2
Dionysus and Apollo
If man is a rope, then the allegorical funambulist is a higher man, or, to be more precise (given that both the ropedancer and the buffoon emerge from the tower symbolizing ‘beast’), a higher beast. This higher beast, referred to by Nietzsche as ‘Dionysian man’ (BT.8), is a divided man, a proud man, but above all, a broken man. His dédoublement is a psychological split between the will to health (and thus necessary illusion) and the will to integrity56 – or, in the parabolic symbolism of Zarathustra, a psychological split between the ropedancer and the buffoon, respectively. Having glanced into the horrifying abyss of nature, Dionysian man finds himself caught between the Scylla of life-denying pessimism and the Charybdis of life-preserving optimism; the latter necessitating a debasement of the self and the former an annihilation of the self in the form of a Schopenhauerian denial of the will to live.57 It is the ‘terrifying Either/Or’ situation envisaged by Nietzsche in Book V of The Gay Science: ‘“Either abolish your reverences or – yourselves!” The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be – nihilism?’ (GS.V.346). In the figure of the ropedancer, Zarathustra’s equivocation between illusion and integrity is seen to be his undoing, while in the figure of the buffoon a way out of this nihilistic dilemma is suggested: an improvised stance which neither negates nor denigrates life but affirms it: redemption through dissimulation.
‘[F]olly itself is the mask for an unhappy, all too certain knowledge’ (BGE.270), and like Hamlet, whom Nietzsche compares to ‘Dionysian man’ (BT.7), Zarathustra seeks to conceal the ugly face of tragic knowledge behind a mask of impudence and foolishness: ‘I myself have now murdered all gods in the fourth act, for the sake of morality. Now, what is to become of the fifth act? From where am I to take the tragic solution? – Should I begin to think about a comic solution?’ (GS.153). Just as in the fifth act of Hamlet, the tragic solution lies in Hamlet’s Pyrrhic victory – vindication at the cost of death – so, in the ignoble fate of the ropedancer, Zarathustra’s moral victory is a tragic one: intellectual integrity at the cost of moral idealism and spiritual well-being. In the victory of the buffoon, however, tragedy is recast into a tragi-comic mould, and Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (I.v.180), revived in the ambiguous figure of the buffoon, is now seen to typify the tragi-comic hero.
In the parable of the ropedancer, the tragic myth, which is ‘to be understood only as an illustration of Dionysian wisdom through Apollonian artifices’ (BT.22), is reborn. Consider the following passage from Birth of Tragedy and its allegorical transposition into the parable:
In the overall effect of tragedy, the Dionysian once again achieves predominance; tragedy closes with a sound which could never have resounded from the realm of Apollonian art. And thus the Apollonian illusion shows itself as what it is: as the constant veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian effect; but the latter is so powerful that in the end it pushes the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and where it denies itself and its Apollonian visibility. Thus the difficult relation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy may really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo, finally, the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is attained. (BT.21)
The ropedancer plays the role of the tragic hero who has peered into the abyss. To a courageous, noble hero, neither the ‘Buddhistic [desire] for nothingness, Nirvana – and no more!’ (GM.I.6) nor what Goethe describes as the romantic’s ‘suffocation on the rumination of moral and religious absurdities’ (CW.3) is a worthy option. Rejecting these quietist and disquietive forms of life-denial, the Dionysian hero invokes the life-affirming and joyful Übermensch; just as the Greeks invented the Olympian world as a ‘transfiguring mirror’ and a justification of human existence (BT.3), so the ropedancer invented the Übermensch as redemption through Apollonian illusion from Schopenhauerian (and Leopardian) pessimism.
As Nietzsche himself confessed in his Nachlaß: ‘in order to bear this extreme pessimism (it can be heard here and there in my The Birth of Tragedy) and to live alone “without God and morality” I had to invent a counterpart for myself. Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as is fitting, the most cheerful’ (KSA.11.571), This contradictory urge towards truth and falsity, towards the real and the ideal, exemplifies the decadent disposition as described by Nietzsche: ‘decadents need the lie – it is one of the conditions of their preservation’ (EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ 2).58 Is not this, ironically, the ‘psychological problem in the type Zarathustra […] how the spirit who bears the heaviest of destinies, a fatality of a task, can nevertheless be the lightest and most otherworldly (jenseitigste)’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 6)?
In striving towards the Übermensch, therefore, the Dionysian ropedancer figuratively ‘speaks the language of Apollo’, but the colossal force of ineluctable Dionysian wisdom eclipses the beautiful illusion of the Übermensch. ‘The self-overcoming of morality out of truthfulness’ (EH ‘Why I am a destiny’ 3) is analagous to Zarathustra’s putative self-overcoming in Part IV. As the reflexive Zarathustra of the fourth part comes to realize, an aesthetic transfiguration is less a justification than a deprecation and denial of man; in the parabolic terms presently under scrutiny, the ropedancer’s will to the life-affirming Übermensch is ironically a life-denying will to the ‘lie of the ideal’ (EH.Pref.2).59 ‘What justifies man is his reality – it will justify him eternally. How much more valuable an actual man is compared with any sort of merely desired, dreamed of. odious lie of a man? with any sort of ideal man?’ (TI ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ 32). If the mark of the ideal (übermenschliche) man is the ability to see and live reality ‘as it is’, the mark of the actual (Zarathustran) man, who lacks the strength for ‘amor fati’ (EH ‘Why I am so clever’ 10), is the ability to see himself as he really is and ‘to laugh at [himself], as a man ought to laugh’ (Z.IV.13.15). Enter the buffoon.
In the guise of the buffoon, ‘the whole “divine comedy” of life, including the inferno’ (BT.1) is now to appear. With the tragic death of the ropedancer, the tragedy does indeed close with a tragi-comic image which ‘could never [have come] from the realm of Apollonian art.’ The ‘tragedy of the real Dionysian effect’ is thus the juxtaposition of the spectacular and almost farcical failure of the ropedancer to attain übermenschliche ‘wholeness and manifoldness’ (BGE.212), and the ropedancer’s terrible and inescapable realization (represented by the mocking figure of the buffoon) that his failure is inevitable. As Nietzsche painfully observes, ‘the corruption, the ruination of higher men, of more strangely constituted souls, is the rule’ (BGE.269), a fate which might have been avoided had the so-called higher men heeded the following words of Blake, ‘The Errors of a Wise Man make your Rule / Rather than the Perfections of a Fool.’60 It is thus the dying words of the ropedancer – spoken with ‘Dionysian wisdom’ -which finally articulate ‘the language of Dionysus’: ‘I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by blows and meagre morsels’ (Z.Prol.6). In short, Dionysian man has two masks: the real and the ideal. Through the ideal mask of the Übermensch (a mask utilized by the prophet Zarathustra) Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, and through the real mask of the buffoon (a mask which the latter most likely borrowed from the madman) Apollo speaks the language of Dionysus.
Wise Fools and Foolish Wisdom
The function of the buffoon vis à vis the ropedancer is analogous to that of the fool’s mirror in one of Holbein’s illustrations to Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, which depicts a fool looking searchingly at himself in a mirror (a motif that Holbein borrowed from the illustrations to Brant’s Narrenschiff), and the reflection sticking out its tongue at him.61 Traditionally, the fool’s mirror – either held symbolically like the jester’s bauble or represented by the jester himself – is a dramatic device employed to reveal the folly of whomsoever the mirror (real or metaphorical) is held up to.
In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Fool acts as a mirror to Lear. Both characters wear cracked masks: through the Fool’s mask of foolery, wisdom can be discerned, whereas folly is seen to reside behind Lear’s mask of regal wisdom. (A similar relationship obtains between Gloucester and Edgar’s ‘Poor Tom’.) Just as the Fool offers Lear his coxcomb (I.iv.95), so the buffoon informs the ropedancer that he should be locked up in the tower where fools and madmen belong.
Incarcerated in his own imaginary tower, the “mad” protagonist in Pirandello’s Henry IV62 represents the madness of a world in which people live at the behest of dogmatists who propagate outmoded concepts and values:
And every moment of the day, them wanting everyone to be as they want … that’s not persecution, of course … oh, no! That’s just their way of thinking, feeling, seeing … well, to each his own! […] You’re just a flock of sheep … paltry, ephemeral, hesitant sheep. And they take advantage of that, they make you submit and accept their way, so you’ll feel and see like them! At least they delude themselves they do! But what do they actually succeed in imposing on you? Words! Which they all interpret and use in their own ways […] Do you think this [that is, his desire to live the role of Henry IV] too, is a practical joke, that the dead go on making life? Yes, it is a joke, in here. But go outside, into the living world […] say hello to all the old traditions for me! Say hello to all the old customs! Start talking … use all the words that have ever been said! You think you’re living? You’re just chewing over the life of the dead! (Act II)
Compare this with Zarathustra’s view of ‘the new idol’ – the state:
Confusion of tongues of good and evil; this sign I give you as the sign of the state. Truly, this sign indicates the will to death! Truly, it beckons to the preachers of death!
Far too many are born: for the superfluous the state was invented!
Just look how it lures them, the far-too-many! How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them! …
It will give you everything if you worship it, the new idol: thus it buys for itself the splendour of your virtues and the look of your proud eyes.
It wants to use you as bait for the far-too-many. Yes, a hellish device has here been devised, a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honours!
Yes, a death for many has here been devised that extols itself as life: truly, a heart-felt service to all preachers of death!
I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where the slow suicide of all – is called “life”. (Z.I.11)63
In Büchner’s Leonce and Lena,64 Valerio mocks, in particular, the idealism of poets:
I shall lie on the ground and allow my nose to peep out between the grass blades. When the bees and butterflies rock themselves upon it, as upon a rose, I shall receive poetical impressions […] How I feel for nature, sir. (I.i) –
compared with Zarathustra’s remarkably similar satire in ‘Of Poets’:
But all poets believe this: that whoever pricks up his ears as he lies in the grass or on lonely banks, will learn about some of those things that are between heaven and earth (Z.II.17) –
and, in general, the folly of mankind: ‘Who will barter his madness for my good sense?’ (I.i).
Lastly, in a chaotic monologue exemplifying the loss of centre in a Godless world, the hapless Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot65 manages to articulate the fact that man, ‘for reasons unknown’ and in spite of his physical and intellectual labours, is in full decline. This decadent type of man is what Zarathustra contemptuously terms ‘the last man’: ‘You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape’ (Z.Prol.3).
Masks and mirrors are the stock-in-trade of the fool, and the predicament of Dionysian man is exemplified in the figure of Till Eulenspiegel. The fool’s mocking and ambiguous mirroring of the owl (a symbol of wisdom) is analogous, in the private sphere, to the ‘refracted light’ by which Zarathustra, in a moment of spiritual gloom and weakness, ironically reflects66 upon the foolish wisdom of his inexorable will to truth: ‘Here are my faults and blunders, here my delusion, my bad taste, my confusion, my tears, my vanity, my owlish seclusion, my contradictions. Here you can laugh’ (GS.311, emphasis added); and, in the public sphere, analogous to the cunning masks of self-preservation which are required by the initiate of Dionysus: ‘how much falsity I shall need, if I am to allow myself time and again the luxury of my truthfulness’ (HH.I.Pref.1). Buffoonery is the studied ‘art of appearing cheerful [… and] above all healthy and malicious’, although a ‘sharper eye and sympathy will nevertheless not fail to notice […] that here a sufferer and self-denier speaks as though he were not a sufferer and self-denier’ (HH.II.Pref.5). In the reflection of the jester’s mirror, the transfiguring image of the Übermensch appears as the wilful self-deception of a melancholy fool and poet:
“The wooer of truth? You? – so they jeered –
No! Only a Poet!
A beast, cunning, preying, prowling,
That must lie,
That knowingly, willingly must lie:
Lusting for prey,
Colourfully masked,
A mask to itself,
A prey to itself –
That – the wooer of truth?
No! Only a fool! Only a poet!
Only speaking colourfully,
Only screaming colourfully out of fools-masks,
Clambering around on mendacious word-bridges,
On colourful rainbows,
Between false heavens
And false earths,
Roaming, hovering about, –
Only a fool! Only a poet! (Z.IV.14.3)
The buffoon symbolizes mocking self-reflection: the ropedancer’s painful realization that the tight-rope, stretched between beast and Übermensch, is only a metaphorical rope-bridge, a mendacious word-bridge ‘signifying nothing’ (except, perhaps, the ‘colourful rainbow’ which appears after a flood of tears.) And if the buffoon mirrors the ropedancer, then both reflect Zarathustra’s dual nature. It is a retrospective reflection, however, to which Zarathustra was blind when he ironically reflected that ‘To men I am still midway between a fool and a corpse’ (Z.Prol.7), and when the buffoon taunted him with the memory of the mocking crowd and the fact that Zarathustra truly spoke like a buffoon (Z.Prol.8). Indeed, it is precisely because he is neither wholly vanquished by his Dionysian wisdom (a corpse) nor so triumphant over it that he can wholly dispense with ‘powerful delusions and pleasurable illusions’ (BT.3) (a fool), that Zarathustra initially fails to recognize himself in the extreme representations of his dédoublement.
Gravity and Levity
In Part III of Zarathustra, in the section entitled ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’, the parable of the ropedancer is retold with figurative variations:
Recently, I walked gloomily through a deathly-grey twilight, gloomy, dour and tight-lipped. Not only one sun had set for me.
A path that ascended defiantly through scree; a wicked, solitary path that was no longer cheered by herb or shrub; a mountain path crunched under the defiance of my foot.
Striding silently over the mocking clatter of pebbles, crushing the stone that made it slip: thus my foot forced its way upward.
Upward – despite the spirit that drew it downward, drew it towards the abyss, the Spirit of Gravity (Der Geist der Schwere), my devil and archenemy.
Upward – although he sat on me, half dwarf, half mole; crippled (lahm), crippling (lähmend), dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain.
‘O Zarathustra,’ he whispered mockingly, syllable by syllable, ‘you philosopher’s stone! You have thrown yourself high, but every stone that is thrown must – fall!
‘O Zarathustra, you philosopher’s stone, you catapult, you star-destroyer! You have thrown yourself so high, but every stone that is thrown – must fall!
‘Condemned to yourself and to your own stoning: O Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back upon you!’ (Z.III.2.1)
Half dwarf, half mole, the spirit of gravity allegorizes the negative aspect of the buffoon; he is, as it were, the buffoon stripped of his motley-dress. And with this identification of the negative force of the buffoon with the grotesque spirit of gravity as depicted above, further characteristics of the buffoon are disclosed.
In the first place, the spirit of gravity’s mocking allusion to Newton’s law of gravity provides further corroboration that part of the signification of the buffoon is reflexivity. Just as the imagination soars upward into the ethereal realm of beautiful illusion, and just as ‘intellectual conscience’ (GS.335), with censorious looks and salutary reminders of man’s limitations, drags it back down to reality; so is the ropedancer’s tentative advance towards the Übermensch checked by the scoffing buffoon, and his plunge into the market square a less than salutary reminder that visionary ideals have no business in the market place. Here, poetic dreams, like mountebanks’ elixirs, will be treated with scorn and ridicule:
Alas, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have let themselves dream!
And especially above heaven: for all gods are poets’ parables (Dichter-Gleichniss), poets’ artifice (Dichter-Erschleichniss)!
Truly, it draws us ever upward – namely, to the realm of clouds: upon these we seat our motley puppets and call them gods and Übermenschen.
For they are just light enough for these chairs – all these gods and Übermenschen.
Alas, how tired I am of all the inadequacies (Unzulänglichen), that should be definitely acknowledged (Ereigniss)! Alas, how tired I am of the poets! (Z.II.17)
‘Who alone has grounds for lying his way out of reality? He who suffers from it’ (A.15). And as the ropedancer’s plunge into the market-square amply demonstrates, it is precisely this mendacity which serves to underscore the inescapable reality of suffering. It is the sick, solitary man who reifies his need for spiritual and material sustenance into palpable, living beings: as Nietzsche confesses in one of his late prefaces,
Thus when I needed to I once also invented for myself the “free spirits” to whom this melancholy-valiant book with the title Human, All-Too-Human is dedicated: “free spirits” of this kind do not exist, did not exist – but, as I have said, I had need of their company at that time so as to remain among good things while surrounded by bad (sickness, solitude, alienation, apathy, inertia): as brave companions and phantoms with whom one can chat and laugh when one feels like chatting and laughing, and whom one can send to the devil when they become tedious – as compensation for the friends I lacked. That free spirits of this kind could one day exist, that our Europe will have such lively and daring fellows among its sons of tomorrow and the next day, palpable and in the flesh, and not, as in my case, merely spectres and hermit’s phantasmagoria: I would like to have the least doubt about it. (HH.I.Pref.2)
But when the spirit of gravity exposes the necessary connection of the ‘melancholy’ with the so-called ‘valiant’, of the sickness of man with the robust health of the Übermensch; when he goads Zarathustra with incessant reminders of the nemesis that awaits all forms of hubris, then Zarathustra, despite all heart-felt wishes to the contrary, is bound to suffer the greatest doubt concerning the future existence of ‘free spirits’. As Nietzsche writes in his Nachlaß: ‘I am a seer, but my conscience casts an inexorable light upon my vision, and I am myself the doubter. ‘67
In the second place, the spirit of gravity is described as ‘crippled’ and ‘crippling’, which recalls the disdainful epithet with which the buffoon harangues the fated ropedancer hesitantly making his way along the tightrope. ‘“Forward, Lame-foot!” ’ he cries, putting the ropedancer’s “heroic” endeavour into its bathetic context of inevitable failure. Pouring scorn on the ropedancer and whispering in Zarathustra’s ear, the buffoon is a prefiguration of the spirit of gravity who drips lead into Zarathustra’s ear and whom the latter, in a fit of pique, calls ‘Lamefoot’ (Z.III.2.2). It is precisely these crippling, leaden thoughts which paralyze the ropedancer – hence the (Freudian) projection and (Nietzschean) ‘ressentiment’ implicit in Zarathustra’s infantile name-calling. Reflexivity denies the ropedancer the pre-reflexive comfort of ‘the splendid dream-birth of the Olympians’ (BT.3) and so, bereft of his beautiful illusions, he wavers and plunges into the abyss of pessimism. In this context, Newton’s law of gravity is of particular relevance. Just as the planets are kept in their orbit by the force of gravity, and would drift aimlessly in the event of the sun’s disappearance,68 so the ropedancer maintains his balance by the gravitational force of the Übermensch, but loses it as soon as the illusion evaporates. The spirit of gravity can thus be seen to operate on two (psychological and linguistic) interrelated levels, namely, the seriousness (1) of pessimism which acts as a psychological depressant (2).
Lastly, in the allegorical spirit of gravity the devilish quality of the buffoon is illuminated. Far from being Satan, however, the spirit of gravity is a “devil” only insofar as he represents for Zarathustra the destructive powers of acute self-analysis and consequent pessimism. If Köhler insists on a devil threatening to drag the ropedancer down to hell,69 then the devil is the voice of intellectual conscience and hell the abyss of pessimism. That Zarathustra constantly felt himself in danger of falling into the eternal night of self-doubt, self-loathing, and paralytic nihilism is, I would argue, ironically borne out by the exuberantly imaginative and emphatically affirmative Zarathustra of Part I and, to a large extent, Part II. The buffoon is not, therefore, one of Satan’s cunning disguises, but rather the sinister, self-mocking mask of one who suffers from the lingering disease of pessimism. And this juxtaposition of the infernal buffoon with the ropedancer epitomizes the Doppelgänger in its ‘psychologically realistic form […] combining the characteristically romantic extremes of exact self-analysis and exuberant imaginativeness.’70
Integrity and Irony
In his discussion of irony, with constant reference to the buffoonery of Diderot’s eponymous anti-hero, Rameau’s nephew, Trilling asserts ‘the intellectual value of the ironic posture’ implicit in ‘the doctrine of masks’.71 He then provides etymological support for associating the idea of the mask with the concept of irony by noting that the word ‘irony’ derives from the Greek word for a dissembler. It is not surprising therefore that the fool or jester, with his multiple masks and revealing mirror, is often dramatically conceived as a highly ironic figure.
Leaping over the ropedancer, the transcendent buffoon gestures towards the ironic attitude of ‘simultaneous immanence and transcendence’.72 This lofty activity of the buffoon can be seen as a metaphorical analogue of Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘transcendental buffoonery’ (transzendentale Buffonerie).73 Schlegel uses this expression to characterize the way in which the romantic ironist74 aesthetically transcends the paradoxical fabric of life. ‘Paradox is the conditio sine qua non for irony, the soul, source and principle’,75 writes Schlegel; it is, as I have argued above, the irresolvable dialectic instinct in Dionysian man. Oscillating between the will to illusion and the uncompromising will to truth, between necessary error and the ‘Minotaur of conscience’ (BGE.29), between what Bourgeois76 refers to as ‘false naïveté and terrible lucidity’, the ropedancer is the victim of an existential irony that simultaneously declares and disdains man’s intrinsic need for a justificatory and redemptive vision of the world. (Is this also, perhaps, God’s irony: that His death simply serves to reinforce man’s vital need for metaphysical comfort?) As the ropedancer’s fate amply demonstrates, to relinquish one’s ideals is to cast away the rod of hope and to plunge into the abysmal hell of nihilism.
Painfully aware of this fundamental contradiction at the core of life, both Schlegel and Zarathustra turned to the putatively resolving figure of the buffoon. Recognizing the futility of trying to effect a reconciliation between his contradictory impulses, the Zarathustra of Part IV, in common with the romantic ironists, assumes an ironic attitude towards them. In doing so, he is engaged in the art of hovering ‘poetic reflection’ which Schlegel terms ‘irony’. The romantic ironist can, ‘on the wings of poetic reflection, hover (schweben) midway between the represented (Dargestellten) and the representing (Darstellenden), free from all real and ideal interests.’77 This artistic freedom is also apotheosized by Nietzsche in The Gay Science:
At times we need to take a rest from ourselves, to look upon, and look down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laugh over ourselves or weep over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we have to be happy in our folly to enable us to remain happy in our wisdom. Precisely because we are, in the final analysis, grave (schwere) and serious human beings, and more like weights (Gewichte) than human beings, so nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap: we need it in relation to ourselves – we need all exuberant, hovering, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal demands of us […] We should also be able to stand above morality – and not only to stand but also to hover (schweben) above it and play. How could we, then, possibly dispense with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, with art – and with the fool? – And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us. (GS.107)
Herein lies the key to the parabolic significance of the buffoon’s triumphant leap over the ropedancer. From this ‘artistic distance’ the elevated buffoon can mock both the heroism of the ropedancer and the integrity of the buffoon in their respective quests for truth; he can also see the spirit of gravity instinct in both hero and fool; in other words, how pessimism is the cause of the former’s idealism and the effect of the latter’s resolute reflexivity. Morality dictates the gravity of their respective endeavours: a weighty earnestness which is detectable in the ropedancer’s rigid fear and in the buffoon’s uncompromising honesty which not only shames the ropedancer out of his idealism, but which cruelly and dangerously ‘never ask[s] whether truth is useful or fatal’ (A. Foreword). Levity is required: the hero must be able ‘to stand with relaxed muscles and [an] unharnessed will’ (Z.II.13) and the fool must beware lest his honesty lead him and others ‘to nausea and suicide’ (GS.107). Accordingly, the Zarathustra of Part IV essays the artists’ art of self-dramatization, because
Only artists, and particularly those of the theatre, have given men eyes and ears to see and to hear with some amusement what each man is himself, experiences himself, desires himself; only they have taught us the value of the hero, the hero that is hidden in every one of these ordinary men; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes – from a distance and, as it were, simplified and transfigured – the art of “staging” (“in Scene zu setzen”) ourselves in front of ourselves. Only in this way can we get over some of the base details in ourselves. (GS.78)
According to Schlegel, the romantic ironist, from this elevated position, can purportedly ‘raise this [poetic] reflection to higher and higher powers and can multiply it, as it were, in an endless array of mirrors.’78 But if Schlegel conceived these infinite powers of reflection as the ‘freest of all licences’79 and as ‘beautiful self-mirroring’,80 Zarathustra senses the nihilistic dangers implicit in such powers. Having countless mirrors and masks at his disposal, Zarathustra arguably fears that this ‘endless array of mirrors’, each with its own ironic reflection, will ultimately preclude any possibility of authenticity. For if every mask is seen to conceal another mask, and so on ad infinitum, then one is led finally to suspect that the last mask, rather like the smallest box in a set of Chinese boxes, will conceal nothing. As Kierkegaard incisively observes: ‘the ironic individual has most often traversed a multitude of determinations in the form of possibility, [and] poetically lived through them, before he ends in nothingness.’81 It is this nothingness which Zarathustra, as early as Part II, perceives lurking behind all those ethereal gods and Übermenschen (Z.II.17).
Unlike Schlegel, therefore, Zarathustra did not view his ‘transcendental buffoonery’ as an expression of infinite poetic freedom, but rather as a masquerade born out of prosaic necessity. Nor did he believe that true objectivity was the prerogative of poets. On the contrary, even those great poets,
for example – men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol – are and perhaps must be men of fleeting moments, enthusiastic, sensual, childish, frivolous and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they usually try to conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights forgetfulness of an all-too-faithful memory, often lost in the mud and almost in love with it, until they become like will-o’-the-wisps around swamps and pretend to be stars – the people may then call them idealists – often struggling with a long nausea, with a recurring spectre of unbelief which freezes them. (BGE.269)
Endorsing Kierkegaard’s critique in this regard, I believe that one of the principal objections to the romantic ironists is, paradoxically, their intrinsic lack of irony. They failed to discern that their ironic attitude, far from being the easy detachment of an impartial spectator, was merely the mask of a disillusioned actor. What distinguishes Zarathustra from the proponents of romantic irony is his will to integrity, which compelled him to reflect upon his own assumed ironic attitude and the cathartic need underlying the art of transfiguring self-projection. And just as an unrelenting moral imperative compelled Nietzsche to confess, not only to himself, but (most unambiguously in his 1886 prefaces) also to his readers, that his ability to overcome with courageous laughter the irony of the human condition was no more than an attitude, a ‘tenacious will to health which often ventures to clothe and disguise itself as health already achieved’ (HH.I.Prol.4); so a rigorous will to honesty compels the Zarathustra of Part IV to warn his higher men that ‘a wise man is also a fool’ (Z.IV.19.10). Unlike the romantic ironists, Zarathustra did not lack ‘the courage of conscience’ to remove his mask(s); ‘the good taste’ to warn a friend or foe of his dissimulation; nor ‘the exuberance’ necessary for self-mockery (BGE.5).
56. This dèdoublement is noted by C G Jung in Lecture VII of his Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: notes of the seminar given in 1934–1939, Part I, ed. James L Jarrett (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 110–28.
57. For a discussion of Nietzsche’s ambivalent relationship to Schopenhauer and pessimism see Francesca Cauchi, ‘Nietzsche and Pessimism: The Metaphysic Hypostatised’, History of European Ideas, 13:3, (1991), 253–67.
58. Cf: Ogilvy: ‘the display of opposities so characteristic of decadence’ (p. 177); and Furtwängler: ‘That [Nietzsche] was at odds with himself, unable to come to terms with himself, is the surest mark of decadence’. See Wilhelm Furtwängler, ‘The Case of Wagner’, in Ronald Taylor (ed. and trans), Furtwängler on Music: Essays and Addresses, (London: Scolar Press, 1991), p. 83.
59. Clark makes a similar point. See Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 275.
60. William Blake, Epigrams, Verses, and Fragments, written about 1808–11.
61. William Willeford, p. 35.
62. Luigi Pirandello, Three Plays, trans. Julian Mitchell (London: Methuen, 1986).
63. Cf. ‘New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles’ (Z.II.1).
64. The Plays of Georg Büchner, trans. Victor Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
65. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, Waiting for Godot, eds. McMillan and Knowlson (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).
66. It is to reflection or reflexivity that the title of this book refers; for that which reflects on is distinct from (contra) that which is reflected upon.
67. Cited in Daniel Halévy, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. J H Hone (London: J Fisher Unwin, 1911), p. 277.
68. This metaphor is, of course, the one used by the madman as he struggles to express the horror vacui from which he suffers as a result of the earth being unchained from its sun.
69. For a discussion of Köhler’s startling, Christian interpretation of the parable of the ropedancer see Cauchi, ‘Figures of funambule’.
70. Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1949), p. 120.
71. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 120.
72. DC Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 337.
73. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, Vol II, ed. Ernst Behler, (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), p. 152, § 42. All future references to the Kritische Ausgabe (KA) will be by volume, page, and section number – eg., Vol II, p. 152, § 42 will read KA.II 152.42.
74. For a comprehensive overview of romantic irony in general and Nietzsche’s attitude towards the early romantics in particular, see Ernst Behler’s following articles: ‘Nietzsches Auffassung der Ironie’, Nietzsche-Studien 4 (1975), 1–35; ‘Nietzsche und die Frühromantische Schule’, Nietzsche-Studien 7 (1978), 59–87; ‘The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism’, in Frederick Garber (ed.), Romantic Irony, (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988), pp. 43–81.
75. Ibid., KA.XVI(1981).174.1078.
76. René Bourgeois, ‘Modes of Romantic Irony in Nineteenth Century France’, in Garber (ed.), p. 119.
77. Schlegel, KA.II.182–3.116.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., KA II. 160.108.
80. Ibid., KA II.204.238.
81. Kierkegaard, p. 298.