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

   It is perhaps of the first importance that the verb "Perceive"
   should be put in its correct Time-relation (if we may so call it)
   to the verb "Be" and its forms, and that "Things perceived"
   should be put in their correct Space-relation to the "I" which
   perceives them." ("Truth and Reality III" 66)

In other words, the perceiving subject, engaging in the temporal activity of seeing, has to address the spatial extension of what is seen in time. Like Bergson and James, then, Marsden posited a spatial-temporal flux of perception, language, and being that contrasts with both Cartesian duality and Lessing's genre division. In the same essay she argued that an individual circumscribes what he or she conceives as "space" and that time is defined by an individual's sustained effort to apprehend the images in that space. "The feeling of Space," she writes,

   is that of calculation as to the amount of expenditure in effort
   which is likely to be necessary in order to bring our sensing
   organs at their most effective point (i.e. the surface of the body)
   into immediate touch with the image called "External." (68)

More succinctly, we need to understand the distance between our bodies and things in the external world, which, until we are in direct physical contact with them, remain as images. On the one hand, while Stephen cannot help but conjoin space and time in his thinking--"A very short space of time through very short times of space"--like Descartes and Lessing, he insists on distinguishing them as separate aspects of reality. (13) On the other hand, from Marsden's perspective, an individual's perception of space is inextricably connected to the time of conscious perception; in effect, time and space are part of the same phenomenon within human consciousness.

As the letter to Weaver quoted in my epigraph indicates, Marsden chose to conflate Stephen's ideas with Joyce's, allowing her to set up Joyce as a competitor so she could differentiate between his metaphysics and her own. At the same time, however, Marsden borrows Stephen's ideas to use as a springboard for her own positions, which end up more aligned with Joyce's own thinking than she acknowledges. Marsden had read early sections of Ulysses by April 1918; Harriet Weaver had sent them to her in manuscript form. She was quick to respond: as her letter shows, she perceived Joyce to be a rival "writer of metaphysics," the ground that she had spent several years staking out as her own in her lead essays for the journals that she had founded. Beginning with the May 1918 issue, she began to critique Joyce's earliest chapters. Even though she does not mention Joyce or Stephen Dedalus, the focus of her critique emerges in her implicit attack on Stephen's ideas about separating time from space in perception. Her May 1918 essay argues that philosophy had categorically defined humans by either their sensory relationship to external stable objects or by their engagement with an inner world of consciousness. The former is the visible world of space; the latter is an abstract, temporal realm. Marsden takes exception to this split, asserting, "Any object is known when we have experience of it under two orders of existence" ("Our Philosophy" 66-67). Any definition of intellection or perception, therefore, that splits them into two disparate parts, misunderstands the nature of knowledge and of reality. She asserts this point in a convoluted passage that proclaims what "all who seek to expound reality" must understand: