Prologue: Groundhog Day
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
‘What if there is no tomorrow?’ asks jaded weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) in Harold Ramis's 1993 film Groundhog Day. ‘There wasn't one today,’ adds Phil – at which point, hardly surprisingly, the person on the other end of the telephone line hangs up. If such a ‘philosophical’ question seems flippant in a Hollywood comedy, in another context – a note written by Nietzsche in 1882 (by coincidence also the year of Joyce's birth) – we are bound to take it more seriously. Under the ominous heading Das grösste Schwergewicht, ‘the heaviest burden’, Nietzsche demands:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
The revelation of eternal recurrence, we should note in passing, is presented by Nietzsche as a hallucination: the news – that there will be no more news, and worse still, that there never has been any – is brought by a demon, a Mephistopheles come to haunt poor Faustus.
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- James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004