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Chapter 3 examines the concentrated attention that other Irish writers gave to Nietzschean thought during the first decade of the twentieth century, making legible the conflicts within and around the Revival movement, especially the tensions among Irish Catholicism, cultural nationalism, and international modernism. To be sure, Joyce’s writing made use of some of Nietzsche’s most famous tropes in articulating a response to these conflicts, a response embodied in the figure of an artist-hero, whose radically new ethical and aesthetic disposition might have a broad communal significance for his people. In July 1904, not long after he had commenced his first attempt to write a novel, the young man signed a lettercard to a friend with the alias ‘James Overman’, evincing the importance of the Übermensch for Joyce and other members of his circle, including John Eglinton and Thomas Kettle, who looked to Nietzsche in their own efforts to promote an ‘efflorescence of art and culture’ in modern Ireland. In Stephen Hero, Joyce calls directly on a number of Nietzsche’s ideas – not just the Übermensch, but slave morality, noble values, and the death of God – to depict the emergence of a heroic artistic consciousness, struggling to overcome nationalist ressentiment and religious authority. This struggle reaches a critical point in the final lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen proclaims his desire to produce something radically new, a conscience beyond bad conscience, which would break from the manners and mores that govern his compatriots. Revisiting the ‘Telemachus episode’ – written in 1914, a decade after Joyce’s noteworthy lettercard – the chapter provides a full account of Stephen’s return to Ireland, the reemergence of his bad conscience, and Buck Mulligan’s playing at Zarathustra prophecy, all as signs that the modernist project of creating new values is necessarily a vexed one, especially in the chastening context of Irish history. At the very outset of Ulysses, Nietzschean allusions cast doubt on the heroic creator of values who emerges in A Portrait, but these references nonetheless offer an important point of departure for understanding the project of cultural transformation undertaken by Joyce’s art and the ethics of Irish modernism negotiated in the pages of his masterpiece.
Nietzsche was a scandal, a revelation, an explosive intellectual force. Soon after he ceased to write, the German philosopher was hailed widely as a leading emissary of ‘the modern’, but his message of cultural transformation resonated nowhere more powerfully than in Ireland. Nietzsche and Irish modernism traces the circulation of the philosopher’s ideas in the work of Irish writers and, more broadly, the Irish public sphere during the early decades of the twentieth century. George Bernard Shaw styled himself an ‘English (or Irish) Nietzsche’, as he developed a ‘drama of ideas’ to advance his radical political philosophy. W.B. Yeats adopted an ethos of ‘proud hard gift giving joyousness’ from Nietzsche as he sought to establish a national theatre in Ireland. James Joyce playfully, and repeatedly, evoked the philosopher’s ideas in his fiction, as the novelist surveyed the cultural resources that might remake the conscience of his compatriots. Before long, Irish priests, politicians, and propagandists also summoned the name of the German philosopher as they addressed a tumultuous period of Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and state building. His thought would ultimately come to play a role in imagining a different future for both postcolonial Ireland and postwar Europe. Recounting this cultural history in meticulous detail, the study demonstrates how Nietzsche provided Irish culture with the potential for new, disruptive modes of thinking and writing, which spoke to both local political circumstances and the predicaments of modernity at large.
Just a few years later, during the Irish Civil War, the philosopher’s name would be evoked on the floor of the Dáil Éireann (lower house of parliament) to pose the relationship between the values of the Irish people and the draconian measures of their new government as ‘a case of Christianity vs. Nietzscheanism’. Drawing on an opposition made familiar by Kettle and Allied propagandists, the remark addresses, in the bluntest terms, the issues at stake for the national conscience as Ireland entered the era of independence. Chapter 5 demonstrates that Nietzsche, despite his drubbing in the public sphere, remained an important point of reference for the foremost Irish writers as they looked beyond the tumultuous intensity of the period and embraced prophetic modes of discourse. With a peculiar admixture of mythology, cosmology, eccentric historiography, and Nietzschean ideas, Yeats sought in A Vision (1925) to offer a systematic, if highly idiosyncratic, account of the patterns of human history that might reveal something about the future. Meanwhile, in his five-part play, Back to Methuselah (1921), Shaw attempted to translate the tenets of his philosophy of Creative Evolution into the legends of a new religion of human enhancement: legends that revise the story of the Garden of Eden, comment directly on the political failings of the present, and project a posthuman future some 30,000 years hence. After the war, like many of their contemporaries, Yeats and Shaw became increasingly enamoured with the potential of eugenics to overcome the counter-selective effects of the recent conflict and to breed the human race into a fitter political animal. Joyce, for his part, demonstrates considerable scepticism about such a potential, but he was nonetheless preoccupied with human breeding and the question of futurity in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses. Among the many competing discourses that addressed these issues in Ireland and beyond, Nietzschean philosophy is again crucial, precisely because it remains open to multiple interpretations, multiple potentialities for the future of humanity, or rather a future beyond humanity, when at least certain individuals will live according to new codes, new values, and new ideals. One of the great achievements of Irish modernism, as we shall see, is that its leading writers accommodated these provocations to their own array of provocative images, metaphors, and myths, which repeatedly crossed the borders between art and society, aesthetics and politics.
The early chapters of the present study consider how Nietzsche’s ideas bore on the reconceptualisation of the role of the Irish artist and the development of new forms of Irish writing during the first decade of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 examines Shaw in the guise of a self-styled ‘artist-philosopher’, who sought to provoke his London audience – so concerned with profit making, social class, and late Victorian respectability – into recognising its own short-sightedness, as he worked to remake the national conscience of both England and Ireland. In doing so, the chapter provides the first comprehensive reading of Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) in terms of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Capitalising on the philosopher’s growing reputation, and appropriating his most infamous creation, the Übermensch, Shaw’s text develops a sprawling, contradictory, dialectical new form of drama in order to promote something that Nietzsche’s oeuvre did not offer: a coherent political philosophy. Like his German counterpart, the Irish playwright pursued a position both within and without traditional philosophical discourse and its field of cultural production, where he could enjoy both the benefits of membership and the returns on transgression. His first ‘drama of ideas’ mingled Nietzschean philosophy, Fabian socialism, and Lamarckian evolutionary theory, along with a parodic comedy of manners, a surreal tableau called ‘Don Juan in Hell’, and an appended ‘Revolutionist’s Handbook’, which collectively strain against the traditional form of the well-made play and shatter the rhetorical conventions of philosophical discourse. But this new ‘modernist’ form of drama nonetheless served to advance a Shavian vision of human enhancement and political transformation. A real revolution, whether in England or Ireland, would only be brought about by changing the ‘raw material’ of the citizenry – the physiological basis of their moral sensibility and collective conscience – in order to raise the national community to heights previously associated with the singular Übermensch. The title of Shaw’s play linked his own reputation to the reception of Nietzsche’s writing, and also allowed critics to write off his ‘drama of ideas’ as recycled German philosophy, though the play itself ultimately offered a type of political philosophy – and worrying propaganda – like nothing before seen on the page or stage in England or Ireland.
An important aim throughout Nietzsche and Irish modernism is to reexamine the relationship between literature and philosophy by rigorously historicising their encounter in modern Irish culture. After the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Nietzsche’s name quickly became prominent in Irish (and English) newspapers as shorthand for a ‘Gospel of the Devil’, associated with German militarism and its perceived threat to Christian civilisation. Chapter 4 documents the emergence of this strain of propaganda in the writings of Thomas Kettle, who wrote an introduction to Daniel Halevy’s The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (1911), which expounds on ‘the duel between Nietzsche and civilisation’, even as it dismisses his philosophy as nothing more than a rather vivid form of poetry. Three years later, on a gun-running mission for the Irish Republic Brotherhood, Kettle witnessed the so-called Rape of Belgium and immediately wrote a series of articles for the Daily News, attributing the rapid escalation of German belligerence to Nietzsche’s destructive influence. Within a few short weeks, a host of Irish clerics reaffirmed the connection, as they negotiated their difficult position between the Home Rule cause and the British war effort by arguing in the popular press that Ireland and England must stand together against the ‘poison doctrines’ of the German philosopher. By November 1914, Yeats could rather mischievously evoke Nietzsche’s name in Kettle’s presence at a nationalist celebration, drawing rousing applause from the Dublin audience for this now explicitly anti-British (if also anti-Christian) figure. During the course of the war, the Nietzsche controversy raged on in newspapers across the Allied powers, while Yeats remained largely silent about the conflict and its catastrophic impact on Western civilisation. But, in January 1919, only days after the armistice was signed, he would return to some of Nietzsche’s most provocative tropes in a series of allusions in ‘The Second Coming’, a poem that famously responds to the trauma of the war years by transforming the imagery of Christian faith into a nightmarish vision of the Antichrist. The final section of the chapter focuses on Yeats’s poem in the context of the Nietzsche controversy in order to read it in terms of the philosopher’s radical transvaluation of its values, which suggests a daunting future for both postwar Europe and postcolonial Ireland.
Shortly after the publication of Man and Superman, Shaw was invited to contribute a play to the Irish National Dramatic Society by Yeats, who was in the first flush of his own life-long enchantment with Nietzsche. The coincidence is a telling one. Chapter 2 turns to Yeats and his newly founded theatre company to examine the ethos of a ‘proud hard gift giving joyousness’, which the poet and developing playwright derived from the German philosopher and placed in the service of a native cultural revival. Like Shaw, Yeats conceived the theatre as an arena where the conscience of a nation might be defined or redefined, but as he sought to impart his ideas of artistic value, cultural continuity, and noble generosity, he encountered an unreceptive audience that he came to refer as the ‘mob’ or ‘crowd’. His work as a playwright during the first decade of the century is best understood as a sustained attempt to appeal to the tastes and values of Irish theatre-goers without condoning what he viewed as their lower instincts. Throughout this period, Nietzsche’s writings were a constant companion and perhaps Yeats’s greatest resource, providing him with the means to reconceive the roles of both the individual artist and the dramatic arts in pursuing his communal project. As demonstrated by the multiplying drafts of his plays and his extensive correspondence with collaborators, Yeats strove persistently to realise a Nietzschean conception of generosity: beginning with his revisions to Where There Is Nothing and continuing through his composition of The King’s Threshold, he imagined heroes with a kind of haughty intensity, coupled with an overflowing fullness, who encounter audiences not yet ready to receive their messages. As he continued to read Nietzsche with great enthusiasm, Yeats went on to write – and repeatedly revise – two plays featuring the mythological hero, Cuchulain, as the exemplar of a renewed communal spirit, both proud and generous, hard and joyous. With the decade drawing to a close, however, he came to consider his efforts a failure, though the ambition remained to fashion a national conscience in the form of an aristocratic ethos suitable to his vision of the Irish people and their destiny.
Chapter 3 tracks a powerful and pervasive connection between archaeology, desire, and wider discourses of authenticity at the fin de siècle. This chapter considers such spurious objects as the Tiara of Saitaphernes, the Neolithic implements of Flint Jack, the medieval ecclesiastical ornaments of Louis Marcy, Victorian Tanagra figurines, the dubious Neolithic discoveries at Dumbuck, Scotland, and the forged artefacts possibly pedalled by Howard Carter, and the stories that circulated around them. Delving into archaeological handbooks and articles in the popular press by a range of archaeologists, anthropologists, art collectors, and critics (such as Scottish archaeologist Robert Munro, English archaeologist John Evans, and fantasy writer Andrew Lang), and reading these discussions alongside aesthetic debates about realism and aestheticism, this chapter ultimately reveals how the fragmentariness of the material record and the subjective experience of archaeological encounter helped rewrite conceptions of intellectual hierarchy, legitimacy, the sanctioned historical narrative, and who gets to write the stories of the past. The chapter concludes by examining Damien Hirst’s controversial exhibit and documentary film, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (2017), offering a new way to read this provocative project through the lens of the Victorian archaeological imagination and the fin-de-siècle discourses of authenticity that it shaped.
This chapter takes up the innovative ways of reading and knowing the past introduced in Chapter 1, and shows that aesthetic innovators at the fin de siècle found archaeology-inspired ways of reading portraits, crafting portraits out of prose, and creating a Decadent prose style shaped by the sensual experience of archaeological discovery. Examining Walter Pater’s collection Imaginary Portraits (1885–1887) alongside Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1890) and Louis Norbert (1914), as well as Lee’s essay ‘Faustus and Helena’ (1880, 1881) and some of her travel writing (e.g., Genius Loci, 1899), this chapter argues that Pater and Lee create an archaeological epistemology of portraiture—one that is both inspired by archaeological excavation and also embedded in their prose styles. Additionally, readings of Lee reveal how she draws from Decadent aesthetics in her transhistorical tales of ghosts and archival mysteries to craft an experimental Decadent prose which also gestures to the iconoclasm and severed perspectives of modernism. Exploring additional works by Pater, including Appreciations (1889), as well as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), this chapter simultaneously unearths the influence of seventeenth-century polymath Thomas Browne’s archaeological tract Urn Burial (1658) on these Decadent stylists. In its examination of the formal styles of prose portraits and archaeological meditations, this chapter teases out the archaeological methods and encounters woven into the fabric of experimental Decadent prose at the fin de siècle.