“If Thou but Scan it Well”

Abstract

In the “Nestor” episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus meditates on the definition of movement from Aristotle’s Physics (III.i.200.10–11),¹ a phrase that Joyce himself encountered during his first trip to Paris in 1903: “It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night” (U, 2:67–70). Considering that the theme of the episode is history, however, it is probable that this definition of movement also refers to the experience of time-passing, for Aristotle also defines time as a “measure of motion” in the Physics (IV.xii), a measure that might be used to count the periods (or beats) that structure the “meters” of verse. Indeed, when Aristotle’s phrase forms itself in the silent space of Stephen’s imagination, his meditation on the meaning of history is mediated by the sensation of a regular rhythm, for the acoustic images of the words are superimposed on a schoolboy’s performance of Milton’s

Lycidas: Weep no more, woeful shepherd, weep no more

For Lycidas, your sorrow is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor (U, 2:64–6)