Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics by Sam Slote (review)

Sam Slote observes that, while W. B. Yeats’s rapport with Friedrich Nietzsche has been variously charted, Nietzsche’s impact on Joyce “has been mostly … neglected” (11, 1). It follows, then, that Slote’s study must be seen as a welcome attempt to set the record straight. At the outset, he wisely creates generous latitude for himself by declaring that his focus is not so much on Joyce’s direct engagement with Nietzsche as his involvement with “issues and problems raised in Nietzsche’s work” (5). Central here is Nietzsche’s reference to his own “multifarious art of style,”¹ and he is particularly relevant to Joyce, according to Slote, “as a theorist of style” (1, 2). The word “ethics” in the title derives from Slote’s claim that, for Nietzsche, “stylistic variety projects an ethical stance in that it conveys a manner of living” (2).

At the center of Slote’s study is an emphasis on a plurality of styles and a cognate plurality of perspectives, which might undertake to do justice to the multifaceted alterity of world/experience. But that, in turn, raises other issues, and, beginning with the solipsistic James Duffy in “A Painful Case” and later turning to Stephen in both A Portrait and Ulysses, Slote traces the difficulty for the “egoarch” (FW 188.16) in escaping from the prison of the self and engaging with the challenge posed by both others and otherness (149, 150). Duffy, in fact, misreads Nietzsche, failing to see in the example of Zarathustra that the goal “is not the Übermensch as such, but rather a perpetual process of overcoming” (16). Duffy’s uncritical attitude toward the Übermensch allows him “to confirm his already well-developed sense of superiority and justify his solitary existence” (17). He thus enters into an absolute condition or hypostasis which, as Slote repeatedly reminds us, is alien to the Nietzschean project.

The case of Stephen is, as one might expect, rather more complex; and two of the six chapters here are devoted to his plight and his (possible) development. Slote regards the aesthetic theory expressed by Stephen in A Portrait as egoistic, for “Stephen engages in a hubris-tic empowerment of the creative will in order to achieve a god-like self-sufficiency and auto-genesis” (29). Ironically, Stephen “rejects one hypostasis, God, for another, the artist” (37). Of the Stephen in Ulysses, Slote observes that, having aspired to fly by the nets of nationality, language, and religion, he has “one more net to fly by, the net of his own pretentious self-determination” (40). And at this point, with the help of Jacques Derrida,² the argument is complicated and enriched by the introduction of the notion of “matricide”: since “maternity indicates the impossibility of auto-genesis,” then the “limit point of egoism” becomes matricide (43).

Such a maneuver allows Slote to engage in a new and incisively analytical approach to Stephen’s guilt feelings—his “Agenbite of inwit” (U 1.481)—arising from his mother’s death. He may posit a theory of artistic creation that in Derrida’s terms is matricidal, but “the theory—and likewise Stephen—remains haunted by maternity” (47). Slote pursues his thesis with considerable ingenuity in detailed readings of both “Scylla and Charybdis” (where Stephen offers William Shakespeare as an instance of the “patrilineal auto-genetic artist”—55) and “Oxen of the Sun,” which, in its focus on “the uncircumventable primacy of maternity,” offers “a redress for Stephen’s matricidal auto-genesis” and for the theory of artistic creation associated with that (63). To be sure, Stephen is capable of important modifications to his aesthetics of egoism, but Slote’s conclusion, in which he doubts whether Stephen “has resolved anything within the space of Ulysses” (100), seems appropriately skeptical.

As the book progresses, Leopold Bloom unsurprisingly moves to the foreground. Where Stephen’s aesthetic is limited by being “mono-logical” and “committed to a single style,” Bloom, as “multipolar everyman,” embodies the Nietzschean capacity for “multiperspectivalism” (73...