“A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you cannot expect an angel to look out.”
Bearing the humbling injunction from Arthur Schopenhauer above in mind, I recently attempted once again a sympathetic, open-minded reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and like my attempts to read Nietzsche sympathetically in the past, I failed once again. In some circles (but not in mine; I don’t have a circle), Nietzsche is the contemporary philosopher par excellence, esteemed for his style, his rhetoric, his polemic power; for me, ass though I may be, I find little sympathy for any of the three. There may be many reasons for this. No English translation of any of Nietzsche’s work sounds like anything but an English translation from a foreign language; if this were untrue of any of the translations I’ve come across (and I’ve tried three different translations of BT), I might blame the translator, but there may be something in Nietzsche’s thought itself which renders it so unaccommodating to my ears. The fetishization of the Dionysiac spirit, and of pre-Platonic Greece itself, is profoundly unconvincing to me (as is Bataille’s obsession with ritual and rite); again, this may be because by nature I am more sympathetic to the Apollonian spirit, but I am not at all sure that this is true. All that heightened rhetoric, all those exclamation points! Reading Nietzsche I can’t help but feel subjected to a loud never-ending harangue from a soapbox, punctuated with a loud, forced laughter and unhelpful references to abstractions like an Übermensch or an eternal recurrence (the concept of the latter, especially, is unpleasant). I have my suspicions as to why Nietzsche is one of the most popular and certainly most influential philosophers of the modern age, but perhaps these are best saved for another time.
I do not require that a philosopher be systematic. Nietzsche certainly is not. Neither, despite all of the secondary literature defining his system, is Schopenhauer, and he admits as much in the very first preface to the very first edition of The World as Will and Representation. But reading Schopenhauer I feel rather differently, as if in a quiet conversation in a dimly-lit study equipped with all the bourgeois pleasures of the mind and body — a roaring fireplace, a carafe of brandy, quiet talk, ironic laughter, as outside a snowstorm rages in the night. Schopenhauer’s manner convinces me as much as his insight; I am happier to admit his inconsistencies, as he himself admits he has them, especially when it comes to women and sex; as Schopenhauer said of Kant, great minds must be allowed to make occasional mistakes with impunity. For me it does not ameliorate the force of his thought or his writing.
I will be fifty in two months’ time, and perhaps I value these bourgeois pleasures more than I ever have: it is night outside, after all, and there is a fierce blizzard blowing. And I am perhaps less interested in popularity or community than ever before. I doubt that any sacrifices I might have to make to be popular or clubbable, whether it’s within a small circle or a large public arena, would justify the returns, quite small as I can imagine them in the larger scheme of things. I can see no justifiable or significant recompense to the exertion to be popular, or at least more widely read. I do not believe, like Nietzsche does (sometimes; sometimes he doesn’t; it depends on which of his aphorisms you quote, and that’s a game I’m not interested in playing, for I don’t have the time), that a culture or a civilization might somehow be recreated that reflects the characteristics of a society that would value tragedy, through revalorizing the Dionysian spirit or what-have-you, and I don’t have the desire for propagandizing those values within my portfolio as a writer.
When it comes to whatever I may write about drama or theatre, especially as it exists now in the country of my birth, I find myself to be more disconnected than ever before, no matter the blowsy and illusory “connections” that things like the blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook pretend to provide. I suppose I have a reluctance to be absorbed into the corporatized digital world that these represent. The mad desperate craze for connection, for accessibility, for popularity, for community, I find profoundly foreign and hostile to my nature as a writer and as a person, especially in an art form like theatre. And yet it is this nature which must be the source for my writings about and for the theatre and drama. This places me outside, which is where I suppose I prefer to be. “A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time,” Kenneth Tynan wrote in the foreword to his 1967 book Tynan Right and Left. “A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.” In both Word Made Flesh and in my writings about erotic tragedy, I have written about what is not happening. I make no pretense that I am, QED, a great critic. But Tynan suggests there is some value to it, and I am content to rest with that.
And besides — it is unfair to write about the dramatists and theatremakers in America without the opportunities to see and become more deeply acquainted with their work than is possible for me now. In acknowledging this, I trust that my readers will understand that from now on Superfluities Redux will be less about theatre and drama and more about other things (theatre and drama will inevitably be engaged on occasion as well, though, as I conceive it, rarely). I write for no community, but for you, if you would like to read it; no harm done at all if you would not and go elsewhere; I will be happy to sit alone with you in that quiet bourgeois den and speak quietly about those obscure, quiet things that matter to me and just may matter to you as well. We may even talk a little about that storm outside, for it is certainly spectacular. Together we can talk away the hours, sharing our resignation, until the blizzard finally slows and ceases and the endless night is peaceful once more.
Liking Nietzsche isn’t compulsory, but I’m kind of surprised that you don’t get much from him. Admittedy, he was himself deeply critical of the Birth of Tragedy, and it is a kind of crazy fantasy of Classical Greece, as you say, although that doesn’t bother me so much. The essential book, to my mind, is The Gay Science: profound and often beautiful. And not so much bombast.
Your post prompted me to go back to Allan Bloom’s lectures on Nietzsche. I recall that he pointed out to us students Nietzche’s appropriation by modern Marxist thinkers, that there were students at the time falling for Marcuse, the Red Army Faction in Germany, etc, and the idea that creativity can only come from chaos, a very dangerous thought in university in the early 80s when I heard it, and at any time. The pervasiveness for example of still at present admiring dramatic charisma and celebrity in our leaders as opposed to calm reason is, as ever, chilling, and Bloom told us this was the enormous influence of Nietzche on modernity. So, he said to pay attention and I did because Nietzche was in some senses as Right wing as it gets, not Left at all, but things can get turned around, and really any ‘side’ can get very pumped up feeling with this thinker, with reason out the window. Nietzche was a good observer of psychological states though, so I’ve enjoyed taking a moment to think about him so much later because of your blog — tx!
Thank you — and go where you need to, intellectually.
Alison,
Sigh. When I was in high school, everybody I knew was reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, so I decided to have a crack at it. I started with The Hobbit and got about ten pages in before I threw it up as a lost cause. A little later, somebody told me that I’d started with the wrong book — that actually I should have begun with Book One of the trilogy proper, The Fellowship of the Ring. Well, I started that one too, and I got almost fifteen pages in before I concluded, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”
In college, I was discussing this with a friend who was also a Tolkien aficianado. After I expressed my dislike of Fellowship and the trilogy generally, she said, “You started with the wrong book, George! You really should have begun with The Hobbit!”
I don’t really have this problem with many writers. My first Nabokov, for example, was Pale Fire, I think, and I was taken enough with it to read Lolita, Ada, Despair, and many of the early (Russian) novels, never experiencing the same displeasure. Some were better than others, but all were worth my time. I think, at this point, I may have to leave the Teutonic shoe-banger aside at last. For what it’s worth, it’s precisely the Nietzschean qualities of The Birth of Tragedy — the Grecophilia, the bombast, the galumphing Dionysianism, all those aspects of it of which he was not critical in the “Attempt at a Self Criticism” that prefaced later editions of the book — and not its Schopenhauerian origins that make the book, for me, unpalatable.
Katherine,
Marcuse’s thinking on the subject of art, and his problematic relationship to things like the Red Army Faction, evolved somewhat through the years. His final book, The Aesthetic Dimension, is rather less susceptible to being co-opted by the radical left, and is worth a look.
Well, as I said, he’s not compulsory. I was surprised because the suppleness and fire of his intellect – and it’s a considerable intellect – when he’s at his best is something I’ve found profoundly stimulating: his thinking about language, say, or on the profundity of surfaces. The Gay Science is the book that speaks about joy in the face of the abyss, and perhaps is least biddable to caricature, which happened to a lot of his writing (most notably with the Nazis – I think it’s that book that has an unnerving and contemptuous description of what ha hated about Germany, unnerving because it precisely describes the rise of Fascism). Should any writer be blamed for the misunderstandings that follow in their wake? He’s problematic, sure, in many ways, you can’t read him without arguing with him, but I also think he can be wickedly funny. Certainly one of the few philosophers I can read with pleasure.
Katherine, it’s frankly bizarre to think of him as a left wing thinker. And with respect, art emerges from the tension between chaos and order. If only one is present, there is no art worth speaking of. Also, I’d say the radical right is a significantly more destructive and pernicious influence in the world at the moment, and more to blame for celebrity culture (think Murdoch) than anything Nietzsche wrote.
No author is compulsory — though I must wonder for whom and for what any author might be said to be compulsory anyway. I argue with Schopenhauer too, but when arguing with him I do not feel that I am arguing with a madman. I’ve done enough arguing with the mad of various stripes to know when argument is pointless. Their logic is indisputable; it’s the a priori assumptions which are mad.
You are certainly right in your assumption that the translation (though it does confuse it more) does not actually worsen the chaos that is The Birth of Tragedy. The German is no better, in fact I would claim it to be even less enjoyable.