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The "woman of no appearance": James Joyce, Dora Marsden, and competitive pilfering
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Thaine Stearns
Joyce's other changes to "The Mookse and the Gripes" after the publication of The Definition of the Godhead are woven into the wordplay and linguistic textures that make up the fabric of the novel, and these revisions reflect a range of positions in the modernist debate about time and space, one of which is certainly Marsden's. A more extended analysis of "The Mookse and the Gripes" shows that Joyce uses the story to introduce a Marsden-like figure and to parody the group of twentieth-century writers, including Marsden, Lewis, Bergson, Whitehead, and Samuel Alexander, who asserted positions about this metaphysical question. Several Joyce scholars have read this fable only as a response to Lewis's Time and Western Man (1927), which, in a chapter entitled "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce," took Ulysses to task for its participation in time aesthetics. (19) This argument does not take into account, however, at least two important considerations. The first is the timing of Joyce's revisions to the story after Marsden's book was published. The second is an issue of content. In particular, Joyce added more allusions to time and space in his revisions to the story completed in early 1929. "The Mookse and the Gripes" is told by Professor Jones, a Lewis stand-in who is figured as "so eminent a spatialist." The preface to the fable is a Jones lecture that shifts almost imperceptibly from discussing time and space to finances, and the professor rants about the "same dime-cash problem elsewhere. "Just as Lewis critiques Bergson and Einstein in Time and Western Man, Professor Jones attacks "the sophology of Bitchson" and "the whoo-whoo and where's hairs theorics of Winestain" (149). Certainly this fable parodies Lewis's arguments in Time and Western Man: the Mookse who in exasperation asks the Gripes "Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser?" (154) serves as a kind of space-mind, while the Gripes, "his Dubville brooder-on-low" (153) (Dublin brother-in-law) offers the time perspective, tormenting his counterpart with the question, "By the watch, what is the time, pace?" (154). We also see here Marsden's argument in her lead essays in the Egoist against the separation of a single order of existence reprised in the question asked by the Mookse, if "this space ... [is] too dimensional." In short, while Lewis's polemics play their part in the argument, it is too simple to claim that "the emphasis in this fable is clearly on the disjunction of space and time a la Lewis" (Otte 301). Marsden's position appears here too in the suggestion that time and space are conjoined in a single entity.
Joyce provides more than just elliptical references to Marsden's ideas in Finnegans Wake, however, in his effort to recuperate Marsden as a writer of significance. When the argument between the Mookse and the Gripes finally ends, with both combatants spent, a Marsden-like figure appears on the scene to carry the two combatants away. The woman is unnamed hut, once again, the passage teems with allusions:
