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Joyce and Nietzsche
From: Cambridge University Press
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Neil R. Davison |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Whether it's the "death of god" or the predominance of the Ubermensch (superman), the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche have influenced twentieth-century thought in a manner not always regarded as beneficial. Like many of his generation, however, James Joyce would appear to have found a soul mate in Nietzsche. Neil Davison of Oregon State University traces the historical and literary connections between the two men. |
 n The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973, p. 23) Hannah Arendt asserts that Nietzsche was one of a handful of modern thinkers who recognized the pivotal role played by the Jews in the progress of Europe. Explaining that emancipated Jewry was an "inter-European, non-national element in a world of growing or existing nations," Arendt claims that along with Diderot and von Humboldt, Nietzsche understood "the grandeur of this consistently 'European' existence." She concludes that "Nietzsche, who out of disgust with Bismarck's German Reich coined the word 'good European' ... [made] his correct estimate of the significant role of 'the Jews in European history, and saved him[self] from falling into the pitfalls of cheap philosemitism or patronizing 'progressive' attitudes." Writing in the post-Holocaust era, Arendt had the advantage of looking back in time at the foreboding movements of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism. Reconsidering his own assumptions about Jews during the Dreyfus era, Joyce had no such advantage. Yet long before Arendt made her claim, Joyce was affected by Nietzsche's insights into the role of European Jewry. |
Nietzsche in Dublin and Trieste
Joyce had read a fair amount of Nietzsche before he ever left for the Continent. Richard Ellmann tells us that he "came to know the writings of Nietzsche" in 1903 (James Joyce, Oxford, 1982, p. 142). Joyce's "hyperborean" behavior after his return from Paris also indicates a Nietzschean influence, which was aided by way of his relationship with Gogarty, who was also an avid reader of the philosopher. In either case, while living in Trieste, Joyce purchased translations of The Birth of Tragedy, The Joyful Wisdom, and The Case of Wagner/Nietzsche Contra Wagner, each of which was published between 1909 and 1911. Given this fact, Joyce scholars have traditionally proposed that he only came to know Nietzsche after 1909. But by 1902, Nietzsche's ideas had become ubiquitous in the intellectual world of Dublin, especially through the influence of W. B. Yeats. And by 1905, Joyce had included Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science as favorite reading of Mr. James Duffy in the story "A Painful Case." The Nietzsche translations that Yeats was passing around his Dublin circle were, of course, readily available to Joyce. |
In My Brother's Keeper (London, 1958, p. 160), Stanislaus Joyce comments that in shaping the character of Duffy, Joyce had stolen much of the protagonist's personal reflections from his brother's diary. He goes on to say that "Jim had also lent Mr. Duffy some traits of his own, the interest in Nietzsche and the translation of Michael Kramer, in order to raise his intellectual standard." "A Painful Case" was rewritten into its final form in May, 1905 in Trieste. From implications of the short story, it is apparent that Joyce had already grasped the concept of the Übermensch from reading Nietzsche's work and not merely as a popular catch phrase. By making Mr. Duffy an admirer of Nietzsche and yet a paralyzed, unfulfilled man, Joyce suggests that Duffy is merely a self-deluded, "straw" Übermensch. Even if Duffy reappears as "the man in the mackintosh" in Ulysses, he has hardly become a moral superman. In any event, Joyce's ironic use of Zarathustra's message demonstrates the depth of his pre-1909 understanding of a central Nietzschean concept. |
Moreover, given the fact that Joyce's Trieste editions were translations, it is unlikely that he ever read Nietzsche in the original; in Dublin, he certainly had to depend upon available English translations. Thus Joyce's Nietzsche--like so many of his Dublin contemporaries--was a product of the translator's art and not of the author's German. Translations of Nietzsche had indeed gained followings in London, New York, and Dublin by 1899, and the Irish capital was at the forefront of this enthusiasm. Describing this Dublin reception, David Thatcher states that "Irish writers were, on the whole, quicker to recognize Nietzsche's importance than their English counterparts: the names of T.W. Rolleston and Stephen Gwynn, Stephen McKenna and James Cousins, Shaw and Yeats immediately come to mind" (Otto Bohlman, Yeats and Nietzsche, Ottawa, 1982, p. 126). Topping the list was the Dubliner most enthusiastic about Nietzsche's ideas, Arthur Symons. In reviewing the translation of The Dawn of Day, Symons criticized the English-speaking world for not paying closer attention to Nietzsche (cited in Bohlman, Yeats and Nietzsche, p. 129). Symons and Yeats together also decided that Nietzsche was the direct intellectual heir of William Blake; in his 1906 book on Blake, Symons included a lengthy comparison of the similarities of the two writers' ideas and paradoxes. Considering the admiration Joyce expressed early on for Blake, the parallel alone was stimulus enough to pique his curiosity. |
Jewishness and Europe
Through his Dublin reading of Nietzsche, Joyce also began to learn about Nietzsche's refiguration of "the Jew." And by 1907--the year Joyce met Ettore Schmitz--translations of The Dawn of Day, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Human, All Too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and On the Genealogy of Morals were available. The bulk of what Nietzsche postulates about both Judaism as an historical force and the Jews as a modern people is contained in these selected texts. Nietzsche's version of the Greek-Hebrew opposition plays a central role in his discussion of Western culture, as well as in his theories of the Übermensch and the "Will to Power." In his view of the West's cultural development, Judaism's "triumph" over Hellenism was fundamental. While that "victory" was problematic, it nonetheless places Judaism and "Jewishness" at the center of Nietzsche's discussion of modern Europe. |
Indeed, Nietzsche's view of contemporary Jews became quite influential to Joyce's construction of Bloom's "Jewishness." Nietzsche's references to the strength of European Jewry were very new to Joyce. He certainly hadn't read anything similar in Matthew Arnold. Nietzsche had followed Arnold in his view that Christianity was an outgrowth of Judaism; in the Nietzschean interpretation, however, Jews had a political existence separate from their historical identity as the original people of "Hebraism" or as the forefathers of Christianity. More crucially, Nietzsche's discussion of contemporary Jewry laid the groundwork for Joyce's later belief that the Jews had developed an acute "shrewdness of character" (often pejoratively described by others as "cunning") to combat and endure their marginality. |
It should be emphasized, however, that as an early twentieth-century "continental literatus," Joyce's debt to Nietzsche involves more than the latter's discourse on "the Jew." The use of Nietzsche's most popular theories amongst Joyce's generation--who often swallowed the writings whole--was of course widespread. Even random selections from a book as popular as Thus Spoke Zarathustra (translated 1896) reveal that Joyce found in Nietzsche a leader in his own rebellion against liberal, bourgeois culture. One common ground for Joyce in particular was Nietzsche's unflinching disdain for "the masses." The prophet's "On Reading and Writing" relays a prime example of this repugnance: "Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit," and then: "Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking. Once the spirit was God, then he became man, and now it even becometh populace [pöbel]." The German pöbel here also translates to "rabble." While Joyce never read the original, in his Thomas Common translation he would find Zarathustra's speech no. 28--originally titled Vom Gesindel--indeed translated "The Rabble." |
Conclusion
Yet despite Nietzsche's influence on Joyce's generation, one should in the end not consider Joyce himself "a Nietzschean" in the sense that the title implies taking the principal theories--Eternal Recurrence, The Death of God, and the Übermensch--as a center of one's philosophical belief. But Joyce's rejection of Christian morality, his commitment to sexual freedom, righteous individualism, and the amorality of art nonetheless place him squarely in the Nietzschean camp. Joyce understood Nietzsche's "transvaluation of Western values" to have penetrated to the core of his own struggle; the philosopher's "sickness of the spirit" is the precise malaise of will that Stephen wars against in both A Portrait and Ulysses. And when we turn to the influence of "Nietzsche's Jew" on Ulysses, there is an unmistakable link between Bloom's "Jewishness" and those representations of "the Jew" found throughout the philosopher's works. |
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