If Nietzsche Read Joyce...

As I was reading Nietzsche the other day, I kept trying to think of writers who I believed that Nietzsche would particularly approve of, especially since he seems to disapprove of writing and language in general (preferring music). I decided that he would be a fan of James Joyce.

Joyce's style is one that deserves reading and rereading in order to get a footing in the plot. He writes in a pure and poetic stream-of-consciousness, thus the reader is bombarded with a mess of "entirely subjective stimulus" (766). Joyce does not draw arbitrary borders between concepts or different thoughts, and thus the concepts of the book become hard to discern.

Once Nietzsche sets up the natural tendency toward conceptualization and therefore convenient lies, he asserts that it is the artist who must fight the process of abstraction and division that we arbitrarily impose upon the world: "[Art] constantly confuses the cells and the classifications of concepts by setting up new translations, metaphors, metonymies; it constantly manifests the desire to shape the given world of the waking human being in ways which are just as multiform, irregular, inconsequential, incoherent, charming and ever-new, as things are in the world of dream" (772). Most people can't make sense of at least parts of Joyce's writing. The overwhelming volume of thought and sense data makes it hard for readers to tease apart meaning. There is minimal selection of detail to guide us comfortably through. Instead, Joyce's reader is left to swim through a sea of another's consciousness. He includes the "inconsequential," and the "incoherent." The experience of Joyce challenges our methods of making meaning; thus, had Nietzsche been alive in Joyce's time, he should have approved of his work as an artist.

Language, and even more so, storytelling, is a difficult area for Nietzsche because language limits the "correct perception" of an object, or the "thing-in-itself." He uses the example of the river, "describing a river, for example, as a moving road that carries men to destinations to which they normally walk" (772). Stories involve even greater exclusion (of entire events or thoughts), but Joyce amends this fault of storytelling. That's why it takes him over 800 pages to tell the story of one day in Ulysses. He needs that much space when he even includes Stephan Dedalus peeing or picking his nose and leaving the booger on the rock. The reader of Joyce comes face to face with the realities that Nietzsche proposes about our blindness to "things-in-themselves." Joyce doesn't give us plot. He gives us a day-in-itself.