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Sunday, January 29, 2006
Incipit Parodia
What do you think of Thus Spoke Zarathustra?
I’ve never been sure. You get sentences like this (in the Hollingdale):
O my soul, I gave you new names and many-coloured toys, I called you ‘destiny’ and ‘encompassment of encompassments’ and ‘time’s umbilical cord’ and ‘azure bell’.
Too, too Hunting of the Snark.
His intimate friends called him "Candle-ends,"/And his enemies "Toasted-cheese."
Stuff like this:
I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle - I call you, my most abysmal thought!
Ah! you are coming - I hear you! My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth into the light!
Ah! Come here! Give me your hand - ha! don’t! Ha, ha! - Disgust, disgust, disgust - woe is me!
It was a boojums.
I’ve always loved Nietzsche for the sharp psychological insight; the elegant, Montaignean reversals of course; the self-delighted wit, with all these philosophers as butts of the joke. Zarathustra throws me because, well, I think Montaigne would never have written this.
Zarathustra said this to his heart as the sun stood at noon: then he looked inquiringly into the sky - for he heard above him the sharp cry of a bird. And behold! An eagle was sweeping through the air in wide circles, and from it was hanging a serpent not like a prey but like a friend: for it was coiled around the eagle’s neck.
‘It is my animals!’ said Zarathustra and rejoiced in his heart. ‘The proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun - they have come scouting.’
Too, too Beastmaster.
Who should illustrate Zarathustra. Boris Vallejo? Maybe Tom Wham? Do it as a boardgame, like Emperor’s Treasure? I have an idea how it might go, which was almost stolen in a comment thread at Hitherby Dragons. (Good story. Start reading from the beginning.)
Anyway, it’s very awkward to be a Nietzschean and have nothing much to say about Zarathustra, in light of this sort of thing. And this:
Among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself. With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging centuries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights—the whole fact of man lies beneath it at a tremendous distance—, it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness.
I’ve been trying, working on it, teaching my Nietzsche honours seminar twice in the last year. I’ve been puzzling over that allegedly central doctrine of Eternal Return. I think I finally understand Zarathustra. I get it about the ugliest man, the pope, the voluntary beggar and the rest of that cast of oddballs who show at the end. I also think I get it about this bit from The Gay Science, which more or less heralds Zarathustra - his author anyway:
Who knows what victim he is looking for, what monster of material for parody will soon attract him? "Incipit tragoedia" we read at the end of this awesomely aweless book. Beware! Something downright wicked and malicious is announced here: incipit parodia, no doubt.
It’s a great relief to have arrived at the point where I feel Zarathustra was intended as parody. I can explain the motivation and the sense of it in terms of eternal return. Still, finally feeling I understand the book well enough to give a lecture is not quite the same as being fully appreciative of its lumbering oddity.
I mean: is it a novel? What do you think? If you admire Nietzsche, do you enjoy Zarathustra?
In other genre-bending news, Amazon is having a 4 for 3 sale
Comments
As I understand, The Eternal Return, The Superman, and the Will to Power were declared to be N’s central ideas either by his sister or by Heidegger. If I thought they were, I’d have no interest in N.
Ecce Homo is even loonier than N’s sister, so scratch that evidence.
Those who like that kind of thing have a great admiration for Z, but it seems pretty dispensable to me. To me, The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil are the great ones, with everything else ancillary.
I’ve admired N. for decades, but recently I’ve been crusading against the German Seriousness, and even though he tried, N. didn’t escape it. I’ve also suggested that if he’d been willing to marry down, he’d have been less tightly-wound and might have written equally good books which were more humane and less overstressed.
It’s interesting that you reference the Hitherby Dragons ongoing story. (Their comments have been hacked, by the way. And Scott can’t currently post on Acephalous. Basically the Internet is broken.) Of current literary productions, I sometimes think that Hitherby Dragons is the one most likely to still be read 500 years from now, complete with a multitude of scholarly footnotes explaining exactly what the Care Bears were and so on, though I will of course disavow this as a joke the moment that someone gets annoying about it. It’s got talent, status as a forerunner of a new form/genre representative of the historical moment, an authorial mythology, the ability to be read at a number of levels. In a sense it’s the inverse of your interpretation of Nietzsche’s parody masquerading as tragedy; tragedy masquerading as parody. (See its Unclean Legacy recent series for an instance of someone wrestling with the Void, literally.)
And BTW, I encourage anyone interested to comment on the Adam Roberts book event over at Acephalous. We’re also talking about Banks and Mieville, if you’ve read no Roberts.
[Wakes up spluttering and almost starts out of his easy chair] What? What?
So let’s play the the game of re-tooling John’s post and replacing Thus Spoke Zarathustra with The Bible. Has anyone ever been able to read this latter right the way through like a novel? Has anybody ever been struck by the absurdity of many of its passages (in translation). The best parodies stick closely to the source text, after all.
Yes, come join the Robertsonian (sit down, medievalists, sit down) festivities! I can’t post, but you can comment. (I thought about posting within a comment, but that would be ridiculous. Although I have a brilliant story about Etienne Balibar peering into a pimped out Chevy Astro Van to share when I can post again. Oh, and I’ll be writing something later this afternoon on Adam and the genocidal responsibility.)
Twilight of the Idols is a tight little book and maybe his best. Otherwise John E is correct about the best two. However, is it coincidental that they are most conventionally written, most restrained, least Nietzschean of the mature works?
Hey, if you don’t like the hyperbole and stridency, are turned off by the bad poetry, you don’t get Nietzsche. That’s ok, Nietzsche wasn’t writing about ideas and propositions but about feelings and affects. His intention was not to stimulate a paper by a 40 yr old professor but to grab a 20 yr old student by the balls and make him an artist. “I am the Ubermensch!” is the proper response to Nietzsche. I cried for hours at the end of Zarathustra. No lie.
We need another post about that damn Danish dude writing all that fictionalized ironic bullshit. I can never decide if I should be either or should be or.
I am also a little surprised at Emerson, who is always decrying the sterility of analytic philosophy. What, John, do you think a politically involved, useful, motivating philosophy is gonna look like? It will look like the Manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, Zarathustra or Coulter or Malkin or Moore.
There is a fastidiousness about polemic on the left and in the left blogosphere that keeps us from relevance.
Hell yes, I enjoy Zarathustra
I also don’t understand how other people read. When I read Heinlein I become a lunar libertarian throwing rocks at Earth. When I read the Manifesto I become a communist. When I read Atlas Shrugged I become a objectivist.
When I read Sickness Unto Death I am almost a Christian. You don’t approach art with a microscope or telescope, trying to keep the mud off your trousers. You surrender and submit as much as possible and let the good stuff break you like a twig.
Is Nietzsche even a philosopher? Although the Genealogy of Morals has some interesting criticism of the social contract (and rather fascist sounding), and later works such as the Twilight of the Idols and Antichrist put forth attacks on various institutions--Xtianity, Kant, socialists, women, the English etc--it’s ultimately not so much philosophy as a type of belle-lettrism, or psychologizing, or in the case of Zarathustra, prose poetry not so far from a Kahil Gibran--or a sort of martial Emerson (RW, not the gloomy clown hereabouts). There are bon mots a plenty to be sure, but it’s not exactly Frege or Russell: and frat boys have for decades learned their gonzo individualism via Nietzschean apothegms. Russell himself thought Nietzsche supremely overrated (as well as a sort of anti-Buddha, and anti-rationalist lacking any well-defined metaphysical position), and at least one of the intellectual forebearers of Der Wehrmacht.
Phreak actually is sort of OK when his meds are working.
Bob M., I actually don’t propose a prophetic, inspiring philosophy. That’s a calumny by my enemies. Just one that doesn’t favor the analytic direction over the synthetic direction quite so fanatically, and which includes rather than excludes so-called “normative” talk (by which I don’t mean meta-ethics or meta-politics), and which does not reduce the philosophy of persons to philosophy of mind, and a few other things like that.
Nietzsche is not exactly Frege or Russell....?
....one of the intellectual forebearers of Der Wehrmacht?
Who would of thunk it? These meaty new ideas are going to give us a lot to work on!
His intention was not to stimulate a paper by a 40 yr old professor but to grab a 20 yr old student by the balls and make him an artist.
Well, despite not having balls which a book may grab (though sometimes being ballsy—hence my nom de blog) when I was 18 I wrote “Nietzsche kicks ASS!!!” all over my copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
And then I got over it, just like I got over The Doors.
(There, I finally screwed up my nerve to comment here. Be nice to the newbie, please, even though I’ve been a little snarky...Btw, Scott: LOL at your Robertsonian/medievalist joke.)
I’ve long wondered how many have first come to Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Norman Brown, Spengler, etc. through reading No One Here Gets out Alive.
Wallace Fowlie even wrote a book about Jim Morrison and Rimbaud.
Joining Machiavelli in “General Fiction” are The Confessions, The Republic, The Nicohmachean Ethics, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, The Federalist and Antifederalist Papers, Herodotus’s Histories, Mills’s On Liberty, The Upanishads, The Bhagivad Gita, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, The Symposium, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Reflections on the Revolution in France, A Lover’s Guide to the Kama Sutra, and a Napolean Dynamite flipbook. I suppose “General Fiction” can be taken more broadly than I would have thought.
Re: being a (going on) 40-year old prof who need something to lecture about, who can barely remember what it was like to go through my Morrison phase (No One Gets Out of Here Alive in 10th grade) - yes, I suppose there is a bit of arthurdantistry in my technique. See the “Philosophical Lexicon":
arthurdantist, n. One who straightens the teeth of exotic dogmas. “Little Friedrich used to say the most wonderful things before we took him to the arthurdantist!” - Frau Nietzsche
Still, Nietzsche DID say he expected endowed chairs in the study of Zarathustra in 100 years. The post was a cunning rhetorical gambit to see whether I could conjure Zarathustra-defenders out of the woodwork.
...to conjure Zarathustra-defenders...
I am conjured.
John says: The Eternal Return, The Superman, and the Will to Power were declared to be N’s central ideas either by his sister or by Heidegger. Yes, Zarathrustra marked 20th Centry thought in a way no other figure did. That’s a reason for being conjured on Z.’s part, right there John goes on: if I thought they were, I’d have no interest in N.
Oh.
I’ve never understood the problem people have with The Eternal Return. It follows (it seems to me) straightforwardly from the question about whether the universe is finite or infinite. If the former, then of course no Eternal Return (we must read it as a fable, etc etc). But if the latter, then The Eternal Return is almost certainly inevitable. This is a function of just how catastrophically beyong-vast ‘infinity’ is. If you think N.’s concept outrages your common sense, then it’s probably the concept of infinity that’s doing the outraging. Of course you’re free to imagine the universe as finite, but that has all sorts of other problems associated with it. [The speech the lead guitarist in Spinal Tap makes when he’s asked if ‘this is the end of the band’ has always seemed to me the best encapsulation of that problematic].
As for the Power-Willy Superman, I’ve always seen him as a rather kindly figure: blue costume, red pants, helping people ... ie a bit absurd-looking by conventional lights, but no blonde ubergruppenfuehrer neither. Going beyond good and evil doesn’t mean being really nasty to people: that’s not revaluing all values, that’s just inverting conventional values and staying stuck in their logic. Superman/Will to Power is a vocabulary for thinking a radical and joyous yawp at the core of things. That’s cool. All the other stuff, the lumpish humour, the creaky Biblical pastiche, I take that sourness with the medicine ‘cause the medicine is so efficacious.
John, that “arthurdantist” is the most airwolf line since, well, airwolf. You should write a devil’s dictionary for philosophy.
whoops, sorry, missed the link.
John Stuart Mill had a nightmare that at some point every possible musical piece would have been written—the “lump of music” fallacy. That’s only true, even theoretically, if your taste in music is very narrow, as Mill’s probably was. It will always possible to create new music, by changing the way you do things.
This isn’t the same as Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, but it does assume a conservative “lump of reality” fallacy, rather than an open future.
Cf. Chomsky’s infinitely fertile transformations. Given any corpus of sentences, it will always be possible to generate a new, heretofore unseen sentence. If reality is like that, and I say it is, there need be no return.
John, I disagree. Any finite matrix, even a large one with a great many elements capable of a very great many permutations, will find those permutations exhausted on an infinite timescale. That’s in the nature of infinity. Mill’s lump of music sounds ridiculous over a timescale of a hundred years (and has, indeed, been disproved); and still sounds ridiculous over a thousand, million, or even a googolplex of years. But these quantities bear no relation to an infinite span of time, which can’t even be described as a ‘span’.
The things we percieve and know are not simples but complexes, and complexes of complexes. The number of units to be recombined is infinite too. That was Chomsky’s point.
Physicists describe a closed system with a finite given number of units which don’t change and don’t disappear, and that’s a timeless world with no past, so any past event can be returned to in theory, so there might be eternal return. But physicists don’t count complexes of these units as ontologically real, and these complexes are infinite.
Re Zarathustra: I’ve never read it. Tried once as an undergrad; gave up. Tried again as a grad student; gave up again. I’ve never taught a whole Nietzsche seminar, but I’ve found that I can teach Nietzsche in my classes all the same, despite this hole in studies.
Re other Nietzsche: I mostly agree with John E.; The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil are the essential Nietzsche, though The Twilight of the Idols has some thoughtful stuff in it. As an introduction, everyone ought to read On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.
Re arthurdanty: I sure someone would have practiced this on Baudrillard.
the eternal recurrence is about as plausible as, say, karma: and like any metaphysical position sort of dependent on ontology: i.e materialism, mind/mental events as synonymous with brain, leaves little room for such grand speculations. and physics has yet to prove that any sort of epiphenomenalism or consciousness exists apart from a physical and biochemical base
Zarathustra? Heterosexual camp.
Are there are any verifiable or confirmable assertions (or proverb-assertions) in Nietzsche? Inspirational bombast and generalizations there are in abundance, but argument is rarely detected. His attacks on Christianity do seem sort of rationalist on occasion: that “proof by potency” is not proof--feelings of piety, religious sensations prove nothing. The ethics--Master/slave morality, Uebermensch, etc.--seems specious at best, although his attacks on the Rousseauian social contract in Genealogy might be justifiable in some sense, at least historically: it’s naive to assume that humans begin societies by sort of working out rights in groups or by consent-- politics via, say, the Vikings is a bit more historically accurate. Nietzsche the historian ja; Nietzsche the metaphysician or psychologist, nein.
Certainly there were militaristic and aristocratic Xtians for one, and a generalization that strength is always good/preferable over weakness seems, well, quite fascist. Mike Tyson or the Undertaker could surely defeat Steven Hawking with a backslap: yet who would rate the Undertaker above Dr. Hawking, even if making use of some Aristotelian sort of virtu? It was that worship of force (at both individual and military level) that alarmed the English rationalists and positivists such as Russell. In too many sections of his writing, Nietzsche resembles a Bavarian Machiavelli.
Let’s agree that there’s a strong flavour of the ridiculous, the pompously risible, the absurdly inflated in the manner of Thus Spake. So what’s the most interesting way of responding to that? Dismissal? Can’t we please muster a less predictable response?
Bavarian Machiavelli: well, Machiavelli isn’t wedded to force as such; he’s wedded to that which works, which sometimes is force, but sometimes isn’t. Machiavelli is premised on a rubric of ‘this is how human beings function in a social group; these are the rules that you need to know how to manipulate to get things done’. Did Nietzsche care how most people thought or functioned? Did he even know? Take a look at this famous picture: is there an image of a major thinker more loony-ish than this one? We’re back to the absurd. (Can you really imagine that Machiavelli would have got very far in Renaissance Italy if he’d worn that moustache? Stared at people with those stary eyes?)
N. was too intense for Lou Salome, and her stories recently reviewed here were apparently too intense also. The goddamn German Seriousness!
Foucault had the reputation for arrogance at the E.N.S., which was the home of the most arrogant Frenchmen, and Frenchmen have a stereotype reputation for being as arrogant as is even minimally plausible.
So a N. vs. F. faceoff would have been fun.
I think it translates particularly badly.
Adam writes:
“Let’s agree that there’s a strong flavour of the ridiculous, the pompously risible, the absurdly inflated in the manner of Thus Spake. So what’s the most interesting way of responding to that? Dismissal? Can’t we please muster a less predictable response?”
One thing I’m trying to figure out is the degree to which these aspects of the thing are intentional. Despite my post’s tone, I’m not dismissive of the work. I’m working on it, in fact. (Take my harsh judgement in a good old ‘why so hard, said the coal to the diamond’ spirit.) Jonathan is probably right that it translates badly. This is hard for me to gauge because I can read German well enough to figure out word-play but I can’t judge poetry. If there is a beauty to these passages I hear going clunk in the night of Z’s abyssmal thought - I have trouble hearing it.
I don’t really see the problem. ASZ is so obviously the contemporary of Les Chants de Maldoror, of Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony and Salambo, has a lot of touches of Longfellow (oddly enough), Jean Paul, Novalis, and uses a rapturous vocabulary that is rather embarrassing to contemporary ears (although, actually, I’d say any look at the movies and tv tells us pretty quickly that we live in a much more sentimental age than the nineteenth century could ever afford to be). There’s a lot of obvious gleefulness in it—I liked the guy with the huge ear, which is supposed to represent the effect of tthe specialization of labor on the human being (and Derrida’s Otobiography is good on this). It is surprising that in an era in which we have comic book explanations of Einstein’s theory of relativity, N.’s Zarathustra is supposed to be so disablingly silly. It’s a libretto for a philosophy, or philosophy as libretto, take your pick.
Nietzsche lived in the late Victorian era, obviously. And he didn’t have the advantage of being effected by the cooler aesthetic that drew on ... Nietzsche. What do you want?
It may have annoyed you to write out that comment, Roger, but, as another non-Jim-Morrison-fan who’s had problems reading Zarathustra, I found it very helpful. Thank you for reacting to the irritation.
"O my soul, I gave you new names and many-coloured toys, I called you ‘destiny’ and ‘encompassment of encompassments’ and ‘time’s umbilical cord’ and ‘azure bell’.
This sentence gives me the queerest feeling, it gives me feelings of the sublime and makes me feel sick at the same time, I’ve gotten a lot of that feeling from what I’ve read of Nietzsche.