Joyce's Nietzschean Ethics

S. Slote

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137364128
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

The first book-length treatment of James Joyce's work through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, Slote argues that the range of styles Joyce deploys has an ethical dimension. This intersection raises questions of epistemology, aesthetics, and the construction of the 'Modern' and will appeal to literary and philosophy scholars.

Chapter 1

“James Overman”: Joyce Reading Nietzsche

Ethics and æsthetics are one.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, §6.421

Although Nietzsche is long regarded as a prophet of and precursor to Modernism, if not also Post Modernism, his impact on Joyce—the archetypal High Modernist author—has been mostly, but not entirely, neglected. With some exceptions, Joyce criticism seems content to have progressed little beyond David Thatcher’s claim, in a survey of Nietzsche’s impact on English-language writers, that Joyce “went through a period of temporary infatuation with Nietzsche which left no mark of any consequence on his creative work.”¹ This relative lack of comparative consideration is odd since Joyce’s greatest ability as a writer is his fluency in a wide range of styles and Nietzsche is the preeminent philosopher of style and perspectivism. As Nietzsche wrote in a somewhat ironically boastful manner in Ecce Homo, “I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man” (EH, 265). Whilst writing Ulysses, Joyce made a similar boast when he described his task as “of writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen” (LI, 167). Indeed, Joyce’s career as a writer could be well described by the rubric “the most multifarious art of style.” From the naturalism of Dubliners to the free indirect discourse of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the radical stylistic, modal, and linguistic shifts in Ulysses and (even more so) Finnegans Wake, Joyce expands and refines the stylistic possibilities of representing multiple individual perspectives.² Already in the earliest-written stories of Dubliners, Joyce modulates style to the individual temperaments represented. With A Portrait he expands this stylistic variability into a sophisticated form of free indirect discourse and with Ulysses takes this a step (or two) further. The absence of quotation marks—or “perverted commas” (LIII, 99) as Joyce styled them—and discursive markers, such as the phrase “he said,” are signs of Joyce’s confidence in his being able to differentiate characters purely on the basis of their own individuating and identificative patois, as well as of his faith in his readers’ interpretive prowess.³ And in the Babelian (or, rather, post-Babelian) Finnegans Wake stylistic pluralization expands across multiple languages. Even early works such as Chamber Music can be seen to lie within this trajectory of refining styles: Seamus Heaney approvingly cites Yeats’s comment to Joyce that his early poems are “the work of a man ‘who is practicing his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops.’”⁴

The thesis of this book is to read Joyce through Nietzsche in order to educe the various ramifications of this “multifarious art of style.” I believe that Nietzsche is important for Joyce not simply because Nietzsche deploys a multiplicity of styles throughout his works (a claim that is, certainly, debatable and perhaps more of a boast than an accurate representation), but rather because Nietzsche thinks through the presuppositions and consequences of stylistic variety. Nietzsche is relevant to Joyce not as a practitioner but rather as a theorist of style. For Nietzsche, stylistic variety projects an ethical stance in that it conveys a manner of living. Nietzsche’s concept of ethics could be best exemplified by the comment Odysseus uses to praise Eumaeus, the glorious swineherd, for his way of life in book 15 of The Odyssey, “zoeis d’agathon bion [you live a good life].”⁵ Bios means the particular mode of life one chooses from the fact of being alive (or animal life), which is what zoös designates. If I were writing for Hello! magazine, I would translate bios as lifestyle. Indeed, the question of style is eminently pertinent to bios since it designates the personalization or individuation of existence. As Nietzsche formulates it, ethics addresses the issue of the agathos bios: the good life as the apt individuation or the appropriate style.

The flavor of ethics implied by Odysseus’s comment is virtue ethics. Michael Slote provides an apt starting point: “A virtue ethics in the fullest sense must treat aretaic notions (like ‘good’ or ‘excellent’) rather than deontic notions (like ‘morally wrong,’ ‘ought,’ ‘right,’ and ‘obligation’) as primary, and it must put a greater emphasis on the ethical assessment of agents and their (inner) motives and character traits than it puts on the evaluation of acts and choices.”⁶ In praising him for his agathos bios, Odysseus’s compliment emphasizes the aretaic aspect of Eumaeus’s individual comportment. Virtue ethics does not concern the value of specific, individual acts but rather the temperament of the individual who performs specific acts under specific and contingent circumstances. An action that might be apt for an individual under one set of circumstances might not be apt for a different individual when confronted by the same state. Any one possible act can only be evaluated in a context of a range of different acts and different actors. Alasdair MacIntyre notes that the Greek word ethikos “means ‘pertaining to character’ where a man’s character is nothing other than his set dispositions to behave systematically in one way rather than another, to lead one particular kind of life.”⁷ To resort to a bit of Yiddish, the project of a virtue ethics is to become a Mensch and not a Übermensch, which is perhaps what Nietzsche’s ethical argument might actually entail. Ethics is thus a matter of individuation or self-fashioning, a question of personal style, of personal disposition, and thus an aesthetic concern.

For Nietzsche, as for Wittgenstein, ethics and aesthetics are one; although, for Nietzsche the reasons for this conjunction are somewhat different. The context for Wittgenstein’s equating ethics and aesthetics is an argument concerning the value of value (a most Nietzschean topic): “If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.”⁸ Statements involving valuation are deontic and cannot be logically proven and are thus quirks of language. Therefore the statement “This is a good deed” is just as logically unsound as the claim “That is a pretty picture.” In some ways Wittgenstein’s argument is compatible with Nietzsche’s, who analyzes this problem in terms of the contingencies in which structures of valuation have emerged: “moralities are also merely a sign language of the affects” (BGE, §187). The problem Wittgenstein later came to realize is that the perspective he tried to instantiate in the Tractatus, a single perspective in which the operations of language can be made transparent, is but one perspective. In the Philosophical Investigations he phrases this quite precisely: “(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5): ‘The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.’—That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it”; “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”⁹ As Nietzsche argues, no single perspective can be privileged, not even the perspective of logical surety. In a notebook entry from 1886, Nietzsche posits as a task, “Attempt to bring Aesthetics closer to unegoistic Ethics (as a preparation for it) through the elimination of the ‘I.’”¹⁰ Ethics and aesthetics interrelate around the question of decentering the self, of transvaluing the value of the ego. Ethics and aesthetics thus interrelate around the multiplicity of perspectives and styles.

Alexander Nehamas’s influential reading of Nietzsche teases out the deep and serious ramifications Nietzsche’s “most multifarious art of style” has for his philosophy:

Nietzsche uses his changing genres and styles in order to prevent his readers from overlooking the fact that his views necessarily originate with him. He depends on many styles in order to suggest that there is no single, neutral language in which his views, or any others, can ever be presented. His constant stylistic presence shows that theories are as various and idiosyncratic as the writing in which they are embodied.¹¹

According to Nehamas, Nietzsche’s stylistic range is not some mere ornamentation grafted onto a philosophical argument, but rather it conveys a fundamental worldview that concerns the absence of any single, unequivocal normative agency. Behind such a general theory of reading Nietzsche lies an entry from a notebook dated late 1886–Spring 1887 that has been collated into the book known as The Will to Power: “In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning, but countless meanings.—‘Perspectivism’” (WP, §481; cf. WLN, 139).¹² Indeed, in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche calls perspective “the basic condition of life” (BGE, Preface, p. 3). And in Human, All Too Human he conveys a clear imperative to perspectival interpretation: “You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every judgement—the displacement, distortion and merely apparent teleology of horizons and whatever else pertains to perspectivism” (HATH, Preface §6). Perspectivism in the aftermath of the death of God, that is, in the absence of any underlying and determinate meaning-giving structure, is fundamentally an ethical stance insofar as it pronounces a way of life. Peter Berkowitz phrases this quite precisely in a study of the political ramifications of Nietzsche’s work: “The new ethics Zarathustra proclaims rests on the knowledge that God is dead. From this foundation Nietzsche infers the obligation to radically emancipate and empower the creative will.”¹³ Likewise, the underlying thesis of Bernard Reginster’s recent book on Nietzsche, The Affirmation of Life, while it does not focus on Nietzsche’s styles, is largely compatible with Nehamas’s work. For Reginster, the main issue with Nietzsche is overcoming nihilism as a response to the absence of any normalizing “truth.”¹⁴ As Nietzsche has it in Ecce Homo, “The lie of the ideal has so far been the curse on reality” (EH, 218). Both Berkowitz and Reginster thus echo Alasdair MacIntyre’s assertion that, because of his analysis of the contingent and nonrational nature of existing structures of morality, “Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age.”¹⁵

A disquisition on the mutual imbrication of ethics and aesthetics in Joyce and Nietzsche’s works itself requires multiple perspectives. Which is not to say that these multiple perspectives—either individually or in aggregate—can fully exhaust the issues. Rather, the idea is to triangulate several perspectives on the intersection between Joyce and Nietzsche to delineate, as if in stereoscope, Joyce’s Nietzschean ethics. This work thus surveys Joyce’s evolving aesthetics (for these are plural) from a series of perspectives informed by Nietzsche in order to educe and elaborate a link between Joyce’s aesthetics and ethics. Nietzsche’s considerations of science, history, truth, gender, nationalism, and anti-Semitism emerge from and depend upon his theories of perspectivism and so these topics will be discussed in this work through the prism of perspectivism and style. Other than the second half of this chapter, I am not so much concerned with Joyce’s direct engagement with Nietzsche, but rather with Joyce’s engagement with issues and problems raised in Nietzsche’s work. To be sure, Nietzsche’s works were not without influence on Joyce, but Joyce’s works evince broader affinities and patterns of consequence than what resulted from his direct (and even indirect) contact with Nietzsche. Joyce’s affinities with Nietzsche are not necessarily volitional—unlike error in the artwork as per Stephen’s argument in “Scylla and Charybdis” (U, 9.229).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1   “James Overman”: Joyce Reading Nietzsche
• Chapter 2   Ecce Auctor: Self-Creation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Chapter 3   Aufhebung Baby: Auto-genesis and Alterity in Ulysses
• Chapter 4   Joyce’s Multifarious Styles in Ulysses
• Chapter 5   Also Sprach Molly Bloom
• Chapter 6   The Gay Science of Finnegans Wake
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index