A Nietzschean Reading of Joyce's Dubliners

Abstract

It is reasonable and useful to read Joyce's Dubliners from the perspective of Nietzschean categories. Such a reading demonstrates that Joyce not only transforms these categories into fiction but also that he uses them both as ideological springboards and as significant structural elements in the organization of the stories. The intention of both Nietzsche's philosophy and Joyce's fiction is to stimulate an examination of modern moral lassitude which will effect a transformation of old static values into new vital realities. The Dubliners themselves are moral slaves who act out of ressentiment, are divided against themselves, and are dominated by an ascetic priesthood incapable of conceiving “the good” as anything more dynamic than an idée fixe. What Nietzsche and Joyce both require is a courageous stare at the concrete, historical real—not an escape to the abstract, metaphysical ideal. For them both, only a return westward to the tangible reality of everyday existence, an existence associated with the death of God, will allow the direction of ressentiment to be changed. Joyce's reversal of traditional symbolism is a kind of revaluation typical of Nietzsche whose Zarathustra turns “his ultimate depth into light.” Dubliners does not conclude with an image of fallen man, but rather with Gabriel Conroy awakened to his own mortality—redeemed and seeking grace in a journey west. The process of Gabriel's redemption corresponds to the development of spirit which Nietzsche describes in Zarathustra I. Joyce divides “The Dead” into three parts, each of which corresponds to one of the stages of spiritual evolution which Nietzsche describes as a threefold metamorphosis from camel to lion to child. Each of Joyce's three sections is colored by a single character to whom Gabriel is forced to respond. These characters are described in terms which allow them to submit easily to one of Nietzsche's categories of spirit. In addition, each of Joyce's sections is unified by an activity which corresponds to the level of awareness embodied in Nietzsche's metaphor. Gabriel's final vision of the snow depends, like Zarathustra's vision of eternal recurrence, on the passionate affirmation of the finitude of the human condition made in the face of the temptation toward nihilism. To read “The Dead” from a Nietzschean perspective demonstrates that the final story reverses the hopelessness of “Grace.” Gabriel's final “yes-saying” is not an act of weakness but of the courageous affirmation that evolves out of a spiritual metamorphosis from the static bonds of duty to a new awareness of the possibilities of becoming.