Throb

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Many annotators (Thornton, Gifford, Johnson, Slote) have affirmed an observation made by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann in their edition of Joyce's Critical Writings (1959). In the 17 September 1903 Daily Express, at the end of his short review of Kentucky writer James Lane Allen's novel The Mettle of the Pasture (1903), Joyce quoted "a passage of great charm" in which the hero's mother sadly weighs his refusal to marry his fiancee as she had urged:

For her it was one of those moments when we are reminded that our lives are not in our keeping, and that whatsoever is to befall us originates in sources beyond our power. Our wills may indeed reach the length of our arms or as far as our voices can penetrate space; but without us and within moves one universe that saves us or ruins us only for its own purposes; and we are no more free amid its laws than the leaves of the forest are free to decide their own shapes and season of unfolding, to order the showers by which they are to be nourished and the storms which shall scatter them at last.

In this passage Mrs. Meredith confronts the limits of her agency,  beyond whose small reach lies a vast "universe" that, operating both "without us and within," shapes our destinies. As Mason and Ellmann note, there is a clear resemblance here to the sentences in Wandering Rocks. Like Meredith's mother, Stephen recognizes that his ego hangs between alien worlds "without" and "within," and even his word "shatter" seems to recall her use of "scatter." Joyce must have recalled Allen's conceit as he wrote, and to the degree that Stephen can be identified with Joyce there is verisimilitude in his thinking these thoughts in June 1904, less than a year after the review was published.

But Joyce does something very different with the conceit. Instead of an abstractly conceived universe that has its own "purposes," and lays down "laws," and "saves" or "ruins"––a kind of pantheistic version of traditional Christian belief––the dynamos in the powerhouse give Stephen a far more concrete and less tidy sense of what lies beyond the reach of human senses. They are "Beingless beings," humming with vital energy but lacking purpose, intelligibility, and even discrete existence. Instead of a lawful universe Stephen detects only a "Throb always without you and the throb always within," two pulsing, swirling, "roaring worlds" that so threaten the "I between them" that he longs to "Shatter them, one and both." The pessimistic urgency of his sentences bears little resemblance to Mrs. Meredith's calm acceptance in The Mettle of the Pasture.

Joyce could possibly have arrived at this vision on his own, but some tracks laid down earlier in the novel encourage a search for sources of conceptual inspiration. The last time that readers entered the thoughts of a solitary Stephen, in Proteus, he was using the ideas of Jacob Böhme and George Berkeley to look for a metaphysical reality deeper than the evidence of his senses. Might not the metaphysical sentences in Wandering Rocks be continuing that kind of philosophical search? Vincent Van Wyk has urged me, in several personal communications, to consider the relevance of Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819, reissued in a longer version in 1844), which Joyce's contemporaries knew as The World as Will and Idea (1883-86), a translation by Richard Burton Haldane and John Kemp. Far more than James Lane Allen's novel, this great philosophical work inquires into the shared reality underlying the world "without" and the world "within." Schopenhauer writes that "the solution of the riddle of the world is only possible through the proper connection of outer with inner experience" (6th ed., 1909, 3 vols., 2:20).

Schopenhauer sets himself the task of finding a way to "go beyond the phenomenal" (1:159) to some grasp of the noumenal reality that Kant called the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself. He agrees with Kant that our experience of physical objects, existing in space and time and causally related to one another, is only "idea" (Vorstellung), the perceptual construct of an embodied creature. We perceive only what our sensory and neural organs convey to consciousness, which means that we do not perceive reality so much as construct it: "All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea" (1:4). Behind this "idea" (or "representation," as later translators have rendered it), most people would assume that some actual objects are out there. But no one can perceive those objects as they are in themselves.

Human beings do, however, have one source of insight into the permanently hidden reality surrounding them––not through sensory knowledge of the world of physical objects, but by knowing one physical object from the inside. The familiarity that most interests Schopenhauer is not primarily cognitive. Unlike Plato, who sought knowledge of the "Ideas" through intellectual activities (dialectic, mystical intuition, erotic contemplation, memory of past lives), he focuses on the "will" that motivates human actions. Like another famous voluntarist, Augustine, he believes that will is a more fundamental director of human life than intellect, that it underlies all human emotions and desires, and that it connects human beings to the universal source of being.

But Schopenhauer, the first professed atheist in the European philosophical tradition, does not locate this metaphysical reality in the mind of God. He posits instead an impersonal, "blindly acting" force that exists outside of objects, outside space and time, outside causality, outside the duality of knower and known. "It appears in every blind force of nature and also in the preconsidered action of man; and the great difference between these two is merely in the degree of the manifestation, not in the nature of what manifests itself" (1:143). Unlike Kant's things-in-themselves (the Table behind the table, the Horse in the horse) this noumenal being is not plural, but rather a single undifferentiated reality manifested in all the things we experience. Schopenhauer named it Will after the connection with human willing, but he might as easily have called it Force, Energy, or Drive.

Schopenhauer does not exalt will as Nietzsche does. In various ways, most notably in the realm of aesthetics, he charts paths by which human beings can lessen the grip of interested volitional striving and become disinterested observers. This aspect of his philosophy is at least roughly congruent with Stephen's wish to escape the hold of the two throbs, though Stephen gives it a far more violent expression. In a fantasy of apocalyptic destruction that he repeats in Circe with his Wagnerian cry of "Nothung!," he grandly thinks of smashing both worlds. The thought of how this universal ruin might impact the "I" in the middle deters him: "But stun myself too in the blow...Not yet awhile. A look around." He thinks of being stunned, not obliterated: apparently his belief that the Christian God would not annihilate a soul he made immortal gives him a Get Out of Will Free card.