Nacheinander

As Stephen walks along the beach, counting his steps with eyes closed, he thinks, "A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible." A moment later he imagines what would happen if he "fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably.... My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander." The German words nacheinander (after-one-another) and nebeneinander (next-to-one-another) describe two types of sensory perception, "audible" and "visible" respectively in words that Stephen also uses here. The interactions of time and space evoked by this pair of terms are important in Joyce's art, but his thoughts about them in Proteus differ significantly from ones he had at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

John Hunt 2024


Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, with remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, translated by Ellen Frothingham (1877). Source: openlibrary.org.


Portrait of the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, made in 1903 by an unknown photographer. Source: Wikimedia Commons.