In the library scene of Ulysses IX Stephen Dedalus presents us with an image of time from which time is virtually absent. "In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that...
moreIn the library scene of Ulysses IX Stephen Dedalus presents us with an image of time from which time is virtually absent. "In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be."1 Notably the instant to which Stephen alludes captures the totality of Past-Present-Future, but only does so by subtracting from its focus time itself, which surely must have something to do with passage, with difference, and with change. Here, Past, Present and Future are in fact abstract concepts given over to space, and all that is left of the sense of time in Stephen's words is the fate of the fading coal. The parable of the coal illustrates an essential quality of time reproduced in the Wake's narrative and rhetorical strategies: time is grasped by the imagination as that which always eludes its own image. What we see when we look at this image (in place of time) is a field of objectified moments existing ideally and simultaneously. Held together by sight and preserved by reflection, Past, Present and Future can only be imagined as a cluster of fixed points abstracted from a linear continuum.
