space. "Objects in space," he says, "form a discrete multi
plicity, and . . . every discrete multiplicity is got by a
process of unfolding in space" (TFW, p. 120). Bergson draws
two conclusions from the nature of space. Since only space
is unbounded and homogeneous, if time shared these traits
with space, time and space would be indistinguishable. But
those who "treat time and space as alike, as both homogeneous
and unbounded media, err because they could not distinguish
the two. Rather, "time, conceived under the form of an
unbounded and homogeneous medium, isn't thing but a ghost of
space haunting the reflective consciousness" (TFW, p. 99).
In short, it is fictitious. The second conclusion Bergson
draws is that "there is neither duration nor even succession
in space, if we give these words the meaning in which con
sciousness takes them: each of the so-called successive
states of the eternal world exists alone ..." (TFW, p.
120). It is the consciousness that sees the multiplicity
by retaining the states and setting them side by side. The
role of the consciousness in space is to perceive changing
relationships. Finally, space for Bergson is three-dimen
sional, not n-dimensional. ". . .A space of more than
three dimensions is a mere idea in the mind and cannot cor-
36
respond to any reality. Whereas three-dimensional space is
that of our experience" (DS, p. 135). By explaining it as
three dimensional, Bergson appears to associate space with
matter, with that which occupies the empty, homogeneous
medium he earlier defined. But he does recognize that the
two are separate; he is assuming matter when he speaks of
dimensionality in space because space by definition is an
empty, homogeneous medium.
Space plays so important a role in man's thinking
because the intellect copes with quantity, measurement, more
easily and thoroughly than it can cope with qualities. Due
to the difficulty in apprehending the qualitative, the
intellect tends to convert qualitative differences to quan
titative terms related to size or relative position. Only
matter— not quality--is measurable by science; it is the
consciousness which immediately perceives the reality of the
qualitative which science can measure only symbolically.
Bergson explains the relation of motion to time suc
cinctly:
It is . . . quite true that time is measured through
the intermediary of motion. But it is necessary to add
that, if this measurement of time by motion is possible,
it is, above all, because we are capable of performing
motions ourselves and because these motions then have a
dual aspect. As muscular sensation, they are a part of
the stream of our conscious life, they endure; as visual
perception, they describe a trajectory, they claim a
space. (DS, p. 50)
Motion, then, has an interior aspect associated with sensa
tion as well as a spatial aspect. And note that as visual
37
perception motion merely "describes" a trajectory. Bergson
further stresses that science measures not the motion itself
but its trajectory, that is, the space which the motion
covers, for at each measured point the motion is stop-
action, a simultaneity or instantaneity rather than a pro
gress from one position to another. Lorena Underhill
explains that "It is chiefly through motion that duration
assumes the form of a homogeneous medium, and that time is
projected into space.As science errs on motion, it errs
on time which it views as a kind of measurable trajectory in
space similar to that of motion.
When theories of relativity burst upon the-philosophic
and scientific scene, many saw them as a breakthrough, a new
concept of a fourth dimension. Students of Bergson could
only nod in agreement when Bergson observed,
It is true that exactly at the moment of our passing
from the unfolding to the unfolded, it would have been
necessary to endow space with an extra dimension. More
than thirty years ago we pointed out that spatialized time
is really a fourth dimension of space. Only this fourth
dimension allows us to juxtapose what is given as suc
cession: without it, we would have no room. Whether a
universe has three, two or a single dimension, or even
none at all and reduces to a point, we can always convert
the indefinite succession of all its events into instan
taneous or eternal juxtaposition by the sole act of grant
ing it an additional dimension. (DS, pp. 58-59)
Bergson does not develop a relativity theory as Minkowski,
Lorentz, and Einstein did, even though he is aware of the
Q
Bergson's Conception of Duration," The University of
Colorado Studies, XI (November, 1914), 196.
38
relationship, because relativity theories are based on fic
titious time. Bergson's philosophy not only recognizes the
relativity of space and time as a four-dimensional con
struct, but his theory of general or universal time involves
instead of instants, simultaneous durations of separate con
sciousnesses and processes, these durations having time
relative to each other (DS, pp. 52-53). They work within
the single real time. Even in the relativity theories,
Bergson claims, only one time is real measurement; the
others are virtual (DS, p. 149).
He continues his description of measured time, explain
ing:
Immanent in our measurement of time . . . is the ten
dency to empty its content into a space of four dimensions
in which past, present, and future are juxtaposed or su
perimposed for all eternity. This tendency simply
expresses our inability mathematically to translate time
itself, our need to replace it, in order to measure it, by
simultaneities which we count. These simultaneities are
instantaneities; they do not partake of the nature of real
time; they do not endure. They are purely mental views
that stake out conscious duration and real motion with
virtual stops, using for this purpose the mathematical
point that has been carried over from space to time.
But if our science thus attains only to space, it is
easy to see why the dimension of space that has come to
replace time is still called time. It is because our con
sciousness is there. It infuses living duration into a
time dried up as space. Our mind, interpreting mathemat
ical time, retraces the path it has traveled in obtaining
it. (DS, p. 60)
Here Bergson explains space-time as space, as virtual time
insofar as our consciousness sees it partake of the nature
of duration because we cannot conceive time as such in meas
ured form. Space-time becomes a mental construct, something
39
fabricated from the methods we apply to space. But we do
not need a theory of relativity to explain or conceive it.
As Bergson writes,
We cannot repeat often enough: the mathematician's
time is necessarily a time that is measured, and there
fore, a spatialized time. We need not take the position
of relativity: from any standpoint, mathematical time can
be treated as an additional dimension of space (we pointed
this out more than thirty years ago). (DS, pp. 136-137)
In fact, the notation of a fourth dimension is introduced
automatically into a relativity theory. Bergson contends
that space-time has always been implicit in our science and
our language. But here the contribution of relativity the
ories comes_to_the fore. Where before we had the conception
of the fourth dimension, relativity theories have to consid
er it in their calculations. Bergson says,
And this [mathematical calculation] leads to the double
effect of endosmosis and exosmosis between time and space,
to their reciprocal encroachment. . . . It now becomes
necessary, in locating a point, to indicate explicitly its
position in time as well as in space. (DS, p. 134)
This conceptualized four-dimensional world is fictional be
cause it is merely a symbolization of space-time, itself a
mathematical construct.
Bergson distinguishes between two varieties of space
time. One refers to "a real environment in which real be
ings and objects evolve" (DS, pp. 149-150). The other
space-time, Einstein's, is only virtual, imagined; "...
The essence of the theory of relativity is to rank the real
vision with the virtual visions" (DS, p. 151). For Bergson,
in relativity space and time remain separate though they may
40
be viewed as coordinate. But in any case he says that
. . . The space-time of the theory of relativity will
hardly be any more incompatible with our long-standing
concept of duration than was a four-dimensional space-and-
time symbolizing both ordinary space and spatialized time.
(DS, p. 135)
This is because both are conceptualizations for the purpose
of making measurements. So far as_an observer is concerned,
the amalgam of the two exists only in his mind.
What is real, that is, observed or observable, is the
separate space and time with which he deals in his system.
He can associate them in a four-dimensional continuum;
this we all do, more or less confusedly, when we spatial-
ize time, and we spatialize it as soon as we measure it.
But space and time then remain invariant. They amalgamate
or, more precisely, their invariance is transferred . . .
only for our phantasmal observers. (DS, p. 155)
Finally, Bergson says that there is a double danger one
exposes himself to when he symbolizes time as a fourth
dimension of space. The first is that he may take all of
the unfolding past, present, and future history of the world~
as really simultaneous— all together in eternity--with only
his mind in motion as he moves along a file of static__spa-
tial events. The second risk is that with space-and-time or
space-time thus constituted, one may feel free to choose
between an infinity of possible divisions of space and time.
Thus the real and original relationship of space and time
would appear as only one of a possible multitude when he can
arbitrarily choose any as appropriate. Professor Bergson
stresses continually that measured time is only symbolized
by space. In reality there is no space-time; space-time is
a necessity of scientific measurement, and when conceived as
41
such there is no conflict between Bergson's and Einstein’s
theories.
Memory plays a key role in Bergson's philosophy. He
explains its importance to the idea of durge.
Without an elementary memory that connects the two mo
ments, there will be only one or the other, consequently a
single instant, no before and after, no succession, no
time. We can bestow upon this memory just what is needed
to make the connection; it will be, if we like, this very
connection, a mere continuing of the before into the
immediate after with a perpetutally [sic] renewed forget
fulness of what is not the immediately prior moment. (DS,
p. 48)
Memory is therefore essential to a concept of duree, the
past, history, or any apprehensible continuity of the self.
Duration, consciousness, and memory imply each other. Berg
son also views perception as closely associated with memory
though separate from it.
Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories,
and inversely, a memory, as we shall show later, only be
comes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into
which it slips. These two acts, perception and recollec
tion, always interpenetrate each other, are always ex
changing something of their substance as by a process of
endosmosis.10
This position explains the activity of the consciousness
which was later worked out in literature by the interior
monologue techniques where perceptions and memories inter
mingle. The relationship is so close that Bergson says the
two activities are inseparable in practice. Memory with
perception "contracts into a single intuition many moments
•^Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W.'
Scott Palmer (New Yor k, 1913) , p. 72.
42
of duration" (MM, p. 80).
Bergson has a complete theory of memory which explains
its relationship not only to various forms of perception but
also to matter perceived. For the purposes of this study,
however, these relationships need not be explored. What is
of importance is the ways in which the past survives into
the present. Bergson sees the past as surviving "under two
distinct forms: first, the motor mechanisms; secondly, in
independent recollections" (MM, p. 87). The first, the
"motor mechanism" is habit memory; that is, something such
as a lesson or a poem learned by heart. Like a habit it is
acquired by repetition, by a conscious effort, and to
achieve it the entire action is broken down and recon
structed. "Like every bodily exercise, it is stored up in a
mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial
impulse, in a closed system of automatic movements ..."
(MM, p. 90). These movements are like the playing of a
record; everything comes successively in the same order and
each repetition takes the same time for playing. Habit mem
ories are a complex stock response.
Professor Bergson calls the other type of memory "pure"
or "spontaneous" memory. It does not have the characteris
tics of habit. For example, when in the process of memoriz
ing something such as a poem, any recollections we may have
of individual readings, of insights we gained or extrinsic
experiences such as a toothache, are "imprinted at once" on
43
our memories (MM, p. 90). In this way they differ from
habit memories which are imprinted by process.
It is like an event in my life; its essence is to bear a
date, and consequently to be unable to occur again . . .
and though my effort to recall this image becomes more and
more easy as I repeat it, the image, regarded in itself,
was necessarily at the outset what it always will be.
(MM, p. 90)
According to this description, if a person has an experi
ence, whether impressive or not, and he recalls it years
later, its chances of being recalled again are greater for
having been remembered once; moreover, the experience will
not alter with repetitions but will carry its original
import. Leitmotifs in literature can be explained as pure
memories because they recur unaltered.
In order for a pure memory to occur there must be some
catalytic occurrence. Bergson explains that the appeal to
which memory responds comes from the present. Not only do
present events or sensations call up the memory, but "it is
from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a
memory borrows the warmth and gives it life" (MM, p. 197).
These memories, then, are not dead recollections but to the
consciousness they are present, living experiences which
usually appear and disappear independently of the will.
", . . Entirely spontaneous, [a memory] is as capricious in
reproducing as it is faithful in preserving" (MM, p. 102).
Bergson concludes that spontaneous or pure memory is
memory "par excellence." Habit memory, which is the one
that psychologists usually study, is "habit interpreted by
44
memory" rather than memory itself (MM, p. 95), because it is
at the call of the will and acts a past experience but
doesn't "call up its image" (MM, p. 19 5) like a spontaneous
memory. Bergson says that true memory,
Co-extensive with consciousness, retains and ranges along
side of each other all our states in the order in which
they occur, leaving to each fact its place and . . . mark
ing its date, truly moving in the past and not . . . in an
ever renewed present. (MM, p. 19 5)
The habit memory is an ever-renewed present because it does
not carry with it the associations which make pure memories
of the past live when called to the present.
Having distinguished the two memories, Bergson explains
that the two "run side by side and lend to each other mutual
support" (MM, p. 9 8). For example, in reciting the mem
orized verse, one of the readings with its attendant circum
stances of toothache may come spontaneously to mind, or if
again we have a toothache the poem may come into memory.
Bergson's concept of the past is closely tied to his
idea of memory, duration, consciousness, and space-time.
The interdependence was first stated in Time and Free Will.
Owing to the fact that our consciousness has organized
them [past events] as a whole in memory, they are first
preserved and afterwards disposed in a series: in a word,
we create for them a fourth dimension of space, which we
call homogeneous time and which enables the movement of
the pendulum, although taking place at one spot, to be
continually set in juxtaposition to itself. Now, if we
try to determine the exact part played by the real and
imaginary in this very complex process, this is what we
find. There is a real space, without duration, in which
phenomena appear and disappear simultaneously with our
states of consciousness. There is a real duration, the
heterogeneous moments of which permeate each other; each
moment, however, can be brought into relation with a state
45
of the external world which is contemporaneous with it,
and can be separated from the other moments in consequence
of this very process. The comparison of these two reali
ties gives rise to the symbolical representation of dura
tion, derived from space. Duration thus assumes the illu
sory form of a homogeneous medium, and the connecting link
between these two terms, space and duration, is simultane
ity, which might be defined as the intersection of time
and space. (pp. 109-110)
This explanation of the interrelationships of terms leads to
an understanding of past, present, and future. They are
organized as one in memory, heterogeneous, an intermingled
unity. Then events become frozen in a linear order, one
after the other, one seen as past and another as future in
relation to an event occupying a center position in the
series. But this homogeneous time is not reality but spa-
tialization of what is in reality a unity. Our states of
consciousness are in a durative flow and exist simultane
ously with the phenomena which come and go in space. This
consciousness is heterogeneous duration; that is, there are
no temporal separations as such possible in it though for
purposes of measurement we construct the relationship of
past events and the symbolic space-time representation of
duration. The intellect constructs a series of simultane
ities, one after the other, which are past, present, and
future in relation to each other.
Bergson cautions that we should not let ourselves
become confused by our language's expressions such as
"between now and then" because there is in reality no such
interval.
46
. . . The interval of duration exists only for us and on
account of the interpenetration of our conscious states.
Outside ourselves we should find only space, and conse
quently nothing but simultaneities. (TFW, p. 116)
These simultaneities are not successive; succession comes by
the mental process of comparing past and present.
Bergson has been criticized for believing that we pre
serve the past itself in memory. Although some of his
expressions sound as if he holds this opinion, he does not.
He writes,
We assert, at the outset, that if there be memory, that
is, the survival of past images [italics added] these
images must constantly mingle with our perception of the
present, and may even take its place. For if they have
survived it is with a view to utility; at every moment
they complete our experience already acquired. (MM,
p. 70)
It is the images that survive and these participate in the
present. And, although Bergson stresses the close interre
lationship of the past and present, the presence of the
past, he clearly distinguishes the two.
For Bergson, the present is what is acting; the past
acts no longer. He says:
But there is much more between past and present than a
mere difference of degree. My present is that which
interests me, which lives for me, and in a word, that
which summons me to action; whereas my past is essentially
powerless. (MM, p. 17 6)
It is on the present, then, that Bergson places his stress.
"The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall
comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of
forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new"
Bergson writes in Creative Evolution (p. 11). The present,
47
that which lives, is the source of creation, becoming,
change. Because time is duration, the past is there:
" . . . What we do depends on what we are" (CE, p. 7) and
what we are is in process, becoming. Past, present, future
are not real distinctions but conveniences of classifica
tion. In the process of creation the present is a "force
which . . . continues to create in a duration which is real
and concrete, in which the past and present form but one--in
short, in 'absolute duration'" (CE, p. 283).
In Matter and Memory Bergson explains the interrela
tionship between temporal distinctions while stressing the
present.
What I call "my present” has one foot in my past and
another in my future. In my past, first, because "the
moment in which I am speaking is already far from me"; in
my future, next, because this moment is impending over the
future: it is to the future that I am tending, and could
I fix this indivisible present, this infinitesimal element
of the curve of time, it is the direction of the future
that it would indicate. The psychical state, then, that I
call "my present" must be both a perception of the immedi
ate past and a determination of the immediate future.
(p. 177)
The present is a psychical state which involves a sensation
and a movement because there is no division between moments.
By describing it as having a foot in the past and one in the
future Bergson represents graphically the present's tendency
toward becoming and the influence of the past on it.
Last, we must determine how the past is preserved so
that it may be active in the present. The preservation can
involve no conscious process, for that composes habit mem
48
ory. Bergson says that "In reality the past is preserved by
itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it fol
lows us at every instant" (CE, p. 5). He goes on to explain
that the past is complete, involving all past thoughts and
sensations, impressions, and willed acts ever since infancy
if not prenatal tendencies. And the past is constantly
growing as the present joins it. This increasing pool is
always ready to be a part of the present.
Bergson does not discuss history as such, that is,
history as a discipline, as the record of facts separate
from consciousness and existing in space. What brief dis
cussion he makes of history is really discussion of the
past, the two terms at times interchangeable in his writing.
To determine his attitudes we must see how he uses the term
to relate to character or change. He speaks, for instance,
of character as "the condensation of the history we have
lived from our birth— nay even before our birth, since we
bring with us prenatal dispositions ..." (CE, p. 5). This
tells us nothing more than his discussions of the past
except that even prenatal conditions affect behavior.
Later, discussing personality, Bergson sees our states
each as a "moment in history that gradually is unfolding"
(CE, p. 6). This view of history as a process with separate
stages is reinforced by his description of evolution as "a
unique series of acts that really constitute a history"
(CE, p. 36). The conception of history as a series of
49
stages is stated elsewhere in other connections. For exam
ple, Bergson writes,
Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being
taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing that
endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into the
present, and abides there, actual and acting. How other
wise could we understand that it passes through distinct
well-marked phases, that it changes its age— in short,
that it has a history? (CE, p. 15)
History, then, may be described as the record of a series of
states and changes in these states. It is a written record
just as memory is an unwritten record; it is consciously
preserved just as pure memory is automatically preserved.
The making of a history is an act of intellect rather than
intuition, and like other spatializations of duration, his
tory is virtual rather than real. Bergson has no negative
attitude toward history so long as its relationship to real
concrete duration, the duration of the universe, is under
stood. Just as the spatialization of time or of events in
one's life is a means of measuring the qualitative, probably
for Bergson historical records are a means of recording
quantitatively what is in reality qualitative.
Recurrence— that is, temporal recurrence— is impossible
in Bergson's view. Life is a "continual elaboration Of the
absolutely new" (CE, p. 11). Duration means invention, time
in a constant flux, so there can be no temporal recurrence.
But Bergson recognizes a sense of recurrence as natural to
man. By the very nature of man's intellect he searches for
patterns, sees similarities. Bergson recognizes that all
50
scientific discovery depends on recurrence; without it there
can be no science. Although memory implies recurrence, a
memory is not an actual recurrence but a new manifestation
of a similar or identical cause. And he considers an action
impressed by habit memory a present occurrence each time it
is called upon.
I have explained Bergson's views of time, space, rela
tivity, memory, the past, present, and future, history, and
recurrence. A large number of scholars and literary critics
point out his influence on philosophy and on literature.
Georges Poulet places him in his historical context and
indicates his contribution to modern thought.
In its essence as in its historical role, the thought of
Bergson is transitional. Its function is to join the past
and the future. On the one hand it is deeply rooted in
the nineteenth century. . . . For Bergson, as for the
romantics, the human being discovers himself in the depths
of memory . . . ; on the other hand, . . . all genuine
thought is thought of the continuous becoming of things. • * - - * -
But Bergson's conception of becoming differs from that of
the nineteenth century in one significant respect. For
Bergson becoming is active, not passive; man is changing,
not being changed. Thus Bergson's is a creative philosophy
rather than one that merely dwells on the past.
Poulet then summarizes Bergson's major contribution to
twentieth-century thought.
It is, without doubt, in this that the originality of
•^Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Balti
more , 19 56X, pT 34.
51
Bergson consists, and his share in establishing the
thought of his century. Not in his conception of memory,
nor in his philosophy of the continuous, but in his af
firmation that duration is something other than history or
a system of laws; that it is free creation: "Instead of
considering the present itself, the present present,"
writes Peguy, "what was in fact considered a present that
was past, a present congealed and stilled, a present
arrested, set down; a determined present. An historic
present . . . Whereas the present is something that has
not yet become past, and the cognizance of the present is
of something that has not yet become history: it is free
dom; the free is that which is not yet booked and jailed
(Oeuvres, NFR, IX, 242)." (p. 35)
Bergson's doctrine of free will leading to his view of the
creative present in real duration set a direction in modern
thought. Many writers describe his contribution to modern
literature, especially to literary techniques associated
with the subjective novel. But less is written of the
broader implications of his thought on literature. Enid
Starkie summarizes that contribution.
Bergson's doctrine may not have altered the course of
philosophical reflection, but he did affect literary
thought, and what writers call philosophy, with the result
that the focus of personality was no longer intelligence,
but intuition and feeling; and that the most precious
intimation of experience, the immediate data of conscious
ness, was considered, at best, half conscious, and capable
only of being revealed to the artist's p r o b i n g . ^
1 0
"Bergson and Literature," The Bergsonian Heritage,
ed. Thomas Hanna (New York, 1962), p. 98.
CHAPTER III
TIME STRUCTURES
In this study of the time structures of Joyce's
Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and
Ulysses, I present a summary of the ways Joyce uses time
while giving special attention to the techniques that may
help show Joyce's ideas and attitudes toward time. Even
though the stories in Dubliners were not written in the
order in which they appear, I do not attempt to show chang
ing views or uses of time from story to story. Rather, I
point out Joyce's fictional techniques which illustrate a
Bergsonian viewpoint.
A number of terms are necessary to describe what Joyce
is doing with time in his fiction. To distinguish various
degrees of pastness, I refer to events that occurred earlier:
the same day or within a few days as "recent past" and to an
experience or known event within a character's lifetime as
"experienced past." References to events before the charac
ter's lifetime are "historical past," and "general past"
indicates events for which Joyce does not supply exact time
clues,
Reminiscences are "pure" or "spontaneous" memories when
52
53
they come to mind unbidden and without the character's hav
ing made a conscious effort to memorize or remember them.
"Habit memory" refers to memorized information and "con
scious memory" to any conscious attempts at recalling an
incident or event.
■Because Joyce uses different kinds of interior mono
logue to represent the levels of consciousness, the descrip
tions of techniques supplied by Robert Humphrey in Stream of
Consciousness in the Modern Novel are a useful tool. He
describes "four basic techniques used in presenting stream
of consciousness. They are direct interior monologue, indi
rect interior monologue, omniscient description, and solilo
quy."-1 - The first, exemplified by Molly's monologue in
Ulysses, is the farthest from the conscious. This is the
technique in which the author disappears or nearly disap
pears in that his presence is not felt in organizing the
character's thoughts, and in the direct monologue no audi
ence is assumed. The indirect interior monologue is usually
presented grammatically in the third person with the
author's presence felt; the omniscient description is third
person description by a narrator of a character's thoughts,
and the soliloquy is the closest to the surface of con
sciousness. In it the character assumes the presence of an
audience and speaks coherently to it. Sometimes Joyce uses
^Humphrey develops these concepts on pp. 24-38.
54
two of these levels in a monologue section, but he has no
soliloquies in his fiction.
A number of critics describe the methods used by
stream-of-consciousness novelists to achieve their particu
lar organization of space and time. Harry Levin (p. 88) and
Robert Humphrey (p. 49) write of the use of the montage and
other cinematic devices such as multiple view, panorama,
flashback, the close-up and fade-out, and Humphrey further
distinguishes between time-montage and space-montage. Hugh
Kenner (p. 114) and Melvin Friedman (pp. 13, 126, 131)
describe literary counterpoint, a borrowing from musical
composition which, Friedman says, was devised by Henri Berg
son (p. 131). David Daiches speaks of alternation inter-
spersed with irrelevant elements. Hans Meyerhoff desig
nates the device as "co-presence” (p. 49), and A. Walton
Litz speaks of it as fragmented chronology and fugal form.
Leon Edel describes the process as fourfold modes of subjec
tivity: point of view, discontinuity, simultaneity, and
time [continuous present] (p. 198). Finally, Joseph Frank
develops the theory of spatial form to explain the unique
movement in the stream-of-consciousness novels.
This stream-of-consciousness criticism provides
^The Novel in the Modern World (Chicago, 1964), p. 108.
^"Spatial Form in the Modern Novel," Critiques and
Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1959, ed. j"! W i Aldridge (New
York, 1952), pp. 43-66.
55
insights which describe what Joyce is doing with space and
time in his fiction. One useful description is that of mon
tage .
Bloom's mind is . . . a motion picture, which has been
ingeniously cut and carefully edited to emphasize the
close-ups and fade-outs of flickering emotion, the angles
of observation and the flashbacks of reminiscence.
(Levin, p. 88)
Robert Humphrey becomes more specific, defining montage as
"essentially a method to show composite or diverse views of
one subject— in short, to show multiplicity" (p. 49). The
importance of the montage for fiction, he explains, is that
the montage and its accompanying techniques are attempts at
"transcending or modifying arbitrary and conventional time
and space barriers" (p. 50). Their purpose, then, is to
express simultaneity and movement. Humphrey follows
Daiches1 distinction between two kinds of montage, the
space-montage and the time-montage. The former refers to
the technique in which time remains fixed and the spatial
element changes; this technique is also called "multiple
view." The time-montage has a subject fixed in space and
the consciousness moves in time with the result that there
is a "super-imposition of images or ideas from one time on
those of another" (p. 50). Humphrey alludes to the Molly
monologue as an example of time-montage and to "The Wander
ing Rocks" as an example of space-montage.
Daiches adds an insight into a specific way by which
Joyce gains simultaneity. Joyce, he observes, finds that
56
mere alternation is not enough, and in addition . . .
introduces, without warning, sentences from an earlier or
later set of paragraphs which are quite irrelevant to the
event being described in this particular spot but which
refer to something happening elsewhere at exactly the same
time. (p. 108)
This device complements the space-montage in "The Wandering
Rocks." A good example occurs at the end of "Nausicaa" in
which Joyce flashes three different scenes between the calls
of the cuckoo clock.
Leon Edel's fourth mode of subjectivity helps to
explain the relationship between the present chronological
time {time forward) and the monologues in the stream-of-
consciousness novel. He describes the monologues as a "con
tinuous present outside of history" (p. 198). We are in
this "subjective time," clock-time continuity, while the
mind is in monologue. In Joyce's novels, time forward--the
movement of the clock--may be a few seconds while many pages
describe the characters' concurrent psychological or subjec
tive time. Clock time provides continuity for the subjec
tive flow.
The concept of literary counterpoint is not so valuable
as other descriptions of space-time relationships because
the term is often used loosely to describe any attempt at
time-montage or space-montage, that is, th.e alternation of
normal space-time occurrence and connection. As Melvin
Friedman points out,
Literary counterpoint is not, strictly speaking, thfe
simultaneous presentation of a series of images or situa
tions; variation in tenses is not the same thing as vari
57
ation in scale forms and tonalities. (p. 126)
Because this term is used widely, Friedman's description of
its specific value when speaking of Joyce's fiction is
important. He writes:
The use of literary counterpoint has been treated in
connection with the new time-space connection suggested by
Bergson and has really no important usage in literature
apart from that. It is doubtless an ersatz product for
what is incommunicable in any art but music. Even when
Joyce attempts to counterpoint a great variety of voices
and musical sounds in the Sirens section of Ulysses by
having one sound overlap another and one image interweave
and combine with another— though probably the most studied
application of the technique of sensory impression in all
contemporary literature— the themes of the episode still
alternate and succeed one another. This is unavoidable.
{p. 131)
The counterpoint is thematic, not temporal because Joyce
interweaves sounds and images rather than different times or
different times and places.
Joseph Frank's "spatial form" is similar to what
Humphrey calls space-montage: the consciousness stopped in
time (clock time) with the spatial element changing. Joseph
Frank recognizes that "Joyce composed his novel [Ulysses] of
an infinite number of references and cross-references which
relate to one another independently of the time-sequence of
the narrative ..." (p. 44). He explains that before the
book fits together in a clear temporal order the reader must
suspend some events and wait for others until all can slip
into place. Only then can the novel be viewed as a whole.
Frank stresses the spatial element of the book because he
sees Joyce's intention as building a "sense of Dublin as a
58
totality" in the mind of the reader (p. 46).
Spatial form— simultaneity in the space-montage--
depends on the stoppage of clock time in the narrative line.
The other space-time technique--time-montage--depends on
temporal continuity with fluid movement between past, pres
ent, and future. And even though the clock may be stopped
in a space-montage passage, the sense of time, qualitative
time, continues to flow because it is not measurable or
separable into instants. Hans Meyerhoff writes,
"Stream of consciousness" signifies what the symbolism of
time and the river has always meant to convey, namely,
that time as experienced [psychological time] has the
quality of "flowing," and that this quality is an enduring
element within the constantly changing and successive
moments of time. (p. 16)
The work of these critics provides an adequate termi
nology to describe the many kinds of time-space relation
ships in Joyce's fiction. The descriptions of various
levels of consciousness in the interior monologues provide a
means of differentiating the quality and amount of time-
space shift. The direct interior monologue, for example, a
representation of the working of the mind when the least
conscious control is present, allows the author to express
heterogeneity, an interconnection of impressions and sensa
tions and memories without relation to their original order
of occurrence. The indirect interior monologue uses tense
shifts to distinguish at least relative time differences,
but nevertheless by heterogeneous references it represents
59
the mind's flow when it is more controlled than in the
direct interior monologue. In omniscient description the
narrator reconstructs the stream of thoughts of a character.
This control usually results in a less fluid mixing of
space-time relationships through sensations and memories.
Identifying the monologue type, then, helps indicate the
degree of space-time fluidity.
The concept of the montage aids the analysis of space
time relationships because distinguishing space-montages and
time-montages accounts for the different effects when either
time is stopped or spatial relationships stop while the
character's thoughts continue to flow. Furthermore, in the
total organization of a book, the concept of spatial form
describes the structure by indicating the relationship
between the sequence of events as narrated and their origi
nal order of occurrence in the linear sequence of measured
time. The concept of subjective time continuity is neces
sary to space-time analysis because that continuity is the
measurable progression of moments that occur while the mind
of a character ranges in monologue. It accounts for the
fact that many memories or sensations told for several pages
may occur during an activity that is completed in seconds.
The relationships of time and space in the interior
monologue and the techniques employed to gain specific
effects are complex. It is often not necessary to identify
the specific time-space technique Joyce is using in the
60
structure of a scene. In these cases I describe the time
and space relationships as "simultaneity," "montage," "frag
mented," or "ranging in space and time." Essentially,
Humphrey's space-montages and time-montages, Daiches1 alter
nations with irrelevancies, Edel's subjective continuity as
well as the other terms explain space-time flux and simul
taneity.
Dubliners^
In a letter to Grant Richards on May 5, 1906, Joyce
tells his plan for his collection of short stories, Dub
liners .
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history
of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because
that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have
tried to present it to the indifferent public under four
of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and
public life. The stories are arranged in this order.5
Though the characters and situations differ, Joyce clearly
attempts to incorporate a variety of ages in Dubliners in
order to create a variegated picture. The ordering of the
stories presents a kind-of chronological progression. Joyce
pictures childhood in "The Sisters," "An Encounter," and
Pagination for Dubliners is from the Viking Press Com
pass edition (1958), for A Portrait from the Viking Press
Compass edition (1956), and for Ulysses from the Modern
Library edition (1961). "D," "P," or "U" precede page
references for which the source of the quotation is not
otherwise identified.
r:
Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, II (New
York, 1966) , 134'.
61
"Araby." Most of the stories tell of young and middle-aged
adults. William Powell Jones notes that the stories occur
in contrasting pairs.® Each of these pairs presents char
acters who are older than those in the previous story. "Ivy
Day in the Committee Room," "A Mother," and "Grace" portray
the public life of Dublin. To the pattern of stories noted
in the letter to Grant Richards, Joyce added "The Dead" as
an epilogue that unites the categories of maturity and pub
lic life.
The three stories of children and adolescents are in
the first person; the rest of the stories are told by a
third-person narrator as past events. As such they are all
recollections. A. A. Mendilow calls this technique the
"fictive present" of the "common run of novels ..."
(p. 94). In fictive-present novels the reader thinks of the
action as present because the past-tense action is in pro
cess. Most of the stories in Dubliners are told in usual
chronological sequence. The shifts in time are primarily
forward with the period of the shift specified by Joyce's
use of standard transitions, so they are not- departures from
usual fictional practice. But the occurrence of interior
monologues or subjective continuity devices are significant
because they may be the working out in fiction of Joyce's
views of time or memory. Many of the stories have conver-
®James Joyce and the Common Reader (Norman, 1955),
p. 15.
62
sations that range freely in space and time, but this rang
ing is natural in conversations, especially those that
involve reminiscences. In "Ivy Day in the Committee Room,"
for example, the mention of names acts as a catalyst to rem
iniscences related to the topics being discussed. Some of
the stories have omniscient description monologues with
events in the fictive present providing the subjective con
tinuity; others like "After the Race" move chronologically
from beginning to end either without reminiscences or inte
rior monologues or with very few.
The use of pure memories is a dominant feature of the
stories in Dubliners. With the exception of "After the
Race" and "A Mother," all the stories contain pure reminis
cences. Often a present event acts as a catalyst to memory.
For example, in "The Dead" the song The Lass of Augrim is
the catalyst to memories for Gretta. And just before this
Joyce writes that "Moments of their secret life together
burst like stars upon his [Gabriel's] memory. This state
ment suggests that the memories arise spontaneously. "An
Encounter" and "Counterparts" contain only brief pure memo
ries but memory plays a prominent part in "Eveline" and "The
Dead." Joyce also indicates the presence of conscious mem
ory in Dubliners. The narrator of "Araby" says, "Remember
ing with difficulty why I had come . . ." (p. 35). And when
the narrator of "A Painful Case" writes that Duffy "tried to
fix her permanently in his memory" (p. 109) he is suggesting
63
habit memory, a conscious attempt to store data for future
use.
Joyce does not stress recurrence in Dubliners. "Ivy
Day in the Committee Room" implies that reading of the memo
rial poem occurs annually, and "The Dead" mentions several
times that the dance recurs annually. But Joyce gives no
special significance to temporal recurrence in these sto
ries .
Joyce illustrates his recognition of the differences
between clock time and psychological time in Dubliners but
stresses neither enough to warrant drawing conclusions about
his views concerning them. In "Araby" the narrator is
irritated because he must wait for his uncle; in "Two Gal
lants" Lenehan notices that clock time seems to move slowly
sometimes and quickly other times. The clock signals antic
ipation in "The Boarding House" and in "A Little Cloud" the
characters feel the passing of the years as they reminisce.
Aside from clock time, Joyce uses measured time in a number
of ways. In "Counterparts" Farrington cannot work fast
enough; he gets into trouble because his pace is slower than
the clock's. In "A Painful Case" Joyce uses general time to
telescope a series of meetings that originally occurred over
a period of years, and in "A Mother" he telescopes time when
he describes Mrs. Kearney's life. As the periods Joyce is
describing become closer to the present, he becomes more
specific about the time relations to indicate either that
64
time relationships are remembered more accurately when
recent or that they have more importance to people when
recent. The telescoping of time may suggest that a period
of measured time seems longer or shorter to a character
because of his state of mind or because of the narrator's
purposes. If so, Joyce's telescoping of periods in the past
can indicate that for him subjective time is more important
than mechanically measured time.
Both the omniscient description monologues and the
indirect interior monologues that occur in most of the sto
ries range over the degrees of past as the past events
become significant to the character without regard to the
original order of occurrence. Joyce suggests the relation
ship of subjective time to external measurement by his use
of subjective continuity devices. "Eveline" returns to the
present only long enough to remind the reader that the
ranging memories and anticipations occur as Eveline sits by
the window. In "Two Gallants," walking provides the conti
nuity for Corley's thoughts, and in "The Dead" Mary Jane's
piano playing acts as continuity for the subjective time of
Gabriel's monologues.
Joyce suggests that the present is more important than
the past in "A Little Cloud" where he writes, "No memory of
the past touched him [Little Chandler], for his mind was
full of present joy" (p. 72). Earlier Little Chandler had
been dwelling on memories of previous joy, but these did not
65
compare with the present. This idea is corroborated in
Joyce's later fiction. However, the past is an important
part of the present for Joyce in Dubliners. Nearly all the
stories contain recollections, and some, such as "The Dead"
and "Eveline," use the past as a force in the present.
The most interesting story from a space and time view
point is "The Boarding House." Here Joyce presents the same
period of time from three separate angles or viewpoints—
those of Mrs. Mooney, Mr. Dolan, and Polly Mooney. This
space-montage anticipates others in Joyce's later fiction
and perhaps such multiple-viewpoint novels as William Faulk
ner's Absalom, Absalom! and Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria
Quartet in which essentially the same period of time is
described from separate viewpoints.
Dubliners, then, uses primarily the standard time tech
niques. Joyce usually gives the season, month, or time of
day, information he gives less frequently in his later fic
tion. Only in a few instances does he use general time in
which the degrees of past, present (fictive present), and
future cannot be determined. Only a few of the interior
monologues dwell at length on memories in which past occur
rences are mixed without regard to their original order.
Clock-time references usually tell how much time has passed
during a forward shift or indicate appointments, their
standard function in fiction. Finally, Joyce tells most of
the stories in forward chronology with few flashbacks and
66
limited information about the past supplied in memory-
oriented monologues.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Like Dubliners, Joyce wrote A Portrait primarily in the
third person fictive present. But often, especially in
interior monologues, he makes direct statements without the
explanatory "He said." As a result, much of the story
appears to be first person indirect interior monologue. For
example, early in Chapter I, after the narrator uses the
third person to describe Stephen caught in the midst of the
scrimmage, he continues:
It would be nice to lie on the hearthrug before the
fire, leaning his head upon his hands, and think on those
sentences. He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next
to his skin. That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into
the square ditch because he would not swop his little
snuffbox for Wells's seasoned hacking chestnut, the con
queror of forty. How cold and slimy the water had been!
(pp. 10-11)
The second sentence is third-person expository material, but
the rest of the passage is. an indirect interior monologue
with Stephen telling his own thoughts. Joyce uses the omni
scient description monologue when the narrator describes
Stephen's thoughts directly:
Then all his eagerness passed away and he felt his face
quite cool. He thought his face must be white because it
felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum
but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those
were beautiful colours to think o f . . . . . (p. 12)
After the second sentence the passage returns to the hetero
geneous references of the indirect interior monologue.
The basic order of events in the novel is chronologi
cal. It covers about twenty years and portrays Stephen's
life from his impressions as a young child to his mature
decisions as a college student. The first two chapters
describe Stephen's youth and end with his first sexual expe
rience. Chapters III and IV describe his adolescence and
end with his aesthetic epiphany, and the final section shows
Stephen a young man at University College and his prepara
tion to leave Ireland.
A Portrait has only two flashbacks, the first recon
structing Stephen's departure from home and his entrance
into Clongowes Wood College and the second telling of a
period late in his first term at Belvedere when Heron caned
him for not admitting his heresy. There are numerous for
ward time shifts, but unlike Dubliners, most of the shifts
here are of unspecified duration. In some, clues such as
"that evening" tell that the shift is a matter of hours, but
in others the reader must determine whether it is months or
years. The beginning of the novel illustrates the shifts in
time. The novel opens, "Once upon a time and a very good
time it was . . ." {p. 7). This opening, a story told by
Stephen's father, is in the pattern of the traditional tale
of the general past told to children. Joyce here recreates
the pure memories of childhood. The scenes following have a
memory relationship; the reader assumes Stephen's growth
from the increased sophistication of language and accuracy
68
of impression. The scenic relationship, then, is one of
process rather than measured time. Next, instead of speci
fying the duration of the forward shift as he does in Dub
liners , Joyce uses asterisks to indicate the shift to the
time of Stephen's first impressions when beginning school.
Several years are telescoped into the opening page of the
novel; the asterisks indicate the passage of years. Later
in the chapter there are time shifts to Christmas vacation
and to a time when a number of boys ran away from school.
There is a reason for Joyce's not specifying the time rela
tionships of scenes, for although the novel as a whole is
chronological, the chapters or scenes within this pattern
are telescoped highlights reconstructed by memory. The
sequence of scenes the artist describes in his maturity may
not be the same as he experienced when a child.
Every chapter of A Portrait contains time shifts of
unspecified length. . These time shifts give the book a
spatial quality because Joyce is presenting pieces, high
lights of a young man's life by successive periods in his
development rather than by temporal succession. And while
each chapter is essentially chronological insofar as at the
end Stephen is older than at the beginning, scenes and mono
logues run concurrently with his growth to obscure the basic
chronology. Chapter I exemplifies the scenic quality of the
novel. It contains three scenes or groups of experiences;
the first, Stephen's memories of infancy; the second, his
69
illness at Clongowes Wood College which includes a Christmas
sequence; and the third, his pandying. Richard Ellmann
aptly describes these as "three fleshings in time. . . . The
sequence became primarily one of layers rather than of
years." The result Joyce achieves is not a picture of
measured time but of growth, a qualitative change.
Joyce's increased use of monologues gives the novel a
quality of transcending measured time. Where only a few of
the stories in Dubliners have interior monologues, every
chapter of A Portrait contains them. These are not yet the
direct interior monologues with their full freedom of move
ment in time and space. But because essentially the same
qualities exist here as in the later forms which Joyce
develops for Ulysses, these monologues, cutting across
linear conceptions of time, make memories present. The sec
ond part of Chapter I, when Stephen is at school, illus
trates Joyce's complex pattern of thought, recollection, and
present experience. The structural devices he employs are
free association, leitmotifs, and parallelism. William York
Tindall summarizes the shifts.
Typical in structure, the opening scene begins with Ste
phen on the playground. Bodily there but hardly there .at
all, he attends to memories of father and mother, the
square ditch, and mother again. After a momentary return
to the playground, his mind wanders by way of words like
"belt" and "suck" to the drain at the Wicklow Hotel and
the lavatory at school. The cross-section of the mind
^James Joyce (New York, 1959), p. 308.
70
{combining sensation, memory, and thought) anticipates the
stream of consciousness that Joyce was to perfect in
Ulysses. (p. 61)
The words that refer to sensations like "wetness," and
"coldness," and "whiteness" act as catalysts to memory.
These present sensations are in the measured time to which
Joyce ties the interior monologues.
While Stephen's mind is in monologue, Joyce uses sub
jective continuity devices to mark the passing of measured
time in the story. For example, in Chapter I the football
scrimmage and school procedures provide the temporal conti
nuity for the subjective time of the ranging monologues.
The schedule of the retreat is the subjective continuity in
Chapter II and later, details such as the opening and clos
ing of a door (p. 135), a girl selling flowers, or walking
serve the same purpose. A more extended example of Joyce's
accounting for measured time while Stephen's mind is in
monologue occurs near the end of the novel. An interior
monologue begins "toward dawn" and lasts until "the full
morning light had come" (pp. 216-221). Joyce identifies
landmarks or the sun's motion— processes rather than clock
time— as his characters wander, for location and action tie
the ranging monologue to the present.
A Portrait presents some scenes in general time; that
is, it gives a montage of a period such as a summer when the
author describes activities as taking place "on Sundays" or
"at times." The method telescopes the period, giving a
71
sampling of typical activity. One good example of telescop
ing time structure occurs late in the novel where Joyce
describes Stephen's university experiences in the last
chapter compared with the nearly three chapters that tell
Stephen's experiences in his early schooling. Regarding
Joyce's use of time, Kevin Sullivan says,
This distortion of time and apparent confusion of chronol
ogy . . . is the kind of thing that readers have since
come to expect in the impressionist novel whose hero is
conscious of the time-space universe . . . only in so far
as the limitations of that universe are apprehended as
modifications of his own sensibility. (p. 126)
Sullivan concludes that "any attempt to straighten out the
details of the chronology would prove futile" {p. 127) .
Joyce seldom mentions clock time in the novel. At one
point to indicate its passage he writes merely, "Time
passed" (p. 126). Only once, near the end, does Stephen ask
the time, and then the clocks disagree. As in Dubliners
where the clock calls characters to appointments, here it
calls Stephen to lectures. Stephen's age is given only
once— in the confessional. This reticence on Joyce's part
to give specifics about measured time is notable because his
ignoring clock time or showing clocks in disagreement sug
gests that it is not important or not real. Immediately
after Stephen's impatience with waiting an hour for his
father--a wait during which measured time seemed longer than
it was— he experiences a feeling of timelessness during his
aesthetic epiphany (p. 167). And after the epiphany,
Stephen walks, losing all concept of the passage of time or
72
space covered. "How far had he walked? What hour was it?"
(p. 172). He does not know.
As in Dubliners, Joyce is most explicit about time and
its passing when the period he describes is closest to the
present. Stephen's diary entries give dates for the months
immediately preceding his departure from Ireland.
The many examples of spontaneous memory and the sense
of recurrence are notable uses of time in A Portrait. The
novel makes extensive use of spontaneous memories; memories
of Stephen's being shouldered into a ditch by Wells, of his
pandying, of his being accused of heresy, of Eileen and the
poem he tried to write for her. And the way these memories
occur is suggested when Stephen says they are called up "as
if by magic" (p. 78) and that his reveries "came thronging
into his memory . . ." (p. 90). These memories bring with
them a sense of recurrence. At one point Stephen feels a
sense of repetitiveness as he has a spontaneous memory of
Eileen (p. 69), Later, being caned by Heron, Stephen finds
the scene so much like an earlier one that his mind recon
structs the former in a flashback (p. 78). And the sugges
tion of recurrence continues as he is "listening to stories
he had heard before" (p. 91) though he does not picture the
former circumstances.
Memory and recurrence are related aspects of the past
which keep the reader aware of the role the past plays as a
part of the present. A Portrait contains uses of all the
73
degrees of past— recent, experienced, and historical, as
well as use of general past. One monologue in Chapter I
ranges over space and time to ancient Greece and Napoleon
(p. 46) and in Chapter V Stephen’s monologue includes refer
ences to Ovid and Roman history as well as to his earlier
education (p. 179).-
The novel's structure does not make use of space-
montages or time-montages, but there is a suggestion of
relativity. In Chapter II, as Stephen sits with his father
in a pub, his father "and his two cronies drank to the memo
ry of their past," and Stephen's "mind seemed older than
theirs . . (p. 95). But while this suggests relativity,
Joyce hasn't worked relativity into the time structure of
his novel as he does in some scenes of Ulysses.
Ulysses
Ulysses has three books, the first centered on Stephen
Dedalus, the second on Leopold Bloom, and the third on his
wife, Molly. The first covers three chapters, the second
twelve chapters, and the last three chapters.^ Stuart Gil
bert, who first studied the technical structure of Ulysses,
explains his findings as follows:
For the present it is sufficient to point out the symmetry
^Paul Jordan Smith, A Key to the "Ulysses" of James
Joyce (New York, 1934), ppT 27-55. Smith points out the
sxmrlarity to the overall structure of The Odyssey where
Books 1-4 center on Telemachus, 5-13 on the wandering
Ulysses, and 13-24 on the return.
74
of the technical structure: a prelude . . . of three epi
sodes— (1) Narrative (young), (2) Catechism (personal),
(3) Monologue (male); a central section (the Odyssey prop
er) of thematic development ending in the brothel scene
. . . the climax of the work; and the finale (the Nostos
or Return) in three episodes balancing the prelude—
(1) Narrative (old), (2) Catechism (impersonal), (3) Mono
logue (female). The central episode (the Wandering Rocks)
is itself divided into eighteen parts differing in theme
and treatment, ail interlocked by a curious technical
device: thus reproducing in miniature the structure of the
whole.®
This summation of the structure is based on the content and
mode of telling rather than on time relationships. And al
though arguing that there are eighteen episodes in Chapter X
presents a neat comparison, other studies deny this "repro
duction in miniature" by showing there are actually nine-
In Ulysses Joyce adheres to the strict unity of time he
uses in some of the short stories in Dubliners. The story
begins about 8:00 A.M. and lasts until after 2:00 A.M.,
9James Joyce's "Ulysses"; A Study (New York, 1952),
p. 31.
■*-°Stanley Sultan, The Argument of "Ulysses" (Columbus,
1964), p. 205, discusses the reasons and justifications for
the variant counts of episodes in Chapter X of Ulysses.
Sultan also suggests other groupings of chapters. For exam
ple, he views the first six chapters as parallel, with the
first and fourth presenting their respective protagonists
"in serious trouble," tihe second and fifth elaborating their
"first attempts to cope with their troubles," and the third
and sixth showing both with "despairing prognostications"
(p. 108). His analysis is based on developing action.
"eighteen hours and forty-five minutes" to be exact.^ Like
Dubliners and A Portrait, Joyce wrote much of Ulysses in the
third person fictive present. "Circe," an exception written
in dramatic form, is in the present tense. The novel makes
extensive use of the direct and indirect interior monologue
and sometimes the author uses omniscient description. These
monologues frequently dispense with pronouns, with verbs,
which indicate tense, and sometimes with conventional gram
matical structure. Monologues with these omissions give the
impression of direct reconstruction of the character's
mental states. Joyce uses direct interior monologues for
the most associational mixing of thoughts, memories, sensa
tions, and anticipations. The ranging in time and space
frequently becomes more controlled as the monologue becomes
closer to the conscious; most of the monologues in Ulysses
fall into the type described as indirect. Omniscient de
scription monologues are less frequent than in the earlier
fiction.
Because the special form of the novel— Joyce's presen
tation of most of the information in the form of spontaneous
memories called up by the present while the characters'
activities on June 16, 1904 provide the subjective continu
ity— I present both the activities in the present and the
■^Levin, p. 88. Frank Budgen claims it takes seventeen
hours (p. 129). The discrepancy exists because the novel is
not specific on the time of day for most of the chapters.
76
past events supplied by memory, these memories occurring
either in monologue or in conversation.
Chapter I, "Telemachus," opens in the early morning
when Buck Mulligan is shaving before breakfast. Although
Joyce does not specify the hour, critics set the time at
8:00 A.M. On the memory level, Stephen recalls the death of
his mother and related events from the recent past first in
conversation, then in an interior monologue. And while at
the water for a swim, Mulligan has a pure memory of a drown
ing that occurred nine days earlier.
The subjective time for Chapter II, "Nestor," is the
events at Mr. Deasy's school where Stephen is teaching his
tory. Joyce does not give the time of day; critics place it
at 10:00 A.M. Stephen’s interior monologues tell recollec
tions of the recent past during his conversation with Mr.
Deasy (pp. 29-36), of the experienced past when they tell of
Stephen's mother and when he was young like the student he
is helping,-*-2 and of the historical past— Greek, Roman, and
New Testament times.
• * - 2Joseph Prescott, Exploring James Joyce (Carbondale,
1964), pp. 25, 60-64, points to these recurrent memories of
Stephen's mother, as well as to the recurrent pandybat
recollections, to show the relatedness of Ulysses and A Por
trait. Because some occurrences were described first m A
Portrait and are not filled in here until later, he contends
that Ulysses is a continuation of the earlier novel rather
than one that stands wholly separate.
1 ?
Chapter III, "Proteus," is almost entirely Stephen's
extended interior monologues in general time that range in
free association without providing time and space relation
ships. The monologues are in the first person, but there
are occasional authorial statements in the third person.
While Stephen's walking acts as subjective continuity, the
monologue blends the recent, experienced, and historic past
in pure memories of friends, Dublin, Paris, and Clongowes
with imaginings of other times and places. Stephen remem
bers his mother's death (p. 42) and the conversation that
took place in the morning regarding the death of Mulligan's
aunt. Much imagery of flux (pp. 44, 45, 47, 49) contributes
to the feeling of timelessness--that is, to time as unseg
mented and non-linear.^
The Bloom section begins with Chapter IV, "Calypso," in
which Leopold Bloom's breakfast takes place at the same time
as Stephen's in Chapter I. Joyce refers to measured time
near the end of the chapter when the bells of St. George's
Church toll the hour, but he does not say what hour it is.
13
Joyce explained his intention here to Frank Budgen
who quotes Joyce as saying, "You catch the drift of the
thing? It's the struggle with Proteus. Everything charges
— sea, sky, man, animals. The words change too" (p. 48).
Proteus stands for instability, change, flux, so the sea
shore is an appropriate setting.
■^Melvin Friedman observes that "The long series of al
most uninterrupted reminiscences of the final episode of the
opening section . . . manages to fill in all the objective
detail of the period separating the end of A Portrait of the
Artist from the beginning of Ulysses" (p. 220). “
78
Bloom's walk to the butcher shop and later conversation with
Molly are the subjective continuity for his interior mono
logues which are primarily thoughts and responses to present
sensations but which contain spontaneous recollections of
recent and experienced past events. As in A Portrait, Joyce
carefully shows, spatial relationships which indicate Bloom's
progress to provide continuity for the subjective time of
the monologues.
Chapter V, "The Lotus Eaters," uses Bloom's going to
the post office and the drug store as subjective time
devices. Here Joyce repeats the time of the funeral first
given in the previous chapter (63) as 11:00 A.M. (p. 71) and
Bloom's comment, "Time enough" indicates that the events of
this chapter occur well before that time. Bloom's interior
monologues, composed primarily of present sensations and
musings, mix past and present tense, first and third person.
He has occasional pure memories of recent and experienced
past events but none of the historical past.
Chapter VI, "Hades," has for its subjective continuity
the carriage ride to Glasnevin cemetery and events at the
cemetery. Joyce gives the time en route as twenty past
eleven (p. 93). Conversations in this chapter contain con
scious memories of the recent past. Bloom's monologues, as
usual, contain much present sensation and references to
earlier events the same day (p. 91), but the final monologue
makes references to the historical past.
Most of Chapter VII, "Aeolus," takes place at the
office of The Evening Telegraph after the funeral. Since
Joyce does not supply the exact time, critics say it is
noon, the end of the three-chapter flashback. At the open
ing of the chapter, the timekeeper of the tram company calls
out names; the organization is scenic rather than temporal
as Joyce pictures trolleys, shoeblacks, and draymen. The
chapter develops by random newspaper headlines about a vari
ety of events and people that are related to the conversa
tion that follows. Bloom's monologue (pp. 118-119) ranges
freely; no two consecutive phrases develop the same refer
ent, thus giving a spatial quality to the monologue. Mono
logues and conversation refer to ancient, medieval, and mod
ern history (p. 133) as well as to such recent- past events
as the death of Stephen's mother. Conversation also makes
use of conscious recollections. The closing section of the
chapter achieves a spatial quality similar to the opening by
naming places and sights which recall the list of stops
along the tram car route.
Chapter VIII, "The Laestrygonians," begins without time
or place clues. An extended interior monologue, it develops
heterogeneous references flowing quickly in and out of
Bloom's mind. Pages 152-153 have flow images reinforcing
the changing present impressions and pure memories. "The
flow of language it is" and related phrases like "in the
stream of life," a recurrent motif, summarize the intention.
80
The subjective continuity is provided by authorial intru
sions giving spatial directions as Bloom walks toward
Byrne's for lunch. Once there, Bloom notes the differences
in the measurements of clock time. "He raised his eyes and
met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five min
utes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two" (p. 173).
This reference to mechanical time with its artificial meas
urement, indicating Bloom's increased consciousness of the
movement of clocks, contrasts with his monologue where time
flows without regard for clock hands.
Chapter IX, "Scylla and Charybdis," takes place in the
library. Conversation refers to the recent and historical
past, and Stephen's interior monologue contains experienced
past pure memories such as "A child Conraee saved from
pandies" and Stephen's mother's death (pp. 189-190). Ste
phen's mind slips in and out of monologues during the con
versation.
1 R
Chapter X, "The Wandering Rocks," does not advance
the action or develop the characters. It is the first chap-
- * - 5This chapter is a montage of portraits of Dubliners
"flanked by representatives of the two 'pillars' of society,
Church and State," as Stanley Sultan puts it (p. 23). He
then points to the fact that Joyce wrote "End of first part
of Ulysses, New Year's Eve, 1918" at the end of the manu
script John Quinn bought from him. Sultan also quotes
Joyce's letter to Frank Budgen, October 24, 1920: "P.S.
Last night I thought of an Entr'acte for Ulysses in the mid
dle of the book after 9th episode Scylla and Charybdis.
Short with absolutely no relation to what precedes or fol
lows like a pause in the action of a play" (Stuart Gilbert,
Letters of James Joyce [London, 1957], p. 149).
81
ter in the novel that Joyce begins by identifying the time
of day; the Very Reverend John Conmee begins his walk
through Dublin at "five to three" (p. 219). Some events in
the chapter occur simultaneously; others precede or follow
each other in chronological order. Although Conmee's walk
provides the process for time advance, the internal evidence
shows that advance to be irregular.-*-®
The organization of the chapter is spatial. As Fr.
Conmee walks, Joyce presents a series of isolated scenes
separate in space and time, the first few related to each
other as Fr. Conmee sees them. Even though not giving tem
poral relationships, Joyce achieves simultaneity for some of
the scenes by showing action relationships. But this space-
montage is not connected by the consciousness of any single
character because the diverse locations of the scenes pre
clude the possibility of one observer. Although clock time
moves forward within each individual scene, all scenes do
not begin where the previous one leaves off, so the forward
order does not apply to the overall structure beyond the
fact that the chapter ends later than it begins. Several
examples illustrate spatial organization; on page 225 por
traits of the blind beggar and others are related to each
other spatially as Fr. Conmee walks. On page 226 Joyce uses
space-time relativity when showing Katey and Boody Dedalus
-*-®Frank Budgen says "the action goes forward at clock-
speed" (p. 130) .
82
in the kitchen at the same time Conmee is walking through
Clongowes fields. This is followed by portraits of Almidano
Artifoni, Miss Dunne typing the date of the novel (16 June
1904), Ned Lambert and J. J. O'Malloy, Hugh C. Love leaving
St. Mary's Abbey, and others. At this point (p. 233) Joyce
gives the time on O'Neill's clock, "After three," so the
above scenes are simultaneous or nearly so with the begin
ning of Conmee's walk.
This time reference is followed by a number of other
portraits and scenes. In one, Joyce describes Dilly showing
Stephen her new book bought with the money obtained from her
father two scenes earlier. Simultaneously Conmee is reading
-his vespers as he walks through Donnycarney. Then, while
Father Cowley and Simon Dedalus discuss foreclosure for
Cowley's debt (pp. 243-245), Reverend Hugh C. Love is leav
ing St. Mary's Abbey which Ned Lambert just finished showing
him in episode eight. So this fourteenth episode is simul
taneous with the eighth told about thirteen pages earlier.
In the nineteenth episode of this interlude, the cavalcade
of William Humble, Earl of Dudley, passes through the
streets. Joyce suggests this is simultaneous with many of
the previous scenes by placing many of the characters from
those scenes along his route and by earlier reference to the
passing of the cavalcade (p. 239).
In Chapter XI, "The Sirens," Joyce brings clocks to the
fore and fuses clock time with musical tempo as he attempts
83
to imitate musical sounds and rhythms with words such as
"Big Benaben. Big Benaben," "Sonnez...La Cloche I I and many
others. Joyce identifies the place, the Ormond Bar, and the
approximate time, 4:00 P.M. in the previous chapter. On
page 260 he again relates the passing of time to the turning
of clock hands. A sense of clock time is prominent here as
a number of characters meet at four o'clock. And Joyce sug
gests spatial relativity by giving Bloom's location at the
Essex bridge simultaneous with Lenehan's entrance into the
bar (p. 261). Clock time seems to speed forward when Joyce
writes "Clock whirred" and "Clock clacked" (pp. 265-266).
Bloom's interior monologues here are chiefly present impres
sions. "Four o'clock's all's well!" is buried among the
narrated sounds that end the chapter. The "Ppprrpffrrppfff"
(p. 291), we discover later when Cissy Caffrey asks the
time, is the sound of Bloom's watch stopping.
Chapter XII, "The Cyclops," takes place at 5:00 P.M.
Conversation and monologues contain pure memories of the
recent, experienced, and historic past. Many of the narra
tives contain catalogues of names, often from widely spread
times and places (pp. 296-297). They interrupt the forward
movement, supplying apparently unrelated details which frag
ment normal spatial and temporal relationships.
In Chapter XIII, "Nausicaa," Joyce gives the time as
after 8:00 because the sun has set. The action is on the
strand along the bay. Gerty MacDowell's omniscient descrip
84
tion monologue ranges freely over space and time. Bloom's
interior monologue is chiefly pure memory. Musing on time
and recurrence, Bloom says that "history repeats itself"
(p. 377) but then adds, "Returning not the same." The mono
logue breaks down into remembered fragments as Bloom is
falling asleep. The chapter ends with a suggestion of rela
tivity as nine "cuckoos" indicating the time are separated
by three spatially separate scenes (p. 3 82).
Chapter XIV, "The Oxen of the Sun," takes place at the
National Maternity Hospital, but Joyce does not give the
time. The narrative mingles past and present. There are
spontaneous memories of the earlier events in the day,
events of Stephen's youth, and other experienced past
events. Reference to "cycles and cycles of generations"
suggests recurrence (p. 414) .
The setting for Chapter XV, "Circe,1 1 ^ is the Mabbot
Street entrance of Nighttown. Later evidence places the
time at about midnight. The organization is scenic; the
1 7
x'Stanley Sultan finds that "Bloom's significant expe
rience in nighttown comprises six closely-related fantasies
and the natural action connected with them." In brief, they
are:
1. family responsibility
2. carnal concupiscence
3. public Bloom on trial
4. elaborate point of defense witnesses
5. transformation of him by Bello
6. sums up Bloom's position (p. 317).
A different ordering of events, arranged by character,
is developed by Rolf R. Loehrich's The Secret of Ulysses:
An Analysis of James Joyce's "Ulysses" (London, 1955),
pp. 2 5-26.
85
chapter is written in dramatic form with directions given in
italics providing the spatial relations as Stephen and
Lynch, Privates Carr and Compton, Cissy Caffrey and Edy
Boardman go their various ways against a background of
static figures (pp. 429-431). This opening is a space-
montage; it achieves simultaneity by providing spatial views
without time advance.
Scenic organization continues as Stephen and Lynch
pass, and the Caffrey twins, Bloom, the Navvy, and Grave
Gladstone enter. Movement suggests time forward as simul
taneously moving figures change in relation to fixed fig
ures. The chapter contains many interior monologues with
pure memories of all degrees of the past. There is a
sequence of dreamlike, impressionistic scenes in which "The
thoughts of all persons become as visible and as tangible as
their bodies" (Budgen, p. 232). There are no references to
the passage of time or to the hour until "God's time is
12.25" (p. 507).18
A flashback reconstructing Bloom's youth through his
young manhood and his marriage to Molly is told in the order
of occurrence (pp. 437-441). In the Virag scene, Virag,
l8One feature which points out the dream quality of the
visions is the relation to natural time. "A long dream
usually takes place in a matter of seconds (or...of min
utes) . Fantasies extending over many pages occur between a
comment and a response, or an entrance and a salutation"
(Sultan, p. 307). Thus while the dreams are apparently long
in pages covered, they are minute in elapsed clock time.
Stream sections share the qualities of dreams with regard to
time.
86
Bloom's "Granpapachi," and Bloom are simultaneous; this
scene suggests the presence of the past as does the appear
ance of other figures from the recent, experienced, and his
toric past (pp. 511-517). Pure memories such as the pandy-
I Q
bat at Clongowes continue to occur. Non-logical, associa-
tional organization is used until near the end, the subjec
tive continuity events showing the guests preparing to leave
after Stephen breaks the whores1 chandelier.
Chapter XIV, "Eumaeus," which begins the Nostos sec
tion, takes place in the cabman's shelter. Conversation and
monologues contain pure memories, and Stephen's "superhuman
effort of memory" (p. 633) is an example of conscious mem
ory .
Joyce uses the catechetical method in Chapter XVII,
"Ithaca," which takes place on the way to Bloom's house and
while Stephen and Bloom are there. Both Stephen and Bloom
have pure memories of a variety of people, places, and
times. It is not until here that Joyce gives Stephen's age
as 22 and Bloom's as 38 (p. 679). The bells of St. George's
l^Leon Edel, after explaining the use of the pandybat
episode in A Portrait, says: "It is curious . . . to stum
ble upon other associations in Stephen's phantasmagoria in
the nighttown scene which take us back not to work commonly
available to the public . . . but to the early fragment,
Stephen Hero, never intended for publication by Joyce. In
the fragment Stephen says to his mother: 'It is a nice
thing, that you go and discuss me behind my back. Have you
not your own nature to guide you, your own sense of what is
right, without going to some Father Jack-in-the-box to ask
him to guide you?' Here then is the explanation of Father
Dolan's 'jack-in-the-box' eruption from the pianola . . ."
(p. 83).
87
Church tell the passage of time {p. 704). The narration
includes anticipation of the future as well as reminis
cences of the present day and the degrees of past.
Chapter XVIII, "Penelope," provides no time clues for
its beginning, but it shows Molly falling asleep in the
early morning of June 17. The direct interior monologue is
in the first person. Joyce uses the present tense for
present time where he has verbs rather than fragments. The
monologue is fluid, controlled by a free association of
past, present, and future events brought to mind by the
senses, anticipation, imagination, and by other memories.
The fluid qualities of the monologue are reinforced by the
absence of end punctuation and capitalization.
Giving the time and space movement in a direct interior
monologue such as this would necessitate great length
because of the many shifts in time and space that occur as
impressions impinge on the consciousness. Robert Humphrey
makes a skeleton outline of the last two pages to demon
strate the movement and the kinds of activities in Molly's
consciousness.
Hears clock
IT imagines Chinese arising
2) anticipates (memory) the Angelus
3) imagines nuns' sleep
4) anticipates next-door alarm
("Alarm" stimulates her to attempt control of conscious
ness; counts)
Sees wallpaper
5) remembers star-shaped flowers
6) remembers Lombard Street dwelling
7) remembers apron Leopold gave her
88
(Thought of Leopold; attempts to control consciousness)
Lowers lamp
8 * 5 reminded has to get up early
9) imagines the next day
10) imagines shopping
11) imagines bake shop
12) imagines making purchases
13) imagines receiving Dedalus
14) anticipates cleaning house
15) imagines entertainment for Dedalus
16) anticipates cleaning piano keys
17) imagines her attire
18) imagines flowers for the table
19) imagines room swimming in roses
20) contemplates (memory and imagination)
"nature"
21) sees (imagination panorama of nature)
22) imagines argument she would give athe
ist: "may as well stop the sun"
23) recalls statement of Leopold's about
the sun during courtship
24) recalls scene of courtship
25) recalls details of Gibralter
26") recalls details of courting
27) fade-out (pp* 46-47)
This intricate pattern of remembering, imagining, and
anticipation--past, present, and future--is typical of the
monologue. Practically no sensations guide Molly's
thoughts; one of the few is a train sound which Molly first
hears (p. 75 4) and which recurs in memory on pages 762-7 63.
Humphrey's sample also demonstrates the variety of temporal
shifts and the multitude of spatial referents in the mono-
There are a number of notable aspects in the time and
space organization of Ulysses. As in Joyce's previous fic
tion, locations play a key role because a walking charac-
2^Stanley Sultan divides Molly's monologue into eight
sections on the basis of content (pp. 423-424).
89
ter's motion pastjthem suggests the temporal continuity for
subjective time in the monologues. The narrator identifies
bars, streets, and buildings as characters move in the day's
activities. But spatial organization is more significant
than a mere interest in location. In "The Wandering Rocks"
and in "The Sirens," for instance, Joyce attempts to achieve
the impression of simultaneity or of alternating simultane
ity and motion by montages and by telling where a second
character is simultaneously with the one being discussed.
Particularly in Chapter X the alternate stasis and movement
resembles the activity of a promenader who stops to chat or
view something and then walks toward his destination. But
Joyce has complicated the organization by showing the rela
tive movement and stasis of a number of characters. With
the psychological time of the monologues, the infrequent
clock-time statements in the novel help illustrate Joyce's
attitudes toward clock time and its relative importance to
the psychological time of the monologues.
The time span of Ulysses is brief, less than a full
day. And although the reader can often determine the clock
^Melvin Friedman notes that there are some fifty char
acters pictured in this scene. He claims that "there is
clearly the suggestion that each of these pathetic glimpses
of ordinary people, traversing the streets of Dublin, is
intended as a kind of revelation; a word or detail about
each of these passers-by is sufficient to exhibit his char
acter.
The attempt is to give a spatial view of Dublin by
the appearance and reappearance of the same characters and
by their frequent encounters. This is one type of literary
counterpoint . . ." {p. 230).
time by clues, Joyce is frequently not explicit and seldom
provides the time of day in the ordinary places such as at
the beginning or end of chapters. Joyce does not tell
Molly's or Stephen's age, and the novel is almost finished
before the author gives the information needed to determine
Bloom's. Clock time is connected with appointments or with
anxiety as in Dubliners and A Portrait. And in Ulysses
Joyce's infrequent mention of clock time is complemented by
his increased use of interior monologues with their inherent
fluidity that brings the characters' past lives and future
prospects in simultaneous focus with the present.
Time outside the monologues in Ulysses is chiefly for
ward. The only sustained flashback is Chapters IV, V, and
VI which tell Bloom's morning activities during the same
time period in which Stephen's were told during the first
three chapters. The remaining chapters appear in chronolog
ical order. A few shorter flashbacks— if they are flash
backs and not only sustained narrations of pure memories—
occur when Bloom tells of his activities before marrying
Molly. Joyce does not need the flashback to give informa
tion about the past because the heterogeneous references in
subjective time supply information about the past in frag
ments rather than all at once in order. Leitmotifs such as
"metempsychosis" and the pandybat and Stephen's mother's
death which recur frequently help show the way the past acts
in the present.
CHAPTER IV
JOYCE ON TIME AND RELATED NOTIONS
In his fiction Joyce discusses space and time with its
divisions into past, present, and future. He also discusses
related subjects such as relativity, memory, history, and
the recurrence of events. After establishing Joyce's atti
tudes and ideas on these subjects, I correlate the ideas
with his use of time and space in the structure of his fic
tion. Joyce does not discuss these topics in his letters;
his published correspondence gives little information about
the intention of his work, and his notebooks have not yet
been published. Because of the absence of clear extrinsic
evidence, I limit this discussion principally to attitudes
and statements in Dubliners, A Portrait, and Ulysses .
When discussing statements in fiction, a person must be
aware of the danger of confusing a character's ideas and the
author's. For this study, however, this is not a serious
problem because my primary interest is in the philosophy
illustrated in Joyce's fiction. There are reasons to
believe that the ideas in Joyce's fiction may also be his
own at least at the time he pictures in the stories. First,
91
92
when the statement is made by the narrator, the reader may
assume that Joyce is that narrator since he has presented no
alternate persona to whom the narrator's statements should
be ascribed. Second, accepting the critical commonplace
that there are marked similarities between Stephen and
Joyce, that A Portrait is a bildungsroman, Stephen's basic
views of reality may be taken as Joyce's. As a character
Stephen is identical in Ulysses, so his ideas here also cor
respond with Joyce's. Finally, except where Stephen and
Bloom may disagree— and in the novel they are in substantial
agreement on the nature of time and space— Bloom's ideas may
be considered acceptable to Joyce. If Joyce were presenting
ideas he considered erroneous through Bloom, he would proba
bly show these ideas as opinions or the narrator or another
character would show them to be questionable.
These reasons for accepting characters' ideas as
Joyce's do not provide the same degree of certitude that
extrinsic evidence can; at best they provide probability.
But because I am interested in correspondences between Berg-
sonian ideas and those presented in Joyce's fiction, it is
not essential to demonstrate the credence Joyce gives the
ideas he incorporates in his art.
Although Joyce exhibits pertinent attitudes toward time
in Dubliners, the stories contain no authorial or charac
ter's statements that demonstrate special interest or clari
fy Joyce's attitudes. However, some clock-time references
in Joyce's novels indicate a positive or negative attitude.
In Ulysses, Bloom "raised his eyes and met the stare of a
bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five minutes fast. Time
going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet" (p. 173). And
-later, thinking about Molly and Boylan, Bloom thinks, "Not
yet. At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clock hands
turning." Then "Clock whirred...Clock clacked" (p. 2 65).
Later, "Sonnez la cloche" punctuates the conversation as the
bell tolls the hour (p. 266). The first quotation shows a
pejorative attitude, and the second and third exemplify the
accumulation of clock sounds that become so prominent they
are oppressive. Joyce associates time measured by the bells
of St. George's Church or by clocks with mere movement,
mechanical measure, "hands moving," "clack." And this meas
ure is relative not to the reality of time but to the meas
urement of another clock, "Five minutes fast." Thus Joyce
suggests quantitative time, clock time, is not reality but a
convention with a social purpose.
Joyce indicates that not only are clock measurements of
time relative to other means of measurement, but that the
sense of time is relative to clock time. In A Portrait
while Stephen is in a pub with his father, Joyce writes:
Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the
counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the
memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of tempera
ment siindered him from them. His mind seemed older than
theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness
and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or
youth stirred in him as it has stirred in them. . . . His
childhood was dead or lost . . . (pp. 9 5-9 6)
94
Where elsewhere Joyce distinguishes time from its measure
ment, here he finds measured time— even if it be years— hav
ing less meaning to him than the age his mind seems to be.
Stephen is agreeing with the adage "You are only as old as
you feel," but he is feeling older by far than his years
measure. It is the age he feels, not the years counted,
that is significant to him. Aging, then, is a process rela
tive to the state of mind; the importance time has is sub
jective, psychological.
Bloom recognizes the correlation between movement and
time, that without movement there can be no measurement of
time. He says:
Back of everything magnetism. Earth for instance pulling
this and being pulled. That causes movement. And time?
Well that's the time the movement takes. Then if one
thing stopped the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit.
Because it's arranged. (p. 374)
Motion is measured by the space covered. By suggesting this
time-in-space Bloom defines the measurement that Stephen
finds less real than his feeling.
Waiting for his father in A Portrait, Stephen walks,
"planting his steps scrupulously into the spaces of the
patchwork of the footpath, then timing their fall to the
fall of verses"— timing as measurement— for “a full hour"
(p. 164). Here Stephen makes his own time measure asso
ciated with motion in space. Time and poetry's metrics are
equated just as the "Sirens" chapter joins musical measure
with clock clacks. Immediately afterward Stephen goes to
95
the seashore where measurement fades from consciousness.
Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man's weariness,
the image of the seventh city of Christendom was visible
to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary
nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the
thingmote. (p. 167)
Timeless reality. And again, "So timeless seemed the grey
warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all
ages were as one to him" (p. 168) . Thus time is not seg
mented— not divisible— for Stephen. His irritation while
carefully measuring an hour of waiting contrasts sharply
with the calm of timelessness.
In A Portrait Joyce associates measured time with
appointments, with getting to classes rather than with a
reality unmeasurable by "clacks." He casually accepts the
fact that his old alarm is an hour and twenty-five minutes
faster than the "right time" which his mother tells him.
Later, after Stephen's aesthetic epiphany, the ecstasy he
feels obliterates awareness of time and space: "He halted
suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he
walked? What hour was it?" {p. 172). Joyce thinks it
enough to observe, "But the tide ivas near the turn and
■^Wyndham Lewis saw this and another quotation as "the
concrete illustrations of that strange fact already noted—
that an intense preoccupation with Time or 'duration1 (the
psychological aspect of time, that is) is wedded to the the
ory of timelessness" (p. Ill). The insight is correct inso
far as duree is qualitative rather than quantitative.
Lewis1 antagonism rests on his conviction that time— as
space— should be treated quantitatively to avoid subjective
chaos.
96
already the day was on the wane" (p. 172) . Measurement
n
gives way to the reality it attempts to categorize.
There are other attitudes and statements about the
nature of time in A Portrait. The theme of a retreat sermon
in preparation for the feast of St. Francis Xavier is "Time
is, time was, but time shall be no more" (p. 113) . And
later, referring to the moment of death, the priest repeats,
"Now the time for repentence has gone by. Time is, time
was, but time shall be no morel" (p. 123). The Church
affirms the separation between the past and the present,
between time and eternity. The image of the bird coming
every million years to take one grain from a sand mountain
is an image of a timeless eternity, one where human measure
is inadequate because it is inappropriate. But time on
earth is measured, divisible; for the Church it is not until
eternity that real time is without measurement. Stephen
appears to accept the separation of past and present, of
time and eternity because confessing his sins implies that
he accepts the ideas presented in the retreat. But if he
subscribes to the ideas temporarily, his later timeless aes
thetic experience in which "all ages were as one to him"
(p. 16 8) indicates his rejection of the Church's view. His
rejection of the Church is so strong that his "throat ached
2As Leon Edel observes, "Consciousness . . . does not
measure time by mechanical means. It possesses its own
time-measure, different within each individual" (p. 93).
97
with a desire . . . to cry piercingly of his deliverance
. . ." {p. 169).
In Ulysses, amid varied recollections, Bloom thinks,
Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morn
ing: set off at dawn, travel round in front of the sun,
steal a day's march on him. Keep it up for ever never
grow a day older technically. (p. 57)
This statement with Stephen's earlier ones refers to a sci
entific and philosophical argument centered on aging in
relativity theories. Bloom is accepting time as a relative
measure where he, moving eastward, would stay the same age
while a person remaining would grow older. This problem is
still argued in time and space studies. By putting this
view in the stream-of-consciousness and not rejecting it
anywhere in the novel, Joyce may be accepting the concept of
relative aging, hence relative time. But Bloom's qualifying
his thought with "technically" either suggests that relative
aging is a technical problem of time measurement rather than
a real-time problem or suggests doubt about relative aging.
Stephen's and Bloom's casual acceptance of the relative' time
measurements of the inaccurate Dublin clocks together with
the positive value Stephen places on timeless experiences
suggests that Joyce does not associate time measurement with
the reality of time. Even though "technically" one does not
grow older, the life process continues.
Among the free associations in Bloom's interior mono
logue late in "The Lotus Eaters," when thinking about things
in flux, he muses, "Always passing, the stream of life,
9‘ 8
which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them
all" (p. 86). This image of life as a stream is repeated,
again related to the flowing of water: "How can you own
water really? It's always flowing in a stream, never the
same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is
a stream" (p. 153). This stream image suggests continuity,
a view of time as interpenetrative rather than as a linear
series of instants one after the other. As water, all is
together and moving in a direction.
Joyce talks about space in a number of contexts. He
opens the "Proteus" chapter'of Ulysses, "Ineluctable modal
ity of the visible: at least that if no more, thought
through my eyes" (p. 37). Taking the final words of the
doxology, Stephen rebuts subjectivist thinking by asserting
the objective reality of space separate from man. When Mr.
Deasy asked, "May I trespass on your valuable space" (U,
p. 33) he was, of course, speaking metaphorically, but this
statement, as the above, suggests dimensional space, that
is, a thing in which objects exist.
Frank Budgen mentions that Joyce was proud of his
definitions of time and space (p. 49). In the library scene
Stephen says,
Unsheathe your dagger definitions. . . . Space: what
you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than
red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's
buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is
but a shadow. (U, p. 187)
In this definition Stephen adds nothing to the dimensional
99
concept of space alluded to earlier. But what he does is
confuse matter with space. _The concept of time and the veg
etable world as a "shadow" of eternity is interestingly Pla
tonic, perhaps occasioned by the introductory statement by
John Eglinton, "Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear
anyone compare Aristotle with Plato." To this Stephen
answers, "Which of the two . . . would have banished me from
his commonwealth?" The first definition of "whatness" of
"allhorse" is Aristotelian. In these definitions Stephen is
playing with the systems of the two philosophers. Later in
the novel the narrator describes Bloom's wandering "to the
extreme boundary of space" (pp. 727-728). If this quotation
is not a mere manner of speech, it indicates that space is a
limited entity. Since the idea is not developed here or
anywhere else in Joyce's fiction, there is not enough evi
dence to draw a conclusion about his notions on the dimen
sion of space.
Joyce points out relationships between time and space.
First Stephen, eyes open, walks through space observing that
things lie nebeneinander, side by side, which he calls the
"ineluctable modality of the visible" (U, p. 37). Then the
narrator begins,
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crack
ling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsom-
ever. 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 mo
dality of the audible. (U, p. 37)
The audible, rhythmic crackling of steps— motion— measures
the inescapable dimension, time. Then the movement in space
combined with this nacheinander, single file stepping,
becomes the ineluctable combination of the two. Though Ste
phen does not call it a fourth dimension, his combination of
the audible with the visible "there all the time without
you," describes the relationship of space and time. And
later in the novel, relativity is given another expression.
About to separate from Buck Mulligan, Stephen says, "Part.
The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house
today, if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space
which I in time must come to, ineluctably" (U, p. 217). The
"Part" refers to Mulligan's leaving. The next sentence
names the time, then asks the place. Stephen makes Socrates
and Judas contemporary in time with himself, and he, moving
in time, must move in space inescapably because the two are
ineluctably related.
In both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and
Ulysses Joyce discusses the divisions -of time— past, pres
ent, and future. Writing of his mother in his diary, Ste
phen says,
Certainly she remembers the past. Lynch says all women
do. Then she remembers the time of her childhood--and
mine if I was ever a child. The past is consumed in the
present and the present is living only because it brings
forth the future. (P, p. 251)
After again telling that he seemed never to have been young,
a child, Stephen says in effect that the past is in the
present. It helps to create the present and is used in it;
101
today is made of yesterday. He sees the present as a
pointer, or more accurately, as a mother in childbirth,
"bringing forth" another made of its contents and in its
likeness. Thus there is an intimate relation between past,
present, and future.
Stephen's ideas do not change in Ulysses. He says:
As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies
. . . from day to day, their molecules shuttling to and
fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And
as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was
born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time
after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the
image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense
instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a
fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that
which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future,
the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now
but by reflection from that which I- then shall be.
(p. 194)
Again Stephen makes use of an image of very complex interde
pendence, the molecular structure of the human body, to
explain the continuity of time, the intimate interrelation
ship of the continuum we divide for convenience as past,
present, and future.
Bloom's ideas are similar to Stephen's but, not a poet,
Bloom does not express them in imagery. Rather, he attempts
to express the interpenetration of time with language which
by its nature is expressed in divided, linear elements. He
says,
I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was
never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be.
Past was is-today. What now i-s will then tomorrow as now
was be past yester. (p. 515)
By the fusion of past, present, and future tenses and our
102
temporal separations— yesterday, now, and tomorrow— Bloom
makes time one, trying to express that it is indivisible in
reality even though our language, a convention, attempts to
perpetuate the conventional measurement divisions. In Dub
liners Joyce writes that "No memory of the past touched him
[Little Chandler], for his mind was full of present joy"
(p. 72). Earlier in the story Little Chandler's present joy
was the recollections, but this statement suggests that the
present experience is the most potent; it supercedes past
recollections and future projections. Stephen's "Hold to
the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the
past" (U, p. 186) repeats the stress on the present.
The close interrelationship of past, present, and
future in Joyce's fiction is clear. But he discusses some
aspects of the past separately. Joyce does not dwell on the
nature of the future, and while he stresses the importance
of the present in a number of places, he never discusses the
nature of the present. The reason may be that he is telling
the present (fictive present), and the now becomes past even
as it is being experienced. Memory and the past, however,
are frequent topics of discussion by narrator and charac
ters. Joyce shows a special interest in the past. In a
letter to Stanislaus, Joyce once commented that forgetting
the past is "a thing beyond my power.
3 -
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 245.
103
In Ulysses Bloom's present sensations are catalysts for
memories during his interior monologues. After thinking of
his earlier married days, Bloom thinks, "Can't bring back
time. Like holding water in your hand" (p. 168). This
recalls the "stream of life" leitmotif, water flowing
through one's hands. The first statement, in connection
with the second, is an argument for the directionality of
time. The past as past cannot be returned. Because this
point is an important one in current literary criticism on
Joyce, it is necessary to firmly establish Joyce's opinion.
And fortunately, his early biographer, Herbert Gorman, pre
serves a conversation in which Joyce said,
I cannot begin to give you the flavour of the old Austrian
Empire. It was a ramshackle affair but it was charming,
gay, and I experienced more kindnesses in Trieste than
ever before or since in my life . . . Times past cannot
return but I wish they were back. (Italics added.) (p.
ro i
Even though a simple, nostalgic statement, this opinion is
important for two reasons.. It helps establish that Joyce
held a progressive notion of time. And it suggests that,
though he believes time to be moving in a direction, he
wishes recurrence were possible. This wish may be a reason
for the sense of recurrence in his fiction.
In A Portrait the sermon during the retreat which shows
time as separated in the eyes of the Church also provides an
attitude toward the past. For spiritual purposes, the boys
are to look into the past to determine their sins, for the
past has to be paid for. Joyce writes,
104
Ah, yes, he [Stephen] would still be spared; he would
repent in his heart and be forgiven; and then those above,
those in heaven, would see what he would do to make up for
the past: a whole life, every hour of life. Only wait.
(p. 126)
Emotionally impressed by the fear-oriented sermon, Stephen
considers the past reparable. But for Bloom it is the "ir-
reparability of the past" (p. 696). The same attitude of a
reproachful past is developed in Ulysses. The narrator,
speaking of Mina Purefoy's thoughts, says:
There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls
them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the
darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait.
He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as
though they had not been and all but persuade himself that
they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance
word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up
to confront him in the most various circumstances, a
vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his
senses or amid the cool silver tranquillity of the evening
or at the feast at midnight when he is now filled with
wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over
one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut
off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of
the past, silent, remote, reproachful. (p. 421)
More than a reinforcement of the past as active in the
present or the past as reproachful or as a spur to contri
tion as the Church sees it, this description is important to
understand Joyce's concept of how the past becomes active in
the present. William York Tindall notes that this selection
"predicts and explains Circe" (p. 200). "Circe" shows the
past rising up to confront Stephen and Bloom. And it does
the same for Joyce; memories— not only evil ones and not
only in "Circe"— rise up. The past is always there in the
memory even though "hidden away" or simply growing dim. And
105
through catalysts, "a chance word," or often a sensation,
the past comes to mind. This selection explains Joyce's use
of memory and free association in his interior monologues.
After confessing at the end of the retreat in A Por
trait, Stephen exclaims, "Another lifel A life of grace and
virtue and happiness 1 It was true. It was not a dream from
which he would awake. The past was past" (p. 146). In the
exuberance of a clear conscience, Stephen feels a sense of
renewal. Later he finds that while "the past was past,"
memories of it "rise up to confront him" as Mina Purefoy's
thoughts declare. The distinction made here between the
past and memory of the past is an important one. Stephen's
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake"
(U, p. 35) seems to contradict the former quotation. This
statement has been used by critics in attempts to prove a
number of points: that Joyce didn't value the past, that he
used recurrance to escape it, that his is a space book and
not a time book. Because the statement is spoken enigmati
cally in Ulysses, without many clues surrounding it, its
meaning is not clarified in the text itself. By adding
other statements, critics draw varied conclusions. Coupled
with the following interior monologue by Bloom, Stephen's
statement about history appears to mean that history is a
useless appendage to the present. Bloom muses:
No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vul
canic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in
the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal,
poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining
106
down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom.
All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old.
Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. . . . Wan
dered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity,
multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there
now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's:
the gray sunken cunt of the world. (p. 61)
The meaning of Stephen's view of history as a nightmare may
depend on his meaning for the word "history." Not itself
the past, history is but a record which tends to isolate the
past, to keep the past qua past. Dead like the picture
Bloom draws. Rather than wishing to escape from the past,
Stephen wishes that the past live. The confusion about
Joyce's meaning results from failure to distinguish between
the past and history. Stephen's "Hold to the now, the here
. . ." (U, p. 186) reinforces his dislike of history as a
record rather than as a living reality.
Margaret Church also believes that Joyce distinguishes
between history and the past. At the time Stephen calls
history a nightmare he has just finished teaching the sub
ject. Church explains,
Stephen, teaching history at Mr. Deasy's school, finds his
work distasteful, sees history as a nightmare because such
teaching involves separating past from present, seeing
history as a group of facts and dates with no relation to
the present. (p. 47)
This, I think, is an accurate reading of the line because it
correlates with Joyce's many statements about the past and
with the stream-of-consciousness technique Joyce uses the
novel to bring the past into the present. History viewed as
an isolated body of records of the past deprives man of a
part of himself. By reading the line "history-as-disci-
pline" Stephen's attitudes toward the past and history com
plement each other. A Portrait shows Stephen living renewed
in the present because he no longer feels the guilt for con
fessed sins. History is not the nightmare; the separation
of the past and present is.
Joyce defines and explains memory in a number of ways.
In Dubliners, his reference to it as "communing with the
past" (p. 16) suggests that consciousness operates in mem
ory. Joyce exemplifies this kind of memory in Ulysses dur
ing the conversation between Mr. Deasy and Stephen. Mr.
Deasy calls on his memory of Shakespeare, "But what does
Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse" (p. 30). And
Stephen with his more accurate conscious memory of litera
ture murmurs "lago," the villain whose advice would be fol
lowed by none in the audience. Later in the scene, after
Mr. Deasy asks Stephen if he can say he owes no man, Ste
phen's conscious memory recollects:
Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of sox, one pair of
brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. Ryan, two shillings.
Temple, two lunches. Bussell, one guinea, Bob Reynolds,
half a guinea, Kohler, three guineas, Mrs McKernan, five
weeks' board. (p. 31)
The Church looks on conscious memory as a tool for self-
improvement. During the retreat in A Portrait the priest
counsels,
Banish from your minds all worldly thoughts, and think
only of the last things, death, judgment, hell and heaven.
He who remembers these things, says Ecclesiastes, shall
not sin for ever. He who remembers the last things will
108
act and think with them always before his eyes. (p. Ill)
The priest means, of course, to remember what has been
learned of these last things. Finally, in Dubliners, Mr.
James Duffy "tried to fix her in his memory" ("A Painful
Case," p. 109). There are many such examples in Joyce's
fiction to illustrate his concept of conscious memory.
Later, in Ulysses, Stephen points to memory as the
constant in a changing world. "But I, entelechy, form of
forms, am by memory because under everchanging forms"
(p. 189). Memory takes on basic importance to the individ
ual as his means of continuity. Earlier, after Mr. Deasy
was speaking of what he remembers, Stephen'thinks, "Glori
ous, pious, and immortal memory" (p. 31). Here, of course,
the statement is ironical because the memories Mr. Deasy
tells are less than pious in their renunciation of prelates.
But Stephen considers memory itself a glorious faculty.
Joyce develops a variety of memory different from con
sciously attempted recall., These memories abide "in the
darkest places of the heart" from where "a chance word will
call them forth suddenly" (U, p. 421). In this kind of mem
ory a catalytic thought, sensation, name, or motif brings
back a memory spontaneously and unsummoned. In A Portrait
the narrator describes Stephen's spontaneous memory in
nearly the same words, saying:
His monstrous reveries came thronging into his memory.
They too had sprung up before him, suddenly and furiously,
out of mere words. He had soon given in to them, and
allowed them to sweep across his intellect, wondering
109
always where they came from, from what den of monstrous
images, and always weak and humble towards others, rest
less and sickened of himself when they had swept over him.
(p. 90)
Memories "came thronging," they "sprung up" and their power
was felt "suddenly and furiously." Here Joyce expresses his
attitudes clearly. Memory is powerful, a spontaneous reac
tion to a catalytic present experience. All spontaneous
memories, however, are not of monstrous things. During Ste
phen's retreat the narrator tells us,
The figure of his old master, so strangely rearisen,
brought back to Stephen's mind his life at Clongowes: the
wide playgrounds, swarming with boys, the square ditch,
the little cemetery off the main avenue of limes where he
had dreamed of being buried, the firelight on the wall of
the infirmary where he lay sick, the sorrowful face of
brother Michael. His soul, as these memories came back to
him, became again a child's soul. (P, p. 108)
The final sentence of this quotation is interesting
when compared with comments elsewhere in Joyce's novels.
For example, twelve pages earlier we are told that "His
childhood was dead or lost" (P, p. 96). And Bloom remarks
in Ulysses, "Can't bring back time” (p. 168). The cyclical
suggestion is reinforced by later comments such as "My
childhood bends beside me" (U, p. 28) which I discuss later.
The statements above from A Portrait are probably not con
tradictory. An author intrusion before a list of spontane
ous memories begins, "Folded away in the memory of nature
with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain" (U,
p. 10). The concept of "folded away" may be the key to
understanding the relationship of the two statements because
110
in the former there is a catalyst, the figure of the priest,
to release the spontaneous memory. In the second, although
his father and friends are reminiscing, Stephen has no memo
ries, no joys similar to theirs. His childhood was folded
away, "lost" as he says here, but not dead.
Because most memories are spontaneous, they cannot be
called up at will. Things memorized may be recalled, but
spontaneous memories are not controlled by the conscious
ness. Joyce discusses how memories may become obliterated
in "Ithaca." After discussing Bloom's reminiscences of his
father and the places he and Rudolph have gone, the question
is, "Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory
of these migrations in narrator and listener?" The
response:
In narrator by the access of years and in consequence
of the use of narcotic toxin: in listener by the access
of years and in consequence of the action of distraction
upon vicarious experiences. (pp. 724-725)
Thus Joyce recognizes that time and subsequent experiences
can interfere with memory. When the memories are not avail
able to the present, they are in effect lost or dead.
The problem posed by Joyce's statement that "His [Ste
phen's] soul, as these memories came back to him, became
again a child's soul," alluded to earlier, needs explanation
in the light of other suggestions of recurrence. Aside from
4
the leitmotif of "metempsychosis," Ulysses contains clear
^Melvin Friedman identifies the leitmotif as "a fic
tional device for suggesting the recurrence of themes and
Ill
indications of recurrence. Stephen, helping a student slow
in math, muses:
Like him was X, these sloping shoulders, this grace
lessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me
to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his
secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the
dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their
tyranny: tyrants willing to be de-throned. (U, p. 28)
A little later in "Nestor" Stephen recalls, "As on the first
day he bargained with me here. As it was in the beginning,
is now . . . and ever shall be . . . world without end"
(U, p. 29). The allusion to the end of the doxology may
imply progressive time as well as recurrence. But as the
scene continues, Stephen's awareness of recurrence becomes
more explicit: "The same room and hour, the same wisdom:
and I the same. Three times now. Three nooses round me
here. Well. I can break them in this instant if I will"
(U, p. 30). The cyclical nature of recurrence is more
explicit in Bloom's monologue much later in the novel where
he thinks,
The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence
that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the
soul is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of genera
tions that have lived. (U, p. 414)
The evidence of Joyce's sense of cyclical recurrence in
life is explicit. And the evidence that he rejected the
concept of recurrence, that he believed in progressive time
is also explicit. Did the two co-exist in his mind unrecon-
for creating the illusion of a circular development" (p.
128). As such, leitmotifs are not really temporal and do
not affect the space and time structure of the novel.
112
ciled, or did he distinguish between artistic use and
reality? All men have a sense of recurrence; it is natural
to see patterns. The day is a pattern of hours, the week a
pattern of days, the year a pattern of months. The Church
calendar is a cycle of feasts. Ever since primitive socie-
ties, as Mircea Eliade explains, man has had a concept of
cycles.^
The concepts of progressive time and cyclical recur
rence are not irreconcilable.’ ' - In one of Bloom's monologues
Joyce states the problem clearly. He says,
The year returns. History repeats itself. . . . Take the
train there tomorrow. No. Returning not the same [ital
ics added]. Like kids your second visit to a house. The
new I want. Nothing new under the sun. (p. 377)
"Like kids your second visit to a house," the pattern of the
day, of growth and decline, of history repeats, but each
repetition is different. The student Stephen observes is a
different student, the visit with Deasy later in time though
similar in pattern. So time is a continuity, the future
always plunging into the past. Even if the later event were
in all aspects identical to a former one and the processes
of arrival and departure identical, time and the conscious
ness of the observer would be changed.
Time, space, relativity, past, present and future, his
tory, memory, and recurrence are all related topics which
^Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask
(New York, 1954) , p~! 52~
113
Joyce's fiction comments on at times with comparative
ambiguity or without explanation and at other times clearly
and unequivocably. In order to aid in determining Joyce's
views on these topics, I will now review the support or
further elucidation Joyce studies provide. Afterwards I
will determine what correlation exists between Joyce's
statements and his application of the ideas in the structure
of his fiction.
Joyce's fiction is the subject of fine explication de
texte and milieu studies. One such study, Patricia Hutch
ins' James Joyce's Dublin, helps explain Joyce's attitude
toward time and its clock-time measurement.
Dublin children are always playing the game of asking
"the right time please", for every street clock has its
own idea of the speed of the earth round the sun. One can
leave home at the hour by Mooney's pub, find Trinity Col
lege going its sedate pace, contradicted by the opposing
views of the Irish Times and the Ballast office . . . and
yet arrive in front of the G. P. 0. five minutes before
departure. . . .
In Ireland there is a sense of temps, the present and
the past, but little concern with 1'heure. . . .6
This selection explains why Joyce's fiction is concerned
with the hour principally when there is an appointment or
schedule to keep. It is the concern with temps that caused
Ulysses to be labeled a "time-book."
Hutchins' book also explains the walking device used so
frequently as a continuity for the interior monologues, an
activity which does not demand attention. "Dubliners," she
® (London, 1950), p. 13.
114
says, "most Irish people, are promenaders." Noting that
Joyce accentuated their walking, she continues, "His books
are peregrinations; people are always coming or going, and
Dublin landmarks are the lace-pins about which the whole
structure is designed" (p. 22).
Wyndham Lewis is more often quoted for his critical
errors with regard to Joyce's fiction than for what insights
he has, probably because he’ often considers the content he
explains as reprehensible. When discussing Joyce's use of
time and the unities, he says,
I regard Ulysses as a time-book; and by that I mean it
lays emphasis upon . . . the self-conscious time-sense.
. . . The Classical unities of time and place are buried
beneath its scale, however, and in this All-life-in-one-
day scheme there is small place for them. (p. 84)
This time-sense, or psychological time, not 11heure, is the
essential reality for Joyce. And Lewis' allusion to the
classical unities is important because, as he suggests,
Joyce adheres to the strictest classical unities in his
basic narrative structure with a unity of time more rigid
than he uses in A Portrait, which covers nearly twenty
years, and more rigid than lie uses in many of the short
stories in Dubliners, some of which cover a period of
years.^ All these works of fiction take place in Dublin,
^Where Lewis complains of the unities being buried,
Philip Toynbee's "A Study of Ulysses" published in Modern
British Fiction; Essays in Criticism, ed. Mark Schorer CNew
York, 1961), pp. 336-357, complains of an excess in the last
three chapters. He says that "At this point in the book
Joyce seems to have fallen into a chronological error of
115
thereby adhering to a strict unity of place in the stories.
Lewis calls the unities "buried," but if buried they often
have headstones to identify them. Lewis was, of course,
referring to the stream-of-consciousness passages in Ulysses
where the subjective continuity is scarcely noticed as the
consciousness ranges in space and time. Lewis prefers that
an author present the external progression of events; Joyce
expresses man's sense of time, his inner reality. As Lewis
divined, in this inner reality a man can live or re-live
much of his life in one day but not in the original chrono
logical order.
I have explored some of Joyce's explicit statements on
the relation of space and time, but critical commentary has
added dimensions of understanding that go further than quo
tation in explaining Joyce's thought. Discussing Ulysses,
Edmund Wilson says in Axel's Castle that Joyce's world "is
always changing as it is perceived by different observers or
by them at different times. It is an organism made up of
'events' . . . and each of these events is unique" (pp. 221-
2 22). He thus indicates that relative perspective and
astonishing simplicity. He seems to have retreated into the
strictest unity of time. We are to spend exactly that peri
od of time in the reading which is supposed to elapse in the
period of which we read. There was no attempt to impose
this burden on us in the earlier parts of the book, and it
is most unwelcome here. Had he described the moments spent
at the- cabman's shelter with the economy and compression of
the opening in the Martello tower I am convinced he could
have achieved all his effects in fifteen pages instead of
fifty" (p. 354).
116
temporal change affect spatial relations. Shiv Kumar inter
prets Joyce's space and time from a different point of view.
Like Hugh Kenner, who says the encounter between time and
space is the theme of the novel (p. 114), Kumar writes:
This space-time polarity is as fundamental to any aesthet
ic theory as to any system of metaphysics, and in the work
of James Joyce as in the entire thought of Bergson, space
and time are presented as contraries, with durational flux
as the only true reality. Whereas space is synonymous
with matter, externality and convention, la duree, on the
other hand, represents spirit, inner reality and free
will. (Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel,
p. 133)
Mr. Kumar’s observation adds something missed in presenting
Joyce's definitions; when Joyce defines space and time, he
does so separately. For example, at the beginning of
"Proteus" he defines space first. When discussing the con
nection of space and time, Joyce speaks of the measurement
of each. Stephen closes his eyes to the visible when he
describes the ineluctable modality of the audible. And
later he says, "Rhythm begins, you see, I hear [italics
added]" (U, p. 37). And then in the library, after defining
space, Joyce stresses time— "Hold to the now . . . through
which all future plunges to the past" (U, p. 186)., The past
and future are measurable, but the now— present experience--
is not. Thus the text supports Kumar's observation of space
and time as contraries while the reality, experienced time,
remains Joyce's central concern. However, as I indicated
earlier, Joyce does point out how consciousness relates
space and time. Suggesting how essential space and time are
117
to Joyce's method, Leon Edel posits a close connection
between these and Joyce's aesthetics. He writes:
Stephen, at one moment in Ulysses equates a shout in the
street with God, thus suggesting-the spiritual qualities
Joyce felt in this synthesis by which the audible or the
visible or both— time or space or again both— merge into
the artist's consciousness to form his "instant of emo
tion" or epiphany. (p. 96)
Richard M. Kain's Fabulous Voyager adds dimensions to the
evidence of relativity already cited. "Bloom," he says,
"conceives of the process of evolution on a cosmic scale as
he speculates on the nature of time."8
Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing.
Same old dingdong.always. Gas, then solid, then world,
then cold, then dead shell drifting around ..." (U,
p. 167)
Here certainly is compression of change and of time, rapid
flux of immense proportions. And pointing to other examples
of Joyce's emphasis on flux, Kain sees all the examples as
leading to "the cosmic perspective" that makes its first
ironical occurrence when Bloom falls down while getting into
his house during "Ithaca." Kain notes that "The question
'Did he fall?' is answered with a record of Bloom's exact
weight . . . followed by calendar calculations." Quoting
the passage (U, pp. 668-669), he adds that it is "shortly
followed by other indications of the perspective of relativ
ity" (pp. 232-233) .
Kain goes on to explain how Joyce recounts the exact
8(Chicago, 1947), p. 232.
118
details of the flow of the water for Stephen's tea and how
Bloom uses these reflections to reiterate his concept of the
eternal flux of nature. Kain then documents other indica
tions of cosmic relativity and ends with an examination of
the mathematical manipulations of Bloom "until we must have
Stephen live until 3072 A.D. and Bloom born in 81,396 B.C.
[U, p. 679]. Here is a case of parallax with a vengeance"
(p. 236)1
Aside from the statements Joyce makes about the pres
ent, past, and future, his attitudes are important. Wyndham
Lewis recognized Joyce's attitude when he wrote, "Proust
returned to the temps perdu. Joyce never left it. He dis
charged it as freshly as though the time he wrote about were
still present, because it was his present" (p. 93). Leon
Edel adds that time present is a "continuum of present, in
which the past inevitably lingered" (p. 13). But it is more
than a lingering. Ellmann describes Joyce's intention as
seeking to "reveal the coincidence of the present with the
past" (James Joyce, p. 563). This lingering, coincidence,
co-presence shows how Joyce would eliminate separation of
past, present, and future to suggest flux without division.
In view of the obvious value Joyce places on the past,
how he makes it linger in the present, coincident with it as
the critics point out, his negative attitude toward history
seems contradictory. History, after all, records the past
that he would like to see live in the present. But this is
119
not Joyce's notion of history. Frank Budgen explains:
History for the boys [in Deasy1s school] is a struggle
to learn the record of past events; for Stephen it is a
struggle against the past as it is recorded in his body
and mind and in the social element in which he lives.
History would present him with a life task ready made.
(p. 44)
History for Joyce works against the past as perceived by
man's consciousness. The ready-made task is to follow the
implications of his position in society rather than live the
present. History's task curtails his creativity.
Arnold Goldman adds that Stephen "hates the temporal
extension of things one after another, 'history' . . ."
(p. 147). History also connotes spatialization in this
reading--the placing of events in order rather than seeing
all the past at once as spontaneously meaningful. Georges-
Albert Astre finds position here pivotal. In "Joyce et la
duree" he says,
Mais le temps chronologique, le temps historique, ne cesse
d'opposer la diversite mSme a notre hantise d'Unitd; par
tous moyens modernes, il viole sans treve chaque con
science, il s'inscrit, grotesquement, sur les plus beaux
dcrans de notre Culture ou de notre philosophie. Il est,
simplement, le temps. Comment triompher de son encom-
brante presence?
LA est le theme fondamental de 1'oeuvre de Joyce, son
probl&me capital. Car il a ressenti, comme nul autre, le
scandale du temps factice de l'histoire, des montres et
des horloges. ...
History is a violator of the sense of time of the human con
sciousness; it is imitation time as M. Astre says. And
William York Tindall adds further reasons for Joyce's dis-
^L'Age Nouveau, XLV (January 1950), 30.
120
like of history. Tindall says,
To him the past [as seen in history] is intolerable, its
shape arbitrary, its materials fictive and uncertain,
"fabled" as Blake says, "by the daughters of memory" or
the Muses. Confined to time and space, history is imper
manent and unreliable. (p. 141)
The "daughters of memory" who seem here to be disliked
because they create fable, are put into the perspective of
Joyce's practice by Richard Ellmann:
The daughters of memory, whom William Blake chased from
his door, received regular employment from Joyce, although
he speaks of them disrespectfully. His work is "history
fabled," [U, p. 24] not only in A Portrait but in Ulysses
as well. He was never a creator ex nihilo; he recomposed
what he remembered, and he remembered most of what he had
seen or had heard other people remember. (James Joyce,
p. 375)
Joyce told Frank Budgen as much once in Zurich. Budgen
reports,
"Some people who read my book, A Portrait of the Artist
forget that it is called A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man." He underlined with his voice the last four
words of the title. (p. 60)
Budgen suggests that this statement may have carried the
connotation of the perspective of space and time. He adds
that Joyce's medium was "not an active sense, but memory,
and who knows when memory ceases to be memory and becomes
imagination" (p. 62)?
What Budgen explains for A Portrait, Daiches does for
Ulysses;
The Homeric and mythical devices secure their effect by
adding depth, like the orchestration of a melody; the
lesser devices tend to work, on the other hand, through
expansion, the richness being not that of a chord, where
one instant gives us the whole, but of a spatial and tem
poral journey, where the whole exists only by virtue of
121
memory and retrospect. (p. 102)
The remembered journey, the movement in time and space, is
the most important aspect of the novel while the historic
adds depth. Memory, then, was a key factor in Joyce's work.
Shiv Kumar says that "Memory forms in the work of Joyce
. . . the basis of art. . . . Stephen and Bloom live under a
perpetual shadow of the past; they are paragons of memory"
(pp. 118-119) .
One final and peculiar feature of Joyce's memory which
Margaret Church mentions is that
memories of his personal past lead to a sense of the his
torical past. For instance, he remembers sitting at the
piano striking chords, and from this scene rise visions of
Agincourt and Greensleeves. (p. 33)
She also alludes to Stephen's visualizing the old Irish
Parliament and his father's school days in Cork. Memory
would be fusing with imagination as Budgen points out, but
here all events become a part of Joyce's world. Joseph
Prescott sums up Joyce's use of memory. He writes,
As a stream of consciousness novel, the book [Ulysses] is
shot through with memories, and memories of memories,
which reach back increasing distances into the fading
past. (pp. 57-58)
Joseph Brennan and Richard Kain offer explanations for
the presence of a sense of recurrence and also the sense of
continuity in Joyce's fiction. Where earlier I offered the
suggestion that the recurrence is pattern and the flow tem
poral, Kain sees Ulysses as having two complementary princi
ples, "the mutation and the continuity of experience"
122
(Fabulous Voyager, p. 48). Brennan concludes that, "In the
end, Bloom realizes, as did Stephen earlier, that history
repeats itself, but it does so with a difference" (p. 43).
The flux which Brennan recognizes is not the flux of Berg-
sonian duration but Heraclitean flux because he sees the
flow imagery as referring to nature rather than to time
(p. 42). Much of the "Nausicaa" chapter contains references
to recurrence and flux. And since the water image is fre
quent and the novel's frame of reference Greek, it is rea
sonable to see Joyce's flux as Heraclitus'. There is, how
ever, no reason to assume that the flux does not extend to
time.
Joyce criticism adds depth to the possibilities of
meaning and reasons for Joyce's notions of time, space, and
related subjects. To complete this survey of Joyce's con
cepts, in the final section of the chapter I explore how he
uses his ideas in the structuring of his fiction.
Joyce spoke of two aspects or kinds of time--time as a
measurable quantity and the more important time as a psycho
logical quality. Both are illustrated in the temporal or
ganization of his novels and short stories. Joyce provides
more time measurement clues to the movement of the stories
in Dubliners than in A Portrait and Ulysses. This differ
ence indicates either he did not yet develop his ideas about
time or did not yet find the way to translate the ideas into
the structure of his fiction. At the level of the base
123
narrative, "Eveline," "After the Race," "Two Gallants," "The
Boarding House," "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," "Clay,"
"Ivy Day in the Committee Room," and "The Dead" take place
from two or three hours to a period of less than twenty-
four. "The Sisters" and "An Encounter" cover about two
days, and "Araby" and "Grace" about a week. The two taking
the longest periods of time are the least clear on specific
periods. "A Mother," while covering several weeks, centers
on one Saturday night; and "A Painful Case," because of a
four-year time shift, takes place in a period of several
weeks longer than the shift. The time indications in "A
Painful Case" are general, that is, Joyce describes the
kinds of activities done on particular days over a long
period.
All the stories move in the usual chronological order,
most of the stories making use of time shifts of specified
duration. In "The Sisters," for example, the narrator says;
"When I came downstairs to supper," and "It was late when I
fell asleep," and "The next morning after breakfast." Joyce
makes sparing use of the flashback, using it only in "The
Boarding House," "A Mother," and "The Dead." Clock time is
taken for granted; it is indicated where needed, but it does
not play a significant role in most of the stories. Its
passing is a source of irritation to the narrator of "Ara
by," in "Counterparts" clock time goes too fast for Farring
ton's working pace, and in "The Boarding House" it is a
124
source of anxiety. Clock time errs in both directions for
Lenehan in "Two Gallants," moving too slowly while he waits
for Corley and too fast for him to be ready to settle down.
These last stories show the disparity between unmeas
urable psychological time and measured clock time. This
psychological time appears when a character is preoccupied;
in these cases time is not mentioned— it does not exist for
the characters. "Eveline" exemplifies psychological time.
Preoccupied, Eveline blends incidents and projections in a
non-temporal relationship with the as yet inescapable verb
tense, a barrier in Joyce's way toward eliminating time
sequence. From Dubliners we can conclude that although
Joyce uses psychological time in a limited way, he usually
indicates conventional, measured time for clarity in the
narrative.
A Portrait covers a period of about twenty years. In
it Joyce is much more reticent in mentioning clock time—
both 1'heure and exact periods of measured time— than in
Dubliners♦ For example, he tells Stephen's age only once—
in confession— and he seldom indicates the exact length of-
the forward time shifts. In Chapter I, a flashback recon
structs Stephen's departure from home and his entrance into
Clongowes Wood College. In the opening scenes, the sophis
tication of the language and behavior described are the only
clues Joyce gives for the passage of time, and later he sel
dom tells how far Stephen has advanced in his schooling.
125
Joyce further escapes conventional time measurement by tele
scoping techniques such as he uses in describing the summer
after Stephen's last term at Clongowes. Joyce refers to
various days, evenings , and recurrent events without speci
fying chronological order. For example, he groups Stephen's
activities into the kinds of things he does "every morning,"
or "evenings," or "on Sundays."
There are places, however, in which time measurement
clues are specific. Joyce indicates the days of the retreat
at Belvedere and the time of a lecture at University Col
lege. His negative attitude toward the artificiality of
time measurement is apparent when he shows the difference
between Stephen's alarm and the "right" time. Stephen is
very much aware of time when he.waits "a full hour" while
his father inquires about the university, and the dated
diary entries of the last pages of the novel that mark the
days after Stephen decided to leave Ireland sometimes give
even the part of the day.
Psychological time, more prominent in A Portrait, is
illustrated by the blending of past events and anticipations
in Stephenis interior monologues. As in Dubliners, the verb
tenses and grammatical structure form a technical block to
total elimination of time divisions, but this effect is
achieved in a limited way structurally and is reinforced
when Stephen says he feels timeless existence. The opening
scenes of the novel, visions in a pool of past, are examples
126
of qualitative rather than quantitative structuring of time.
These scenes present Stephen's growth by describing his
maturing rather than the passing of years.
Ulysses takes place in a day, about eighteen hours
which are for the most part "buried" as Wyndham Lewis
charged. Time advances except for the flashback during the
first three chapters of the Bloom section. Here even more
than in A Portrait Joyce is reluctant to specify the lengths
of time covered by shifts. Although Joyce provides the date
later in the novel, in most cases the reader must work out
the advance of time for himself by examining the various
scenes. Bloom's and Stephen's ages can be determined only
late in the book. Clock time is associated principally with
appointments; Bloom shows its unreality by his attitudes
when noting differences in clock measurement in "The Laes-
trygonians." The exact time of day is first noted in con
nection with Dignam's funeral. "The Sirens" demonstrates an
acute awareness of the clock time which fuses with the meas
ure of musical rhythm. The chapter has repeated references
to clocks and time, but measured time is seldom a force? it
becomes inconsequential because of the subjective time of
the monologues.
With the development of the direct interior monologue
Joyce is able to express psychological time without the
interference of verb tenses. He uses the other monologue
types to show variant levels of consciousness, and in these
127
grammatical structures he continues to place events without
regard to their original sequence. Even conversation ranges
in time and space as the monologues. Joyce's neglect in
identifying the progressive hours of the day in the linear
sequence of the base narrative together with the many mono
logues illustrate Joyce's view that psychological time, not
measured time, represents reality. In reality times past
and present coexist.
Joyce's notion of space cannot be determined in Dub
liners or in A Portrait. Its importance is seen only in
Joyce's careful cataloging of places while characters' minds
are in monologue. We see the room Eveline sits in, the
buildings Stephen and Lenehan pass, sequences of locations
which” the tram passes. The structure of Chapter I of A Por
trait, when Stephen first enters Clongowes, is spatially
conceived, a group of scenes that show Stephen's relation to
the group. Stephen is alternately on the fringes and center
of the football game while—his mind is in monologue.
In Ulysses, "Aeolus" achieves a spatial quality;
Joyce's use of headlines relating to events separated in
place and time presents a spatial distribution in reality
without regard for any temporal relation that may exist. A
more sophisticated spatial quality is achieved in "Wandering
Rocks" in which Joyce builds a spatial picture of Dublin by
means of the peregrinations of a number of Dubliners who
cross each other's paths at times while Joyce gives scenic
128
views in various parts of the city. Finally, the dramatic
"Circe" chapter is essentially spatial, made of many scenes
from the memory and imagination.
Although Joyce does not formulate a relativity proposi
tion in Dubliners, "The Boarding House" is a beautifully
conceived example of structural relativity. The same set of
events covering a given period are viewed from the angles of
three persons: Mrs. Mooney, Mr. Doran, and Polly Mooney.
Joyce shows three fixed points in place and a moving period
of time, a space-time relativity. And while the time is
clock time as always in a relativity theory, the thoughts of
each person express qualitative time.
No structural examples of space-time relativity appear
in A Portrait unless the term is stretched into meaningless
ness. For example, one may argue that tram trips take place
in time and cover space, a heightened space coverage to the
constant time. Technically these are examples of space-time
relativity as are the walking scenes. The same may be said
for the many relativity examples of space-montage and time-
montage in the interior monologues of the fiction. But the
only important scenes are those in which time and space are
consciously manipulated for purposes of structure.
I have already alluded to several examples of relativ
ity in Ulysses. "Wandering Rocks" has spatial relativity
both to simultaneous time and to moving time. Examples of
static space-time relativity occur where Joyce gives clues
129
of simultaneity. In the first example Joyce shows Katey and
Boody Dedalus in the kitchen simultaneous with Father Con-
mee's walking in the fields reading his breviary. A similar
scene pictures Fr. Conraee walking, reading his breviary
while Dilly is showing Stephen her new book. This same
device is used in "The Oxen of the -Sun" to show Stephen and
Bloom who is en route to the-hospital to see Mina Purefoy.
Another example of relativity occurs when the Reverend Hugh
C. Love is just leaving St. Mary’s Abbey as Ned Lambert and
J. J. 0'Malloy look on. Several episodes later the minister
is seen in the same position by Simon Dedalus, Father Cow
ley, and Ben Dollard. Not only do these spatially related
scenes occur at the same space-time moment, but the inter
vening scenes are similar in time even though Joyce is not
explicit about their spatial relationships.
An example of moving time with space as a constant
shows Dilly Dedalus, Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus all just
missing each other when they browse at the book stall. The
walking throughout the scenes illustrates the more compli
cated relationships of moving in time with the varying spa
tial relationships. ("And time? Well that's the time the
movement takes" [U, 374].) This chapter, then, is a clear
structural example of space-time relativity. Another, not
so creatively conceived from a structural viewpoint, is
"Circe" which opens with scenes of space-time relativity.
Initially the four dimensions are in a stasis; then movement
130
changes the carefully set scenic relationships.
A discussion of structural use of the past, present,
and future necessarily overlaps with the discussion of time
because past, present, and future are conventional catego
ries or divisions of time. But Joyce's use of the fictive
present and the real present in "Circe" and in the direct
interior monologues demonstrates his stress on the now. The
fluidity of consciousness which does not respect the
"clock's clack" blends future and past with this present,
making experiences register as a continuous present, the
here, the now.
In Dubliners probably the best example of the co
presence of the past and present occurs in "The Dead" in
which Michael Furey, Gretta's first love, lives for Gabriel
Conroy.A Portrait is the work of the older artist reach
ing primarily into the recent and experienced past when Ste
phen was a young man. The few historical-past references to
Rome and Agincourt ar to Aquinas or Aristotle, not neces
sarily partaking of the racial past as has been suggested,
are probably only the visualizings of the artistic imagina-
l^in James Joyce Richard Ellmann says "that the dead do
not stay buried is a theme of Joyce which lasted in his work
from beginning to end1 (p. 253).
131
t i o n . Ulysses is a book of the co-present uniting ele
ments of the present, experienced and historical past, which
belong to indivisible subjective time, with the present on
16 June 1904.
History, like the temporal divisions above, does not
lend itself to structural illustration in the same way as
time, space-time relativity, or space. But Ulysses1 title
and the names Joyce gives chapters refer to the epic of
early Greece. A number of critics have pointed out the cor
respondences of structure to The Odyssey. Joyce is not
using The Odyssey as an artifact, but rather he is making it
a living part of the present. By making the Homeric epi
sodes a layer of reference in Ulysses, Joyce makes them
active in this modern odyssey of a modern man. This novel,
therefore, does not present history as history but as a
dimension of man's present experience.
Although the first book that comes to mind when one
considers Joyce's use of memory is A Portrait, Dubliners too
is in many ways a memory book. Memory plays no part in
"After the Race" and little in "Counterparts," but all the
other stories contain many pure memories of the recent and
experienced past or the general past for recurrent events or
■'■■'•Margaret Church feels these exemplify Jungian theory
of the racial past (p. 33). Artistic visualization seems
the simpler explanation since the allusions appear to be
conscious imaginative projections rather than participations
in the past.
132
behavior patterns. "Eveline" is almost entirely spontaneous
reminiscence triggered by anticipation of the protagonist's
imminent move to Buenos Aires, and much of "A Little Cloud"
is reminiscence of the previous eight years. Joyce used
primarily spontaneous memory in Dubliners and in the two
novels. The fiction contains relatively few examples of
habit and conscious memory.
From the opening, "Once upon a time and a very good
time it was," A Portrait gives memories— and memories of
memories--as Stephen recalls incidents such as his pandying.
The schema of the novel in Chapter II, in fact, records only
the memories of memories. And in Ulysses the memory of sen
sations and events consumes the major share of the mono
logues. Because the base narrative is principally the pres
ent moving forward while the bulk of the novel is memory,
pointing backward, the reader finds himself where the future
plunges to the past and where the past plunges into the
future.
Recurrence is much more easily established with regard
to symbolic content than organization. For example, in Dub
liners Arnold Goldman sees cyclical patterning in "Counter
parts," "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," "Clay," and "The
Dead" (pp. 121-125); and Margaret Church names "After the
Race" (p. 29). But calling the story the "end of a cycle"
as Goldman does or arguing cyclical recurrence because road
racers run on a cyclical course is either proving no cycle
133
at all or stretching symbols. These readings probably
reflect cycle searching rather than the actual presence of a
full cycle in the stories. The case is stronger for cycli
cal recurrence in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and "The
Dead." In the former, Joe Hynes' poem was probably an
annual recitation during the anniversary celebration, and in
the latter story Michael Furey's return and the party itself
indicate recurrence..
The sense of recurrence born of Joyce’s notion that the
past lives in the present is clearly demonstrated not only
by leitmotifs but by events in A Portrait. For example, the
scene in Chapter II which combines Heron's finding a fault
in Stephen with "striking him . . . with his can[e] across
the leg" {p. 76, et seq.) elicits a Confiteor after the
injunction "Admit!" This scene is immediately followed by a
pure-memory flashback to Stephen's first term in the college
when a similar situation existed (pp. 78-83). These are
cyclically recurrent scenes because the pattern of events is
the same.
Ulysses, too, contains cyclical recurrence. Ellsworth
Mason wrote a dissertation to demonstrate that Joyce's
shifting of symbolic sections from The Odyssey was to gain a
1 ?
cyclical effect. Because this shift is on the symbolic or
reference level, it is not concerned with the time sequence
12"Joyce's Ulysses and the Vico Cycle," unpubl. diss.
(Yale, 1948).
134
of the base narrative. Yet in the dramatic "Circe," figures
out of the recent, experienced and historical past— Edward
the Seventh, Stephen's mother, Simon, Garret Deasy, Shake
speare, Fr. Dolan, Virag, and others— are present again.
Furthermore, Molly's monologue refers to the Angelus, to the
necessity of rising early, thus completing the temporal
cycle of the day that began with Stephen's and Bloom's ini
tial scenes. The next day comes to Molly in the form of
shopping and work to be done. If 16 June 1904 is every day
for modern man, then the recurrence is cyclical. The prob
lem with identifying the recurrence of the past in the pres
ent with cycles is that cycles have parts, and those parts
must return with the new occurrence. Thus the best example
of structural cyclic recurrence is in A Portrait in which
the cycle of sin-cane-admit-confession is repeated in suc
cession with the only differences years, intensity, and
emotion.
CHAPTER V
COMPARISON OF BERGSON AND JOYCE
Inquiry into influences on James Joyce's thought on
time and space has led to opinions of his similarity to
Eastern myth, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas,
S0ren Kirkegaard, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, William James,
Alfred North Whitehead, Albert Einstein, Giordano Bruno,
Giambattista Vico, and Henri Bergson. Much of the differ
ence of opinion on the nature of time and space in Joyce's
fiction is caused by failure to define terms, systematically
to analyze Joyce's literary practice, or by failure to
recognize that Joyce's fiction illustrates ideas both of
permanence and of change. But more important, since litera
ture does not treat philosophical problems directly— that
is, as abstract theory— and since Joyce was probably either
directly or indirectly aware of the work of most of these
men, their influence or his correspondence with their ideas
about time and space can be supported with varying success.
Some of these philosophers and psychologists influenced each
other; others had similar insights. For example, Whitehead
acknowledged his debt to Bergson (Lewis, p. 162) and before
135
136
William James refined his theory of psychological time in
The Principles of Psychology, Bergson already suggested its
application to aesthetics in Time and Free Will and was -
stressing the distinction between time and space (Friedman,
p.. .75) .
Without disputing or evaluating the amounts or kinds of
influence or similarity between Joyce and the many philoso
phers and psychologists suggested, I trace correspondences
between Bergson and Joyce. Literary critics have long
claimed that Bergson is a probable source for Joyce's time
and space. Wyndham Lewis says that in his "scrutiny of con
temporary time-philosophy" he was "more and more . . . led
to sources in Bergson's psychological time-conception
. . (p. 163). From a chronological point of view, an
influence is quite possible. Time and Free Will, Matter and
Memory, and The World of Dreams were all published between
1889 and 1901, before Joyce completed any of his fiction for
publication. And although we do not know the extent, Joyce
was aware of Bergson's ideas which were already popular at
the turn of the century. Even if Bergson's ideas were
shared with contemporaries, it was Bergson who studied time
and space extensively.
Margaret Church states a critical commonplace when she
writes, "In general, Bergson's influence on the contemporary
writer has been to indicate for him a sense of time which
was humanly meaningful in terms of man's inmost existence
137
. . ." (p. 9) . This sense of time as meaningful to humans
is a starting point both for Bergson's theory and for the
subjectivist novelists' literary inquiry because fiction
writers are interested in men's unique reactions to their
world. In exploring correspondences between Bergson's and
Joyce's thought, I begin with their-.attitudes about time,
then compare their views on space, relativity, memory, the
past, present and future, history, and recurrence. When I
ascribe the thinking of one of his characters to Joyce, I do
so only as the operating theory in his fiction. The corre
spondences, then, are between Bergson's ideas and those of
narrators and characters in Joyce's fiction.
Bergson's conception of real time, which he calls
duree, is perceived by intuition rather than by the intel
lect because the intellect tends to spatialize, to separate
time into moments. Duree is qualitative, an unmeasurable
flow, a succession of interconnected conscious states. It
may be nothing more than a succession of qualitative changes
with mutual interpenetration but without separation. Duree
is pure heterogeneity without precise outlines or distinc
tions, so the events perceived are not side by side. Duree
is a flow but it is not linear, neither horizontal nor
vertical. Thus duration is the feeling of time the individ
ual has; there is, in addition, a real, concrete duration
simultaneous with it. Duration is opposed to the discon
tinuous, abstract time as measured by clocks. Clock time is
138
a convention, a dimension of space, not a reality.
Joyce, like Bergson, recognizes two kinds of time. And
like Bergson, the important time for him becomes subjective
time; clock time relates only to social functions and is
relatively unimportant. From his earliest fiction Joyce
uses measured time to indicate appointments or, as in the
case of Farrington in "Counterparts," a source of irritation
because Farrington's natural pace is slower than the conven
tional measure. The real time for Joyce is the psychologi
cal time, the personal time that corresponds to Bergson's
dur^e because in reality pace varies with the mental state
of the character. For example, Stephen's hour wait in A
Portrait seems very long to him, and during "The Sirens"
episode of Ulysses time speeds and Bloom's watch breaks,
opening the way for the timeless scene at the strand. Ste
phen, too, feels timelessness in A Portrait soon after the
measured wait for his father. This feeling of timelessness
is due to the absence of artificial time; it is not a refu
tation of duree.
Because duration is personal, the character's state of
mind determines the seeming pace of its flow. Not a throw
back to the unprogressive notions of time held in ancient
Greek or in medieval time as Joseph Brennan claims, time
lessness for Joyce is an affirmation that psychological time
is real, a qualitative rather than quantitative measure.
And if myth is an attempt to escape time as Eliade suggests,
139
it is not duree that it attempts to escape so much as the
mathematical conception of time as a series of points side
by side, forming a line since the beginning of the world or
of history. The interior monologues in Joyce's fiction
indicate not that time is static but rather that memories of
past events are available to the present not in the original
order of perceived occurrence but as they become meaningful
to the present. As Shiv Kumar points out,
The minds of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus remain in a
perpetual flux and cannot be said to coincide with any
particular "mathematical instant." There is thus a sig
nificant resemblance between Joyce's conception of the
"continuous present tense" . . . and Bergson's "real, con
crete, live duration." (Henri Bergson and the Stream of
Consciousness Novel, p. 105)
So Joyce's interior monologue technique, his variation of
time's pace for his characters as well as his statements
about the nature of time support correspondences with Berg
son’s distinction between real time--duree— and abstract
time, the time of clocks. For both men qualitative time is
the reality.
Each successive book Joyce published presents a clearer
indication of his structural and ideological affirmation of
dur^e. In Dubliners he uses few interior monologues, none
of which are direct. In the short stories Joyce does not
discuss the nature of time, space, or memory. He does not
noticeably attempt to discredit clock time in favor of psy
chological time, nor does he make use of flow or flux
imagery to suggest that time is a qualitative reality. It
140
is chiefly through reading backward from the novels that we
find early evidence of a sense of duration in Dubliners.
But between the writing of Dubliners and A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, either Joyce's sense of subjective
time became more acute or he worked out the methods for
incorporating this qualitative sense of time, for in A Por
trait exact time clues are fewer, the story shifts in space
and time even outside stream sections, and omniscient and
indirect interior monologues play an important role.
Ulysses continues the trend toward subjective time to the
point of eliciting Wyndham Lewis’ angry attack.-*- Yet with
the shifting of time and space, Joyce, like Bergson, recog
nizes that the consciousness observes events in the present
one after the other regardless of the order in which they
are recalled. Therefore, Joyce has the basic narrative move
primarily forward while the enduring "I" is experiencing the
flowing "now" enriched by recollection,
Bergson defines space as an empty, homogeneous,
unbounded medium which permits us to view objects quantita
tively. The consciousness sees the multiplicity in space
and retains the states by setting them side by side, so the
consciousness perceives relationships as changing. Space
plays so important, a part in man's thinking because it is
apprehended by the intellect which deals with quantity more
- * - A portion of the criticism appeared on page 17 and in
footnote 1 on page 95.
141
easily than with quality. The spatialization of time
results from perceiving motion in space; science perceives
time as motion— a kind of trajectory which is measurable in
space. At times Bergson seems to confuse the matter in
space with space, but he clearly distinguishes the two.
When he speaks of space as having extension, he is assuming
matter which occupies the empty, homogeneous medium.
When Stephen defines space as "what you damn well have
to see" (U, p. 187) he too is apparently confusing space
with matter. But when in Ulysses space is described as the
ineluctable modality of the visible (p. 37), Joyce is recog
nizing space as the medium in which things are distinguish
able, so his confusing of space and matter is only apparent.
Like Bergson, Joyce assumes matter when he assigns measur
able physical properties to space. When in A Portrait Joyce
describes Stephen as pacing, stepping carefully in the
spaces of the footpath's patchwork, Joyce is recognizing the
relation of motion to time's measurement and the relation of
motion to spatial measurement. Bergson defines space as
boundless; Bloom once refers to the extreme boundary of
space (pp. 727-728). His statement may be a mere manner of
speech, for his considerations of the constellations
(p. 698) indicate vast relative distances. Because Bloom's
one comment is the only statement on the extension of space,
we cannot be certain whether or not Bloom thinks space
unbounded. His view, however, is essentially the same as
14 2
Bergson's with regard to space as the medium or modality in
which quantitatively measurable matter ex:sts and in which
motion occurs and consequently in which science gets its
notions of quantitative time.
Most of what Bergson writes about relativity appears in
Duration and Simultaneity, published in 1922, long after
Minkowski, Lorentz, and Einstein developed their space-time
relativity propositions and after Joyce completed Ulysses.
But, as Bergson says, he pointed out the relationship
between space and time in his earliest work published before
the work of the physicists. Space-time, which is the
mechanical time of science, has long been a part of human
experience. What relativity theories add is the mathemati
cal measurement of coincident space and time instants and
the measure of these instants from variant relative view
points. The differing space-time relationships for
separated observers is implicit in the concept of duree with
its differing paces for various observers. As Bergson indi
cates, the concept of space-time relationships pre-dates
these relativists' theories, and Joyce was aware of time as
a fourth dimension of space even when he wrote his short
stories. Although there is no way of ascertaining Joyce's
source of information on relativity, his use of it in the
structure of his fiction closely corresponds with Bergson's
theory.
It is in Time and Free Will that Bergson first points
143
out that measured time is a fourth dimension of space; he
says this dimension of space allows us to juxtapose what is
given as succession. More than space-time instants, Bergson
recognizes simultaneous durations of consciousnesses which
are relative to each other, to real concrete duration, and
to the three dimensions of matter in space. Space-time
instantaneities do not partake of the nature of real time
but are purely mental constructs of virtual stops. And in
the relativity theories of the physicists, space and time
remain separate even though they are viewed as coordinate;
the amalgam exists only in the mind of the observer.
Joyce, too, separates space and time early in Ulysses;
the audible and the visible are presented as separate,
related realms, the first having to do with measured time
and the second with measured space. Stephen's motion com
bines the two, motion making the notion of time possible in
quantitative space. In the same novel Bloom's meditations
supply examples of cosmic relativity. But these are merely
mental constructs that would have Stephen live until 3 07 2
A.D. and Bloom himself born 81,396 B.C. (p. 679). At
another time Bloom muses on the possibility of relative
aging with variant space-time relationships (p. 57). Fi
nally, like Bergson, Stephen implies that space and time are
unavoidably related in quantitative time when he says, "That
lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctably1 1
(U, p. 217). The relationship is ineluctable because meas
144
ured time is not real time but a dimension of space. Berg
son's theory and Joyce's fiction, then, are similar with
regard to the space-time relation.
Even though both Bergson and Joyce think clock time
only virtual and therefore less important than real time,
both writers demonstrate a special interest in space-time
relativity. Bergson's interest was strong enough to prompt
him to write Duration and Simultaneity in which he observes
that time as a fourth dimension of space is introduced auto
matically into relativity theories, that when the intellect
spatializes time, time becomes an automatic coordinate.
Joyce uses the relativity insight as the basis for the
structure of "The Boarding House" probably before he knew
Einstein's first paper published in 1905 or Minkowski's in
19 08. And since we do not know if Joyce read Bergson's
work, his use of space-time relativity here may be the
result of his conscious or subconscious apprehension of time
as an automatic coordinate of space. However, by the time
Joyce speaks of relativity in Ulysses he knew the work of
Bergson and Einstein. Even scenes in which Joyce indicates
a special awareness of the space-time relationship without
making any special structural manipulation have for their
source relativity perception. But Joyce's special effects
in the structure of "The Wandering Rocks" and parts of
"Circe," result from an interest in relativity theories so
strong that Joyce worked out the theories in the sophisti-
145
cated structure of the chapters.
Memory plays as important a role in Bergson's philoso
phy as it does in the structure of Joyce's fiction, for mem
ory is essential for endurance; without memory there would
be no way for a person to apprehend his continuity. He
would know only the continuing of the before into the after;
an interior monologue, could record only present sensations
without a sense of the past or a sense of recurrence or
endurance. Memory is so vital that in Ulysses Stephen goes
so far as to say, "But I...am by memory..." (p. 189).
Bergson and Joyce have a similar conception of the
nature of memory. Bergson describes two distinct forms of
memory--the first a motor mechanism, a consciously learned
habit, and the second a spontaneous and independent survival
of the past into the present. When Stephen recites the
doxology he is repeating a "memorized" formula (U, p. 29),
When his students are reciting a history lesson they are
relying on the same habit or motor-mechanism memory (U,
p. 24). But for Bergson's theory and from the viewpoint of
Joyce's fiction, this kind of memory is minor. The chief
kind of memory is the pure or spontaneous one, the one that
pops into the present without conscious attempts at recall
and brings the past into- the present. Leitmotifs and memo
ries in monologues and conversation become so frequent in A
Portrait and in Ulysses that these novels may be justifiably
called memory books.
146
Both Bergson and Joyce recognize the relationship
between perception and memory. For both men memories are
called up by some catalytic occurrence in the present; it is
the sensorimotor elements of present action that give memo
ries warmth and life according to Bergson's theory and which
make the memories alive and meaningful in Joyce's fiction.
Bergson says that memories become actual when they slip into
a perception. In A Portrait the sting of a cane on his legs
brings back tangibly to Stephen a similar sting years earli
er. The force of memories is so strong that Joyce describes
them as springing "furiously" (p. 90). And spontaneous mem
ories, according to Bergson, recur more frequently once
recalled. The frequent recurrences of leitmotifs such as
"metempsychosis," and of Stephen's memories of his early
days at Clongowes, his pandying, and his mother's death sug
gest agreement with Bergson's description.
J. Mitchell Morse notes that Aristotle and St. Augus
tine speak of the flux of the future into the past and that
Joyce's statements seem to echo theirs (pp. 35-36). But on
the surface level of generalization the sequence of past,
present, and future is common observation. To determine a
correspondence or influence, more than an echoing statement
is needed. It is in the special nature of the relationship
that Joyce's and Bergson's views are similar with respect to
the nature of the past, present, and future. Joyce's novels
are memory books because Joyce recognizes the need for the
147
presence of the past for a sense of endurance because the
consciousness organizes past events in memory. In both
Bergson's theory and Joyce's writing, the present is the
most important, the other aspects being relationships to the
present. Man's consciousness is in durative flow with
events existing in space simultaneously with the durative
flow of the consciousness. The consciousness itself cannot
be divided into past, present, and future; nor can the
events themselves, for they are simultaneous. The time
divisions are spatializations of the flow. The intellect
constructs a series of simultaneities which it refers to as
past and future in relation to the present. In reality
there are no intervals, just a unity; in space there are
only simultaneities, no progression.
Stephen recognizes the close interrelation of past,
present, and future. In Ulysses he calls the future "the
sister of the past" (p. 194). But more significantly, in
the same passage he recognizes that what gives spatial
events continuity is the individual consciousness, the
enduring I. For Stephen, the artist, the consciousness,
weaves and unweaves his image of these spatial phenomena;
what he sees in the future is the reflection of his present
awareness. And Bloom too attempts to break down the divi
sions of past, present, and future by mixing these words
and verb tenses (p. 515). By so doing Joyce, like Bergson,
suggests that past, present, and future are divisions of
148
virtual time, not real duration, and that time is a flow
while the perceived events are spatial simultaneities.
Although Bergson and Joyce recognize the divisions as
the conveniences of virtual time, they see a significant
qualitative difference in that the present is what is act
ing, what is alive. "Hold to the now, the here, through
which all future plunges to the past" (U, p. 186), Stephen
says, and earlier in Joyce's fiction no memory of the past
affects Little Chandler because "his mind was full of pres
ent joy" (D, p. 72). Bergson writes that "My present is
what interests me, which lives for me . . ," (MM, p. 176)
because the past is powerless. Duration for Bergson means
invention, the creation of new forms. This present is both
a perception of the immediate past and a determination for
the immediate future; for both men the present, becoming, is
the important part of abstract time.
The present, becoming, is central for both men because
this is the space-time corresponding to the living percep
tion of the consciousness in duration. In the real, quali
tative order the past is in the present for flux is not
linear. We are today what we were yesterday with today
added, and, like a snowball, tomorrow will add today and
yesterday to the present as the consciousness is in an ever-
new becoming. These past images represent what is really
simultaneous in space, but as the consciousness perceives
the events the intellect divides them in virtual time
149
divisions. Joyce does not discuss how the past is pre
served; he says only that he can not forget the past^ and
shows that it is preserved and how the present calls it up.
Bergson claims the past images are preserved by themselves,
automatically, because if their preservation were not auto
matic, it would have to be by effort, and this effort would
constitute habit memory.
Both Joyce and Bergson say very little about the nature
of history, so there is neither reason to believe that Berg
son had any influence on Joyce nor reason to stress corre
spondences between the two men. To understand the writers'
concepts of history, the relation and distinction of the
past and history is necessary. Stephen makes the most
direct though unexplained statement when he calls history a
nightmare from which he is trying to awake. He clearly
intends a distinction between history and the past, history
being a dead record of events past which are not meaningful
in the present. Critics suggest a number of plausible
explanations for Joyce's negative attitude towards history;
an important reason is that conscious preservation of the
past as an end in itself constitutes a subversion of the
value of pure memories which occur only when meaningful to
the enduring consciousness. For Bergson, the terms "past"
and "history" are usually interchangeable because he talks
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 245.
of history as the thing "we have lived"; the history he
discusses reaches no farther into the past than prenatal
dispositions. At another time he speaks of a "history that
is gradually unfolding" (CE, p. 6), suggesting that he
regards history as a dynamic becoming. History is, then,
the written record just as memory is the unwritten record.
The only negative attitude Bergson might have— if any— would
occur if we fail to recognize that the linear sequence of
recorded history is a spatialization of simultaneous events.
In other words, like Stephen, Bergson would reject a view of
history as a phenomenon of quantitative time in which events
are necessarily linear rather than as a record of the dynam
ic, enduring becoming of the consciousness. As history is
frozen and linear it is a violator of the sense of time of
the human consciousness.
Perhaps the most widespread rejection of correspon
dences between Henri Bergson's theory of duree and Joyce's
idea of time comes from those who hold that Joyce was influ
enced by the Viconian theory of cyclical recurrence, for to
many there appears to be a contradiction between a Berg-
sonian sense of time as ever new and the Viconian view of
recurrence in history.-^ These critics assume that because
Vico does not approach history from the usual chronological
sequence of abstract time, he does not believe time is real.
^Seepages 13-14.
151
They fail to recognize that Bergson frequently stresses that
chronology— quantitative time— is not real.
Vico's The New Science is a history, but unlike most
other histories, it is not based on chronology, for Vico
distrusts chronology because numbers interfere with the
overview of the large picture of history.^ Vico never sug
gests that time is not real, that time does not exist, but
only that measured time does not give an accurate under
standing of the patterns of history. For Vico it is pat
tern, the pattern of cycles— an age of-the gods, an age of
the heroes, and an age of men--that recurs. But each recur
rence of the cycles is in a different form, in a different
time. Vico is not talking about time; he has no opinion of
it either as static or as flowing, for he is not interested
in time either as a convention or as a reality. What he
demonstrates is that there are no nev,7 basic patterns in his-
tory, just recurrence of the three cycles. Bergson, like
Vico, rejects the spatialized conception of events— hence,
of history— as occurring along a line or a continuum. But
while recognizing pattern seeking as a necessary activity of
the intellect, Bergson stresses the importance of the
intuition in perceiving creativity, newness, flux.
Vico never pretends that temporal recurrence is pos
sible; Bergson explains that it is impossible because life
4
Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, The New
Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, 1948), p. 106.
152
is a continual elaboration of the new; duration means inven
tion, and time is a constant flux. According to Bergson,
man's intellect searches for patterns and sees similarities
by its very nature; Vico views all history as a vast pattern
of recurrent cycles. Moreover, for Bergson the very nature
of memory implies recurrence, but there is no actual recur
rence of events, only a renewed image. There is, then, no
contradiction between the Bergsonian and Viconian theories
even though both stress very different things, the former
intuition and the latter intellect.
As Joyce observes and values pattern and system in
events and processes, he is Viconian; as he observes and
values flux, change, newness, and creativity, he is Berg
sonian. To say things recur but with a difference or to say
that things are ever new but with familiar aspects or pat
terns is to differ in emphasis only. Joyce's notion that
the past lives in the present gives rise to a sense of
recurrence. Leitmotifs and events such as Stephen's caning
in A Portrait attest to Joyce's sense of recurrence, even
cyclical recurrence. When Bloom observes, "Returning not
the same," he is recognizing that recurrence is in pattern
but not in time. As regards time, the future is always
plunging into the past in a stream of consciousness. As it
suggests recurrence, then, Joyce's fiction is neither
exclusively Viconian nor Bergsonian but rather is similar to
each because Joyce sees both stability and change in the
153
universe.
With regard to space and history, Bergson and Joyce
have similar ideas. But because neither develops a theory
of history, Bergson's conception must be drawn from a vari
ety of related statements and attitudes, and Joyce gives no
more than an enigmatic description from which we must
determine his meaning. Although Bergson's conception of
space is similar to other conceptions of space as a bound
less, empty medium, Joyce's conception as seen in his fic
tion is the same as Bergson's. The marked similarities with
regard to the qualities of time, the past, present, and
future, the importance of becoming make rejection of Berg
son's correspondences in Joyce's fiction impossible.
Bergson's and Joyce's statements of the relationship of
the past, present, and future are similar to those of earli
er philosophers only in the superficial sense of sequence.
The special nature of these divisions, the conception of the
divisions as virtual, and the stress on the present is
closely related to their ideas on the nature of time as
becoming, as qualitative in reality, quantitative by conven
tion. Also very similar are their conceptions of space-time
relativity and pattern recurrence. Bergsons duree, his
stress on the psychological nature of real time, was well
known before Joyce wrote his fiction. But post hoc does not
automatically mean propter hoc, and although Joyce knew
Bergson's work, he never acknowledged any influence, so no
154
direct influence can be irrefutably proven. Acknowledged or
not, however, the correspondence between Bergson's earlier
philosophy and Joyce's statements and structuring of his
fiction with regard to time and its related concepts is too
clear and too pervasive to be denied.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF
WORKS CONSULTED
155
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Creator Troth, Alexander Stephen, Jr. (author)

Core Title Joyce-Bergson Correspondences In The Theory And Time Structure Of 'Dubliners,' 'A Portrait,' And 'Ulysses'

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor O'Dea, Richard J. (committee chair), Belle, Rene F. (committee member), Burbin, James H., Jr. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-697610

Unique identifier UC11361306

Identifier 6913090.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-697610 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6913090.pdf

Dmrecord 697610

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Troth, Alexander Stephen, Jr.

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

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