Joyce’s

Nietzschean Ethics

Sam Slote

ISBN: 9781137364128

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364128

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JOYCE’S NIETZSCHEAN ETHICS


Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics

Sam Slote


JOYCE’S NIETZSCHEAN ETHICS

Copyright © Sam Slote, 2013.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


To my wife Ivana and my son Leslie, with much love, for making this book different from
what it otherwise might have been.


Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

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


Acknowledgments

When writing a book about ethics, proper and judicious acknowledgments ought to be made.
Fortunately, in my case such a task is a joy rather than a burden. I am grateful to all my
friends, colleagues, and students for all they have provided me and I would not wish it to be
otherwise. But of course, all the inevitable errors remain mine and mine alone.
The Joyce world provides many joys beyond the reading of Joyce’s works and these include
the companionship of many genial types, some of whom I would like to thank for their help,
inspiration, and example: Derek Attridge, Valérie Bénéjam, Murray Beja, John Bishop, Ron
Bush, Tim Conley, Matthew Creasy, Luca Crispi, Vincent Deane, Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer,
Anne Fogarty, Andrew Gibson, Michael Groden, Judith and Richard Harrington, Clive Hart,
Declan Kiberd, Terence Killeen, Geert Lernout, Laurent Milesi, Andrew J. Mitchell, Vike Plock,
Jean-Michel Rabaté, Fritz Senn, André Topia, Dirk Van Hulle, and Michelle Witen. A special
thanks goes to David Hayman, my graduate school supervisor, whose work on Joyce (and
Beckett) continues to inspire me. Special thanks also goes to Philip Kitcher, with whom I
discussed portions of this book, to Finn Fordham for numerous helpful suggestions, and to
James DiGiovanna, whose work on Nietzsche provided me with some conceptual starting-
points for this present work.
I find myself to be truly fortunate to be at Trinity College, Dublin, with such wonderful
colleagues and students. Among my colleagues I would like to thank Peter Arnds, David
Berman, Terence Brown, Brian Cliff, Helen Conrad-O’Briain, Nicky Grene, Darryl Jones, Jarlath
Killeen, Stephen Matterson, and Eve Patten. Working with PhD students is multidirectional and
I can only hope that they have benefited working with me at least as much as I with them and
so I would also like to thank Robert Baines, Philip Keel Geheber, and Alison Lacivita.
Beyond families of work, my own family has provided me with sustenance of both the
physical and metaphysical kinds. And so I will close this section by thanking my mother, my
sister, and my father, whom I miss dearly. And to my lovely wife Ivana and my son Leslie,
named after my father, I dedicate this book, even the pages Leslie chewed on while I was
(trying to) write and revise it.


Abbreviations

Works by James Joyce

Dub “Dubliners”: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (New
York: Viking Press, 1969).
Ex Exiles (London: Paladin, 1991).
FW plus page and line number. Finnegans Wake, ed. Robbert-Jan Henkes, Erik
Bindervoet, and Finn Fordham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
JJA plus volume and page number. The James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden et al.
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1978–79).
LI, LII, Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert
and LIII (New York: Viking Press, 1957; reissued with corrections 1966); vols. II and III, ed.
Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966).
OCPW Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
P “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G.
Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1968).
PSW Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John
Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991).
SH Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon (New
York: New Directions, 1963).
SL Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press,
1975).
U plus episode and line number. Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1993).
UCSE “Ulysses”: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard
Steppe and Claus Melchior, 3 vols. (New York: Garland, 1986).

Works by Friedrich Nietzsche

AC The Antichrist, tr. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 565–656.
BGE Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966).
BT The Birth of Tragedy, tr. Walter Kaufmann, in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of
Wagner (New York: Vintage, 1967), 15–144.
CW The Case of Wagner, tr. Walter Kaufmann, in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of
Wagner (New York: Vintage, 1967), 153–92.
Day Daybreak, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
EH Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
(New York: Vintage, 1969), 199–344.
GM On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, in On the
Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1969), 13–198.
GS The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974).
HATH Human, All too Human, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986).
TI Twilight of the Idols, tr. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 463–563.
UM Untimely Meditations, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983).

WEN Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, tr.
Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
WLN Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, tr. Kate Sturge (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
WP The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1968).
WS The Wanderer and His Shadow (Part 2 of Volume 2 of Human, All too Human
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 301–95).
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 103–439.
 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).
In the past few years, there have been a few studies that emphasize an ethical dimension to
Joyce. In James Joyce’s Negations, Brian Cosgrove proposes that for Joyce, “Irony is the
response that the world in its bewildering infinitude demands.”16 Cosgrove’s argument is that
Joycean irony is more akin to Schlegel’s than to Flaubert’s in that it acknowledges its inherent
participation with human frailty. In her provocative book Ethical Joyce, Marian Eide advances
a similar claim for construing an ethical import to Joyce’s oeuvre, but her focus derives from
Emmanuel Lévinas’s work in terms of construing ethics as an primordial response to alterity in
which the other remains as other: “For Joyce, then, the first ethical obligation is to experience
and express sympathy while preserving the differences between oneself and another.”17 While
my study proceeds on some terrain parallel to Eide’s, my focus is on how an ethics is
implicated through Joyce’s multifarious style rather than on an ethics of alterity and respect.
In his engaging study “Ulysses” and Us, Declan Kiberd also makes the case that Joyce is
fundamentally an ethical writer and that this point has been missed by the assimilation of
Joyce into university curricula. Kiberd reads Ulysses as an example of “wisdom literature” in
which Joyce “sought a new style which would show the dignity of everyday living,”18 and, in so
doing, “he would explore modes of teaching and learning which answer the emotional and
intellectual needs of ordinary people in search of a wiser way of life.”19 In Kiberd’s reading,
Ulysses is an ethical book in spite of its stylistic complexity; on the other hand, I will claim that
Ulysses is an ethical book precisely because of its stylistic complexity.
From his earliest writings, Joyce is concerned with an ethics of art and, specifically, an ethics
of his art in the sense of outlining a proper and specific course of action for his art to take. In
his paper “Drama and Life,” delivered at University College Dublin in January 1900, he
valorizes drama over literature because of its power to “portray truth” through the “interplay
of passions” (OCPW, 24). Because of this, drama is a “communal art” (OCPW, 25). Such a
sentiment is eminently Wagnerian and, indeed, in this paper Joyce counts Wagner along with
Ibsen as “the masons [who] are building for Drama, an ampler and loftier home” (OCPW, 24).20
Joyce’s concept of a communal art mirrors Wagner’s “The Art-Work of the Future,” where he
writes that “Tragedy flourished for just so long as it was inspired by the spirit of the Folk, and
as this spirit was a veritably popular, i.e. a communal one.”21 Nietzsche’s own rapport with
Wagner is complicated by his early appreciation and subsequent personal falling-out and
critical disdain,22 but a main thread running through his numerous attacks on Wagner is the
charge that an egoism lies behind his advocacy of a supposedly communal art. In The Case of
Wagner, Nietzsche contrasts Wagner with Bizet:

Finally, [Bizet’s] music treats the listener as intelligent, as if himself a musician—and is in this respect,
too, the counterpart of Wagner, who was, whatever else he was, at any rate the most impolite genius in
the world (Wagner treats us as if—he says something so often—till one despairs—till one believes it)
(CW, §1).

Nietzsche begins this book by stating that he would agree with the proposition that “Wagner
sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian” (CW, Preface).
That is, one must first move through the egoism of Wagner in order to ultimately become
polite. This is, I suggest, also the trajectory of Joyce’s aesthetics. Although his essay “Drama
and Life” valorizes drama as a communal art, Joyce’s own early artwork is anything but
communal (and, admittedly, not very dramatic). Over the course of his career as a writer Joyce
becomes more like Bizet, as Nietzsche describes him, and comes to treat his readers as if they
were writers themselves.
In this chapter, after outlining the book’s overall argument, I will discuss Joyce’s own
engagement—limited as it was—with Nietzsche in his early works. Joyce’s references to
Nietzsche depict him—not entirely accurately, but also not uniquely—as an advocate of a
brutal egoism that needs to be overcome. But it is actually in the attempt to overcome this
egoism that Joyce aligns with Nietzsche. The second chapter argues that Stephen Dedalus’s
aesthetic theory from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man correlates on some key points
with Nietzsche’s idea of the “experiment” from The Gay Science in that both entail theories of
self-creation and self-fashioning. Nietzsche’s experiment is an exercise in self-creation in the
aftermath of the realization of the death of God, that is, a mode of self-creation within a world
of contingencies. For Nietzsche this involves giving style to one’s character by creating one’s
own individual values (GS, §290). The experiment is an exercise in ethikos. In Stephen’s
aesthetic theory, the artist becomes an artist through the apprehension of claritas; that is, the
artist creates himself as an artist by creating art. In this way, the work of the artist is double:
the artist creates artworks, which in turn create the artist as an artist. The artist, as a creator,
is thus “auto-genetic,” that is, self-creating and self-determining. Stephen’s claim to “fly by
those nets” of “nationality, language, religion” (P, 203) is thus a direct consequence of such an
egoistic aesthetic. Such a conception, for both Joyce and Nietzsche, runs into the problem that
a self can never be truly auto-genetic.
The third chapter examines how Stephen’s concept of the auto-genetic artist is reworked in
Ulysses. A consequence of the type of egoistic self-determination that Stephen proposes is that
it denies alterity. Derrida calls this aspect of Joyce’s aesthetic—which he addresses in his third
essay on Joyce, “The Night Watch”—matricidal. According to Derrida’s analysis, writing is
matricidal in that it denies the agency of the maternal by attempting to project an impossible
auto-genesis of the author. In Ulysses, with his remorse of conscience (“Agenbite of inwit”)
over the death of his mother, Stephen thus confronts the tension between matricide and auto-
genesis. I will trace out the implications of this tension by examining Stephen’s thoughts on
maternity and creation in “Proteus.” I will then move to a detailed consideration of his theory
of Shakespeare in “Scylla and Charybdis,” which works as a revision of the aesthetic theory
from A Portrait and introduces, albeit imperfectly, a notion of empathy and recognition of
otherness into the artist’s egoism. This chapter concludes with an analysis of the conjunction
between maternity and creation in “Oxen of the Sun,” which I will argue serves as a
counterpoint to Stephen’s theory in “Scylla.”
Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare, with its idea of egoistic empathy, also implicates Bloom.
Bloom’s status as an “everyman” relates to Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare and is also a
consequence of Stephen’s aesthetic theory in A Portrait in that Bloom is an everyman not in
specifics of his character but rather in the specificity in which he is depicted. Bloom—like
Odysseus—is polytropic and open to multiple perspectives. The fourth chapter examines the
ethical implications of Joyce’s polytropic styles by looking at three moments of Bloom’s
equivocal Jewishness: in “Cyclops” where he is confronted by anti-Semitism, in “Eumaeus”
where he presents his utopic vision of a harmonious Ireland to Stephen, and finally in “Ithaca”
when Stephen sings an anti-Semitic song to Bloom.
The fifth chapter will look at Molly as an embodiment of Nietzsche’s affirmative ethics. In
her own way she announces what Nietzsche calls “the great Yes to life” (EH, 226) and, in so
doing, proposes a theory of creation that resolves, at least potentially, the dilemmata of
Stephen’s matricidal theory of artistic creation. In this chapter I will also discuss the ways in
which Nietzsche does not necessarily endorse the Zarathustrian Übermensch.
The final chapter turns to Finnegans Wake to consider the multiplicity of Wakean languages
as an extension of Joycean stylistic perspectivism. The argument of this chapter is that Wakean
multiplicity has a strong ethical imperative in that it encourages a plurality (or, in Wakean
terms, “plurability”) of perspectives and, as such, is the culmination of an aesthetic tendency
inaugurated (albeit imperfectly) in A Portrait. I will also discuss the political ramifications of
Wakean perspectivism in terms of the ideas of “Europe” projected by both Nietzsche and
Joyce. In the Wake, Joyce proposes several new perspectives on his earlier notion of the self-
involved and self-creating artist with Shaun’s description of Shem writing about himself on his
body with an ink made from his excrement. In this critique of the egoistic aspect of his earlier
aesthetic, Joyce proposes an overcoming of matricidal writing, which I will discuss through a
reading of the “Soft Morning City” section of the Wake.

* * *

The earliest critical engagement with Nietzsche came from the prominent Danish literary critic
Georg Brandes, who first lectured on Nietzsche at Copenhagen University in the spring of
1888 and who also corresponded with Nietzsche.23 (Joyce admired Brandes greatly and in
1919 sent him a copy of A Portrait.24 Brandes’s book William Shakespeare: A Critical Study
was one of Joyce’s three main sources for “Scylla and Charybdis.”25) Brandes coined the
expression “aristocratic radicalism” to describe the sweep of Nietzsche’s thought and he
includes in his 1889 essay on Nietzsche a citation of a letter from Nietzsche in which he
commends Brandes for this rubric, “It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read
about myself.”26 Brandes argues that Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism finds parallels in both
Renan and Flaubert’s distrust of the rabble in the valorization of the solitary great man who
challenges the mendacity of hegemonic ascetic idealism. “He sees the real nobility of man in
his capacity for promising something, answering for himself and undertaking a responsibility—
since man, with the mastery of himself which this capacity implies, necessarily acquires in
addition a mastery over external circumstances and over other creatures, whose will is not so
lasting.”27 Many of the earliest readers of Nietzsche follow from the tenor of Brandes’s
appraisal and, whether as approbation or reproach, saw in his works a project of radical
elitism.
The British isles suffered a small effusion of interest in Nietzsche in the first decade of the
twentieth century, resulting in what Ezra Pound derisively called, in his poem “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley,” a “neo-Nietzschean chatter.”28 The first spur was Havelock Ellis’s series of three
articles on Nietzsche, which appeared in The Savoy in 1896. In the same year, the first English
translations of some of his works began to be published, although the range of texts initially
translated was limited (complete and more accurate translations, undertaken by Oscar Levy,
were published between 1909 and 1913).29 The initial critical reaction varied between
hostility, feigned indifference, or admiration. David Thatcher writes, “Discussions of egoism
and altruism were a staple of philosophic thinking in the last years of the [nineteenth] century,
and it was in this context that Nietzsche’s ideas began to be noticed.”30 He also notes that
“Irish writers were, on the whole, quicker to recognize Nietzsche’s importance than their
English counterparts.”31 In particular, George Moore was an early Irish enthusiast of
Nietzsche’s works. Patrick Bridgwater writes that “Nietzsche became the spokesman of the
anti-Victorian movement; with him the New Paganism of the 1880s returned with a
vengeance.”32 Reinforcing an impression of Nietzsche in an anarchic dimension was Max
Nordau’s Degeneration, an English translation of which was published in 1895. Nordau’s book
was an attack on what he perceived as decadence and degeneration in fin de siècle art and
literature, and he puts Nietzsche in the same torrid company of the Pre-Raphaelites, the
Symbolists, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Zola.33 H. G. Wells concluded a brief essay against Social
Darwinism by condemning it as “the glorification of a sort of rampant egotism—of
blackguardism in fact,—as the New Gospel. You get that in the Gospel of Nietzsche.”34 G. K.
Chesterton was equally dismissive of Nietzsche and stated that he “attributes to the strong
man that scorn against weakness which only exists among invalids”35—which is actually the
very argument Nietzsche makes about slave morality, as I will discuss shortly.
In 1904, William Francis Barry, a Catholic theologian and writer, published a collection of his
essays, which had previously appeared in the journals Dublin Review and Quarterly Review,
entitled Heralds of Revolt. Like Nordau, Barry discusses a range of writers and movements
that he disagrees with and considers “ruinous to the ethics, the arts, the social order which we
have inherited from our Christian ancestors.”36 Two essays cover Neo-Paganism and the final
is on Nietzsche. Although Barry’s stance is critical, he is also thoughtful and considered. Of
Nietzsche he writes:

[Nietzsche] is the latest, and by no means least significant, of those spirits that, like the too often
quoted Mephistopheles, “say No” to an entire civilisation. His Nie pozwalam, or “I decline to agree,”
uttered with explosive rhetoric and flowing out into ten thousand aphorisms has made him the hero as
well as the prophet of free-thinkers. To him the Church seems an effete superstition, the State mere
tyranny, metaphysics the ghost of religion sifting upon its grave, morality a bugbear, law the enemy of
life, and everything permissible so long as men please themselves.37

Barry notes, “For the English reader, probably the speediest way into [The Birth of Tragedy]
would be through Walter Pater’s meditations.”38 The association between Nietzsche and Pater
certainly helped ease Nietzsche’s assimilation into British thought. Indeed, as I will argue in
the next chapter, some of the correspondences between Joyce and Nietzsche derive from
Pater’s influence upon Joyce. Arthur Symons, Pater’s main disciple and a major early
proponent of Nietzsche, likewise linked the two writers: “Pater has dealt with some of the
Greek problems very much in the spirit of Nietzsche.”39 However, despite several coincidences
between their works—notably an archetypal distinction between Apollo and Dionysius—Pater
was likely ignorant of Nietzsche’s writings.40
The same year as Barry’s book was published, Joyce’s friend W. K. Magee, writing under his
customary pseudonym John Eglinton, published a brief article on Nietzsche for Dana, the
journal he edited.41 Eglinton’s view on Nietzsche is somewhat more favorable than Barry’s,
but it is not without qualification. Both Barry and Eglinton emphasized the egoistic dimensions
to Nietzsche’s proclamations. According to Barry, Nietzsche’s “ideal was perfection to be
achieved by himself, first as freedom of intellect, then as an untrammelled self-directing
life.”42 And Eglinton, while he calls the idea of the Übermensch “a little crazy” (a judgment
perhaps Nietzsche would agree with, as I will discuss shortly), describes it as “he who adds a
new power and significance to life.”43
Nietzsche’s valorization of the strong individual, while scorned by some such as Chesterton,
found approval in other quarters, such as the journal The Eagle and the Serpent (named after
Zarathustra’s companions), which ran intermittently from 1899 to 1902. This was edited by J.
B. Barnhill, writing under the pseudonym Erwin McCall. Its subtitle was “A Journal of Egoistic
Philosophy and Sociology” and it announced that it was “Dedicated to the Philosophy of Life
Enunciated by Nietzsche, Emerson, Stirner, Thoreau, and Goethe.” Egoism—of the Strinerian
kind—was indeed its central motivating tenet, as is made clear in an editorial from the first
issue: “A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of freemen is necessarily a race
of egoists.”44 The equation of freemen and egoists is telling and, in a way, presages the change
in name and editorial policy of The New Freewoman to The Egoist in 1914; The Egoist being
Joyce’s publisher for A Portrait and a portion of Ulysses.45
W. B. Yeats was a keen advocate of Nietzsche. He credited the New York lawyer John Quinn
(who, among his other connections with Modernist writers, later supported Joyce during the
writing of Ulysses) with introducing him to Nietzsche’s works in 1902. Later that year, in a
letter to Lady Gregory, he called Nietzsche “that strong enchanter.”46 Yeats’s rapport with
Nietzsche can be charted in various dimensions. In his monograph, Otto Bohlmann writes that
while one cannot construe Yeats as a Nietzschean writer, “Nietzsche was but one of many
quarters in which Yeats found incitement of his views.”47 Terence Brown proposes that Yeats
was attracted to “the concept of heroically self-disciplined leadership by the Nietzschean free
spirit, instructing a chosen cadre of illuminati.”48 The Celtic Revival was, almost by definition,
an exercise in transvaluation: creating a value for Ireland apart from its perfidious neighbor
and, for Yeats, Nietzsche offered an example in transvaluation and overcoming. As David
Thatcher argues, “Yeats was being stimulated to work on Nietzsche’s ideas and develop them
in terms of the Irish search for national identity and cultural unity.”49 Yeats’s Nietzsche is the
hero who inspires and creates a nation, Cúchullain as proto-Übermensch.50
The milieu in which young Joyce would have encountered Nietzsche in turn-of-the-century
Dublin thus emphasized, either disapprovingly or approvingly, the pagan and elitist elements
of the Übermensch and, with Yeats, an application of these to the project of the Celtic Revival.
Such is the figuration of Nietzsche presented in Ulysses, as advocated by Buck Mulligan. In
“Telemachus,” Mulligan invokes Nietzsche along with Wilde and Swinburne as intellectual
touchstones for the omphalos he calls home. In Joyce’s Trieste notebook, he writes that “The
Omphalos was to be a temple of neo-paganism.”51
Mulligan’s parody of the Mass, which opens Ulysses, clearly evinces some pagan
sensibilities, a suspicion buttressed by his fondness for Swinburne (U, 1.77). For Mulligan,
Nietzsche is the philosopher who promises power to an elite intellectual class that stands
above and apart from the masses. In this, Mulligan is (unsurprisingly) close to his model,
Oliver St John Gogarty. In a letter to G. K. A. Bell from January 1905, Gogarty neatly expresses
Nietzsche’s lure: “Think of the sunlight and scenery that Aristotle himself must have
renounced in order to force his ideas into form . . . and of all the fierce walks it cost Nietzsche
before he could record his satire against mediocrity!”52 For Gogarty, like Mulligan, the
Übermensch acts as the bulwark against the lumpen rabble.
Mulligan and Stephen’s sojourn in Sandycove is part of Mulligan’s pseudo-Nietzschean
“transvaluation” of Ireland: “God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do
something for the island. Hellenise it” (U, 1.157–58). In the earliest version of this passage, the
allusion to a Nietzschean project is a bit clearer. The “Telemachus” episode of Ulysses began
as a draft for a subsequently abandoned sixth chapter for A Portrait, written in 1912–1913, a
few pages of which survive. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain conclude that Joyce originally
intended “to have Stephen’s departure into exile be the result of his expulsion from the
Martello Tower by the Gogarty-figure called Doherty in this fragment and the Pola notebook
but Mulligan in Ulysses.”53 In this fragment of the proto-“Telemachus,” Doherty exhorts
Stephen, “Dedalus, we must retire to the tower, you and I. Our lives are precious. I’ll try to
touch the aunt. We are the super-artists. Dedalus and Doherty have left Ireland for the
Omphalos.”54 In the final text, Mulligan is somewhat more cynical about Stephen’s abilities to
join with him on such a project: “I’m the Übermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen”
(U, 1.708–9).
Beyond his dental problems, Stephen is encumbered by a guilt over his mother’s death
(which will be further discussed in chapter 3). Mulligan chides Stephen for not having prayed
to his mother at her deathbed: “You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying
mother asked you . . . I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging
you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something
sinister in you” (U, 1.91–94). According to Mulligan, Stephen’s refusal to pray was a symptom
of his being overly Hyperborean, that is, too aloof. In Greek mythology the Hyperboreans are a
people from beyond the north wind (huper, beyond and boreas, the north wind) who live a
thousand years in an inaccessible land bereft of violence and war.55 Gifford notes that
Mulligan’s use of this word echoes the opening of Nietzsche’s book The Antichrist: “Let us face
ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. ‘Neither by land nor
by sea will you find your way to the Hyperboreans’—Pindar already knew this about us” (AC,
569).56 Gifford’s Nietzschean allusion is apposite to Mulligan’s comment but really only as an
intensifier to the already-evident colloquial sense of Hyperborean that Mulligan proposes. In
this way, aloofness is granted the gravitas of a philosophical stance.
Mulligan’s Hyperborean is also linked to Ireland through the belief that the Celts were the
basis of the Greek Hyperboreans (the word Hibernian is etymologically unrelated). Douglas
Hyde explains in his 1899 book A Literary History of Ireland, “The Celts seem to have been
first known to Greek—that is, to European history—under the semi-mythological name of the
Hyperboreans, an appellation which remained in force from the sixth to the fourth century
before Christ.”57 Mulligan’s chiding of Stephen thus yokes together Nietzsche into his project
of a Celtic Revival: reviving Ireland through a pagan and Nietzschean Hellenization.
Contrary to Mulligan’s pretensions, Stephen sees Hyperborean aloofness not as a
philosophical stance, but rather as the product of an indulged selfishness. After Mulligan
announces his goal to Hellenize Ireland, he asks Stephen why he is not eager to join him on
such a project and says that if Haines is the reason why, then “we’ll give him a ragging worse
than they gave Clive Kempthorpe” (U, 1.163–64). Such a line betrays Mulligan’s privileged
public school education and thus prompts Stephen to imagine a scene in which this young
Kempthorpe is assailed in Magdalen College at Oxford:

Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, aproned, masked
with Matthew Arnold’s face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing
motes of grasshalms.
To ourselves . . . new paganism . . . Omphalos (U, 1.172–76).
Gifford glosses “to ourselves” as a translation of the Irish Sinn Féin, we ourselves, thereby
consociating Mulligan with the Celtic Revival and its political manifestations.58 However, in
context, this seems more like Stephen imagining the well-fed and bullying Oxford narcissists,
who have just been tormenting the hapless Kempthorpe, toasting themselves for being
“pagan” and superior. “To ourselves” is more Oxonian than Hibernian. Indeed, Mulligan’s goal
to Hellenize Ireland is more of an Arnoldian and English public schoolboy project than a
Nietzschean one. Mulligan’s Nietzsche is a good example of what Joyce’s Nietzsche is not:
haughty, elitist, rebellious, egoistic, selfish, bullying, and sybaritic. Like Wells’s Nietzsche,
Mulligan’s is a bit of blackguard.
Young Joyce was not entirely immune from a Mulliganesque pseudo-Nietzschean posturing.
Not unlike many adolescents of a certain temperament, the young Joyce found himself
enamored of Nietzsche insofar as he offered what seemed to be a philosophical justification of
haughtiness; for example, he signed a letter of July 1904 to his prospective publisher George
Roberts, whom he asked a loan of a pound, with the pseudonym “James Overman” (LI, 56).
Somewhat more substantively, his college essay “The Day of the Rabblement,” an invective
against the Irish Literary Theatre, begins with Joyce setting himself above and apart from the
rabble he descries: “No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he
abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to
isolate himself” (OCPW, 50). His earlier advocacy of a truly communal art in “Drama and Life”
has here subsided in favor of a superior, Hyperborean artist. Perhaps symptomatic of this very
sentiment of proud artistic isolation, this essay was rejected by St Stephen’s magazine, an
undergraduate journal at University College Dublin, because Joyce mentioned Gabriele
D’Annunzio’s novel Il Fuoco, which was listed on the Vatican Index of Prohibited Books. Such
suppression is ironic, since in the essay Joyce characterizes the forces of censorship in Ireland
as being, unlike their counterparts in England, impotent (OCPW, 50). To counteract the
censorship, Joyce teamed up with his friend Francis Skeffington, whose essay “A Forgotten
Aspect of the University Question” was also rejected by St Stephen’s. They privately published
their two essays together in October 1901. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus writes that the essay
“got more publicity than if it had not been censored.”59 This was hardly the first time that
Joyce was confronted with obstacles to publication. As has been much discussed, the genesis
and genealogy of Joyce’s works is enmeshed within complex publication histories.60
In the very sentence of this essay Joyce deploys a tactic to separate himself from his readers:
according to Stanislaus Joyce, he refers to Giordano Bruno as “the Nolan” in order to give his
readers “a false impression that he was quoting some little-known Irish writer.”61 Such an
insulating sentiment is also Nietzschean, or, at least, pseudo-Nietzschean. According to Barry’s
characterization of Nietzsche, “genius will make its own way, provided that the swinish
multitude do not trample it down. The ‘herd’ is the danger.”62 Joyce, likewise, professes a
distrust of the herd in this essay. While he expresses some admiration for some of Yeats’s
plays, he berates his elder for a “treacherous instinct of adaptability” (OCPW, 51), that is, for
succumbing to the mores and values of the herd. While in this essay Joyce refrains from
identifying the Rabblement—leaving it as only some kind of amorphous herd—context makes it
clear that he is referring to a specifically Dublin-based haute bourgeoisie deaf to new arts and
against which he pits the artist, the true artist, that is, himself. As Joyce evolves as an artist he
leaves behind such vagueness apropos the Rabblement and will introduce specificity and
detail, as will be argued in subsequent chapters. For the Joyce of this essay the artist has to, by
necessity, be Hyperborean: “Until he has freed himself from the mean influences about him—
sodden enthusiasm and clever insinuation and every flattering influence of vanity and low
ambition—no man is an artist at all” (OCPW, 52).
Joyce’s brief, controversial, and laudatory citation of D’Annunzio in “The Day of the
Rabblement” suggests the way in which he would have understood Nietzsche at this time.
Beyond his advances in the novelistic form, which Joyce endorses, D’Annunzio was an early
supporter of Nietzsche in precisely the Hyperborean mode of aristocratic radicalism that Joyce
espouses. He writes at the conclusion of the Preface to his novel Trionfo della Morte, “We turn
our ear to the voice of the magnanimous Zarathustra, or abbot, and we prepare in art with
sure faith for the arrival of the Übermensch, the superman.”63 Nietzsche is thus an exemplar
of self-proclaiming artistic exceptionalism for D’Annunzio, just as D’Annunzio was such for
Joyce.
If anything, the Hyperborean artist Joyce and D’Annunzio celebrate is Wagnerian, at least
Wagnerian in the terms that Nietzsche came to understand, a “tyrant” whose “pathos topples
every taste, every resistance” (CW, §8). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra begins with such a Wagnerian
moment when he enters the marketplace to teach the rabble his great prophecies about the
death of God and the coming of the Übermensch, but instead of obediently listening to him
they regard him as a mere performer catering to their amusement. Confounded, he thinks:
“There they stand . . . there they laugh. They do not understand me; I am not the mouth for
these ears. Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?” (Z, 128).
One way to construe this passage is as a parable of the artist maligned by the very people he
seeks to redeem. But such a reading misses the egoism and hubris that characterizes
Zarathustra at this early stage. Peter Berkowitz summarizes this point quite precisely: “The
irony is that while rejecting the content of conventional piety he has already adopted, but with
poor results, the terms, the pose, and even something akin to the aim of the priests he
denounces.”64 The clue that this might be the case and that Zarathustra’s egoism is
excessively involute is that at this stage Nietzsche characterizes the Übermensch as a final
outcome or end in itself, “the meaning of the earth” (Z, 125). Whereas, instead, as is revealed
later in the book, the Übermensch is itself something to be overcome, one more mere step and
creating must endeavor to continually create: “I love him who wants to create over and beyond
himself” (Z, 177). The goal is not the Übermensch as such, but rather a perpetual process of
overcoming.65 As Nietzsche put it in Ecce Homo, the word Übermensch has been understood
as “the very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent” (EH, 261); that is,
Nietzsche recognizes that he was misunderstood just like Zarathustra, and so perhaps
Eglinton was right and the Übermensch was just a bit crazy after all.66
If the Joyce who wrote “The Day of the Rabblement” distrusted, if not despised, the rabble,
then the Joyce who wrote “A Painful Case” projects a different worldview. In some respects the
character of Mr. Duffy represents a parody in extremis of the younger Joyce. Duffy, we are told,
“had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any
communion with others” (Dub, 109). While he has “an odd autobiographical habit” of writing
in his mind “a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a
predicate in the past tense” (Dub, 108), he refuses to write anything down because, as he
explains to Mrs. Sinico, he does not want to “submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse
middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios” (Dub,
111). Like the artist Joyce described in “The Day of the Rabblement,” Duffy abhors crowds and
isolates himself in order to contemplate himself. But, in such involution, he misses the human
cost of his hubris, that is, the pain of the painful case of Mrs. Sinico’s suicide.
Duffy’s sense of himself as superior to his fellow Dubliners is echoed in his acquisition of
copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science in the time between him severing
contact with Mrs. Sinico and her death (Dub, 112). We are told that some two months after he
left Mrs. Sinico behind he wrote: “Love between man and man is impossible because there
must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because
there must be sexual intercourse” (Dub, 112). This directly follows from a passage in
Zarathustra: “woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love . . . But tell me, you
men, who among you is capable of friendship?” (Z, 169). Duffy thus turns to Nietzsche to
confirm his already well-developed sense of superiority and justify his solitary existence.
Indeed, Marvin Malanger writes that “Joyce relies upon Nietzsche for a great deal more than
his remarks on woman. He uses Nietzsche’s idea of the superman, and makes it, in fact, the
basis of the character of Duffy.”67 Malanger also suggests that another line from Zarathustra
represents Nietzsche’s endorsement of a character like Duffy: “The lonely one offers his hand
too quickly to whomever he encounters” (Z, 176). In seeing Nietzsche unequivocally endorse
the misanthropic and misogynistic aspect of Zarathustra, Malanger is misreading Nietzsche,
although this misreading is instructive precisely because it parallels Duffy’s own misreading of
Nietzsche (and perhaps even Joyce’s). Duffy is not the Übermensch precisely because he does
not strive to overcome himself, but instead rests content (or whatever approximation of
contentedness he values) in his Hyperborean Chapelizod.68
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues how systems of morality develop as codifications
and justifications of already-existing sets of values; more precisely, what he calls slave morality
emerges as a response to a socially contingent status of disempowerment that translates or
transvalues that disempowerment into its own kind of nobility (BGE, §260). In essence, slave
morality is what tells the meek that they shall indeed inherit the earth as a palliative for their
present weakness. Therefore, in believing himself superior, Duffy actually betrays his
weakness and pettiness. In this way, his interest in Nietzsche suggests a symptomatic
misreading of Nietzsche (other examples of which could be found in Chesterton and
Malanger). His cruel belief in himself as superior and as “a unique figure” (Dub, 110) is
exemplary of slave morality. Rather that be the Übermensch, Duffy remains human, all too
human (or duff, all too duff), reducing Nietzsche to merely moral utility. He would perhaps be
better served if he had purchased a copy of Atlas Shrugged instead, since all he does is shrug,
whether in Chapelizod or his eating house in George’s Street away from Dublin’s gilded youth.
Duffy misreads Nietzsche’s Übermensch as simply being a rarefied individual, rather than as
an entity that is engaged in perpetual becoming and overcoming. It seems that Joyce drew the
same (faulty) conclusion about Nietzsche as Duffy, but unlike Duffy progressed beyond that. In
Exiles Richard admits to Robert that the idea that “All life is a conquest, the victory of human
passion over the commandments of cowardice” was just “the language of my youth” (Ex, 99).
Francis Fergusson sees in that line “the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy.”69 Joyce thus
consigns his reading of Nietzsche—his Hyperborean “James Overman”—to the grandiloquence
of his youth, thereby overcoming his own youthful reading (or misreading) of Nietzsche.
Joyce’s initial misreading of Nietzsche—the language of his youth—is what he overcame to
arrive at something like a Nietzschean ethics, the first step of which is outlined in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man.
 Chapter 2
Ecce Auctor: Self-Creation in A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man

As its title indicates, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is something of a self-
reflexive affair, authorial navel gazing as it were. By evoking a formula familiar to portraiture,
this title indicates that its creator will be presented an inchoate state. The supplementary “as a
Young Man”—absent from the title of Joyce’s original 1904 essay1—emphasizes the distance
and dissonance between the character presented and the artist, whilst still acknowledging
some ambiguous measure of potential consonance. In this way, the novel narrates the
possibility of its own genesis. This is, of course, the generic condition of autobiography (which
is not to say that A Portrait is an autobiography, at least not in a traditional sense), since all
autobiographies (including fictional ones), in their own individual ways, propose to directly or
indirectly narrate the story of how their authors came to write them.2 Indeed, Paul Valéry goes
one step beyond with the claim that “there is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully
prepared, of some autobiography.”3
Autobiographical self-reflexivity is announced in the opening of the 1904 essay “A Portrait of
the Artist”:

The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are
we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron, memorial aspect. Yet the past
assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual
present is a phase only. Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard
and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art,
by some process of the mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that
which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts. But for such as these a
portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion (P, 257–58; PSW, 211).

The density and idiosyncrasy of passages such as this help explain why John Eglinton
complained that “I can’t print what I can’t understand” when he turned this essay down for
publication in Dana.4 In this essay, Joyce conceives the portrait as not being simply
documentary or factual (“the characters of beard and inches”), but rather as the presentation
of an “individuating rhythm,” that is, an individual and individuating signature. The task Joyce
sets for the artist here recalls Pater’s in his essay “Style”: “For just in proportion as the
writer’s aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not
of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art.”5 In this sense, all
art is autobiographical in that art (or, at least, “fine art”) presents the artist’s sense and
sensibilities through his individual style, “the medium through which alone he can explore that
inward sense of things.”6 As Jean Starobinski notes, the gesture of autobiography is the
presentation of what makes a subject a distinct and unique individual; that is, an
autobiography is primarily an exercise in and of one’s own style.7 According to Joyce, the
subject’s past is presented or represented through the sensibility of the subject’s present,
thereby suggesting the “fluid succession of presents.”
While the earlier essay is an imperfect attempt at applying its own theory (and Stephen Hero
is likewise a stunted application), the later novel is somewhat more successful. For example, A
Portrait famously opens in a childlike, fairy-tale style with Stephen’s father reading to him a
story about a moocow: “His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass:
he had a hairy face” (P, 7). The expression “through a glass” is an entirely apposite phrase
from a child’s perspective—one as yet unaware of the mechanics and accouterments of
optometry—while also directly evoking the biblical passage, “When I was a child, I spake as a
child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away
childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:11–12). This allusion
provides a neat clue to Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse8 since the phrase “when I was a
child, I spake as a child” perfectly describes the narrative decorum here: Stephen is a child
and hence the language in which he is described is childlike. Likewise, as Stephen matures,
the tone and register of the language become increasingly more sophisticated. A. Walton Litz
calls this sort of thing in Joyce’s work “expressive form,” the idea being that “form ‘expresses’
or imitates qualities of its subject.”9 Litz prefaces his discussion of this by noting that Joyce
kept in his Paris flat a picture of Cork in, suitably enough, a cork frame.10 Through this
modulation of “expressive form” the character of Stephen’s infancy is rendered stylistically.
In his essay on style, Pater endorses something like expressive form: “To give the phrase, the
sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its
subject and with itself:—style is in the right way when it tends towards that.”11 A self-
reflexivity is thus essential to one’s own style, as if the individual sentence were also, following
from Valéry, “a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.”
This opening scene with Simon reading to young Stephen is quite autobiographical. On
January 31, 1931, John Stanislaus Joyce wrote to his son, “My dear Jim I wish you a very happy
birthday and also a bright and happy New Year. I wonder do you recollect the old days in
Brighton Square, when you were Babie Tuckoo, and I used to take you out in the Square and
tell you all about the moo-cow that used to come down from the mountain and take little boys
across?” (LIII, 212). (This letter also reveals that Joyce’s father never actually read any of his
son’s novels.) In the opening scene of A Portrait, Joyce is not simply recollecting some moment
from his boyhood, but rather is refracting that past moment back through an imagined childish
sensibility. And, in turn, the evolution of Stephen’s temperament is indicated through the
increasing complexity of language and style as he ages. The Bildung of this Bildungsroman is
thus conveyed through the evolution of the styles across the book, from the young Stephen in
Chapter 1 to the pretentious undergraduate who leaves for Paris at the close of Chapter 5.12
This dimension of stylistic development suggests an important link between Joyce and
Nietzsche. The basic principle of free indirect discourse in A Portrait allows for the character
of Stephen to be narrated from a perspective that is at once consociate but distinct. The joint
or brisure13 between the “young man” and the “artist” is an interval of becoming, of the one
becoming the other. For Joyce, the artist is an artist because, somewhat tautologically, he
narrates how he became an artist. In this way, the autobiography is a synecdoche of auto-
genesis. In Nietzsche, we see this issue indicated in the subtitle for Ecce Homo, his own
Bildungsroman (of sorts), “How One Becomes What One Is.” Variations on this formula appear
in his earlier works: “Be your self. All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not
yourself” (UM, 127); “What does your conscience say?—You must become who you are” (GS,
§270); “We, however, want to become those we are” (GS, §335); “Become who you are!” (Z,
351). The rub for Nietzsche is that such becoming is never teleological: “Becoming does not
aim at a final state, does not flow into ‘being’” (WP, §708). The problem Nietzsche signals here
is how does one become what one is, that is, how does one evolve into that which one
presumably already is. This tautology suggests that for Nietzsche the act or art of becoming is
a perpetual process. An important corollary to this is that Nietzsche does not brook any
interiority, the self is a function of its actions and not of any internal, covert qualities: “there is
no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—
the deed is everything” (GM, I§13). The self can be said to be only insofar as it becomes:
becoming is what one is, no more and no less.
In this way, Nietzschean self is not unlike Finnegans Wake from the period 1922–1939 when
it was known in its serial publication as a “Work in Progress.” As Nietzsche writes in “On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” “existence fundamentally is—an imperfect tense
that can never become a perfect one” (UM, 61). Existence is invariably (in the grammatical
sense) imperfect, that is, incomplete, evolving. Indeed, as I will shortly argue, for Nietzsche
the self is itself a kind of artwork engaged in a process of continual self-fashioning.
The intertwined development of artist and artwork is the central focus of Stephen’s aesthetic
theory, as is presented in Chapter 5 of A Portrait. This theory concerns, among a few other
things, the problem of auto-genesis; by which I mean the problem of individual self-derived
self-creation. The core of Stephen’s aesthetics revolves around a tripartite phenomenology of
perception: integritas, consonantia, and claritas.14 First, the object is apprehended as an
integral object apart from other objects, “selfbounded and selfcontained upon the
immeasurable background of space or time which is not it” (P, 212) as Stephen puts it. This
would be integritas. Next, the object would be perceived as a complex object composed out of
its own constituent components; that would be its consonantia, its internal disposition.
The claritas moment is less straightforward and it is worth bearing in mind that in the
version of this argument presented in Stephen Hero claritas is synonymous with “epiphany”
(SH, 213), a term that properly means to show forth or become manifest (epiphaneia), a
coming to presence as unconcealment.15 Stephen explicitly rejects interpretations of Thomistic
claritas that would characterize it as either a symbolic or idealistic manifestation. This is not
without significance: claritas is not as such transcendent, it is not a revelation or irruption of
some ideal Platonic form. Instead, Stephen describes it as a lucidity of engaged phenomenal
perception:

When you have apprehended that basket as one thing [this would be the apprehension of integritas] and
have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing [this would be the
apprehension of consonantia] you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically
permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he
[Aquinas] speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the
artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination (P, 213).16

Claritas arises out of the perceiver’s synthesis of integritas and consonantia; indeed, it arises
out of the only possible synthesis of integritas and consonantia. Claritas results from the
apprehension of the thing as the thing that it is. More precisely, claritas is the precise
apprehension of the object presencing itself as itself. Claritas is the apprehension of a process
of phenomenological lucidity where noumenon and phenomenon become one. In this way,
Frank Budgen was quite correct when he claimed that “Joyce’s realism verges on the
mystical.”17
Stephen’s theory applies to Joyce’s own compositional techniques, since, in general, Joyce’s
writing emphasizes a precise representation of minute and particular details without being
strictly documentarian. The specificity of detail (claritas) is refracted through the
apprehending artist’s imagination. We can see this at work in the account of young Stephen’s
trip to Cork with his father where he sees the word fetus carved into a desk in the anatomy
theatre:

On the desk before him he read the word Fœtus cut several times in the dark stained wood. The sudden
legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the absent students of the college about him and to shrink
from their company. A vision of their life, which his father’s words had been powerless to evoke, sprang
before him out of the word cut in the desk. A broadshouldered student with a moustache was cutting in
the letters with a jackknife, seriously. Other students stood or sat near him laughing at his handiwork.
One jogged his elbow. The big student turned on him, frowning. He was dressed in loose grey clothes
and he had tan boots . . . It shocked [Stephen] to find in the other world a trace of what he had deemed
till then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind (P, 89–90).

The single word inspires Stephen to hypothesize a scene in which it was first carved into the
desk. This imagined scene is laden with specific details: the student who carves in the word
has a moustache, is broad-shouldered, and wears loose grey clothes with tan boots. The scene
is vivid precisely because of its attention to small and particular details. In Ulysses, Stephen
calls this attention to small detail “Local colour” (U, 9.158).18 Indeed, the word fetus is more
evocative than his father’s reminiscences of his own schooldays, which are not even directly
indicated in the text. Furthermore, the word, beyond representing the scene of its inscription,
serves as a reflection of young Stephen’s teenage sexual frustrations, thereby revealing to
Stephen that sexual thoughts are not uniquely his own. In this way, Stephen’s vision of the
word fetus illustrates his theory of claritas: by perceiving the image of this single inscribed
word, he apprehends a larger, but no less specific scene. In this case, a haunting moment of
his own life-story at that particular moment, namely adolescent sexual frustration.
In a certain way, as Joseph Valente and Margot Backus argue, the word fetus inseminates
Stephen with both linguistic and sexual unease.19 At the very least, the word provides a
moment of inspiration for Stephen as he evolves and matures. A Portrait could be seen to
narrate Stephen’s apprenticeship to language, how his linguistic sensibility evolves from his
father’s story of the moocow to his contemplation of the “queer word” “suck” and its
onomatopoeic qualities (P, 11), and, eventually, to his sophisticated, if not unpretentious,
aesthetic theory in Chapter 5. But even before his theory is laid out, we hear about Stephen’s
ruminations on linguistic efficacy as he contemplates a phrase from Hugh Miller’s book The
Testimony of Rocks.20

Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet
and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their
colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of
words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he
was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the
prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of
individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? (P, 166–67)

Stephen is apparently not some budding Symbolist poet beholden to the color azure. This
passage proffers several hypotheses to explain Stephen’s fascination with the power of words
without actually positing an unambiguous answer. Is it the rhythm of phrasing or is it a
connotative power? Is it the ability to represent an outer world precisely or a power to express
internal thoughts and moods? In any case, Stephen ties linguistic representation—the
presentation of a world linguistically—to the apprehension of claritas.
Stephen’s conceptualization of claritas does not really align with a Nietzschean
phenomenology as such, but in a certain way, it is not without affinity to Martin Heidegger’s
analysis of the ontology of objects in his essay “The Thing”: “The jug is a thing insofar as it
things. The presence of something present such as the jug comes into its own, appropriatively
manifests and determines itself, only from the thinging of the thing.”21 Both Stephen and
Heidegger follow from the Aristotelian notion that the presencing of an existent object is an
action (energeia for Aristotle in the Metaphysics).22 The object presents itself as that which it
is and no other. This presencing is never a fait accompli, but is rather an ongoing process of
work; as Heidegger has it, “the thing things.”23 But what Stephen adds is that this presencing
is occasioned, or more precisely fulfilled, through a sensory, that is, aesthetic apprehension.
Heidegger, on the other hand, is largely uninterested in matters of aesthetics.24 For Stephen’s
aesthetics, claritas is an ontological unconcealment or revelation (hence its cognate term in
Stephen Hero, epiphany). The thing things only insofar as its thinging can be seen and
recognized as such.
Claritas is not just what happens, it is what is, as Stephen says, “conceived” in the
imagination of the apprehending artist (P, 213). And so, in Stephen’s formulation, the
intervention of the artist’s faculty of apprehension is essential to the presencing of the object.
For Stephen, art is all around us, if only we could have the eyes to see it; but that is what poets
are for, to disclose claritas. The moment of aesthesis occurs not just in the object’s presencing
but also in the artist’s represencing. Here Joyce follows from Pater, who concludes his essay on
Joachim Du Bellay with a commentary on the poem “D’un vanneur de blé au vents” with a
passage that prefigures Stephen’s argument: “A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a
weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door: a moment—and the
thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that
the accident may happen again.”25 This moment of effervescent subtlety is occasioned by the
artist.
Although Stephen cites Shelley and the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, his theory brings
us into a Blakean register.26 For Blake, the artist and artwork are mutually engendering in that
each creates the other through interpreting that other. The artist and the artwork are inter-
interpretive. The artist is created (as an artist) by the artwork that is, in turn, created by the
artist. In his poem Milton, Blake characterizes Paradise Lost as divinely inspired, but Milton is
also creating God; that is, he creates the very God who inspires him: “Silent Milton stood
before / The darkened Urizen; as the sculptor silent stands before / His forming image; he
walks round it patient labouring. / Thus Milton stood forming bright Urizen.”27 Such self-
creating artistic creation is occasioned through perception. For Blake, perception is
imaginative and thus is creative: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence
itself.”28 Blake’s conception is thus an inflated egoism in that it construes the whole world as a
fragment of some autobiography that is being written. Stephen’s account of claritas is thus
Blakean in that it aligns perception with creation and the implications this has for self-creation
connects with Nietzsche, as I will discuss shortly. In any case, Stephen’s definition of claritas
directly leads into his account of the godlike artist whose perception becomes a creative force:

The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods
upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional
gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely
personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the
persons and the action like a vital sea . . . The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has
flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a
proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood
and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to
speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human
imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the
God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of
existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails (P, 214–15).

Stephen proposes a theory of genre in which lyric evolves into epic and finally into drama in
the diffusion and dissemination of the lyrical artist into and throughout their artwork (thereby
echoing Joyce’s own idiosyncratic preoccupation with and exultation of drama in his early
twenties). Art, at least interesting art, is not purely involute self-reflection. According to
Stephen’s theory, the moment of aesthesis in dramatic form is accomplished only through the
initiative of the artist’s personality, which withdraws from the artwork but, in so doing,
permeates it entirely. The aesthetic image is fulfilled in the act of representing the world in full
phenomenological precision and clarity, but one that is “purified and reprojected from the
human imagination.” The artist is thus the filter and fulcrum between life and art. Mimetic
fidelity is artistic fulfillment both in the sense of the fulfillment of the artwork and the
fulfillment of the artist. As Stephen has it at the end of the encounter with the birdgirl in
Chapter 4, the goal of the artist is “to recreate life out of life” (P, 172); or, as he is about to
launch into his “Parable of the Plums” in Ulysses, “On now. Dare it. Let there be life” (U,
7.930).29
Lynch’s response to Stephen is telling in that it points to a flaw in this theory: “What do you
mean . . . by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island?
No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this
country” (P, 215). As if to prove his point, immediately after he speaks, “The rain fell faster” (P,
215). This (usual Hibernian) rain signals Joyce’s ironization of Stephen’s lofty goals. The
artist’s personality cannot completely subsume and control the matter of the world that it
digests, purifies, and regurgitates. Stephen’s egoism prevents him from recognizing such
contingency and complexity. He proudly claims as an ambition at the novel’s close “to forge in
the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (P, 253). This agenda follows
perfectly from his aesthetic theory in that it proposes to subsume an entire nation to the artist,
as if there could be no life in Ireland without Stephen’s daedalian dispensation (this scene will
be discussed from a different perspective in chapter 4).
Stephen’s formulation of his aesthetic theory can be read as a descriptive summary of the
mechanics of free indirect discourse in A Portrait. In free indirect discourse, the personality of
the artist is both abstract and pervasive. For example, in the opening scene of A Portrait,
discussed earlier, while the style is suitably childlike, and is thus inflected by young Stephen’s
temperament, it is also informed by the personality of the absent artist, the author who signs
himself “James Joyce.” The artist is refracted into the world he himself reflects in his artwork.
In the opening passage, Joyce is not so much representing the mental state of young Stephen
(or even, considering the autobiographical evidence, himself), rather he is presenting his own
artistic sensibility “through a glass darkly.” This also allows for a distinction between Stephen
and Joyce in that Stephen is not the artist whose portrait is here presented. Free indirect
discourse expresses the brisure between the artist and the young man. Stanislaus Joyce’s
comment on the matter is perhaps the most accurate: while acknowledging the
autobiographical elements in A Portrait—many of which he was witness to—he states that “A
Portrait of the Artist is not an autobiography; it is an artistic creation.”30 The corollary to this
would be that A Portrait is autobiographical only in the sense of writing a life, even if it is not a
life that is fully consistent with documentary evidence (the “characters of beard and inches”
Joyce decried in his 1904 “A Portrait” essay).
In his reading of Ecce Homo, Derrida describes it as being, in part, an “allobiography” in
that the life being recounted is not isomorphic with the individual who lived that life. Nietzsche
himself was emphatic on this point: “I am one thing, my writings are another matter” (EH,
259). Just as the “doer” is a fiction added to the deed, the textualization of life is not equal to
life; it is the fiction added to life (that is, a synecdochic dwarf). The allobiography thus affirms
two entities who sign themselves “Friedrich Nietzsche,” the one who writes and the one who is
written: the affirmation is thus both nominative and accusative.31 Likewise, A Portrait affirms
both the artist and the young man, separately.
Stephen’s theory is crucial for understanding the evolution of Joyce’s aesthetics. Stephen’s
theory is ultimately one of egoism in that concomitant with the artist’s withdrawal from the
artwork, the artist remains as the focal prism mediating between life and art, turning the one
into the other (and vice versa). Although, perhaps, it would be more accurate to describe his
theory as being ego-focal rather than as egoistic. In being an artist as such, he creates not just
the work of art but also creates himself as an independent, self-standing, self-sufficient (that is,
auto-genetic) artist. He is his auctor, hear him roar. Stephen wrests egoism from becoming.
This is not unlike William Barry’s characterization of Nietzsche (as discussed in the previous
chapter) where “perfection [is] to be achieved by himself, first as freedom of intellect, then as
an untrammelled self-directing life.”32 The consequence for this is that all art is necessarily
autobiographical in a rather tautological manner: the artist creates the artwork that is infused
with him, and this in turn is what creates the artist as artist. This theory clearly follows from
the earlier essay “A Portrait of the Artist” where he describes his “ineradicable egoism” (P,
259; PSW, 212). And, as will be discussed in the final chapter, in Finnegans Wake Joyce
satirizes this notion of the self-involved and self-creating artist with Shaun’s description of
Shem writing about himself on his body with an ink made from his excrement (FW, 185.14–26).
The artist is father to both the work of art and to himself, or, as Mulligan mockingly puts it in
“Scylla”: “Himself his own father” (U, 9.875). This has some consequences that are developed
within Ulysses and this will be addressed in the following chapter.
In his important essay “Against Ulysses,” Leo Bersani precisely identifies this egoistic
comportment of the Joycean aesthetic: “Joyce miraculously reconciles uncompromising
mimesis with a solipsistic structure.”33 This perhaps aptly describes what we find in A Portrait,
since, according to Stephen’s aesthetic theory, mimetic clarity is directly linked with the
artist’s intervention as the mediating agency between life and art. While Bersani’s point may
well be apposite to Ulysses, it misses some nuance. Furthermore, Bersani’s critique of Ulysses
is actually quite consonant with Hélène Cixous’s more positive reading in The Exile of James
Joyce, where she posits Joyce as a self-creating artist who substitutes himself for God, the
ultimate father, as the creative agency.34 The artist is thus an artist by being an egoist. Jean-
Michel Rabaté expands upon this point in his book James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism,
where he argues that Joycean egoism does not retreat into solipsism because it blends with
language, in such a way as to make Joyce “the Lacanian symptom of literature.”35
Using a Heideggerian vocabulary, the selfing of the artistic self is coordinate with the
thinging of the thing: the artist is auto-genetic insofar as he creates and recreates life from
life. Stephen’s is thus an aesthetics that links ontology with epistemology: the world is fulfilled
in the artist’s exacting representation of it. We can see this in Joyce’s famous, if not exactly
correct, boast to Frank Budgen that Dublin could be recreated from the pages of Ulysses.36
The world is revealed in its representation by the daedalian artist, or, even a Zarathustrian
artist. Despite his protestations against priests,37 Zarathustra, like Stephen, aspires to be a
“priest of the eternal imagination” (P, 221): “A seer, a willer, a creator, a future himself and a
bridge to the future—and alas, also, as it were, a cripple at this bridge: all this is Zarathustra”
(Z, 251). Zarathustra conjoins perception, willing, and creating in himself. In contrast to
Mulligan’s glib and mocking conscious invocation of Zarathustra, Stephen’s is more subtle
(without necessarily being deliberate). Like Zarathustra, Stephen engages in a hubristic
empowerment of the creative will at the cost of everything else in order to achieve a godlike
self-sufficiency and auto-genesis.
In A Portrait, Stephen empowers the artist as a focal point of creation. But, Stephen’s project
of creative auto-genesis is by definition fallible, unlike the Christian God or the Catholic Pope.
This horizon of fallibility is what might leaven Bersani’s charge against Joyce of solipsism and
the charge against Stephen of “ineradicable egoism.” Indeed, it is essential that Stephen’s
theory admits the possibility of failure. With the epiphany of the birdgirl comes the realization
of the call “to live, to err, to fall, to triumph” (P, 172; emphasis added) and this extends from
his earlier decision to reject the call to the priesthood:
 His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders . . . He was destined to learn his own wisdom
apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.
The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall
silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it
would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet falling, still unfallen but about to fall (P,
162).

Self-determination can always fail and without this possibility of failure, self-determination can
never really be authentic. This leads to Stephen’s famous claim to “fly by those nets” of
“nationality, language, religion” (P, 203, emphasis added). On the one hand, this implies that
Stephen is striving to be an artist independent from any external mode of determination. But,
on the other hand, it means more than just an attempt to bypass those strictures, since these
are as safety-nets, things that would catch him were he to fall. In effect, he rejects the
priesthood because it was too safe.
Because it includes the possibility of failure, Stephen’s project of artistic self-determination
has some affinities with what Nietzsche calls the experiment in The Gay Science. Effectively,
the question of ethics in Nietzsche revolves around the alignment between auto-genesis and
hypostasis (in Greek, hupostasis means foundation).38 In The Gay Science, the key element in
Nietzsche’s infamous proclamation is not that “God is dead,” but rather it is that “we still have
to vanquish his shadow” (GS, §108). God, for example, is but one of many possible iterations of
hypostasis; that is, a foundational principle of organizing the world into the appearance of a
stable coherence. Inverting Milton’s formula from Paradise Lost (reprised by Alexander Pope
for “An Essay on Man”), God was invented to justify the ways of man to man. In Stephen’s
parlance, hypostasis would be a net in that it serves as a background principle of order that
provides for the possibility of stable meaning. For Nietzsche, God is thus the archetypal net,
but hardly the only one. After the death of God, hypostasis endures in new and different
formulations. As Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science in the section that immediately follows
his grand proclamation of the death of God: “The total character of the world, however, is in all
eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement,
form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names are there for our aesthetic
anthropomorphisms” (GS, §109). The philosopheme “God” is a projection of our image onto the
world as a means of explaining it, an aesthetic anthropomorphism, as Nietzsche has it, that is
used to provide laws for our apparent understanding. As he puts it in The Will to Power, “the
world is fabricated solely from psychological needs” (WP, §12). The concept of God is a way to
justify understanding the world in human terms by delegating what eludes understanding to a
numinous black hole. But the world is not human, it is not like us even though we are a part of
it. And, for Nietzsche, even the category of the “human” is itself an error (GS, §115). So,
according to Nietzsche, the act of hypostatic deification is a root error in human thought.
At an early age, Stephen has an intimation of the fragility of the hypostasis of God when he
contemplates the linguistic relativity of God’s name:

God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s
name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French
person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages
in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still
God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God (P, 16).

In Stephen’s contemplation of the post-Babelian predicament, one can see the potential for
something like Finnegans Wake in which the deployment of multiple languages destabilizes the
possibility of unequivocal reference and meaning. Stephen is here somewhat unsettled by how
the nominative effect can be undermined by the existence of multiple languages although,
ultimately, he fixes such slippage with the belief that “God’s real name was God.” But it is still
just a name, a nominal effect enmeshed within not just a single language, but a plurality of
languages.39 In this way, Stephen’s faith in a stable, grounding hypostasis has received its first
knock.
The Nietzschean transvaluation of value entails the rejection of hypostasis in any of its
forms, God or man or whatever, to fly by all those nets. Stephen’s haughty proclamation “I will
not serve” (P, 239)—which is an echo of Satan’s “non serviam” from Father Arnell’s hellfire
sermon (P, 117)—is thus a possible first step toward something like Nietzsche’s experiment.
With the death of God, an infinite number of interpretive states becomes possible; for example,
science would be one, nihilism another, as well as many other possibilities. Nietzsche proposes
what he calls the experiment as a potential response to this multiplicity of choice, a solution
that respects the crisis. There is something eminently practical about the experiment: at its
most basic it is Nietzsche’s suggestion as to how to live with uncertainty.
According to Nietzsche, with the experiment, one creates one’s own provisional and
pragmatic (as opposed to absolute and doctrinaire) hypostasis, one create one’s own
hypostasis out of oneself. In this way, as Alexander Nehamas puts it, “Our creations eventually
become our truths, and our truths circumscribe our creations,”40 much like Blake’s version (or
vision) of Milton creating the God who, in turn, creates Milton. In Stephen’s case, he creates
himself as an artist out of the mimetic precision requisite to his artistic creations and so in his
aesthetic it is not God that lies in the details, but rather that which has replaced God.
 Stephen’s “non serviam” alludes to Milton’s Satan, but, turning to Milton, the difference
between Satan and Mammon is instructive in terms of what Nietzsche means with the
experiment. Mammon’s proposed project of self-determination acknowledges the inevitable
provisionality of creating a self in a pre-given world. Ultimately, Mammon proposes that
through work “Our torments also may in length of time / Become our Elements.”41 That is,
through work hell can be redefined, or, to use a Nietzschean term, transvalued. Satan
proposes something else entirely: he wants to become absolutely auto-genetic, but God is
literally in his way. The important distinction between Satan and Mammon is that, as Nietzsche
would have it, Satan wants to kill God but only so that he could take his place and become
God, or a godlike hypostasis himself. Satan’s project of selfhood is a purely auto-genetic one:
out of ressentiment he wants to become the measure of all things and substitute himself for
God. In brief, in The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche defines ressentiment as a reinterpretation
of value that is motivated by resentment and jealousy (GM, I§7). The important point here is
that ressentiment is also an expression of the will to power, the will to power as hypostasis.
Nietzsche claims that will needs a direction, something to will, even if that willing is against
itself. Ressentiment is the will to power against itself, against sovereignty as such, “life against
life” (GM, III§13) or, “nature against something that is also nature” (WP §228). Ressentiment is
perhaps an inevitable corollary to auto-genesis, as will be discussed in the next chapter.
Mammon’s project of self-creation, on the other hand, is not one of pure auto-genesis: he
understands that freedom is delimited and contingent but can be increased through work and
activity. Rather than be motivated by ressentiment, Mammon proposes to work with what is
available to make a better life through a project of self-redefinition.42 This is a dynamic
process, not something that has an endpoint, but rather something that continually evolves.
Nietzsche is explicit about this continual evolution in a notebook entry from the autumn of
1887 that was collected into The Will to Power:

“Truth” is . . . not something there, that might be found or discovered—but something that must be
created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end—
introducing truth as a processus ad infinitum, an active determining—not a becoming conscious of
something that is in itself firm and determined (WP, §552; cf. WLN, 155).

Elsewhere in The Will to Power, he states, “Truth is the kind of error without which a certain
species could not survive” (WP, §493). The way to reconcile these two propositions is simple: if
truth is anything but a process, such as a static state, it is an error. So, one continually creates
oneself by refashioning oneself and this is who one is; or, more precisely, this is who one
should be: a self that is always in the process of self-fashioning, a being that is always engaged
in the work (energeia) of becoming, of becoming oneself. As will be discussed in chapter 5,
such perpetual self-fashioning is not always easy. Nietzsche’s affirmative side is thus an ethics
of self-creation in a manner that is surprisingly consonant with Stephen’s aesthetics: one
creates oneself out of one’s provisional and contingent interpretations.

We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who
give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and
discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order
to be able to be creators in this sense—while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on
ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even
more so that which compels us to turn to physics—our honesty! (GS, §335)

The parallels between Nietzsche’s experiment and Stephen’s aesthetic project are fairly clear.
The self becomes as it is, it creates itself, by understanding the world in all its variety and
unencumbered by preconception. This all sounds well and good, but how can this be done?
What does this entail? Nietzsche elaborates this elsewhere in The Gay Science:

One thing is needful.—To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those
who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until
every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye . . . In the end, when
the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed
everything large and small (GS, §290).

To be auto-genetic is to have a style (or two) of one’s own. Nietzsche’s experiment exemplifies
a virtue ethics in that it proposes the self-discovery, through practice and trial and error, of
one’s own ethikos. In effect, the experiment is a little like applying a Kuhnian paradigm of the
sciences to oneself: “We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs” (GS, §319).
One observes oneself, but without reference to some external hypostasis such as God, in order
to try to uncover one’s strengths and weaknesses so that one might reconfigure them into a
single, cogent plan, that is, one’s self: one makes oneself into something like a work of art, that
is something figured under a cogent plan, a single taste or unified style as it were. This
process works by trial and error. Nietzsche is explicit about this in Ecce Homo: “To become
what one is, one must not have the faintest notion of what one is. From this point of view even
the blunders of life have their own meaning and value” (EH, 254). Self-creation requires trial
and error: failure has to be a part of the experiment. Stephen’s decision to reject the
priesthood in order to pursue the call “to live, to err, to fall, to triumph” (P, 172) is thus his
individual version of the experiment, a life enriched by blunders. As he states in “Scylla,” in a
nontrivial passage that I will discuss in the next chapter, “errors are volitional and are the
portals of discovery” (U, 9.229).
In the experiment one does not escape all constraints, rather one makes one’s own
constraints through which one lives; this is why Milton’s Mammon is a good example of
Nietzsche’s experiment. This is not a hypostasis as such, but rather the functional equivalent
of a hypostasis, it provides the meaning-giving utility of a hypostasis without the insinuation
that this particular hypostasis is a universal truth. The truth for one individual is not the same
as the truth for someone else. Do not hypostasize your ethos would be the Nietzschean credo;
and that is what would be beyond good and evil. As he put it in Beyond Good and Evil:
moralities must “finally reach agreement that it is immoral to say: ‘What is right for one is fair
for the other’” (BGE, §221). Another way of putting it would be: make your life challenging.

I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” but I no longer wish to hear anything of all
those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my “truthfulness”; for
there courage has lost its right (GS, §51).

The important part of this passage is not necessarily Nietzsche’s insistence upon his
pragmatism, but rather the comment that his pragmatism is not infinite. His pragmatism is
limited and biased and partial. The experiment is always provisional and thus can never
overcome bias. The experiment gives meaning without recourse to faith in some hypostasis
precisely because it demands continual reinterpretation and reevaluation. In this way, the
experiment fulfills Nietzsche’s claim in The Birth of Tragedy: “for it is only as an aesthetic
phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (BT, §5). Nietzsche’s claim
here is echoed by Pater in his essay on Wordsworth: “To treat life in the spirit of art, is to make
life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true
moral significance of art and poetry.”43 Free indirect discourse redounds onto life and not just
the writing of that life, but the good life, the agathos bios. The ambiguity of the world and the
torments of existence are palliated by interpreting the world and one’s position in it as a work
of art (and therefore requires some degree of falsification). Since interpretation is for
Nietzsche necessarily a creative act, the experiment is an exercise in creating and continually
recreating oneself and, concomitantly, one’s world. As Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science,
“we want to be the poets of our life” (GS, §299).
Elsewhere in The Gay Science, Nietzsche elaborates “ultimate skepsis”: “What are man’s
truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors” (GS, §265). What is true for one individual is
still in many other ways a mistake. The way to realize the provisionality of any individual truth
claim is through human interaction and engagement with the world, that is, through an
acceptance of contradiction:

Everybody knows nowadays that the ability to accept criticism and contradiction is a sign of high
culture. Some people actually realize that higher human beings desire and provoke contradiction in
order to receive some hint about their own injustices of which they are as yet unaware. But the ability to
contradict, the attainment of a good conscience when one feels hostile to what is accustomed,
traditional, and hallowed—that is still more excellent and constitutes what is really great, new, and
amazing in our culture; this is the step of steps of the liberated spirit: Who knows that? (GS, §297)

The experiment requires input from other people; it is not something one does all alone on,
say, the top of a mountain in Tibet or County Wicklow—Zarathustra did spend ten years alone
on a mountain, before announcing that he needs company (Z, 121–22), even if his first foray
into the marketplace proved to be less than a resounding success. The experiment is an ethics
of self-awareness that requires the perceptions of others and the ability to recognize those
perceptions and, in so doing the weaknesses and contingencies of one’s one perceptions.
Nietzsche already alluded to this in the conclusion to “On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life”: “There is a parable for each one of us: he must organise the chaos within him
by thinking back to his real needs” (UM, 123). Glossing this passage Peter Berkowitz writes,
“Thus [Nietzsche] firmly grounds self-creation (organizing the chaos within) in self-knowledge
(grasping one’s real needs).”44 The experiment provides a mechanism to “think back to one’s
real needs,” a way of creating oneself out of a clear and unbiased self-knowledge, a self-
knowledge that is not limited to just the self. In this way, the egoism of the experiment points
toward empathy. To give oneself style is to recognize that style is already plural. This further
implies that for Nietzsche epistemology has an ethical dimension in that knowledge, even self-
knowledge, is intimately concerned with alterity. One always recalibrates one’s self-
interpretation based on an engagement with the world. As with my Heideggerian phrasing of
Stephen’s project, in Nietzsche’s experiment, the self selves: that is the self is that which is
engaged in the act of making itself a self. Selfwork is artwork.
Nietzsche admits that this action of selving is rather daunting. This is an important point and
it leads to a potential problem with Nietzsche’s ethics, one which has been compounded in
misreadings of his valorization of the egoism of the “noble soul” (BGE, §265). Nehamas
cogently argues that since Nietzsche conceives of the soul as not inseparable from the body in
that doer is an affect of the deed, “noble souls are those that act nobly.”45 Nobility derives
from action, from how one lives one’s life, one’s perpetual and engaged acts of agathos bios.
This is not easy and so the experiment is not for everyone. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
writes: “Independence is for the very few, it is a privilege of the strong” (BGE, §29). The
experiment is for the Hyperborean. Bernard Reginster succinctly draws the conclusion that
Nietzsche is “an ethical elitist: there is only one good life for human beings, and some human
beings are more capable of achieving it than others.”46 As discussed in the previous chapter,
this would be the element within Nietzsche that would appeal to someone like Mr. Duffy, an
exemplary misreader of Nietzsche. The experiment entails making the self autocratic and this
is a problem shared by Stephen’s haughty conception of the godlike artist: he rejects one
hypostasis, God, for another, the artist. By being so self-reflexive and involute, the auto-genetic
artist proposed in A Portrait is stunted. As Hugh Kenner writes, “The ‘priest of the eternal
imagination’ is indigestibly Byronic. Nothing is more obvious than his total lack of humour.”47
Stephen’s lack of humor is a serious limitation, but one which Joyce, fortunately, does not treat
too seriously. In the stylistic and perspectival pluralities of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake such a
limitation might be overcome and Stephen’s acknowledgment of the possibility of failure helps
point the way.
 Chapter 3
AufhebungBaby: Auto-genesis and Alterity inUlysses

At the close of A Portrait, Stephen had left Dublin with the grand, proud plea “Old father, old
artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” (P, 253). When he reappears at the start of
Ulysses, back in Dublin after having returned from Paris, he is somewhat despondent; his old
father has apparently not stood him in good stead. As he thinks in “Scylla and Charybdis,”
“Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage
passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater, ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering.
Lapwing you are. Lapwing be” (U, 9.952–54). If Stephen’s ambition, as articulated in A
Portrait, necessitates the possibility of failure, then at the start of Ulysses he has failed or, at
least, come precipitously close to failure.
Stephen’s theory of aesthetics implied a self-creating or auto-genetic artist. An alternative
narrative could be imagined for A Portrait where it is not just the story of the evolution of
Stephen’s linguistic sensibilities but also the story of the evolution of his political sensibilities;
that is, in the sense of his coming to terms—however incomplete—with a world of other people
and other perspectives. The Christmas dinner scene would be an example of this as Stephen
alternates between being excited by the heated language around him (P, 38) and not
understanding it (P, 37). Indeed, before this scene we are told that “it pained him that he did
not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended” (P, 17).
Stephen’s position in the world—whether from a cosmological perspective or a sociopolitical
one—is at least partially predetermined and thus never completely within his control.
Stephen is thus not solely responsible for his being there, his Da-Sein. Because of this
predetermination, his mental and even physical activity can never be completely auto-genetic.
For example, in “Proteus,” even his gestures are not completely original: at one point he
remarks, “That is Kevin Egan’s movement I made” (U, 3.438–39). Throughout this episode,
Stephen is haunted by alterity, by others.
A more fundamental and inevitable compromise to Stephen’s attempts at auto-genesis comes
from the material fact of his birth. Stephen is ineluctably predetermined as the offspring of his
two parents. However, the fact of his birth (which is still, after all, a fictitious fact), is also not
without complication. Although A Portrait closes with the plea to his “Old father,” Stephen is
not just a paternal offspring, but also a maternal offspring. The main modification to his
temperament in Ulysses involves a strained and sustained consideration of maternity, which is,
of course, haunted by the absence of his mother. Because his mother has died, Stephen can no
longer contemplate the possibility of paternity in isolation. Furthermore, his guilt at not having
prayed for her on her deathbed—his “Agenbite of inwit” (U, 1.481)1—could be construed as the
inevitable result of the impossibility of attaining a purely self-sufficient aesthetic egoism. On
the one hand, Stephen’s theory demands that he be auto-genetic and independent, which is
why he could not pray for her on her deathbed, since he would then be surrendered to the nets
of family and religion. On the other hand, he still cannot ignore the sentiment expressed by
Cranly that a mother’s love is the one true thing in life (P, 241–42). Precisely because Stephen
is not Hyperborean, as Mulligan claims in “Telemachus” (U, 1.92), he feels guilt. He does sing
a song “with awe and pity” (U, 1.251) to his mother on her deathbed, Yeats’s “Who Goes with
Fergus?” (U, 1.249–53; 15.4189–90); thereby showing that he is not completely callous, but,
nonetheless, he still refuses to engage with his dying mother in the affect that matters most to
her. His Agenbite is the double bind of this contradiction between auto-genesis and the surety
of motherly love. Thus, he has one more net to fly by, the net of his own pretentious egoistic
self-determination. In “Wandering Rocks,” Stephen is afforded a chance to redress his
eschewal of familial obligation when he meets his sister Dilly selling old books to help support
their family. “She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me
with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green
death” (U, 10.875–77). And so, again, Stephen makes the same choice, turning away from his
family to avoid being ensnared. His Agenbite indicates that he remains servile to his own
theory of artistic sovereignty.
Stephen’s Agenbite could be characterized in Nietzschean terms as the fault line of his auto-
genetic project hypostasizing itself. He values his own worth above others, above his mother’s.
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche characterizes this as the bad faith of the ascetic ideal:
“the philosopher sees in [the ascetic ideal] the optimum condition for the highest and boldest
spirituality and smiles—he does not deny ‘existence,’ he rather affirms his existence and only
his existence” (GM, III§7). By affirming only his existence, Stephen’s self comes at the cost of
losing the world.
The weight of Stephen’s Agenbite comes to the fore in “Circe” when he confronts an
apparition of the ghost of his mother. At first he professes his innocence by blaming the
material condition of her death in a manner analogous to Mulligan’s glib reversion to clinical
language (U, 1.204–7), even as he criticizes Mulligan for his coarseness: “They say I killed you,
mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny” (U, 15.4186–87). And when
she beseeches him to repent and reminds him of her maternal sacrifices, he yet again repeats
his credo “Non serviam!” (U, 15.4228). And finally by praying for him (U, 15.4232–33), she
further tightens the double bind. To this, Stephen can only respond with the mock-heroic,
pseudo Wagnerian cry “Nothung!” (U, 15.4242) as he smashes the chandelier with his
ashplant. The echo of the English word “nothing” within the name of the sword Nothung,
suggests that perhaps Stephen’s action is not as resonant with meaning as he imagines or
implies. The story of Siegmund, Siegfried, and Nothung also provides an inversion of the story
of Daedalus and Icarus. In Wagner’s opera, it is the son who succeeds where the father has
failed whereas in the Greek myth, it is the son who drowns while the father soars.2 In any
case, Stephen’s act does not really accomplish anything other than some minor property
damage, and it is up to Bloom, a bourgeois gentilhomme, to pick up the pieces. Furthermore,
Stephen’s Agenbite endures beyond this scene and so it cannot be construed as cathartic:
afterward, when he meets the drunken English soldiers on the street and unintentionally
provokes them, he says, “Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn’t
want it to die” (U, 15.4473–74). Here, he conflates Ireland with his dead mother by saying he
“didn’t want it to die.” In attempting to profess his independence from Ireland, his Agenbite
bites again.
The seeds for this conundrum are sown in “Proteus” where Stephen considers the maternal
aspect of creation. In the following passage, the changes Joyce made during the course of
composition are significant. The first extant draft, part of NLI’s holdings, reads:

The soul created even He dare not destroy for the lex eternal that overshadows His will. Is that then the
divine substance wherein the Father and Son are consubstantial? Arius could tell me, mocking his own
answer. Luckless heresiarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last. Dead and dirty. The ways of
the Creator are not our ways.3

The next extant draft4 is somewhat different and is mostly identical to the final text, which
reads:

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and
a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will. From before
the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then
the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try
conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch!
In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled
upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts (U,
3.45–54).

In the earlier draft, the object of God’s creation is impersonal and abstract, the soul; whereas
in the final text it is personal: “He willed me.” Stephen comes to think of the fact of his
creation and not just creation and existence in the abstract. Concomitant with this
personalization of creation, Stephen insists upon the material circumstance of his creation: he
was made not begotten. Specifically, he was made within his mother’s womb, the result of the
union of both his parents. The early draft omits the material and maternal aspect of Stephen’s
birth. This material or carnal causa efficiens is what fundamentally denies him the possibility
of being auto-genetic; his very existence derives from the carnal conjunction of others, “the
man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.” In stressing the
artist’s auto-genesis, Stephen’s aesthetic theory almost completely elides this material aspect
of creation even as it emphasizes the “whatness” of things disclosed through claritas.
Likewise, here he stresses the coupler’s will, the causa finalis, as it were. To be truly auto-
genetic is to deny the carnality and thus causality of the parents.
In this passage from “Proteus,” Stephen does seem to admit the “Amor matris, subjective
and objective genesis” (U, 9.842–43) back into creation as part of his causa efficiens. However,
the mother he admits of is already dead, “a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.” And,
presumably, she was not already dead when Stephen found himself born. He is haunted by the
spectrality of his maternal causa efficiens, the material pre-givenness of creation.
Derrida’s third essay on Joyce, “The Night Watch,” addresses these issues of maternal
creation. This was written in 2001 as the preface to the reedition of the book James Joyce ou
l’écriture matricide by the psychoanalyst Jacques Trilling. Trilling writes of “the ineluctability
of birth, of the marked hour, always already inscribed,”5 an event that Trilling calls
“uncircumventable” (indescellable).6 Maternity is the always already par excellence; that is,
the mother of the always already. In Derrida’s reading of Trilling, this irreducibility of birth
motivates writing: it both possibilizes and impossibilizes writing. Writing is the attempt to
create oneself, to sign oneself, to give oneself one’s birthday, to supplement the maternal
causa efficiens with an ontology of one’s own. Writing, insofar as it projects a possibility of
auto-genesis, is matricidal, a tendency that clearly characterizes Stephen’s aesthetic theory.
But, precisely because the self can never fully be auto-genetic, a tension or ressentiment
emerges, which is what Trilling and Derrida term “matricide,” a desire for a pure,
unencumbered auto-genesis, a different birth that does not come “from the other.”7 In both
Trilling and Derrida’s analysis, writing emerges from this matricidal desire for auto-genesis.
The writer—the auctor—consequently and concomitantly could be seen as someone acting
against their birth, contradicting it, attempting to circumvent the uncircumventable by
imposing its auto-genesis over its ineluctable allogenesis.8 Insofar as birth is understood as
stable, as a being or an origin, then to write is to project a wish to never have been born and
thus paradoxically to have no origin, that is, to always have been. This desire is, of course,
impossible to achieve precisely because of the ineluctability of birth. To be is to resent the
uncircumventability of allogenesis and to write is thus to be haunted by birth. The limit point
of egoism is matricide precisely because maternity indicates the impossibility of auto-genesis.
As Stephen thinks in “Telemachus” in a line that encapsulates the egoism that animates
matricide in a melodramatically adolescent manner: “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! / No, mother!
Let me be and let me live” (U, 1.278–79). Stephen cannot be with his mother and with the
specter of his mother, the specter of maternity. But any act of writing is always countersigned
by the irreducibility of the fact of having been born: writing is always countersigned by the
maternal alterity it can never expunge.

One can already imagine the stakes of this tri—and its remainder, which will endlessly reanimate, which
will always make rise up, as its leaven, as its ferment, the ineluctability or fatality of matricide: it is
indeed possible to kill the mother, to replace her, to substitute one “womb” for another. This is more
possible today than ever, though the possibility is ageless. But what is impossible to expunge is birth,
dependency upon an originary date, upon an “act” of birth before any birth act or certificate. One can of
course curse this act of birth, this act without act, this act before the act, this act before the first act.
But the curse remains powerless, from Job (“Why did you bring me forth from the womb?” Job 10.18) to
Shakespeare—so important for Joyce and for Trilling, and right here in this text—to Baudelaire and so
many others. There is a curse because in cursing one does no more than confess that some evil or some
accursed thing has taken place, without any possibility of remission. In confessing, the curse confirms,
repeats, reproduces, and makes endure that which it would like to repress. There is no sense in wanting
to expunge this evil [mal] insofar as it remains the very condition for such a wanting. The wanting
inscribes denegation within it: I do not want, I cannot want what I say I want: not to be born—or to die.
Like suicide, matricide (the curse of being born) bears within it this contradiction. But far from
paralyzing matricide, the contradiction motivates it. Compulsively, interminably—and writing comes to
be inscribed in this repetition. It signs it and countersigns it. What appears impossible through this
curse or malediction, but also through every blessing or benediction, through every -diction, is to
expunge, contest, or even confirm the contingency of my being-born, which always presupposes some
denegation of being-born, and the simple thought of my virtual “not being born.” Yet this impossible
remains the only possibility I have of gaining access to the experience of existence, to the “I am,” as
well as to time, to the temporality of time inasmuch as it is always and first of all my time, my “living
present.” This access to the experience of the “I exist” is of varying intensity, no doubt, but the intensity
is to be measured against that of an “I might have not been born”—which is presupposed by every “I
should not have been born”—and against the correlative “I could die,” which is presupposed by every “I
should die.”9

This concept is hardly original to Trilling or Derrida; in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche
writes, “The free spirit will always breathe a sigh of relief when he has finally resolved to
shake off that motherly watching and warding with which women govern him” (HATH, §429).10
The implications of matricidal writing for Nietzsche will be further elaborated in chapter 5.
Julia Kristeva writes of an analogous concept when she describes male abjection in Powers of
Horror.11 Likewise, Heidegger proposes something analogous with the claim that “Dasein as
such is guilty” because its Being is inherently owed to that which is Other.12 Beckett phrases
the conundrum of the matricidal contradiction somewhat more succinctly than Derrida in “A
Piece of Monologue”: “Birth was the death of him. Again.”13 And Stephen puts this even more
succinctly in “Proteus” with his neologism “moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb” (U, 3.402). This
particular neologism took some time for Joyce to formulate: on a margin of the second-extant
draft of “Proteus,” he compiled a list of various experimental alternatives, before settling on
the formulation “moombh.”14 This was shortened to “moomb” on the Rosenbach manuscript.15
However, this word was set as “womb” on the first set of placards, presumably by one of the
printers who thought this was a mistake (UCSE, 1731), thereby eliminating the result of
Joyce’s work gestating the mot juste. In any case, this neologism inscribes an equivalence
between womb, moon, and tomb, suggesting some fungibility between the three. This
expresses Derrida’s point that to write is thus to assert an identity that supplements the
uncircumventable, to make oneself a neologism, not unlike “moomb,” or as Derrida says, to
substitute one womb for another. Of course, as with the errant typesetters for the first edition
of Ulysses, different orders of allogenesis can always efface one’s neologisms. Writing is
conditioned by and through alterity and not just at its birth but during its life.
An analogous error in the textual history of Ulysses comes in the telegram that Stephen’s
father had sent to him in Paris: “Nother dying come home father” (U, 3.199). This enigmatic
formulation sent in the name of the father calls Stephen back to Dublin to attend the death of
“nother.” The dying mother is thus redacted and retracted in the message from the father,
presumably through a less-than-efficient communication network. This error in transmission
was itself incorrectly transmitted, since a typist misconstrued Joyce’s writing and entered in
“Mother” instead—a reading that persisted until Gabler’s edition (UCSE, 84)—thereby
instantiating the “Mother” as a retraction (or negation) of the “other” retraction.
 With Derrida’s argument in mind, we can now turn to Stephen’s thoughts of the man with his
voice and the ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. Immediately before this moment,
Stephen had espied two women coming down the steps for Leahy’s Terrace. He imagines them
to be midwifes, with one carrying a misbirth in her bag. In a sense then, these putative
midwifes give birth to Stephen’s conception of the materiality of his conception of his birth:
“Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten” (U, 3.45). Even if he underestimates
the significance of the substantiality of birth, he does not, cannot, deny it completely. Thus
made, he cannot be unmade: “From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me
away or ever. A lex eterna stays about Him” (U, 3.47–49). Stephen here turns one strain of
Catholic orthodoxy against another. According to Catholic theology, the human soul is
necessarily eternal and cannot be annihilated by man or by God. As Aquinas succinctly puts it:
“We must assert that the intellectual principle which we call the human soul is incorruptible.
For a thing may be corrupted in two ways—in itself and accidentally.”16 The problem, then, is
whether an omnipotent God can destroy what He has made. Aquinas manages to finesse this
problem with the lex eterna: it is not that God cannot will a soul away, but rather, not unlike
Melville’s Bartleby, He would prefer not to, since He is His law. Aquinas writes: “all that is
attributed to the divine essence or nature does not fall under [Eternal Law], but in reality is
itself the Eternal Law.”17 Birth and the eternity of the soul are uncircumventable for even the
Catholic God.
Just as Stephen is haunted in Ulysses by his mother, his aesthetic theory is haunted by
maternity in that it requires the artist to commit a godlike matricide. As Mulligan puts it
during the apparition of the ghost of Stephen’s mother in “Circe”: “Kinch dogsbody killed her
bitchbody” (U, 15.4178–79). However, few (if any) people are actually God and so matricide
remains impossible and a limit case of writing. The issue with matricide as Derrida argues is
that one might be able to kill the mother, but maternity as such will always live on. He writes:

What indeed would a mother be, how would one speak of her, how would one address her, without the
presupposition of a maternity of the mother? And what would a maternity of the mother be, an essence
of the mother as such, without a mother, without the singular, absolutely unique existence of a mother?
If matricide is at once one and double, and thus forever frustrated, and thus always renewed, repeated,
hounded (the lure of this dogged pursuit being sometimes the mother, sometimes maternity), it has to
do with the fact that there is both the mother and maternity. As soon as one believes one has killed the
mother, maternity remains—to be killed. Isn’t writing a killer? Inversely, it is because maternity and the
mother are one (maternity is the maternity of the mother, its essence and its “as such”) that the
matricidal pursuit remains the same and without end. Between the mother and maternity the
ontological difference is not; it is not a difference between two (beings). This must be said, as we all
know, about any ontological difference. There is thus no possible tri, no real sorting out, between the
mother and maternity. And yet this sorting out is necessary, for maternity will never be reducible to the
mother and this ontological difference opens up the possibility of a tri or a sorting out in general. That
is, in just a couple of words, the raison d’être of interminable matricide: an ontological difference
between the mother and maternity, almost nothing, nothing that is.18

Seen in this light, Stephen’s patrilineal theory of artistic creation, as elaborated in “Scylla”
(which will be discussed shortly), would seem to be, at least in part, a further symptom of his
guilt. However, following from the logic of Derrida’s argument, the inverse of this proposition
would also hold: Stephen’s guilt would be a symptom of his theory, or, at the very least, they
are coeval. Stephen’s theory posits artistic creation as usurping maternal creation thereby
denying—killing—maternity. But nonetheless, the theory—and likewise Stephen—remains
haunted by maternity.
Stephen is thus trying to supplement an uncircumventable maternity with his own proper
creativity, his faculties of creativity. This leads to the problem that Derrida addresses of the
near-zero ontological difference between mother and maternity. The claim that paternity is a
legal fiction assumes that maternity is not a fiction, that it is certain, determinate, and
definitive. However, Derrida seems to suggest that maternity is also a fiction, albeit of a
different order. In Archive Fever, he writes:

[Freud] makes a mistake in affirming that there can be no doubt about the identity of the mother,
insofar as it depends on the witness of the senses, while the identity of the father always remains
doubtful since it depends, and it alone, on a rational inference, as that “legal fiction” of which Stephen
speaks in Joyce’s Ulysses. However, better than ever today, if only with the possibility of surrogate
mothers, prosthetic maternities, sperm banks, and all the artificial inseminations, as they are secured
for us already and will be secured still more for us in the future by bio-genetic techno-science, we know
that maternity is as inferred, constructed, and interpreted as paternity. And as paternal law. In truth, it
has always been thus, for the one and for the other.19

The figure of the mother is a contingent, material instantiation or, as Stephen has it in “Oxen,”
the “subsubstantiality” of maternity (U, 14.308). As Michael Naas puts it, “The mother is thus
not outside all fiction and speculation, all calculation and substitution.”20 Indeed, as Naas
demonstrates, May Dedalus is hardly the only mother in Ulysses. The book is filled with
mothers, from Swinburne’s “great sweet mother,” “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening
sea” (U, 1.77–78)—and thus a mother that would somewhat impede procreation, to “old
mother Grogan” (U, 1.357), to the milkwoman with her “Old shrunken paps” (U, 1.398)—a
paternal term used to designate that she is long past her maternal prime, to Cyril Sargent’s
doting mother (U, 2.140), to all the mothers Mulligan sees “pop off every day in the Mater and
Richmond” (U, 1.205–6), to Josie Breen, whom Bloom wonders is pregnant (U, 8.212), to Mina
Purefoy, and, of course, to Molly mother of Milly and Rudy. In short, even with the relative
absence of the BVM, maternity is overdetermined in Ulysses.
This surfeit of mothers and maternity in Ulysses suggests how Joyce and perhaps even
Stephen might resolve the double bind of matricidal writing. In Nietzschean terms, matricide—
in seeking to circumvent the uncircumventable—would be exemplary of ressentiment, the will
to power against itself, or “life against life” (GM, III§13). As Nietzsche argues in The Gay
Science and elsewhere, because auto-genesis is impossible, ressentiment is inevitable: “While
every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the
outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself’; and this No is its
creative deed” (GM, I§10). Like Stephen, ressentiment says, “No, mother! Let me be and let
me live” (U, 1.279). Stephen’s Agenbite is a second-order ressentiment: the ressentiment that
results from the inevitable impossibility of matricide, which is itself the ressentiment of having
been born.
In the notes collected as The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that “The will to power
interprets” (WP, §642). This is its most basic manifestation, whether it is an interpretation that
construes the world as a sphere of utility and thus morality, as it would be with the various
forms of ressentiment such as asceticism, or it is something more, to use Nietzsche’s
expression, cheerful (fröhliche).21 And so, Nietzsche proposes interpretation, itself a will to
power, as the means of investigating the aberrant forms of the manifestations or signs of the
will to power that have been occasioned by centuries of ressentiment. Specifically, he proposes
genealogy as the antidote, however provisional, to ressentiment. Alexander Nehamas
describes genealogy as “Nietzsche’s alternative to ontology,” in that it proceeds inductively
from the contingent and not deductively from the general.22 The identity of each event is to be
found in an account of its interrelationships to other phenomena. But there can be no one
single genealogical account that perfectly explains any one single phenomenon. Therefore,
there needs to be multiple genealogies, or multiple genealogical perspectives, with each being
provisional, having no pretense of being anything more (GM, III§12). The way out of the
matricidal trap is to allow for multiple genealogies thereby leavening the pull of any one single
filial dependency.
Nietzsche calls this act of provisional, perspectival reading an art (GM, P§8). The way out of
the problem of ressentiment, at least for Nietzsche, involves subjectivity and contingency
rather than a pretense to objectivity and phenomenology. He writes:

Art—to say it in advance, for I shall some day return to this subject at greater length—art, in which
precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience, is much more
fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: this was instinctively sensed by Plato, the
greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced. Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine
antagonism—there the sincerest advocate of the “beyond,” the great slanderer of life; here the
instinctive deifier, the golden nature. To place himself in the service of the ascetic ideal is therefore the
most distinctive corruption of an artist that is at all possible; unhappily, also one of the most common
forms of corruption, for nothing is more easily corrupted than an artist (GM, III§25).

Nietzsche invokes Plato and his argument that art is a pernicious diversion from the truth
embodied by philosophy. In Nietzsche’s reinterpretation, art’s diversion away from the
pretense toward an ideal is exactly its advantage. Art is the lie that does not pretend to be
otherwise, at least as long as it does not pretend to be a moral teacher. Kelly Oliver offers a
concise formulation of this: “The artist or genealogist is a faker who laughs at himself.”23 Art
is what Nietzsche calls later “the comedian of the ideal” (GM, III§27). To be a comedian of the
ideal is to abandon the very idea of trying to determine in general or absolute terms the value
of life and the world. It is to turn to oneself in order to make one’s own life valuable without
claiming that one’s particular method of accomplishing this should or even could be followed
by others. This, of course, allies with the experiment.
In “Proteus,” Stephen is being something of a genealogist of the phenomena and
epiphenomena both within and without by tracing connections amongst the contingent
furniture of the world around him. An example would be his metaphoric equation of language
and the shifting beach-sand, which is inspired by the recollection of Louis Veuillot’s derisive
description of Théophile Gautier’s unwieldy prose as “un coche ensablé.” The first version, on
the NLI draft, reads: “Heavy on this sand is all language which tide and wind have silted up.”24
On the Buffalo draft this is changed somewhat: “The heavy sands are language that tide and
wind have silted here.”25 On the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce elided the preposition “that,”
which improves the overall flow of the sentence at the expense of some syntactic clarity.26 The
basic sense is essentially the same in both versions: Stephen equates the shifting sands with
language in that both are continually changing and evolving through external forces. Sands
shift by the motion of wind and tide and language changes through evolving patterns of usage.
Stephen’s line reflects the science of this episode as indicated on the Linati schema, philology,
the study of the Protean nature of language.
Although the two versions have a congruous general sense, the specific articulation on each
draft is subtly, but tellingly, different. In the first version, language is heavy on the sand; as it
were, a metaphorical duvet. In distinction, in the second version, language is explicitly equated
with the shifting sands: “The heavy sands are language.” Furthermore, the sense of the word
“silted” is not necessarily identical between these two versions. In the first, it works in the
sense of accumulating and being deposited by the wind and tide. In the second version, it
works in the more figurative sense of flowing and passing away. One could say then that the
sense of the word “silted” has itself silted between these two versions; one sense flows in as
another dissipates across the palimpsest of drafts. The change in syntax activates a different
level of connotation. Furthermore, the metaphorical equation of sand and language has also
silted in that language becomes, between the two drafts, identical with sand rather than with
its blanket. Stephen’s description of silting language is thus an apt metaphor for the linguistic
changes made between the drafts of a work in progress.
Such a textual genealogy is not unlike Stephen’s Protean phenomenology. Each new draft
supplements the one before and between drafts, a new text comes that silts up and over the
language of the preceding, receding draft. Likewise, Stephen absorbs, remakes and remodels
himself by remaking and remodeling the past. Stephen is making himself into an artist who is a
genealogist of himself. He continues his meditation on the sandy strand by contemplating past
incursions to Ireland:

Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a
molten pewter surf. Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the
collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows.
Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives,
running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is
in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the
spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me (U, 3.300–9).

In addition to the Viking invasion that Stephen alludes to, he thinks of a more welcome
incursion by whales. The Thom’s Dublin Annals entry for the year 1331 writes of “a great
famine relieved by a prodigious shoal of fish, called Turlehydes, being cast on shore at the
mouth of the Dodder. They were from 30 to 40 feet long, and so thick that men standing on
each side of one of them, could not see those on the other. Upwards of 200 of them were killed
by the people.”27 This event occurred just where Stephen stands, as the Dodder’s mouth is
very near the South Wall. All these events, and others, have silted their trace upon the sands
and upon Stephen who explicitly identifies himself here with the famished burghers of
Mediaeval Dublin. And he does this by being a changeling; obviously an apposite enough
reference in this Protean episode. But the mythical resonance also fits: Stephen construes
himself as the supplement to May Dedalus’s eldest son. Stephen changes his matronym. The
artist is not his own father, not just his own father, but rather, his own mother. On Sandymount
Strand, Stephen constructs a genealogy of himself, fashioning himself through his partial,
delimited perspectives of the world around him, “seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide,
that rusty boot” (U, 3.02–3). In this way, and others, Stephen supplements matricide with
ventriloquy, that is, a speaking from the belly, from the womb. Derrida writes of this
connection between ventriloquy and genealogy:

Not its source, for it has no source, and for good reason, but its endless race. A race without end
because without origin. Birth, being born (not the being born nothing or from nothing, but always the
being born from . . . or in two’s, me and before me the other me): this is neither the beginning nor the
origin nor even, save the phantasm, a point of departure. A dependency, no doubt, but not an origin or
point of departure. A generation, perhaps, but without origin. The word generation is big with all these
ambiguities. It’s a ventriloquial word.28

Stephen supplements his spectral mother with the specters of other mothers, the traces of
other mothers. On Sandymount Strand the modality of his will to power is ventriloquy. The
result or remainder—or even Aufhebung, another resonant and pregnant word—of his parents’
conjugal union, he conjugates new possibilities out of his perception in the matrix of his
imagination. In the experiment, one ventriloquizes oneself, provisionally, perpetually. As
Nietzsche has it in Beyond Good and Evil, “In man creature and creator are united” (BGE,
§225). Man is the creature who creates or generates within a contingent world, whether that
creation is himself or an artwork or (as with both Nietzsche and Wilde) himself as artwork. Of
course, this proves to be an imperfect solution, since Stephen is still very much haunted by his
mother May Dedalus. That which creates is also that which was created. In genealogizing
himself on Sandymount Strand, Stephen has not yet resolved the double bind of matricide.

* * *

Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare in “Scylla and Charybdis”—where, according to Mulligan, he

“proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is
the ghost of his own father” (U, 1.555–57)—provides, in effect, a genealogy of the artist and
the artwork. In proffering an interpretation of Shakespeare’s artistic creations, Stephen
presents a rationale for his own conceptualization of himself as an artist. He makes
Shakespeare into a role model for the type of artist he himself wants to become, much as how,
in Milton, Blake describes Milton as creating the very God who inspires him. If, as a
changeling in “Proteus,” Stephen changes his matronym, in “Scylla” he attempts to change his
patronym as a way of making himself an artist from a Shakespearean genealogy—and,
likewise, turning Shakespeare into an artist from a Dedalian genealogy in a Möbius strip of
genealogical influence. As Borges puts it, “each writer creates his precursors.”29 In its
emphasis on a patrilineal genealogy, his theory follows from, but also substantially modifies his
aesthetic theory from A Portrait and, in so doing, it also works as something approximating an
aesthetic theory for Ulysses itself. The Shakespeare theory is not a perfect account of Ulysses
since it is still informed by Stephen’s Agenbite of inwit and is thus still matricidal. However,
also implicated in Stephen’s genealogy is Bloom and his presence suggests a possible
resolution to the matricidal problem of Stephen’s aesthetics.
Frank Budgen recounts that shortly after “Lestrygonians” had been serialized in The Little
Review, Joyce received a letter from a reader who was tiring of Bloom, “The writer of [the
letter] wants more Stephen. But Stephen no longer interests me to the same extent.”30 Budgen
uses this exchange as a pretext to elaborate the salient features of Bloom and, coming after an
account of five Bloom-centric episodes, his encomium is certainly not surprising.31 However, it
also directly precedes Budgen’s summary of “Scylla and Charybdis,” the last Stephen-centric
episode and an episode in which Bloom barely appears, once only indirectly and once briefly,
only at the very end.32 I, for my part, find this placement of Joyce’s curt dismissal of Stephen
in favor of Bloom in Budgen’s book to be telling, since I would argue that Bloom is indeed a
central character in “Scylla,” and that this episode offers, at least in part, a theory of Bloom
couched within Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare.
Stephen begins his theory with the assertion that Shakespeare, whose son Hamnet died in
childhood, was cuckolded by his wife, thereby suggesting a correlation between Stephen’s
Shakespeare and Bloom (while unnoted in Ulysses, it is not insignificant that Hamnet
Shakespeare shared a birth date, February 2, with Joyce and, likely, Stephen). Indeed, in the
previous episode, Bloom’s thoughts contained numerous Shakespearean allusions—usually
misquoted—that serve as an anticipation of Stephen’s theory.33 According to Stephen,
Shakespeare modeled the character of King Hamlet after himself so that he might play that
role onstage in order to enact a symbolic revenge against his unfaithful wife. By addressing
Hamlet through the proxy of the dead king’s ghost, Shakespeare addresses his dead son
Hamnet: “you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty
queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway” (U, 9.178–80).
One further connection between Shakespeare and Bloom is suggested when Eglinton dares
Stephen to “prove that [Shakespeare] was a jew” (U, 9.763). As with most aspects of
Shakespeare’s life, his religious convictions have been subject to endless speculation, with no
definite historical conclusion.34 Eglinton’s question is also entirely apposite to Bloom, since his
Jewishness is by no means unequivocal, as will be discussed in the next chapter. Beyond this,
the conjunction between Bloom and Shakespeare intersects with a variety of other
correspondences throughout Ulysses as I have argued elsewhere.35
There are several dissents to Stephen’s theory. A. E. finds “this prying into the family life of a
great man” (U, 9.181) to be distasteful. Likewise, Eglinton protests at the biographical reading
Stephen proposes: “She died, for literature at least, before she was born” (U, 9.216). Stephen’s
interlocutors do not see the viability of interpreting artwork through the material and
contingent circumstances of its creation. They do not approve of the genealogy he proposes.
Stephen retorts, “She died . . . sixtyseven years after she was born. She saw him into and out
of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore his children and she laid pennies on his
eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he lay on his deathbed” (U, 9.217–20). Stephen counters
Eglinton by apparently reinserting Hathaway back into the dialogue. For Stephen, art is not an
abstracted idealism, as it is for A. E., but rather is inseparable from its material and domestic
circumstances. With the specific scene of Shakespeare’s deathbed, Stephen attempts to
illustrate the importance of small, contingent details, the epiphenomena that furnish and
vitalize both life and art. The specific detail of the pennies on Shakespeare’s corpse’s eyes is
not just relevant to Shakespeare, it comes from Stephen’s mother’s deathbed, whose corpse,
as he remembers in the next paragraph, was “bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers” (U,
9.222). Stephen’s argument advocating the importance of biographical details for
Shakespeare’s art is itself infused with biographical details from his own life. Stephen is thus
making Shakespeare into the type of artist he himself is like; like Blake’s Milton, he creates his
own artistic progenitor. His retort is thus conveyed through the style of his formulation as
much as through its substance. As with the elaboration of his Shakespeare theory, where he
depicts the specific scene of Shakespeare onstage playing King Hamlet opposite Burbage’s
Prince, the accumulation of “local colour” (U, 9.158) is fundamental to Stephen’s (and Joyce’s)
style.36
Eglinton, in any case, tries to refute the import of Anne Hathaway by claiming that
Shakespeare’s marriage was a mistake (U, 9.226–27), an accident of life that has no bearing on
art. This leads Stephen to make his famous claim that for a man of genius “errors are volitional
and are the portals of discovery” (U, 9.229). There are a number of resonances of this line, but
for the moment suffice it to say that Anne Hathaway is important to Stephen’s theory primarily
insofar as he can claim her as an adulteress. In effect, she is little more than the punch line to
Stephen’s unoriginal joke, “If others have their will Ann hath a way” (U, 9.256–57).37 As Mr.
Best says of this exchange between Stephen and Eglinton, “Yes, we seem to be forgetting her
as Shakespeare himself forgot her” (U, 9.240–41). Beyond her adultery, a lynchpin to Stephen’s
argument, Anne Hathaway seems to betoken a bit of a blind spot in Stephen’s theory;
something I will discuss later.
The next dissent that Stephen faces in articulating his theory is the widely held view that
Shakespeare modeled Prince Hamlet after himself and thus the king would be a figuration of
his own father, John Shakespeare.38 So, in identifying the ghost as Shakespeare, Stephen is
blithely flying past the net of most Shakespearean scholarship:

The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests,
disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son . . . Fatherhood, in the sense of
conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only
begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the Madonna which the cunning Italian intellect
flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the
world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris,
subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction.
Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son? (U, 9.833–45).

Stephen has veered away quite a bit from Shakespeare in this privileging of paternity over
maternity. While motherhood may be certain—just as motherly love is, as Cranly had told
Stephen in A Portrait (P, 241–42)—the provenance of fatherhood is uncertain. However, it is
precisely because of this uncertainty that fatherhood is important for Stephen. The paternal
bond is metaphysical, not physical or biological. Unlike maternity, the authenticity of paternity
cannot be vouchsafed. Paternity is an indirect and thus indeterminate parentage. However, for
Stephen, this very indeterminacy is what makes it significant. His theory of artistic patrimony
is that paternity is archetypal of creation precisely in that it is uncertain.
According to Stephen, the consubstantiality of the holy and undivided Trinity is more
essential to Christianity than the purity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (in this way, at least,
Stephen really is a Trinity man). Putting Mary at the center of Catholic worship, he argues,
guaranteed Catholicism’s hold on the masses. Stephen thus denigrates Mary’s stature and
status. Indeed, apart from “Nausicaa,” the BVM is rarely invoked in Ulysses, unlike Finnegans
Wake. She is not one of the many, many mothers in this text. The Irish Catholic Church’s
fixation on the mother is a distraction from the true “mystical estate,” which is, according to
Stephen, eminently patrilineal. In this way, Stephen dismisses both church and maternity,
thereby aggravating his Agenbite of inwit. Of course, he cannot truly obviate the maternal in
his assertion of a patrilineal auto-genetic artist, as exemplified by Shakespeare.

Stephen clarifies what he means by this mystical estate:When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or

another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own
son merely, but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his
own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature,
as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection (U, 9.865–71).

Stephen defines patrimony as the essential condition for the artist and in so doing has
introduced a significant modification to his biographical reading of Hamlet: Shakespeare is not
just Hamlet’s father, he is the father of all; he is even more pan-paternal than Theodore
Purefoy, that most “remarkablest progenitor” (U, 14.1411). In a sense, it does not matter who
exactly wrote Shakespeare’s plays, merely that they were written by some prolific individual.
Indeed, on the one hand, Eglinton remarks that “of all great men, [Shakespeare] is the most
enigmatic” (U, 9.359), while, on the other, Best replies that “Hamlet is so personal” (U, 9.362).
As William Schutte points out, both comments are valid: the plays can be personal without
divulging the character of their creator.39 This also ties in with the 1904 “A Portrait” essay: art
can be autobiographical while revealing nothing of the “beard and inches” of the artist. This
patrilineal mode of artistic creation clearly follows from Stephen’s aesthetic theory in A
Portrait, where he defined the artist as being independently self-creating. As with the
enigmatic Shakespeare, the artwork is intimately personal even as the artist remains hidden
and mysterious.
Stephen’s argument, which started by positing Shakespeare as playing the role of King
Hamlet, has now evolved into a theory of Shakespeare as the preeminent figure of a godlike
artist, Coleridge’s polytropic “myriadminded man” (U, 9.768)40 who encompasses all creation
and, in so doing, creates himself. This would mean that Stephen’s initial premise is faulty, since
Shakespeare, in his divine plenitude, could not be reduced to any one of his characters. As
Eglinton observes: “The truth is midway . . . He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all” (U,
9.1018–19). Stephen relents at this and agrees: “He is . . . The boy of act one is the mature
man of act five” (U, 9.1020).
Shakespeare reflects and is inflected by everybody, everybody seeing their reflection in
Shakespeare.41 This pan-dimensionality of Shakespeare is hardly a point original to Joyce. As
Borges has it in a footnote in his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “All men who speak a line
of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.”42 Coleridge’s myriad-minded man infects the minds
of myriad men. Nietzsche, too, expressed a similar point: “The highest man would have the
greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed,
where the plant ‘man’ shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g.,
in Shakespeare), but are controlled” (WP, §966). And, likewise, Derrida makes a similar point
apropos Nietzsche being polytropic: “Nietzsche must have been familiar with all genres.”43
Shakespeare is analogous to (the Christian) God not simply because of the sheer range of his
creative output, but rather because he infuses himself throughout his creations. Shakespeare,
like God, ingathers and subsumes multiplicities, his multiplicities. As Eglinton observes,
“When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père) is right. After God Shakespeare has created
most” (U, 9.1028–29). The comment was properly made by Dumas père, Alexandre.44 And the
irony of Eglinton’s confusion is that, in a sense, it confirms Stephen’s construction of artistic
patrimony in that father and son become indistinct (or, at the very least, their witty aperçus
become indistinct and unattributable) in the “apostolic succession, from only begetter to only
begotten” (U, 9.838–39).45
After Eglinton’s comment that Shakespeare is “all in all,” Stephen proposes a new genealogy
for Hamlet in which Shakespeare again plays, but unlike the earlier scene where Stephen cast
Shakespeare as King Hamlet, here Shakespeare plays all characters. This new scene works as
the revision to Stephen’s Shakespeare theory as well as to his aesthetic theory from A Portrait.
Furthermore, the scene is painted through a variety of lines and images concatenated from
Shakespeare’s works and days:

Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If
Judas goes forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk
through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-
love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly
(He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman
of catholics calls dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would
be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more
marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself (U, 9.1042–52).

The paraphrase from Maurice Maeterlinck’s La Sagesse et la destinée46 is apt because, in a

review of his first play, Octave Mirabeau called him, “le Shakespeare belge,” a line that Joyce
alluded to in a 1907 letter to Stanislaus (LII, 212). Shakespeare’s progeny are legion. Indeed,
this passage concerns the multiplicities engendered in and by Shakespeare. If Shakespeare is
all his characters, “all in all” as Eglinton said, then this omnipresence is itself present in
everyone, “all in all in all of us,” as Stephen says. This marks the important modification
Stephen makes to his aesthetics of egoism. The artist—whether Shakespeare or Maeterlinck or
Stephen or Joyce or God—is not the only focal point; egoism is multipolar. Any man can be an
everyman, just as any day can be a Bloomsday, or as Stephen puts it, “Every life is many days,
day after day.”
This suggests the main resonance of Bloom within Stephen’s theory, since Stephen has
characterized him as an everyman, the typical epithet applied to Bloom. Of course, Bloom’s
status as an everyman is not unproblematic. For example, not every man enjoys kidneys for
breakfast, just as not every man’s sexual fantasies involve “armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey
slime” (U, 10.622). Bloom is not an everyman in all the exact specifics of his characteristics,
rather he is an everyman in that he is detailed in such a richness of specificity. Not all men like
kidneys, but every man has their culinary idiosyncrasies and so on. Bloom is an everyman not
because he is perfectly, or even adequately, representative of all mankind, but because his
specific quirks are precisely enumerated. As Joyce told Budgen, “I see [Bloom] from all sides,
and therefore he is all round in the sense of your sculptor’s figure.”47 The representation of
Bloom in Ulysses thus exemplifies the claritas or phenomenological clarity that Stephen had
described in A Portrait.
Corollary to Bloom’s status as an everyman is the proposition that any man could be an
everyman. As Molly explains why she chose Bloom, “as well him as another” (U, 18.1604–5).48
Indeed, in “Wandering Rocks,” Joyce presents snapshots of a variety of other possible
Ulysseses through the brief accounts of various other characters in Dublin on June 16, 1904, in
effect suggesting all the paths not taken for Ulysses just as the Wandering Rocks were
themselves the path not taken by Odysseus.
Bloom is thus a multipolar everyman, just as Shakespeare, according to Stephen, is a
multipolar artist. Such multipolarity is, of course, the attribute Joyce fashions for himself. In
“Scylla,” through his proxy Stephen, Joyce places himself in a Shakespearean lineage—
Shakespeare’s Joyce—but he also makes Shakespeare into an artist of Joycean stature—Joyce’s
Shakespeare. Ultimately, Joyce does not just substitute himself for Shakespeare, he substitutes
Shakespeare for himself. This becomes clear (or reasonably so) in the list of “Irish heroes and
heroines of antiquity” (U, 12.176) whose images are said to adorn a row of sea-stones across
the Citizen’s girdle in “Cyclops.” One of these images is of a “Patrick W. Shakespeare” (U,
12.190–91); clearly an amusing entry of this listing of characters of (mostly) non-Irish
provenance. As Anne Fogarty has suggested, this name plays with P. W. (Patrick Weston) Joyce,
author of English as We Speak it in Ireland (1910) and many other works on Irish history and
culture.49 Joyce thus substitutes Shakespeare’s name for his own in the name of a
contemporary expert on Hiberno-English, thereby making Shakespeare Irish through himself.
 According to Stephen, the artist is important precisely in that he is multiple, and this
multiplicity is reciprocal and communal: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts,
giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” In
effect, Stephen here proposes an egoistic plurality, the artist-as-everyman, and, conversely,
everyman-an-artist, or, at least, a potential artist.
Indeed, this sense of possibility actualized is what makes the artist an artist: “He found in
the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.” The artist sees his
imagination (his world within) confirmed in the world outside. Stephen’s formulation here is,
in effect, an Aristotelian rendition of Mallarmé’s line about Hamlet: “il se promène . . . lisant
au livre de lui-même [he wanders . . . reading the book of himself].”50 The artist sees himself
confirmed by seeing the world, but conversely, this confirmation can only occur by the artist’s
ability to be receptive to the multifacetedness of that world. In A Portrait, Stephen proposed
that the artist diffuses himself into and throughout his works, which is a strategy he also
imputes to Shakespeare, “As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies . . . from day
to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image”
(U, 9.376–77). But, unlike A Portrait, Stephen here allows for a reciprocal counterdiffusion.
Just as the artist diffuses himself into his work, the world is diffused into the artist, here
signaled under the auspices of “mother Dana.”
Joseph Valente articulates the consonance between the artist as Stephen describes him and
Nietzsche’s works in terms of perspectivism: “He simultaneously lives out the many
perspectives available to him and incorporates them into a broader perspective which
abstracts and transforms them.”51 The artist that Stephen proposes here is the egoist open to
alterity, which is thus unlike the more closed off and withdrawn artist proposed in A Portrait.52
In this way, Stephen’s Shakespeare theory represents a further step in his maturation as an
artist. It also represents a democratization of Nietzsche’s Übermensch: any man can be an
Übermensch, any man can overcome himself by seeing in himself a continual experiment in
self-fashioning rather than resting content.
The possibility of plurality as indicated in Stephen’s comment also has an impact on how
Joyce reworks free indirect discourse in Ulysses. If in A Portrait Stephen’s theory of aesthetics
reflects Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse in that novel, then an analogous thing happens in
“Scylla.” Simply put, Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse in Ulysses is multipolar, which is to
say that it is not strictly delimited by the consciousness of any one individual. To take “Scylla”
as an example, both Stephen’s various discourses as well as the narrative style of the episode-
as-a-whole take on a Shakespearean cant and hue (just as the style of “Lestrygonians” is
literally peppered with culinary and gastronomic terms and allusions). In A Portrait, the
narrative style betrayed a tendency to the centripetal, whereas in Ulysses the style is both
centripetal and centrifugal.
After Stephen has finished his peroration, he admits that he does not believe in his own
theory (U, 9.1065–67). At this, Eglinton cannot resist interjecting a variety of other au currant
theories about Shakespeare and Hamlet and sarcastically notes that, at the very least, the
proponents of these theories did believe in them (U, 9.1070–77). Stephen then thinks:

I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to
believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other chap (U, 9.1078–80).

Stephen does not necessarily not believe in his proposed theory, and there’s the rub. On the
side of belief lie the egomen, or rather, the Greek expression ego men, “I, for my part” or “I
myself,” which would be roughly equivalent to mé fhéin, the singular of Sinn Féin.53 And, on
the side of unbelief there’s everybody else, the “other chap” of alterity. Not believing thus
marks the retreat of the ego and the approach of alterity and Stephen does not know yet
where to go.
This indicates the flaw in Stephen’s theory, which is why it would be more of a prolegomenon
to Bloom than a theory of Bloom as such. Stephen concludes the proposition that the artist is
“all in all in all of us” with the postulation that he would be “an androgynous alien, being a
wife unto himself.” To this, Mulligan sarcastically cries “Eureka!” (U, 9.1053). This then leads
him to his crude satire of Stephen’s proposition “Everyman His Own Wife / or / A Honeymoon
in the Hand” (U, 9.1171–73). The crass, masturbatory joke is actually quite apposite to the
logic of Stephen’s argument. His formulation of egoistic openness is still somewhat solipsistic
in that it omits the care, that is to say, the love of alterity. Stephen’s theory of egoistic
openness omits love. Concomitant with the omission of love is the omission of the maternal
from this theory of artistic patrimony. Stephen’s theory, even though it is less self-centered
than before, remains matricidal.
As with the earlier discussion of Anne Hathaway, the omission of the maternal is a blind-spot
or error, which is to say that it might also be some kind of potential portal of discovery.
Obviously, Stephen’s omission of maternity from his theory would be informed by his Agenbite
of inwit. This leads directly into the question of the most infamous crux in Ulysses, the
“hardest crux ever” (FW, 623.33–34), as it were. To much fanfare when it first appeared, the
Gabler edition restores the following passage to Stephen’s argument in “Scylla”:

– Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added, another image?
 Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui
bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus (U, 9.427–31).

This line had been absent in all editions prior to Gabler: it appears on the Rosenbach
manuscript but not on any subsequent drafts. Gabler construes this apparent lacuna as the
result of a typist’s eyeskip (UCSE, 1738).54 The significance of this line is that it answers a
question that Stephen had asked of himself in “Proteus” (U, 3.435) and, more dramatically, this
is the question that he asks of his mother’s ghost in “Circe”: “Tell me the word, mother, if you
know now. The word known to all men” (U, 15.4192–93). According to this missing passage,
love is thus the word known to all men and the answer to what Stephen’s mother does not tell
him.
Gabler’s restoration of this line back into “Scylla” is not without controversy. There are two
distinct, but related, issues relevant here: the editorial and the thematic.55 At the time it was
drafted, this passage in “Scylla” responded to the previously installed question in “Proteus”
but does not necessarily anticipate the question in “Circe” as that episode had not yet been
drafted. Therefore, restoring this passage to the text of “Scylla” potentially violates Gabler’s
editorial practice of invariant context (UCSE, 1899–1900).56 Without wading further into these
perilous waters, I would like to point out that while love may indeed be the word known to all
men, it is not (yet) the word fully known to Stephen in his disquisition about Shakespeare and
patrimony. The line’s ambiguous textual status thus indicates the flaw or lacuna in Stephen’s
theory and, thus, its latent matricidal tension.
Even if Stephen has not yet escaped this net, by admitting plurality into the artist’s egoism,
with the “all in all in all of us,” he does point toward a potential way out. By omitting love as a
condition of plural perspectives, he does not get there yet, and this inability indicates the
centrality of Bloom, the “Everyman or Noman” (U, 17.2008) in all of us, an importance that
might be possibilized when the two characters actually meet. And, indeed, their meeting
occurs in an episode that reprises the theme of creation into a different register.

* * *

If Joyce could be said to challenge Shakespeare in “Scylla and Charybdis,” then the
counterpart episode would certainly be “Oxen of the Sun,” where the narrative is conveyed
through a series of 19 burlesques that trace out a genealogy of English prose styles from their
beginnings in Latinate forms through, for example, Mallory, Pepys, de Quincey, Sterne,
Sheridan, and so forth until its end that is rendered as a mishmash of drunken babble. In this
episode Joyce mimes the anthology of English prose, perhaps in an attempt to surpass
Shakespeare in comprehensiveness.57 Arguably the major problem with this episode—at least
beyond the (not inconsiderable) difficulties it presents to first-time readers58—is why its
burlesque history of English prose styles might be pertinent to its setting in a maternity
hospital during the birth of a child. Assuming Joyce’s expressive form to be operative here, this
aspect of the episode’s overall stylistic decorum should be more than simply a case of Joyce
gratuitously demonstrating his virtuosities as a writer (although such braggadocio cannot be
completely discounted).
In terms of expressive form, the embryological structure to “Oxen” is entirely appropriate:59
the indications of the development of the fetus in utero are, on a formal level, analogous to the
culinary and gastrological allusions in “Lestrygonians.” As John Gordon has argued, the
individual literary burlesques within “Oxen” are likewise instances of expressive form in that
context of the style of any given burlesque corresponds, if ironically, to its subject matter; for
example, Bloom’s momentary reverie in front of a bottle of Bass beer is expressed in and
amplified by an ecstatic prosody largely borrowed from De Quincey (U, 14.1078–1109).60 But
that still fails to answer the question as to why Joyce applied this overall stylistic decorum to
the episode-as-a-whole. What is the link between literary style and maternity? The question is
all the more compelling, since, as has been stated variously, all the writers Joyce sampled in
“Oxen” are male. And so it seems that Joyce is suggesting some connection, perhaps even a
fundamental one, between the development of English literary prose styles and the
development of the fetus in utero. Although his study has been superseded in many details
over the years, Robert Janusko’s work on “Oxen” is still the dominant work on that episode and
while he deals with both the embryological and stylistic decorums of that episode,61 he does
almost nothing to connect the two together.
One possible link that has been suggested is that Joyce is responding and reacting to
contemporaneous advances in biology, specifically the theory of recapitulation, popular in the
nineteenth century, which is often phrased as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”62 The basic
idea behind this is that the each of the stages of the development of any individual being
(ontogeny) represents or mimics or is analogous to one of the adult forms that appeared in the
evolutionary history of the species to which it belonged (phylogeny). In other words, the
development of a human fetus replays the history of the evolution of man. In terms of
contemporary theories of evolution, recapitulation theory has been dismissed as an overall
pattern, although isolated moments of correspondence between ontogeny and phylogeny are
observed in various species; this is called “minor recapitulation.”
 And so applying recapitulation theory to “Oxen” would be straightforward enough: Joyce
would be indicating an analogy between the history of the development of English prose style
and the development of the human being’s Being; or, human ontogeny recapitulates linguistic
phylogeny. Indeed, a line from Joyce’s college essay “The Study of Languages” seems to
endorse such a reading: “in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of
men” (OCPW, 15).63 However, there is a key distinction between this philologically sensitive
claim and the recapitulationist reading of “Oxen,” and this distinction indicates a flaw in the
recapitulationist reading. Joyce writes that the history of words recapitulates the history of
man: but both these histories belong to the order of cultural life, the bios, whereas, in
distinction, embryological development belongs to one’s animal life, the zoös. In his college
essay Joyce is simply claiming that one aspect of cultural life is reflected in another; he is not
claiming an essential link between bios and zoös, which is exactly what the recapitulationist
reading of “Oxen” proposes.
For the recapitulationist reading to work, the zoös and the bios should be somehow
interrelatable within Ulysses. More specifically, artistic creation, such as the creation of
variegated literary styles, should be relatable to human procreation on some level. But what
we see in Joyce’s works up to “Oxen” is, in fact, the denial of a relation between zoös and bios.
The matricidal tendency of Stephen’s theory—as evinced in both A Portrait and “Scylla”—
obviates any link between zoös and bios. The legal fiction of paternity belongs to the bios and
not the zoös and in Stephen’s formulation artwork is purely a function of the patrilineal bios.
What I would like to propose is that “Oxen of the Sun” is Joyce’s way of reasserting the
uncircumventable primacy of maternity back into artistic creation as a redress for Stephen’s
matricidal auto-genetics. With “Oxen,” Joyce is implying a different definition of artistic
creation than the one Stephen supplies in “Scylla,” a definition that perhaps does not proceed
through denial, as is the wont of ressentiment.
If maternity is reasserted in “Oxen,” then it is hardly apparent in the account of Mina
Purefoy’s difficult labors. “Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought
about a happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and doctor. All
that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had manfully helped” (U, 14.1310–
13). The account of the birth of Mortimer Purefoy emphasizes the work of the surgeons, who
are, needless to say, male. We are explicitly told that Mina only contributes to this work
indirectly; indeed, her labors are catachrestically described as manly. The tenor of her
motherhood is characterized in a thoroughly patrilineal manner, thereby harmonizing with
Stephen’s theory of patrilineal creation in “Scylla.” Mortimer’s birth is fully enmeshed within
the legal fiction of the paternal order:

Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight in her eyes, that longing hunger for
baby fingers (a pretty sight it is to see), in the first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent
prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband. And as her loving eyes behold her babe
she wishes only one blessing more, to have her dear Doady there with her to share her joy, to lay in his
arms that mite of God’s clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces (U, 14.1315–22).

Already her motherhood is subservient to the Universal Husband, whoever that might be.
Weldon Thornton suggests this is a gibe at the Theosophists as they tended to apply the
adjective “universal” to a wide array of concepts although, apparently, never to husbands.64
However, in the context of this passage, the expression seems to be overtly Christological, with
the universal husband being Christ. This seems apposite, since nuns are referred to as brides
of Christ. Of course, like Grecian urns, nuns would be eternally unravished brides. In any case,
with both nuns and with the account of Mina’s delivery, the maternal powers are repressed in
favor of a specifically patrilineal if not divine regeneration. Indeed, the maternal scene is only
depicted as complete with the presence of Mina’s husband Theodore Purefoy, “the
remarkablest progenitor barring none” (U, 14.1411). Furthermore, the description of
Mortimer as “the fruit of their lawful embraces” emphasizes the mechanics of the certification
of the legal fiction of paternity. In other words, in “Oxen,” Mortimer’s birth is consigned to the
register and strictures of the bios. If there is to be a reassertion of the maternal in “Oxen,” it
does not accrue to Mina Purefoy’s benefit.
On the other hand, there are a number of places in “Oxen” where the tension between bios
and zoös does get raised. The episode begins with an encomium to procreation as a national
imperative: “the prosperity of a nation [is] more efficaciously asserted [through] . . . that
proliferant continuance [that] constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted
benefaction” (U, 14.13–17). It is incumbent upon the polis, the sphere of the collected bioi, to
perpetuate zoös. The life of one needs the life of the other. As both Mary Lowe-Evans and
Andrew Gibson have argued, Joyce is here playing with various contemporaneous discourses
about the recrudescence of the blighted and oppressed Irish through medicine, hygiene, and,
especially, reproduction. In particular, the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street,
opened in 1894, was founded to cater to the otherwise poorly served, underprivileged Catholic
mothers of Dublin.65 In a sense, the Holles Street Hospital is fundamental to an Irish Revival
(and not just a literary revival or athletic revival). In Odysseus’s terms, to lead a good life—
zoeis d’agathon bion—mandates “proliferant continuance.”
This particular idea of the regeneration of Ireland at the start of the episode is phrased
through generalities. It is only with the account of the discussion of the various young men
that matters move to specificities. When Bloom first joins them, their discussion revolves
around whether to save the life of the mother or the life of the child in cases where the
survival of one necessitates sacrificing the other. It is noted that there is no specific legal
prescription in this case: “the law nor his judges did provide no remedy” (U, 14.213–14). The
prevailing sentiment amongst the medical students is that the mother’s life should be saved:
“she should live because in the beginning, they said, the woman should bring forth in pain” (U,
14.208–9). According to these students, the pains of pregnancy are, ever since Eve, the
condition of womanhood. Even mothers cannot escape maternity and so, because of biblical
ordination, the medical students proclaim “by our Virgin mother, the wife should live and the
babe to die” (U, 14.215). In place of the lack of human law regarding the course of action in
this circumstance, divine law provides the answer, or as is stated, “A redress God grant” (U,
14.214). Maternity cannot be killed and so the mother is granted a reprieve. This ineluctability
of maternity is proclaimed in the name of the great sweet mother, the BVM. Of course, there is
some irony here as the students’ appeal to the great Catholic mother to spare the mother’s life
directly contravenes Catholic orthodoxy, which holds that it is the child who should be saved,
since (presumably) the mother was already baptized, whereas an unbaptized child would be
ineligible for heaven. The Catholic church apparently favors a type of matricide in that the
mother must die but only so that maternity can survive. Joyce alluded to the orthodox position
on the earliest extant draft of this passage: “all cried with one voice the wife should live sith
she was God’s creature as well as other, and the babe to die.”66 In this formulation, there is an
implication of the hypocrisy in allowing the sacrifice of one of God’s creatures. In any case, the
students turn one aspect of Catholic dogma—the maternity of the BVM—against another for
the sake of the mother’s life.
Of course, the students’ advocacy of the mother’s life rests within an insistence on her pain
and suffering. In this advocacy they speak with one voice; that is, they do not admit difference
of perspective. This lack of differential perspective contrasts with Bloom, who upon being
informed of Mina Purefoy’s difficult labor by nurse Callan “felt with wonder women’s woe in
the travail that they have of motherhood” (U, 14.119–20). Unlike the students, Bloom
acknowledges the pangs of birth as more than simply inevitable. Pangs are not punishment.
Bloom’s wonder is related to Nietzsche’s own claim “that there may be the eternal joy of
creating, that the will to life may eventually affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving birth
must also be there eternally” (TI, X§4)—this will be elaborated in chapter 5. Bloom’s bios is
supple and open to other perspectives, other bioi. As an everyman, Bloom can occupy both the
specific and the general; like Christ he can be a universal husband while still also being
Molly’s all-too-imperfect husband.
As a fictional character, Bloom is multiperspectival in two separate but congruous senses: he
is presented by Joyce and perceived by the reader in multiple perspectives (the “sculptor’s
figure” Joyce described to Budgen) and, likewise, he can construe his environs from different
perspectives. Furthermore, the possibility of multiple perspectives is what might separate
Nietzsche’s writing from what Derrida calls “matricidal writing.” I would like to get at this first
by looking at the ways in which Bloom could be considered maternal as one mode of his
multiperspectivalism. This becomes quite literal during Bloom’s examination by Mulligan,
Crotthers, and Dixon in the Messianic sequence in “Circe.” Dixon pronounces Bloom “a
finished example of the new womanly man” (U, 15.1798–99) who is “about to have a baby” (U,
15.1810). To which Bloom says, “O, I so want to be a mother” (U, 15.1817) before giving birth
to octuplets. If matricide is the name of the attempt to supplement the uncircumventable
maternal creation with an ontology of one’s own, then Bloom supplements it with a maternity
of his own. Indeed, later in “Circe” when the ghost of Stephen’s mother asks Stephen, “Who
had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers” (U, 15.4197), this statement is a
kind of premonition of the kindness Bloom will show Stephen at this episode’s end. But these
examples are of Bloom becoming a mother or mother-proxy thereby supplementing maternity,
which could be considered a type of matricide. Indeed, Bloom’s various maternal qualities
stand in contrast to the relative paucity of information meted out in the text about his own
mother, Ellen Higgins.
Bloom’s maternal aspect stands as a kind of corrective to Stephen’s sullen, solipsistic, and
matricidal egoism. Stephen’s multipolar egoism allows for multiple perspectives, but still
remains limited insofar as it confirms the artist as an artist; that is, creativity is still reserved
for an elite. In distinction, Bloom’s multiple perspectives are not purely yoked to artistic
creation. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche links creation with the maternal:

Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s growing light. But that the creator may
be, suffering is needed and much change. Indeed, there must be bitter dying in your life, you creators.
Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all impermanence. To be the child who is newly born, the
creator must also want to be the mother who gives birth and the pangs of the birth-giver (Z, 199).

Creation is painful. This is why maternity is exemplary for creation, but is not necessarily the
only form creation can take. Stephen wants to usurp this creative agency for himself, whereas
Bloom, an imperfect artist (at best), recognizes the creative in the procreative. However, it is
perhaps Molly who best exemplifies this connection between pain, multiperspectivalism and
multicreation; such will be the argument of chapter 5.
Now, Stephen’s theory of artistic creation, in being closed off to the procreative powers of
the maternal, as evinced in its patrilinearity, eschews the concomitant pangs of creation. We
see this reflected in “Oxen,” with Stephen’s comment concerning whether the mother’s or
child’s life should be saved. Unsurprisingly, Stephen expresses an orthodox Catholic view, even
if it is not without some sarcasm:

Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one in limbo
gloom, the other in purgefire. But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly
impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he
said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than
we (U, 14.223–28).

Stephen, somewhat disingenuously, here takes up the Catholic Church’s position that the souls
of the mother or daughter are better off in the hands of their maker, and that the drinking
party ought to be concerned with the “souls that we nightly impossibilise,” that is, the
“wasted” seed that they do not put to “productive” use with the whores of nighttown. Stephen
is inveighing against the squandering of creativity, but both the squandering and the creativity
in question are actions performed strictly by men. And so, for Stephen, if women are
uncircumventable in the process of procreation, their importance remains secondary to the
male/paternal function. If, as he says, men are “means to those small creatures within us,”
then women are even more secondary from procreation. Mulligan’s subsequent elaborate riff
on a national fertilizing farm at which he would “devote himself to the noblest task for which
our bodily organism has been framed” (U, 14.663–64) is an extension of this idea that women
are merely instruments for male pleasure, procreation, and thus because of this, they serve the
national interest. After a bit of rough-and-tumble joking from the students, Stephen forcefully
reiterates an orthodox Catholic view:

Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of
canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of
vampires mouth to mouth . . . He said also how at the end of the second month a human soul was
infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for God’s greater glory whereas that earthly
mother which was but a dam to bear beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the
fisherman’s seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church for all ages founded (U,
14.241–52).

Stephen, exiled from “mother Church,” remains proud, even haughty (“orgulous”) of its
doctrines, its law of canons, its orthodoxies as well as of its heterodoxies. In any case, in his
formulation here, the earthly mother cedes all her rights to the holy mother, or the mother
church, which is itself a patrilineal institution, founded by Saint Peter. In this sequence
Stephen thus reprises his patrilineal theory of creation and applies it to the regulation of
pregnancy, thereby subsuming procreation to a different authority.
At this point, Bloom is asked what his opinion is concerning which life to save. Not being up
to the standard of his interlocutors in either drunkenness or knowledge of medicine or
theology, Bloom evades the question as such by suggesting that “it was good for that mother
Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence” (U, 14.257–58). Bloom’s point is not
incompatible with Stephen’s in that both emphasize the rights and powers of the mother
church over any and every actual earthly mother (or child for that matter). However, of course,
Bloom’s point comes from a kind of cynical pragmatism rather than a theological ideology: no
matter who dies, mother or child, the church benefits from the death through donations
collected at whichever funeral. Rather than subscribe to dogma, Bloom is pragmatic. Such
pragmatism is akin to Nietzschean genealogy in that it posits a contingent, human condition
(in this case, greed) that has been clouded over by the alternative aetiology of Catholic dogma.
With his hasty interpretation, Bloom has transvalued the church’s own self-interested
transvaluation.
Stephen is impressed by Bloom’s ad hoc solution: “Which hearing young Stephen was a
marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord”
(U, 14.260–61). There are several orders of transvaluation at work in this line. Most directly,
Stephen is responding to Bloom: the church profits with money taken from (or, more precisely,
donated by) the poor and credulous. The phrase he uses inverts or revalues Proverbs 19:17:
“He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord.” And so, according to this inversion,
the church values filthy lucre rather than compassion. However, this reformulation is not
original to Stephen. He is, in fact, echoing Mulligan from earlier that day: “He who stealeth
from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra” (U, 1.727–28). Mulligan seems to
be implying that Nietzsche offers nothing more than anticlericalism. And so Stephen
appropriates (if not steals) Mulligan’s inversion (which was already an appropriation). Even
this seemingly trivial mention of Nietzsche evinces a Nietzschean transvaluation. As Stephen
says later, with a flourish, “Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius
professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail” (U, 14.362–64). In any case, Stephen’s
transvaluation is expressed in the service of characterizing Bloom’s answer as itself a
transvaluation.
 At this point, Stephen reformulates his point about creation, but this time without reference
to the institution of the church as such: “In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit
of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the
postcreation” (U, 14.292–94). This reprises his consideration in “Proteus” about the possibility
of God being able to annihilate what He has created. Stephen here again denigrates the
maternal role in the production of humans; the essential work of creation, of creating souls,
lies solely within God’s purview. As he says subsequently, “Entweder transubstantiality oder
consubstantiality but in no case subsubstantiality” (U, 14.307–8). In “Eumaeus,” Stephen goes
a step further and retracts this possibility of the indestructible soul:

They tell me on the best authority it [the soul] is a simple substance and therefore incorruptible. It
would be immortal, I understand, but for the possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause, Who, from
all I can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other practical jokes, corruptio per se
and corruptio per accidens both being excluded by court etiquette (U, 16.756–60).

In other words, the soul is actually corruptible (at least in potential) because God is not
“subject to” his law, precisely because God is His law. God can thus overcome and overpower
maternity, substituting His womb for the (m)other’s. Since God is the only truly self-created
being (at least according to Judeo-Christian belief), because He does not have His own mother,
He (and only He) can unwork maternity. God is thus the only successful artist, that is, the artist
who succeeds in matricide.
In contrast to Stephen’s argument, Bloom continues to contemplate the sufferings of Mina
Purefoy during her delivery, which reminds him of Molly’s maternal sufferings:

But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the terrorcausing
shrieking of shrill women in their labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne
him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art could save so dark is
destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair
corselet of lamb’s wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and lie akeled (for it was
then about the midst of the winter) and now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir
looked upon him his friend’s son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness and as sad as
he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all accounted him of real parts) so grieved he
also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered
his goods with whores (U, 14.264–76).

This passage provides the clue as to the stylistic pluralities of “Oxen.” On the more trivial side,
Janusko admits to being unable to assign a single stylistic antecedent to this paragraph; he
finds elements of John Wyclif’s sermon on the prodigal son, but sufficiently adulterated with
John Bourchier, Lord Berners, and with Elizabethan chronicle style.67 Likewise, Bloom’s
thoughts range from Mina Purefoy’s difficult labor to his own dead son Rudy to Stephen
wasting away his abilities through his association with blackguards such as Mulligan. Bloom is
thus contemplating the same point that Stephen had made earlier, about his squandering away,
or, to use Stephen’s term, “impossibilizing his creative abilities.” In this train of thought,
Bloom thus consociates empathy and creativity through a concern for Stephen.
In any case, the style of these thoughts is seemingly plural. Beyond being seemingly plural,
style is inherently plural; as Derrida has it in Spurs, for there to be style, in the singular, there
has to be more than one: “if there is going to be style, there can only be more than one.”68
Derrida’s negative formulation (“there can only be more than one”) is significant, since it
indicates that style, as such, in the singular, cannot exist: style emerges out of differentiation.
Plurality is the mother of all styles.
A comparison between Joyce and Proust is instructive here. Proust essayed his own version
of “Oxen of the Sun” with a suite of pastiches of various French authors, an exercise in styles,
first published in Le Figaro in 1908–1909 and collected in the 1919 volume Pastiches et
Mélanges. These imitations are remarkably effective and cannot merely be called
“caricatures”; in a very real sense in these pastiches Proust inhabits the styles of the writers
he imitates. Style is something Proust thought about extensively. In Contre Sainte-Beuve,
which is contemporaneous with the pastiches, he writes that style is “not in words, it is not
expressed, it is all between words.”69 This would imply that style has an odd rapport with
grammar; like grammar, style is concerned with the selection and disposition of words, but not
strictly on a level of codification and ordination.
For Proust, the single most salient quality of style is originality. This quality is inseparable
from the writer’s personality; each artist has their own style, evident across their works, even
to the point of monotony.70 This level of individuation finds expression through grammar
without being subservient to grammar. Subliminally, style arises out of an idiosyncratic employ
of grammar. In a 1919 essay on Flaubert, Proust writes that “there is a beauty in
grammar . . . that has nothing to do with accuracy.”71 He goes on to delineate subtle
grammatical irregularities in Flaubert’s writings in order to argue for their sublime
pertinence. He concludes by stating that Flaubert’s grammatical singularities manifest a new
vision of the world.72 At one point, Proust goes so far as to claim that Flaubert’s use of certain
verb tenses, pronouns, and prepositions is as revolutionary as Kant’s philosophical system.73
Joyce was apparently less sanguine about Flaubert’s grammatical oddities: Ellmann reports
that he was pleased as punch to have found three faults in the Trois contes.74 For Proust, the
beauty of writing lies not in perspicacity but in individuality. But such individuality and
originality is only apparent through differentiation: style is grammar made aesthetic, a subtly
individuated deviation from what could be considered a normative grammar. Even minimally,
style by definition deviates from and distorts grammar. This point is congruous with Derrida’s
argument in Spurs in that to have style, in the singular, is to have style in the plural. Style is an
individuation out of plurality. In short then, precisely by being individual and unique, style
must always be multiple: for there to be style, in the singular, there must be styles, in the
plural, a plurality of modes of deviating from grammatical strictures. Furthermore, by being
individual, a single style must always be susceptible to imitation and parody (assuming, at
least, a certain modicum of technical competency). “Oxen of the Sun” is thus an almost
inevitable corollary to Saintsbury’s anthology.
Bernard de Fallois remarked apropos Proust’s pastiches that “there is therefore no great
difference between a pastiche, which consists of creating in another’s register, and a work of
art, which consists of creating in one’s own.”75 This is exactly what Joyce is doing in “Oxen of
the Sun.” Each inset, with its own style, is an individual perspective, the protocols for which
Joyce “learned” (so to speak) whilst amassing representative citations for each author from
various anthologies such as Peacock and Saintsbury.
This is also exactly the state Nietzsche claims for himself in Ecce Homo, his autobiography,
his writing of his bios, his styles:

To communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by means of signs, including the tempo of these
signs—that is the meaning of every style; and considering that the multiplicity of inward states is
exceptionally large in my case, I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that
has ever been at the disposal of one man (EH, 265).

And so to return to my point that bios could be translated as lifestyle: for there to be one
lifestyle, it must be possible for there to be many different lifestyles, in the plural. For
Nietzsche, the refinement of the style appropriate for an individual is an ethically charged act:
“one ought to discover the means of expression for the most desirable state of mind, the state,
that is to say, which is most desirable should be communicated and conveyed: that of the
spiritually joyful, luminous and honest man, who has overcome his passions. This will be the
teaching that there exists a best style: the style corresponding to the good man” (WS, §88).
The agathos bios has its own style, which is one style out of many possibilities. Thus, the
agathos bios is procreative; as Dixon says of Bloom’s answer, “That is truth, pardy . . . and, or I
err, a pregnant word” (U, 14.259). Ultimately the problem with Stephen’s aesthetics is that it
is monological, that is, committed to a single style, which he valorizes as the dramatic. His
Agenbite of inwit is, ultimately, a symptom of the impossibility of the monological style. A
plurality of style and perspectives is the alternative to matricide. The ethical lesson of “Oxen”
is that plurality of style is the matrix of and for life and for the perpetuation of life. And
following from this would be the idea that any ethical lesson—such as, say, the ethical lesson
from Ulysses—is inchoate or imperfect, that is provisional and perspectival and incomplete, for
only the incomplete perpetuate.
 Chapter 4
Joyce’s Multifarious Styles in Ulysses

In an obituary of Richard Rorty published in the Los Angeles Times, Crispin Sartwell
disapprovingly cited Rorty’s maxim “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with
saying” as evidence of relativism gone amok.1 Because Sartwell’s obituary appeared online,
this particular iteration of this line was subsequently reprised in numerous articles and essays
on Rorty, many approving, even though it is not actually something Rorty ever wrote. In
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he did write, “The aim of all such explanations is to make
truth something more that what Dewey called ‘warranted assertability’: more than what our
peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying.”2 Rorty’s line is considerably more
nuanced than Sartwell’s miscitation and, indeed, means almost the opposite of what Sartwell
claims it does. However, the miscitation is in effect a self-fulfilling prophecy precisely in being
re-cited by others: apparently, citing (or misciting) Rorty is what your contemporaries, or
perhaps our peers, let you get away with saying.
The problem that Rorty identifies—which is glossed over in Sartwell’s miscitation in a
nontrivial manner—is whether the truth can be more than what our peers will, ceteris paribus,
let us get away with saying. Can there be a truth that withstands and survives the
perpetuation of misreadings and misapprehensions? This question is central to Nietzsche’s
epistemology. In his early essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” he asks, “What is
truth?,” to which he answers:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations

which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, decorated and which, after lengthy
use, seem firm, canonical and binding to a people: truths are illusions that are no longer remembered as
being illusions, metaphors that have become worn and stripped of their sensuous force, coins that have
lost their design and are now considered only as metal and no longer as coins (WEN, 257).

According to Nietzsche, truth is an illusion that we buy into, an illusion that we forget is an
illusion because of some kind of suspension of disbelief. This is not to say that the truth is
merely just what one can get away with saying, rather that the truth might only be available to
language in a manner that is complicated by rhetorical effects.3 Indeed, Nietzsche is being
quite canny in his formulation, since he is not quite saying that “I know what the truth is; the
truth is just a metaphor, just a lie.” Instead he uses a numismatic metaphor to illustrate the
concept that the truth is just a metaphor. Paul de Man points out this apparent contradiction
quite elegantly: “A text like On Truth and Lie, although it presents itself legitimately as a
demystification of literary rhetoric remains entirely literary, rhetorical, and deceptive itself.”4
No single perspective can be privileged automatically. This is why Nietzsche promotes
genealogy (or rather genealogies, since these are, by necessity, plural) as an alternative to a
monolithic historical account. In the absence of an unequivocal truth, a multiplicity of
perspectives and styles can allow for a “truth” that is more than simply what one’s
contemporaries (or peers) will allow or condone: “the more affects we allow to speak about
one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete
will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be” (GM, III§12). The point here is not to
construct a functional equivalent of some objective “God’s-eye-view,” but rather to concatenate
multiple perspectives in a parallactic manner in order to arrive at a more nuanced perspective,
a perspective that nonetheless remains fallible and provisional. The “multifarious art of style”
(EH, 265) is thus ethically charged, since the acknowledging of multiple perspectives respects
“truth” more than any single overriding hypostatic dogma.
Nietzsche starts the Genealogy of Morals by condemning unnamed “English psychologists”
for positing their own particular cultural norms—specifically those of utility—as universally
true and normative (GM, I§§1–2).5 These English psychologists have thus hypostasized their
own idiosyncratic ethos. They believe their coin to be true and universal. Such a “moral” view
of history is represented in Ulysses by the Unionist Mr. Deasy. Deasy is a stickler for officially
sanctioned symbolism, as is evinced with his savings box that divides each denomination of
coin appropriately (U, 2.217–20). For Deasy, truths are not worn-out metaphors, even as he
spins out cliché after cliché without much reflection.6 When he attempts to impart to Stephen
a lesson of financial probity by quoting Shakespeare’s line “Put but money in thy purse” (U,
2.239; Lear, I.iii.347), Stephen points out that that line was actually said by Iago thereby
rendering the advice somewhat suspect. Stephen has a different perspective and for him the
coins symbolize other things; they are “hollow shells. Symbols too of beauty and power. A lump
in my pocket: symbols soiled by greed and misery” (U, 2.226–28). Of course, such cynicism
does not make Stephen’s perspective inherently more valid than Deasy’s. Deasy is merely
advocating financial probity (albeit in prejudiced terms), while Stephen—perhaps out of a
ressentiment harbored by his impecuniousness—sees filthy lucre. Both resort to clichés about
coins, just different clichés.
Like Nietzsche, Stephen recognizes that the past is not always glorious and its symbols not
always benign: “every past, however, is worthy to be condemned—for that is the nature of
human things: human violence and weakness have always played a mighty role in them” (UM,
76). In this section of “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Nietzsche is
describing the task of critical history, which is to strip away the sentimentality of historical
research in order to uncover the harsh facts that characterize human endeavor (Nietzsche’s
conceptualization of genealogy is a subsequent refinement and modulation of this idea of
critical history). In dialogue with Deasy, Stephen is something of a critical historian, whereas
Deasy would, in part, exemplify what Nietzsche calls the “antiquarian historian,” a collector of
tokens and pieties (UM, 75).
Unsurprisingly, many of the historical claims that Deasy propounds are dubious. His so-
called “Glorious, pious and immortal memory” (U, 2.273) is anything but glorious and pious
and immortal.7 For example, at one point Deasy, assuming Stephen to be an unreconstructed
Fenian (U, 2.272), proclaims that he is descended from both rebels and from Sir John
Blackwood, a parliamentarian who voted for the Act of Union. This is a doubly incorrect
assertion, since Blackwood was actually anti-Union but died on February 27, 1799 before he
could even cast his vote.8 By invoking both hons and rebels, Deasy implies that his pedigree
spans all sides of the national question, as if in his one person he can encompass all Irishness:
“We are all Irish, all kings’ sons” (U, 2.279–80); to which Stephen says, “Alas” (U, 2.281).
Deasy here attempts to diminish the difference between Unionist and Republican in the name
of some grander notion of “Irishness” that is favorable to the status quo that he represents,
whereas Stephen remains indifferent, that is, indifferent to Deasy’s sleight-of-hand
suppression of difference. In Rorty’s terms, Stephen does not completely let Deasy get away
with this “warranted assertability” of Irishness.
Stephen responds to Deasy’s use and abuse of historical record with his gnomic declaration
that “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (U, 2.377). In context of
Stephen’s discussion with Deasy it is not so much the “facticity” of history that Stephen is
maligning but rather historiography (that is, the discipline of history), the interpretations or
“warranted assertability” of history, what Nietzsche calls a “history of morality.” To this Deasy
reasserts an unequivocal endpoint to the mad parade, whose trinkets he collects, when he
claims, “All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God” (U, 2.380–
81). Deasy is perfectly content with hypostasis, whereas for Stephen, as he archly points out,
God is “a shout in the street” (U, 3.386). In keeping with his aesthetic, God lies in the
contingent details of local color. Furthermore, as Robert Spoo points out, this particular shout
in the street is hardly innocent. In the context of a schoolboys’ hockey match in a wealthy
Dalkey school, such a shout suggests the violence infused within Irish history.9
Of course, in the context of Deasy’s platitudinous and erroneous generalities, Stephen’s own
response could be viewed with some suspicion. At the very least, Stephen’s responses to
Deasy’s grand pronouncements lack nuance. The possibility of nuance, of shaded perspectives,
comes with Bloom and, in the Nostos section, in Stephen’s incomplete and imperfect
interactions with Bloom. In this chapter I will examine some specific moments within Ulysses
in which the tensions of perspectival ethics are raised. These moments coalesce around
questions of history, science, Jewishness, and anti-Semitism.

* * *

After Stephen claimed that history is a nightmare, he asks himself, “What if that nightmare
gave you a back kick?” (U, 2.379). In “Cyclops,” Bloom himself is given a bit of a back kick by
history and historical debate. Indeed, the title of Nietzsche’s second “untimely meditation” is
entirely apposite to the tenor of the conversation between Bloom and the Citizen, “On the uses
and disadvantages of history for life.” “Cyclops” presents a debate as to the nature of the
various colonial discords in Irish history as itself being one more discordant event, as if Irish
history consists of nothing but debates, sometimes violent, about the meaning of Irish history.
And so, discussions of the violence in Irish history wind up repeating and perpetuating
violence. (I am told by colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast that “Cyclops” is still a
contentious episode to teach in Northern Ireland.) This episode’s stylistic disposition is far
from trivial: the episode proceeds through intercalating multiple perspectives and styles. One
level comes from a narrator who is clearly biased: an unnamed and opportunistic dun (or debt
collector) who was at the scene at Barney Kiernan’s and is relaying the past event, several
hours and many pints later.10 In this way, the encounter between Bloom and the Citizen, in
which history is debated, is itself conveyed as an “historical” event and furthermore in such a
way as to blur the distinction between gossip and history (something that Joyce takes to
further extremes in Finnegans Wake). Interpolated within the dun’s pub narrative are a series
of stylized burlesques. These function a little like the headlines in “Aeolus” in that they proffer
ironic commentary on the action. But these burlesques take the form of narratives, which are
in a few cases relatively long. These recapitulate incidents described by the narrator in
language that parodies a variety of literary and journalistic conventions; most, but not all, are
variants of forms found in the Irish Literary Revival.
As with the literary pastiches in “Oxen of the Sun,” the style and content of each burlesque is
fitted to the topic; for example the Dublin Fruit, Vegetable, and Fish Market is described as “a
shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen by mariners who traverse the extensive
sea” (U, 12.87–88). And, after Alf Bergan claims to have just seen the dead and buried Paddy
Dignam alive, there follows a digression in the style of a Theosophy journal (U, 12.338–73).
If Joycean expressive form operates on the local level, it also is pertinent to the overall
multiperspectival structure of this episode. In terms of the Homeric scheme, the Citizen is a
figuration of the Cyclops, the one-eyed giant. By having only the one eye, he cannot reconcile
multiple perspectives through parallax;11 that is, the monoptic Cyclops is blind to perspectival
sight and insight. Because it incorporates shifting perspectives, the structure of the “Cyclops”
episode provides a Weltanschauung (or, rather, Weltanschauungen) that at least one of its
characters cannot register. The plurality of styles redress the characters’ blindness because no
one single style can be adequate.
Clearly the Citizen is bigoted and intolerant of both other people and other perspectives, but
Bloom is also not entirely innocent of bias. As Jed Deppman writes, “What is at issue is not so
much the linguistic expression of historical events, or their objective existence, but rather
their didactic possibilities. For both the Citizen and Bloom, history is all too coherent an
allegory, and they both think they’re reading the same text; for the Citizen however, it is a
tragedy, while for Bloom it is a discouraging textbook.”12 Bloom thinks he can communicate
with the Citizen even though the Citizen has no tolerance and little patience for any
perspective that does not align with his own.
The premises under which each party conducts the debate are divergent. The Citizen and
the others believe that Bloom has won some money on the Gold Cup horse race that day
because of a misconstrued comment Bloom made earlier that day to Bantam Lyons (U, 5.534)
that has gossipaciously spread throughout Dublin (U, 12.1550–57). Failing to buy drinks for all
to celebrate and share his winnings is thus considered by the assembled drinkers something
tantamount to a mortal sin. Bloom is oblivious to this supposition and thus is not fully
cognizant of the rationale that underlies the hostility that meets him.13 A number of other
factors compound Bloom’s hostile reception: he is perceived to be Jewish and thus an outsider
to proper Catholic Irish society. Perhaps worse is that he is not much of a drinker and he acts
as a bit of a know-it-all. When discussing the execution of Joe Brady (one of the Invincibles
involved in the Phoenix Park murders), Joe says that the posthanging erection was a sign of the
“ruling passion strong in death” (U, 12.463); that is, a final sign of Brady’s machismo and
fortitude. Ever rational, Bloom spoils this image by trying to explain that posthanging
tumescence is a perfectly normal phenomenon (U, 12.464–67). The Citizen takes Bloom’s
application of rationalism to Brady as an insult:

– The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and glaring at Bloom.
– Ay, ay, says Joe.
– You don’t grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is . . .
– Sinn Fein! says the citizen. Sinn fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate
before us (U, 12.519–24).

This is the first instance of direct antagonism between Bloom and the Citizen, who, by citing
Thomas Moore’s “Where is the Slave?,” has effectively labeled Bloom an enemy of Ireland.
Bloom has no place within the polis the Citizen proclaims: “Sinn fein amhain,” we ourselves
alone.14 Bloom can be no citizen. For the Citizen, Ireland should be more than politically
independent and autonomous and be a country defined purely by and for its native inhabitants
without reference or recourse to the world beyond its shores. The Citizen construes the Irish
as pure, whereas Bloom is impure and hybrid, “Half and half . . . A fellow that’s neither fish
nor flesh” (U, 12.1055–56). Bloom’s rationalism exiles him from the nation being defined and
defended on Little Britain Street (certainly an ironic address for the Citizen to express his
Republicanism).
If the Citizen’s argumentative position is informed by a Nationalist ideology, Bloom’s
rationalism is also biased by his faith in science. At least one difference is that Bloom does not
incline toward violence. Bloom has eminent faith in the explanatory powers of science; as he
states in “Circe,” “Every phenomenon has a natural cause” (U, 15.2795–96), that is, every
phenomenon is always potentially explicable. These points are further articulated in the
Thomas Huxley inset in “Oxen of the Sun”: “Science, it cannot be too often repeated, deals
with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the street has to face
hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can. There may be, it is
true, some questions which science cannot answer—at present” (U, 14.1226–30). However,
hardheaded facts can be, and indeed are, blinked. For Nietzsche, the sciences, for all they
have accomplished (and in many ways he appreciates these accomplishments) are but one of
the shadows of God that need to be vanquished. In The Gay Science he suggests that the death
of God characterizes the contemporary epoch and can be taken to mark a liberation from an
ancient régime of piety and obeisance (GS, §343). However, this is rebuffed in the next section,
which concerns science and bears the title “Here Too, We Are Still Pious”: “We see that
science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science ‘without presuppositions’” (GS, §344).
Science is not purely a dispassionate inquiry or research that proceeds by testing its
hypotheses either through verification or falsification, rather, science depends upon its own
kind of faith, specifically a faith in a “will to truth,” the idea that “nothing is needed more than
truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value” (GS, §344). For
Nietzsche, science is but one possible perspective, a useful and a valuable one to be sure, but
not the only perspective. Nietzsche argues that there is “still a metaphysical faith upon which
our faith in science rests” (GS, §344); that is, its conceptual foundation or legitimation is not
far different from religion’s.15 Science is one more of God’s unvanquished shadows; as
Nietzsche asks “what if . . . God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie” (GS, §344).
Bloom’s faith in science rests upon a foundation of presupposition and faith in a manner
structurally analogous to the Citizen’s own cyclopean vision.
An important qualification is that faith in science manifests differently than faith in religion
and redounds to the issue of utility. Faith in science can be rewarded with practical
accessories. “Science—the transformation of nature into concepts for the purpose of mastering
nature—belongs under the rubric ‘means’” (WP, §610). Indeed, Bloom’s faith in science extends
beyond awe at the cosmos he imperfectly understands, since he frequently plots and plans how
he might exploit the natural world for his own gain, such as his plan to build a hydroelectric
plant at Poulaphouca or Powerscourt (U, 17.1710–14). Faith in science translates the world
into a resource for exploitation. This does not belie the advantages such exploitation affords,
but it does suggest that science is not a limitless or benign force.16 “It is an illusion that
something is known when we possess a mathematical formula for an event; it is only
designated, described; nothing more!” (WP, §628). The will to truth of science has its
advantages, but as with all manners of exploitation, these come at the price of deception.
The drink-fueled debates in “Cyclops” counterpoint the sober Loyalist history pronounced by
Deasy in “Nestor.” While the political sympathies and allegiances of the Citizen and Deasy are
mostly in opposition, they both employ a selective and distorting view of their history in order
to buttress their ideologies. In this way, historiography is a science in that it treats historical
events as exploitable resources. Furthermore, besides a shared anti-Semitism, both the Citizen
and Deasy agree that the immediate cause of English involvement in Ireland was Devorghil’s
infidelity.17 Nationalist and Loyalist thus both agree on misogyny and prejudice against what is
other or hybrid.
The question of Bloom’s hybridity is neatly formulated in Ned Lambert’s question, “Is he a
jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the hell is he?” (U, 12.1631–32). The
answer to this question is not straightforward because in many ways Bloom would not be
considered Jewish: he fails to observe kosher cuisine (U, 4.46, 17.1897, et passim), he is
uncircumcised (U, 13.979–80), his mother was not Jewish (U, 17.536), he had been baptized
twice, first as a Protestant and then as a Catholic preparatory to marrying Molly (U, 17.542–
47)18, and his father, while born Jewish, had been converted first by Protestants and then by
Catholics (U, 8.1071–74, 15.2455–58, 17.1637–40). However, despite these factors, in many
ways, although not absolutely and unequivocally, Bloom identifies himself as being Jewish.
When confronted by the Citizen’s anti-Semitism, he proclaims, “Christ was a jew like me” (U,
12.1808–9). His feelings toward his Judaism are marked by both nostalgia and regret, such as
when he remembers his father reading from his Hagadah book (U, 7.206–11). Perhaps the
most relevant illustration of Bloom’s ambiguous Jewishness comes when Molly remembers
Bloom’s habit of kissing the hall-door (U, 18.1406). It is Jewish custom to kiss the mezuzah—a
small, ornate rectangular box containing a parchment of scripture, affixed to the front door—
when entering or leaving a house. In “Nausicaa,” Bloom confused the mezuzah with the
tephilim, which are leather boxes containing scripture that are worn during prayer (U,
13.1157–58). Bloom’s act of kissing the mezuzahless door is an habitual obeisance to an absent
signifier.
Marilyn Reizbaum characterizes Bloom as culturally Jewish even if he remains (mostly)
unobservant religiously.19 Indeed, Bloom’s eschewal of religious practice is perfectly
consistent with a variety of Jewishness. However, the type of secular Jew who nonetheless
identifies as a Jew, while typical to early twentieth-century Trieste, was not at all common in
Dublin. The Jewish community in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century was primarily of
Lithuanian origin and was largely religiously observant. In contrast, the Jewish community in
Trieste at this time was primarily of Hungarian descent and was far less orthodox.20
With the character of Leopold Bloom, Joyce has, in effect, imported a Triestine Jew into
Dublin. Indeed, the only commercial establishment in Ulysses that did not exist in Dublin in
1904 is Dlugacz’s “porkbutcher” (U, 4.165) on Dorset Street, which is where Bloom sees an
advert for “Agendath Netaim,” a Zionist plantation in Palestine (U, 4.191–92).21 Apparently,
Dlugacz is a nonobservant Jew who espouses Zionist causes. He is named after one of Joyce’s
Triestine students, Moses Feuerstein Dlugacz, an advocate of Jewish rights and Zionist
causes.22
Bloom’s hybrid religious status complements his nature as an “everyman.”23 His (social,
religious, national) identity is not fixed and unequivocal but rather inhabits a range. Every man
is neither fish nor flesh, every man is sui generis. Of course, not every character in Ulysses
enjoys (or endures) the same degree of lavish individual detail as Bloom. Ulysses’s
multiperspectivalism has its limits.24 On the other hand, this also indicates the inherent
limitations of any possible perspective, even a combinatory multiperspectivalism.
The kind of purity that the Citizen proclaims is illusory, instead there are relative degrees of
hybridity. Indeed, even Bloom’s gender is not unambiguous. During a medical examination in
the Messianic scene in “Circe,” Dr. Dixon calls Bloom “a finished example of the new womanly
man” (U, 15.1798–99). The epithet “womanly man” was coined by the anti-Semitic and
misogynistic author Otto Weininger in his book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character,
1903; translated into English in 1906). Weininger asserted outright that the religion of
“Judaism is saturated with femininity,”25 with the result that Jewish males are ineffectual and
effeminate, and that “the most manly Jew is more feminine than the least manly Aryan.”26
Weininger goes beyond simply condemning Jewish men for being overly feminine. He warned
that Jewish tendencies might contaminate Christian male virility: “I think of [Jewishness] as a
tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but
which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion only amongst Jews.”27 His book,
then, is in large part a plea to the pure Aryan peoples to reject corruption by the Jews.
As if to prove his point about Jewish self-hatred, Weininger himself was part Jewish and he
shot himself shortly after the publication of his book. Weininger’s book was widely circulated
in Europe and Joyce was familiar with it.28 Neil R. Davison writes that “Weininger’s
conclusions parallel much 19th Century discourse about both Jews and women.”29
Bloom’s attitudes toward his Jewishness are complex. He feels somewhat dispossessed of his
Jewish heritage, although some of that dispossession was voluntary. Like Weininger himself,
but to much less of a degree, Bloom is filled with self-deprecation. Weininger writes that Jews,
like women, do not believe in themselves. But whereas women believe in others, such as their
husbands and children, “the Jew believes in nothing, within him or without him. His want of
desire for permanent landed property and his attachment to movable goods are more than
symbolic.”30 Davison claims that Bloom inverts Weininger’s position:

The implication throughout Ulysses is that Bloom’s self-deprecation comes not from a “Jewish nature,”
but from a lack of a strong, unified identity, which pivots on his denial of his own Jewish identity. But
while the experience of June 16 invests him with a new strength of conviction about his “Jewishness,”
which in turn provokes in him an entirely new—and newly assertive—self acceptance, his exilic,
pacifistic position disallows him to ever rediscover Zionism as a viable alternative.31

In other words, Bloom’s “womanliness” (exaggerated in the scene in which he is called a

“womanly man” with his gynaecological examination) is a manifestation of his empathy and his
strength, rather than his “weakness” as Weininger would assert. Indeed, Molly admits that her
attraction to Bloom stems from the fact that “he understood or felt what a woman is” (U,
18.1578–79).32 Hybridity is a strength precisely because it is multifarious. In a notebook
contemporaneous with the composition of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote, “With
respect to Aryan and Semitic. Where races are mixed, the source of great culture.”33 The
Citizen, of course, resists hybridization and, furthermore, remains oblivious as to how his own
identity as a staunch Irishman is not alien to hybridity. In terms of his attempts to force his
historical understanding upon others, the Citizen exemplifies Nietzsche’s claim, made through
a reference to Odysseus, that “the great sweep of life has actually always shown itself to be on
the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi” (GS, §344). In distinction, multifarious Bloom is a
reasonably scrupulous polutropos.
The Citizen is based on Michael Cusack, the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA),
which advocated the playing of Irish sports as opposed to English ones, or “shoneen games”
(U, 12.899).34 One irony of the GAA is that teams are organized by county, which is, of course,
a specifically English municipal structure. The revival of Irish games is thus effected through
the medium of the colonizer. Hybridity is inevitable even though the Citizen refuses to
acknowledge it. At one point he condemns Bloom as a descendent of an immigrant to
Hibernian shores: “Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert
us . . . after allowing things like that to contaminate our shores” (U, 12.1671–72). Evidently,
the Citizen misses the point that Saint Patrick was himself an immigrant, of sorts, who
contaminated by conversion. Writing against the more xenophobic elements of the Gaelic
League, Joyce argued in his 1907 lecture “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages”:

Our civilization is an immense woven fabric in which very different elements are mixed, in which Nordic
rapacity is reconciled to Roman law and new Bourgeois conventions to the remains of a Syriac religion.
In such a fabric, it is pointless searching for a thread that has remained pure, virgin and uninfluenced
by other threads nearby. What race or language (if we except those few which a humorous will seems to
have preserved in ice, such as the people of Iceland) can nowadays claim to be pure? No race has less
right to make such a boast than the one presently inhabiting Ireland (OCPW, 118).

In effect, Joyce’s conception of national identity is one of evolving, mingling hybridities.

Likewise, Nietzsche agues against any notion of national purity. In Ecce Homo he boasts of his
Polish ancestry: “I have many racial instincts in my body from that source” (EH, 225). His
attitudes toward Germany and the Germans are somewhat mixed and generally none too
positive (e.g., “German profundity is often merely a hard and sluggish ‘digestion’” [BGE, §244];
a topic that will be further discussed in chapter 6), but in Beyond Good and Evil he makes a
statement apropos Germany that parallels Joyce’s above statement about Ireland: “The
German soul is above all manifold, of diverse origins, more put together and superimposed
than actually built” (BGE, §244). National character is the product of contingency and
admixture; in Heideggerian patois, national character is guilty. Of course, such hybridity
would also characterize the English, as Joyce indicates in “Oxen of the Sun” by tracing the
evolution of English prose style through Latin and Saxon antecedents. Nietzsche figures
hybridity in idea of the wanderer, the subject of the last section of the first part of Human, All
Too Human: “He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other
than a wanderer on the earth—though not as a traveller to a final destination: for the
destination does not exist” (HATH, §638). The rootlessness of wandering exile, burdensome as
that can be, allows for possibilities of growth that might otherwise be stifled in a fixed home
and identity. Bloom’s own awkward notion of nation—when pressed to provide one—is “the
same people living in the same place” (U, 12.1422–23), which he then qualifies to include, “Or
also living in different places” (U, 12.1428). Placelessness can also be a nation. And Bloom’s
role as the Wandering Jew traverses through multiple registers of language, nationality, and
religion as he travels, “passing from land to land, among people, amid events” (U, 17.2015–16).
Before returning to “Cyclops,” a few points must be made about the rapport of Nietzsche’s
texts with anti-Semitic writers such as Weininger. In Geschlecht und Charakter, Weininger
speaks quite highly of Nietzsche, although he (somewhat bizarrely, considering his own
argument) does fault him for weakening some of his arguments by a propensity to shock. In
the first half of the twentieth century, elements of Nietzsche’s works were appropriated by
anti-Semitic factions, starting with his sister and culminating with Hitler and the National
Socialists’ championing of their version of the Übermensch.35 The misappropriation of
Nietzsche by anti-Semitic factions is symptomatic of the very problem Nietzsche identifies and
condemns. One of the few places where Nietzsche’s writings are not as subtle and nuanced as
his anti-Semitic admirers allow is where he condemns anti-Semitism. In late 1887, disgusted
with his sister’s anti-Semitic coterie, he wrote to her, “It is a matter of honor to me to be
absolutely clean and unequivocal regarding anti-Semitism, namely opposed as I am in my
writings.”36 Although Nietzsche claimed to be absolutely unequivocal about being an anti-anti-
Semite, precisely because he deploys a number of different perspectives, taken in isolation
some of his comments can be, without much imagination, construed as anti-Semitic. Perhaps
the most neutral account he offers apropos Judaism comes in a lengthy section entitled “Of the
People of Israel” in Daybreak:

They have known how to create for themselves a feeling of power and of eternal revenge out of the very
occupations left to them (or to which they were left); one has to say in extenuation even of their usury
that without this occasional pleasant and useful torturing of those who despised them it would have
been difficult for them to have preserved their own self-respect for so long. At the same time, however,
their revenge does not easily go too far: for they all possess the liberality, including liberality of soul, to
which frequent changes of residence, of climate, of the customs of one’s neighbours and oppressors
educates men; they possess by far the greatest experience of human society, and even in their passions
they practise the caution taught by this experience (Day, §205).

Here Nietzsche outlines what he will develop in Beyond Good and Evil and (especially) in The
Genealogy of Morals as the slave revolt. In the slave revolt of morality, motivated by a
ressentiment against the sovereignty of master morality, those not of the noble caste
reinterpret morality by transforming the dichotomy of good and bad into good and evil,
thereby transvaluing notions of the good (GM, I§10). In both the Genealogy and Beyond Good
and Evil Nietzsche claims that this slave revolt of morality originated with the Jewish people as
their revenge against their oppression (BGE, §195). However, while the slave revolt originated
with the Jews, Nietzsche finds its more pernicious effects elsewhere and, in particular, in
Christianity. Indeed, in the above passage from Daybreak, he characterizes the revenge as a
necessary palliative for oppression and furthermore as something that is tempered by an
empathy that itself emerged from the Jewish people’s multifarious experiences.
In the third essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche describes what he calls “ascetic idealism” as a
descendent of the slave revolt.

The idea at issue here is the valuation the ascetic priest places on our life: he juxtaposes it (along with
what pertains to it: “nature,” “world,” the whole sphere of becoming and transitoriness) with a quite
different mode of existence which it opposes and excludes, unless it turn against itself, deny itself: in
that case, the case of ascetic life, life counts as a bridge to that other mode of existence. The ascetic
treats life as a wrong road on which one must finally walk back to the point where it begins, or as a
mistake that is put right by deeds—that we ought to put right: for he demands that one must go along
with him; where he can he compels acceptance of his evaluation of existence (GM, III§11).

Moral asceticism is the will to power against itself: the will wills against its inclination to thrive
and is thus “life-inimical” (GM, III§17). For the ascetic, life is something to be endured rather
than enjoyed. It is important to note that Nietzsche is not against all forms of asceticism: there
would be a nonmoral asceticism that is just as ascetic, the difference being that nonmoral
asceticism does not present its asceticism as an ideal that should be followed en masse.
Asceticism, as such, is thus not incompatible with the experiment. Nietzsche writes that “every
spirit has its own sound and loves its own sound” (GM, III§8), and so, for some cases,
asceticism might prove to be “the most appropriate and natural conditions of their best
existence, their fairest fruitfulness” (GM, III§8).37
The problem comes when that asceticism (and the ressentiment that occasioned it) is
hypostasized, when it becomes a hypostatic ideal. This is due to a paradox inherent to the will
to power. If the will to power is the will to thrive, then the will to suppress the will to power is
also a manifestation of the will to power in that it too aims to thrive: “the ascetic ideal springs
from the protective instinct of a degenerating life” (GM, III§13). What the ascetic ideal has in
common with other modes of the will to power is self-preservation, even as the self that it
preserves is self-destruction. Ascetic idealism is thus, perversely, the expression of a
ressentiment against the will to power as the will to power.
For the ascetic ideal to thrive, it needs priests as its agents of propagation, those who
empower themselves by interpreting weakness as a virtue. The priest harnesses ressentiment
for his own ends:

“I suffer: someone must be to blame for it”—thus thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the
ascetic priest, tells him: “Quite so, my sheep! someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this
someone, you alone are to blame for it—you alone are to blame for yourself!”—This is brazen and false
enough: but one thing at least is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered (GM, III§15).

The ascetic priest thus translates or reinterprets suffering not as the result of unfulfilled
ambition but rather as the result of guilt. The ascetic priest transforms ressentiment into the
functional equivalent of hypostasis and presents itself as a kind of spiritual medicine.38 This is
why Stephen’s dour “priest of the eternal imagination” is, at least, not an ascetic priest:
Stephen does not pretend to will away suffering by propounding a moral diagnosis.
In Nietzsche’s genealogy of the slave revolt, while the Jews originated the slave revolt, their
own ressentiment, as he argued in Daybreak, is tempered by empathy. For the Jews, their
ressentiment has neither hypostasized nor metastasized. In distinction, according to
Nietzsche, anti-Semitism embodies the worst of humanity’s hypostasizing tendency. Anti-
Semitism is egoism inflated to racism. As he writes in The Genealogy of Morals, ressentiment
“blooms best today among anarchists and anti-Semites” (GM, II§11). In this, both Deasy and
the Citizen would be perfectly exemplary in their misreadings and misapplications of historical
epiphenomena to justify their respective (and, as a Unionist and a Nationalist, their mutually
antagonistic) ideals. Like Nietzsche, Stephen suggests how anti-Semitism itself embodies the
very traits it projects upon the Jewish people when he says, in “Scylla,” “Jews, whom christians
tax with avarice” (U, 9.783).
Joyce famously told his friend Carlo Linati that Ulysses is “l’epopea di due razze (Israele–
Irlanda) [the epic of two races (Israel–Ireland)]” (SL, 270). Joyce was hardly alone in
comparing the plight of the Irish with that of the Jews; even an anti-Semite like Arthur Griffith
made such comparisons.39 And John Taylor’s speech advocating the revival of the Irish
language, which is discussed in “Aeolus,” explicitly equates the Irish with Zionism (U, 7.845–
69). Even the Citizen makes such a point, albeit inadvertently, when he describes the diaspora
forced upon the Irish by the cruelty of their British masters: “But those that came to the land
of the free remember the land of bondage” (U, 12.1372–73). This suggests the Israelites’
persecution in Egypt as related in Exodus 13:3 “Remember this day, in which ye came out of
Egypt, out of the house of bondage” and Exodus 20:2 “I am the Lord thy God, which have
brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” Taylor had used this line
in his speech (U, 7.865) and earlier in “Aeolus” Bloom had miscited it.40
An additional point of analogy between the Irish and the Jews involves slave morality and
ressentiment. The Citizen—like the Jews in Nietzsche’s account in Daybreak—indulges in “this
occasional pleasant and useful torturing of those who despised them [and without which] it
would have been difficult for them to have preserved their own self-respect for so long” (Day,
§205). The difference is that, in Joyce’s presentation in “Cyclops,” the Irish are untemepered
by the empathy of the Jews and so their ressentiment is monological, bereft of perspective,
cyclopean.
Despite his fondness for drink, the Citizen exhibits some of the tendencies of an ascetic
priest. His vision of history is effectively one of betrayal: Ireland has been victimized and
stymied for centuries by its perfidious neighbor. As he says, “Any civilisation they have they
stole from us” (U, 12.1200). As the dun-narrator has it, the history of Irish subjugation is a
well-worn tirade for the Citizen, “he starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old
guard and the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of ninetyeight” (U, 12.480–81). In
effect, his view of Irish history reprises the motif of the song “The Croppy Boy,” which served
as a set-piece in “Sirens”; Kernan, with typical pretension, called this song “Our native Doric”
(U, 11.991). Of course, in Ireland (or anywhere outside ancient Greece for that matter) Doric is
not the native Doric. The pro-British Kernan’s comment is apposite the Citizen, since the
Hibernian idiom is one of loss, betrayal, and victimization. “The Croppy Boy” tells the poor,
bathos-soaked story of cropped-hair Wexford rebel of 1798 who is treacherously slain by a
Loyalist officer disguised as a priest. Like the Croppy Boy, for the Citizen, Ireland has been
perpetually betrayed by the English ever since the Saxon adulteration of Ireland that resulted
from Devorghil’s adultery. However, within “Sirens” that song is overdetermined in that it
resonates with both Bloom and Stephen: like Bloom, the Croppy Boy leaves behind no male
heir (U, 11.1064–68) and like Stephen, the Croppy Boy did not pray for his mother on her
deathbed (U, 11.1042–43). The song means more than just betrayal: our Doric is hybridized in
that its resonances exceed the nationalist context.
On the other hand, the Citizen resists any hybridization of Ireland. For instance, he laments
the English names listed in the births and deaths section of the, as he calls it, “Irish all for
Ireland Independent” (U, 12.222). Furthermore, the only concession the Citizen allows Bloom
in his argument about the English contribution to “moderation and botheration and their
colonies and their civilisation” (U, 12.1195–96) is “their syphilisation” (U, 12.1197), which is
actually an astute pre-postcolonial criticism of the infecting spread of cultural value.41 This
also echoes the claim made in Gaelic League and Sinn Féin propaganda at the time that the
British soldiers stationed in Ireland helped spread venereal disease. Dublin’s garrison
consistently was among the top five most afflicted in all of the United Kingdom. For example,
in 1880, more than one-third of the 4,537 men stationed in Dublin were treated for venereal
disease, including 940 cases of syphilis.42
In his debate with Bloom, the Citizen adamantly insists upon the suffering of the Irish and
refuses to tolerate any counterexample. On the other hand, at least initially, Bloom prefers to
proceed by generalization and sees oppression as general worldwide and not simply just over
Ireland. “But, says Bloom, isn’t discipline the same everywhere. I mean wouldn’t it be the same
here if you put force against force . . . We’ll put force against force, says the citizen” (U,
12.1360–64). It is only under pressure from the Citizen that Bloom identifies himself as one of
the persecuted (U, 12.1470–72) and then he makes his final plea:

– But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and
hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
– What? says Alf.
– Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred (U, 12.1481–85).

In proposing love—which may or may not be the word known to all men—Bloom advocates a
mode of life apart from the Citizen’s life-inimical ressentiment. Like Nietzsche (in this one
aspect and really few others, except for the moustache), Bloom advocates life above all else,
life in all its multifarious modalities: “Every naturalism in morality—that is, every healthy
morality—is dominated by an instinct of life” (TI, V§4). Ressentiment may be inevitable, but it
can be tempered. But Bloom has not made his argument eloquently and is mocked by both the
Citizen and the narrative decorum, which produces a mawkish elaboration of how “love loves
to love love” (U, 12.1493). Of course, Bloom’s “victory” over the Citizen is not even symbolic as
he is left to run away, being pursued by both Garryowen and a biscuit box.

* * *

In “Eumaeus,” Bloom gets a second chance to debate history with his conversation with
Stephen, a mercifully less vitriolic and less prejudiced interlocutor. But, from Stephen’s
perspective he finds himself trapped again in a conversation with an older gentleman about
the thorny matter of Irish national identity. Like Deasy, Bloom tries to convey to Stephen what
it means to be Irish. And, as with Deasy, Bloom’s suasion proves to be less than efficacious.
After Skin-the-Goat catalogues a well-worn list of English misdeeds in Ireland, the narrator
announces that “their conversation accordingly became general and all agreed that that was a
fact” (U, 16.993–95). The facticity of history thus becomes rhetoric, that which is subject to
persuasion and accord. Those assembled apparently let Skin-the-Goat get away with a
statement regarding the truth of the mad parade of history. Skin-the-Goat continues by arguing
that there is no future in England’s dreaming and concludes an encomium to Ireland and with
an entreaty that all Irishmen “stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for
Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her sons” (U, 16.1007–9). The
narrator then adds: “Silence all round marked the termination of his finale. The impervious
navigator heard these lurid tidings, undismayed. /—Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that
rough diamond palpably a bit peeved in response to the foregoing truism” (U, 16.1010–13).
Apparently, Skin-the-Goat’s patriotic finale has not, in point of fact, terminated. The truism is
not the final word and the matter of nationalism is imperfect, which is to say still ongoing.
In any case, Skin-the-Goat’s peroration prompts Bloom to consider the enmity between
Ireland and England. While no Unionist, Bloom is eminently pragmatic and is not completely
persuaded by the hot-blooded condemnation of English rule. He finds it “highly advisable in
the interim to try to make the most of both countries even though poles apart” (U, 16.1039–
40). This particular formulation of the rapport between these islands recalls an earlier
characterization of Bloom and Stephen: “the views of the pair, poles apart as they
were . . . clashed” (U: 16.774–76). There is a clash, or at least mismatch, between Bloom and
Stephen just as there is between Ireland and England. Indeed, the argument of this episode
involves mismatched accord and lack of resolution, a theme that is matched by the
awkwardness of its style. As Christine O’Neill writes, “Eumaeus is dominated not so much by
Bloom’s voice as by a Bloomian voice, an exaggerated and partly distorted writing effort of the
type Bloom would admire and aspire to if he were yielding the pen. It is a voice which strives
for an elevated style; the driving desire is to please and impress Stephen.”43 The grammatical
irregularities and stylistic infelicities of this episode thus indicate and implicate more
substantive patterns of mismatch, such as those between Bloom and Stephen and between
Ireland and Britain.
Thoughts of conflict bring into Bloom’s mind thoughts of reconciliation, even if the potential
reconciliation is phrased awkwardly. And, of course, thinking about histories of discord and
vengeance also brings into Bloom’s mind suggestions of potential reprisal against Boylan, with
his thoughts about “those love vendettas of the south” (U, 16.1061). Ultimately, his thoughts
about various troubles and strife recalls to him the enmity leveled against him by the Citizen,
which he recapitulates to Stephen:

He took umbrage at something or other, that muchinjured but on the whole eventempered person
declared, I let slip. He called me a jew and in a heated fashion offensively. So I without deviating from
plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in
reality I’m not. That was one for him. A soft answer turns away wrath. He hadn’t a word to say for
himself as everyone saw. Am I not right? (U, 16.1081–87)

This passage evinces a fairly common trait of Eumaean prose: ambiguous referents occasion
various possible meanings. Now, Bloom’s account transforms the debate about history that he
had had with the Citizen into a historical account, which is something that had already
happened within the narrational context of the “Cyclops” episode, alternating, as it did,
between the dun’s account and the parodically inflated intrusions. Furthermore, Bloom’s mini-
rendition of the scene is just as partial and biased and inaccurate as the dun’s. The Citizen did,
in point of fact, have more than a few words, not to mention a Jacob’s biscuit tin, in riposte to
Bloom after his assertion that “Christ was a jew like me” (U, 12.1808–9). Whatever the moral
of “Cyclops” may be, it is most certainly not “a soft answer turns away wrath.” Bloom’s
recourse to historical narrative is thus as selective and biased and self-serving as Deasy’s.
A further inaccuracy in Bloom’s account comes in his statement that “in reality” he is not
Jewish. While technically accurate, since Bloom’s mother was a gentile, this claim lacks more
than some nuance, especially considering Bloom’s own Agenbite of inwit about his religious
patrimony. Stephen’s response, as indicated in the text, restores some nuance to Bloom’s
religious filiation: “Ex quibus, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent, their two or four
eyes conversing, Christus or Bloom his name is or after all any other, secondum carnem” (U,
16.1091–93). There are several orders of reconfiguration and recalibration at work in
Stephen’s line. He is quoting, partially, Romans 9:5 from the Vulgate: ex quibus est Christus
secundum carnem, “and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.” And so, it seems,
at first blush, that Stephen is supporting Bloom’s thesis that Christ was Jewish. However,
complicating matters, in the biblical context of this passage Paul is explaining his desire to
convert Jews to Christianity. And so, Stephen’s mumbled interpolation of Bloom’s name after
Christus implies not just that Bloom, like Christ, is Jewish, but also that he is, or has been,
subject to conversion of his faith. Furthermore, Stephen’s interjection of Bloom’s name is a
perfect example of how possible referents multiply ambiguously within the convolute Eumaean
style.
Bloom is, of course, not without nuance himself as he tries to imagine the perspectives of
others. Although he misses the irony in Stephen’s interjection, he continues by noting that
“you must look at both sides of the question . . . It’s all very fine to boast of mutual superiority
but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form” (U,
16.1094–1100). Effectively, Bloom is here replaying his argument with the Citizen that “it’s no
use . . . Force, hatred, history, all that” (U, 12.1481), even as he tries to acknowledge the
Citizen’s point of view. In a sense, history is a nightmare for Bloom as well. Bloom is trying to
phrase a possible reconciliation but, of course, his inept phrasing works at cross-purposes. His
Eumaean tautology “mutual superiority” neatly expresses the national question of Ireland
apropos England, both sides are equal precisely in that they each profess superiority over the
other.
Stephen’s reply again adds some nuance to Bloom’s orthodox, utopian liberalism:
“Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes’ war . . . between Skinner’s alley and
Ormond market” (U, 16.1104–5). There are various layers of historical consciousness that
inform Stephen’s remark. Indeed, it is not exactly clear what, if anything, Stephen is referring
to because the references are multiple and intertwined. He flippantly alludes to both the Seven
Weeks’ War of 1866 between Prussia and Austria and the pan-European Seven Years’ War of
the mid-eighteenth century, both key events in the evolution of the European nation-state. The
more local resonance would be to various internecine outbursts of violence perpetrated in
Dublin at various times, such as the Liberty Boys, south-side weavers, who would often attack
the Ormond Boys, north-side butchers, in the eighteenth century.44
However, there is at least one other allusion at work here. Barrack Bridge, the second bridge
to span the Liffey, was first built in 1674 and wound up being a competitor to a local ferry
company and so a number of apprentices at that firm attempted to destroy it. Twenty-one of
these would-be saboteurs were captured and upon their transfer from the Castle to the
Bridewell a rescue was attempted. In the ensuing mêlée, four of the apprentices were killed,
and from that time on the bridge was called “Bloody Bridge,” with the word “bloody” being
used in both its senses.45 And so the bridge’s name does not commemorate some Republican
hero, but rather a commercial squabble. Presumably Bloom is cognizant of this allusion, since
he adds to Stephen’s remark that “all those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring
up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed
to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money
question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when
to stop” (U, 16.1111–15). Of course, this single, cumbrous sentence is itself an example of
someone not knowing when to stop. In any case, Bloom’s quasi-Marxian analysis of history is
quite on-target here, the money question is one that forms and informs questions of history
and nation. This question of the money question is as apposite to the bad blood at Barney
Kiernan’s as it is to the bad blood at Bloody Bridge.
The “Memorable bloody bridge battle” is already a panoply of different recalled battles,
different contestations waged at the same site. Indeed, Stephen’s formulation of the
“Memorable bloody bridge battle” itself recalls the tautological headline in “Aeolus,”
“MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED” (U, 7.358). History, almost by definition, is precisely
that which can be recalled. But, recollection of past polemics does not in and of itself reconcile
those polemics; indeed, as the trajectory of the nomenclature of Dublin bridges shows, the
polemic is merely replayed and restaged as we had with the polemical debates concerning
history in “Cyclops.” As Bloom remarks to Stephen’s interjection, it is all a “hocuspocus of
conflicting evidence” (U, 16.1109–10). In some senses this characterization is perfectly
apposite to Stephen’s point, but in others it misses it entirely, since all the evidence Stephen
has alluded to points in the same direction.
In any case, by recognizing Stephen’s allusions to commercial battles, Bloom is picking up at
least the basics of what he is saying, but is responding only in generalities, much like Skin-the-
Goat’s earlier paean to Ireland and also much like his own argumentative stance in “Cyclops.”
However, if Skin-the-Goat’s concerns were strictly local, Bloom’s are global: he wants to
generalize Stephen’s comment about that Bloody Bridge battle. Upon hearing Stephen’s
remark, he ponders, “the whole world was full of that sort of thing” (U, 16.1107 8).46 In this
way, the tenor of their conversation exemplifies their respective temperaments, the artistic and
the scientific (U, 17.560). Stephen talks about specifics, Bloom generalities. This is also Joyce’s
hint to his readers as to how to read Ulysses: pay attention to both the minute, specific detail,
the “local color” as it were, as well as to the larger, general patterns of “all kinds of words
changing colour” (U, 16.1143). Ulysses is a book for both close reading and grand statements
(much like this one).
Stephen’s responses to Bloom may be somewhat flippant, but they do show that he is
conversing with him in a somewhat more engaged manner than he had with Deasy. While their
temperaments clash, there is a connection of sorts, between them: “Though they didn’t see eye
to eye in everything a certain analogy there somehow was as if both their minds were
travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought” (U, 16.1579–81).
Bloom, as the rational type, does attempt to negotiate his way through the “hocuspocus of
conflicting evidence” that Stephen presents in order to arrive at some kind of truth. If his
empirical rationalism had held little sway with his fractious conationals at Barney Kiernan’s,
he nonetheless maintains the same faith in rationalism with Stephen. As he tells Stephen,
“History, would you be surprised to learn, proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the
inquisition hounded the jews out” (U, 16.1120–22). Bloom holds out the possibility that such a
truth exists through the murk of language and history. As he recalls later with the incident of
Parnell and the hat, “as a matter of strict history, Bloom was the man who picked it up” (U,
16.1514–15).47 For Bloom, history is perfect, which is to say, despite the hocus-pocus of
contradiction, history allows for the possibility of the strict and decisive and probative. In
general, Bloom shares this historical attitude with Deasy. But, for Bloom, unlike Deasy, the
march of history is not a stately, dogmatic teleology. Bloom tends toward the pragmatic:
lessons can be learned from history and these lessons can be used to improve the lot of
humanity. In this specific case, Bloom is trying to prove to Stephen that Jews are not the cause
of national inanition—as Deasy and Weininger claim—and that they can be good and loyal
citizens.

I’m, he resumed with dramatic force, as good an Irishman as that rude person I told you about at the
outset and I want to see everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable
tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the neighbourhood of £300 per annum.
That’s the vital issue at stake and it’s feasible and would be provocative of friendlier intercourse
between man and man. At least that’s my idea for what it’s worth. I call that patriotism. Ubi patria, as
we learned a smattering of in our classical days in Alma mater, vita bene. Where you can live well, the
sense is, if you work (U, 16.1131–40).

This sounds all well and good—that is, if you discount the awkward syntax—and is reminiscent
of some of Bloom’s more politic proposals during the Messianic scene in “Circe” (see U,
15.1684–93). The logic of Bloom’s patriotism is encapsulated by his use of a Latin proverb ubi
patria vita bene, “where my country is, life is good.” He learned this, as he says, in school, his
alma mater, or his nourishing mother. From the mother he learns about the nature of
patrimony. But, of course, he has misremembered what he had learned, since the proverb is
actually ubi bene, ibi patria, “where it is well with me, there is my country.” This kind of
mercenary statement is perfectly apposite to the stereotype of the usurious, manipulative Jew,
the stereotype to which Deasy subscribes and which Bloom is presently and patiently
attempting to refute. Bloom has thus, inadvertently, repurposed, redirected, and transvalued
the stereotype.
Ultimately Bloom’s emphasis on the right to work is not entirely different from what Skin-
the-Goat had proclaimed earlier: “work for Ireland and live for Ireland” (U, 16.1007–8). For
Skin-the-Goat the connection to the homeland is metaphysical, whereas for Bloom it is largely
economic and pragmatic (in a Millsian sense), but nevertheless, Bloom, in repudiating and
countering Skin-the-Goat’s sentimental patriotism winds up reduplicating it, albeit in a
different register. In this way, the critique repeats and enshrines its purported antithesis.
Stephen, unsurprisingly, will have none of Bloom’s pragmatic economics and says, “Count
me out, meaning work” (U, 16.1148). Bloom has laid himself on the line here: he has
articulated, as clearly as he can, his view of social utopianism, which he imagines would be
received favorably by an educated young man such as Stephen, as opposed to the ruder gentry
of Dublin society, such as the Citizen. And, in response, Stephen patently dismisses Bloom’s
groovy utopia, or at the very least he dismisses himself from it. As he was with Deasy, Stephen
is indifferent to utopian ideals, whatever the variety.
Bloom’s discombobulation at Stephen’s curt dismissal is expressed in one of the more
humorous instances of mismatched Eumaean prose:

The eyes were surprised at this observation because as he, the person who owned them pro tem.
observed or rather his voice speaking did, all must work, have to, together (U, 16.1149–51).

The Latinate legal term “pro tem” here reprises the “pro rata” from Bloom’s previous
disquisition. The attempt to metonymize Bloom into eyes and a voice results in more than a
little confusion. In effect, the metonymically constituent parts of Bloom do not work together
in this passage, thereby counterbalancing the expressed sentiment that all must work
together. Bloom’s plea for unity devolves into catachresis.
Bloom tries to emend himself, or rather emend his statement, by proposing that the work
Stephen performs need not be of the manual kind: “You both belong to Ireland, the brain and
the brawn. Each is equally important” (U, 16.1158–59). It is here where Stephen interjects
what is perhaps his ultimate reconfiguration of the national net he needs to fly by:

– You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to
the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short.
– I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.
– But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me (U,
16.1160–65).

Stephen is, in effect, here saying ubi bene, ibi patria, but not exactly. Rather than allow himself
to be subsumed under national tradition, or rather to one of many different national traditions
available to him as an Irishman in the early twentieth century, Stephen himself subsumes those
multiple traditions, as if to say Les Irlandes, c’est moi. On the one hand, this reprises
Stephen’s famous claim from the end of A Portrait that he aims to “forge in the smithy of my
soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (P, 253), but it also takes up the final step in his
aesthetic theory, “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond
or above his handiwork, invisible or refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”
(P, 215). In A Portrait, Lynch immediately picks up the national question in relation to
Stephen’s lofty claim: “What do you mean . . . by prating about beauty and the imagination in
this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his
handiwork after having perpetrated this country?” (P, 215). As noted in chapter 2, the rain
emphasizes Lynch’s point about the “Godforsaken” quality of Ireland, thereby ironizing
Stephen’s lofty pronouncement.But, the implication of Lynch’s point is that for the artist to
create his world, he also has to create, or recreate, his country. This brings us right back to the
experiment, which entails a degree of fabulation within self-creation.
Stephen’s response to Bloom that “Ireland must be important because it belongs to me”
suggests that he accepts the challenge of being akin to what Nietzsche calls “the comedian of
the ideal” (GM, III§27), that is, someone who challenges preexisting genealogies with a
genealogy of their own. Bloom, understandably, does not quite understand Stephen. So, in
response to Bloom’s misapprehension, Stephen utters, seemingly diplomatically, “We can’t
change the country. Let us change the subject” (U, 16.1171). But, within this conversational
defeatism there is a suggestion of something else: Stephen can change the country, at least in
a figurative sense. He can change it by reconfiguring it, by bringing up all the phenomena and
epiphenomena of Irish life. Stephen places his talent over and above his tradition, but without
abandoning that tradition. Precisely because history is imperfect, it is eminently fungible, and
thus prone to art. Stephen flies by the net by picking up all its loose pieces, such as the Bloody
Bridge and Skinner’s Alley and the two Dublin vestals from Fumbally’s Lane (U, 7.923–24), and
so on. In this way, Stephen has become an ironist in terms of Rorty’s definition: “[The ironist]
is trying to get out from under inherited contingencies and make his own contingencies, get
out from under an old final vocabulary and fashion one which will be all his own.”48 Following
from Rorty, Stephen flies by the nets by diving right into them.
Stephen’s aesthetic project from A Portrait through (at least most of) Ulysses involved his
self-creation as an auto-genetic artist, as exemplified by his goal of flying by the nets of
“nationality, language, religion” (P, 203). Unlike the Citizen’s jingoistic jingle of Sinn Féin,
Stephen’s tune is the ego men of mé fhéin (although, admittedly, in neither Greek nor Irish), an
egoism he reprises in exiling himself from Bloom’s social, utilitarian utopia. However, his
aesthetic practice of recording precise mimetic detail implies a codependence (or
cointerdependence) between artist and world. The artist individuates himself amidst others.
This gets Stephen fairly close to Nietzsche’s concept of individuation:

The first question is by no means whether we are content with ourselves, but whether we are content
with anything at all. If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence.
For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with
happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—
and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed
(WP, §1032).

Every thing depends on everything else; no thing things alone. As we see in “Ithaca,” the water
that flows from the faucet in Bloom’s kitchen depends upon a whole infrastructure with its own
history (U, 17.164–82). Indeed, the narrative form of “Ithaca,” and of Ulysses itself, can be
taken as a way of presenting and affirming the interconnectedness of the phenomena and
epiphenomena in and around Dublin on just one day. In being the record of a few people on
one day in Dublin and, thus, all (or, at least, a lot) of the history and histories that have led to
that day, Ulysses goes against the concept of Sinn Féin: we ourselves are never alone.

* * *

It remains a very much open question if Stephen has resolved anything within the space of
Ulysses. As discussed in the previous chapter, even after the confrontation with the image of
his mother’s ghost in “Circe,” when he confronts the two English soldiers, he is still riven by
his Agenbite. In terms of the incommensurability between Stephen and Bloom, Stephen’s
singing of the ballad of “Little Harry Hughes” in “Ithaca” is an especially problematic moment.
Bloom and Stephen are apparently conversing reasonably amiably and are comparing thoughts
about their respective backgrounds. Bloom sings the opening of “Hatikvah”—“The Hope”—
which was the anthem of the Zionist movement and now serves as the Israeli national anthem
(U, 17.763–64). According to the Ithacan narrative voice, Stephen hears this as a “profound
ancient male unfamiliar melody” (U, 17.777). However, as Hugh Kenner notes, this is not a
particularly ancient melody, since it dates from 1878.49 In response to this melody, Stephen
sings the ballad of Harry Hughes, which, in light of Bloom’s just having sung a Zionist song, is
clearly an unusual, if not impolitic choice because of its unconcealed anti-Semitism.50 The
song is itself presented along with its musical score, written out for the first edition—and
reprised for subsequent editions—by Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who had translated portions of
Ulysses for Valery Larbaud’s Joyce talk in 1921.51 This interpretive crux in the text was the
subject of much debate at the 2007 Joyce conference in Austin, Texas, and Margot Norris’s
paper, included in the conference proceedings, runs through the range of critical responses.52
These can be broadly characterized as either trying to somehow rationalize Stephen’s act or to
condemn him for being at best insensitive and at worst an unreconstructed anti-Semite.53 And,
of course, these two possibilities are hardly mutually exclusive.
I would say the key passage to approaching this conundrum is the passage that follows the
presentation of the song:

Condense Stephen’s commentary.

One of all, the least of all, is the victim predestined. Once by inadvertence, twice by design he
challenges his destiny. It comes when he is abandoned and challenges him reluctant and, as an
apparition of hope and youth, holds him unresisting. It leads him to a strange habitation, to a secret
infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him, consenting (U, 17.832–37).

This is perhaps one of those passages in “Ithaca” when we, as readers, might welcome some
additional elaboration but are, instead, treated to some kind of soi disant condensed version of
Stephen’s commentary. Furthermore, it is not even clear if this uncondensed commentary is
spoken to Bloom, perhaps as an explanation of why Stephen chose this song, or if, instead, it
represents Stephen’s silent contemplation. Beyond this ambiguity, the act of condensing the
commentary into such an enigmatic and telegraphic formulation is itself the result of some
mediating agency that renders Stephen’s commentary—whether vocalized or silent—into this
particular form. The commentary is thus subject to the caprice of the Ithacan narrative voice.
Such caprice is a common characteristic of the Ithacan mode; consider the description of what
Bloom hears as Stephen walks away down Eccles Lane: “The double reverberation of
retreating feet on the heavenborn earth, the double vibration of a jew’s harp in the resonant
lane” (U, 17.1243–44). This description makes it seem as if Stephen is playing a Jew’s harp as
he is walking away. Such an instrument would betoken an obvious symbolic overtone, a
unification of the Jew with the national instrument of Ireland. Following this line, Antonia Fritz
reads this passage as providing the very unification that is denied by Stephen’s singing of the
ballad.54 However, it would be odd for Stephen to be carrying a Jew’s harp unnoticed until this
late point in the book. An “Ithaca” notesheet entry makes it clear that Stephen has no such
instrument and that the sound comes from elsewhere: “SD bootsoles on flags of hollow lane
twanged a fourfold chord, scale of a jew’s mouth harp.”55 The sound is not made by a Jew’s
harp, but rather is perceived as being like a Jew’s harp and this consociation is made at the
level of a narrative intervention.56 The narrative concatenates, or condenses the one sound
into the other.
The sense of the verb “condense” is almost entirely converse to “elaborate”: rather than
expansion, it denotes contraction, a minimization or attenuation, but also a refinement and,
through its prefix con-—from the Latin com-—it denotes a sense of combination or conjoining.
And this sense is likewise indicated in the word “commentary.” This dual sense of “condense”
would be akin to Freud’s concept of dreamwork condensation (Verdichtung), which involves
both attenuation and combination. For Freud, the dream content is, on the one hand, reduced
in its subsequent narration, but also, on the other hand, to some degree it is inflected if not
contaminated in and by its narratological configuration. Narration is inherently an act of
condensation. While Freud admits of such contamination he claims that “the new connections
are, as it were, loop-lines or short-circuits, made possible by the existence of other and deeper-
lying connecting paths.”57 In other words, the interpretive comingling, while distorting, is not
without relevance to the dream under scrutiny in that it brings to the fore already-latent
tendencies. Condensation is misleading but not necessarily mendacious.
Freudian condensation is analogous to the role Nietzsche grants to art. In the section of
Twilight of the Idols entitled “Reason in Philosophy,” Nietzsche sketches the various attempts
to, as Rorty (actually) put it, “make truth something more that what Dewey called ‘warranted
assertability’: more than what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying.”58
Nietzsche seems to conclude that “truth” can never be available without some measure of
distortion—as he put it in The Gay Science: “We no longer believe that truth remains truth
when the veils are withdrawn” (GS, Preface §4). He begins the final section of “Reason in
Philosophy” by condensing (his word) his insight into four theses, the last of which is as
follows:

Any distinction between a “true” and an “apparent” world . . . is only a suggestion of decadence, a
symptom of the decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality is no objection to
this proposition. For “appearance” in this case means reality once more, only by way of selection,
reinforcement, and correction (TI, III§6).

Condensed into this proposition is the idea that the distortions introduced in and by art
suggest some kind of truth, while still remaining distortions. There can be no truth without
perspective, that is to say no truth without distortion.
This idea of condensation provides us with a clue as to how to interpret Stephen’s singing of
the song, since the form of Stephen’s commentary is conjunct, that is, multiple in that the
characters named therein cannot be singly construed. Even if this conjunction is purely a
function of narrative caprice, like the reverberation of Stephen’s boots condensed with the
reverberation of a Jew’s harp, it might not be entirely irrelevant.
On one level, the condensed commentary reads like a simple plot summary of the song,
where the victim predestined would be poor Harry Hughes, who twice drives a ball onto the
property of a Jewish neighbor, the first time over the wall and the second through a window,
thereby challenging his destiny. The apparition of hope and youth would then be the daughter
who lures in Harry to his death in a “secret infidel apartment.”
However, the condensation is too overdetermined to read as a straightforward plot summary
of the song. The “victim predestined” has multiple possible referents. Like the double
reverberations of Stephen’s boots on the cobbled lane, there are perhaps additional
resonances that emerge from the condensation. For example, the victim predestined could also
be read as being Bloom. Indeed, in the next three questions and answers the host, that is
Bloom, is successively identified as the victim predestined (U, 17.838), the reluctant,
unresisting (U, 17.841), and the secret infidel (U, 17.843). The first two instances conflate
Bloom with the figuration of Harry but the third conflates him with the rapacious Jew. In terms
of continuing the correlation between Bloom and the victim of Stephen’s commentary, the line
about an apparition of hope and youth tempting him and leading him to a house of strange
habitation could be read as an allusion to the scene in “Oxen of the Sun” when Bloom is lost in
contemplation thinking about his first sexual encounter, which was with a prostitute named
Bridie Kelly, “A score of years is blown away. He is young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective
arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey presto!), he beholdeth himself” (U, 14.1043–45).
So, Bloom is a plausible but not necessarily compelling adjunct referent to the commentary’s
victim.
But, of course, in its supernumerary concatenations, the commentary is more than somewhat
overdetermined. Instead of reading the victim, that is Harry, as a figuration of Bloom, an
alternative might be to construe the victim as being a condensation of Stephen. Kenner takes
this approach and accordingly reads the “infidel apartment” as 7 Eccles Street and thus sees
the commentary as Stephen’s tactless strategy of excusing himself from Bloom’s offer to stay
the night.59 One problem with this reading, as Norris notes, is that at this point in the text
Bloom has not yet actually made his offer to Stephen to stay the night.60 However, perhaps the
infidel apartment is not where Stephen is presently, but rather where he had been earlier that
night, namely Bella Cohen’s brothel. Indeed, Stephen’s commentary about the song, in its
condensed form, reads like a summary account of Stephen’s predicament and its denouement
in nighttown where he was confronted by the apparition of the ghost of his mother. Stephen’s
commentary, as presented in the text, condenses his nighttown peradventure into Harry’s
narrative. Such concatenation redounds to Stephen’s Agenbite of inwit in a significant way. A
direct consequence of Stephen’s proud claim to “not serve” (P, 239) is that he cannot be
beholden to anyone. Stephen’s Agenbite is thus the result of his being servile to his own
peculiar ideal of aesthetic self-determination. The apparition of his mother’s ghost in the
brothel reminds him of this double bind and even twists it further when she forgives him for
his lapse (U, 15.4238–40). The apparition of the ghost is thus the manifestation of the
contradiction Stephen inhabits, the self-destructive aspect of his aesthetics of self-creation. In
this way, the ghost could be seen to immolate him. Even though he resists his mother’s ghost
with the vainglorious “Nothung!” (U, 15.4242), he nonetheless is immolated “consenting”
because the vision of the ghost is a direct consequence of his guilt.
Of course, unlike Harry, Stephen manages to escape and he escapes courtesy of Bloom. And
so I propose that the condensed version of Stephen’s commentary works as an elliptical
acknowledgment of Bloom’s rescue of Stephen. From the perspective of Stephen’s attempted
auto-genesis, it is essential that such an acknowledgment be elliptical, otherwise, were it to be
direct, Stephen would be in Bloom’s debt and thus trapped in one further net, a debt-net, as it
were. The condensed elaboration acknowledges the debt without implicating Stephen into a
new debt-relationship, thereby maintaining his purported artistic integrity. By transvaluing his
recognition of Bloom’s kindness, he can acknowledge Bloom without compromise.
The narration of this whole scene works in an analogous manner. By providing us with the
musical score to the ballad, the Ithacan narrator, instead of being helpful, elaborates the
wrong aspect of the song, that is, the aspect of Stephen’s singing of the song that matters the
least within the immediate context. As with many of the expansive Ithacan passages, such as
the elaboration of Bloom and Stephen’s ages (U, 17.447–61), the salient information is
obscured amidst elaborate condensation. Likewise, the strategy of the condensation engages
in a hermeneutic bait-and-switch by acknowledging Stephen’s debt to Bloom surreptitiously.
Both Stephen and the Ithacan narrative voice prevaricate.
This reading of Stephen’s confused motivations might help disentangle the convoluted
syntax of the question and answer that follow Stephen’s condensed commentary, where Bloom
is identified as the victim predestined:

Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?

He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told (U,
17.838–40).

The hypotaxis here confuses matters more than just a bit: for example, it is not clear whether
the two personal pronouns refer to Stephen or to Bloom or are split between them. As
Beckett’s Unnamable has it, “it’s the fault of the pronouns”61; although, with syntax like this, a
few other things are awry in this sentence. What we have here are two sentences that share
the same proposition, thereby condensing them into one. One sentence is: “He wished that a
tale of a deed should be told of a deed”; the other is: “He wished that a tale of a deed not by
him should by him not be told.” The second sentence is reasonably straightforward, Bloom
would prefer Stephen to not tell nasty and mendacious stories about blood vendettas
perpetrated by Jews, or, more closely, not to accuse him of deeds of which he is not
responsible. The first sentence has a consociate implication: “He wished that a tale of a deed
should be told of a deed,” that is, Bloom would rather Stephen acknowledge what Bloom
actually did. But, instead of such straightforwardness, in the condensed commentary Bloom is
thanked through the negative example of poor little Harry Hughes (that is, he is thanked for
not letting Stephen succumb to a fate like Harry’s). In other words, the deed was not by him,
nor was it told, at least not directly, by him: the deed not by Bloom is not told by Stephen in
this oblique acknowledgment. In other words, this passage could be paraphrased as Bloom
acknowledging Stephen’s periphrastic acknowledgment but wishing that it were phrased
directly rather than through an injurious song. However, since the formulation of Bloom’s
reaction is at least as condensed as Stephen’s commentary, this shows that Bloom is likewise
not immune from Ithacan legerdemain. Bloom’s acknowledgment of Stephen is as periphrastic
and prevaricated as Stephen’s acknowledgment of Bloom. In other words, at least through the
scrim of Ithacan narration, Bloom acknowledges Stephen’s acknowledgment, even if he is not
completely pleased by it. Even in this transvalued formulation the economy of the debt remains
in force because the trace of acknowledgment remains through the subterfuge. In this way,
Bloom and Stephen are united precisely in that they unite around a fundamental separation.
Bloom and Stephen—or “Stoom” and “Blephen” (U, 17.549, 551)—are united in being
irreducible and apart, as a kind of interpersonal manifestation of Zeno’s paradox where
“nought nowhere was never reached” (U, 17.1068–69). For in Ulysses we can find a
presentation of complex and contradictory and equivocal emotions in, and not despite of, the
elaborate vagaries of its multifarious styles.
With the ballad of Harry Hughes, Stephen engages in a seemingly overt exhibition of anti-
Semitic prejudice. But the manner in which this act is compounded and confused by narrative
strategies of condensation allows for a nuanced deflection of anti-Semitism, although not
necessarily in a manner that would absolve Stephen of his boorishness. The narrative thus
both conveys and occasions multiple, simultaneous and nonresolvable perspectives on the part
of the reader: Stephen is being cunning; Stephen is being rude. Within the moment of the
singing of the song lie a number of different perspectives and permutations. The affirmative
dimension of Ulysses derives from the plural possibilities, affirming life from all its variegated
and irreconcilable ingredients.
 Chapter 5
Also Sprach Molly Bloom

According to Jacques Mercanton, Joyce remarked that he often found himself complimented
for his portrayal of Molly Bloom with the comment, “Yes, women are just like that.” Joyce said
that such a sentiment annoyed him and his typical response to these effusions was simply to
stare at the corner of the ceiling in silence.1 Joyce thus refuses to affirm a proposition that
defines women in relation to his writing and this indefinite affirmation, in its own way, is as
affirmative as Molly’s “Yes.”
Nietzsche is seemingly unafraid to define what women are like and he frequently does so in
unflattering terms. Brandes writes of Nietzsche’s misogyny: “He does not seem to have known
many women, but those he did know, he evidently loved and hated, but above all despised.
Again and again he returns to the unfitness the free and great spirit for marriage.”2 Such an
unnuanced reading of Nietzsche helps explain his appeal to someone like Duffy. Joyce’s own
sentiment on the matter of marriage is somewhat at odds with Nietzsche’s: when explaining to
Budgen why Christ cannot be a perfect man because he was a bachelor, Joyce said, “Surely
living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do.”3 The difficulty of a
consociate abiding is precisely why it is so important for a spirit, free and great, or otherwise.
In his translation of The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann resorts to understatement in a
footnote at the end of a particularly misogynistic section of book II (GS, §§59–68): “Nietzsche’s
comments on women generally do him little credit” (GS, §68 n. 5). However, perhaps Nietzsche
is up to something a bit more subtle than just spinning out tired clichés about the vanity and
irrationality of women. For instance, he concludes the section that prompts Kaufmann’s
embarrassed apology with the claim that “it is man who creates for himself the image of
woman, and woman forms herself according to this image” (GS, §68). Despite Nietzsche’s
privileging of the male perspective, such a statement is not incompatible with Simone de
Beauvoir’s famous statement, which has been inaugural for much feminist theory, that “One is
not born, but rather becomes, woman.”4 The idea here is that the concept “woman” is not
necessarily a biological essentialism, instead it is a construct, a symptom of hypostasis.
Perhaps Nietzsche’s most contentious misogynistic statement is the start of the Preface to
Beyond Good and Evil, where he writes, “Supposing truth is a woman—what then?” (BGE,
Preface, p. 2).5 Taken at face value, such a claim seems to be almost meaningless. So many
things, people, and ideas have been equated with women that, in a sense, the very category of
woman is meaningless. A quick Google search of the phrases “X is a woman” or “X is like a
woman” yields the following list of things equated with women (not including Molly Bloom):
God, the devil, Barack Obama, France, justice, freedom, fortune, translation, math, suspense,
the Pakistani army, a user interface that only relies on aesthetics, a piano, a guitar, football,
highways, Sauron, and many, many others. At the very least, the category woman is not unlike
Nietzsche’s definition of the truth in “On Truth and Lie,” a worn-out metaphor that
nonetheless remains in circulation.
Nietzsche’s formulation in the Preface of Beyond Good and Evil is significant in that he starts
out by installing a supposition, “Supposing truth is a woman.” As with his discussion of truth
and metaphor in “On Truth and Lie,” Nietzsche is not saying outright that truth is a woman,
but instead he is invoking a point of view, or paradigm, in which truth would be equated with a
woman. Indeed, the subject of the Preface is this very gesture of philosophical presupposition.
So, with the first sentence, the initial presupposition, Nietzsche is calling attention to this
gesture of philosophical presupposition that he associates with the name-category woman.
Within the context of the Preface he continues this metaphoric equation between woman and
truth by comparing philosophers to men who would try to seduce truth, as if it were a woman
in order to uncover what is hidden. But, these philosophers have been very unlucky in their
advances. The reason for this lack of success is the recalcitrance of dogmatism or hypostasis:

And perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again how little used to be
sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for each sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the
dogmatists have built so far: any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul
superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do
mischief); some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very
narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts (BGE, Preface, p. 2).

The reason why philosophers have failed to make any headway is that they still labor under
childish presuppositions—presuppositions that would be not unlike the very one that Nietzsche
begins with, namely, equating the truth with woman. The problem is not whether the truth is
or is not like a woman, the problem is making metaphoric claims of this (or any) kind—that
human, all too human hypostatic itch, the will to power that denies multifarious perspective.
“To be sure, it meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition
of all life, when one spoke of the spirit and the good as Plato did” (BGE, Preface, p. 3). The
problem comes with the invention of idea-categories such as the truth and the good and
woman and so on. The problem was abstracting concepts that would be independent of
perspective, which Nietzsche here calls the basic condition of life. This is a problem precisely
because such abstractions are like the gesture of slave morality of abstracting a general,
universal rule from the contingent.

Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly,
physiological demands for the preservation for a certain type of life. For example, that the definite
should be worth more than the indefinite, and the mere appearance worth less than the “truth”—such
estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless mere foreground
estimates, a certain kind of niaiserie which may be necessary for the preservation of just such beings as
we are. Supposing, that is, that not just man is the “measure of things” (BGE, §3).

Nietzsche again proposes a supposition: a supposition of an alternate paradigm, an alternate

paradigm of paradigmicity: suppose man is not the measure of all things and that the world is
not in the image we have created for it, an image that derives from our needs, or rather, from
what we believe our needs to be. In Alexander Nehamas’s reading of Nietzsche, such world-
construction is inevitable and necessary. We need our hypostases, but the problem comes in
believing that our individual, perspectively delimited hypostases are universally true.6 Later in
Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes:

Woman wants to become self-reliant—and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about
women “as such”: this is one of the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe (BGE,
§232).

Woman aims to be self-reliant, which is thus perhaps not unlike the master in the master
morality: a self-sufficient, self-defining, and auto-genetic being, a being that provides its own
truth, a being that is auto-genetic, as opposed to having meaning hoisted upon it by someone
else, by some man, such as Nietzsche. The converse implication of this “uglification” is that in
trying to be auto-genetic, woman runs the risk of becoming a being in thrall to hypostasis, that
is, in becoming like a man.
Returning to the first line of the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, woman, as a category, has
been invented and defined by man. Man is what defines the truth in his image and he has
defined it as woman, he has thus defined truth as that which is not man, that is, as something
that is not the same as him. He has defined truth out of a difference that is then suppressed.
Such a move of identification and definition oppresses both truth and women.
This is, unsurprisingly, the central issue of Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche in Spurs. Unlike
Heidegger, whose readings of Nietzsche he critiques, Derrida pays a lot of attention to
Nietzsche’s stylistic exuberance, including especially his comments apropos woman. According
to Derrida, the statement that opens Beyond Good and Evil indicates a kind of short-circuit in
philosophical reasoning, “There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is because of
that abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is ‘truth.’ Woman is the name of that
untruth of truth.”7 A bit later, “That which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth
—feminine.”8 And, “There is no such thing as a woman, as a truth in itself of woman in itself.”9
In this reading, “woman” is the name given to the situation where truth is named through
difference, that is, she is the name that covers over the absence of truth. In this way, woman,
or rather the name “woman,” is the indication that the hypostatic gesture is always fictional,
the name of the untruth of what we call “truth.”
Nietzsche and Derrida’s deployment of the word-concept “woman” as a name for the
elusiveness of any notion of truth perhaps still succumbs to clichéd stereotypes of femininity.
Luce Irigaray argues that Nietzsche’s attack on hypostasis is itself another hypostasis because
of the gender politics conveyed by his slippery rhetoric apropos women: “Femininity—the
father’s indispensable intermediary in putting his law into force.”10 Nietzsche certainly seems
susceptible to such an accusation with claims like, “In the end [truth] is a woman: she should
not be violated” (BGE, §220). The truth is what cannot be known; it cannot be known because
it does not exist. As he says: “mulier tacet de muliere [woman should be silent about woman]”
(BGE, §232). This inverts Heraclitus’s famous fragment 123, which is loosely translated as
“nature [phusis] loves to hide”11: it is in the nature of nature, as it were, to hide, just like a
woman. Nietzsche seems to be every close to reprising the argument he purportedly inveighs
against and so, perhaps, for Nietzsche woman is the name of the blind spot in his argument.
An analogous argument can and, indeed, has been leveled against Joyce.12 For example,
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar contend that Joyce’s egoism as a writer is ultimately
“reacting against or seeking to appropriate the primal verbal facility of the mother.”13 They
construe Joycean jouissance as merely being a symptom of a pretension to “linguistic
puissance.”14 Their argument is analogous to Bersani’s “Against Ulysses” (discussed in chapter
2), but genders Joyce’s egoism as specifically and exclusively patriarchal, which is not a
challenging assertion to make considering Stephen’s theory of artistic patrimony as
adumbrated in “Scylla and Charybdis.” It would seem that both Joyce and Nietzsche are
matricidal writers. As Kelly Oliver writes of Nietzsche, “Perhaps his writings manifest a guilt
for his mother’s pain and for the ‘matricide’ necessary to separate from her.”15 Self-assertion,
even in a modality of plural perspectives is perhaps still a symptom of the struggle to separate
from the maternal.
The charges of Irigaray and Gilbert and Gubar against, respectively, Nietzsche and Joyce
certainly have some validity. Both Nietzsche and Joyce propose an egoistic project in the
aftermath of the death of God that entails a matricidal aspect as the condition of self-creation
or auto-genesis. The accusation could be mollified if the auto-genetic condition being proposed
is not an absolute one, that is, if it did not presume to be universally true. In this way, the
perspectivisms of both Joyce and Nietzsche might liberate their works from the demon imp
hypostasis. In Nietzsche’s case, the experiment is a means of finding a mode of life that is
individually suited (the agathos bios), as opposed to universally applicable. For Nietzsche, to
live a good life requires living in the way that is most suited to oneself, to personalize zoös into
a bios of one’s own. Nietzsche’s egoism is not so much a self-valorizing—which would be
tantamount to making oneself a hypostasis—but rather is a function of valorizing the ongoing
and indefinite and imperfect project and process of self-fashioning. Affirming life requires the
affirmation of an individual, idiosyncratic and contingent self-fashioning as an individual,
idiosyncratic and contingent self-fashioning—as opposed to something that would be
universally true and valid. Nietzsche articulates such a process in the idea of the eternal
recurrence of the same.
Nietzsche uses the phrase “the eternal recurrence of the same” numerous times throughout
his later works and its meaning seems to be different in each instance.16 And so the eternal
recurrence of the same does not recur in exactly the same way in Nietzsche’s works. In The
Gay Science, where it is first introduced, it works as a kind of litmus test to see if the
experiment is working:

The greatest weight.—What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest
loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more
and innumerable times more: and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every
thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in
the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even
this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again,
and you with it, speck of dust!” . . . If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you
are or perhaps crush you . . . Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to
crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (GS, §341).

In this formulation the eternal recurrence of the same is a thought experiment to test if one
has led a life that can be endured verbatim repeatedly ad infinitum. Nietzsche is here
demanding that one must ask of oneself if one has led the kind of life that one would be willing
to repeat over and over again, in exactly the same way, with all the bad things together with all
the good things, for eternity. If one can not just bear that prospect, but relish it, then one has
passed. This is thus the greatest affirmation one can make over one’s life and thus the greatest
burden of this selving of the self. For Gilles Deleuze the eternal recurrence is a fundamentally
practical ethical response in that it is the test of one’s own individual ethos (the bios) as it has
been lived (zoein), since it asks “whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its
eternal return.”17
Rather than invoke a pessimistic fatalism in the powerlessness of human agency to effect
change, the conceptualization of the eternal recurrence should inspire, as Nietzsche states in
The Gay Science, a change in one’s own disposition. Reginster argues that by making us
acknowledge everything in life, seeing the bad as essential as the good, “Nietzsche would
therefore be exhorting us to recognize a certain substantive value, namely the value of
‘becoming.’”18 The thought of the eternal recurrence compels one to be dynamic rather than
static, that is, to perpetually engage with becoming. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche calls the eternal
recurrence “the highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable” (EH, 295). The
qualification “at all attainable” implies a pragmatic disposition to the eternal recurrence, that
it is not an absolute ideal but rather an exercise. One becomes what one is by construing, if
not valuing or transvaluing, one’s life through the concept of the eternal recurrence of the
same. As Nietzsche puts it in Ecce Homo:

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not
forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all
idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it (EH, 258).

And loving life in its eternal recurrence is the greatest affirmation and this is what Nietzsche
considered to be his greatest contribution to philosophy. The eternal recurrence is the
indispensible prerequisite to affirmation:

Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own
inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian, that is
what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet . . . I, the last disciple of the
philosopher Dionysius—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence (TI, X§5).

If Nietzsche is the teacher of the eternal recurrence, then the character Zarathustra is a failed
teacher of the same. Peter Berkowitz claims that the chief difference between Zarathustra and
Nietzsche is that “Zarathustra argues from his own desire to become a god to the death or
nonexistence of God and gods.”19 Zarathustra hypostasizes himself by installing himself as a
new shadow of God. As he says:

But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a
god! Hence there are no gods. Though I drew this conclusion, now it draws me (Z, 198).

Zarathustra is thus not unlike Milton’s Satan and the price he pays for his hubris, for his
servility to his own sovereignty, is failure. After his travels and travails, Zarathustra defines the
eternal recurrence as a literal phenomenon of cosmological metempsychosis that works as a
kind of salvation or absolution for a failed life. In short, Zarathustra becomes Christian, all too
Christian. In Book III, after he returns to his cave, ill and febrile from having gone under, he is
met by a chorus of animals who sing of a literal eternal recurrence:

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything
blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally
the same house of being is built (Z, 329).

Although, at first, he chides them, after reviewing his failures he comes around to their
perspective:

Now I die and vanish, you would say, and all at once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body. But
the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the
causes of the eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this
serpent—not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame
life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things, to
speak again the word of the great noon of earth and man, to proclaim the overman again to men (Z,
333).

Zarathustra thus comes to believe in the eternal recurrence as something true and something
that will redeem his failed life, not because it is a better life but because it is the same life,
again and again. This has little in common with how Nietzsche formulated the eternal
recurrence in The Gay Science. There, the eternal recurrence is not a consolation for a failed
life but rather the means to perpetually evaluate and reevaluate life. For Zarathustra the
eternal recurrence is a reward, whereas for Nietzsche it is a perpetual course correction for
becoming. In the fourth part of Zarathustra, the ugliest man espouses a notion of the eternal
recurrence that matches Nietzsche’s proposal in The Gay Science: “‘Was that life?’ I want to
say to death. ‘Well then! Once more!’” (Z, 430). The ugliest man affirms return not as
consolation but as what animates life in its being-toward-death. The eternal recurrence is not a
perfect loop; instead it works precisely because of an ineluctable interregnum, death. And so,
in the thought experiment of eternal recurrence, what recurs is always incomplete.
Book III of Zarathustra ends with his song of affirmation:

If I am a soothsayer and full of that soothsaying spirit which wanders on a high ridge between two seas,
wandering like a heavy cloud between past and future, an enemy of all sultry plains and all that is weary
and can neither die nor live—in its dark bosom prepared for lightning and the redemptive flash,
pregnant with lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes, soothsaying lightning bolts—blessed is he who
is thus pregnant! . . . Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring
of recurrence? (Z, 340).

He claims to love this eternity of recurrence, one in which he is pregnant, filled with
possibility, but always sterile. Indeed, the gendering of this line is significant: “blessed is he
who is thus pregnant.” Zarathustra here takes on the burden of procreation himself, something
that is, strictly speaking, not biologically possible. As J. P. Mahaffy, former Provost of Trinity
College, Dublin, replied when asked what the difference between man and woman is, “I can’t
conceive.”20 The presumption for androcentric creativity—not unlike what Stephen proposed
in “Scylla”—is the mark of an egoism run amok.
Nietzsche also discusses male procreation in section 72 of The Gay Science, which is entitled
“Mothers,” “Pregnancy has made woman kinder, more patient, more timid, more pleased to
submit; and just so does spiritual pregnancy produce the character of the contemplative type,
which is closely related to the feminine character: it consists of male mothers” (GS, §72). This
idea of a spiritual pregnancy that is gendered male recalls Diotima’s argument in The
Symposium. Diotima uses the erotic drive to procreate as a paradigm for creation in general
and she explicitly genders this as the work of the male: “when the procreant is big with child,
he is strangely stirred by the beautiful.”21 As ovulation was completely unknown in Plato’s
time, he is simply reproducing his contemporary conventional wisdom. But still, Socrates—
through Diotima—is engendering procreation as a specifically male activity. Socrates (and
hence also Plato) set up a female figure of authority in order to characterize procreation as a
male activity. Plato’s model of creation is thus eminently matricidal.
Nietzsche explicitly alludes to Diotima’s argument in Twilight of the Idols: “No lesser
authority than that of the divine Plato . . . maintains . . . that all beauty incites procreation, that
just this is the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual up to the most spiritual” (TI,
IX§22). However, unlike Diotima, Nietzsche does not appear to denigrate sensual or physical
procreation in favor of this spiritual procreation. For Plato, sensual procreation leads to
spiritual procreation, which ideally should jettison sensual procreation. Nietzsche, on the other
hand, does not dismiss the sensual from the spiritual; he continues in Twilight of the Idols,
“Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic contest” (TI, IX§23).
By this he means that Plato created the art of dialectics; a point that Stephen echoes in
“Scylla” when he dryly notes that Socrates learned dialectics from his wife Xanthippe (U,
9.235). If procreation is thus to be a paradigm of creativity, then creativity must be
collaborative, as with dialectics. Creation cannot be achieved in isolation. Even self-creation is
of a necessarily delimited kind and thus can never be purely auto-genetic.
In all this talk about creation, with the emphasis on spiritual procreation and “male
mothers,” it might seem that Nietzsche is eliding sexual difference; perhaps like Plato he is
ignoring the role women play in procreation. But, then again, perhaps he does not:

There are two types of genius: one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which
prefers being fertilized and giving birth. Just so, there are among peoples of genius those to whom the
woman’s problem of pregnancy and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting has been
allotted—the Greeks, for example, were a people of this type; also the French—and others who must
fertilize and become the causes of new orders of life—like the Jews, the Romans, and, asking this in all
modesty, the Germans? Peoples, tormented and enchanted by unknown fevers and irresistibly pressed
beyond themselves, in love and lusting after foreign races (after those who like “being fertilized”), and
at the same time domineering like all that knows itself to be full of creative powers and hence “by the
grace of God.” These two types of genius seek each other, like man and woman; but they also
misunderstand each other—like man and woman (BGE, §248).

Creation requires the work of both genders in erotic cooperation. Sexual difference is thus the
undoing of the hypostasis of the single and autocratic self, the hypostasis of the self as purely
auto-genetic. Sexual difference occasions self-creation as allogenesis (as opposed to an
egocentric auto-genesis). Because one needs others to exist, right from the moment of birth,
one alone—ego men or mé fhéin—cannot be the measure of all things: any one solitary
individual cannot claim a master morality in its pure, idealized form. Instead, one lives in a
world contingent upon the acts of others. In short, one lives in a world contingent upon the
irony of the self. The matricidal aspect of Stephen’s aesthetics blinds him to this allogenesis.
Likewise, Zarathustra’s conception of the eternal recurrence, which involved his being
pregnant with an eternity of possibility, reflects his desire for autocratic and auto-genetic self-
creation and this is, as Peter Berkowitz puts it, “the supreme empowerment of the creative
will.”22 In distinction, Nietzsche avoids this autocracy by defining the creative will as being
ineluctably delimited, conditional, and contingent.
In all these sections about woman as such, Nietzsche is implying a most unusual definition of
sexual difference. He is not relying on a biological difference of genders, or not only a
biological difference, nor is social differentiation the only other component, although both of
these obviously play their part. Instead, Nietzsche is relying on an ontological difference
between the genders, specifically one that involves creation. This recalls the experiment.
Creation, production, reproduction are never-ending aspects of existence. Procreation does not
end with the birth of the child, since after all, one has to raise the infant (cf. GS, §376). The will
to create is ceaseless. Nietzsche returns to this idea in Twilight of the Idols, where his
comments about maternity suggest a way out of the matricidal trap:

For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, that the basic fact of
the Hellenic instinct finds expression—its “will to life.” What was it that the Hellene guaranteed himself
by means of these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life; the future promised and hallowed in
the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the over-all continuation of
life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. For the Greeks the sexual symbol was
therefore the venerable symbol par excellence, the real profundity in the whole of ancient piety. Every
single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most solemn
feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy: the pangs of the woman giving birth
hallow all pain; all becoming and growing—all that guarantees a future—involves pain. That there may
be the eternal joy of creating, that the will to life may eventually affirm itself, the agony of the woman
giving birth must also be there eternally.
All this is meant by the word Dionysius (TI, X§4).

In this passage, Nietzsche makes maternity exemplary for an ethics of creation because, as
Bernard Reginster argues, the “valuation of creativity implies a valuation of loss.”23 Nietzsche
conjoins creation, suffering, and affirmation. Creation is continuation by other means because
that which is created, the child, is destined to become independent. In this way, Nietzsche
shifts the onus of matricide from the child who strives to become independent to the mother
who knows that her child must eventually become independent. Matricide is thus the ultimate
act of maternal love. Even Zarathustra acknowledges this point: “Whatever I create and
however much I love it—soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it” (Z, 227). The
“solution” to matricide is that it be conjoined with maternal love as a process. Like life,
maternal love is a work in progress that is never achieved as such. Life is always incomplete.
“This paradoxical structure brings to light the most distinctive feature of the will to power: it is
a kind of desire that does not allow for permanent (once-and-for-all) satisfaction.”24 In Ecce
Homo, Nietzsche even allows Zarathustra such a dialectic of process:
 The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he that says No and does No to an unheard-
of degree, to everything to which one has so far said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-
saying spirit (EH, 306).

The “great Yes to life” (EH, 226) is thus an act of indeterminate affirmation. It is indefinite
because life is always fragmentary, that is, always foreclosed by death. For example, in
“Ithaca,” Blooms thinks as he prepares to go to bed of “imperfections in a perfect day” (U,
17.2071). The day is perfect in the sense not of excellence, but of being complete (or nearly
so). However, this question, and its attendant answer, presuppose the possibility of perfection,
even if only ironically, such as with the first answer on the list of imperfections, “A provisional
failure to obtain renewal of an advertisement” (U, 17.2074). The day’s perfection is always
imperfect and provisional. Likewise, life is always imperfect, or, as Stephen says in “Scylla,”
“Every life is many days, day after day” (U, 9.1044). Life is thus the perpetuation of incomplete
being, being that is always being-toward-death. And, thus, the affirmation of life is the
affirmation of its imperfection.
Corollary to the affirmation of imperfection is the affirmation of the persistence of pain. In a
pithy statement that has been enmeshed within misapprehension, Nietzsche states, “Pain is
not considered an objection to life” (EH, 297).25 In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche argues that
the central and foundational flaw of Western metaphysics is that pain is and has been
considered an objection to life: “Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike:
it is no good” (TI, II§1). The idea is that pain needs to be absolved with the promise of an
afterlife where rewards can be duly meted out. This implies that life is merely a way-station
that needs to be endured; an idea that Socrates espouses in the Phaedo and Gorgias and that
gets taken up by Christianity. In distinction, Nietzsche proposes pain as indispensible, not
because it is or can be good, but because it hurts. Affirmation abides pain. The value of life is
actually amplified if its imperfections—such as pain and suffering—are also affirmed.
This idea of an affirmation that conjoins creativity with loss and imperfection is precisely
what is lacking in Stephen’s various theories of artistic creativity as expressed in both A
Portrait and Ulysses. To recreate life out of life, as Stephen claimed as his goal in A Portrait (P,
172), means giving birth, perhaps not literally but at least as a paradigm of artistic creation.
The artist supersedes the mother, hence the matricidal aspect of his aesthetic. We see this
encapsulated by his neologism in “Proteus”: “moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb” (U, 3.402), as
discussed in chapter 3. Stephen elides the maternal role in creation and thus only perceives
loss and absentation; he suffers the pangs without giving birth. Like Zarathustra’s, Stephen’s
creation is sterile.
Molly’s resounding affirmations in “Penelope” are the ultimate redress and corrective to
Stephen’s matricidal Agenbite of inwit. In this, Molly is perhaps the most Nietzschean of all
the characters in Ulysses, the creator who affirms and who—as Nietzsche put it in Ecce Homo
in a section where he proudly delineates his own hybrid heritage as the descendant of Poles
who emigrated to Germany—delivers “the great Yes to life” (EH, 226). Molly affirms, even with
her negations. Indeed, Joyce seems to tacitly allude to a Nietzschean quality to Molly’s
affirmation when he tells Budgen that “the last word (human all-too-human) is left to Penelope.
This is the indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity” (LI, 160). Unlike
Zarathustra, Molly and her affirmations remain within the contingencies of human existence.
Affirmation in “Penelope” is the subject of Derrida’s “Ulysses Gramophone” where he
addresses the question of how one responds to affirmation, specifically to Molly’s concluding
affirmation, which in all its repetitions is more than somewhat ambiguous. In context she could
be referring to Bloom, as she has just remembered their first date at Howth, or to Boylan, or to
going to sleep, or to her childhood in Gibraltar. And so amidst all these, possibilities, what
exactly is she affirming: “What is being said, written, and what happens/arrives with yes?”26
(Molly’s soliloquy could not exist in Irish because the Irish language lacks a word for “yes.”
The Irish translation of Ulysses uses the word “seadh,” a purely phatic word.27) For Derrida,
Molly’s yes is an affirmation that affirms itself as an affirmation without any single decidable
referent; it is an indeterminate affirmation. In posing the question of response, this essay deals
with matters of responsibility and is thus a key text for signaling the ethical dimensions of
Derrida’s work. In having an undecidable referent, Molly’s yes is irresponsible and so the
question is how does one respond to the irresponsible. “Reciprocally, two responses or two
responsibilities refer to each other without having any relation between them. The two sign yet
prevent the signature from gathering itself. All they can do is call for another yes, another
signature. And furthermore, one cannot differentiate between two yeses that must gather
together like twins, to the point of simulacrum, the one being the gramophony of the other.”28
To say yes, to affirm the yes, is to listen to the ouï-dire (hearsay) and to have and to hear that
listening respond. Molly’s affirmation is excessive and overflows in affirming itself as an (act
of) affirmation.
The multifariousness of Molly’s yes stands in apparent contrast to the overall narrative
decorum of the “Penelope” episode. Unlike all the other episodes in Ulysses, “Penelope” is
ostensibly mono-perspectival. The other episodes deployed, in varying degrees, multiple
perspectives, from the alternations between third-person free indirect discourse and first-
person interior monologue in the earlier episodes—what Joyce called the book’s “initial style”
(LI, 129)29—to the various perspectival collages of the later episodes. “Penelope,” on the other
hand, is Molly unadulterated, or seemingly so. While the grammatical run-ons and near-
absolute absence of punctuation and the complete absence of apostrophes might suggest a
raw transcription of Molly’s thoughts, the episode remains textually mediated. For example,
the episode includes italics and is thus not completely bereft of textual conventions and,
indeed, Molly’s orthographic errors are indicated by slashed letters in “symphathy” and
“newphew” (U, 18.730). And instead of the word “carat” to indicate the purity of gold, the
episode has “carrot” (U, 18.870), a plausible mistake for her to make but one that can only be
distinguished in writing. These indications of a mediating textualizing agency suggest that we
have not completely left free indirect discourse.
Even within her seemingly mono-perspectival soliloquy, Molly’s perspective is continually
shifting throughout “Penelope.” Perspectively, “Penelope” is as multifarious as Molly’s yes.
Indeed, the multiplicity of the one depends upon the other. Molly’s yes is so promiscuous
precisely because her perspective is multifarious: a mono-polylogue or mollypolylogue, an
ongoing, shifting, Protean, existential experiment in affirmation. As an example, the episode
begins with her remembering Bloom’s obsequiousness with Mrs. Riordan (Stephen’s aunt
Dante) back when they used to live at the City Arms Hotel, but this train of thought leads her
to think “still I like that in him polite to old women” (U, 18.16). A criticism of Bloom’s behavior
leads to a (perhaps reluctant) appreciation. Like Joyce, Molly sees Bloom “from all sides,”30
the bad as well as the good.
Joyce explicitly linked Molly’s variability of perspective with her affirmation; in a letter to
Frank Budgen dated August 16, 1921 he wrote, “Though probably more obscene than any
preceding episode it seems to me to be perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy
engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib. Ich bin der [sic] Fleisch der stets bejaht”
(SL, 285). The German phrase translates as “Woman. I am the flesh that constantly affirms”
and is an inversion of Mephistopheles’s characterization of himself in Goethe’s Faust: “Ich bin
der Geist der stets verneint [I am the spirit that constantly negates]” (SL, 285n). Bonnie Kime
Scott suggests that Joyce used the pejorative word “Weib” to suggest an allusion to “Ewig-
Weibliche” from the affirmative, female-centered coda to Faust II. However, by using “Weib”
and not “Ewig-Weibliche,” Joyce emphasizes that Molly is carnal and earthly, rather than
spiritual, like the Mater Gloriosa who closes Faust.31 Molly’s affirmative potential is linked to
her carnality and to her multifarious perspectivism. Idiosyncratic perspectivism is the burden
and birthright of embodied being.
In terms of Molly’s shifting perspective, at one point while contemplating women’s
inclinations toward betrayal, she thinks, “I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the
way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches” (U, 18.1458–59). Yet only a bit earlier did she
express a considerably more positive view of gender solidarity:

I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you
wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling
around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a
woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us
they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be
if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats why I suppose hes running wild now
out at night away from his books and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house
I suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none
was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up
in her behind in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to
have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I
knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going
to think myself into the glooms about that any more (U, 18.1434–51).

Molly’s claim that “a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop” comes across as
counterintuitive, considering the rambling and unpunctuated context in which it appears. And
her claim that men in general do not know what it is like to be a woman is partially
contradicted later by her statement that at least Bloom “understood or felt what a woman is”
(U, 18.1578–79). Her view of women here is explicitly predicated on their reproductive powers:
“God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create
something” (U, 18.1564–65). If Stephen’s aesthetic theory elided the maternal role, Molly
appears to consider little else.
It is not just that women can procreate while men cannot, but men need women as their own
mothers, “where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I
never had.” Molly here admits that she never really had a mother of her own to look after her:
it seems that her mother, Lunita Laredo, either died or left when she was young. It also seems
that Lunita was Jewish, since Molly remarks that she looked Jewish (U, 18.1184–85), thereby
presumably making Molly more Jewish than Bloom.32 Thinking of absent mothers leads Molly
to think of Stephen and his predicament, which would likely be different were his mother still
alive, “his poor mother wouldnt like that if she was alive ruining himself for life” (U, 18.1454–
55). This then leads her to think of Rudy, but unlike Bloom who throughout Ulysses remains
preoccupied with his death some 11 years later, Molly seems able to remember the event of his
passing without lingering on it, without it festering in her mind. First, she remembers Rudy’s
conception, which was prompted by her seeing two dogs copulate, something which Bloom
also recalled (U, 6.77–79):

I suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none
was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up
in her behind in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to
have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I
knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going
to think myself into the glooms about that any more (U, 18.1444–51).

As it does not infrequently, Bloom’s mind wandered during Paddy Dignam’s funeral and he
imagined the possibilities a cemetery offers for romantic assignation, “In the midst of death we
are in life” (U, 6.759). Molly’s thoughts of Rudy here are a necessary counter to this idea of
Bloom’s: in the midst of life we are, also, in death, or being-toward-death. Even though she
refused to go into mourning for Rudy at the time of his death because, as a sickly newborn, he
“was neither one thing nor the other” (U, 18.1308), Molly nonetheless acknowledges Rudy’s
death as a part of her life without “going to think myself into the glooms.”
Earlier, Molly had contemplated being a muse, of sorts, to Stephen:

Im sure itll be grand if I can only get in with a handsome young poet at my age Ill throw them the 1st
thing in the morning till I see if the wishcard comes out or Ill try pairing the lady herself and see if he
comes out Ill read and study all I can find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who he likes so he wont
think me stupid if he thinks all women are the same and I can teach him the other part (U, 18.1358–64).

While not completely untainted by sentimentality, Molly’s imagined scene of romantic

inspiration is somewhat practical. Along with the plan to assert her sexuality is a sense of
manipulation. Exploitation is certainly a part of Molly’s psychology: she frequently alludes to
taking advantage of men such as Bloom and Boylan; as noted in chapter 4, Molly explains to
herself her attraction to Bloom in terms both sincere and cynical: “he understood or felt what a
woman is and I knew I could always get round him” (U, 18.1578–80). In part she loves Bloom
because she can exploit him and this exploitation a complements her affirmation. This leads to
a key moment in Nietzschean ethics: affirming life requires an affirmation of strife and
exploitation; as he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil: “life itself is essentially appropriation,
injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s
own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation” (BGE, §259). Later he writes
that exploitation “is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life” (BGE,
§259). Affirming life includes an affirmation of all the unpleasant aspects of existence, as is
evident in the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same.
Like Molly, Bloom, as part of his comportment of being an everyman, is hardly innocent of
the exploitation of others. For example, after running into M’Coy in “Lotus Eaters” he thinks
that he might have been able to wheedle out of him a free train ticket so he could go to
Mullingar to visit Milly and perhaps spy on her and her new boyfriend (U, 5.320–21). This one
example shows him being doubly devious. Beyond this one instance, he is conducting a
surreptitious epistolary affair and throughout Ulysses exhibits much guile and even
deviousness. In “Penelope,” Molly chastises him for being, not unlike Odysseus, a wily
polutropos, “the way he plots and plans everything out” (U, 18.1008–9). Indeed, it is not
impossible that Bloom has engineered, at least in part, the affair between Molly and Boylan.
The evidence for this is far from conclusive, but it does answer the question as to why Bloom is
absolutely certain that the affair is to begin on June 16. From what is presented in Ulysses,
Bloom has enough information to suspect such an affair, but not enough for certainty. The two
pieces of evidence for Bloom’s complicity in the affair, both circumstantial, are in “Eumaeus.”
First, Corley informs Stephen that he had seen Bloom with Boylan several times at the
Bleeding Horse pub (U, 16.198–99). Granted, Corley is not the most reliable witness, but if he
is correct this information is curious, since Bloom and Boylan have little reason to socialize on
their own. More significant is the moment later in this episode when Bloom shows Stephen a
photograph of a singer whom he claims is Molly, “in the full bloom of womanhood in evening
dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom” (U, 16.1429–
30). Bloom appears to be suggesting something to Stephen with this photograph. At the very
least, this scene shows that attempting to secure an extramarital dalliance for Molly is not
beyond Bloom’s psychological horizon.
Molly at least knows that Bloom suspects the affair: “he has an idea about him and me” (U,
18.81). But perhaps she even suspects that he is somehow involved in plotting and planning
the affair, since she also thinks “can you feel him trying to make a whore of me” (U, 18.96). At
the very least, even if Bloom is not explicitly complicit in arranging the affair, he is not beyond
responsibility because, for reasons left not completely clear within Ulysses, the Blooms have
not engaged in vaginal intercourse since the death of Rudy, as is explicitly although
cumbrously announced toward the end of “Ithaca” (U, 17.2278–84). Bloom alludes to this in
“Lestrygonians” when he thinks “Could never like it again after Rudy” (U, 8.610). The absence
of a pronoun makes the subject of this sentence unclear, thereby eliding allocating the
responsibility for the absence of carnal intercourse.33 Molly, on the other hand, is explicit. In
the passage cited above when she thinks of Rudy and his death she thinks: “we were never the
same since” (U, 18.1450). While she does elide the specific occasion (we were never the same
since when), she does assign a shared responsibility, neither the one nor the other, but the
union of the two. As with creation and procreation, the absence of procreation is a mutual
endeavor. Both are complicit in the status of their marriage. As Bloom had said in “Eumaeus,”
“It’s all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent
violence and intolerance in any shape or form” (U, 16.1098–1100). Such reciprocity is the mark
of Nietzschean responsibility. Bloom and Molly are conjoint in their responsibility and in their
creativity (or lack thereof).
Perhaps inadvertently Molly does assign blame to Bloom. Reprising her earlier mistake of
substituting “omission” for “emission” (U, 18.1170), she thinks apropos Boylan, “Ill wipe him
off me just like a business his omission” (U, 18.1538). Unlike Boylan, Bloom’s omission is
omitting his emissions from inside Molly. Her slip of substituting “omission” for “emission” is
telling in other ways, since this indicates her carnality in an odd way. Unlike Zarathustra,
Molly is not concerned with overcoming, but rather with simply coming. That is, she is a carnal
being, or, more precisely, carnality is one of many perspectives to her being.
In “Ithaca,” we are told that even though Bloom has been “wronged” by Boylan, “the
matrimonial violator of the matrimonially violated had not been outraged by the adulterous
violator of the adulterously violated” (U, 17.2197–99), that is, the cuckold Bloom is not
outraged by the adulterous Boylan. However, Bloom’s thoughts on this matter are not pure and
simple and range between the “antagonistic sentiments” of “envy, jealousy, abnegation,
equanimity” (U, 17.2154–55). He attains equanimity regarding Molly’s infidelity because after
some contemplation he finds adultery to be “as not more abnormal than all other parallel
processes of adaptation to altered conditions of existence, resulting in a reciprocal equilibrium
between the bodily organism and its attendant circumstances” (U, 17.2190–93). In other
words, Molly’s tryst with Boylan was an adaptation in reaction to the changed circumstances
of her marital life and, as such, is perfectly natural: Molly desires consummated intercourse,
which is something Bloom cannot provide, hence Boylan. This would be why ultimately it does
not matter that much if Bloom directly commissioned Boylan to engage in an affair with his
wife, since Bloom is still responsible, or coresponsible, for Molly being sexually unsatisfied.
Indeed, this passage begins with the statement, “As as natural as any and every natural act of
nature expressed or understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in
accordance with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity” (U, 17.2178–80).
The inordinate repetition of the word “natural” in this passage of course suggests that Bloom’s
equanimity in this matter might actually be less than absolute. In any case, their dissimilar
similarities entail process of adaptation to attain mutual equilibrium, of which infidelity is but
one example or consequence or modality of life and love.
In conducting her affair Molly is pursuing sexual satisfaction outside the confines of a
marriage that does not provide for such. The affair does not necessarily mean that she no
longer loves Bloom, but rather that, at the very least, the tenor of their relationship has
changed. Molly’s thoughts at the end of the episode include a reminiscence of her first date
with Bloom at Howth (U, 18.1572–81) and the details she remembers harmonize with Bloom’s
own thoughts of the same in “Lestrygonians” (U, 8.898–916). While distinct and divergent,
Bloom and Molly’s perspectives are compatible. Molly’s infidelity is, then, one aspect of her life
and opinions and not even necessarily an important one. Although she looks forward to
continuing the affair, it is but one of the many things she thinks of in this episode and, as such,
implicated in her affirmation. Molly affirms the contingent, the multifarious conditionality of
life lived in numerous comportments. Her “great Yes to life” is an affirmation of the good and
the bad, the emissions and the omissions that have filled her life and days. Molly’s going to
sleep is a synecdoche of her human life, that is, this one hour is both a fragment from that life
as well as something that stands as a representation of that finite and fragmentary life. Her
indefinite affirmation is creative in that she keeps on affirming, saying “yes,” going to sleep,
waking up, possibly making breakfast for Bloom, and so on, until she doesn’t.
 Chapter 6
The Gay Science of Finnegans Wake

Ulysses is not without certain difficulties. Despite much insightful critical exegesis there
remain many interpretive conundrums, things about which even seasoned Joyceans can only
agree to disagree. These cruxes range from the small, such as the identity of the man in the
macintosh or Martha Clifford’s real name, to the large, such as the nature of Joyce’s rapport
with Ireland and Irish history. However, there are, at least, a number of things that just about
anyone who has read the book can agree on: the novel’s events take place in Dublin on June
16, 1904 (with some taking place in the early morning of the following day). The three main
characters are Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser for the Freeman’s Journal, his wife
Molly, a concert singer who is set to embark on affair with her manager, and Stephen Dedalus,
reprised from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In addition, there is some kind of
connection to Homer’s Odyssey, which is signaled in the title, although the exact nature of this
particular rapport remains open to debate. While there are a certain number of things that
remain ambiguous about Ulysses, there is a basic and agreed-upon foundational template from
which critical inquiry can begin.
Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, does not present us with the luxury of even a modicum
of the unequivocal. Basic statements about this book are fraught with complication and are, at
best, misleading unless nuanced, or, at worst, simplistic to the point of being meaningless. In
terms of basic critical orientation, the Wake is certainly not written in English; that is, “in the
Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language
in any sinse of the world” (FW, 83.10–12). Perhaps it would be safer to say that it is written
from English as it includes many different languages, “like engels opened to neuropeans” (FW,
519.01)—shunting language, languages, onto a wider arena. After careful analysis Laurent
Milesi estimates 80 languages in the Wake.1 However, properly identifying and cataloguing
languages is not without its problems. Fritz Senn recounts that in 1969 at the second
International James Joyce Symposium, he ventured that the word “sommerfool” (FW, 415.27)
played on the Swiss German word for butterfly, Sommervogel, a plausible inference
considering the time Joyce spent in Zürich. However, Jack Dalton loudly denied this
identification and insisted on linking it to the Danish word, sommerfugl, also butterfly.2 And
Dalton’s rage at Senn’s gloss pales in comparison to the vitriol spilled over properly
distinguishing between Dutch, Flemish, and Afrikaans.3
Beyond the problem of languages, it is difficult to say that Finnegans Wake has a plot,
although some critics certainly insist that it does, usually an expansion of the proposition of a
“solid man saved by his sillied woman” (FW, 94.03).4 It is difficult to say that there are
characters, or at least fixed characters, although, again, some critics claim that there are, but
even these critics would concede that Wakean characters operate in ways that are very
different from just about any other literary work.5 Determining a setting is a bit of a “locative
enigma” (FW, 135.26), although, as with just about all Joyce’s other works, the Wake does
seem to focus on Dublin (and its environs), even if it does ask, “So, This Is Dyoublong?” (FW,
13.04). The place, wherever it is, is not immediately inviting.
One reasonably clear “fact” about the Wake is that it refers to a mysterious document that is
subject to misinterpretation, a “proteiform graph [that] itself is a polyhedron of scripture” (FW,
107.08). Of course, there is some irony in this being a relatively unambiguous fact, since
statements apropos this mysterious “Letter” have a self-conscious aspect and could be said to
characterize the conundrums of the Wake itself. In describing the unreadability and
indeterminacy of the Letter, the Wake further taunts its readers. “Thus the unfacts, did we
possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude” (FW, 57.16–17). This feeds into
one of the most recited critical commonplaces of the Wake, Beckett’s claim that Joyce’s
“writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”6 Such a line can be profitably
applied to genetic analyses of the Wake; as Dirk Van Hulle argues, “the composition process is
an integral part of what [Joyce’s] works convey.”7
Compounding our critical uncertainties, an argument could even be made that this book is
not even by James Joyce, thereby depriving us of another commonplace usually associated with
literary works. Such an argument would revolve around Joyce’s plan in the late 1920s to
“abdicate” his authorship of his Work in Progress to James Stephens. On May 20, 1927, he
wrote Weaver: “Of course he would never take a fraction of the time or pains I take but so
much the better for him and me and possibly for the book itself. If he consented to maintain
three or four points which I consider essential and I showed him the threads he could finish
the design. JJ and S (the colloquial Irish for John Jameson and Son’s Dublin whisky) would be a
nice lettering under the title” (LI, 253–54).8 Apparently, Joyce believed that his
“vicociclometer” (FW, 614.27) no longer requires the direct initiative of its creator who, like
Stephen Dedalus’s ideal artist, can remain “within or behind of beyond or above his
handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (P, 215).9
While ultimately Joyce did not cede the Work in Progress to Stephens (and one can easily
imagine Stephens’s relief), this episode during its composition shows that Joyce does not
necessarily ascribe to himself an authority conventionally associated with writers.
Although basic feats of critical orientation lack surety, there are two enduring hermeneutic
commonplaces apropos the Wake, but these are certainly not without their detractors: that the
Wake is a dream and/or a universal history. Both rubrics derive from comments that Joyce
made and also have some textual support. However, Joyce’s claims are more equivocal than
might be assumed. For the dream, the major source is Joyce’s claim in a letter to Weaver from
1926 that “one great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be
rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot”
(LI, 146). Joyce does not explicitly mention dreaming here, merely that a “great part of human
existence” cannot be rendered in a language ordained by logic. Another comment from a letter
to Weaver is even more equivocal: “My brother says that having done the longest day in
literature I am now conjuring up the darkest night” (LIII, 140). Here, Joyce is simply conveying
Stanislaus’s judgment rather than actually endorsing such a pronouncement.10 In any case,
the dream hypothesis creates further interpretive problems: is the Wake written in a style that
reflects what Freud called “dreamwork” or, somewhat more literally, is it supposed to be the
representation of the dream, or dreams, experienced by a specific and perhaps even
identifiable individual or group of individuals.11 As Derek Attridge astutely notes, “The trouble
about appealing to such a description to explain what the book is about is that it poses exactly
the same problems as those which, on a wider canvas, it is being used to solve.”12 As in
dreams themselves, the obfuscation occasioned by the dream reading suggests, without
actually delivering, a deeper profundity.
In terms of the Wake being a universal history, after Ulysses was published, Harriet Weaver
asked Joyce what he would write next and he answered, “I think I will write a history of the
world.”13 And Joyce combined the idea of the Wake as a dream and the idea of it as a universal
history when he proclaimed that he had “conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn, lying
in death beside the river Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world—past and
future—flow through his mind like the flotsam on the river of life.”14 This combination of the
oneiric and the universal reaches its apotheosis in Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson’s
mythopoeic reading of the Wake: “Finnegans Wake is a prodigious, multifaceted monomyth,
not only the cauchemar of a Dublin citizen but the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving
humanity.”15 From this logic a dream can be, or at least pretend to be, a universal history.
The idea that Joyce is presenting “a universal history” is misleading, since it implies that
there is one single perspective from which all human history might be (somehow) told. To be
universal, a universal history requires multiple perspectives. Precisely because the language of
the Wake is convoluted by multiple languages, many first-time readers miss its stylistic
variability and assume it is written in a monolithically miasmic style; indeed, the inclusion of
numerous languages in the Wake translates, as it were, stylistic plurality onto multiple
linguistic registers. No one style can be apposite to the Wake. Even though Campbell and
Robinson call the Wake “multifaceted,” they nonetheless claim it is a “monomyth,” thereby
appealing to an imagined static and stable single ground for interpretation. Like so many other
critics, they hypostasize the Wake. Instead of trying to disambiguate the Wake, perhaps a more
fundamental interpretive step would be to recognize why it has been ambiguated; that is, to
recognize that reading the Wake is an exercise within the demesne of the equivocal apart and
away from the demon imp hypostasis.
On the level of style, the Wake is complex because it compounds and confounds together
multiple referential senses. Although the terms “pun” or “paronomasia” are frequently used to
describe Wakean language they miss the point somewhat. A pun conflates two (or more)
disparate meanings synchronically whereas Wakean language multiplies meanings
diachronically. To use the terms from Lessing’s aesthetics that Stephen contemplates in
“Proteus,” Wakean polyvalence is nacheinander rather than nebeneinander (U, 3.13, 3.15). To
be sure, such diachronic polyvalence is often enabled through portmanteau constructions, but
the complexity of the Wake is primarily syntactic rather than semantic in that glossing, or
unpacking, the portmanteaux is only of small (but not insignificant) help.
To take an example, the sentence “Vetus may by occluded behind the mou in Veto but Nova
will be nearing as their radient among the Nereids” (FW, 267.22–24) might describe the
occultation16 of Venus by the Moon and the simultaneous appearance of a Nova shining in the
constellation Eridanus (formerly known as Nereus), but it is also a metaphorical expansion of
the saying “out with the old (vetus), in with the new (nova).” There is also a sexual component
to this passage enabled by the word “mou,” which is French slang for the human body and also
means a man of weak character as well as the contrary ironic sense of someone strong and
vigorous. These senses allow for this passage to also be read as describing a (possibly old and
impotent) man lying on top of, and thus occluding, an old woman, as during coitus, even as a
new young buck makes merry with some charming nymphs (nereids, the daughters of Nereus).
In this way, this simple passage is linguistically parallactic: multiple perspectives are allowed,
which complement and subvert each other. In the Wake, sense and nonsense are parallactically
enmeshed.
In this way, Wakean language is “parapolylogic” (FW, 474.05),17 that is, suggestive of
multiple senses in tandem, sometimes harmonious, sometimes discordant, often both. Any
Wakean passage is susceptible to multiple and incommensurable readings, and each reading is
a fractal or partial metonym of some imagined yet nonpresent asymptotic whole. The
proliferation of patterns that can be adduced—the puns that can be parsed, the estranged
words that can be translated, the syntax that can be construed, and (even) the characters that
can be named—make it seem as if there could be an overall guiding structure, a figure in the
carpet. But the rampant proliferation of these clues also interferes with the possibility of a tidy
synthesis without remainder, the carpet remains too messy and littered. No pattern is
definitive, yet all that can be read are these partial and incomplete series that take the place of
answers, as “the infinisissimalls of her facets becomes manier and manier” (FW, 298.31–32).
The convolute Wakean style is a vehicle for a multitude of concurrent perspectives. Philippe
Sollers deploys an analogous multiple logic in his novel H, which is written as a single
unpunctuated sentence, thereby recalling Molly’s soliloquy. However, Sollers announces in this
book how it is different from “Penelope”: “I oppose against the interior monologue the exterior
polylogue.”18 Of his following novel, Paradis, which is written in a similar style, Sollers replied,
when asked who speaks in his novel, “Multitudes such as one has never seen within a unity
that one has never heard of.”19 In Sollers’s books, as in the Wake, the rabble speaks through
the equivocation, that is, through a plurality of perspectives.
In a very telling passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche outlines how the natural sciences
risk becoming a godlike hypostasis:

It is no different with the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content
nowadays, the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought
and human valuations—a “world of truth” that can be mastered completely and forever and with the aid
of our square little reason. What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this—
reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one
should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity (GS, §373).

As Nietzsche has it, hypostasis robs life of ambiguity. To accept that one’s status as a being is
provisional and delimited is to accept life, at least this is how Nietzsche would define it:
“Rather has the world become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the
possibility that it may include infinite interpretations” (GS, §374). In this way, Nietzsche’s
condemnation of precise valuation as “a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion
for mathematicians” echoes Derrida’s criticism of Joycean glossators in “Two Words for
Joyce.”20 It also echoes Stephen’s condemnation in Stephen Hero of modern epistemology:
“The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can
conceive . . . It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of
redemption” (SH, 186); and also Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals: “We modern men are
the heirs of the conscience-vivisection and self-torture of millennia” (GM, II§24). In killing what
it studies and contemplates, vivisection is inherently antilife. For Nietzsche, knowledge comes
from a multiplicity of perspectives, a multiplicity of styles that each occasion their own partial
and incommensurable Weltanschauung. Rather than look at a syncretic and synthetic totality,
it encourages a “heptachromatic” (FW, 611.06) vitality of local colors.
For Nietzsche the death of God is “the meaning of our cheerfulness” (GS, §343). It is
precisely because there is and can be no overarching hypostasis that one has to understand
one’s existence as an aesthetic phenomenon in order to make it bearable: “we must
occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom”
(GS, §107). In this way, art—and especially art that inclines toward laughter—can “do what is
good for the preservation of the human race” (GS, §1). This is exactly what Nietzsche means by
a gay science, which derives from the Provençal “gai saber,” a term that designates the art of
poetry (BGE, §260). Nietzsche invokes this belated tradition a counter to the heavy, stodgy
Germanic thinking: German Wissenschaft is hardly fröhliche. As he says right at the outset, the
book is “a bit of merry-making after long privation and powerlessness” (GS, Preface, §1).
Nietzsche’s gay science is the marriage of laughter with wisdom (GS, §1). In the Genealogy of
Morals, Nietzsche allies this humor with challenging the mode of the will to power that is the
ascetic ideal by beholding us to become “the comedians of this ideal” (GM, III§27). In this task
art has a special role, but only some kinds of art and especially not the art that Wagner hoisted
on Europe. In critiquing his Parsifal Nietzsche proposes that, unlike Wagner, an artist is only
worthy “when he knows how to laugh at himself” (GM, III§3). Following from Nietzsche’s
argument, Simon Critchley proposes that humor is integral to ethics precisely because it
“allows us both to maintain the ethical demand and to moderate and assuage that demand.”21
Humor allows for empathy but also palliates the discomfort empathy occasions.
There seems to be a link between what Stephen portentously calls “silence, exile, and
cunning” (P, 247) and the title Nietzsche chose for the prelude in rhymes for The Gay Science,
“Joke, Cunning, and Revenge.” However, and quite typically, Stephen omits the jokes. Stephen
is too dour for a gay science. If one were to tell a high school student who has recently read
either Dubliners or A Portrait (or both) that Joyce is a funny writer, one would most likely be
met by a look of incredulity. Unlike Ulysses and the Wake, Joyce’s earlier works are not really
that funny. However, with Ulysses Joyce uncovers the comedic potential of multifarious style
(something that Nietzsche did not quite manage so well). Like Bloom’s hat, Ulysses is a “high
grade ha” (U, 4.69–70). Carola Giedion-Welcker recalls Nora telling her that Joyce would wake
her with his laughter while writing the Wake and so she would admonish him, “Jim, stop
writing or stop laughing.”22
Philip Kitcher comments that in the Wake, “the humor, ranging from the simplest slapstick to
sly and subtle witticisms, conveys a background attitude to life that is absent from
philosophical accounts, an appreciation and zestful enjoyment of ordinary things.”23 The point
that Joyce’s humor is of a kind normally absent from philosophical accounts is important and
suggests a consonance between what Joyce is doing and Nietzsche’s condemnation of
traditional modes of philosophy and science. But there is seriousness in Joyce’s laughter. In the
Wake, Joyce elevates whimsy to a philosophical principle, to a way of life, to a way of living life.
The agathos bios abides ambiguity. Derrida associates this laughter with Wakean
overdetermination and equivocity, a “certain quality of laughter would accord something like
affect to this beyond of calculation, and of all calculable literature.”24 In the absence of God,
“loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!” (FW, 259.07–8). What
Nietzsche calls “rich ambiguity” serves as the occasion for laughter, that which resounds in art
after the death of God. Another way of looking at this would be to take the sentence “Sleep,
where in the wake is thy wisdom” (FW, 114.19–20). Reading this as a declarative statement,
that is, as an answer, postulates some kernel of wisdom within the wake, something positive
that could be identified and codified, whereas reading this as a question would imply there
would be no certainty of finding wisdom. And so, with a gay science, multiperspectivism is
implicated and imbricated with affirmation, rich ambiguity, and laughter. Laughter is what
remains in the wake of hypostasis.

* * *

In a curious footnote to the essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida admits that “the paragraph that
is about to end here will have marked the fact that this pharmacy of Plato’s also brings into
play Bataille’s text, inscribing within the story of the egg the sun of the accursed part; the
whole of that essay, as will quickly become apparent, being itself nothing but a reading of
Finnegans Wake.”25 And in “Two Words for Joyce,” Derrida called the whole Plato essay “a sort
of indirect, perhaps distracted, reading of Finnegans Wake.”26 The sense in which such a
statement might be valid is that “Plato’s Pharmacy” proposes a theory of writing as an
absentation in the wake of the loss of a pure, self-present plenitude, that is, in the wake of the
death of God. The absentation that occasions and characterizes writing indicates the death of
God, that is, the impotence of hypostasis. As a representation, writing does not make
something present, rather, it indicates the absence of that thing: “What is repeated is the
repeater, the imitator, the signifier, the representative, in the absence, as it happens, of the
thing itself, which these appear to reedit, and without psychic or mnesic animation, without
the living tension of dialectics.”27 In his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, Derrida argues that
Plato’s denigration of writing is itself constituted by writing. In effect, the argument is that like
Husserl, Plato attempts to regulate play into a determinacy, that is, into something that can be
determined with a fixed and stable identity. But such fixity is impossible in the realm of writing
because of its ineluctable absentation. Writing is thus the remembering and propagation of a
foundational forgetting: “They will represent him even if he forgets them; they will transmit his
word even if he is not there to animate them.”28 This is perhaps the sense that is most
apposite to the Wake in that the propagation of a kind of oblivion or erasure is exactly the fate
of the character (or characteristics) styled as HCE. He is remembered by those parasitical
forms of local life that abound on the dead. But then memory is always unfaithful, full of holes
and ready to deceive: “m’m’ry” (FW, 460.20).
We see this pattern at work in the opening section of the Wake’s second chapter, in a
passage called “Here Comes Everybody,” which begins with a genealogy:

Now (to forebare for ever solittle of Iris Trees and Lili O’Rangans), concerning the genesis of Harold or
Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen (we are back in the presurnames prodromarith period, of
course just when enos chalked halltraps) and discarding once for all those theories from older sources
which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the
Ankers and the Earwickers of Sidlesham in the Hundred of Manhood or proclaim him offsprout of
vikings who had founded wapentake and seddled hem in Herrick or Eric, the best authenticated version,
the Dumlat, read the Reading of Hofed-ben-Edar, has it that it was this way (FW, 30.01–11).

The passage purports to start to lay out the genesis behind some individual’s nickname,
however the passage is so encumbered by additional clauses that it winds up becoming an
exercise that leads to ambiguation rather than disambiguation. On the one hand, the passage
claims that the genealogy that is to be presented is “the best authenticated version.” This, of
course, implies that there are other versions of this story, less authentic ones, mendacious
ones, doubtful ones (some of which are herein named). On the other hand, the various
subclauses in the passage have the effect of asserting the intractability of these doubtful
versions at the expense of any one “authentic” version. Indeed, we do not even have just one
name for this individual, but rather two (“Harold or Humphrey”). Right from the start, the
claim for the authenticity of his name is compromised. Furthermore, that parenthetical clause
enumerates some of the less authentic stories concerning the genesis of his agnomen that are
in circulation. Before the sentence even posits the possibility of the most authentic version, it
gives a whole bunch of less authentic ones and, rather than discarding the inauthentic names,
as the sentence claims, they are firmly enstated. In other words, the statement toward
accuracy and definitude is compromised right from the outset. Even in its most inchoate
formulation there is no one single perspective afforded to this individual or to his name or
names. Ultimately, there is so much ambiguation in this passage that it is somewhat difficult to
be able to identify what, exactly, is being ambiguated in the first place. The story of Harold (or
Humphrey) as is told here is very much about this idea of the perpetuation of ambiguation
without an original. We have a corrupted chain of transmission that is bereft of an original
statement or ur-text.29
The supposedly authentic story that is told is that one day this Humphrey, who is a gardener,
was trying to catch earwigs in a flowerpot attached to a pike. Seeing this odd sight, a visiting
monarch asks him what he is doing, to which he replies that he was catching earwigs. And so
the monarch dubs him “Earwicker.” But the provision of such information is questioned:
“Comes the question are these the facts of his nominigentilisation as recorded and accolated in
both or either of the collateral andrewpaulmurphyc narratives. Are those their fata which we
read in sibylline between the fas and its nefas?” (FW, 31.33–36). The authenticity of the most
authentic version is cast into doubt. Furthermore, the facticity of that fact is authenticated by
its being recorded into legend, and nothing more. In this way this is not unlike that passage in
“Eumaeus,” “Their conversation accordingly became general and all agreed that that was a
fact” (U, 16.993–95). Saying it makes it so, or at least makes it into the functional equivalent of
a fact. Even this brief version of the narrative is not the original one, since the identity of the
king’s second gunman is given according to a later version of the story.
Although it is not certain that these are the facts, the one thing that can be vouchsafed is
that from this day—whatever that day was and whatever happened on that day—Humphrey
was called by the initials HCE, which were expanded by popular turn to be “Here Comes
Everybody.” We do not know the cause of this nickname, just the result that there is this
nickname.
It is somewhat easier to see where Joyce got this name. At the time he wrote this, in the
autumn of 1923, he was on holiday in Bognor and discovered the name “Earwicker”
(pronounced Erricker), which is an old family name in Sidelesham, Sussex.30 The “Earwickers
of Sidlesham” being one of the versions that the passage in I.2 discounts. There is nonetheless
a trace of this genealogy in the text, since Harold’s reply to the king is delivered in a Sussex
accent, which is amplified in the final version as: “Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin on
thon bluggy earwuggers” (FW, 31.10–11).
In any case, to this purportedly most authentic version of HCE’s story, baser rumors
circulate and entangle into his reputation. As soon as one fact is established—and established
problematically—it is challenged:

A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely
scarcely hint. It has been blurtingly bruited by certain wisecrackers (the stinks of Mohorat are in the
nightplots of the morning), that he suffered from a vile disease. Athma, unmanner them! To such a
suggestion the one selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not
to be, and one should like to hope to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made (FW, 33.14–21).

This denial is, of course, self-defeating: by articulating the hope that some nefarious statement
about a “vile disease” should not be made, such a statement is, in fact, made. In this way, the
denial of the baser accusations is exactly how these accusations are stated. But, these
accusations proceed with as much epistemological ambiguation as did the so-called most
authentic version of the genesis of his name. Both the accusation and the defense are
equivocal. As with the opening of this chapter, the equivocation is ambiguated. As an example,
here is the earliest draft of the passage that first details the accusations against HCE:

Slander, let it lie its flattest, has never been able to convict our good and great and no ordinary
Southron Earwicker, that homogenius man, as a pious author called him, of any graver impropriety than
that, advanced by some woodwards or regarders . . . of having behaved with ongentilmensky immodus
opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the swoolth of the rushy hollow whither . . . but whose
published combinations of silkinlaine testimonies are, where not dubiously pure, visibly divergent, as
wapt from wept, on minor points touching the intimate nature of this, a first offence in vert or venison
which was admittedly an incautious but, at its wildest, a partial exposure with attenuating
circumstances (FW, 34.12–27).

This passage initially purports to mitigate the severity of the accusation but, precisely because
it adds so much new information, it winds up furthering the denigration of HCE even if—or
perhaps especially because—this new information is itself not unequivocal. Like the genealogy
of his nickname, the passage that enstates the charges against him is encumbered by
ambiguating “attenuating circumstances.”
 This passage does not seem to exclusively concern some person named Humphrey Chimpden
Earwicker, since there are all sorts of other additional references that point in various
directions. For example, Humphrey is called a “grand old gardener” (FW, 30.13). The Edenic
allusion is amplified and we find him “in prefall paradise peace” (FW, 30.15). And elsewhere in
the text HCE, the victim of accusations of impropriety, is linked with Parnell. He is multiform,
or, as it says in the final text, “An imposing everybody he always indeed
looked . . . magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation” (FW, 32.18–21). Like
Bloom, HCE is an everyman, but in a different sense. As was argued in chapter 3, Bloom is an
everyman because he is so precisely delineated as an individual, whereas HCE is an everyman
precisely because he is not precisely demarcated as an individual; he is “more mob than man”
(FW, 261.21–22). The Wakean individual is already multiple: not alone and isolated in an
involuted egoism, but sinn féin agus eile (us and others), or even, broadening the linguistic
register, sinn féin et les autres, rather than just a solitary sinn féin.
As an example of how HCE’s identity is porous, I will look at how Joyce incorporated a
pattern of reference into his accusation. On a notebook preparatory to the first draft of
Chapter I.2, Joyce wrote:

It is not true that Pop was homosexual he had been arrested at the request of some nursemaids to whom
he had temporarily exposed himself in the Temple gardens.31

In this notebook “Pop” was the name Joyce used before settling on HCE.32 This passage is a
slightly modified version of a passage from the 1918 edition of Frank Harris’s biography of
Oscar Wilde. In an appendix, Harris refutes the accusation that Horatio Lloyd, Wilde’s father-
in-law, had been suspected of homosexuality and writes: “The charge against Horatio Lloyd
was of a normal kind. It was for exposing himself to nursemaids in the gardens of the
Temple.”33 Harris defends Lloyd from one accusation by charging him with another. When
Joyce transferred this element from the notebook to the draft, he modified some of the words
that would directly implicate Harris’s book as his source by changing “nursemaid” to
“maidservant” and “park” to “rushy hollow” (JJA 45: 3; BL 47472: 97v). And, by the time of the
final text the reference is further ambiguated by all sorts of additional material that clouds
over the reference to Lloyd. Indeed, the allusion to Horatio Lloyd remained undiscovered until
I picked it up whilst working on a paper on Wilde in the Wake.34 However, what ultimately
matters is not so much the fact that there is an allusion to Lloyd, but rather the ambiguation of
that reference. It is not necessary or perhaps even helpful to know, via the notebook, the
provenance of this line, what is interesting is to see how it participates within the confused
accusation of HCE.
The Wake’s second chapter consists of the vignette “Here Comes Everybody” and its
dénouement, a sequence that details the dissemination of the news about HCE and his
misdeed. The second chapter ends with a listing of the various people who hear and in turn
further spread the rumors of HCE and culminates with a song, the Ballad of Perce O’Reilly
(perce-oreille is French for earwig). The start of the third chapter tells how each of these
gossipacious individuals, in turn, suffer fates not unlike HCE. “Of the persins sin this
Eyrawyggla saga . . . no one end is known” (FW, 48.16–21). In I.2 these characters had been
able to vicariously participate in HCE’s crime by acting as way-stations in the dissemination
and distribution of rumor, and in I.3 they come to replay HCE’s “diasporation” (FW, 257.25) in
a “spoof of visibility in a freakfog” (FW, 048.01–2). Those who have clouded HCE are
themselves humiliatingly beclouded: “Yet all they who have heard or redelivered are now with
that family of bards and Vergobretas himself and the crowd of Caraculacticors as much no
more as be they not yet now or had they then notever been” (FW, 048.06–9). The characters, or
actors, have departed; they have evaporated along with their cloud. They do not exist in the
present (“not yet now”) and they have never existed (“notever been”). But they have left a kind
of trace, since they remain “as much no more.” They remain in that a possible future is
anticipated in which HCE can return: “Canbe in some future we shall presently here amid the
zouave players of Inkerman . . . the zitherer of the past with his merrymen all, zimzim, zimzim”
(FW, 048.09–16). In this way, they participate in and contribute to HCE’s universalization.
In the first draft of the opening of the third chapter, the characters have the same names as
the ones who spread the rumor of HCE at the end of the second chapter, thereby showing
continuity. However, in subsequent drafts their names were changed—some recognizable
modifications, others more substantial alterations35—and so a direct continuity is not evident
in the final text and this lack of continuity complicates reading the Wake as a straightforward
narrative. What happens, then, is that a text, or purported text, such as the tale of HCE,
proliferates through such continual dissimulation that there is no text there as such. In effect
the plot of Finnegans Wake could be summarized as the dissemination of calumny apropos
HCE and its consequences: “First you were Nomad, next you were Namur, now you’re Numah
and it’s soon you’ll be Nomon” (FW, 374.22–23).
The allusion that HCE is a “grand old gardener . . . in prefall paradise peace” (FW, 30.13–15)
adds more than just a few biblical overtones. In the first chapter, after a retelling of the song
“Finnegan’s Wake” in which Tim Finnegan rises from the dead when a whisky bottle hits his
head during his riotous wake, he is encouraged to remain dead: “Now be aisy, good Mr
Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don’t be walking
abroad . . . You’re better off, sir, where you are” (FW, 24.16–28) and “Repose you now! Finn no
more!” (FW, 28.33–24). His death is democratically imposed. This recalls the madman in The
Gay Science, a precursor to Zarathustra, who proclaims, “Whither is God? . . . We have killed
him—you and I . . . How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? . . . Must
we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” (GS, §125). As described in
chapter 2, the problem Nietzsche diagnoses in The Gay Science is that the concept of God as a
regulative hypostasis might have been superseded, but the persistence of a hypostasis in a
different form nonetheless remains. This leads Andrew J. Mitchell to read the “hubbub caused
in Edenborough” (FW, 29.35–36) as the aftermath of God’s death. “God’s death cannot be
regarded a fait accompli because He dies only to reappear again, each appearance announcing
a subsequent death.”36 God may be dead, but he keeps coming back, in various guises (not
unlike some horror movie villain). “Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister
Finnagain! Comeday morm, and, O, you’re vine! Sendday’s eve and, ah, you’re vinegar!
Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again!” (FW, 5.09–12). Mitchell goes on to
read the continual repetition of the death of God through the various instantiations of HCE as
a manifestation of the eternal recurrence of the same in that “each occurrence is a unique
event that singularly repeats anew the question of finitude,” thereby preferring a reading of
the eternal return as cosmological rather than as an existential imperative.37 Through
repetitions and variations, something is perpetuated—but what, exactly?
Within the Wake patterns consistently recur in a differential manner, as is evidenced with the
various and varied repetitions of the phrase “The seim anew” (FW 215.23): “being humus the
same roturns” (FW, 18.05), “moves in vicious circles [Vichian cycles] yet remews the same”
(FW, 134.16–17), “The same renew” (FW, 226.17), “And Sein annews” (FW, 277.17), “This aim
to you!” (FW, 510.02), “To flame in you” (FW, 614.09), “The sehm asnuh” (FW, 620.15), and
(finally) “The way I too” (FW, 620.27–28).38 The same does anew, but always through
differentiation and circuitous detour.
We see this process of repetition and variation with both the form and content the so-called
Quinet sentence. This is a sentence from Edgar Quinet’s Introduction à la philosophie de
l’histoire de l’humanité that Joyce called “beautiful” (LI, 295). It appears six times, with
variations, in the Wake. Because of its repetitions, Clive Hart characterizes it as one of the
Wake’s major motifs.39 Its earliest appearance in terms of composition is in II.2, where it is the
closest to Quinet’s text. As Inge Landuyt and Geert Lernout have shown, Joyce did not derive
the passage directly from Quinet, but rather from a book by Léon Metchnikoff, La Civilisation
et les grands fleuves historiques, since he reproduces Metchnikoff’s own errors in citing
Quinet.40 In its citation in II.2 it is flanked by the marginal aside “Also Spuke Zerothruster”
(FW, 281.L6–7), thereby suggesting that the repetition and variation of Quinet’s sentence
(itself a palimpsest through Metchnikoff) might be understood in terms of the eternal
recurrence of the same.
The Quinet sentence in II.2 reads:

Aujourd’hui comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche
en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance et pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de
maîtres et de noms, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et
brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les âges et sont arrivées jusqu’à nous, fraîches et
riantes comme aux jours des batailles
[Today, as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth disports in Gaul, the periwinkle in Illyria, the
daisy on the ruins of Numantia; & while around them the cities have changed masters and names, while
some have ceased to exist, while the civilisations have collided with one another and smashed, their
peaceful generations have passed through the ages and have come up to us, fresh and laughing as on
the days of battles] (FW, 281.04–13).41

The traces of grand historical events, such as the “MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED” (U,
7.358), are effaced by a perpetually growing and renewing botanical life. What recurs is not
individual life, but life. In this way, recurrence is the least interesting aspect of the eternal
recurrence of the same. Instead, what matters is the specificity of the individual matter that
recurs, the local color of the hyacinth, the periwinkle, and the daisy.
What recurs, then, is life, the facticity of life ever-living. The meaning of life is, well, life.
Individuals come and go but life is always the same anew. This is touched on in Ulysses with
the issue of metempsychosis, which Bloom (patiently) explains to Molly. At first his explanation
is correct as he explains it as reincarnation (U, 4.362–65), but then, in a subsequent
elaboration, he conflates it with metamorphosis (U, 4.375–77). The chief difference between
metempsychosis and metamorphosis is that the former, reincarnation, necessarily involves a
de-incarnation, that is, death. For the eternal recurrence to work, in the Wake and elsewhere,
it must involve death.

Toborrow and toburrow and tobarrow! That’s our crass, hairy and evergrim life, till one finel howdiedow
Bouncer Naster raps on the bell with a bone and his stinkers stank behind him with the sceptre and the
hourglass. We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s
without ends (FW, 455.12–18).

Beyond the allusion to the opening line of Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 5, Scene 5, this passage
also twists Macbeth’s sentiment that “life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts
and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more” (V.v.24–26). For recurrence to
recur, death must also recur, endlessly since odd is, indeed, without ends.

Life, he himself said once (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or
krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the corpse of our seedfather, a phrase which the
establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn.
The scene, refreshed, reroused, was never to be forgotten (FW, 55.05–11).

Living is being-toward-death, over and over again. What recurs in the Wake is not so much
HCE as such (if such could be said to exist), but, rather, life in its recurrent and recombinant
being-toward-death: here comes and goes everybody.

* * *

Both Nietzsche and Joyce’s politics have been subject to misapprehension. In Nietzsche’s case,
the basic itinerary of the co-opting of the Übermensch by Nazism and Fascism is well-known.
Daniel W. Conway writes that “Nietzsche’s strategy of indirection has backfired egregiously
and often. Rather than discourage unworthy readers from attempting to divine his Promethean
wisdom, his rhetorical gyrations have in fact issued a blanket invitation to cranks and scholars
alike.”42 The claim here is that, accidentally, Nietzsche has inaugurated a politics, that is, a
specific and single political perspective. Joyce has likewise endured an analogous fate,
although in a diametrically different political orientation. Perhaps the most melodramatic
display of a political reading of Joyce was Philippe Sollers’s intervention during a discussion on
the possible relationship of Joyce’s work to the Irish Revolution at the 1975 Joyce Symposium
in Paris:

Sollers.—[Placing a book on the table:] Je vous montre une révolution.

Translator.—He shows you one revolution.
[Morris] Beja.—That is a copy of Finnegans Wake.43

Sollers’s political reverie of Joyce obviously follows from Eugene Jolas’s (not entirely
successful) conscription of Joyce into service for an international “revolution of the word.”
Thus, like Nietzsche’s, but in a very different vector, Joyce’s politics are understood within a
European context. Ezra Pound, one of the first to critically comment upon Joyce, insisted upon
Joyce’s status as an international writer rather than just an Irish writer. From his 1914 review
of Dubliners: “It is surprising that Mr Joyce is Irish . . . He is not an institution for the
promotion of Irish peasant industries. He accepts an international standard of prose writing
and lives up to it.”44 The following year, Pound wrote that Joyce “writes as a European, not as
a provincial.”45 While Pound does not ignore an Irish comportment to Joyce’s writing, he
subordinates it to Joyce’s continental inclinations. A few years later, Valery Larbaud essentially
repeated Pound’s characterization of a European Joyce, albeit without Pound’s tetchy
Hibernophobic edge: Joyce “is what we call a pure ‘Milesian’: Irish and Catholic of old stock,
from the Ireland that benefits from some affinities with Spain, France, and Italy, but for whom
England is a strange land which cannot be made closer even by the commonality of
language.”46 There is a straight line, at least roughly, between Pound and Larbaud and
Ellmann’s biography where Joyce is canonized within a European corpus.47 Ellmann’s Joyce
fits in perfectly with the New Criticism in that any historical context and specificity to Joyce’s
works was inessential to an appreciation of Joyce’s Modernist, international grandeur.
Certainly, such a deracinated critical stance would be useful to critics, typically American at
this time, who would have been, among other things, somewhat oblivious to the nontrivial
nuances of Irish history and culture.
Of course, there had been dissent to this construction of Joyce. The year Ulysses was
published, Ernest Boyd bitterly took Larbaud to task and claimed that Joyce’s works can only
be understood in the context of the Irish Literary Revival: “The fact is, no Irish writer is more
Irish than Joyce.”48 The Larbaud/Boyd tension is one that has endured, through various
permutations, throughout the history of Joyce criticism. Largely thanks to Ellmann, the Pound-
Larbaud position prevailed for many years, but starting in the 1980s with the emergence of
postcolonial theory, the pendulum swung the other way and readings of Joyce began to engage
specific Irish literary, historical, political, and cultural contexts. In a sense, these readings
repatriate Joyce from his Modernist exile. One recent example of this, Andrew Gibson’s Joyce’s
Revenge, through careful and detailed readings of Joyce’s engagement with specific historical
references, construes Joyce’s “Irishness” as a “‘Celtic revenge’ on the colonial power.”49 In
this way, Gibson suggests a mediation of sorts between Joyce’s “Irishness” and his position
within European High Modernism. As Friedhelm Rathjen has suggested, Joyce “is not an Irish
writer but an ex-Irish writer.”50 That is, Joyce is a migratory writer, as is indicated in the
geographical odysseys listed in the epigraphs to A Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake:
“Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914” (P, 253), “Trieste-Zurich-Paris / 1914–1921” (U, 18.1610–11), and
“Paris, / 1922–1939” (FW, 628.17–18).51 In his Continental translocations, Joyce remained not
not Irish, which is to say that his affiliation could be subsumed within the larger rubric of
Europe whilst also retaining the specificity of Hibernian inflection.
 As any viewer of the Eurovision Song Contest can attest, Europe is a bit of a myth, a
discordant whole comprising dissonant parts. As Nietzsche argues it, “Europe” as concept
arises out of a tension between ideas of the national and the supranational. In
contradistinction, he associates German policy—as exemplified by their national anthem
“Deutschland über alles”—as a “perpetuation of European particularism, of petty politics,”
which “[deprives] Europe itself of its meaning, of its reason” (EH, 321).52 In Beyond Good and
Evil, he defines “good Europeanism” as the overcoming of “atavistic attacks of
fatherlandishness,” even as he admits that the “good European” can still permit the occasional
bout of “hearty fatherlandishness” (BGE, §241).53 “Europeanization” tends toward
homogenization as well as an evolving independence away from any one specific, singular
ingredient or “determinate milieu” (BGE, §242). For Nietzsche, the supranational is the
“nomadic type of man” (BGE, §242); wandering, like Bloom, “from land to land, among people,
amid events” (U, 17.2016). Europe is a path away from national prejudice and xenophobia, a
new collective identity emerging from a process of intermixture: “Europe wants to become
one” (BGE, §256). In this, Nietzsche posits Jewish wandering as exemplary for the Europe to
come: “As soon as it is no longer a question of the conserving of nations but of the production
of the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew will be just as usable and desirable as
an ingredient of it as any other national residue” (HATH, §475). Europe, for Nietzsche, is
monadic and nomadic; that is, a single entity comprised of variable, shifting, migratory parts, a
“wholeness in manifoldness” (BGE, §212). This is not a singularity that absorbs and dissolves
its constituent parts (like the “multifaceted monomyth” Campbell and Robinson claim as the
most salient characteristic of the Wake), but a singularity occasioned by variable and shifting
and incommensurable tendencies and perspectives.
The project of Europeanization that Nietzsche endorses is one of the “repudiation of
national, class and individual vanity” (WS, §215)—which is not the same as a repudiation of
national, class, and individual identity. Nietzsche’s Europe is one in which the hypostasis of
the nation-state holds little (but not no) sway. Of course, this is a Europe of the mind and not
an extant (or even probable) geopolitical configuration. For Nietzsche, “Europe” and “modern”
are largely synonymous.54 Europe and the modern are things we evolve into, like ourselves, as
in the subtitle to Ecce Homo, “How One Becomes What One Is.” Nietzsche’s Europe is a
tendency, not a bureaucracy, a never-attainable direction and not an institution that enforces
codes and regulations. It is an abode where miscegenation and hybridization can abide.
Finnegans Wake, therefore, is Europe, or, at least, has some things in common with
Nietzsche’s ideas for Europe. Since each language has its own style, its own perspective and
purchase upon the world, the Wake combines these styles and perspectives. Like ALP, the
Wake is a “Bringer of Plurabilities” (FW, 104.02). Linguistically, the Wake is multiperspectival.
This is precisely the point that Beckett seized upon to connect Joyce with Dante. “[Dante’s]
conclusion is that the corruption common to all dialects makes it impossible to select one
rather than another as an adequate literary form, and that he who would write in the vulgar
must assemble the purest elements from each dialect and construct a synthetic language that
would at least possess more than a circumscribed local interest.”55 On the other hand, purity
is not quite the goal of Joyce’s linguistic manipulations. One can see this with the ten thunder
words, “The hundredlettered name again, last word of perfect language” (FW, 424.23–24). The
individual thunder words glued together in each of the massive thunder words cannot be
pronounced in any one language, and thus parsing these words together individually, or as a
unit, reenacts or repeats the hubris of the Babelian fall. Laurent Milesi writes: “The advent of
Pentecost is constantly thwarted and a reconciliation does not appear behind the formal fusion
of languages in the mould of Wakean language.”56 Languages are fused, but, as such, do not
point toward a syncretic, whole, and pure language. There is no single word or primal scene of
decrepitude to be construed here at the place of this one-hundred-letter word, “where flash
becomes word and silents selfloud” (FW, 267.16–17). With too many languages, there are too
many perspectives, there is too much to comfortably digest in the “new Irish stew” (FW,
190.09).

* * *

Readers of Nietzsche might be surprised at the detail he lavishes upon his diet and digestive
abilities (or, more accurately, inabilities). In Ecce Homo, he relates how he suffered a poor and
ill-conceived diet as a young man. More specifically, he berates German cuisine for all manner
of distempers: “Add to this the virtually bestial prandial drinking habits of the ancient, and by
no means only the ancient Germans, and you will understand the origin of the German spirit—
from distressed intestines” (EH, 238).57 German food leaves Nietzsche “theosophagusted”
(FW, 610.01). Nietzsche describes his own diet as being somewhat ascetic and he calls the best
cuisine that of Piedmont—which is where he was living at the time he wrote Ecce Homo.
Piedmont cuisine is quite eclectic, reflecting both the diversity of its terrain and its history of
enduring incursions by various European powers.58 Nietzsche’s cataloguing of various diets by
national type—and his championing of the eclectic cuisine of Piedmont—suggests that his
disquisition relates to his arguments concerning Europe and national identity. Unlike Cleanth
Brooks and the New Critics who derided the old historicist urge to uncover, as Browning
facetiously put it, “what porridge had John Keats,”59 Nietzsche sees tremendous importance to
specific material, contingent forces and foodstuffs. One is and thinks what one eats; morality is
diet. And so in delineating his own Dantean (that is, pan-Italian Piedmont) diet, Nietzsche
examines the various menus of diets across Europe, as national character and type is reduced
to matters of cuisine. “All prejudices come from the intestines” (EH, 240). If each nation’s
custom and character is allied with diet, then a European cuisine would be omnivorous and—
unlike the dyspeptic German spirit that “does not finish with everything” (EH, 238)—it would
digest it properly.
This, of course, leads us to the Shem the Penman chapter of Finnegans Wake, where Shem is
caricatured by Shaun as a self-obsessed artist who writes about himself on his own body with
an ink made from his excrement (FW, 185.14–26). Digestion is key to Shem’s art; his diet is
pan-European, but is not without an occasional Irish lilt, “he would far sooner muddle through
the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea” (FW, 171.05–6). As
noted in chapter 2, this account can be construed as a parody in extremis of the egoistic
aesthetic Joyce labored under in A Portrait in that Shem extrudes “endlessly inartistic portraits
of himself” (FW, 182.18–19).
Of course, this “portrait of himself” is the product of Shaun and, as such, is potentially
biased. The Shem and Shaun dynamic is difficult to delineate: as twins they are opposite and
equal and both share and invert each other’s attributes. They might be distinct and
distinguishable from each other, but they cannot exist separately or independently. Neither is
auto-genetic, instead they are co-genetic, a “dividual chaos” (FW, 186.04–5).
The epithet Shaun prefers to castigate his wayward brother with in Chapter I.7 is “low”:
“Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs. So low was
he that he preferred Gibson’s tea-time salmon tinned” (FW, 170.25–27). Shem’s low mien is
reiterated constantly throughout this chapter: “O! the lowness of him was beneath all up to
that sunk to!” (FW, 171.12–13); “Talk about lowness!” (FW, 171.29); “bardic memory low” (FW
172.28); “the noxious pervert’s perfect lowness” (FW, 174.35–6); “the pleb was born a
Quicklow and sank alowing till he stank out of sight” (FW, 175.03–4); “How is that for low,
laities and gentlenuns?” (FW, 177.08); “this disinterestingly low human type” (FW, 179.12–13);
and “enough of such porterblack lowneess” (FW, 187.17). But, unsurprisingly, lowness is not
reserved exclusively for Shem, since Shaun suffers from this stooped gesture as well.
In III.1, Shaun cannot describe the Letter without resorting to periphrastic persiflage,
making his delivery highly circuitous. When asked to “vouchsafe to say” (FW, 424.15) why, in
particular, he dislikes Shem, the only answer he can give is that he hates Shem “for his root
language” (FW, 424.17) and then later for his “lowquacity” (FW, 424.34). But if the language
that ululates from Shem is low, then, reciprocally, the language in which Shaun comes to be
rendered through the course of Book III is also low. His gesture of delivery comes to echo his
charge against Shem of writing: “the hummers in their ground all vociferated echoating:
Shaun! Shaun! Post the post! with a high voice and O, the higher on high the deeper and low, I
heard him so!” (FW, 404.06–9). Shaunish delivery is coordinate with Shemmish inscription; and
any possible synthesis between the two would be a “trinity [that] shams lowliness” (FW,
014.34). The interplay between Shem and Shaun—brothers who are “consanguineous to the
lowest degree” (FW, 572.26)—stoops and falls at a low angle.
Lowness seems to be then a common trait expressed variably between the two brothers:
“Lowly, longly, a wail went forth. Pure Yawn lay low” (FW, 474.01). But lowness is not
restricted to the character of the fraternal struggle since during his inquiry in III.3, Yawn
beseeches the interrogating Mamalujo to “crouch low, you pigeons three!” (FW, 480.03).
Lowness informs all sides in this “starchamber quiry” (FW, 475.18–19). The differences
between the participants around HCE’s downfall merge down a low decline.
Once HCE is ventriloquized through Yawn’s supine body—once Yawn bespeaks HCE—his
own speech is not without a low trait or two. Through the lowness of Yawn, lowly HCE comes
to speak of the accusations leveled against him: “Such ratshause bugsmess so I can barely
conceive of! Lowest basemeant in hystry!” (FW, 535.17–18). The low or base charges leveled
against him have rendered or articulated him as a lowly individual. But then the accusers
themselves are low; one of the earliest characterizations of the Cad has him “a creature in
youman form who was quite beneath parr and several degrees lower than yore triplehydrad
snake” (FW, 036.06–7). As the baser meanings read into HCE proliferate, everyone is lowered.
If in I.3, HCE’s besmirchers come to suffer his fate of desistance, then his own recurrence is
conditioned by and through the perpetual abasement of rumor. It all falls down to that level.
Shem—as related by Shaun—is a low character, a lowness Shaun shares, even as he
excoriates Shem for his sham artistry, an artistry that is a caricature of Joyce’s own youthful
aesthetic. Indeed, Joyce used the character of Shaun to refract the words of many of his own
critics, such as Ezra Pound (who was none too fond of the Wake), Wyndham Lewis, Dr. Joseph
Collins, and Stanislaus, among many others.60 The caricature cuts both ways as Shem and
Shaun are each implicated in an artistic production of transmuting “life out of life” (P, 172).
Each recycles the other.
The problem, then, in assuming and assimilating the voices of his antagonist critics, might be
if Joyce substitutes himself—as artist—for the hypostasis he displaces. This is exactly what
Cixous charges Joyce with doing, with attempting to become God’s shadow. With Shem, Joyce
explores the will to power of the artist, or rather, the will to power latent within the aesthetic
of the “egoarch” (FW, 188.16). Since Shem defecates, he also must have eaten first, and the
chapter devoted to Shem begins with a catalogue of the many foods he consumes: “So low was
he that he preferred Gibsen’s teatime salmon tinned, as inexpensive as pleasing, to the
plumpest roeheavy lax or the friskiest parr or smolt troutlet that ever was gaffed between
Leixlip and Island Bridge” (FW, 170.25–28). As is typical of Joycean description, this passage is
richly detailed and is laden with alternative possibilities; in this case a specific brand of salmon
is preferred to other types of fish. And so Shem’s comestible input is well-detailed, as is the
output:

The first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till
by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising
moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life
unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous,
potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squid
self which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its
dudhud (FW, 185.34–186.08).

Shem’s digestive tract has “transaccidentated” foodstuff into faecal “scriptsigns” (FW, 118.28).
This recalls the line from Joyce’s 1904 “A Portrait” essay in which he describes himself “like an
alchemist . . . bent upon his handiwork, bringing together the mysterious elements, separating
the subtle from the gross” (P, 261; PSW, 214); a passage that was reworked into A Portrait as
“the priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the
radiant body of everliving life” (P, 221).61 Finn Fordham notes, the concept of
transaccidentation is converse to transubstantiation in that only the superficial qualities of the
matter (that is, the accidental qualities) are transformed, as opposed to the essential or
substantive attributes.62 Transaccidentation is analogous to metamorphosis: following from
Ovid, Arachne is still Arachne even after she has become a spider and Daphne is still Daphne
even after she has become a laurel. And the Catholic Mass provides an example of
transubstantiation without a concomitant transaccidentation with the Eucharist, where the
consecrated bread and wine become, respectively, the body and blood of Christ (at least if one
is not of a Reformist disposition).63 Alchemical transmutation, of the kind Joyce invokes as a
paradigm for his art in A Portrait, involves (ideally, but not so much practically) both
transaccidentation and transubstantiation. In Stephen’s aesthetic theory, claritas is realized
out of phenomenological exactitude; that is, once the accidental attributes are precisely
rendered, then the essential substance will shine forth. But in the Wake, the transformation
Shem inaugurates is only of the accidental variety. It is as if the substance itself does not
matter, merely the artist’s own gastrointestinal work. Indeed, in A Portrait, Stephen styled
himself as a godlike artist whereas Shem’s writing makes no reference to the divine. His
transaccidentation is what writing is after God has died: “This exists that isits after having
been said we know” (FW, 186.08–9). Shem’s faecal “scriptsigns” (FW, 118.28) are devoid of
divine authority; “So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke,
paperspace is a perfect signature of its own” (FW, 115.06–8). There is no need to pray, no need
for a higher authority, when every paperspace, every perspective, is a perfect signature of its
own.
In the absence of divinity, Shem transaccidentifies “his own person life unlivable . . . into a
dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal.” His personal
individuality is a dividual chaos, that is, his individuality is finite, divided, and communal (the
word dividual means divided and shared). That is, he becomes not unlike the Shakespearean
artist Stephen described in “Scylla”: “all in all in all of us” (U, 9.1049–50). Indeed, earlier we
were told that he boasted of besting Shakespeare: “he was avoopf (parn me!) aware of no
other shaggspick, other Shakhisbeard, either prexactly unlike his polar andthisishis” (FW,
177.31–32). The term “polar andthisishis” is self-reflexive in that the Shakespearean polar
antithesis is also exactly what is adjunct: and this is his. The polar antithesis to Shem is Shem
as well as Shaun, at least that’s how Shaun tells it. Following from Stephen’s argument in
“Scylla,” Shakespeare is part of the dividual chaos that is all in all in all of us, that is, one
additional ingredient in the “cyclewheeling history.” In a “cyclewheeling history” there can be
no “egoarch.” The plural perspectives of the Wake dissolve the autocracy of the auto-genetic
self into an eternally recurring finitude. With the gay science of Shem’s faecal art, Joyce does
not substitute himself as a new hypostasis and, instead, he laughs at himself, he laughs at the
demiurge in himself.

* * *

Margot Norris offers an inventive reading of the last chapter of the Wake by proposing it as
Stephen reconciling with his mother as a solution to his Agenbite of inwit:

Imagine that Stephen, after Bloomsday, sleeps and dreams. Homeless, penniless, friendless, and hungry,
he longs, in dream, for his mother’s comfort, as he did long ago in the Clongowes infirmary. He knows
that to regain her love he would have to change, or rather to have changed, since she is dead and it is
 now too late . . . Since he cannot imagine his reconciliation with the mother literally—such a vision is
too painful and embarrassing, too fraught with sentimentality and melodrama—the mother is figured
through a metaphor, the metaphor of the sea, mer, the homophone of mère.64

Norris reads the entire last chapter as Stephen’s dream-wish of reconciliation: for example, he
imagines himself overcoming his hydrophobia by being St. Kevin immersed in his bath. While I
agree with the broad outline of this reading, that the Wake ends by proffering a resolution to
Stephen’s Agenbite of inwit, I think Norris’s reading is overliteral by insisting on specifically
positing the character of Stephen Dedalus as the dreamer of this chapter. While there are
echoes of Stephen in the final chapter, the references are too polyvalent to be restricted to just
one dreamer (and, perhaps, even to any dreamer). Instead of Stephen reconciled with his
mother, I would argue that ALP’s monologue “Soft Morning City” proposes a more general
form of reconciliation between writing and the maternal, thereby suggesting a resolution to
the matricidal condition of auto-genesis. The Wake ends by undoing the egoarchic.
As with “Penelope,” “Soft Morning City” is a woman’s soliloquy; this is the voice of ALP, Anna
Livia Plurabelle, the main female “character” or female voice in the Wake, although, up until
this part of the text, with some small exceptions, she has not been heard. ALP is more than just
a character, she is also, as her name suggests, the river Liffey. The Liffey is a tidal river in that
it carries water in from the sea and then it also carries water back into the sea, and so on and
so on.65 At this point the river is ebbing, retreating into the sea. Indeed, the ending of the
Wake is also linked to the beginning, since the Wake is a circular book with the last sentence
feeding back into the first and so, commensurate with this idea of ending and dying is a sense
of childhood. ALP’s monologue is filled with references to pantomimes, nursery rhymes, and
children’s stories, such as “We’ll not disturb their sleeping duties” (FW, 620.36–621.01), that
is, Sleeping Beauty, and “possumbotts” (FW, 622.11), better known as Puss-in-Boots.
In a paper presented at the 2009 James Joyce Research Colloquium at University College
Dublin, John Bishop demonstrated how, like “Oxen of the Sun” but in a less programmatic
manner, “Soft Morning City” is filled with allusions to fetal development, but these are
conjoined with allusions to the signs of decrepitude preparatory to death.66 As Bloom thinks in
Glasnevin Cemetery, “In the midst of death we are in life” (U, 6.759). But the inverse also
holds, in the midst of life we are in death, or, rather, in a state of being-toward-death, “when
the angel of death kicks the bucket of life” (FW, 170.12–13). Emmanuel Lévinas cites
Epicurus’s proverb about the nonpresence of death within life: “If you are, it is not; if it is, you
are not.”67 Death is the ultimate other in that it is when the one itself becomes othered. (The
epitaph on Marcel Duchamp’s grave in Rouen bears a similar sentiment: “D’ailleurs c’est
toujours les autres qui meurent [Besides, it is always others who die].”) This is to say that
one’s own death can never be experienced, since it is the very moment at which experience
stops, but nonetheless this moment is always imminent, even proximate. “First we feel. Then
we fall” (FW, 627.11). And, as Bishop concluded his paper, sleep is the closest experience to
death that exists within life.68 “Soft Morning City,” then, concerns life approaching or even
becoming death, which is to say that it is about life, the condition of mortal, finite life.
The passage begins with a soft, that is, misty morning, of the sort not untypical to Ireland:

Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have falled on to long my
hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves (FW, 619.19–
22).

She is carrying leaves, fluvial detritus, and this is causing her to lisp. The leaves could also be
construed as the pages of this very book, that is, she is carrying the book to its end; indeed, on
the last page she says that she has only one leaf still (FW, 628.06–7). The finitude of human
existence is thus directly equated with bibliographic finitude. There is something analogous
between “Soft Morning City” and Beckett’s Malone Dies: the thoughts of an individual at the
end, approaching death. Indeed, Malone wishes that he dies at the same exact same moment
in which he stops telling the story he has embarked on as a divertissement for his being-
toward-death.69 The end of the book and the end of the life are intimately conjunct. Although,
perhaps, the more apposite Beckettian analogue to “Soft Morning City” would be his play
Rockaby, which features a “prematurely old” woman in a rocking chair listening to a recording
of her voice. The play begins with the woman saying “more”—which she repeats three more
times—and the recording replying “till in the end,” until it says, just before it ends, “fuck
life.”70 The end ends, but with not no hope left of continuation.
As ALP is passing through the city, she addresses HCE, who is first called “man of the
hooths” (FW, 619.25), which is to say that the river is in sight of Howth. She calls for him to
rise, since he has been asleep for so long:

Rise up now and aruse! Norvena’s over. I am leafy, your goolden, so you called me, may me life, yea your
goolden, silve me solve, exsogerraider! You did so drool. I was so sharm. But there’s a great poet in you
too. Stout Stokes would take you offly. So has he as bored me to slump. But am good and rested. Taks to
you, toddy, tan ye! Yawhawaw. Helpunto min, helpas vin. Here is your shirt, the day one, come back. The
stock, your collar. Also your double brogues. A comforter as well. And here your iverol and everthelest
your umbr. And stand up tall! Straight. I want to see you looking fine for me. With your brandnew big
green belt and all. Blooming in the very lotust and second to nill, Budd! (FW, 619.25–620.02).
This then leads to various coalesced reminiscences, which could be read, at least in part, as
her memories of her relationship with her husband and her family. But this can also be
construed in different ways concurrently: “Proudpurse Alby with his pooraroon Eireen, they’ll.
Pride, comfytousness, enevy!” (FW, 620.05–6). She imagines walking hand-in-hand with her
husband, but this is also the husband as Britain (“Proudpurse Alby”) lying next to Ireland (“his
pooraroon Eireen”). It is more than one family and more than one family dynamic being
described, “I will tell you all sorts of makeup things, strangerous. And show you to every
simple storyplace we pass” (FW, 625.05–6). This is a narrative of passing, passing to the end,
remarking what has gone by and left its trace. One story, or one element of one story is
passing, but some form of story will endure: “Who’ll search for Find Me Colours now on the
hillydroops of Vikloefells? But I read in Tobecontinued’s tale that while blubles blows there’ll
still be sealskers. There’ll be others but non so for me” (FW, 626.17–20). As Joyce indicated in
a letter to Frank Budgen (LI, 406), the word “hillydroops”—heliotrope—is the answer to the
guessing game in Chapter II.1 in which Shem is taunted to guess her color. The tale will be
continued even as ALP is absented from it just as children keep on playing games, as was the
argument of the version of the Quinet sentence in II.1 (FW, 236.19–32).
By the end of this passage it is clear that this voice is dying:

But I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am
passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me.
And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad
father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it,
moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms (FW, 627.33–628.04).

In a notebook, Joyce wrote out a rough draft of this passage that is largely identical with the
final version save for one not-insignificant variant: instead of “my cold father,” he wrote “my
cold father’s mother.”71 For the final text, the mother returns to the father rather than to her
paternal grandmother.
Toward the end there is an acknowledgment of the arrival of the end, but tinged with
something else: “Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee,
mememormee” (FW, 628.13–14). As John Bishop notes, the word “mememormee” is a cry of
the dying: remember me, but also me, me, more me, a plea and cry to continue on living,72 the
egoarch’s last stand and the last “great Yes to life” (EH, 226). But since the Liffey is tidal as
the water disperses into the ocean, it is gathered back into the river and is born again, as it
were, the same anew; hence the yoking together of the last sentence into the first.
The end is bitter but the problem of finitude is resolved, albeit partially, through children.
“Soft Morning City,” if not the Wake as a whole, is about generational continuity. The mother
lives on in maternity, that is, lives on in her children, the stories, and games that are to be
continued in her absence. This inverts the matricidal problem of the desire for auto-genesis: if
the child is matricidal in the desire to be fully independent, then, on the other hand, the parent
is utterly dependent on the child for continuation, for the mememormee. In becoming an artist,
the child becomes a parent, “the sehm asnuh” (FW, 620.15), but different. In other words, the
impossibility of auto-genesis cuts both ways, for both the parent and the child. Instead of auto-
genesis, there is a co-genesis between parent and child, not unlike the co-genesis between
Shem and Shaun. If, as Heidegger put it, Dasein is always guilty—that is, contingent upon
others—then dying, being-toward-death, is also guilty, as ALP enjoins her husband as she
passes away. Death may be uniquely solitary, but dying is not.
The ethical message, then, of Finnegans Wake could be summed up as: remember your
parents. In the indeterminacy in the wake of the death of God, the artist might be self-involved,
but, in this, the mother still endures. In the middenheap of Finnegans Wake, the mother
endures as she dissipates, indeed, she endures because she dissipates. This makes ALP’s final
soliloquy even more affirmative than Molly’s.
In some ways, the problem of metaphysics is the problem of death. As Nietzsche argued in
Twilight of the Idols, “Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no
good” (TI, II§1). Such a judgment places a great weight on the belief in an afterlife, a being-
after-death in which the torments of life might be relieved. Christianity—following from Plato—
offers a vision of immortality in a metaphysical realm. Even unvanquished shadows of religion
can allow for mortal succor:

How strong the metaphysical need is, and how hard nature makes it to bid a final farewell, can be seen
from the fact that even when the free spirit has divested himself of everything metaphysical the highest
effects of art can easily set the metaphysical strings, which have long been silent or indeed snapped
apart, vibrating in sympathy; so it can happen, for example, that a passage in Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony will make him feel he is hovering about the earth in a dome of stars with the dream of
immortality in his heart (HATH, §153).

Even art addresses a “metaphysical need,” allowing for an overcoming of mortality with the
promise of overcoming the finitude of death in a metaphysical hereafter.73 In contrast, science
—which for Nietzsche, as discussed in chapter 4, still runs the danger of becoming one more
unvanquished shadow—promises to eradicate this metaphysical need of redressing the finitude
of death by asserting an idea of “definitive death” (Day, §72). In ending the Wake with ALP’s
mortal “proliferant continuance” (U, 14.15), Joyce affirms something that eluded Nietzsche, a
nonmetaphysical—that is, physical and carnal—immortality. Joyce’s “great Yes to life” is an
affirmation of procreation and, thus, an affirmation of the indefinitive life: the immortality of
procreation, a good life perpetuated, until it dies, again.
 Notes

1 “James Overman”: Joyce Reading Nietzsche

1.David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 1890–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 136.
Patrick Bridgwater, similarly, claims that for Joyce “Nietzsche had been little more than a passing whim”
(Patrick Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony [Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972], 142). Both
Thatcher and Bridgwater echo Richard Ellmann’s assessment that “at heart Joyce can scarcely have
been a Nietzschean any more than he was a socialist” (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1982], 142).
2. One exception to this critical neglect is Joseph Valente, “Beyond Truth and Freedom: The New Faith of
Joyce and Nietzsche,” James Joyce Quarterly 25.1 (Fall 1987): 87–103.
3. Luca Crispi has shown that at one point in the earliest extant draft for “Sirens” (NLI MS 36,639/7A),
which is the earliest extant draft in which Bloom appears, Joyce originally wrote in the phrase “he
thought” before some of Bloom’s dialogue only to subsequently delete this phrase. And so, in this
deletion was born a characteristic element of Ulyssean style (Luca Crispi, “A First Foray into the
National Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts: Bloomsday 2011,” Genetic Joyce Studies 11 [Spring
2011]: online, accessed July 1, 2012).
4. Seamus Heaney, “Joyce’s Poetry,” Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber,
2002), 388–90, 389. Yeats made this comment in a letter to Joyce (dated December 18, 1902; LII, 23–24).
5. Homer, The Odyssey, ed. A. T. Murray, revised by George E. Dimrock, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), XV.491; translation mine.
6. Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89.
7. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 38.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1981), §6.41.
9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan,
1958), §114–15.
10. Cited in Matthew Rampley, Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 193.
11. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985),
37.
12. The text known as The Will to Power is not the work that Nietzsche announced he would write in The
Genealogy of Morals (GM, III§27), but rather a collection of his notes edited, without his approval, under
the supervision of his sister after his mental breakdown in 1889 (see Walter Kaufmann’s introduction;
WP, xiii–xxix). While the granular disposition of these notes resembles the aphoristic style of Nietzsche’s
works, the text The Will to Power is not, as such, a coherent work in the way his other individual books
can be seen to be. This creates a problem in terms of how to construe this text within Nietzsche’s corpus.
At one extreme is Heidegger, who claims that The Will to Power along with Nietzsche’s other notes
supersedes his published work: “[Nietzsche’s] philosophy proper was left behind as posthumous,
unpublished work” (Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, tr. David Farrell Krell [New York: Harper and
Row, 1979], 9). Such an extreme has largely been repudiated within Nietzsche scholarship. The opposite
extreme can be found in Wayne Klein’s argument that “many, if not most of the notes assembled in The
Will to Power cannot genuinely be ascribed to Nietzsche” (Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of
Philosophy [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997], 198, cf. 181–99).
13. Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995), 263.
14. Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 9.
15. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 114.
16. Brian Cosgrove, James Joyce’s Negations (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007), 26.
17. Marian Eide, Ethical Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2.
18. Declan Kiberd, “Ulysses” and Us (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 29.
19. Ibid., 63.
20. For more on Joyce and Wagner see Timothy Martin, Joyce and Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991).
21. Richard Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” Prose Works, vol. 1, tr. William Ashton Ellis (London:
Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1895), 69–213, 136.
22. “Nietzsche and Wagner ultimately parted ways over their disagreement as to the function of myth. For
Wagner, myth laid claim to religious authority; for Nietzsche, myth was an æsthetic game to foster the
art of living” (Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, tr. Shelley Frisch [London:
Granta, 2002], 89; cf. 85–107).
23. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 18.
24. Ellmann, James Joyce, 230 n.
25. Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, tr. William Archer, Mary Morison, and Diana
White (London: Heinemann, 1898). As an acknowledgment, Joyce cites Brandes in “Scylla” (U, 9.418).
See also William Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 157.
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Georg Brandes, December 2, 1887; cited in Georg Brandes, Friedrich
Nietzsche, tr. A. G. Chater (London: Heinemann, 1914), 3 n.1.
27. Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche, 32–33.
28. Ezra Pound, Personæ, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 199.
29. Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony, 12–17; Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 17–51.
30. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 53.
31. Ibid., 126.
32. Bridgewater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony, 15.
33. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 27. “Nordau, a Jew, cannot forgive George [sic] Brandes, a fellow Jew,
for numbering himself among Nietzsche’s apostles” (ibid.).
34. H. G. Wells, “Human Evolution, III—Mr Wells Responds,” Natural Science X.62 (April 1897): 242–44,
244.
35. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: John Lane, 1905), 198.
36. William Barry, Heralds of Revolt (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), vi.
37. Ibid., 343.
38. Ibid., 354.
39. Arthur Symons, “Nietzsche on Tragedy,” Plays, Acting and Music (London: Archibald Constable & Co.,
1909), 11–16, 13.
40. Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony, 29.
41. Friedhelm Rathjen mentions this article as a possible source-text for Joyce (Friedhelm Rathjen, Irish
Company: Joyce and Beckett and More [Scheeßel: Edition ReJoyce, 2010], 43).
42. Barry, Heralds of Revolt, 349.
43. John Eglinton, “A Way of Understanding Nietzsche,” Dana 6 (October 1904): 182–88, 187.
44. [J. B. Barnhill], Editorial, The Eagle and the Serpent 1 (February 25, 1898), 3; cited in Thatcher,
Nietzsche in England, 56.
45. Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 46–49.
46. William Butler Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 3, 1901–1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald
Schuchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 284.
47. Otto Bohlmann, Yeats and Nietzsche (Ottawa: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 17.
48. Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2001), 153.
49. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 149.
50. See Bohlmann, Yeats and Nietzsche, 145–55.
51. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, The Workshop of Dædalus (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1965), 97.
52. Oliver St. John Gogarty, Many Lines to Thee, ed. James F. Carens (Dublin: Dolmen, 1971), 69.
53. Scholes and Kain, Workshop of Dædalus, 106.
54. Ibid., 108.
55. Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Fable (Boston: J. E. Tilton and Company, 1868), 12.
56. Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), 15. Nietzsche is here alluding to Pindar’s tenth Pythian Ode: “Neither by ships nor by land
canst thou find the wondrous road to the trysting place of the Hyperboreans” (Pindar, The Odes, tr. Sir
John Sandys [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915], Pythian X.29–30).
57. Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland, ed. Brian Ó Cuív (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1967), 2.
58. Gifford and Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, 17.
59. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 152.
60. While Joyce faced difficulties publishing Dubliners, Chamber Music and Exiles, the tortuous path to
Ulysses’s publication helped generate his reputation as a writer. Ironically—with just the small
qualification The Calendar of Modern Letters’s refusal to publish “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (Ellmann,
James Joyce, 574)—Finnegans Wake is the only work by Joyce to not suffer from censorship. See also
Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship (New York: NYU Press, 1997).
61. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 153.
62. Barry, Heralds of Revolt, 369.
63. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Trionfo della Morte (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1896), xi; translation mine.
64. Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 142.
65. See Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 250–51.
66. MacIntyre misses the point that, ultimately, the Übermensch is meant to be discarded and he calls the
Übermensch an “at once absurd and dangerous fantasy” (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 113).
67. Marvin Magalaner, “Joyce, Nietzsche, and Hauptmann in James Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case,’” PMLA 68
(March 1953): 95–102, 98.
68. Cynthia Wheatley-Lovoy reads Duffy as representative of the Apollonian type as described by Nietzsche
in The Birth of Tragedy and Mrs. Sinico, insofar as she challenges his solitude, the Dionysian (Cynthia D.
Wheatley-Lovoy, “The Rebirth of Tragedy: Nietzsche and Narcissus in ‘A Painful Case’ and ‘The Dead,’”
James Joyce Quarterly 33.2 [Winter 1996]: 177–93).
69. Cited in Hugh Kenner, “Joyce’s Exiles,” The Hudson Review 5.3 (Autumn 1952): 389–403, 390.

2 Ecce Auctor: Self-Creation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

1. Although the holograph fair copy manuscript is dated January 7, 1904, Hans Walter Gabler has argued
that the text was initially composed in 1903 (Hans Walter Gabler, The Rocky Road to “Ulysses” [Dublin:
NLI, 2004], 1–3).
2. As Gérard Genette argues, the conceit of the autobiographical subject merging with the author at the
end of an autobiography is an illusion, since some gap always remains between them (Gérard Genette,
Narrative Discourse, tr. Jane E. Lewin [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980], 226). This point is evident
in Tristram Shandy when Tristram notes that it takes him one year to write an account of one day of his
life and so the gap between the life and the writing of the life always increases: “the more I write, the
more I shall have to write” (Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Howard Anderson [New York: W.W.
Norton, 1980], 207).
3. Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry, tr. Denise Folliot (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985), 58.
4. John Eglinton, Irish Literary Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1935), 136.
5. Walter Pater, Selected Writings, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 105.
6. Ibid., 121.
7. “Style here assumes the dual function of establishing the relation between the ‘author’ and his own past;
but also, in the orientation toward the future, of revealing the author to his future readers” (Jean
Starobinski, “The Style of Autobiography,” tr. Seymour Chatman, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and
Critical, ed. James Olney [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980], 73–83, 74).
8. Hugh Kenner’s “Uncle Charles Principle” offers a good, basic account of the mechanics of free indirect
discourse in Joyce’s works: “normally neutral narrative vocabulary [is] pervaded by a little cloud of
idioms which a character might use if he were managing the narrative” (Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], 17). Kenner’s use of the conditional here is crucial, since
it implies that there is and remains a distance between the mimetic and the diegetic even as that
 distance appears to be elided through the tenor of the narrative. In distinction, the aptly named
Benstock principle allows for a greater matrix of variability of diegetic interference: “Fictional texts that
employ free indirect speech (the narrational mode most common to Ulysses) establish the contextual
supremacy of subject matter, which influences the direction, pace, point of view, and method of diction”
(Shari Benstock and Bernard Benstock, “The Benstock Principle,” The Seventh of Joyce, ed. Bernard
Benstock [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982], 10–21, 18).
9. A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 44.
10. Ibid.; see also Ellmann, James Joyce, 551.
11. Pater, Selected Writings, 112–13. On the other hand, Pater would not necessarily approve of some of the
specific stylistic strategies Joyce deploys, since he rejects neologisms and colloquial language (ibid.,
108).
12. Of course, A Portrait is more accurately described as a Künstlerroman than as a Bildungsroman, but
within the novel such a distinction is effectively collapsed, since Stephen’s maturation as an individual
coincides with the development of his conception as an artist in that he conceptualizes himself as an
artist.
13. In Of Grammatology, following from a suggestion made by Roger Laporte, Derrida uses the word brisure
to designate both difference and articulation, since etymologically that word means both “break” and
“hinge” (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, rev. ed. [Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998], 65).
14. William Noon notes in his highly nuanced reading of Joyce and Aquinas that Stephen’s partition of the
aesthetic experience into discrete states is an inaccurate reading of Aquinas. For Aquinas, these three
attributes are synchronic ontological categories inherent in the object apprehended, rather than the
diachronically articulated phases of apprehension that Stephen claims (William T. Noon, Joyce and
Aquinas [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957], 48).
15. Jacques Aubert makes the nice point that Stephen’s solution to the ontological problem named by
claritas is to resolve a figurative meaning, “by interpreting a figurative word, he has solved not only a
linguistic, semantic problem but also an ontological mystery, that of the Trinity” (Jacques Aubert, The
Aesthetics of James Joyce [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992], 106). Indeed, the
proper Scholastic definition of claritas is as a concept and ultimately as a word, in that the goal of
perception is a linguistic apprehension: the object becomes an object in and of language (Noon, Joyce
and Aquinas, 159).
16. Stephen echoes Shelley’s line again in “Scylla and Charybdis” as the “intense instant of imagination” (U,
9.382). In “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley writes, “the mind in creation is a fading coal, which some
invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from
within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions
of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed.
Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers [New York: Norton, 1977], 503–4).
17. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 71.
18. Wyndham Lewis berated Joyce for this mania for local color: “The amount of stuff—unorganized brute
material—that the more active principle of drama has to wade through, under the circumstances, slows
it down to the pace at which, inevitably, the sluggish tide of the author’s bric-à-brac passes the observer,
at the saluting post, or in this case, the reader. It is a suffocating, moeotic expanse of objects, all of them
lifeless, the sewage of a Past twenty years old, all neatly arranged in a meticulous sequence” (Wyndham
Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards [Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993], 89). Joyce
took this criticism quite seriously and admitted to Harriet Shaw Weaver that Lewis’s “hostile criticism is
by far the best that has appeared” (LIII, 250). For an account of Joyce’s early response to Lewis’s
attacks, see David Hayman, “Enter Wyndham Lewis Leading Dancing Dave: New Light on a Key
Relationship,” JJQ 35.4/36.1 (Summer–Fall 1998): 621–31.
19. Joseph Valente and Margot Backus, “‘An Iridescence Difficult to Account For’: Sexual Initiation in Joyce’s
Fiction of Development,” ELH 79.2 (Summer 2009): 523–45, 539.
20. The phrase given in the text is a misquotation (Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated, rev. ed. [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982], 219).
21. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971),
177.
22. “The word ‘actuality’ [energeia], which we connect with fulfillment, has, strictly speaking, been
extended from movements to other things; for actuality in the strict sense is identified with movement”
(Aristotle, Metaphysics, tr. W. D. Ross, Complete Works, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984], 1047a; Metaphysica, ed. W. Jaeger [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957],
1047a).
23. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 177.
24. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger defines “artwork” as a special case of the self-presencing
of the things thinging in which the world’s interconnectedness is disclosed. Heidegger conceptualizes
this in terms of production or creation rather than in aesthetic (that is, sensory) terms. Artwork is poetic
(poiein, to make) in that in creating itself, it discloses truth: “Art lets truth originate” (Heidegger, Poetry,
Language, Thought, 77).
25. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 185.
26. Yeats was one of the first to notice a connection between Blake and Nietzsche. In his 1896 essay
“William Blake and His Illustrations to The Divine Comedy,” he writes of Blake’s pagan philosophy: “One
is reminded of Shelley, who was the next to take up the cry, though with a less abundant philosophic
faculty, but still more of Nietzsche, whose thought flows always, though with an even more violent
current, in the bed Blake’s thought has worn” (William Butler Yeats, Collected Works: Early Essays, ed.
Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein [New York: Scribner, 2007], 97).
27. William Blake, Milton, ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi (London: The William Blake Trust/The
Tate Gallery, 1998), plate 19, ll. 7–14.
28. Ibid., plate 32, l. 32.
29. With his “Parable of the Plums,” Stephen finally manages to employ a type of mimesis like Joyce’s own in
that the story is filled with all sorts of small details: the two vestals live in Fumbally’s Lane; they have
saved £3 10s in a red tin letterbox and Stephen even indicates the numismatic disposition of this sum,
“Two and three in silver and one and seven in coppers” (U, 7.934).
30. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 39.
31. Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies,” tr. Avital Ronell, The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V. McDonald
 (New York: Schocken, 1985), 1–38, 19–20.
32. Barry, Heralds of Revolt, 349.
33. Leo Bersani, “Against Ulysses,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Casebook, ed. Derek Attridge (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 201–29, 219.
34. “Joyce is attempting to set up a vision of his own, ex-centric as far as the Creation is concerned, a world
which can escape from the Absolute which rules the world God has created. Everything which usually
constitutes or contributes to the traps and nets in which God holds the world and the mind captive,
subjected to his Presence and Omnipotence, is endangered by Joyce’s art” (Hélène Cixous, The Exile of
James Joyce, tr. Sally A. J. Purcell [New York: David Lewis, 1972], 701).
35. Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, 23; cf. 67–69.
36. Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses,” 69.
37. See Z, 202–5 and also GM, III§§17–22.
38. In Ulysses, Joyce twice uses the word “hypostasis” in the Christian theological sense of designating the
union of the human and divine. According to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Athanasius defines hypostasis as “Deity existing in a personal mode, the substance of Deity with certain
special properties.” Christ is thus “the traditional figure of the hypostasis” (U, 17.783). In “Proteus,”
Stephen contemplates the problem of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist: “Dan Occam thought of that,
invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled his brain” (U, 3.123–25). By calling
hypostasis an imp that tickled Occam’s brain, Stephen is hardly describing the “traditional figure of
hypostasis,” since he gives it metaphoric attributes (mischievous impishness) that contrast with its loftier
senses. In this way he personalizes the hypostasis.
39. As Derrida writes in his essay “Différance”: “This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name
could approach: God, for example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects,
the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in
which, for example, the nominal effect différance is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a
false entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the system” (Jacques Derrida, Margins of
Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 26–27).
40. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 174.
41. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poetry, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday, 1963),
II.274–75.
42. See James DiGiovanna, Ethics and Aesthetics of Self-Creation, unpublished PhD dissertation, SUNY-
Stony Brook, 2001.
43. Pater, Selected Writings, 139.
44. Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 40.
45. Alexander Nehamas, “Nietzsche and ‘Hitler,’” Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?, ed. Jacob Golomb and
Robert S. Wistrich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 90–106, 94.
46. Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 264.
47. Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), 132.

3 Aufhebung Baby: Auto-genesis and Alterity in Ulysses

1. The phrase “Agenbite of inwit” is Joyce’s variation of Ayenbite of Inwyt, the title of a moral treatise
translated from the French in 1340. The phrase means “remorse of conscience,” that which bites again
(re-mordere) the inward wit (Weldon Thornton, Allusions in “Ulysses” [Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1968], 21–22).
2. See also Martin, Joyce and Wagner, 42–43.
3. NLI 36,639/7A, f. 3.
4. Buffalo V.A.3, f. 3.
5. Jacques Trilling, James Joyce ou l’écriture matricide (Belfort: Circé, 2001), 93.
6. Ibid., 94.
7. Jacques Derrida, “The Night Watch,” tr. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, Derrida and Joyce: Texts
and Contexts, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013),
92.
8. Derrida’s own earlier work could be understood as being as matricidal as Stephen’s theory in that the
maternal role in writing was denied in favor of a patrilineal model; to wit, “Literature would begin
wherever one no longer knows who writes and who signs the narrative of the call—and of the ‘Here I
am’—between the absolute Father and Son” (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret,
tr. David Wills, 2nd ed. [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008], 134).
9. Derrida, “The Night Watch,” 91–92.
10. See also Zarathustra: “That your virtue is your self and not something foreign, a skin, a cloak, that is the
truth from the foundation of your souls, you who are virtuous” (Z, 206).
11. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 157–
73.
12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and
Row, 1962), 331; “on the null basis of its null projection, [Dasein] has, in its Being with Others, already
become guilty towards them” (ibid., 334).
13. Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 425.
14. Buffalo V.A.3, f. 15.
15. Rosenbach, “Proteus,” f. 15. The Rosenbach manuscript is foliated by episode; it is reproduced in James
Joyce, “Ulysses”: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, ed. Clive Driver (New York: Octagon Books, 1975).
16. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, tr. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, rev. ed., 5 vols. (Notre
Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1981), 1.75.6.
17. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.93.4.
18. Derrida, “The Night Watch,” 101.
19. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, tr. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47–48.
20. Michael Naas, “The Mother, Of All the Phantasms . . . ,” Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, ed.
Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 163–81, 173.
21. “But to me, on the contrary, there seems to be nothing more worth taking seriously, among the rewards
for it being that some day one will perhaps be allowed to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness—or in
my own language gay science—is a reward” (GM, P§7).
22. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 104. See also Foucault’s claim: “The genealogist finds that there is something
 altogether different behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no
essence or that their essence was fabricated in piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (Michel Foucault,
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” tr. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow [New York: Pantheon, 1984], 76–100, 78).
23. Kelly Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche (New York: Routledge, 1995), 38.
24. NLI 36,639/7A, f. 1.
25. Buffalo V.A.3, f. 11; U, 3.288–89.
26. Rosenbach, “Proteus,” f. 11.
27. Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Thom’s, 1904),
2092.
28. Derrida, “The Night Watch,” 92.
29. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and his Precursors,” tr. Eliot Weinberger, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot
Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), 363–65, 365.
30. Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses,” 107.
31. “Bloom should grow upon the reader throughout the day. His reactions to things displayed in his
unspoken thoughts should not be brilliant, but singular, organic, Bloomesque” (ibid.).
32. Budgen notes that he asked Joyce about Bloom’s virtual absence in this episode; Joyce replied: “Bloom is
like a battery that is being recharged . . . He will act with all the more vigour when he does reappear”
(Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses,” 118).
33. Examples of such miscitations are, “Look on this picture then on that” (U, 8.675) instead of “Look here,
upon this picture, and on this” (Ham, III.iv.53) and “Method in his madness” (U, 8.335) instead of
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t” (Ham, II.ii.211–12).
34. A recent example would be Stephen Grennblatt’s Will in the World where he suggests that from his
youth Shakespeare was subject to both Catholic and Protestant influences from his parents and thus
wavered between the two. “Shakespeare’s plays provide ample evidence for doubleness and more: at
certain moments—Hamlet is the greatest example—he seems at once Catholic, Protestant, and deeply
skeptical of both” (Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], 103).
35. Sam Slote, “1904: A Space Odyssey,” Joyce Studies Annual new series, vol. 2 (2008): 163–71.
36. The phrase “local colour” is the heading of a subchapter on Hamlet in Georg Brandes’s book on
Shakespeare (Brandes, William Shakespeare, 357–60).
37. Shakespeare puns on the varying resonances to his name “Will” in sonnets 135 and 143. The pun on the
name Anne Hathaway goes back at least to 1792 and Charles Dibdin’s “A Love Dittie” in his novel
Hannah Hewit; or, the Female Crusoe: “Angels must love Ann Hathaway; / She hath a way so to control, /
To rapture the unprisoned soul, / And sweetest heaven on earth display, / That to be heaven Ann hath a
way; / She hath a way, / Ann Hathaway—To be heaven’s self Ann hath a way” (quoted in Schutte, Joyce
and Shakespeare, 62 fn. 5).
38. Hamlet was officially registered on July 26, 1602, one year after Shakespeare’s father’s death (Brandes,
William Shakespeare, 341; cf. Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare, 161–62).
39. Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare, 88.
40. In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge writes that his own work could not surpass “the greatest genius,
that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare” (Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], 320).
41. This happens to both Stephen and Bloom in “Circe,” when they each see themselves in the face of a
“beardless” Shakespeare in the mirror (U, 15.3822), the image of the face crowned by the antlers of a
cuckold.
42. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking,
1998), 68–81, 76 n. 4.
43. Jacques Derrida, Spurs, tr. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 39.
44. Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare, 150 fn. 9.
45. Stuart Gilbert takes a different route in explicating Eglinton’s confusion by saying it “is a recall of
Stephen and Sabellius’ hypothesis” (Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” [New York: Vintage, 1955],
220 n.). In “Telemachus,” Stephen had thought about, among other heresiarchs of divine patrimony,
“Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son” (U, 1.659–60).
46. “If Judas go forth to-night, it is towards Judas his steps will tend, nor will chance for betrayal be lacking;
but let Socrates open his door, he shall find Socrates asleep on the threshold before him, and there will
be occasion for wisdom” (Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom and Destiny, tr. Alfred Sutro [New York: Dodd,
Mead and Co., 1912], 31).
47. Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses,” 17–18.
48. While Molly seems to admit of a potential fungibility of the men in her life, she thinks of herself as
unique and irreplaceable: “of course hed never find another woman like me” (U, 18.232–33). The
implications of this will be analyzed in chapter 5.
49. Anne Fogarty, “Ghostly Intertexts: Joyce’s Revisions of Shakespeare,” unpublished paper.
50. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 275. Best
cites this at U, 9.114–15. The citation is from Mallarmé’s letter-essay “Hamlet et Fortinbras,” which is
not, as Best characterizes it, a prose poem (U, 9.112–13).
51. Valente, “Beyond Truth and Freedom,” 87–103, 94.
52. The crossover that Stephen posits between the actual and the possible derives from Aristotle’s Poetics,
where that “bald . . . millionaire” (U, 3.06) writes: “the historian narrates events that have actually
happened whereas the poet writes about things that might possibly occur. Poetry, therefore, is more
philosophical and more significant than history, for poetry is more concerned with the universal, and
history more with the individual” (Aristotle, Poetics, tr. Leon Golden [Tallahassee, Florida State
University Press, 1981], 1451b1 9–14). Stephen, on the other hand, posits an equivalence between the
actual and the possible through the medium of the artist reading the book of himself in his environs. An
implication of this formulation, which would be a hallmark of Joycean aesthetics, is that a precisely
defined individual becomes universal.
53. On the Rosenbach draft of “Scylla,” Joyce wrote: “Who helps to believe? I myself” (f. 32).
54. The passage appears on Rosenbach “Scylla,” f. 13.
55. The bibliography for this crux is extensive: see Jean Kimball, “Love and Death in Ulysses,” James Joyce
Quarterly 24.2 (Winter 1987): 143–60; Jean Kimball, “Love in the Kidd Era: An Afterword,” James Joyce
Quarterly 29.2 (Winter 1992): 369–77; Richard Ellmann, “A Crux in the New Edition of Ulysses,”
Assessing the 1984 “Ulysses,” ed. C. George Sandulescu and Clive Hart (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe,
 1986), 28–34; Wilhelm Füger, “Unanswered Questions about a Questionable Answer,” in Sandulescu and
Hart, Assessing the 1984 “Ulysses,” 35–42; Michael Groden, “‘Proceeding Energetically from the
Unknown to the Known’: Looking Again at the Genetic Texts and Documents for Joyce’s Ulysses,”
Variants 4 (2005): 183–95, 190–95.
56. See also Geert Lernout, “La Critique textuelle anglo-américaine: une étude de cas,” tr. Jacques Mailhos,
Genesis 9 (1996): 45–64.
57. In writing “Oxen,” Joyce relied extensively upon two anthologies of English literature, Saintsbury’s
History of English Prose Rhythm and Peacock’s English Prose from Mandeville to Ruskin (see Robert
Janusko, The Sources and Structure of James Joyce’s “Oxen” [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983] and
Gregory M. Downing, “Joyce’s ‘Oxen of the Sun’ Notesheets: A Transcription and Sourcing of the
Stylistic Entries,” Genetic Joyce Studies, 2 [Spring 2002]: online, accessed July 1, 2011).
58. On June 30, 1920, Harriet Weaver wrote to Joyce that “I think this episode [‘Oxen of the Sun’] might also
have been called Hades for the reading of it is like being taken the rounds of hell” (LIII, 16 n.1).
59. Joyce programmed into “Oxen” references to fetal development: “The procession is also linked . . . with
the natural stages of development in the embryo” (LI, 139).
60. See John Gordon, Joyce and Reality (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 108–21.
61. Janusko, Sources and Structure.
62. See Gordon, Joyce and Reality, 143–55.
63. Years later Joyce expressed much the same idea when he first met Jacques Mercanton, “L’histoire des
peuples, c’est celle des langues [The history of humanity is the history of languages]” (Jacques
Mercanton, Les Heures de James Joyce [Arles: Actes Sud, 1988], 15).
64. Thornton, Allusions in “Ulysses,” 345.
65. Mary Lowe-Evans, Crimes against Fecundity (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989); Andrew
Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 150–70.
66. Buffalo V.A.11, f. 7. This formulation also appears on the subsequent draft (Buffalo V.A.14, f. 5). The
Rosenbach manuscript—which was not the working fair copy for this episode—reads “the wife should
live (sith she was God’s) and the babe to die” (Rosenbach, “Oxen,” f. 11).
67. Janusko, Sources and Structure, 64.
68. Derrida, Spurs, 139.
69. Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 157;
translation mine.
70. “And, thinking again about the repetitiveness of Vinteuil’s work, I explained to Albertine that great
writers have only ever written a single work, or rather, refracted through different media a single beauty
which each of them has brought to the world” (Marcel Proust, “The Prisoner” and “The Fugitive,” tr.
Carol Clark [London: Penguin, 2003], 347).
71. Marcel Proust, “À propos de ‘Style’ de Flaubert,” Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre
(Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 282–96, 283; translation mine.
72. Ibid., 288.
73. Ibid., 282.
74. Ellmann, James Joyce, 492.
75. Quoted in Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust et le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 382; translation mine.

4 Joyce’s Multifarious Styles in Ulysses

1. Crispin Sartwell, “The Provocateur’s Philosopher,” Los Angeles Times (June 12, 2007), online, accessed
September 9, 2007.
2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 176.
3. Nietzsche is starker about this in Human All Too Human: “It is true, there could be a metaphysical
world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed . . . Even if the existence of such a world were
never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge;
more useless even than knowledge of the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger
of shipwreck” (HATH, §9).
4. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 113.
5. According to Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche is here replaying Rousseau’s charge that Hobbes had
“inadvertently transplanted civilized man into a pre-political setting” (Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 288 n. 10).
6. Marian Eide also discusses Nietzsche’s description of the truth as a metaphoric worn coin in relation to
Deasy’s thrift (Eide, Ethical Joyce, 73).
7. Indeed, this line is from a Protestant toast to William of Orange: “To the glorious, pious and immortal
memory of the Great and Good King William III, who saved us from popery, slavery, arbitrary power,
brass money and wooden shoes” (D. A. Chart, The Story of Dublin [London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907],
264).
8. Dictionary of Irish Biography, online, accessed August 15, 2010. The original for Deasy, Henry N.
Blackwood Price, was descended from Blackwood and appealed to the memory of his ancestor to
persuade Joyce to help him in his campaign against foot and mouth disease in 1912: “Be energetic. Drop
your lethargy. Forget Leinster for Ulster. Remember that Sir John Blackwood died in the act of putting on
his topboots in order to go to Dublin to vote against the Union” (quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 325–
26). On the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce has Deasy provide a slightly more accurate historical account:
“I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. I am descended from sir John
Blackwood who voted against the union” (Rosenbach, “Proteus,” f. 11). While this correctly conveys
Blackwood’s anti-Union sentiment, it still distorts the record, since Blackwood never managed to vote
one way or the other.
9. Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 70.
10. See David Hayman, “Cyclops,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1974), 243–75, 243.
11. For more on parallax in Ulysses see my essay “Joyce and Science,” Palgrave Advances in James Joyce
Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 162–82, 168–71.
12. Jed Deppman, “Hallow’d Chronickles and Exploytes of King Rodericke O’Conor from Joyce’s Earliest
Draftes to the End of Causal Historie,” Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce, ed. David Hayman and Sam
Slote (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 179–99, 185.
13. In “Ithaca,” when he returns home, Bloom sees the torn-up betting slip that Boylan had placed on the
favored but losing horse. The description of the “Reminiscences of coincidences” (U, 17.322) that play
 across Bloom’s mind makes it seem as if he had finally pieced together the convoluted narrative of the
widespread misapprehension that he had bet on the winning horse, since, in “Eumaeus,” he had read a
newspaper account of the Gold Cup race (U, 16.1274–89). However, this is more likely an effect of
Ithacan narrative caprice and misdirection (other examples of which will be discussed later in this
chapter).
14. There is some irony to the Citizen’s invoking of Griffith’s Sinn Féin, since at one point John Wyse says
that Bloom gave the idea for Sinn Féin to Arthur Griffith (U, 12.1574). This is not quite true. Sinn Féin
was in part inspired and influenced by the successful nineteenth-century Hungarian resistance to
Austrian rule. Griffith’s idea for Ireland, with a separate Parliament and territorial integrity, was based
on Ferenc Deák’s plan that left Hungary a separate kingdom under the rule of Franz Josef. There were
even rumors that Arthur Griffith had a Jewish advisor/ghostwriter (Hugh Kenner, “Ulysses,” rev. ed.
[Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987], 133). Since Bloom was a Jew of Hungarian
descent, this implausible bit of gossip is lent enough credibility for some of his peers to believe it. And, in
this way, the gossip about Griffith’s Jewish advisor, which, while false, is based on a quantum of truth,
mixes with the gossip about Bloom’s religion to create a new falsehood that takes on a life of its own.
15. Paul Feyerabend makes an analogous point: “The word ‘science’ may be a single word—but there is no
single entity that corresponds to that word . . . the assumption of a single coherent world-view that
underlies all science is either a metaphysical hypothesis trying to anticipate a future unity, or a
pedagogical fake” (Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 3rd ed. [London: Verso, 1993], 238 and 245).
16. In one of his (many) discussions of industrialization, Marx concludes that the problem only lies within
the “capitalist application of machinery” rather than within the machinery as such (Karl Marx, Capital,
vol. 1, tr. Ben Fawkes [New York: Vintage, 1977], 569). In distinction, Heidegger argues that any notion
of use is inherently exploitative; that is to say, all technological application is capitalistic (see Martin
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, tr. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row, 1977],
26–32).
17. Deasy states: “A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here” (U, 2.392–93); the Citizen:
“The strangers, says the Citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in. We brought them in. The
adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here” (U, 12.1156–58).
18. This passage lists three baptisms. The second one is not a sanctioned religious ceremony as such but
rather an instance of Bloom and three friends lightheartedly “baptizing” themselves with water from a
pump in Swords, a town named for a well that was supposedly blessed by St. Columcille.
19. Marilyn Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3–5.
20. Cormac Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 204–
5.
21. Joyce’s Hebrew is incorrect here. Agudath Netaim is Hebrew for “a society of planters.” Charles Parish
suggests that Joyce’s spelling was likely one of faulty transliteration, since the Hebrew letters that make
up “Agudath” and the nonexistent “Agendath” are virtually indistinguishable to the untrained eye
(Charles Parish, “Agenbite of Agendath Netaim,” James Joyce Quarterly 6.3 [Spring 1969]: 237–41, 239).
In any case, this mistake connects Bloom’s sense of his lapsed Judaism with Stephen’s Agenbite of inwit.
22. John McCourt, The Years of Bloom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 235–36.
23. Reizbuam uses the term mischling to characterize Bloom’s hybrid status. This is a pejorative term used
in nineteenth-century Germany to denote racial hybridization (Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other, 92–
93). A problem with this part of her argument is that she consistently applies the term mischling to
anything that is somehow mixed, thereby divesting Ulyssean hybridity of its protean force. By
relentlessly applying this term, Reizbaum risks undermining the poetics of difference she tries to
articulate by making mischling into the seemingly sole identity of alterity in Ulysses.
24. Margot Norris has recently examined the character of Blazes Boylan as one of the more prominent
examples of a barely individuated stock character in Ulysses (Margot Norris, “Don’t Call Him ‘Blazes’:
Hugh E. Boylan’s Narrative Caricature,” James Joyce Quarterly 48.2 [Winter 2011]: 229–49).
25. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, authorized translation from the sixth German edition (London:
William Heineman, 1906), 306.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 303.
28. Ellmann, James Joyce, 463; see also McCourt, Years of Bloom, 228–31.
29. Neil R. Davison, James Joyce, “Ulysses,” and the Construction of Jewish Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 139. Stanislaus Joyce betrays similar prejudices in a diary entry from 1904: “As
for women, they are cowards . . . They have the minds of Jews” (The Complete Dublin Diary, ed. George
H. Healey [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962], 114).
30. Weininger, Sex and Character, 321.
31. Davison, James Joyce, 145.
32. Of course she immediately qualifies this with her statement “and I knew I could always get round him”
(U, 18.1579–80). The significance of Molly’s multiplicitous perspective apropos Bloom will be discussed
in the following chapter.
33. Quoted in Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy, 232 n. 39.
34. On the earliest extant draft of “Cyclops” (Buffalo V.A.8), the Citizen is named as Cusack, Michael
Cusack, or Citizen Cusack (a cognomen Cusack himself used). By the fair-copy stage, Joyce had rendered
him as the anonymous “Citizen,” thereby implying a distance away from the historical character.
35. Walter Kaufmann’s study Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (first published in 1950) was
the first major attempt to wrest Nietzsche’s reputation away from the taint of Nazi misreading (see
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 3rd ed. [New York: Vintage, 1968],
42–47). Davison also presents a strong account of Nietzsche’s misappropriation as well as of Joyce’s
engagement with Nietzsche’s writings about Jewish identity (Davison, James Joyce, 114–26). See also
Tracy B. Strong, “Nietzsche’s Political Misappropriation,” The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed.
Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119–47, 130–
32.
36. Quoted in Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 45.
37. See Nehamas, Nietzsche, 116–17.
38. Socrates—who frequently compares himself to a doctor and characterizes philosophy as a spiritual
medicine, notably in the Phædo—is obviously implicated here. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche
condemns Socrates for “the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate
the deepest abysses of being and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of
 correcting it” (BT, §15; cf. TI, II§§1–12).
39. Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other, 39–44.
40. Bloom thinks “all that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of
bondage” (U, 7.208–9). This completely inverts the meaning of the escape from Egypt. There is, however,
a possible justification for the statement implied by Bloom’s misquotation. As soon as the Jews left Egypt,
God began to impose all sorts of laws and strictures upon them, most famously the Ten Commandments,
but also many, many others. In total there are 613 precepts in the Pentateuch. So in a sense the Jews did
flee out of Egypt and into bondage, into the bondage of laws and regulations.
41. For a discussion of the Citizen’s salient critique of English colonial ambitions, see Emer Nolan, James
Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), 96–105.
42. Joseph V. O’Brien, “Dear, Dirty Dublin” A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982), 116. Bloom thinks about the diseased British soldiers in “Lotus Eaters” (U, 5.72).
43. Christine O’Neill, Too Fine a Point: A Stylistic Analysis of the Eumæus Episode in James Joyce’s
“Ulysses” (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1996), 102.
44. “The city was rent by the continual broils of local factions as purposeless and bloody as the feuds of
Montague and Capulet . . . The weavers of the Earl of Meath’s Liberty around St. Patrick’s, calling
themselves the Liberty Boys, fought desperate battles along the bridges and quays with the Ormond
Boys, the butchers in Ormond Market on the opposite side of the river” (Chart, Story of Dublin, 101).
45. Douglas Bennett, The Encyclopædia of Dublin, rev. ed. (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005), 23–24.
46. Since part of the Eumaean narrative method involves paraphrase, it is not clear if Bloom said the above
comment or it is merely an unspoken thought.
47. One problem with a “strict” history of this memorable incident, is that the two tellings of the incident in
“Eumæus” differ: in one version, Parnell’s response to Bloom is “Thank you” (U, 16.1336) and in the
other it is “Thank you, sir” (U, 16.1523). The occasion of Bloom’s “hat trick” was the storming of the
offices of United Ireland on December 11, 1890. This was a significant event in Parnell’s life as it marked
the beginning of the end of his control over the Irish Parliamentary Party in the wake of the revelation of
his affair with Kitty O’Shea. During this fraught time, Parnell’s appearance degenerated from his
previous customary fastidiousness. A journalist, who had not seen Parnell for several years, wrote that
he was “less studied in his attire than formerly. His face was paler, his hair more meagre and it was
unkempt and long at the back” (Robert Kee, The Laurel and the Ivy [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993],
587). And, during the storming of the offices of United Ireland, Parnell was indeed hatless. An
eyewitness recounts: “His face was ghastly pale save only that on either cheek a hectic crimson spot was
glowing. His hat was now off, his hair disheveled, the dust of conflict begrimed his well-brushed coat”
(ibid., 588). So, with the scene of Bloom returning Parnell’s hat, Joyce intervenes in the historical record
in order to restore to Parnell a smidgen of his lost dignity.
48. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 97.
49. Kenner, “Ulysses,” 142.
50. This song is a variant of an old ballad on the murder of a young boy, St. Hugh of Lincoln, about the year
1255, who was found dead on premises belonging to a Jew and so, in retaliation many Jews were killed.
The incident is referred to by Chaucer in The Prioresses’ Tale and by Marlowe in The Jew of Malta. This
story is a classic example of the blood accusation or blood libel, which has it that Jews kill Christian
children to use the blood in rituals such as the Seder. Richard Madtes notes that, of the nearly 20
versions of this ballad in F. J. Child’s anthology English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York:
Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1882–1898), only one calls the victim “Harry Hughes,” the others read “Sir
Hugh” (Richard E. Madtes, The Ithaca Chapter of Joyce’s “Ulysses” [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1983], 96). In his “early commonplace book,” which consists of notes taken from 1903–1912, Joyce
transcribed a version of “Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s Daughter” (NLI MS 36,639/02/A f. 10r), which he lists as
being taken from Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). The version in this notebook is not
the same as the one that appears in Ulysses (see Luca Crispi, “A Commentary on James Joyce’s National
Library of Ireland ‘Early Commonplace Book,’” Genetic Joyce Studies 9 [Spring 2009]: online, accessed
November 1, 2010).
51. Ellmann, James Joyce, 521; Ellmann misspells his name as Benoîst-Méchin.
52. Margot Norris, “Stephen Dedalus’s Anti-Semitic Ballad: A Sabotaged Climax in Joyce’s Ulysses,” De-
Familiarizing Readings: Essays from the Austin Joyce Conference, ed. Alan W. Friedman and Charles
Rossman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 65–86.
53. The charge of anti-Semitism against Stephen cannot be completely discounted even in light of Stephen’s
debate with the unambiguously prejudiced Mr. Deasy. On the earliest extant draft of “Cyclops,” Joyce
included Stephen with the others at Barney Kiernan’s and he even participated in the anti-Semitic
tirades (Buffalo V.A.8, f. 22r). Michael Groden speculates that “Stephen’s chanting of ‘Little Harry
Hughes’ . . . is probably related to the aspect of Stephen’s character that Joyce removed from ‘Cyclops’”
(“Joyce at Work on ‘Cyclops’: Toward a Biography of Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 44.2 [Winter 2007]:
217–45, 220).
54. Antonia Fritz, “Oviditties in ‘Ithaca,’” Joyce’s “Ithaca,” ed. Andrew Gibson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996),
77–104, 100.
55. Phillip F. Herring, Joyce’s “Ulysses” Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1972), 455, “Ithaca” notesheet 9, l. 80.
56. Without recourse to this notesheet entry, Robert Boyle managed to interpret the Jew’s harp as a
metaphoric displacement of the sound of Stephen’s boots on the lane (Robert Boyle, James Joyce’s
Pauline Vision [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978], 14).
57. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 4, 280.
58. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 176.
59. Kenner, “Ulysses,” 139.
60. Norris “Stephen Dedalus’s Anti-Semitic Ballad,” 81–82.
61. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1959), 408.

5 Also Sprach Molly Bloom

1. Mercanton, Les Heures de James Joyce, 15.
2. Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche, 54.
3. Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses,” 191.
 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 283.
5. This reprises a question from The Gay Science: “Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not
letting us see her reasons” (GS, Preface §4).
6. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 95–96.
7. Derrida, Spurs, 51.
8. Ibid., 55.
9. Ibid., 101.
10. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, tr. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), 95. Irigaray also addresses Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: “But the incantation
that moves, troubles, sings—of the impossibility of clearly saying anything, that says everything, every
woman, all together, the female one and the other with no differentiation or distinction that can be put
into words, this ‘style’ of evocation, harmony is missing in her” (ibid., 96; see also Oliver, Womanizing
Nietzsche, 132–33).
11. Heraclitus, Fragments, ed. and tr. T. M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), fragment
123, 70–71.
12. For a survey of the critical responses to “Penelope,” see Kathleen McCormick, “Reproducing Molly
Bloom,” Molly Blooms, ed. Richard Pearce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 17–39.
13. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth
Century. Vol. 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 263.
14. Ibid., 261.
15. Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche, 145.
16. Reginster outlines the various different possible interpretations of the eternal recurrence of the same
(Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 205–19).
17. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 68.
18. Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 226.
19. Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 184.
20. Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty (London: Granada, 1981), 30.
21. Plato, The Symposium, tr. Michael Joyce, Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 526–74, 206d; emphasis added.
22. Berkowitz, Nietzsche, 208.
23. Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 244.
24. Ibid., 247.
25. This statement is apropos the line “If you have no more happiness to give me, well then! you still have
suffering,” which is from Lou Salomé’s poem “Prayer to Life.” Nietzsche notes in the text that this poem
has been attributed to him even though he did not write it. For the 1908 printing of Ecce Homo,
Nietzsche’s sister deleted the attribution to Salomé, thereby perpetuating the misattribution of the poem
(EH, 296 n.4).
26. Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” tr. François Raffoul, Derrida and Joyce:
Texts and Contexts, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2013), 41–86, 72.
27. James Joyce, Uilséas, vol. 12, tr. Séamas Ó hInnéirghe and Breasal Uilsean (Belfast: Foillseacáin Inis
Gleoire, 1991), 1 et passim.
28. Derrida “Ulysses Gramophone,” 80.
29. See Michael Groden, “Ulysses” in Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 15–17.
30. Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses,” 17.
31. Bonnie Kime Scott, Joyce and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 158.
32. Molly’s possible Jewish background is not unequivocal; see Neil R. Davison, James Joyce, “Ulysses,”
236–37.
33. The ambiguity derives from the equivalent conjugations in English of the first and third persons. When
translating this line into a language that lacks such an equivalence, many translators have, perhaps
unconsciously, chosen a specific subject, thereby rendering one interpretation of this passage that
forecloses other interpretive possibilities. For example, the first French translation installs Molly as the
subject: “Elle ne s’y plaisait plus après Rudy” (James Joyce, Ulysse, tr. Auguste Morel, assisted by Stuart
Gilbert, reviewed by Valery Larbaud and James Joyce, Œuvres, vol. 2, ed. Jacques Aubert [Paris:
Gallimard: 1995], 189), whereas the first full Italian translation installs Bloom as the subject: “Mai preso
gusto dopo Rudy” (James Joyce, Ulisse, tr. Giulio De Angelis [Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 1988], 163). The
second French translation uses a circumlocution to preserve the ambiguity: “Plus pris de plaisir du tout à
faire ça après Rudy” (James Joyce, Ulysse, tr. Jacques Aubert et al. [Paris: Gallimard, 2004], 212).

6 The Gay Science of Finnegans Wake

1. Laurent Milesi, “L’Idiome babélien de Finnegans Wake,” Genèse de Babel, ed. Claude Jacquet (Paris:
CNRS, 1985), 155–215, 174–76.
2. Fritz Senn, “Being a Sommerfool,” A Wake Newslitter, new series, VII.5 (October 1970): 74–76.
3. See Geert Lernout, “Dutch in Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce Quarterly 23.1 (Fall 1985): 45–66.
4. For example John Gordon, “Finnegans Wake”: A Plot Summary (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1986).
5. Joyce’s use of “sigla” to designate his characters in his notebooks can be taken as an indication of the
unconventional ways in which he handles character, as Roland McHugh asserts in his (pioneering but
now dated) study of the sigla: “Personages [in Finnegans Wake] are fluid composites, involving an
unconfirmed blur of historical, mythical and fictitious characters, as well as nonhuman elements”
(Roland McHugh, The Sigla of “Finnegans Wake” [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976], 10).
6. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce,” Our Exagmination Round His Factification for
Incamination of Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett et al. (New York: New Directions, 1962), 1–22, 14.
7. Dirk Van Hulle, Manuscript Genetics, Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 2008), 2.
8. See Ellmann, James Joyce, 591–92 and James Stephens, “The James Joyce I Knew,” The Listener 36
(October 24, 1946): 565–66.
9. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce upon the Void (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), 114.
10. The apotheosis of the dream interpretation of Finnegans Wake is John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
11. John Gordon assumes that the dreamer is identifiable as a Chapelizod publican (Gordon, “Finnegans
Wake,” 9–13), although many other possibilities have been raised, including the idea that the dreamer is
Bloom (Bernard Benstock, “L. Boom as Dreamer in Finnegans Wake,” PMLA 82.1 [March 1967]: 91–97).
12. Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 138–39.
13. Quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 537.
14. Ibid., 544.
15. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton-Key to “Finnegans Wake” (New York: Penguin,
1977), 3.
16. “Occultation” is the technical term for when a brighter heavenly body, such as the Moon, covers,
whether wholly or partially, a dimmer body, such as a star or planet. The word “eclipse” is used when a
dimmer body covers a brighter one, such as the Moon covering the Sun (OED).
17. Joyce also uses the word “pollylogue” (FW, 470.09).
18. Philippe Sollers, H (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 42; translation mine. For an analysis of this novel, see Julia
Kristeva, “Polylogue,” Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 173–222.
19. Philippe Sollers, Vision à New York. Entretiens avec David Hayman (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 135;
translation mine.
20. “Counting these connections, calculating the speed of these communications or the length they travel,
would at least be impossible, de facto, so long as we have not constructed the machine capable of
integrating all the variables, all the quantitative or qualitative factors. This won’t be happening any time
soon. In any case this machine would only be the weighty double of the ‘Joyce’ event, the simulation of
what this name signs or signifies, the signed work, the Joyce software today, joyceware. No doubt it is
being built, the worldwide institution of Joyce studies, James Joyce Inc. is working on it, unless it already
is it” (Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” tr. Geoffrey Bennington, Derrida and Joyce: Texts and
Contexts, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013], 22–
40, 25).
21. Simon Critchley, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 90.
22. Richard M. Kain, ed., “An Interview with Carola Giedion-Welcker and Maria Jolas,” James Joyce
Quarterly 11.2 (Winter 1974): 94–122, 96.
23. Philip Kitcher, “Collideorscape: Finnegans Wake in the Large and in the Small,” Joyce Studies Annual,
new series, vol. 3 (2009): 188–211, 196.
24. Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 38.
25. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 88 n.
20.
26. Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 28.
27. Derrida, Dissemination, 111.
28. Ibid., 104.
29. This pattern of ambiguation can be traced genetically. On the earliest draft of the passage, Joyce began
with a simple declarative statement toward the presentation of a genealogy, but the revisions Joyce made
on that first draft installed the disambiguation (JJA 45: 2; BL 47472: 97).
30. Clive Hart, “The Earwickers of Sidlesham,” A Wake Newslitter, old series, no. 4 (July 1962): 1–2.
31. James Joyce, The “Finnegans Wake” Notebooks at Buffalo: VI.B.3, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and
Geert Lernout (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 119; Buffalo notebook VI.B.3: 15.
32. David Hayman, The “Wake” in Transit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 130–38.
33. Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (New York: Horizon Press, 1974), 608.
34. Sam Slote, “Wilde Thing: Concerning the Eccentricities of a Figure of Decadence in Finnegans Wake,”
Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce, ed. David Hayman and Sam Slote (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 101–22.
35. The first draft lists Hosty, O’Donnell, Peter Cloran, Treacle Tom, and Shorty; all of whom appeared at the
close of I.2 (JJA 45: 28; BL 47471b: 2v). By the next draft, Hosty becomes “Osti-Fosti,” O’Donnell
becomes “A’Hara,” Peter Cloran becomes “Paul Horan,” Treacle Tom becomes “Sordid Sam,” and Shorty
becomes “Langley, the prophet” (JJA 45: 141; BL 47471b: 10).
36. Andrew Mitchell, “‘So it appeals to all of us’: The Death of God, Finnegans Wake, and the Eternal
Recurrence,” James Joyce Quarterly 39.3 (Spring 2002): 419–33, 423.
37. Ibid.
38. This line, a homophonic link to “the seim anew” (FW 215.23), also echoes another phrase from I.8,
“Towy I too, rathmine” (FW, 215.11); therefore, in being multiple, what is “annewed” is not exactly the
same.
39. Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in “Finnegans Wake” (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 182–200.
40. Ingeborg Landuyt and Geert Lernout, “Joyce’s Sources: Les grands fleuves historiques,” Joyce Studies
Annual 6 (1995): 99–138, 112–15.
41. The translation is from Roland McHugh, Annotations to “Finnegans Wake,” 3rd ed. (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 281.
42. Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), 119.
43. Jacques Aubert and Maria Jolas, eds., Joyce & Paris 1902 . . . 1920–1940 . . . 1975 (Paris: Éditions du
CNRS, 1979), vol. 2, 107.
44. Ezra Pound, “Dubliners and James Joyce,” The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York:
New Directions, 1954), 399–402, 400–1; originally published in The Egoist I.14 (July 15, 1914).
45. Ezra Pound, “The Non-Existence of Ireland,” Pound/Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York: New Directions,
1967), 32–33; originally published in The New Age XVI.17 (February 25, 1915).
46. Valery Larbaud, “James Joyce,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, 103 (April 1922): 385–409, 387;
translation mine.
47. See, for example, Joseph Kelly’s study Our Joyce (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), which
describes and challenges the process by which the view of Joyce as the European Modernist became
dominant for such a long time in Joyce criticism.
48. Ernest Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 1922), 405.
49. Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 1. The phrase “Celtic revenge” comes from Eglinton, Irish Literary Portraits,
146. In an earlier study, Gibson allies this “Celtic revenge” with Pound’s impulse to remake and remodel
literary culture (“Ulysses, Cantos and the Shapes of Cultures,” Pound in Multiple Perspectives, ed.
Andrew Gibson [London: Macmillan, 1993], 158–87).
50. Friedhelm Rathjen, “Silence, Migration, and Cunning: Joyce and Rushdie in Flight,” James Joyce
 Quarterly 39.3 (Spring 2002): 553–58, 556.
51. The Portrait itinerary omits that Joyce’s stays in Pola and Rome and the Wake itinerary is misleading in
that Joyce was far more peripatetic in the 1920s and 1930s than the curt epigraph suggests.
52. Earlier in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche notes that he broke with Wagner because Wagner embraced the
“reichsdeutsch” (EH, 248).
53. In the final section of Human, All too Human, “The Wanderer and his Shadow,” Nietzsche fleshes out
“Europeanization” with a more pragmatic and prescriptive analysis: “The practical outcome of this
spreading democratization will first of all be a European league of nations within which each individual
nation, delimited according to geographical fitness, will possess the same status and rights of a canton:
in this process the historical recollections of the former nations will be of little account” (WS, §292).
54. “Here, where the concepts ‘modern’ and ‘European’ are almost equivalent, what is understood by
Europe comprises much more territory than geographical Europe . . . On the other hand, the cultural
concept ‘Europe’ does not include all of geographical Europe” (WS, §215).
55. Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce,” 18.
56. Milesi, “L’Idiome babélien de Finnegans Wake,” 178; translation mine.
57. See also BGE, §244 (cited in chapter 4) and GS, §134: “The German discontent with life is essentially a
winter sickness that is worsened by the effects of stuffy cellar air and the poison of stove fumes in
German living rooms.” Apropos Wagner, Nietzsche admits that “the mere proximity of a German retards
my digestion” (EH, 247). Presumably Nietzsche’s Polish ancestry (EH, 225) would spare him from
suffering an auto-genetic indigestion.
58. Gillian Riley, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 392.
59. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (London: Dennis Dobson, 1968), 125.
60. See, for example, David Hayman, “Enter Wyndham Lewis Leading Dancing Dave,” 621–31.
61. Shem’s production is not artistic in the way that young Joyce would have understood. In notes taken in
Paris in 1903 in his “Early Commonplace Notebook” (the so-called Paris notebook; excerpts initially
published in Gorman’s biography and, as of 2003, held at the National Library of Ireland), Joyce writes
that “art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end” (NLI 36,639/02/A
f. 12v) and, consequently, that excrements, children, and lice cannot be works of art because they are
“human products—human dispositions of sensible matter. The process by which they are produced is
natural and non-artistic; their end is not an esthetic end: therefore they are not works of art” (NLI
36,639/02/A f. 13v; OCPW, 104). Stephen draws on this argument in his discussion with Lynch in A
Portrait: “Can excrement or a child or a louse be a work of art?” (P, 214). In Shem’s case, in contrast,
there is an aesthetic end implied in Shaun’s description.
62. Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at “Finnegans Wake” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47–48 and 47
n. 19. Fordham presents a detailed reading of how the valences in this passage changed over the course
of its composition (ibid., 39–65).
63. The link between alchemical processes of transformation and Catholic spirituality is hardly unique to
Joyce: “the fact that alchemists made analogies between the alchemistic process and the Christian
mysteries is not so strange when we remember that in the middle ages most alchemists were
clerics . . . Although it is true that a number of clerics were offended by Henry VI’s appeal in which the
transmutation of metal was likened to the consecration during holy mass, many others did not object”
(H. L. Ogrinc, “Western Society and Alchemy from 1200 to 1500,” Journal of Medieval History 6.1
[March 1980]: 103–32, 126).
64. Margot Norris, “The Last Chapter of Finnegans Wake: Stephen Finds His Mother,” Critical Essays on
James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” ed. Patrick A. McCarthy (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 212–30, 227.
65. Marvin Magalaner, A Guide through “Finnegans Wake” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009),
12–13.
66. John Bishop, “Joyce’s Last Word: Thoughts on the Last Paragraph of Finnegans Wake,” unpublished
paper, presented at the second annual James Joyce Research Colloquium, University College Dublin,
April 18, 2009.
67. Emmanuel Lévinas, Time and the Other, tr. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press,
1987), 71.
68. Bishop, “Joyce’s Last Word.”
69. “It does not depend on me, my lead is not inexhaustible, nor my exercise-book, nor Macmann, nor
myself, in spite of appearances. That all may be wiped out at the same instant is all I ask, for the
moment” (Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, 270).
70. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 435 and 442.
71. James Joyce, The “Finnegans Wake” Notebooks at Buffalo: VI.B.47, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer,
and Geert Lernout (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2004), 43; Buffalo notebook VI.B.47: 40.
72. Bishop, “Joyce’s Last Word.”
73. Nietzsche’s choice of Beethoven’s glorious Ninth is of course an interesting one, since the “Ode an die
Freude” is (since 1972 and currently) the “Anthem of Europe” (or, more precisely, the anthem of the
E.U.), although some of its other appropriations have been less-overtly benign: “In 1938, it was
performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to
celebrate Hitler’s birthday” (Slavoj Zizek, “‘Ode to Joy,’ Followed by Chaos and Despair,” New York Times
[December 24, 2007]: online; accessed August 15, 2012). The Ninth has been the emblem of both the
supranational and the hypernational.
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 Index

Note: Locators followed by ‘n’ denotes notes

A. E. (pseudonym of George Russell), 53

aesthetics, 1, 3–5, 7–8, 22, 25–9, 31–3, 35, 39–40, 42–3, 46, 52, 56–7, 59, 72–3, 98–9, 104, 108, 116, 119,
122, 132, 147–50, 162 n. 14, 163 n. 24, 168 n. 52, 182 n. 61
affirmation, 8, 33, 107, 111–13, 115, 118–20, 123, 126, 134, 154–5
“Agenbite of inwit,” 7, 40–1, 48, 52, 55, 60, 73, 93, 100, 103–4, 119, 151, 165 n. 1
alchemy, 149–50, 182 n. 63
allogenesis, 43, 45, 116
ALP, 145, 151–5
alterity, 5–7, 36, 40, 43, 45, 59–60, 173 n. 23
anti-Semitism, 5, 8, 78, 82, 84, 86–7, 89, 97, 100, 105–6, 175–6 n. 53
Apollo, 11, 160 n. 68
Aquinas, St Thomas, 22–3, 46, 162. n. 14
Aristotle, 12, 25, 163 n. 22, 168 n. 52
Arnold, Matthew, 14
artwork, artistic creation, 1–2, 4–8, 10, 14–17, 20–1, 22, 25–30, 32, 34–7, 47, 49, 51, 56, 59, 67, 71, 73, 98–9,
116–17, 119, 155, 163 n. 24, 182 n. 61
ascetic ideal, 9, 41, 48–9, 87–90, 133, 146
Attridge, Derek, 129–30
Aubert, Jacques, 162. n. 15
Aufhebung, 51
autobiography, autobiographical, 16–17, 19–21, 24, 26–8, 54, 56, 72, 161 n. 2
auto-genesis, auto-genetic, 7, 21–2, 28–30, 32, 34, 37, 39–43, 48, 55, 63, 99, 104, 110–11, 116–17, 147, 150,
154, 181–2 n. 57

Babel, babelization, 2, 31, 127–8, 130, 145–6

Backus, Margot, 24
Barnhill, J. B., 11
Barry, William Francis, 10–11, 15, 28
Bataille, Georges, 134
Beckett, Samuel, 44–5, 105, 128, 145, 152–3, 183 n. 69
Beethoven, Ludwig Van, 155, 183 n. 73
Beja, Morris, 143
Bell, G. K. A., 12
Benoist-Méchin, Jacques, 100, 175 n. 51
Benstock, Bernard, 161–2 n. 8, 179 n. 11
Benstock, Shari, 161–2 n. 8
Berkowitz, Peter, 4–5, 16, 36, 113, 117, 170 n. 5
Bersani, Leo, 29, 111
bios, 2–3, 35–6, 63–5, 72–3, 111–12, 134
Bishop, John, 152, 154, 179 n. 10
Bizet, Georges, 6–7
Blackwood, Sir John, 77
Blake, William, 25–6, 32, 52, 54, 163–4 n. 26
Bloom, Leopold, 8, 41, 52–3, 57–8, 60–2, 65–71, 73, 78–86, 89–101, 103–5, 118–27, 133, 138, 142, 145, 152,
157 n. 3, 167 n. 31–2, 168 n. 41, 171 n. 13, 171–2 n. 14, 172 n. 18, 172–3 n. 23, 174 n. 40, 174 n. 42,
174 n. 46, 174–5 n. 47, 179 n. 11
Bloom, Milly, 48, 124
Bloom, Molly, 8, 58, 66–7, 70, 82–5, 107–8, 119–27, 131, 142, 155, 168 n. 48, 173 n. 32, 178 n. 32
Bloom, Rudy, 48, 71, 122–4, 178 n. 33
Bohlmann, Otto, 11
Borges, Jorge Luis, 52, 56
Boyd, Ernest, 144
Boylan, Blazes, 92, 119, 123–5, 171 n. 13, 173 n. 24
Boyle, Robert, 176 n. 56
Brandes, Georg, 9, 107, 159 n. 25, 159 n. 33, 167 n. 36, 167 n. 38
Bridgwater, Patrick, 10, 157 n. 1
Brooks, Cleanth, 146
Brown, Terence, 12
Bruno, Giordano, 14–15
Budgen, Frank, 23, 29, 52, 58, 66, 107, 119, 121, 153, 167 n. 32
Burbage, Richard, 54
BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary), 48, 55, 65–6

Campbell, Joseph, 130, 145

Catholicism, 29, 46, 55, 57, 65–9, 80, 82, 143, 149–50, 167 n. 34, 182 n. 63
Celtic Revival, 12–14
censorship, 14–15, 160 n. 60
Chart, D. A., 170 n. 7, 174 n. 44
Chesterton, G. K., 10–11, 18
Christianity, 10, 29, 55–6, 64, 70, 84, 87, 89, 114, 119, 155, 164–5 n. 38, 175 n. 50, 182 n. 63
Cixous, Hélène, 29, 149, 164 n. 34
claritas, 7, 22–6, 42, 58, 150, 162. n. 15
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 56, 167–8 n. 40
Collins, Joseph, 148
condensation, 101–6
contingency, 3, 5, 7, 17, 27, 33, 36, 44, 47–9, 51, 53, 78, 86, 99, 109, 112, 116–17, 119, 126, 146
Conway, Daniel W., 142–3
Cosgrove, Brian, 5
Crispi, Luca, 157 n. 3, 175 n. 50
Critchley, Simon, 133
“The Croppy Boy,” 90
Cúchullain, 12
Cusack, Michael, 85, 173 n. 34

Dalton, Jack, 128

D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 14–16
Dante, 145–6
Dasein, 40, 44, 155, 166 n. 12
Davison, Neil R., 84, 173 n. 35, 178 n. 32
de Beauvoir, Simone, 108
de Fallois, Bernard, 72
de Man, Paul, 76
De Quincey, Thomas, 62
Deák, Ferenc, 171 n. 14
Deasy, Garrett, 76–8, 82, 89, 91, 93, 96–7, 170 n. 6, 170–1 n. 8, 172 n. 17, 175–6 n. 53
death, 13, 17, 40–1, 45, 53–4, 68–9, 80, 90, 103, 114, 117–18, 122–4, 126, 130, 140, 142, 152–3, 155, 167 n.
38
Dedalus, May, 7, 13, 40–3, 45–7, 51, 54, 61, 100, 103–4, 122, 151
Dedalus, Stephen, 7–8, 12–13, 20–34, 37, 39–43, 45–61, 66–71, 73, 77–8, 89–106, 111, 115–16, 118–20, 122,
124, 127, 129, 133, 150–1, 162. n. 12, 162. n. 14–16, 164 n. 29, 164–5 n. 38, 165–6 n. 8, 168 n. 41, 168
n. 45, 168 n. 52, 175–6 n. 53, 182 n. 61
Deleuze, Gilles, 112
Deppman, Jed, 79–80
Derrida, Jacques, 7, 28, 43–7, 51, 56, 66, 71–2, 110, 119–20, 132, 134, 162. n. 13, 165 n. 39, 165–6 n. 8, 179
n. 20
digestion, see food
Digiovanna, James, 165 n. 42
Dionysius, 11, 113, 117, 160 n. 68
Diotima, 115
Dlugacz, Moses Feuerstein, 83
Downing, Gregory M., 169 n. 57
dreamwork, 101–2, 129
Du Bellay, Joachim, 25
Dublin, 12, 15, 17–18, 29, 39, 45, 50–1, 58, 65, 79–80, 83, 90, 94–5, 97, 99–100, 127–8, 130, 144, 171 n. 8,
174 n. 44
Duchamp, Marcel, 152
Duffy, Mr (“A Painful Case”), 16–18, 37, 107, 160–1 n. 68
Dumas, Alexandre (both father and son), 56–7

Eglinton, John (pseudonym of W. K. Magee), 11, 16, 20, 53–4, 56–7, 60, 168 n. 45, 181 n. 49
egoism, 4–9, 11, 14, 16, 26–9, 36, 40, 43, 57, 59–61, 67, 89, 99, 111, 115, 138, 147, 149–50, 154
Egoist, The, 11
Eide, Marian, 5–6, 170 n. 6
elitism, 9, 12, 14, 37, 67
Ellis, Havelock, 9
Ellmann, Richard, 71, 143–4, 157 n. 1, 169 n. 55, 175 n. 51, 178 n. 8, 179 n. 13
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 11
energeia, 25, 33, 163 n. 22
Epicurus, 152
epiphany, 22, 25, 29
epistemology, 29, 36, 75, 132, 137
error, 5, 30–1, 33–5, 37, 45, 54–5, 60–1, 120, 141
eternal recurrence of the same, 112–17, 140–2, 177 n. 16
ethics, 1–8, 10, 18, 33–7, 72–3, 76, 78, 112, 117, 120, 123, 133, 155
Europe, 8, 49, 84, 94, 110, 143–7, 181 n. 53–4, 183 n. 73
Eurovision Song Contest, 144
everyman, 8, 57–9, 60–1, 83, 138
evolutionary biology, 62–3
experiment, the, 7, 30–7, 49, 51, 59, 88, 98, 111–12, 114, 117
exploitation, 82, 123, 172 n. 16
expressive form, see free indirect discourse

fatherhood, see paternity

Fergusson, Francis, 18
Feyerabend, Paul, 172 n. 15
finitude, 126, 140, 150, 152, 154–5
Finn MacCool, 130
“Finnegan’s Wake” (song), 140
Flaubert, Gustave, 5, 9, 71–2
Fogarty, Anne, 58
food, 27, 86, 146–7, 149, 181–2 n. 57
Fordham, Finn, 149, 182 n. 62
Foucault, Michel, 166 n. 22
free indirect discourse, 1–2, 20–1, 27, 35, 59, 62, 79, 92, 120, 157 n. 3, 161–2 n. 8
Freud, Sigmund, 47, 101–2, 129
Fritz, Antonia, 101
Füger, Wilhelm, 169 n. 55

GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association), 85

Gabler, Hans Walter, 45, 60–1, 161 n. 1
Gaelic League, 85, 90
Galvani, Luigi, 25
Garryowen, 91
Gautier, Théophile, 49
gender, 5, 83–5, 110–11, 115–17, 121
genealogy, 48–53, 57, 62, 69, 76–7, 89, 98, 135, 137–8, 166 n. 22, 180 n. 29
Genette, Gérard, 161 n. 2
Germany, German, 86, 116, 119, 133, 144, 146–7, 181 n. 52, 181–2 n. 57
Gibson, Andrew, 65, 144, 181 n. 49
Giedion-Welcker, Carola, 133
Gifford, Don, 13–14
Gilbert, Sandra, 111
Gilbert, Stuart, 168 n. 45
God, 26, 29–32, 34, 37, 42, 46, 52, 56–7, 66, 69–70, 76, 81, 108, 113, 134, 149, 164 n. 34, 165 n. 39
death of, 4, 7, 16, 30–2, 81, 111, 113, 132, 134, 140, 150, 155
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11, 121
Gogarty, Oliver St John, 12
Gordon, John, 62, 169 n. 60, 178 n. 4, 179 n. 11
Gorman, Herbert, 182 n. 61
Greenblatt, Stephen, 167 n. 34
Gregory, Lady Augusta, 11
Griffith, Arthur, 89, 171 n. 14
Groden, Michael, 169 n. 55, 175–6 n. 53, 177 n. 29
Gubar, Susan, 111

Harris, Frank, 138

Hart, Clive, 141
Hathaway, Anne, 53–4, 60, 167 n. 37
Hayman, David, 163 n. 18, 171 n. 10, 180 n. 32, 182 n. 60
HCE, 135–40, 142, 148, 153
Heaney, Seamus, 2
Heidegger, Martin, 25, 29, 36, 44, 86, 110, 155, 158 n. 12, 163 n. 24, 166 n. 12, 172 n. 16
Heraclitus, 111
history, 5, 53, 58, 62, 76–80, 82, 85, 89–96, 99–100, 127, 129–30, 143–4, 149–50, 174–5 n. 47
Hitler, Adolph, 86, 183 n. 73
Homer, 2, 49, 79, 127
human, the, 5, 17–18, 26–7, 31, 33–5, 37, 46, 63, 65, 69, 75, 77, 89, 96, 109, 112–13, 119, 126, 129, 131,
132–3, 149–50, 152, 164–5 n. 38, 167–8 n. 40, 182 n. 61
humor, 37, 97, 133–4
Husserl, Edmund, 135
hybridity, 81–3, 85–6, 90, 119, 145, 172–3 n. 23
Hyde, Douglas, 13
Hyperborean, 13–18, 37, 40, 160 n. 56
hypostasis, 30–2, 34–5, 37, 41, 76, 78, 88–9, 108–11, 113, 116, 130, 132, 134, 140, 145, 149–50, 164–5 n. 38

Ibsen, Henrik, 6, 10
interpretation, 2, 4, 25, 31–3, 35–6, 47–9, 52, 69, 78, 88, 100, 102, 127–30, 132, 162 n. 15, 176 n. 56, 177 n.
16, 178 n. 33, 179 n. 10
Ireland, 8–10, 12–15, 27, 41, 50–1, 55, 58, 65, 77–82, 85–6, 89–92, 94–9, 101, 119, 127, 130, 143–4, 146–7,
152–3, 171–2 n. 14, 174–5 n. 47
Irigaray, Luce, 110–11, 176–7 n. 10
Irish Literary Revival, 79, 144

Janusko, Robert, 62, 70, 169 n. 57

Jolas, Eugene, 143
Joyce, James, 1–2, 5–21, 26–9, 37, 49, 58, 61–3, 65, 71–2, 76, 79, 85–6, 89, 107, 111, 121, 128–30, 133–4,
136–7, 141–4, 147–50, 153–4, 157 n. 3, 159 n. 25, 160 n. 60, 162 n. 11, 162. n. 14, 163 n. 18, 1 64 n.
34, 164–5 n. 38, 167 n. 32, 169 n. 58–9, 169 n. 63, 171 n. 8, 172 n. 21, 175 n. 50, 179 n. 20, 180 n. 29,
181 n. 51, 182 n. 61, 182 n. 63
Chamber Music, 2, 160 n. 60
“The Day of the Rabblement,” 14–17
“Drama and Life,” 6–7, 14
Dubliners, 1, 16–18, 37, 107, 133, 160 n. 60, 160 n. 68
Exiles, 18, 160 n. 60
Finnegans Wake, 1–2, 8–9, 22, 28, 31, 37, 55, 60, 79, 127–55, 160 n. 60, 178 n. 5, 179 n. 17, 180 n. 29, 180
n. 35, 180 n. 38, 181 n. 51
“Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages,” 85
“A Portrait of the Artist” (1904 essay), 19–20, 22, 28, 56, 149, 161 n. 1
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1–2, 7–9, 11–12, 18–31, 34, 37, 39–40, 52, 55–60, 63, 98–9, 119,
127, 129, 133, 144, 147–50, 162. n. 12, 181 n. 51, 182 n. 61
Stephen Hero, 20, 22, 25, 132
“The Study of Languages,” 63
Ulysses, 1–2, 6–8, 11–12, 24, 28–9, 37, 39, 45–8, 52–3, 55, 58–60, 63, 78, 83, 89, 95, 99–100, 105–6, 119,
 124, 127, 130, 133, 142, 144, 157 n. 3, 164–5 n. 38, 172–3 n. 23, 173 n. 24
“Aeolus,” 27, 79, 83, 89, 95, 99, 141, 164 n. 29, 174 n. 40
“Calypso,” 82–3, 133, 142; “Circe,” 41, 46, 61, 66, 81–3, 96, 103–4, 168 n. 41
“Cyclops,” 8, 58, 78–82, 85–6, 89–96, 99, 171 n. 14, 172 n. 17, 173 n. 34, 175–6 n. 53
episodes: “Telemachus,” 12–14, 40–1, 43, 47–8, 52, 69, 168 n. 45
“Eumaeus,” 8, 70, 91–8, 124–5, 136, 171 n. 13, 174 n. 46, 174–5 n. 47
“Hades,” 122–3, 152
“Ithaca,” 8, 61, 82, 86, 95, 99–101, 103–5, 118, 124–5, 145, 164–5 n. 38, 171 n. 13, 172 n. 18
“Lestrygonians,” 48, 59, 62, 82, 124, 126, 167 n. 33, 178 n. 33
“Lotus Eaters,” 80, 123–4, 174 n. 42
“Nausicaa,” 55, 82–3
“Nestor,” 48, 76–8, 82, 89, 96, 170 n. 6, 171 n. 8, 172 n. 17
“Oxen of the Sun,” 8, 47, 55–6, 61–73, 79, 81, 86, 103, 152, 155, 169 n. 57–9, 169 n. 66
“Penelope,” 58, 83, 85, 107, 119–26, 131, 151, 168 n. 48, 173 n. 32, 177 n. 12
“Proteus,” 8, 40–2, 45–6, 49–52, 61, 69, 119, 130, 164–5 n. 38, 168 n. 52
“Scylla and Charybdis,” 5, 8–9, 24, 28, 34, 39, 47, 52–61, 63–4, 89, 92–3, 111, 115–16, 118, 150, 159 n.
25, 162 n. 16, 168 n. 50, 169 n. 53
“Sirens,” 90, 157 n. 3
“Wandering Rocks,” 40, 58
Joyce, John Stanislaus, 21
Joyce, Nora, 133
Joyce, Patrick Weston, 58
Joyce, Stanislaus, 15, 27–8, 57, 129, 148, 173 n. 29
Judaism, 8, 53, 78, 80, 82–4, 87, 89, 93, 97, 122, 145, 178 n. 32

Kain, Richard M., 12

Kant, Immanuel, 71
Kaufmann, Walter, 107, 158 n. 12, 173 n. 35–6
Keats, John, 146
Kee, Robert, 174–5 n. 47
Kelly, Joseph, 181 n. 47
Kenner, Hugh, 37, 100, 103, 161 n. 69, 161 n. 8, 171 n. 14
Kiberd, Declan, 6
Kimball, Jean, 169 n. 55
Kitcher, Philip, 133
Klein, Wayne, 158 n. 12, 173 n. 33
Kristeva, Julia, 44, 179 n. 18
Kuhn, Thomas, 34

Lacan, Jacques, 29
Landuyt, Ingeborg, 141
Laporte, Roger, 162 n. 13
Larbaud, Valery, 100, 143–4
laughter, 16, 23, 49, 98, 115, 133–4, 141, 150
Lernout, Geert, 141, 169 n. 56, 178 n. 3
Lessing, Gotthold, 130
Lévinas, Emmanuel, 5, 152
Levy, Oscar, 9
Lewis, Wyndham, 148, 163 n. 18
life, 2–4, 6, 8, 10–11, 16, 18, 22, 24, 26–9, 32–7, 40, 42, 45, 48–9, 53–4, 57, 63, 65–8, 72–3, 78, 85, 87–8, 91,
96, 99, 102, 106, 109, 111–14, 116–19, 122–3, 125–6, 130, 132–5, 141–2, 149–50, 152–5, 161 n. 2, 168
n. 48, 181–2 n. 57, see also bios and zoös
Linati, Carlo, 50, 89
“Little Harry Hughes,” 100, 102–5, 175 n. 50
Little Review, The, 52
Litz, A. Walton, 21
Lloyd, Horatio, 138–9
love, 16–17, 24, 40, 55, 60–1, 91, 126, 169 n. 55
Lowe-Evans, Mary, 65

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 3, 5, 160 n. 66

Madtes, Richard, 175 n. 50
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 57, 168 n. 46
Magee, W. K., see Eglinton, John
Mahaffy, J. P., 115
Malanger, Marvin, 17–18
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 59, 168 n. 50
Mamalujo, 148
Mammon (Paradise Lost), 32, 34
Martin, Timothy, 158 n. 20
Marx, Karl, 95, 172 n. 16
Mary, see BVM
maternal, maternity, 7–8, 40–8, 51, 54–5, 59–60, 62–71, 97, 111, 115–19, 121–2, 151, 154, 165–6 n. 8
matricide, 7–9, 43–4, 46–8, 51–2, 60–1, 63, 65–7, 70, 73, 111, 115–19, 151, 154, 165–6 n. 8
McCormick, Kathleen, 177 n. 12
McCourt, John, 172 n. 22
McHugh, Roland, 178 n. 5, 180 n. 41
Melville, Herman, 46
Mephistopheles (Faust), 121
Mercanton, Jacques, 107, 169 n. 63
metaphor, 49–50, 75–7, 108–9, 131, 151, 164–5 n. 38, 170 n. 6, 176 n. 56
metamorphosis, 142, 149
Metchnikoff, Léon, 141
metempsychosis, 142
Milesi, Laurent, 128, 146
Mill, John Stewart, 97
Miller, Hugh, 24
Milton, John, 26, 30, 32, 34, 52, 54, 113
mimesis, 1–2, 20, 23–5, 27, 29, 32, 54, 58, 62, 126, 129, 134–5, 164 n. 29
Mirabeau, Octave, 57
Mitchell, Andrew J., 140
Modernism, 1, 11, 143–4, 181 n. 47
Moore, George, 10
Moore, Thomas, 80
Mulligan, Buck, 12–14, 28–9, 40–1, 46, 48, 52, 60, 66, 68–9, 71
multiperspectival, see perspective
music, 6–7, 100, 104, 183 n. 73

Naas, Michael, 47
nationalism, 5, 7, 12, 64–5, 68, 77, 81–3, 85–6, 89–92, 94–101, 144–7, 181 n. 53, 183 n. 73
Nehamas, Alexander, 4–5, 32, 36, 48, 109, 174 n. 37
New Paganism, 10, 12
Nietzsche, Elizabeth, 158 n. 12
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1–18, 21–2, 25–6, 28, 30–7, 41, 44, 48–9, 51, 56, 66–7, 69, 72, 75–8, 81–2, 85–9, 91, 98–
9, 102, 107–19, 123, 132, 134, 140, 142–6, 155, 158 n. 12, 158 n. 22, 160 n. 56, 160 n. 68, 163–4 n. 26,
170 n. 3, 170 n. 5, 173 n. 35, 176–7 n. 10, 177 n. 25, 181 n. 52–3, 181–2 n. 57, 183 n. 73
The Antichrist, 13
Beyond Good and Evil, 3–4, 17, 34–6, 51, 85–7, 108–11, 116, 123, 133, 144–5, 158 n. 12, 181–2 n. 57
The Birth of Tragedy, 10, 18, 35, 160 n. 68, 174 n. 38
The Case of Wagner, 6, 16
Daybreak, 87, 89, 155
Ecce Homo, 1, 5, 8, 16, 21, 28, 34, 72, 76, 85, 113, 118–19, 144–7, 154, 177 n. 25, 181 n. 52, 181–2 n. 57
The Gay Science, 7, 17, 22, 30–1, 33–6, 48, 81, 85, 102, 107–8, 112, 114–15, 117, 132–4, 140, 176 n. 5,
181–2 n. 57
Human, All Too Human, 4, 44, 86, 145, 155, 170 n. 3
On the Genealogy of Morals, 22, 32, 41, 48–9, 76, 87–9, 98, 132, 164 n. 37, 166 n. 21
“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 75–6, 108
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 16–17, 22, 29, 36, 67, 113–15, 118, 141, 164 n. 37, 166 n. 10
Twilight of the Idols, 66, 91, 102, 113, 115–18, 155, 174 n. 38
Untimely Meditations, 21–2, 36, 77–8
The Wanderer and His Shadow, 72–3, 145, 181 n. 53–4
The Will to Power, 4, 22, 31, 33, 48, 56, 82, 99, 158 n. 12
nihilism, 5, 32
Nolan, Emer, 174 n. 41
Noon, William T., 162. n. 14–15
Nordau, Max, 10, 159 n. 33
Norris, Margot, 100, 103, 151, 173 n. 24

O’Brien, Joseph V., 174 n. 42

Odysseus, 2–3, 8, 58, 65, 85, 124
Ó Gráda, Cormac, 172 n. 20
Ogrinc, H. L., 182 n. 63
Oliver, Kelly, 49, 111, 176–7 n. 10
O’Neill, Christine, 92
ontological difference, 46–7, 117
Ovid, 149

pain, 17, 65–7, 111–12, 117–19

Parish, Charles, 172 n. 21
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 92, 96, 174–5 n. 47
Pater, Walter, 10–11, 20–1, 25, 35, 162 n. 11
paternity, 40, 47, 54–7, 60, 63–4, 67–8, 111, 154, 165–6 n. 8
Pepys, Samuel, 62
perspective, perspectivism, 1, 3–5, 8, 21, 37, 39, 48–9, 51, 59, 61, 66–7, 72–3, 76–81, 83, 87, 89, 91, 94, 102,
104, 106, 108–9, 111, 114, 120–1, 125–6, 130–2, 134, 136, 143, 145–6, 150, 173 n. 32
Pindar, 13, 160 n. 56
Plato, 23, 49, 109, 115–16, 118, 134–5, 155, 174 n. 38
Pope, Alexander, 30
Pound, Ezra, 9, 143, 148, 181 n. 49
Price, Henry N. Blackwood, 170–1 n. 8
procreation, 47, 63, 64–5, 67–8, 73, 115–17, 119, 122, 125, 154–5
Proust, Marcel, 71–2, 170 n. 70

Quinet, Edgar, 141, 154

Quinn, John, 11

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 29, 178 n. 9

Rampley, Matthew, 158 n. 10
Rand, Ayn, 18
Rathjen, Friedhelm, 144, 159 n. 41
Reginster, Bernard, 4–5, 37, 112–13, 117, 177 n. 16
Reizbaum, Marilyn, 83, 172–3 n. 23
Renan, Ernest, 9
representation, see mimesis
ressentiment, 32–3, 43, 48–9, 63, 77, 87–9, 91
Roberts, George, 14
Robinson, Henry, 130, 145
Rorty, Richard, 75, 78, 99
Russell, George, see A. E.

Sabellius, 168 n. 45
Safranski, Rüdiger, 158 n. 22
Saintsbury, George, 72, 169 n. 57
Salomé, Lou, 177 n. 25
Sartwell, Crispin, 75
Satan (Paradise Lost), 31–2, 113
Sauron, 108
Schlegel, Friedrich, 5
Scholes, Robert, 12
Schutte, William, 56, 159 n. 25, 167 n. 37
science, 5, 32, 34, 47, 49–50, 78, 81–2, 95–6, 132, 134, 155, 172 n. 15
Scott, Bonnie Kime, 121
self-creation, 3, 7–8, 21–2, 25–9, 32–4, 36, 39, 51, 56, 59, 70, 98–9, 104, 111–12, 116–17
self-determination, 7, 30, 32, 40, 104, 110–11
self-fashioning, see self-creating
Senn, Fritz, 128
sexual difference, see gender
Shakespeare, Hamnet, 53
Shakespeare, John, 54, 167 n. 38
Shakespeare, William, 8–9, 44, 52–61, 77, 142, 150, 167 n. 34, 167 n. 37, 167–8 n. 40
Hamlet, 52–7, 59–60, 167 n. 33, 167 n. 36, 167 n. 38
Shaun, 8, 28, 147–8, 155
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 25, 162 n. 16, 164 n. 26
Shem, 8, 28, 147–50, 154–5, 182 n. 61
sinn féin (Irish, “we ourselves”), 14, 60, 80, 99–100, 116, 138
Sinn Féin (political organization), 14, 100
Skeffington, Francis, 15
slave morality, 10–11, 17–18, 48, 87–9, 109
Slote, Michael, 2–3
Slote, Sam, 139, 167 n. 35, 171 n. 11, 180 n. 34
Socrates, 115, 118, 174 n. 38
Sollers, Philippe, 131–2, 143
Spoo, Robert, 78
Starobinski, Jean, 20, 161 n. 7
Stephens, James, 129
Sterne, Laurence, 62, 161 n. 2
Stirner, Max, 11
Strong, Tracy B., 173 n. 35
style, 1–8, 20–1, 27, 34, 36, 54, 59–60, 62–3, 70–3, 76, 79, 86, 92–3, 105, 110, 120, 129–33, 135, 145, 157 n.
3, 158 n. 12, 161 n. 7, 162 n. 11, 176–7 n. 10
superman, see Übermensch
Swinburne, Algernon, 12, 47
Symons, Arthur, 10–11

Tadié, Jean-Yves, 170 n. 75

Taylor, John, 89
Thatcher, David, 1, 9, 12
Thoreau, Henry David, 11
Thornton, Weldon, 64, 165 n. 1
Tolstoy, Leo, 10
transvaluation, 4, 12, 17, 31–2, 69, 87, 97, 104, 113
Trilling, Jacques, 43–4
truth, 5–6, 32–5, 49, 75–7, 81–2, 92, 96, 102, 108–12, 132, 170 n. 6

Übermensch, 3, 8, 11–14, 16–18, 59, 86, 142, 160 n. 66

Valente, Joseph, 24, 59, 157 n. 2
Valéry, Paul, 19, 21
value, 3–4, 7, 12, 15–17, 31–2, 34, 41, 49, 69, 81, 88, 90, 113, 119, 132
Vanderham, Paul, 160 n. 60
Van Hulle, Dirk, 128
ventriloquy, 51, 148
Veuillot, Louis, 49
Vico, Giambattista, 141

Wagner, Richard, 6–7, 16, 41, 133, 158 n. 22, 181 n. 52, 181–2 n. 57
Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 129–30, 163 n. 18, 169 n. 58
Weininger, Otto, 84, 86, 96
Wells, Herbert George, 10, 14
Wheatley-Lovoy, Cynthia D., 160 n. 68
Wilde, Oscar, 12, 51, 138–9
will, 4, 9, 29, 32–3, 42, 45–6, 49, 54, 66, 81–2, 85, 88–9, 112–13, 117–18, 123, 167 n. 37
will to power, 4, 32, 48, 51, 88, 109, 118, 123, 133, 149
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 3
woman, 17, 84, 107–11, 115–16, 121–2, 176–7 n. 10
Wordsworth, William, 35
Wyclif, John, 70

Xanthippe, 116

Yeats, William Butler, 2, 11–12, 15, 40, 157 n. 4, 163–4 n. 26

Zarathustra, 4, 8, 11, 16, 29, 36, 69, 113–16, 118–19, 125, 140
Zionism, 83–4, 89, 100
Zizek, Slavoj, 183 n. 73
Zola, Émile, 10
zoös, 2, 63–5, 111–12