ulysses and consciousness

In Ulysses, Stephen ponders the nacheinander (one thing after another) and the nebeneinander (one thing next to another) of music and visual arts respectively.

I wrote:

The styles and narrators of Ulysses add some nebeneinander to the nacheinander of stream of consciousness.

Thoughts of Stephen, thoughts of Bloom = nacheinander (we experience one thing after another)

Style of one chapter clashes/contrasts with style of previous or next chapter: nebeneinander (one thing next to another)

Character and plot = nacheinander

Typographical tricks (headlines in Aeolus), narrative interruptions (Cyclops) = nebeneinander (narrative juxtaposed to something)

Joyce's challenge: to make his novel more than a novel, he had to do more than tell a story one thing after another (nacheinander). He also wanted us to be able to contemplate the parts of Ulysses nebeneinander.

Integritas = we hear the story of Ulysses as a stream of narrative fragments moving forward in time

Consonantia = we ponder the styles of Ulysses and how the chapters fit together

Claritas = drawn in by the narrative nacheinander and puzzled by the jarring styles' gnomonic juxtaposition nebeneinander, we experience the silent, luminous stasis of aesthetic apprehension, ineluctably.

There are parallels here to how the brain creates consciousness.

nacheinander = the formation of new memories through time

nebeneinander = selected memories in neuronal workspace of working memory are juxtaposed one next to another to create a conscious scene (Edelman's "remembered present"?)

But there is also the successive nacheinander of conscious states. The brain takes the nacheinander of sequential expreiences and makes it into a smoothly flowing series of nebeneinanders to create the nacheinander of consciousness.

The key to Joyce's aesthetic is stasis. It seems also to be the secret of consciousness: our brain seizes the flux of experience to create a conscious scene in the present. The succession of these scenes is what creates the "illusion" of consciousness.