Joyce

Abstract

Chapter 3 examines the concentrated attention that other Irish writers gave to Nietzschean thought during the first decade of the twentieth century, making legible the conflicts within and around the Revival movement, especially the tensions among Irish Catholicism, cultural nationalism, and international modernism. To be sure, Joyce’s writing made use of some of Nietzsche’s most famous tropes in articulating a response to these conflicts, a response embodied in the figure of an artist-hero, whose radically new ethical and aesthetic disposition might have a broad communal significance for his people. In July 1904, not long after he had commenced his first attempt to write a novel, the young man signed a lettercard to a friend with the alias ‘James Overman’, evincing the importance of the Übermensch for Joyce and other members of his circle, including John Eglinton and Thomas Kettle, who looked to Nietzsche in their own efforts to promote an ‘efflorescence of art and culture’ in modern Ireland. In Stephen Hero, Joyce calls directly on a number of Nietzsche’s ideas – not just the Übermensch, but slave morality, noble values, and the death of God – to depict the emergence of a heroic artistic consciousness, struggling to overcome nationalist ressentiment and religious authority. This struggle reaches a critical point in the final lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen proclaims his desire to produce something radically new, a conscience beyond bad conscience, which would break from the manners and mores that govern his compatriots. Revisiting the ‘Telemachus episode’ – written in 1914, a decade after Joyce’s noteworthy lettercard – the chapter provides a full account of Stephen’s return to Ireland, the reemergence of his bad conscience, and Buck Mulligan’s playing at Zarathustra prophecy, all as signs that the modernist project of creating new values is necessarily a vexed one, especially in the chastening context of Irish history. At the very outset of Ulysses, Nietzschean allusions cast doubt on the heroic creator of values who emerges in A Portrait, but these references nonetheless offer an important point of departure for understanding the project of cultural transformation undertaken by Joyce’s art and the ethics of Irish modernism negotiated in the pages of his masterpiece.