Difficult Books

On page 37 of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus uses the German terms “nacheinander” and “nebeneinander.”

In German, nacheinander means “one after another” or “successively”; and nebeneinander means “next to one another” or “adjacent.” To Stephen, they represent time (and by extension the audible) and space (and by extension the visual), respectively.

Most commentators trace this distinction to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), whose Laökoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry distinguishes between the nebeneinander nature of static art (such as painting and sculptures) and the nacheinander nature of dynamic art (such as poetry and music).

As discussed in the this May 2007 post from the Another Reader’s Review blog, Lessing was one of the first European art critics to distinguish between these two types of art.

Static art can only capture a moment in time, and it is the artist’s job to determine the perfect moment to capture. Dynamic art, on the other hand, loses the intensity in which that moment is captured but it gains by being able to capture a sequence of events.

I've posted some samples of the essay here, and the full text can be found at the Internet Archive.

But perhaps this is the passage most relevant to Ulysses:

But I will try to prove my conclusions by starting
from first principles.

I argue thus. If it be true that painting employs
wholly different signs or means of imitation from
poetry, — the one using forms and colors in space,
the other articulate sounds in time, — and if signs
must unquestionably stand in convenient relation
with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by
side can represent only, objects existing side by side,
or whose parts so exist, while consecutive signs can
express only objects which succeed each other, or
whose parts succeed each other, in time.

Objects which exist side by side, or whose parts
so exist, are called bodies. Consequently bodies
with their visible properties are the peculiar subjects
of painting.

Objects which succeed each other, or whose parts
succeed each other in time, are actions. Consequently
actions are the peculiar subjects of poetry. . . .
bodies, however, exist not only in space, but
also in time. They continue, and, at any moment of
their continuance, may assume a different appearance
and stand in different relations) Every one of
these momentary appearances and groupings was
the result of a preceding, may become the cause of
a following, and is therefore the centre of a present,
action. Consequently painting can imitate actions
also, but only as they are suggested through forms.

Actions, on the other hand, cannot exist indepen-
dently, but must always be joined to certain agents.
In so far as those agents are bodies or are regarded
as such, poetry describes . . bodies, but only indi-'
rectly through actions.

Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use
but a single moment of an action, and must there-
fore choose the most pregnant one, the one most
suggestive of what has gone before and what is to
follow.

Poetry, in its progressive imitations, can use but a
single attribute of bodies, and must choose that one
which gives the most vivid picture of the body as
exercised in this particular action.

Hence the rule for the employment of a single
descriptive epithet, and . the cause of the rare occur-
rence of descriptions of physical objects.

-- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laökoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, Part 16, pages 91-92