5
Decadent Deeds and Redemptive Satire
Once in a while we harvest love and honour for deeds or works which we have long since cast from us like a skin: and then we become easily tempted to play the comedians of our own past and throw the old hide once again over our shoulders. (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 393)
Having affected the ‘artistic distance’ of the ‘transcendent buffoon’ and the art of mocking self-reflection, Zarathustra is now able to ‘look down upon himself and laugh and weep over ‘the hero no less than the fool’ (GS.107) performing in the drama of his soul. But a performance is all it is. For if, in Part IV, the rebirth of tragedy as tragi-comedy (prefigured in the parable of the ropedancer) is finally realized, the Dionysian wisdom that speaks through the mask of Apollo is intrinsically tragic. ‘Dionysian wisdom […] is an unnatural abomination [… and he] who by means of his knowledge plunges nature into the abyss of destruction must also experience in himself the disintegration of nature’ (BT.9). It is precisely the fragmentary nature of Zarathustra’s psyche and its dramatic attempts at reintegration that is staged in Part IV. But Zarathustra’s past is so poignant and his old hide so well-preserved that the ‘comedian’, like the circus clown, remains more tragic than comic.
Burdened by the past and driven by the ‘spirit of revenge’ (Z.II.20), ‘the cruel wheel of [Zarathustra’s] restless, morbidly lascivious conscience’ (GM.III.20) backtracks along the irreversible rut of time. Time’s gateway is Janus-faced,137 and if that aspect facing the forward-looking traveller bears the inscription ‘Moment’ (Z.III.2.1), then that facing the backward-looking traveller bears the epitaph ‘It was’ (Z.II.20). Unable to reverse the past, Zarathustra rehearses it, albeit with harrowing consequences. For while the hearse known as memory stages the passion play, its ‘rolling Ixionian wheel’138 cleaves ever-deeper the rut of recollection. Recalling the ‘accidents’ of his past, Zarathustra recycles them into a tragi-comic satire: ‘[for] that is all my art (Dichten) and aim, to compose (dichten) and gather into one what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident’ (ibid.). The repetition here of ‘dichten’ underscores Zarathustra’s aesthetics139 of redemption, that is, his attempt to resurrect (re-present) the past by refashioning (re-casting) the bloody spectres of illusory truth and passionate regret into parodic higher men; for it is ‘only artists, and particularly those of the theatre [… who] have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes […] the art of staging ourselves in front of ourselves. Only in this way can we get over some of the base details in ourselves’ (GS.78).
Self-Contempt and Self-Pity
At the start of Part IV, we find Zarathustra still convalescing in his alpine sanatorium and still being ministered to by his two assiduous sick-nurses. We are to infer from Zarathustra’s white hair and ‘dark’ looks that his convalescence has been a long and melancholy one. The seemingly terminal illness from which he is suffering is the decadence of ‘modern culture’ – ‘Who of us has not dirtied his hands and heart in the disgusting140 service of the idols of modern culture? Who is not in need of the waters of purification?’ (UM.IV.1) – while nausea and pity at the sight of modern man are the persisting symptoms which preclude his long-awaited return to society. Long years of solitude, away from ‘the madhouses and hospitals of culture […] away from the nauseating stench of inner corruption and the hidden infestation of disease’, have shielded Zarathustra from his ‘great disgust at man’ but not, as we are soon to discover, against his ‘great pity for man’ (GM.III.14). His nausea at the thought of the ‘eternal recurrence of even the smallest of men’ (Z.III.13) – the cause of his initial breakdown -has, with the healing powers of ‘active forgetfulness’ (GM.II.1) and the passage of time, abated considerably; old age has dimmed the sickening memory of the ‘all-too-human’ pride and complacency of the ‘last man’ (Z.Prol.5), and his former ‘contempt for man’ (A.38) has now mellowed into pity.141
This mellowing process has been artificially accelerated by a superabundance of ‘honeyed’ illusion – produced by the ‘Apollonian artifice’ (BT.22) of ‘transfiguring mirrors’ (BT.3) – administered to Zarathustra by his complaisant eagle and serpent. But, in the same way that Dionysus would find a surfeit of ‘honey offerings’142 (Z.IV.1) cloying and ultimately indigestible, Zarathustra finds his increasing dependence upon ‘hermit-phantasmagoria’ (HH.I.Pref.2) – the ingenious artwork of ‘hermits’ pets’ (Z.IV.1) – a morally insupportable burden. Paradoxically, weighty illusion is Zarathustra’s ‘specific gravity’ (GS.V.380). Thus, in response to his animals’ facetious question, ‘Do you not lie in a sky blue lake of happiness?’ Zarathustra wryly remarks upon the aptness of their metaphor,143 knowing, of course, that they ‘also know that my happiness is heavy and not like a rolling wave (flüssige Wasserwelle): it oppresses me and will not leave and acts like molten pitch’ (Z.IV.1).
Having ‘murdered all gods […] for the sake of morality’ (GS.153), Zarathustra is left with the once nauseating but now pitiful sight of unregenerate and diminutive man. In this indiscriminate “reduction” of man (‘The greatest all-too-small!’), self-identification is inescapable: the pity which Zarathustra feels for man – a form of Schopenhauerian compassion engendered by empathic identification144 – morally compels him to hold the fool’s mirror up to his own face. There he sees self-contempt mingled with self-pity. ‘Through knowing ourselves and regarding our own nature as a moving sphere of opinions and moods, and consequently learning to despise oneself, we restore our proper equilibrium with others’ (HH.I.376); contemptuous pity for man turns into pitiful self-contempt and his fool-reflection grows ever darker. ‘Upon the best personalities of our time,’ writes Nietzsche in his early essay ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, ‘there lies a certain gloominess and torpor, an eternal frustration over the struggle between dissimulation and honesty which is being fought out in their breast, an uneasy self-confidence – whereby they become totally incapable of being signposts and at the same time taskmasters for others’ (UM.III.2).
Signposts and Gravestones
Discomforted by the ill-fitting masks of prophet (taskmaster) and ‘individual higher exemplar’ (UM.III.6) (signpost), and torn between the fool’s mirror and his animals’ ‘transfiguring mirror’, Zarathustra disingenuously employs the latter’s reflection of fraudulent happiness as ‘bait’ for the ‘queerest fish’ (signposts and taskmasters are necessarily strange and untimely creatures) that he hopes to catch in the ‘rich sea’145 of humanity (Z.IV.1).146 But, without the self-confidence injected by his sick-nurses, and their imperial (‘a thousand year empire’ ibid.) art of metaphysical comfort, the signpost bearing the name Zarathustra loses its exemplary sense of direction and remains but a sign: ‘a question mark for such as have the answers’ (DD ‘The Fire-Beacon [Feuerzeichen]’). This question mark is the fish-hook of ‘irritable honesty’ (GS.107) which had long ago cast up its answers from the tumultuous sea of life and which now confines itself to Zarathustra’s ‘sorrowful, black’ (Z.III.1) inland sea. As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm: such as have the answer will be reeled in and closely scrutinized. Their rare and splendid brilliance will be marvelled at and admired, but in the final analysis these ‘fairest human fish’ will be deemed all-too-nauseatingly-human and cast out once again into ‘the belly of all black affliction’ (Z.IV.1).
In these dirty waters of truth (Z.I.13), Zarathustra’s fish-hook of integrity discovers no ‘historical future [of] paradise regained’,147 but of paradise irredeemably lost. Buried deep within him lies Zarathustra’s ‘grave-island’ (Z.II.11), the land of his father and forefathers: ‘the land of [modern] culture’ (Z.II.14).
On this deathly island, Zarathustra finds neither ‘creators’ nor ‘harvesters’, merely ‘the graves of [his] youth’ (Z.II.11). But whereas, in Part II, he made a pilgrimage to this sacred land and, ‘as life and youth, sat there upon yellow grave-ruins, hoping’ (ibid.); and, in Part III, painfully recalled how such hope had later turned into despair and his ‘sighs sat upon all human graves and could no longer rise up’ (Z.III.13); in Part IV, Zarathustra ironically reflects upon his folly.148 As his ‘irritable honesty’ had turned his contempt for man into self-contempt, it had also redirected his magnanimity away from ‘the [afterworldly] convalescent [who] glances tenderly at his illusions and, at midnight, creeps around the grave of his god’ (Z.I.3), towards his own graveyard vigils when he too had cast ‘loving glances’ at the all too fleeting ‘visions and apparitions of his youth’ (Z.II.11).
Self-Knowledge and Self-Parody
Zarathustra is ‘a hero of his time’ and, like Lermontov’s hero, is a portrait ‘not of a single person’ but rather ‘of the vices of [his] whole generation in [its] ultimate development.’149 As one of those ‘who have to be the conscience of the modern soul and as such have to possess its knowledge, in whom all that exists today of sickness, poison and danger has come together – whose lot it is to have to be sicker than any other individual because [they] are not “only individuals”’ (HH.II.Pref.6), Zarathustra can either, like Pechorin, succumb to the poison or, like the ‘transcendent buffoon’, struggle to rise above it. Unlike Pechorin, however, the “hero” of Part IV of Zarathustra – like all great men, a ‘genuine child of his time’ (UM.III.3) – is not only acutely aware of his cultural vices, as symbolized by his higher men, but, by employing this self-knowledge as material for malicious and relentless self-parody (GS.Pref.1), is able ‘to skin, exploit, expose [and] “portray”’(HH.II.Pref.6) the afflicitions of his time from which he so keenly suffers.
A compassionate contempt like that which characterizes Zarathustra’s state of mind in Part IV is born, according to Hume, of a not unlikely coupling: ‘the misfortunes of our fellows often cause pity, which has in it a strong mixture of good-will. This sentiment of pity is nearly allied to contempt, which is a species of dislike, with a mixture of pride.’150 Like Lear’s exuberant, dancing and childish Fool, Zarathustra playfully mocks the folly of his master(s). But his ‘simultaneous commitment to exalted visions and to a renegade impulse which mockingly dissolves them’,151 forces Zarathustra both to scorn the ghosts of his ‘dead companions’ who haunt the manifold ‘hiding places’ (Z.IV.2) within his soul, and to offer them indefinite ‘refuge’ (Z.IV.6) there.
Possessing a soul which thirsted to experience ‘the entire range of values and desiderata to date’ and to sail around ‘all the coasts of this ideal “mediterranean”’; a soul which wanted to know ‘from the adventures of his own most authentic experience how a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal feels, like [for example] an artist, a saint, a legislator, a wise man, a scholar, a pious man, a soothsayer, and an old style divine esoteric’; Zarathustra had sailed for many years in the company of the ‘Argonauts of the ideal’ (GS.V.382). Zarathustra’s pilgrimage in Part IV recounts, and to a certain extent relives, this voyage. The higher men whom Zarathustra encounters – the soothsayer, the two kings (legislator), the conscientious man of spirit (scholar), the sorcerer (artist), the last pope (pious man), the ugliest man (wise man), and the voluntary beggar (saint) – are in small part caricatures of those cultural figures whom Zarathustra has at some time ‘honoured and revered’, and in large part allegorical representations of the decadent values and nihilistic ideals which these figures body forth and which continue to take refuge in the innermost recesses of Zarathustra’s soul.
In short, Zarathustra himself becomes the ‘monster of parodic material’ which finally attracts him, and which he transforms, if not transfigures, into a ‘downright wicked and malicious’ (GS.Pref.1) self-portrait. Unlike most self-portraits, however, Zarathustra accomplishes his own by means of not one mirror but a series of ‘ghostly’ mirrors (namely, his seven higher men and his shadow), the shadowy outlines of which he fleshes out in the primary colours of self-knowledge, for ‘the great poet dips only from his own reality.’ (EH ‘Why I am so clever’ 4).152
137. Like the two aspects of Zarathustra’s psyche: the madman who looks behind and the prophet who looks ahead.
138. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lucretius, 1. 260.
139. Notwithstanding the promissory note sounded in the title of Alexander Nehamas’ book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (London: Harvard University Press, 1985); the particular relevance of Nietzsche’s partially autobiographical work Zarathustra; and Nehamas’ central interpretative claim concerning ‘Nietzsche’s effort to create an artwork out of himself (p. 8); this aspect of what Nehamas refers to as Nietzsche’s ‘aestheticism’ is poorly argued and, with the exception of Ecce Homo, lacks persuasive textual support. His correlative claim that Nietzsche showed not only ‘that writing is perhaps the most important part of thinking’, but ‘also the most important part of living’ (p. 41), is implicitly refuted by Nietzsche himself in UM.III.3, GS.93 and BGE.296. For a convincing rejection of Nehamas’ anachronistic ascription to Nietzsche of a specifically post-modern form of aestheticism whereby one looks at the world ‘as if it were a literary text’ (Nehamas, p. 3), see Brian Leiter, ‘Nietzsche and Aestheticism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, (2 April 1992), 275–90.
140. This adjective (widerlich) is absent from Hollingdale’s translation.
141. White also notes the absence of disgust from the Zarathustra of Part IV, but attributes this to Zarathustra’s transformation at the end of Part III: ‘After embracing the thought of the eternal recurrence, Zarathustra can pass by even the rabble’ (p. 103). As will become apparent in the chapters which follow, however, the Zarathustra of Part IV not only fails to ‘pass by’ his higher men – all of whom, despite their eminence, harbour within themselves rabble values – but actively pities them.
142. In Greek mythology, honey is the food of the gods.
143. Given the collusion of hermit and hermit’s pets, the latter well know how the former ‘like to sit in the abyss below a perfectly clear sky: they need different means than other men for enduring life; for they suffer differently (namely, as much from the profundity of their contempt for man as from their love for man). – The most suffering animal on earth invented for itself – laughter’ (KSA.11.576).
144. Schopenhauer, p. 295.
145. Sea traditionally represents the ‘primordial waters; chaos; formlessness; material existence; endless motion; it is the source of all life, containing all potentials; the sum of all possibilities in manifestation; the unfathomable’. It also symbolizes ‘the sea of life which has to be crossed’ (Cooper, p. 121). In other words, the sea represents the locus of the will to power.
146. Bennholdt-Thomsen points out that this image of Zarathustra as the fisher of men is ‘less like the disciples of Jesus (Mark 1:17) than the philosophical fisher in Lucian’s Fisherman’. See Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nietzsches Also sprach Zarathustra als literarisches Phänomen – Eine Revision (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1974), p. 128.
147. Erich Heller, ‘Zarathustra’s Three Metamorphoses: Facets of Nietzsche’s Intellectual Biography and the Apotheosis of Innocence’ in The Importance of Nietzsche (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 83.
148. ‘Folly is an endless maze, / Tangled roots perplex her way, / How many have fallen there! / They stumble all night over bones of the dead, / And feel they know not what but care, / And wish to lead others, when they should be led’. Blake, Songs of Experience, ‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard’.
149. Mikhail Lermontov, ‘Author’s Preface’ to A Hero of Our Time, trans. Paul Foote (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), p. 19.
150. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section VI, Part II:202, footnote 1.
151. Morton Gurewitch’s depiction of the ironist, cited in D C Muecke, The Compass of Irony, p. 186.
152. Cf. ‘Painting in writing. – An object of significance will be best represented if, like a chemist, one takes the colours for the painting from the object itself, and then uses them like a painter: so that the portrayal is allowed to grow out of the boundaries and shadings of the colours. Thus the painting will acquire something of the ravishing element of nature which makes the object itself significant’ (HH.I.205).