1
The Drama of the Soul36
Then something happened, that silenced every mouth and fixed every eye. For meanwhile, the ropedancer (Seiltänzer) had begun his art: he had emerged from a little door, and was proceeding across the rope, which was stretched between two towers so that it hung over the market and the people. Just as he had reached the middle of his course the little door opened once again and a motley fellow, like a buffoon (Possenreißer), sprang out and followed the former with rapid steps. ‘Forward, lame-foot (Lahmfuß)!’ cried his terrible voice, ‘forward sloth, smuggler, pale-face! Lest I tickle you with my heel! What are you doing here between towers? You belong in the tower, you should be locked up, you are blocking the way of a better man than you!’ And with each word he came nearer and nearer to him: but when he was only one step behind him, there occurred the dreadful thing that silenced every mouth and fixed every eye: he emitted a cry like a devil and sprang over the man standing in his way. But the latter, when he saw his rival thus triumph, lost his head and the rope; he threw away his pole and, faster even than this, shot into the depth, a whirl of legs and arms. (Z.Prol.6)
In an aphorism entitled ‘To move the crowd’, Nietzsche writes: ‘Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who plays himself? Must he not first translate himself into grotesque obviousness and then perform his whole person and cause in this coarsened and simplified manner?’ (GS.236). In the parable of the ropedancer, ‘the Dionysian drama of “the Destiny of the soul” (GM.Pref.7), is brought centre-stage. This parable of the fall encapsulates the story, and prophesies the fate, of Zarathustra. Picking his tentative way towards the dark tower,37 where ‘the lie of the ideal’ (EH.Pref.2) lies hidden, the ropedancer symbolizes the Zarathustra of Parts I to III; his fatal fall, precipitated by the buffoon, foreshadows the death, in Part IV, of Zarathustra’s idealism, devoured by the worm of bad conscience. As for the buffoon, his raillery sets the tone for Zarathustra’s ‘downright wicked and malicious’ (GS.Pref.1) self-parody of Part IV, while his triumphant leap over the ropedancer hints at the ironic distance to which Zarathustra aspires, but ultimately fails to realize, in Part IV. To support my claim of parabolic prophecy, it will be necessary to examine in detail the symbolic function served, in the first instance, by the parable’s mise-en-scène and, in the second, by the dialectical relationship of its two principal actors.
Madman and Prophet
The market square setting is highly significant insofar as it registers a thematic link between the parable of the ropedancer and the earlier parable of the madman (GS.125). The market square38 represents the parochial world of fixed values (see Z.III.12.8) and easy virtue, of provincial ‘poverty, filth and wretched contentment’ (Z.Prol.3). In Book III of The Gay Science, the madman runs into the market square screaming “I seek God! I seek God!” and generally lamenting the cataclysmic death of God; the jeers of the crowd are testimony to the prematureness of his apocalyptic message (GS.125). One year later,39 the madman returns to the market square, only this time in the guise of the visionary prophet Zarathustra. Despair wears the mask of hope, and the aching need for metaphysical comfort is assuaged by the vision of a new redeemer: ‘I teach you the Übermensch’ (Z.Prol.3), says Zarathustra; once again, the jeering crowd testifies to the untimeliness of his meditation. In both these scenes, the significance of the market square would appear to be that the news of God’s death and the coming of a new messiah is, to a Christian throng, simply a tale told by the village idiot.
Both parables share the same basic presupposition – the death of God -and the same existential legacy – the exigency of finding a surrogate god. According to Nietzsche, this almost childlike need for metaphysical comfort is one of the deleterious effects of religious indoctrination: ‘Under the rule of religious concepts, one has become accustomed to the idea of “another (behind, below, above) world” – and, with the destruction of religious delusions, one feels an uneasy emptiness and deprivation, and out of this feeling grows once again “another world”, but now merely a metaphysical one that is no longer religious’ (GS.151). Despite the obvious parallels between the two parables, there is, however, a distinct shift of emphasis from pessimism to optimism, from alienation to self-creation. Whereas, in the earlier parable, a new god is desperately being sought, in the later one he has been found. The madman and the prophet constitute Zarathustra’s two most vividly painted masks, and placed back-to-back, they form the Janus-face of Zarathustra’s psyche. Fearful of the vacuous and meaningless present, the madman looks behind and bewails what has been lost:
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it now moving? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? And backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still an above and a below? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become cold? Is not night and more night constantly approaching? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? (GS.125);
while the prophet looks ahead, to the redemptive figure of the Übermensch, for deliverance from ‘the night, the absent sun, [and] the father’s murder’.40 In other words, the madman represents the impulse towards the real in contrast to the prophet who represents the opposite tendency towards the ideal (whether imaginary or fictitious). And in the parable of the ropedancer, this reaching ‘for an upper air, while describing plunges [and] prostrations’,41 typifies the romantic preoccupation with Doppelgänger42 motifs.
Nature and Anti-Nature
‘The contradictory nature at the bottom of the German soul’ (BGE.244), or what Hamann refers to as the idealism and realism instinct in all philosophy,43 is represented by the two towers between which the human rope is stretched. ‘Man is a rope, tied between beast and Übermensch – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal’ (Z.Prol.4). Accordingly, he who strives towards the Übermensch must walk the tight-rope.44 But if, as the two towers suggest, the human rope-bridge symbolizes an evolutionary continuum formed by ‘all beings hav[ing] hitherto created something beyond themselves’ (Z.Prol.3), then the ignoble fate of the ropedancer necessarily calls into question the value of the Übermensch and the merits of such a doomed pursuit.
On Nietzsche’s showing, the Übermensch, as an image of man in his ideal state of moral (in the disciplinary sense of a ‘high spirituality [that] is the spiritualization of justice’ BGE.219) and cultural (in the sense of a cultivated, ‘transfigured physis’45 UM.III.3) perfection, represents ‘a type of supreme achievement’ (EH ‘Why I write such good books’ 1). He is a type of man that ‘conceives reality as it is: he is strong enough for that – he is not estranged or removed from it, he is reality itself, he still has in himself all that is terrible and questionable in reality, only thus can man possess greatness’ (EH ‘Why I am a destiny’ 5). ‘To acquire power so as to aid the evolution of the physis and to be for a while the correction of its follies and clumsiness’ requires ‘great health’ (see GS.382 and GM.II.24) and is the ‘exalted and transfiguring overall goal’ of man and, ultimately, humanity (UM.III.3). But, as the fatal fall of the foolishly idealistic and clumsy ropedancer serves to demonstrate, such striving for a ‘“higher culture” [that] is based on the spiritualization of cruelty’ (BGE.229) will, ‘by its nature’ (or, more precisely, ‘anti-nature’ – see TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’), lead at best to defeat and at worst to death: ‘for what and how much is amenable to any kind of improvement at all, in the individual or in the generality?’ (UM.III.3).
Noble and Ignoble
The human rope is composed of many twisted strands, and in this chaotic ‘psychic household’ the meanest and noblest strands are inextricably entwined (BGE.244); accordingly, the distinction between what is noble and what is mean is not easily discernible. To begin with, the positioning of the tight-rope high above the hidebound herd would seem to suggest the nobility of such an elevated endeavour, but, then, the suspension of the tight-rope might also be deemed to signify the ropedancer’s need for a willing suspension of disbelief so that his ideal of the Übermensch – Nietzsche’s ignoble lie – can exert its normative influence over the personal (as opposed to universal)46 moral sphere before the critical voice of practical reason reveals the illusory nature of all ethical ideals; or, in the words of Coleridge, ‘so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination47 that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.’48
Second, the ropedancer, seen striving towards his exalted vision of human perfection, might at first glance appear noble, and the buffoon, as the instrument of the ropedancer’s death, not only mean but also dæmonic (in the Judæo-Christian sense)49 and even cynical (in the Nietzschean sense).50 Upon closer inspection, however, the buffoon can be seen to represent a type of nobility: his perfect balance symbolizing the equipoise of the ironic higher man who, through the creation of ‘artistic distance’ (GS.107), transcends his dual impulse towards the real and the ideal, or, in Nietzschean terms, the contradiction of his will to honesty with his life-preserving will to artifice; and his triumphant leap over the ropedancer gesturing towards the ‘noble soul […] which rises little and falls little, but dwells always in a free, translucent atmosphere and height’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 397). Whereas the ropedancer, whose high-flown ‘ideal has […] driven him so impetuously that midway along every path he has got out of breath and had to stand still’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 350), and whose dithering equivocation has cost him his life, can be seen to possess those ‘midway’ qualities more akin to mediocrity than nobility.
Upon even closer inspection, however, the buffoon can also be seen to represent the idealism of Zarathustra’s missionary intent. As a marginal figure simultaneously inside and outside society, the buffoon ‘holds the social world open to values that transcend it’51 in the same way that Zarathustra – oscillating between mountain and valley, solitude and society – offers the multitude transvalued moral values. But if the buffoon’s leap over the ropedancer effectively brings him closer to the Übermensch and, by implication, to the cultural and moral idealism which it signifies, the ropedancer’s consequent fall dramatizes the gravitational pull of social conditioning and, by extension, the mortal danger in all idealist undertakings. Like the cripple in Browning’s “Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came”, the buffoon is ‘the bizarre muse of the poetic solipsist, directing him to the site of the absolute he seeks and of absolute self-destruction.’52 While the buffoon, by virtue of his lofty values, is seemingly able to distance himself from the stagnant social mores ‘peddled in the thoroughfares’,53 the ropedancer, as his ignoble fall seems to suggest, is unable to free himself from the old morality. Indeed, as Nietzsche confesses in his Nachlaß: ‘What will be the hardest [task] for Zarathustra? To free himself from the old morality’ (KSA, Vol.10, p. 180).54 Once again, the parable of the rope-dancer – with the buffoon’s figurative promise of radical individualism and the ropedancer’s parabolic social bondage – dramatizes a further type of romantic duality: that which ‘promises that bounds may be passed, bonds broken, that nature and society may be deserted, while also, on many occasions, retracting the promise.’55
36. An earlier version of this chapter appears in Nietzsche-Studien, 23 (1994), 42–64, under the title ‘Figures of funambule: Nietzsche’s Parable of the Ropedancer’.
37. ‘… I had so long suffered in this quest, / Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ / So many times among ‘The Band’ – to wit, / The knights who to the Dark Tower’s search addressed / Their steps’, Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, ll. 37–41.
38. In traditional symbolism, the square ‘represents limitation and therefore form. The square is the perfect type of enclosure […] symbolizing permanence and stability’. See J C Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp. 157–8.
39. Books I to IV of The Gay Science were written in 1882 and Zarathustra was commenced in 1883.
40. Stefano Agosti, ‘Coup upon Coup: An Introduction to Spurs’ in Derrida’s Spurs, p. 23.
41. Karl Miller, Doubles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 23.
42. ‘I am a Doppelgänger, I have a “second” face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third’ (EH ‘Why I am so wise’ 3).
43. Johann Georg Hamann, in Ronald Gregor Smith, J G Hamann: A Study in Christian Existence (London: Collins, 1960), p. 255.
44. On this reading, the ropedancer is not, as Parkes claims, an ‘image for the Übermensch’. The Übermensch, by definition, is ‘over man’; it is only man who needs to go under in order to go over and across to the Übermensch. See Graham Parkes, ‘The Overflowing Soul: Images of Transformation in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’, Man and World 16 (1983), p. 341.
45. Greek for ‘nature’, and as ambiguous as the English equivalent.
46. See Nietzsche’s repudiation of Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’: ‘What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? This “firmness” of your so-called moral judgment? This “absoluteness” of feeling that “here everyone must judge as I do”? Rather admire your selfishness in this respect. And the blindness, pettiness, and simplicity of your selfishness. For it is selfish to experience one’s own judgment as a universal law, and this selfishness is blind, petty, and simple because it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself nor created for yourself your own, your very own, ideal – for that could never be somebody else’s let alone that of everybody, everybody!’ (GS.335).
47. Zarathustra confides that ‘The beauty of the Übermensch came to me as a shadow’ (Z.II.2).
48. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV.
49. Köhler preposterously equates the buffoon with the Judæo-Christian Devil despite Nietzsche’s emphatic repudiation of all such anthropomorphisms and Zarathustra’s insistence that ‘there is no Devil and no Hell’ (Z.Prol.6). See Joachim Köhler, Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine verschlüsselte Botschaft (Nördlingen: Greno, 1989), pp. 424–26.
50. Lampert identifies the buffoon with ‘the serviceable cynic described as a “jester” in Beyond Good and Evil’ (p. 27): one of those ‘so-called cynics […] who simply recognize in themselves the beast, the commonplace, the “rule” and yet still have that degree of spirituality and that itch which constrains them to speak of themselves and their kind before witnesses […] Cynicism is the only form in which common souls brush against honest; and the higher man must prick up his ears at every coarse and refined cynicism and congratulate himself whenever a buffoon without shame […] speaks out in his presence’ (BGE.26). For a detailed critique of Lampert’s and Köhler’s entirely negative reading of the buffoon see Francesca Cauchi, ‘Figures of funambule: Nietzsche’s Parable of the Ropedancer’, Nietzsche-Studien, 23 (1994), 42–64.
51. William Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), p. 137.
52. Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, & Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 142.
53. W B Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter.
54. All future references to the Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. G Colli and M Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), will be by volume and page number – eg., Vol 10, p. 180 will read KSA.10.180.
55. Miller, p. 46.