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

(8.) The "Proteus" chapter of Ulysses was the second to be published in the Egoist. Although the Little Review serialized Joyce's novel in the United States before the Egoist published it in England, Harriet Weaver, who communicated regularly with Marsden regarding editorial issues with the journal, was directly involved in all phases of the novel's publication. See Lidderdale and Nicholson's account of her role in publishing the novel (199-200).

(9.) References to Ulysses give episode and line.

(10.) See, for instance, Bergson's Matter and Memory:

   The mistake of ordinary dualism is that it starts from the spatial
   point of view: it puts, on the one hand, matter with its
   modifications, in space; on the other hand, it places unextended
   sensations in consciousness. (220)

(11.) Both Kadlec and Clarke discuss the exchange of ideas between Marsden and Pound, especially in regard to Pound's essay series "The Serious Artist" and Marsden's reaction to his ideas. Neither Kadlec nor Clarke, however, discusses the striking differences between Marsden's attacks on Cartesian thought and Pound's affirmation of Cartesian geometry in his essay "Vorticism." This disagreement was another source of contention between the two ambitious writers. Pound's essay stands as his assertion of his own importance in modernist letters, and his analysis depends on privileging Descartes. Marsden's attack on Descartes served notice to Pound of her contrary view of his significance.

(12.) Although it is impossible to know whether Joyce utilized Marsden's discussions about Descartes before writing the "Proteus" chapter, he had probably read the New Freewoman and the Egoist; Pound sent him copies of the New Freewoman, and Harriet Weaver sent him copies of the Egoist. As Wendy Steiner has pointed out, in his walk along Sandymount Strand, Stephen Dedalus reenacts "a good portion of the history of philosophy" (33), including Descartes. Just before the passage quoted above ("You are walking through it ...") Stephen meditates about the extension of bodies in space: "Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured, How? By knocking his sconce against them" (3: 8-9).

(13.) Steiner overlooks Stephen's argument about Lessing in Portrait and thus reads his meditation in "Proteus" as a correction of Lessing: "whereas for Lessing these were two incommensurate realms, for Stephen temporal sequence and spatial contiguity have proved interchangeable" (35). Unless Stephen had revamped his aesthetic theories completely in his time away from Ireland, my reading is more consistent.

(14.) The "pregnant moment" in painting is analogous to the ekphrastic object in poetry, when the temporal movement of the action is ostensibly "suspended" creating a painted image or one that can be "seen" in the text. Lessing's Laocoon (1766) famously articulated the prescription that a visual image was most appropriately purely spatial, suspended in time. This dictate is undermined by ekphrasis, of course. Joyce and other modernist writers overtly challenged Lessing's ideas with their verbal depictions of representational space. For discussions of ekphrasis and its relationship to time in painting, see W.J.T. Mitchell's "Ekphrasis and the Other" in his Picture Theory and James Heffernan.