Flaubert, Schlegel, Nietzsche: Joyce and some European Precursons

Abstract

The influence of Gustave Flaubert on James Joyce is well-established, but might it not be more appropriate to look to Friedrich Schlegel for a version of irony that is closer to Joyce's artistic practice? Faced with a world of bewildering plenitude and the recurrent paradoxes in our experience, the literary artist requires, in Schlegel's view, a flexibility of response which will do justice to such multiplicity. Schlegel thus advocates an aesthetic which responds directly to contingency, one that arguably corresponds to Joyce's procedures in the "allincluding I...] chronicle" of Ulysses, where the constant narratorial shifts, for example, seem to indicate an aspiration to come to terms with the contradictory totality of experience. Moreover, the relativism implicit in Schlegel's insistence on authorial flexibility and "caprice" —as the artist seeks to devise strategies which will respond to the complexity of our world— becomes fully explicit in Nietzsche's later and more cogent advocacy of a "diversity of perspectives" in the interests of perceptual completeness. Such diversity is intrinsic to Joyce's non-absolutist aesthetic. The essay concludes with an indication of some further possible affinities between Joyce and Nietzsche.