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11 Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman Gerald Gillespie That Joyce maintained an interest in the famous philosopher of pessimism and religious atheist, Arthur Schopenhauer, is clear from Schopenhauer’s appearance in Finnegans Wake, in one of the funniest open references amid a string of allusions to German romantic thinkers. It occurs early on in the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, when the “apologuis[ing]” Shaun sets out to “spinooze from the grimm gests of Jacko and Esaup” (FW 414.16–17), that is, to give an uplifting twist like Spinoza, the favorite Dutch-Jewish philosopher for many romantics, to the often dark materials cultivated by the Grimm brothers of fairy-tale fame, whose realm of fiction is conflated with the biblical story of those archetypal rival brothers, Jacob and Esau (with a nod to the Greek fabulist Aesop). In an oblique reference to Nietzsche, this twist is slyly an Apollonian act of shaping (“apologuise”). That Joyce would favor the Gracehoper is clear from the description of him “always jigging, ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity” and grappling to and with the female “till she was puce for shame and also fourmish her in Spinner’s housery at the earthsbest schoppinhour so summery as his cottage” and so forth (FW 414.22–23, 32–34). It seems a high time (“earthsbest schoppinhour”) for what is exhibited by the Gracehoper, a frolicking of the life-force or will of which Schopenhauer taught much less cheerfully. But the countervailing tendency soon puts in its appearance. Indignant over the Gracehoper’s ways, the inimical Ondt (Danish for “evil”), “not being a sommerfool, was thothfully making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass of his windhame, which was cold antitopically Nixnixundnix” (FW 415.27–29). This triune nay-saying embedded in the Ondt’s home name pretty well establishes once again the complex of oppositions between the Shem and Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 179 Shaun polarities. Here is not the place to expand on various underground allusions in the much longer passage in the Wake—for example, the Spinozan “apologetic” idea of an intellectual love of God’s creation or the way in which Schopenhauer redefined the “thing-in-itself” as a will inherent in nature. Of immediate interest is that Schopenhauer is still hovering as a presence in the narrating mind or voice, although the protagonist capable of thinking about these matters, the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses, has faded away as a concretized intellectual hero and is now dispersed in Shem and some Shaun attributes all across the later Wake, scattered in traces we can punctiliously pursue in guides such as Tindall’s. But it is not the same experience as observing and listening to a character like Stephen who is a kind of creative force in his own right in Ulysses. In my Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, as its index shows, I paid attention to the Schopenhauerian presence in the French and German novelists but neglected his relevance for Joyce. Yet, even in Ulysses, things no longer are as easy and straightforward for assessing what’s streaming in a character’s mind as when earlier we had our first encounter with Stephen in the Portrait. Upon the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, students of Joyce hardly need reminding that a particular allusion or strand of allusions in Ulysses ought to be appreciated, finally, for how it fits within strata and webs of reference and functions at different levels of authority in various contexts. This consideration motivates me to supplement my book and call attention to a particular shadow among the many shadows falling over Stephen in the “Proteus” episode. When at its close he senses, “Behind. Perhaps there is someone,” and looks “rere regardant” at the arrival of “a silent ship” (U 3.505), whether it be Odysseus’s, the Flying Dutchman’s, or others’ more menacing , Stephen’s looking also serves as an invitation to us readers to apprehend the looming shadow of all our bodily and spiritual ancestors. Just before that gesture of regard, we are privy to Stephen’s worrying about himself: “My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the superman. What is that I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?” (U 3.494–97). Joyce nudges us awake with this question...

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