James Joyce
If you came to this post to find out what “Ineluctable Modality of the Visible” means. This is the best I have to offer right now:
This is the entire sentence as it appears in Ulysses:
“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.”
This means his current thought is only about what he is observing through his eyes. ”at least that and no more” implies the limitations of eye sight and he is saying here that there is more. There is an old saying that goes ”there is more than meets the eye.”
Ineluctable – that which cannot be escaped from.
modality- A condition like eyesight. Hearing is a modality. However, from each condition a limitation can also be implied. As eyesight is a modality, it also implies the limitation of not being able to hear, or being limited by the quality of our eyesight. A modality only offers a partial reality. Eyesight doesn’t give us reality in its entirety, because it can’t give us hearing or taste, both which add aspects to reality. Eyesight, hearing, and taste are all visible modalities, and all limiting, even together.
James Joyce with Nora
By its nature of being visible, it is an ineluctable modality. That which is visible is limited because it’s being observed by a modality which implies a limitation.
The product of an ineluctable modality is sin. Sin is shortsightedness. Sin is not being able to see the whole picture. We cannot escape from sin and every sin is a limitation. Sin limits the scope of our lives and the expansion of our minds, therefore it is a product of the ineluctable modality of the visible. Sin is caused by the visible, not by the invisible which is God.
Joyce, although he professed to be non-religious, I think he was only against organized religion, like the Catholic Church in which he was raised. From what I’ve read, he disowned the Catholic Church, and all religion, but always went to church on Easter. If you read “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man,” you can certainly see his conflicting feelings about religion and his disappointment in the people who professed to be religious. From his Catholic upbringing, he certainly was sin conscious and guilt ridden. You don’t need to be raised a Catholic to have those conditions, but those conditions seem very ingrained in the Catholic mind.
Our sin not only limits our view of the world, but our limited view of the world also results in sinning. People who seem to be absorbed in sin also seem to have limited views of reality. People who are the worst sinners are those who either most want to escape reality or have such limited minds that they can’t see any reality beyond what is visible to them. Everyone has met people–usually professed atheists–who say that the only things that they believe is what they can see or hear or touch. These types of people appear to be without imagination.
When a person becomes more awake to reality and doesn’t reject it, they seem to sin less and less. I also think people sin less and less as they become happier and happier, and one becomes happier as they stop running away from reality. However, no one is so awake in reality that they never sin, unless they are a Jesus or a Buddha or a saint.
Perhaps maturing just means doing away with sin, but there is no way of ever getting rid of it totally. It’s ineluctable.
This post is a work in progress.
If you disagree with me or have a different insight, I would love to hear it.
Update: 6/16/2012
I was on a bus in Manhattan today, and I started thinking about this. I think I got some new insight.
If whatever is visible is limiting, then that which is invisible would not be limiting. For instance, our imagination. The imagination is not an ineluctable modality of the visible. It is invisible and therefore unlimited. For something to be eternal or unlimited it must be invisible. God is eternal and unlimited and invisible. Also, that which is eternal, unlimited and invisible is without sin. You can imagine sinning, but the imagination itself is not sin. It can’t be because it’s not visible and therefore not an ineluctable modality. Even though people have limited imaginations, some more than others, the imagination itself is unlimited. The imagination does not come to us through a modality like eyesight or hearing.
A young James Joyce
If you are interested in reading more about James Joyce, please check out my post entitled James Joyce’s 129th Birthday Today, or my most current post on James called James Joyce on Art and Artists.
I have another post called Thoughts on Ulysses on another blog of mine called Gayle’s Stream of Consciousness, in case you would have any interest.
love the two contrast photos! still beautiful and eccentric! … the first pic looks like you had a modeling gig? i love the pink bike with basket! cheers lovely lady!
i think you defined one example of ineluctable modality very accidentally by showing what religiosity (and by this i don’t mean simply adherence to a religion) can do to one’s understanding; joyce was getting at something far more earthly and tangible than sin. you have found a way to distort this great modernist’s ideas so that they conveniently support and nurture your own worldviews. that’s an example of ineluctable modality: how modes or patterns inevitably affect what would otherwise be a completely uninformed, and thus more open and unbiased perspective of anything. the ineluctable modality of the visible is how all our knowledge and experience will shape our understandings of anything we sense.. i reckon.
sorry, it just seems like you’ve taken key words and linked them arbitrarily to something that you wanted to say already. it’s not even like your beliefs shaped your understanding because you didn’t attempt to understand. it seems like you are the one who is limited and scared to delve into the truth of things. if God is at the core of the truth, then there should be no fear for those with faith.
Oliver, thank you for your comment. I will deeply think about what you said.
Irish , Catholic(don’t want to be but that’s ineluctable too.) and can relate to Joyce’s feelings.Thanks for your thoughts.
Whoa this short article was exciting, do you not discover that once in a while you’ll have problems with writers-block? That occurs a lot to me whenever we develop our very own blog posts on MITA. We talk about life coaching and just how hypnosis might help fix a lot of things.
thanks ur parents for having you
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Thanks for your input and I will use it for my college research that I am doing for this website.
This is a linguistic conundrum. Joyce played with language. It is not about religion . It is about experience and aesthetics. Immediacy and the process of reflection. invisible modalities ? Improbable wordgames. This is not about sin. Joyce revelled in the residual guilt associated with transgressing various social norms. Non serviam sounds petulant and adolescent when viewed through the prism of provincial hubris.
People with religious frame of minds, like myself, seem to analyze most everything from a religious viewpoint. I’m not sure the religious point of view is irrelevant or wrong, just a different way of explaining things than the way the secular mind explains things. Thank you for your comment. It gives me something to think about.
Joyce’s insights were rooted in his understanding of the origins of alphabetic literacy. The primary ineluctable modalities of literacy are in the chiastic crossover of the senses involved in the invisible: sound, being given visible form in the letter, and the visible letter being rendered “unseen” in the translation of the visible sense into acoustic modality. This hybrid space opened by the letter is semantically expansive precisely because it is iconically reductive and refuses to rest in the place of the fixed image. The mind is set on an unending journey for meaning.
I’m fairly sure that Joyce is just writing about physical things here. When D closes his eyes, he can imagine that only his mind exists. When he opens them, he is confronted by an assortment of things that appear to exist independently of his mind – beach, stones, sea, sky, etc. Each of these things has its own unique “thingness,” its own modality.
This phrase crops up on the Wikipedia entry for “subjective idealism,” which is worth a read for more on the debate as to whether we can truly know that anything exists outside our own minds. Bishop Berkeley rejected the idea that any true reality exists independently of us and it is interesting to read that Dr. Johnson refuted this by kicking a stone.
I tend to see the world in spiritual ways,my frame of reference, and being lived in primarily the visible world does lead to sin or at least not to true love..I helped my 8th grade daughter write a paragraph on love for school, concerning Romeo and Juliet and we use this quote from Joyce.
We also included poem from Thomas Merton: Late have I loved you , beauty so ancient and so new,..late have I loved you….Lo , you were within,,,,,but I outside, seeking there for you, She liked it. Thanks for interesting point..People write material and the meaning may be totally unknown to them because it comes from an unconscious scource. Brian Hocum