Bartholomew Ryan

The Children of Nietzsche:

Chaos, Plurality and Cosmopolitanism in
Joyce and Pessoa
Abstract: Nietzsche urged philosophers and artists to flourish as ‘good-’ or
‘supra-Europeans,’ an invitation Bartholomew Ryan argues was accepted most
brilliantly by two twentieth-century philosophical poets – James Joyce and Fer-
nando Pessoa. In them, Ryan sees ‘children of Nietzsche’ who appropriated
Nietzsche’s ideas and styles to transform their literary human subjects into mul-
tifaceted, plural cosmopolitans. Ryan explicates their Nietzschean attempts to
reconcile the chaos of modernity with the possibility of a cosmopolitan
human by fusing polyglot, nomadic existences into a ‘chaosmos’ of plurality.
By challenging the nihilism of their age, Joyce and Pessoa further elaborated
Nietzsche’s ‘good-’ or ‘supra-’ European ideal.

Nietzsche’s invitation to philosophers and artists to flourish as ‘good Europeans’

and ‘supra-Europeans’ (KSA 11, 35[9]) during the “advent of nihilism” (KSA 13,
11[411]) and beyond is accepted, I argue, most brilliantly by James Joyce and Fer-
nando Pessoa – two philosophical poets who merge and reconcile the chaos of
modernity with the possibility of a cosmopolitan human. Joyce and Pessoa are
both philosophical authors par excellence – for when I say philosophical, it is
because they are avid readers in the history of philosophy and because they in-
corporate and engage in the modern philosophical issues such as confronting
the age of nihilism and the problem of consciousness with the plurality of the
subject in their literary output. They are arguably better equipped than strict phi-
losophers in dealing with these issues.¹ I refer to Joyce and Pessoa as “children
of Nietzsche,” because they answer his call to ‘free spirits’ by appropriating his
styles and ideas in order to transform the human subject into a multifaceted, plu-
ral cosmopolitan self, which is the unfolding of Nietzsche’s ‘good-’ and ‘supra-’
European. I will explicate this in three sections, showing first why Joyce and Pes-
soa are prioritized in this role as living through the advent of nihilism and

 As a proposal to philosophers, Alain Badiou writes in a small essay on Pessoa: “If Pessoa rep-
resents a singular challenge for philosophy, […] it is because his thought-poem inaugurates a
path that manages to be neither Platonic nor anti-Platonic. […] To this day, philosophy has
yet to comprehend the full extent of this gesture” (Badiou 2005, p. 38).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110606478-023
362 Bartholomew Ryan

Nietzsche’s initial reception; second, through their related visions of dis-loca-

tion, manifested through supra-nationalism, the polyglot writer and nomadic ex-
istence; and third, some of the ways in which they encompassed the plural and
cosmopolitan self or ‘chaosmos’ of plurality.

1 Why Joyce and Pessoa? Disintegration,

Transformation and the Nietzsche Reception
The first half of the twentieth century heralded in Nietzsche’s “advent of nihil-
ism,” which was also Kierkegaard’s vision of the “age of disintegration” prophet-
ically described almost forty years before Nietzsche (Kierkegaard 1996, p. 350),
and later Max Weber’s reuse of Schiller’s slogan of the “disenchantment of the
world,” and most recently Eric Hobsbawn’s “age of extremes.” Joyce and Pessoa
were part of the first generation after Nietzsche to confront and live in the “his-
tory of the next two centuries” (KSA 13, 11[411]). The first three decades of the
twentieth century witnessed the apex and collapse of empires, the painful births
of nations, the development of new and divisive modes of philosophy such as
phenomenology and logical positivism, and new artistic expressions with count-
less ‘-isms.’ These decades saw the erosion of traditional belief systems, global
wars, a revaluation of values in new political systems, the emergence of the
power of mass movements, and new forms of propaganda and the spreading
and manipulation of information. There were also extraordinary leaps in science
and technology that enabled the creation of the new imposing electrified city or
metropolis, as alarming population growth occurred simultaneously with the
dislocation, diaspora, and mobility of peoples. During this tumultuous period,
many intellectuals were devouring Nietzsche’s works, just as both Kierkegaard
and Schopenhauer came into vogue.
Nietzsche’s ‘big ideas’ (that ‘God is dead,’ the revaluation of values, the eter-
nal recurrence, and the will to power as well as the Übermensch) became slogans
for young European intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, and
can be found explicitly and implicitly in Joyce and Pessoa’s writings. Joyce and
Pessoa were classic products and receivers of the cult of Nietzsche in the first
decade of the twentieth century, and so their explicit references to Nietzsche
are sometimes superficial, damning and full of parody, as was the case with
the general first wave reception and image of Nietzsche alongside the hagiogra-
phy, and less the later more careful, nuanced readings. Pessoa only had a Span-
ish translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra but he also had seven books on
 The Children of Nietzsche 363

Nietzsche which were read and underlined;² and Joyce at least references The
Gay Science, Zarathustra and The Antichrist in key moments in his major works.
When many either volunteered or were coerced to fight in the jingoistic, na-
tionalistic, colonial World War I in the frenzy of the times, Joyce and Pessoa
wrote throughout the whole period. Their writing productivity was their stance
of affirmation of the body and the spirit over the destruction of them by the lead-
ership and status quo of socio-political society. As symbolic “children of
Nietzsche,” Joyce’s Ulysses (1914– 1921) and Finnegans Wake (1923 – 1939), and
Pessoa’s heteronymic poetry (1914– 1935) and modernist magazine Orpheu in
1915 represent, on the one hand, chaos and disintegration; and, on the other
hand, exemplify an artistic will to power and the confidence and affirmation
of the new, or new beginnings, of the now and imagined future. Joyce wrote Ulys-
ses through World War I, the 1916 Rising in Ireland and the War of Irish Inde-
pendence, and finally published it in the same year as the birth of the Irish
Free State in 1922 on the eve of the Irish Civil War. He then spent the next sev-
enteen years writing his final work, publishing it as Finnegans Wake in 1939
on the eve of WW II. He died in Zurich in January 1941 when Nazi Germany
had taken control of most of Europe.
Joyce embodies Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit’ in the midst of a disintegrating age,
who recognizes man’s propensity to destroy each other and construct lies to con-
trol others and continue violent wars, and famously ends Ulysses with the affir-
mative, yet crucially unstable word ‘Yes’ when comes to the superficial positivity
that is thrown at us on a daily basis. As Kiberd says it well: “So his (Joyce’s) re-
fusal to provide a “satisfactory” climax in their final meeting is his rejection of
the obligation felt by realists to present a coherent, stable, socialized self” (Ki-
berd 1996, p. 354). He is the ‘tragic jester’ (Joyce 1992, p. 1971) who, like
Nietzsche, prizes laughter above all as salvation and as a therapeutic healthy re-
lationship with oneself and the world. Thus, Joyce writes in Ulysses: “He laughed
to free his mind from his mind’s bondage” (Joyce 2008, p. 204). It is a case of
Nietzsche’s philosophy being carried on and liberated by the artistic vision
and linguistic revolution of Joyce, of whose work T. S. Eliot was a famously en-
thusiastic supporter. Of Ulysses Eliot declared that it “destroyed the whole of the

 Pessoa had a number of texts in his personal library by or related to Nietzsche, including a
Spanish translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Pedro González-Blanco; Frédéric Nietzsche
by Eugène de Roberty (1902); Revaluations by Alfred Benn (1909); La Philosophie de
Nietzsche (1898) by Henri Lichtenberger; Nietzsche e L’immoralisme (1902) by Alfred Fouillé.
Pablo Lopez’s article (Pessoa 2016, pp. 85 – 103) provides historical background of Pessoa’s re-
lation to Nietzsche, and for explicit reference to Nietzsche’s name in Pessoa’s texts, see Jerónimo
Pizarro’s article (Pessoa 2016, pp. 389 – 421).
364 Bartholomew Ryan

nineteenth century […] It showed up the futility of all English styles” (Woolf 1982,
p. 50 [diary entry for 26 September 1922]). However, this may be a bridge too far,
for Joyce’s passion and love is literature – but his approach to it, or his way of
reverence of it, is a ribaldic irreverance, and crucially, unlike Eliot, as Seamus
Deane pointed out already – Joyce sees the collapse of civilization “to be wel-
comed because it had been brought about by the coercive exercise of that very
patriarchal authority that many other writers wished to rescue and re‐establish”
(Joyce 1992a, p. xiv). Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s joyful war, much like Nietzsche’s
whole philosophical endeavor. As early as 1904, Joyce wrote in a letter to his fu-
ture wife Nora that his “mind rejects the whole present social order and Christi-
anity – home, the recognized virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines” and
that he “could not enter the social order except as a vagabond” (Ellmann 1982,
p. 169). He quickly set out to be a global writer, a nomadic author, a cosmopol-
itan, allied to no one save human beings everywhere.
For both Nietzsche and Joyce, Homer is the champion of humanity rather
than Jesus, Faust or Hamlet, and after the Greek adventurer both attempt to
go further in confronting and living in the eternal recycling of life. Like
Nietzsche, Joyce and Pessoa are not nihilists, but sift through and break with
past traditions and belief systems to create innovative art for the future. These
writers know that gazing critically though the past paves a way to the future,
or as mapmaker and writer Tim Robinson writes: “the sound of the past is an
agonistic multiplicity” (Robinson 2011, p. 2). Nietzsche and Joyce each view
the history of philosophy as a history of a story or fable – our story – hence
Nietzsche’s summary of Western philosophy in The Twilight of the Idols (How
the “true world” finally became a fable; The history [Geschichte] of an error [TI
Fable]). Joyce’s runs through at least sixteen philosophers or thinkers in just
four pages in Finnegans Wake in his wonderfully subversive retelling of Aesop’s
fable of the ant and the grasshopper, now called “The Ondt and the Gracehoper.”
It is an example of, as stated in the same chapter, “the last word in stolentelling”
(Joyce 1992a, p. 424). The Ondt – meaning evil or bad in Danish – represents the
system, the controls, the norm, the status quo, embodying hard work and plan-
ning for the future; while the Gracehoper, or Grace-hoper – as Shem who is an-
other mask of Joyce – is living in the now – irresponsible, hedonistic, living as a
vagabond, and giving himself over to loafing, just like Kierkegaard’s philosoph-
ical pseudonym Johannes Climacus, whose task, when everything has become
more easy, is to make difficulties everywhere (Kierkegaard 1992, p. 186 – 187).
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concludes with a striking
Nietzschean goal and perspective when Stephen Dedalus declares to himself:
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experi-
ence and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my
 The Children of Nietzsche 365

race” (Joyce 1992b, p. 276). Here we have Nietzsche’s “will to power,” eternal re-
currence and philosophy as lived condensed into the most important line in Joy-
ce’s first novel. Ulysses is the book that intends to follow up on Stephen Dedalus’
ambitions and objective, beginning with him in a tower about to set off on a jour-
ney to find his way and path in life. Here Joyce crucially makes direct reference
to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Joyce 2008, p. 22) and The Antichrist (Joyce 2008,
p. 5).³ While lost in what to do and angry with country, religion and colonizer,
a frustrated Dedalus resolves to liberate himself from all three. Echoing both
the opening of Zarathustra and the first three words of Plato’s Republic, he is
about to make his way down into the world and thinks that he will be the
hero of the story.
Pessoa also wrote during an apocalyptic and transformative moment in his
country, amidst chaotic times in the “advent of nihilism.” Yet, as contemporaries
seeking a new literature and an affirmation of the cosmopolitan human in
Nietzsche’s philosophy, Joyce and Pessoa take different approaches in crucial
areas. There is a clear evolution in Joyce’s writing, through his four major
works, climaxing in Finnegans Wake where everybody is everything, and every-
one becomes an avatar of someone else, but Pessoa does not evolve, per se
(“And so I do not evolve, I simply JOURNEY.” [Pessoa 2001, p. 263]) Pessoa’s in-
novation, while being a brilliant poet, is supplying what he calls “a drama in
people” (Pessoa 2012, p. 228), through his creation of the heteronyms. His love
of contradiction allows him to creating opposing perspectives and styles in
them. His most prolific, vociferous and futuristic heteronym is Álvaro de Cam-
pos, whose birthday Pessoa consciously chose to be the same as Nietzsche’s.
Campos exemplifies modernism – as the idle naval engineer, bisexual, of Jewish
descent, a restless traveler and sufferer of anxiety and neuroses. Many of these
traits are essential components of the idea of “the children of Nietzsche,” and it
is only Campos of the heteronyms that is present in the magazine Orpheu in 1915,
where his two great poems “Triumphal Ode” and “Maritime Ode” are published
– relentlessly propelled by the Nietzschean Rausch. Nietzsche declares in the fa-
mous paragraph under the title “Towards a psychology of the artist” that “Frenzy
must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no
art” (TI Skirmishes 8). If Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro is “a kind of blood-
less Zarathustra” (Lourenço 2002, p. 87), then Campos is the neurotic and rest-
less son of Zarathustra. He too will namecheck Nietzsche two years later in
his outrageous Nietzschean manifesto “Ultimatum” damning European culture,

 See also Valente 1987.

366 Bartholomew Ryan

which concludes with him calling out for an Übermensch that is more complete,
complex and harmonious rather than strong, hard and free:

And I shout out, firstly:

The Superman will not be the strongest man but the most complete!
And I shout out, secondly:
The Superman will not be the toughest man but the most complex!
And I shout out, thirdly:
The Superman will not be the freest man but the most harmonious! (Pessoa 2001, p. 86)

In his critique of the Nietzsche persona at the beginning of the twentieth century
and through his own corrective, Campos is in fact describing, as Zenith points
out (Zenith 2016, p. 137), a more sophisticated and subtle Nietzsche that we
have come to know and read one hundred years later.

2 Dis-Location as a Mode of Affirmation for the

Good European and Supra-European
2.1 Supra-Nationalism

Nietzsche was well aware of the very powerful allure of nationalism and patrio-
tism which he begins with in his comprehensive entry on the “good European” in
Byond Good and Evil (BGE 241). He concludes this paragraph with a call to
“grand politics” in the twentieth century which will be a “struggle for mastery
over the whole earth.” This is a glimpse into the politically ambiguous aspect
of Nietzsche whose warlike tone differs from Pessoa’s non-democratic phanta-
sies of a ‘Fifth Empire’ led by Portuguese poets (him and his heteronyms), and
is worlds apart from Joyce’s passivism and embracing of democracy with
warts and all. And yet in Nietzsche also, there is a quasi-call and fantasy to
the free thinkers – echoing Percy Shelley’s poets as the “unacknowledged legis-
lators of the world” – that the ‘good Europeans’ should transform themselves
into the “lords of the Earth” and “legislator[s] of the future” (KSA 11, 35[9])⁴
What brings Nietzsche, Joyce and Pessoa together is that they remain quin-
tessentially nomadic, subversive writers, immersed in many languages, and bal-
ance themselves between the parochial and the global quite effortlessly (which is
what it is to be cosmopolitan). For these three, the triumph of nationalism and

 For a more detailed analysis of this declaration and position on the development of the
Nietzsche’s reference to the “good European,” see Gori and Stellino, 2015.
 The Children of Nietzsche 367

reductionist social movements of the day were the final desperate surges of the
dying values around them. Despite the fact that each of them astutely and hu-
morously mocks nationalism and the places they come from in their works, all
three were later assimilated into their respective national cultures. Each of
their (self-identified) greatest works, which arguably made them exemplars of
their native cultures, fit uneasily into the cultural canons of their disparate
homelands.⁵ While emphatically linked to their places of birth, their works are
damningly critical of their particular countries of origin, despite now being icon-
ic within them. This is to say: their greatest works served their cultures best by
betraying them, which is what it is to be a radical cosmopolitan or ‘good Euro-
pean.’ For example, see Campos’ comments on Portugal: “And you, two-bit Por-
tugal, monarchical vestiges rotting as a republic, extreme-unction-compunction
of Disgrace, artificially in Europe’s war but really and truly humiliated in Africa”
(Pessoa 2001, p. 74). He is also merciless with Germany, and whose comment
gives us a clue to the presence of the raw, primitive Nietzsche on his mind:
“You, German culture, a rancid Sparta dressed with the oil of Christianity and
the vinegar of Nietzscheization, a sheet-metal beehive, an imperialistic horde
of harnessed sheep” (Pessoa 2001, p. 74). Joyce calls his country of birth “Error-
land” in Finnegans Wake (Joyce 1992a, p. 62), and in the same book reveals his
choice to be an exile and nomad rather than live in the error-ridden island: “He
even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far
sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s
split little pea” (Joyce 1992a, p. 171).
In searching for ‘good Europeans,’ Nietzsche finds Goethe, who – like Joyce
and Pessoa – is not simply the great writer of the language he writes in, but
strives to be a global writer – as free spirit, a master of his art, a polymath, a
life-affirmer, a lover of ancient and modern cultures, assimilating and embody-
ing the passion and paradox of existence, “[…] the sensibility, the idolatry of na-
ture, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary […]” (TI Skir-
mishes 49). Nietzsche writes that Goethe is “not a German event, but a
European one … What he wanted was totality […] he disciplined himself to
wholeness, he created himself […] Such a spirit who has become free stands
amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism” (TI Skirmishes 49). Pessoa
was seeking a kind of totality too in a transformed sense for a new world, with
Orpheu, and thinking specifically at times of German culture as the one to sur-
pass, writing, probably in 1914: “Wagner wanted music + painting + poetry.

 I refer to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Pessoa’s The Book
of Disquiet (Pessoa: 2015).
368 Bartholomew Ryan

We want music x painting x poetry” (Pessoa 1993, p. 41). And Ulysses and Finne-
gans Wake are perhaps the two most comprehensive works of modern fiction – in
that they aspire to contain everything. Finnegans Wake may be one of the most
anti-fascist/anti-totalitarian books ever conceived in its attempt to contain all
fragments and ruins (chaos) within a totality (a published book).
Nietzsche sought a more liberated voice by turning away from the German
tradition and Wagner, and incorporating the influences of Emerson, Stendhal
and Dostoevsky, all of whom encouraged him to “feel cosmically” (KSA 9,
11[7]). Joyce publicly celebrated ‘good Europeans’ such as Flaubert, Ibsen, Vico
and J. P. Jacobsen, and Pessoa was inspired more by the English and American
tradition of Shakespeare, Milton and Pater and Whitman than the Portuguese
tradition. To become “depersonalized” and “nonregional” – as Pessoa declares
in English (Pessoa 1966, p. 143) – is to not write from a nationalist tradition
but rather “for Europe, for all civilization” (Pessoa 1966, p. 119). Joyce and Pes-
soa, like Nietzsche, are destined to be posthumous; their arrival is still to come
and their gaze is to the future. Pessoa declares “[…] we are nothing as yet, but
even what we are now doing will one day be universally known and recognised
[…]” (Pessoa 1966, p. 117). In his one but significant critical remark on Ulysses,
Pessoa refers to it as a “literatura de antemanhã” (Pessoa 2006b, p. 890) – liter-
ally a “literature of just before the dawn,” as a messianic text that lies ahead of
us.
Pessoa’s Orpheu is also cosmopolitan in its distribution and geographical
connections, despite having the disadvantage of not being written in English,
French or German. However, contributors from Orpheu spanned four continents,
and the magazine represents the brief triumph of a cosmopolitan project amidst
the chaos of World War I, with its greatest poet – the non-existent Álvaro de
Campos – at the center, as the idle naval engineer and eternally restless post-
Christian striving to be a free spirit and breathe new life into a tired, resigned
culture. Its benefactor was based in Mozambique; its publishers were situated
both in Lisbon (director Luiz de Montalvôr) and Rio de Janeiro (director Ronald
de Carvalho) – thus Orpheu is promoted as a “projecto luso-brasileiro”; one of its
poets (Armando Cortez Rodrigues) was in the Azores, Camilo Pessanha – who
would have contributed poems to the third installment – lived in Macau (now
in modern day China), and Sá-Carneiro lived in Paris – an epicenter of literary
modernism.
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote that “As an artist one has no home in Europe
except in Paris” (EH Clever 5), and it was there where the painters who contrib-
uted to the Orpheu project – Santa Rita Pintor and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso –
learned their craft. It is where both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were published
 The Children of Nietzsche 369

and where Joyce lived for most of his working life. Contra nationalism and show-
ing the inclusiveness of the good European, Nietzsche had written previously:

Even now there exists in France an understanding in advance and welcome for those rarer
and rarely contented men who are too comprehensive to find their satisfaction in any kind
of patriotism and know how to love the south in the north and the north in the south – for
the born Midlanders [Mittelländler], the ‘good Europeans.’ (BGE 254)

2.2 The Polyglot Writer and Nomadic Thinking

Their multiple localities of the imaginary and the real and their cosmopolitanism
shines through in their delight in other languages as well being absolute masters
of their own. Pessoa grew up speaking French in the family home in South Afri-
ca, received an English language education and wanted to be an English lan-
guage poet, writing his first hundred poems in English; Nietzsche was a profes-
sor of philology who wished Thus Spoke Zarathustra had been written in French
and not in German: “I wish I had written it in French so that it might not appear
to be a confirmation of the aspirations of the German Reich” (KSA 12, 9[188]).
Joyce was a polyglot who spoke Italian in his home, French and German became
second mother tongues to him, he learned and read Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gael-
ic and Russian, had reasonable Danish and Norwegian, and incorporated so
many languages in Finnegans Wake that the book is almost impossible to trans-
late. Its alchemic fusion of multiple languages and frequent puns make it diffi-
cult to recognize as English or to classify as literature. Umberto Eco saw Finne-
gans Wake signaling “the birth of a new type of human discourse” (Eco 1989,
p. 86). Joyce always felt he was serving the colonial master by writing in English
so, as mythologist Joseph Campbell (one of the first to decipher the book) ex-
plains, “as a cosmopolitan genius he learned to bend to his craft purposes the
recorded tongues of the world” (Campbell 2005, p. 356).
Thus, from their multilingual passions and appropriations, they also em-
brace nomadic lifestyles, while at the same time always being associated to
the locations whence they came, embracing the possibility of a multiplicity of
home. Nietzsche’s statement from The Gay Science is a guide to the cosmopolitan
of the twentieth century onwards:

We who are homeless are too manifest and mixed racially and in our descent, being ‘mod-
ern men’, and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-
admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way
of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the ‘historical sense’.
(GS 377)
370 Bartholomew Ryan

The goal for Nietzsche is to be “at home in many countries of the spirit, at least
as guests” (BGE 44). He is also, like Joyce and Pessoa later, advocating Novalis’
vision of philosophy: “philosophy is really homesickness [Heimweh], an urge to
be at home everywhere” (Novalis 1997, p. 135). Campos declares: “I don’t belong
anywhere. My country [Pátria] / Is wherever I’m not” (Pessoa 2006a, p. 149).
Nietzsche and the two poets constantly use the motif of the sea, river and port
due to this nomadic vision. The symbol of water (in the rivers and the ocean) sig-
nifies being adrift and continually in flux, dissolving borders, changing, and
morphing, recycling and renewing, just as language does and as do their
texts. From Nietzsche’s impassioned descriptions of Genoa (GS 291), a city not
unlike maritime Lisbon, to the most ambitious poem from Pessoa’s cosmopolitan
heteronym – “Ode Marítima,” there the ecstatic salutation is to the seafaring life.
Campos portrays the life of the citizen of the sea as a kind of Portuguese Bildung:
“The diversified, floating life ends up educating us in humanity” (Pessoa 2006a,
p. 194). The opening pages of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are looking out
to the sea; and in the closing pages of both books, the feminine voice refers to
water, river and the sea, and in the case of Finnegans Wake, the final voice is
the river returning to the sea for the cycle to begin again.
As nomadic writers, going beyond the boundaries of their tribe, Joyce and
Pessoa and sometimes Nietzsche sign off their writings from various and symbol-
ic locations conveying new cosmopolitan places (such as, for example, Trieste,
London, Paris, the Suez Canal, Nice and Genoa) and declaring their status as no-
madic guests. Even though Pessoa never set foot in any other country except Por-
tugal and South Africa, his imagination and heteronyms travel far and wide. At
the forefront of this nomadic thought and eruptions of thought and expression is
Nietzsche who – in his book from 1886 Beyond Good and Evil – described the
philosopher as:

a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary
things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if they came from without [from the outside],
as if from above and below, as by his kind of events and thunderclaps; who is himself per-
haps a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a fateful man around whom snarling, quarrel-
ing, discord and uncanniness is always going on. A philosopher: alas, a creature who often
runs away from himself, is often afraid of himself – but which is too inquisitive not to keep
‘coming to itself’ again. (BGE 292)

This could well fit a description of Joyce in the midst of writing Ulysses or Fin-
negans Wake. Joyce quotes Mallarmé through the voice of his very thinly dis-
guised younger self Dedalus – “il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même [he
strolls about, reading in the book of himself]” (Joyce 2008, p. 179). This can
be a mantra for many modern philosophers and artists who, unlike the ancients
 The Children of Nietzsche 371

who invoked the Muses, are now only left with invoking themselves – which is
the elusive self as subject, or as Campos writes: “The ancients invoked the
Muses. / We invoke ourselves” (Pessoa 1998, p. 208).
At the very beginning of Ulysses, the vain character Buck Mulligan declares
to Dedalus in the tower that they are Hyperboreans (Joyce 2008, p. 5) as
Nietzsche does in Human, All Too Human (WS 265) and later at the beginning
of The Antichrist: “Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very
well how far off we live” (A 1). The Hyperborean is another indication of the
Übermensch but which both Dedalus and Joyce will instead try to move away
from this isolated, ice-region and rather embrace the human all-too-human,
moving towards the worldly Leopold Bloom and dirty mixed up, bodily interac-
tive world, exemplified in all its bacchanalian unpredictability of life through the
alchemy of words in Finnegans Wake. By the time of Finnegans Wake, Zarathus-
tra has become a “Zerothruster” (Joyce 1992a, p. 281) and a “hypothecated Bet-
tlermensch” (Joyce 1992a, p. 161) – the latter alluding to a beggar (from the Ger-
man Bettler) who is hypothecated – which is to be mortgaged or pledged without
security. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce has responded radically to Nietzsche in his
call for joyful disruption, revaluation of values, giving a critique and ‘explosi-
tion’ (exposition and explosion [Joyce 1992a, p. 419]) of subjectivity and con-
sciousness, and creating multiple perspectives.

3 The Plural and Cosmopolitan Self

In an entry from 1885 in his notebooks, Nietzsche jots down various aspects of
the ‘good European,’ of which the ‘supra-European’ and ‘legislator of the future’
are included, such as being atheists and immoralists, encouraging interbreeding
and irony, supporting the maturing of democratic institutions, and being wary of
settling down. (KSA 11, 35[9]) Nietzsche was certainly inspired by Jacob Bur-
khardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) whose description of
cosmopolitanism struck a chord:

The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in itself a high stage of
individualism. Dante, as we have already said, finds a new home in the language and cul-
ture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words ‘My country is the whole world.’ […]
The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence.
‘Only he who has learned everything,’ said Ghiberti, ‘is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his
fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly de-
spise the changes of fortune.’ In the same strain an exiled humanist writes: ‘Wherever a
learned man fixes his seat, there is home.’ (Burckhardt [1860] 1990, p. 99)
372 Bartholomew Ryan

Pessoa’s fascinating passage on a vision of cosmopolitanism from the unfinished

essay in English (published posthumously) that I mentioned in the previous sec-
tion, conjures a messianic imagining of the cosmopolitan Portuguese artist (i. e.
himself). I apply this to the project of the symbolic “children of Nietzsche,” and
which invites us to think of Nietzsche’s “good European” and “Supra-European”
as radical cosmopolitans and plural subjects incorporating my previous points
of the advent of nihilism, supra-nationalism, dis-location and nomadic thought:

The Portuguese Sensationists are original and interesting because, being strictly Portu-
guese, they are cosmopolitan and universal. […] No people depersonalises so magnificently.
That weakness is its great strength. That temperamental nonregionalism is its unused
might. That indefiniteness of soul is what makes them definite […] They are born civilised,
because they are born acceptors of all […] they have a positive love of novelty and change.
They have no stable elements […]. (Pessoa 1966, p. 143)

The depersonalization and ‘indefiniteness of soul’ allows the artist, sensationist

and philosopher to put on one mask after another, to be experimenters and feel
comfortable confronting chaos as cosmopolitans.
To don a mask is to be plural. Nietzsche knew this, and in his elusive refer-
ence to the supra-European he also refers crucially to the art of wearing masks
and having distance from one’s emotions and/or affects in the same sentence:
“All strength applied to development of strength of the will, an art that permits
us to wear masks, an art of understanding beyond the affects (also to think in
a ‘supra-European’ way, at times)” (KSA 11, 35[9]). Through Nietzsche’s “soul
as subject-multiplicity” (BGE 12), Pessoa’s “be plural like the universe” (Pessoa
2001, p. 237) and Joyce’s depiction of existence and multiverse containing
order and disorder – or ‘thisorder’ (Joyce 1992a, p. 540), of chaos and cosmos
forming the word ‘chaosmos’ (Joyce 1992a, p. 118), progression or the process
is only in the eternally recycling of itself and everything within it, moving
“from a Eurocentric to a global context” (Kuberski 1994, p. 5). Kiberd writes
that: “He [Joyce] knew from personal experience that to be modern is to experi-
ence perpetual disintegration and renewal, and yet somehow to make a home in
that disorder” (Kiberd 1996, p. 329).
For both Joyce and Pessoa, rather than a death of the subject, there is a plu-
rality of the subject. And to confront the void within the self is the great task ad-
dressed in Nietzsche philosophy and afterwards throughout Pessoa’s heteronym-
ic poetry and Joyce’s last two books (Kiberd 1996, p. 354), where the world as
macro and microcosm is founded upon the void, upon incertitude – or as
Joyce puts it, as “ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void”
(Joyce 2008, p. 650). As Nietzsche says in his Nachlass: “In short, we gain a val-
uation of not-knowing, of seeing things on a broad scale, of simplification and
 The Children of Nietzsche 373

falsification, of perspectivity” (KSA 11, 40[21]). Eco comments on Joyce’s two last
books by saying that if Ulysses “represents the most arduous attempt to give
physiogamy to chaos, […] Finnegans Wake defines itself as Chaosmos and Micro-
chasm and constitutes the most terrifying document of formal instability and se-
mantic ambiguity that we possess” (Eco 1989, p. 61).
In constructing Ulysses, Joyce indicates in a letter his intention (and the chal-
lenge) of creating a work of plurality, multiplicity, and from a variety of points of
view: “The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different
points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by
my fellow tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough
to upset anyone’s mental balance” (Ellmann 1982, p. 512). And finally, we read
Nietzsche in one of his final pieces of writing revealing his intentions of multiple
perspectives and, anticipating Finnegans Wake, to incorporate every name in his-
tory: “What is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom I am every
name in history” (Nietzsche 1976, p. 686). It is interesting for a moment to note
when connecting Joyce’s “chaosmos of Alle” and Pessoa’s “be plural like the
universe” to radical cosmopolitanism how the modern day Western shaman Ter-
ence McKenna reads Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as both psychedelic and apocalyp-
tic (McKenna 1995).
The psychedelic and apocalyptic are already evident in the massive Circe ep-
isode of Ulysses, which functions as “the book’s unconscious” (Kiberd 2009,
p. 229). Finnegans Wake is psychedelic in that there are no stable points of
view, no fixed identities, one is ever sure who is speaking, all boundaries are dis-
solved, and time is no longer linear. It is also apocalyptic/eschatological, in that
it is structured as Fall, Wake and Resurrection – in four books: Past (Fathers),
Present (Sons), Imagined Future (People), and Eternal Recurrence (Ricorso).
So, like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and inspired at least by the structure of
Vico’s New Science, Finnegans Wake has four parts, or three books and a ricorso.
Every age is often treated as apocalyptic, because our lives accelerate towards
death and we are always running out of time (hence, the Gracehoper’s final
words and critique to the Ondt: “why can’t you beat time?” (Joyce 1992a,
p. 419) Thus, every great poet must be in his or her own way fundamentally apoc-
alyptic, not to make us panic but rather to wake us up to our temporal, multi-
faceted existence of infinite differences and antinomies.
As with Nietzsche, Joyce and Pessoa see aesthetic and spiritual pursuits as
synonymous. Nietzsche’s writings are an overcoming of oneself or the idea of
self, with each book displaying, celebrating and discarding a variety of selves
– hence we may have various Nietzsches just as we have various poets in Pessoa.
Beginning with reference to probably Nietzsche’s most provocative texts – The
Antichrist and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Joyce’s Ulysses demands us to read the
374 Bartholomew Ryan

book anew and differently each time, where words are not to be trusted and can
be transformed or petrified, to illuminate the unreliability of the past, give subtle
guidance to the future, and alert the reader to the present, and make a celebra-
tion of complexity of the human journey despite and amidst man’s greatest ef-
forts to this day to simplify and reduce human existence and oftentimes enslave
it.
Absorbing and transforming Nietzsche and in expressing the chaosmos of
plurality, Joyce and Pessoa are lovers of contradiction in their pursuit in opening
up multiple perspectives. As Eco writes of Finnegans Wake: “The only faith that
the aesthetics and metaphysics of the Chaosmos leaves is the faith in Contradic-
tion” (Eco 1989, p. 87). Often in Finnegans Wake you will find a word that is an
antinomy that has the opposite meaning within the same word. In the opening
episode of Ulysses, an inner voice quotes Walt Whitman’s lines “Do I contradict
myself? Very well then I contradict myself” (Joyce 2008, p. 17) – which is one of
the mantras for Pessoa and his super-ego Álvaro de Campos.
Halfway through Ulysses, Dedalus goes about unraveling a marvelous and
absurd argument on patrimony in Shakespeare and Hamlet only to discredit it
all at the end. It is also important to point out that the sentence in parenthesis
that follows these lines from Whitman’s poem inserted in the opening episode of
Ulysses and which directly inspired Pessoa’s entire poetic enterprise are stated as
such: “I am large, I contain multitudes” (Whitman 2004, p. 123). In Ecce Homo,
Nietzsche states that the final capacity for the task of the revaluation of values is
the “tremendous multiplicity which is none the less the opposite of chaos” (EH
Clever 9). This is one of the capacities required for his thought (“the precondi-
tion, the protracted secret labour and artistic working of my instinct” [EH Clever
9]). And in “Ultimatum,” Campos states clearly his artist of the chaosmos of plu-
rality and multiplicity:

The greatest artist will be the one who least defines himself, and who writes in the most
genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies. No artist should have just one per-
sonality. He should have many, each one being formed by joining together similar states of
mind, thereby shattering the crude fiction that the artist is one and indivisible. (Pessoa
2001, p. 84)

The self is being obliterated and multiplied – this is its paradoxical definition in
the chaosmos, at times going far beyond the confines of any “I.” The chaosmos is
Campos’ ocean, which is constantly and ruthlessly moving, transforming, ex-
panding and shrinking, and recycling (much like the structure and content of
Finnegans Wake and how we can read Nietzsche afresh after Joyce and Pessoa).
This becomes clearer when we read the whole of a passage from a 1926 poem by
Campos – Nietzsche’s avatar, emerging to the world (as a fiction) in 1890 (the
 The Children of Nietzsche 375

year after the mental collapse of Nietzsche) to combine the artistic with the sci-
entific in the chaosmos, and proclaim the world a “dynamic void”:

Do you, like Hamlet, dread the unknown? […]

Scatter yourself, O physicochemical system
Of nocturnally conscious cells,
Over the nocturnal consciousness of the unconsciousness of bodies,
Over the huge blanket of appearances that blankets nothing,
Over the grass and weeds of proliferating beings,
Over the atomic fog of things,
Over the whirling walls
Of the dynamic void that is the world … (Pessoa 2006a, p. 223)

Perhaps then, finally, Campos speaks both for Nietzsche and Pessoa towards the
end of “Ultimatum” when he explicitly states the task of the philosopher creating
multiplicities and contradictions:

The philosopher will become the interpreter of crisscrossing subjectivities, with the greatest
philosopher being the one who can contain the greatest number of other people’s personal
philosophies. Since everything is subjective, every man’s opinion is true for him, and so the
greatest truth will be the inner-synthesis-summation of the greatest number of these true
opinions that contradict one another. (Pessoa 2001, p. 83)

Nietzsche had already written in his notebooks: “The task: to see things as they
are! The means: to be able to see with a hundred eyes, from many persons” (KSA
9, 11[65]). In attempting to turn the tedium of repetition into transformation and
something new, Nietzsche tries to express the “Yes” in the amor fati and eternal
recurrence, which Joyce follows and succeeds via creating the two works of the
eternal recurrence with an emphatic Yes. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce describes the
very process of the book as “one continuous present tense integument slowly un-
folded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history […]” (Joyce 1992a,
p. 186), and throughout the work refers to it as “prayers in layers all the thump-
ing time” (Joyce 1992, p. 454), a “book of breathings” (Joyce 1992, p. 415), and
“some kingly work in progress” (Joyce 1992, p. 625).
The triumph for Pessoa is that he never ceases embracing and following
Nietzsche’s “multiple ambiguity [Vieldeutigkeit]” (KSA 12, 2[128]) – as chame-
leon, as the poet as deceiver (“The poet is a faker [fingidor]” (Pessoa 2006a,
p. 314) and being polyphonic: “Intelligence spreads and scatters us, and it’s
through this scattering that we survive. Every age leaves to future ages only
what it wasn’t […] Where we are is who we are [Estar é ser]. To pretend is to
know ourselves” (Pessoa 2001, p. 200). And as Álvaro de Campos writes again
in his colossus Dionysian Rauschlike operatic poem (“Maritime Ode”):
376 Bartholomew Ryan

Transient citizens of the same uncertain country,

Totally and perfectly cosmopolitan, for you never stay long in one place,
And you contain every sort of face, costume and race!” (Pessoa 2006a, p. 194)

4 Conclusion
In the wake of Nietzsche’s incisive critique of the collapse of Judeo-Christian val-
ues, artists such as Pessoa and Joyce echo his expression of the possibility of a
cosmopolitan humankind. As ‘children of Nietzsche,’ Joyce and Pessoa heroical-
ly work through the Zeitgeist of the age of European nihilism, nationalism, col-
onialism and disintegration by pioneering philosophical works of art that navi-
gate the early twentieth century’s chaos. Through Joyce’s alchemical novels,
revolutionary new directions were forged in literature, just as Pessoa’s hetero-
nymity generated a rich tapestry in the plurality of the subject. As Campos
scrawled on a scrap of paper, the “cosmopolitan life thrown to the four
winds” (Pessoa 2014, p. 127) exemplifies the danger that is always present in an-
swering Nietzsche’s call of the good- and supra- European in restlessly thinking
and creating cosmically while remaining affirmative to the transformative power
of art in our mercurial lives.

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