"Ineluctable" means simply "unavoidable, inevitable," but its
etymology is interesting: the Latin eluctari means
"to struggle out of." The word's root meaning implies, then,
that Stephen is struggling to escape from the "modality of the
visible." And indeed, at the end of the first paragraph he
thinks, "Shut your eyes and see." He wishes
that there might be an alternative to physical sight, some
mode of spiritual vision that he could access by blacking out
the input of the senses. Near the end of the next
paragraph, walking along the sand with his eyes closed tight,
he thinks, "Am I walking
into eternity along Sandymount strand?"
The answer to his question will be No, but he already has the
answer before conducting his bizarre experiment: he knows that
physical vision is "ineluctable." Stephen's struggle to
overcome sight recalls his struggle to overcome the bitter
facts of history at the beginning of Nestor, where
he decided that "they are not to be thought away." And it
anticipates Shakespeare's struggle (in Scylla and
Charybdis) to overcome the disastrous facts of his
sexual life, which similarly could only be thought about, not
thought away.
In the case of physical sight, the text suggests that
ineluctability may not be a bad thing. The phrase that
follows, "at least that if no more," implies
that sight is something to start with. Like Descartes who
doubted the existence of everything in his experience until he
found one solid foundation on which to build his philosophy,
Stephen at least has sight, "thought through my eyes,"
on which to center his existence.
Thornton suggests that "Ineluctable modality of the visible"
may have been inspired by Aristotle's De Anima, but
acknowledges that "nowhere have I found this exact phrase."
Gifford too fails to find an exact Aristotelian analogue, but
Stephen does think often of
Aristotle in the remainder of the paragraph. Against the
Greek philosopher's empiricist understanding of sight, he is
soon advancing idealist understandings inspired by his reading
of Jakob Boehme and George Berkeley. The
thought that comes through the eyes, according to these
conceptions, is not knowledge of physical objects and
processes, but spiritual insight. But Aristotelian materialism
seems to have the last word. When Stephen opens his eyes to
find that he has not succeeded in blinking the world away, he
thinks, "See now. There all the time without you: and ever
shall be, world without end." The concluding
phrase echoes Aristotle's understanding of matter, which Joyce associated
with Proteus.
Stephen struggles to reconcile Aristotelian empiricism with
idealism as espoused by writers like Böhme, Berkeley, and
Blake, but he always holds fast to the former as the
ineluctable basis for understanding reality. In Scylla
and Charybdis, thinking once more of Aristotle as a
guide to understanding the prodigious reality of William
Shakespeare's corpus, he resolves to "Hold to the now, the
here, through which all future plunges to the past."
