At the end of Telemachus Mulligan playfully
compares himself to the unfallen man of Christian myth, and
then to the fully evolved man of Nietzschean philosophy: "My
twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Uebermensch."
The sudden disappearance of a rib makes him Adam, and in the
figure of the Übermensch he aspires to Friedrich
Nietzsche's prophetic ideal of a man who succeeds in
overcoming the soul-killing heritage of Christian ethics and
metaphysics. Several sentences later, Mulligan perverts the
language of Proverbs 19:17 (“He that hath pity upon the poor
lendeth unto the Lord”) to trumpet Nietzsche's rejection of
Christian ethics: "He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to
the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra."
Nietzsche developed his concept of the superman or overman in
two works of the 1880s, The Gay Science and Thus
Spake Zarathustra. Mr. James Duffy, the protagonist of
“A Painful Case,” one of the short stories of Dubliners,
owns copies of both works. In a 1904 card addressed to
publisher George Roberts, a young Joyce, who likewise had been
reading some of Nietzsche's works, signed his name "James
Overman."
Ellmann speculates that "it was probably upon Nietzsche that
Joyce drew when he expounded to his friends a neo-paganism that glorified
selfishness, licentiousness, and pitilessness, and denounced
gratitude and other 'domestic virtues'" (142). In Ulysses
it is not only Mulligan who displays this kind of reaction to
the Übermensch. Stephen too, in Oxen of the
Sun, parodies biblical language in a Nietzschean spirit
to justify sexual licentiousness: "Greater love than
this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for
his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that
effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of
French letters to the university of Oxtail nor breathed
there ever that man to whom mankind was more beholden."
"French letters" are condoms.
In the same chapter, Stephen also recalls Mulligan's parody
of Proverbs, this time to attack the financial greed
of the Catholic church. In response to Bloom's tongue-in-cheek
ruling that, when forced to choose between saving the life of
a pregnant woman or her child, the child should live because
then the church will receive both "birth and death pence,"
Stephen "was a marvellous glad man and he averred
that he who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord for
he was of a wild manner when he was drunken."
Ellmann observes that "At heart Joyce can scarcely have been
a Nietzschean" (142). Joyce did indeed prove not to be one in
the limited and distorted sense of justifying selfish impulses
and slaying sacred cows, but there is more to Nietzsche and to
Joyce's engagement with his ideas. Ulysses seems
very Nietzschean in its rejection of transcendental
metaphysics that devalue life and shackle human beings in sin
and guilt. Criticism is beginning to come to terms with the
ways in which the novel follows Nietzsche in seeking an answer
to nihilism by affirming embodied existence and overcoming
mere "humanity." In addition to Sam Slote's Joyce's
Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave, 2013), there is an
excellent unpublished undergraduate thesis by Nathan Miller,
"Reading Nietzsche in James Joyce's Ulysses" (2011).
