Become What You Are: Joyce, Nietzsche, and the Terror of Self-Creation

John Banville has been reading Dubliners since he was twelve years old. His older sister handed him the book, and it was, he says in his Rebind commentary, “an enormous revelation.” Here was a book about actual life: not detective stories, not English public schoolboys getting up to japes. This was the world as he knew it. He immediately began writing “utterly dreadful imitations” of Joyce’s stories. He has never really stopped thinking about them.

What Banville brings to Dubliners that most readers don’t is a specific historical vantage point: he stayed. Joyce left Dublin in 1904 and never came back to live there. Banville has lived there his entire life, which means he has spent decades watching the city Joyce made famous by fleeing it, watching its people circle the same patterns Joyce diagnosed in 1914, wondering whether anything has really changed. And he has done all of this while carrying, in his back pocket, a philosophy that promised it could.

In the 1960s, Banville was in his twenties, newly married, and like many of his generation had been working through Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who argued that human beings could and must create themselves from scratch rather than simply accept the lives they were born into. He was convinced the answer was simple. “We thought it was simple,” he says. “You simply said to people: look, you don’t have to be bound by the rules of the Church or the hidebound rules of society. You can be free. You can become, as Nietzsche recommends, what you are. And we thought, well, everybody would then be happy.”

What he didn’t realize, what Joyce had understood fifty years earlier, was that becoming what you are is the most terrifying thing a person can be asked to do. Not because it is difficult, but because most people do not want to do it. The last thing the vast majority of people want, Banville concludes, is freedom. Freedom means there is nobody telling you what to do, nobody helping you, no solid ground on which to set your foot. You are constantly in midair.

Dubliners and Thus Spoke Zarathustra are two answers to that problem. Nietzsche calls you upward. Joyce watches you stay where you are. Read together, through Banville and through Clancy Martin, whose Rebind commentary on Zarathustra runs through the whole of Nietzsche’s most demanding text, they make an argument neither book makes alone.