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DATE: ……………………………………………… Mark Bolsover Artistic Inspiration and the Figure of the Artist in the works of James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche Mark Bolsover PhD English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2011 2 Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to Dr Simon Malpas who has unflaggingly and generously supported my writing and academic career since my days with him as an undergraduate student at Manchester Metropolitan University and whose supervision and example have been invaluable to me. My thanks also to Christos Hadjiyiannis for his friendship and knowledge of the works of T.E. Hulme, to Sharon Selby for her help with Aquinas and to Dr Lee Spinks for his advice on Joyce and Nietzsche. My thanks, finally, to my parents, Ray and Margaret, for their unflagging and profoundly undeserved support. 3 Contents Declaration 1 Title Page 2 Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 6 Chapter 1. Nietzsche’s early Schopenhauerian—anti-Schopenhauerianism: 21 Intuition, Flux and Anti-metaphysics between ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ and The Birth of Tragedy I – On ‘intuition’ and the laceration of the concepts of the intellect: 22 Nietzsche’s early ironic anti-Schopenhauerianism II – On the Undivided Continuity of States: the ‘primal unity’, 43 ‘duration’ and ‘the will to power’ Chapter 2. On ‘Art and Life’: The ‘classical’ as Romantic—anti- 55 Romanticism in the development of Stephen’s aesthetic theory between Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I – On ‘applied Aquinas’: the evolution of the ‘epiphany’ into the 57 ‘esthetic image’ between Stephen Hero and Portrait II – On the Becoming Actual of the Being of Beauty: anti-metaphysics 82 and ironic anti-romanticism in the definition of the ‘classical’ in Joyce, Nietzsche and T.E. Hulme Chapter 3. On the ‘artist’s metaphysics’: Romantic—anti-Romanticism in 125 the fold of the self-creation of the artist in The Birth of Tragedy I – On ‘Incorporation’ and the Apollinian sublime 128 II – On ‘Purgation’ and the Dionysian sublime 143 III – The Lyric Poet: the fold in the self-creation of the artist 159 (i) – On Rapture and Nausea as artistic inspiration 161 (ii) – Nietzsche’s ‘Classicism’: the ‘artists’ metaphysics’ (the 166 self-creation of the artist) 4 (iii) – In-between ‘exuberant mockery’ and the sublime: the 190 Affect of Tragedy Chapter 4. The Fold in the self-creation of the artist between ‘the smoke 205 and breakers’ and ‘the rock’: Romantic—anti-Romanticism in Joyce’s Ulysses I – ‘The beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against 212 hard facts’: the two poles of the debate in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ II – ‘quintessential triviality ’: the genesis of Hamlet and the Romantic- 224 anti-Romanticism of the fold in the ‘image’ of the artist III – The ‘present-day scientist’: On the Politics of Classicism in 260 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ Conclusion 268 Appendix: ‘Transfiguration’ 272 Bibliography 273 5 Introduction This thesis will seek to examine the parallel which it will argue exists between the theorising of artistic inspiration and the resulting conception of the figure of the artist in the works of Joyce and Nietzsche. Recent critical work on the relationship between Joyce and Nietzsche has tended to focus exclusively on the question of influence . In ‘The Struggle against Meta (Phantasma)-Physics: Nietzsche, Joyce and the “Excess of History”’, for example, drawing his reading in particular from The Use and Abuse of History , Joseph Buttigieg gives a broad account of Nietzsche’s conception of history, but, in effect, uses his reading of Nietzsche to simply augment his reading of Joyce, arguing that his conception of the ‘postmodern’ Nietzsche can ‘illuminate and give depth’ to the works of the ‘modernist’ Joyce. 1 In The Aesthetics of James Joyce , Jacques Aubert discusses what he calls the ‘Nietzschean overtones’ of Joyce’s work. 2 Aubert focuses on what he argues is Hegel’s crucial influence on Joyce and appears to align Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s influence on Joyce, with what he allusively refers to as ‘post-Hegelian’ or ‘Neo-Hegelian’ philosophy, though it is never clear precisely what he intends these to denote. 3 In ‘Beyond Truth and Freedom: The New Faith of Joyce and Nietzsche’, Joseph Valente gives an illuminating account of Joyce and Nietzsche’s mutual rejection of metaphysics, but focuses exclusively on the later Joyce and Nietzsche. Again, Valente frames his argument specifically in terms of an influence, drawing on an idiosyncratic reading of the concept of the ‘superman’ and 1 Buttigieg refers to Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History , trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). Buttigieg, Joseph A., ‘The Struggle against Meta (Phantasma)-Physics: Nietzsche, Joyce and the “Excess of History”’, boundary 2 , 9 (1981), 187-207 (see 189). 2 Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce (Chicago: John Hopkins University Press, 1992). 3 66. See references throughout. F.C. McGrath also seeks to characterise Nietzsche in this way, arguing that ‘turn-of-the-century aesthetics’ ‘was thoroughly imbued’ with Hegel and that ‘neo-Hegelianism’ had been made ‘widespread in Britain and Europe through the works of Nietzsche and Wagner’, though, again, he appears to offer little evidence to clarify Nietzsche’s ‘neo-Hegelian’ status, or to substantiate his historical claims. See F.C. McGrath, ‘Laughing in His Sleeve: The Sources of Stephen’s Aesthetics’, James Joyce Quarterly , 23, (1986), 259-275, 259-275 (see 260). 6 identifying Stephen Stephen as ‘recognizably Zarathustrian’. 4 The central problem with the critical approach these accounts share in common, which concerns itself with the question of influence, is that it obliges itself to attribute a detailed and philosophically thoroughgoing reading of Nietzsche’s works to Joyce, one not always necessarily in evidence in the criticism itself. It must thus be at pains to stretch available biographical information on Joyce’s reading of Nietzsche, as well as examples drawn from Joyce’s texts, in order to fit a partial, incomplete or inaccurate characterisation of Nietzsche’s thought; threatening to transform Joyce into some kind of ‘Nietzschean’ and Nietzsche into some kind of anticipatory ‘Joycean’. 5 By contrast, then, this thesis will seek to set aside the problematic question of influence from the outset, instead seeking to examine the mutually illuminating parallel which it will argue exists between the theorising of artistic inspiration and the resulting conception of the figure of the artist in the works of Joyce and Nietzsche. It will argue that this parallel has mutually illuminating consequences for an understanding of both Nietzsche and Joyce’s relationships to metaphysics and, through this, to Romanticism. It will be the task of this thesis to explain the way in which both Nietzsche and Joyce retain the key terms of Romantic accounts of artistic inspiration, whilst rejecting the metaphysical claims at stake in them. My argument will be grounded in a reading of Nietzsche focussing on an in- depth close-reading of the opening sections of The Birth of Tragedy . In particular I will argue for a critical reappraisal of the Apollinian and Dionysian within the text, 4 ‘Beyond Truth and Freedom: The New Faith of Joyce and Nietzsche’, James Joyce Quarterly , 25 (1987), 87-103. 5 In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann claims that Joyce had read some of Nietzsche’s work during 1903, but does not provide any details of the extent or depth of Joyce’s reading, nor of Joyce’s possible consultation of whatever critical material was available on Nietzsche at that time. This leaves little biographical evidence to on which ground a thesis of influence. See Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 142. 7 and of the relationship between them. I want to locate this reading in the context of recent critical debates which have sought to identify Nietzsche’s work as a philosophy of naturalism. 6 These debates have focussed exclusively on the nature of Nietzsche’s naturalism in his later philosophy, from Human, All Too Human (1878-1880), onwards, dismissing Birth as part of an early Schopenhauerian, Wagnerian and Romantic ‘phase’ of Nietzsche’s work. Brian Leiter, for instance, argues that Nietzsche’s naturalism constitutes a ‘Methodological Naturalism’ (‘M-Naturalism’), according to which ‘philosophical inquiry […] should be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences’. 7 It is a naturalism whose claims are not necessarily confirmed in a scientific manner and which therefore remains a ‘ Speculative M-Naturalism’, and yet is also in part a ‘Substantive’ naturalism insofar as it holds ‘the (ontological) view that the only things that exist are natural ’. 8 For Leiter then, Nietzsche’s is a naturalism which remains ‘speculative’ insofar as it is intuitive and artistic and yet also empirical and, therefore, ‘substantive’ in its rejection of metaphysical explanations of phenomena; limiting its own project to an examination of natural drives and forces.