As we saw in the previous chapter, in “Lestrygonians”, an episode that revolves around food, Bloom thinks that you “never know whose thoughts you’re chewing” (U 217). However, more than a mere comparison with the act of eating, the importance of this notion for the argument of the present chapter primarily relates to our emerging understanding of how a mind like James Joyce’s (and Leopold Bloom’s) works. Throughout Ulysses, thoughts seem to migrate from mind to mind, thus contributing to the construction of Dublin as what Wyndham Lewis called an “Aladdin’s cave of incredible bric-à-brac” (86). As was argued in chapter I, the main reason for this concerns a particular way of figuring out one’s own identity, and with the consequent importance of returning to sources. We never know whose thoughts we are chewing because, as was explained, in Ulysses our thoughts — which will ultimately be closely linked to words such as “mind” or “identity” — may have originated in another person’s head. This frequently becomes evident in certain
repetitions of sentences, which can be observed in “Wandering Rocks”, where we follow several characters between 3 and 4 p.m.1 Even though these characters are minding their own business, they often have similar thoughts; not only does this help to create the idea that every moment in the episode occurs at the same time, but it also shows that these people’s minds share particular thoughts:
Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of The Woman in White far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy notepaper into her typewriter.
Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion? Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.
The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased and ogled them: six.
Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard :
— 16 June 1904 . (U 293-294) And
1 According to Stuart Gilbert’s chart in James Joyce’s Ulysses, p. 30.
Tom Rochford took the top disk from the pile he clasped against his claret waistcoat.
— See? he said. Say it’s tum six. In here, see. Turn Now On.
He slid it into the left slot for them. It shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased, ogling them: six. (U 297)
[The highlights are mine]
With this in mind, and considering Ulysses, in this chapter we will see that the process behind what happens both in this example and also in other often not so clear cases, is deeply connected to how Bloom understands and describes the Greek concept of “metempsychosis”.
Therefore, we will see how this concept plays the part of that which connects everything. Moreover, the fourth episode of Ulysses, “Calypso”, where we first read the word “metempsychosis” will be examined alongside other episodes (for this is a recurring term in the novel) including “Nausicaa”.
Furthermore, it will also be shown that William James contemplated the idea of there being a certain stuff that connected everything that existed (and not only people, even though he did not consider himself to be an absolutist), although not exactly in the same way. To begin, we will examine an especially painful episode from his biography, as it is a good example of how the idea of a particular kind of connectedness between things has, in a way, always been present in James’s mind.
When his very close friend Minnie Temple died, James wrote a letter as if to her, in which he said “use your death (or your life, it’s all one meaning) tat tvam asi.” (Richardson 113) This story is told by Robert D. Richardson, one of William James’s latest biographers, and the Sanskrit
quotation, तत् त्वम् असि “tat tvam asi”, meaning “that thou art”, comes from an ancient Indian sacred text, the Chandongya Upanishad, which James read and to which he often went back. In this Upanishad, we are told that young Svetaketu is given a lesson by his father regarding the
constitution and the origin of all things in the Universe. To teach his son, Svetaketu’s father tells him that in the beginning there was an ultimate Being, an entity that decided to be “many” instead of “one”, and that, by having created everything, became the “subtle essence” that constitutes all that there is: “That which is the subtle essence this whole world has for its self. That is the True.
That is the Self. That art thou, Svetaketu.” (Principal Upanishads 463) In what follows, I will argue
that James kept this idea in the back of his mind, and ultimately went back to it in the book that resulted from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, The Varieties of Religious Experience, especially in the lectures dedicated to mysticism, where he quotes from the
Chandongya Upanishad: “‘That art Thou!’ say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: ‘Not a part, not a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of the World.’” (TVRE 419) While re-reading this, and after having read James’s essay “A World of Pure Experience”, I began to see his definition of “pure experience” as a variation of tat tvam asi, in the sense that, for James, there is something which underlies everything that exists (despite his reservations concerning the whole idea of “absolutism”, as was pointed out, i.e., of there being one ultimate and immutable being that controls and constitutes everything). To James, it seems, this something has to do with how each person experiences the existence of the objects that they observe, and not with a single ubiquitous entity. As such, this chapter will also examine Essays in Radical Empiricism, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”, and a relevant passage from The Principles of Psychology.
Connecting both authors, it will be shown that Joyce’s use of the term “metempsychosis” in Ulysses (around which the novel revolves) has important similarities with James’s concept of “pure experience”. In this sense, both James and Joyce seem to be arguing that to know oneself and to know certain things about the world one lives in is dependent upon knowing other people, as we began to see in the first chapter. Therefore, an initial comparison between both concepts, and, to some extent, particular misunderstandings that result from considering that there is some sort of ultimate connection between people and what they think2, will be the endeavour of this chapter, the first part of which shall be dedicated to William James.
First of all, it is important to understand what James began to mean by “experience”. In
“Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience”, James declares that
Experience means experience of something foreign to impress us, whether spontaneously or in consequence of our exertions and acts (…) experience moulds us every hour, and makes of
2 This idea will be fully developed in chapter IV. Yet, it is important enough for how both authors understand
“pure experience” and “metempsychosis” for it to be anticipated here.
our minds a mirror of the time- and space-connections between the things in the world.
(Principles 619; II)
Generically, “experience” began to mean, for James, our appreciations of ourselves and of that which is different from us, that which is foreign in relation to us, that which we apprehend through the five senses and through our reasoning, i.e. our mind, and thus influence our relationship with the world. This allows us, adds James, to “continually divine from the present what the future is to be”
(Principles 619; II), and the reason is that “we find it difficult even to imagine how the outward order could possibly be different from what it is” (Principles 619; II). Yet, and more than that, for James
“experience” shall also encompass an active effort towards not only becoming aware of but also towards truly perceiving and understanding other people, which is deeply connected with his argument for toleration, as previously illustrated.
However, to broaden James’s notion of “experience”, it is essential to look into a later essay of his, compiled in a collection named Essays in Radical Empiricism, with the title “Does
‘Consciousness’ Exist?”, regarding James’s insight that there is something that ends up constituting everything. This will ultimately imply that when it comes to entities like “knower” and “known”, the way something is experienced is, in fact, what ends up connecting both entities. Thus, and to begin the essay, James states:
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure
experience,’ then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. (Empiricism 2-3)
Even though here there still seems to be some kind of separation between “bearer of the knowledge, the knower” and “the object known”, as had also occurred in Principles, James appears to have refined his idea, and points to something specific that makes up everything, including not only
“perceiver” and “perceived”, but also the connection between the two entities, that is, “the relation towards one another”. That something is “pure experience”: a certain “stuff” (to use James’s term)
that makes and underlies all that exists, and which will constitute James’s doctrine of Radical Empiricism.3 At first glance, this could almost be like the Stoics’ logos4, something similar to what we commonly understand by “reason”, and which not only confers order to the Universe but also connects everything to everything else. The Stoics argue that there is something, logos or “reason”, that underlies all that exists in the world, which governs every event in nature, including men, and that this results in a rational structure of the universe. Alternatively, as Dirk Baltzly asserts in the Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy, “God is identified with an eternal reason (logos, Diog. Laert.
44B) or intelligent designing fire or a breath (pneuma) which structures matter in accordance with Its plan (Aetius, 46A).” (“Stoicism”)5
Be that as it may, i.e. regardless of where James got his inspiration from (the Upanishads, stoicism, or any other source), “pure experience” has little to do with any philosophy that argued for absolutism, which is something he always contended, mainly in arguments with his friend and colleague, the philosopher Josiah Royce.6 Unlike Royce, James considered that there could not be one single, immutable and ideal truth, and he argued for this idea in “A Pluralistic Universe”. In this essay, James declares that everyone’s experience adds to the full meaning of “truth”. As such, even though everything could be connected to everything else, for James there could not be one single and ideal truth, which is a fundamental idea to anyone who argues for absolutism (and something
3 James’s biographer, Robert D. Richardson notes that this idea of “pure experience” does not help us predict future happenings in the same way as experience — as James understood it in Principles — did:
The doctrine of pure experience is hard to defend [for] no one can live by pure empiricism (according to which it does not matter how many times a ball drops when you let go of it; you are never entitled to conclude it will drop the next time). (466)
Even if this is a pertinent problem concerning the study of William James’s philosophy as a whole, it is not our concern to go deep into it. Also, more than “experience” it is “pure experience” that will interest us here, regardless of the difficulties that such a concept may bring forward. And the reason is that, as we said in the beginning, it is this idea that most helped us along with the comparison and the consequent understanding of James and Joyce’s work in parallel, which is my main objective.
4 James has knowingly read the Stoics, mainly Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, to which he recurred whilst arguing with his father about his religious beliefs — see, for example, an article by Emma Sutton (published in Volume 4 of the William James Society journal, William James Studies) entitled “Marcus Aurelius, William James and the Science of Religions”.
5 Even though it is not our goal to dissertate on stoicism nor on this philosophy’s importance to William James’s philosophy, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge the influence it had on him.
6 From James’s biography by Robert D. Richardson, we learn that
Royce and James were warm friends and colleagues who disagreed merrily with each other. (…) [James] once wrote Royce (…) ‘I am sorry you say we don’t see truth in the same light, for the only thing we see differently is the Absolute, and surely such a trifle as that is not a thing for two gentlemen to be parted by.’” (189-190)
that would in a way be closer to the Stoics’ conception of logos, for reason is still connected with an idea of God). Consequently, according to James, truth is something in perpetual formation;
something that depends on every individual’s variable experience of reality, which by definition, cannot be absolute and unchangeable.
Yet, in the sense that the things experienced and the person who experiences them are connected by pure experience, there still seems to be something in James’s view of truth that could function as a kind of network that connects all of us, and would thus constitute whatever truth is.
However, the difference is that for James what is relevant for the idea of truth, that which really counts, is the relation between subject and object, i.e., the experience of one by the other which, by definition, is still not something established by a supreme all-knowing being. Accordingly, because experience is always changing and because it is not only impossible to count all the people who ever existed as well as all the people who will ever exist and, at the same time, account for all their experiences, this is at the base of what prevents James from being an absolutist.7
Furthermore, James will refine his approach to this notion in the course of “Does
‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and state that “thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are” (Empiricism 20). The reason for this being so is made clear in a short essay, “Tigers in India”, where James argues that a
7 To better understand this, it is useful to read Michael R. Slater’s summary of James’s reservations concerning absolutism, in the essay “James’s Critique of Absolute Idealism in A Pluralistic Universe”:
In some ways James’s reservations about absolute idealism went deeper (…), especially in regard to the religious and metaphysical implications of belief in an all-knowing and all-encompassing Absolute. (…)
James saw absolute idealism as the major ‘spiritualistic’ rival of his own pluralistic philosophy, and his objections to it were not merely theoretical but also deeply personal: above all, it was the practical consequences of absolute idealism that most worried him, including its implications for how we understand ourselves, the world, and our relationship to it. To deny the reality of relations, for example, and to affirm the view that our experience of a world of plural beings and qualities is ultimately illusory can lead — and for absolute idealists such as Bradley and Royce, necessarily leads — to the conclusion that we are merely parts of and objects for an
all-enveloping absolute mind. Likewise, the belief that everything, including ourselves, is part of an impersonal and timeless Absolute — part of a ‘block universe’, as James sometimes terms it — raises troubling questions about the nature of evil and of human free will. Finally, James believed that the absolute idealist insistence that the world of everyday experience is deeply incoherent and incomplete, and requires Aufhebung by a timeless, immutable metaphysical entity if its contradictions and shortcomings are to be resolved, has the effect of de-realizing and devaluing the actual world. (170-171)
paper seen [that which is concrete] and the seeing of it [which belongs to the realm of thought] are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience. (Blindness 32)
If experience is what constitutes both thing and thought, it is what allows James to bring both entities closer together. What follows is that consciousness, unlike thought, is, as James puts it, a fictitious entity; a concept created and not experienced by thoughts, which makes it not a “thing”. It is, therefore, fundamental to understanding that for James whatever may be real is everything that can be experienced (either through the senses or through the mind), if one wants to begin to grasp what he means by “pure experience”. Even though it could still appear to be some kind of division between “knower” and “known” (as if following our early quote from The Principles of
Psychology), as we saw, here James is refining his early intuition by taking a step forward, i.e., by approximating “knower” and “known” (or “thought” and “thing”) because, he tells us, they are both real, in the sense that the “stuff” that constitutes “thing” is the same that constitutes “thought”, and that is “pure experience”.
If this resonates with something Ralph Waldo Emerson would say, it is no accident, for Emerson was not only someone with whom James was on familiar terms (he was a close friend of James’s father), but he was also someone whose work James admired.8 The idea that, for Emerson,
“thought” and “thing” can be brought together can be found in Emerson’s famous essay “The Poet”:
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. (262)
What Emerson is describing here is the romantic idea according to which what unifies “thoughts”
and “things” is language, or rather the correct language, the correct words, the ones that are better
8 As James expresses in a letter to his brother Henry, written in 1903, just a year after the publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience:
The reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say, has thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and reporting them in the right literary form, (…) seems to me a moral lesson to all men who have any genius, however small, to foster. (Letters II 190)
fitted to express the poetry that already exists in the world. To do this, and to pass on the message of the universe, we need a translator, an intermediary, a poet. Differently, in James’s case, that which unifies “thought” and “thing” is not the expression of what the universe may be saying, through the words of someone else, but simply anyone’s pure experience of one thing by the other (which endlessly adds to our understanding of the universe, as we will see ahead).
As such, for James, there is no need for a particular interpreter or intermediary, which helps to explain, in part, his famous dislike of religious institutions. Even though they were founded by true religious experiences that occurred to people whom James calls “religious geniuses” (who could, in this case, almost correspond to Emerson’s poet), religious institutions offer nothing but
“second-hand” experiences, as he explains:
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are “geniuses” in the religious line (TVRE 6)
To understand what a true religious experience is, we must have one, because any intermediary will inevitably distort the message that is being communicated through their experience, by simply trying to communicate it through words. This is the reason why James does not have a very positive view of churches and other institutions of organised faith. Also, his view is even less optimistic than the one described in Emerson’s “The Poet” for in Emerson’s case even though the message is always a little betrayed by it being translated, language still brings us closer to the message of the universe or nature, if we are not destined to have access to it personally.
However, if having a religious experience is not what is in store for us, what James is saying is that in order to get closer to understanding what that means, the only thing left for us to do is still to try to look at those religious geniuses whom the universe (or god) decided to bestow with a