Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  Every one of the nine stories constituting The Encyclopedia of the Dead concerns the character, corruption, and consequent fate of texts and the resulting endangerment of mind, bewilderment of heart, and debasement of the State that stem from such corruptions, as well as the advantages that accrue to politicians and their police.

  But ideas aren’t literature, any more than remarks are, or plots, or people, or noble truths, or lively lies, or Belgrade’s morose gray streets; and I would not recommend the reading of Danilo Kiš on their account, or the reading of Jane Austen either. In Kiš’s case, where the concepts are inconsequentially derivative anyway, it is the consistent quality of the local prose that counts. It is how, sentence by sentence, the song is built and immeasurable meanings meant. It is the rich regalia of his rhetoric that leads us to acknowledge his authority. On his page, trappings are not trappings but sovereignty itself. Hence it is not the plan, devious of design as it is, but its nearly faultless execution that takes away the breath and produces admiration.

  III

  NIETZSCHE: THE POLEMICAL PHILOSOPHER

  In an early, autobiographical essay, written for school, Friedrich Nietzsche recalled that he found Naumburg overly busy—dusty and indifferent as well as bewilderingly various—after the close, quiet, neighborly life of Röcken, the tiny country village where he was born. Naumburg would shrink as his own mind woke and widened, of course, but the boy could not immediately realize in what sleepy surroundings he would endure his early dreams. Over the years this decidedly Pietist community, peopled in large part by pensioners with their defensive pretensions, had lost its economic position to Leipzig, its cultural eminence to Dresden, its political boldness to repeated disappointment (even the intellectual center of the Pietist movement had shifted to Halle), and it was now so reluctant to grow or change that its population of thirteen thousand seemed to increase significantly when the three Nietzsches arrived.

  Nietzsche’s mother, having lost her husband, then their child, and somewhat at a loss herself, accepted the life of a widowed Frau Pastor with a readiness to run from any risk unusual in one still an attractive twenty-three; although, outside her husband’s household, which continued to include his mother and two sisters, she had little chance to obtain a decent livelihood. Pastor Nietzsche, who suffered from Socratic fits of abstraction and debilitating glooms, was as devoted a royalist as he was a Lutheran, recognizing, according to doctrine, the descent of divinity from God to kings. He was outraged and humiliated by the revolution of 1848, when his son’s namesake, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, bowed to the demands of an upstart rabble and, as a sign of submission, put on their rebellion’s cockade. The pastor’s brain softened, as they described such things then, and he died blind, in madness and despair, the next year.

  In death, Nietzsche’s father became what he only might have been in life: the simple good man, loved by all who knew him, whose shoes his son’s small feet would grow to fill, and whose virtuous path those feet would faithfully follow. At the age of four, Nietzsche’s future with his father was complete, but his future with his father’s eulogistic figure had just begun. In Nietzsche, “The Last Antipolitical German,” Peter Bergmann reports that in the alley behind his new home, Nietzsche more than once heard, as though in a play he had yet to read, his father’s ghostly warning voice. Of what did it warn him? Of disobedience, no doubt, although it would be more romantic to imagine that it warned him of his fate. “You are the image of your father,” his grandaunt wrote upon the occasion of his confirmation, willing the resemblance, for at sixteen he was already beginning to doubt his vocation and smudge the family likeness. Nevertheless, Nietzsche would return to Naumburg with his own madness forty years later, and there, nursed by his mother as his father had been, he would affright visitors with the hoarse howls of his increasingly ravenous and unkempt death.

  So, safely keeping to her husband’s orbit, and wearing his village pieties like a medal round her neck, Nietzsche’s mother took her son and daughter, Elisabeth, to nearby Naumburg, where the survivors, rejoining the two spinster aunts, squeezed into the grandmother’s gaunt back rooms, submitting to her regimen and rule as well, while inadvertently completing the circle of skirts which was later to account, in many minds, for the philosopher’s misogyny, and soothe if not excuse its sting.

  Like many of Nietzsche’s aversions, this one would be misunderstood. In his day, women not only carried the venereal consequences which would later infect him (as historical suspicion has it); they also bore much of the culture onward the way they bore babies; and, as the philosopher would diagnose and define their case, they had a community of ailments to show for their service. Among them the passive emotions flourished; resentment drove the buggy in which religious solace rode; misdirected energy was relieved by flashes of torpidity; female intelligence and talent went into the management of the male and the making of coquettes, shrews, majordomo mothers, humorless saints and drones. It was common knowledge that their masters—those self-designated kings of creation—could be led by the nose, if not by the penis, to whatever place it was wished to put them, and into whatever project it was desired their powers should be employed. Nietzsche clearly preferred unconventional and emancipated women like Cosima Wagner, Malwida von Meysenburg, and Lou Salomé. “Go to women?” he wrote, “Then take the whip,” but in that famous jokey photo of himself and Paul Rée, pulling a cart like a pair of oxen, it is Lou’s hand that holds the knotted rope.

  The ultimate issue is an ancient one, which Nietzsche’s hyperbolic rhetoric inflates but whose enlargement reveals a fatal equivocation. We are carried in the womb like pooches on a cushion, but after that the encounters of our wishes with the world are often as painful and damaging as the collision of cars. Sometimes we find it simpler to alter the world, bend it to our will (in which case we aspire to be masters of it, and call our knowledge of it “power”); however, we may instead find it advisable to alter ourselves, to redefine, redirect, or set aside our desires (in which case we shall seem to submit like slaves). What is critical is how correctly (and courageously) we understand our powers, and whether we are willing to generalize our condition and make a habit of our responses. If we are Stoics, we shall feel we can command nothing of the world and at best but a bit of ourselves. Tamburlaines may, for a while at least, have larger visions, more confident and grander aims. Frequently, unable to take matters into our own hands, like subtle Figaros, we manipulate the hands where matters do rest, managing ordinary men by means of bribery, blackmail, seduction, denial, and nagging; kings and queens by flattery, scheming, treachery, and petition; and the gods through priests, sacrifices, and by prayer. Our characters congeal around our choices, and our moralities make the best of it. So some of us grow up small boys, arrogant and imperious, inclined to throw tantrums when our wills are thwarted; others of us feast on renunciation, fattening our spirits until they poke from our bodies as our bones do; still others go about kowtowing to circumstances, crying that “what will be, will be,” like the reassuring chirp of birds; or we sing instead the song the sirens sang, make an art of our passivity, prepare our bodies to be as drawn on as banks, and open our legs there like a purse.

  Any observant childhood will confirm the fact that there is scarcely a crime that does not wear some virtue’s face, or a virtue that isn’t inwardly villainous. Nor is there a familiar moral quality we haven’t long found the cliché’s contempt for. In Nietzsche’s case, these were principally, and most immediately, obedience, piety, chastity, modesty, neatness, industry, sacrifice, and service. Later mercy, pity, and sympathy would be added. Bullied by benevolence, the young are routinely made victims of virtue, and it does not take them long to realize, as they are forced to internalize their obligations, what other interests these serve: that stinginess becomes frugality in straitened circumstances, that honesty is a kind of spiritual disarmament which traffics, at the same time, in the brutalities of frankness, that neatness is an enemy of history and change, or that a disd
ain for frivolity is a form of fear. The traits that gain the medal for goodness do not make their owners lively or attractive persons. It is wit and energy, quickness and sensitivity, responsiveness and enthusiasm, skill and daring, we warm to—signs of vitality, in short—not the dozens of “do nots,” however wholesomely embodied, which the authorities have thought up for their profit.

  We become Stoics (if that is where we end up) not because reality is good and relentlessly rational, but because we feel powerless to affect events and are willing to be put in our place like a knickknack on a shelf, to cover ourselves, like our eventual graves, with dust. If we have to accept what we get, why not imagine that it’s just what we want? Our early sense of the injustice of justice will soon be driven off with kicks and curses, like a stray, to be replaced by a blindfolded figure holding scales. Another scenario has us advising one reddened cheek to offer the other, since such a gesture calms the smiting palm, decreasing the slaps of our masters; and we celebrate humility and obedience for the same wise reasons of weakness. Thus—and inevitably—the strong promote programs of exercise for themselves while recommending rest to everybody else; the cerebral study chess and pretend its bloodless board is one of battle; while wimps practice patience, servility, and patriotism. Nietzsche bit our values as if they were suspicious coins and left in each of them the indentation of his teeth, because, for him, only the hard, not the soft, was genuine.

  At sixteen or seventeen, a passage like this one from Human, All Too Human will read like a truth table; or, perhaps one should say, it ought to:

  What fetters the fastest? What bonds are all but unbreakable? In the case of men of a high and select kind they will be their duties: that reverence proper to truth, that reserve and delicacy before all that is honoured and revered from of old, that gratitude for the soil out of which they have grown, for the hand which led them, for the holy place where they learned to worship—their supreme moments themselves will fetter them the fastest, lay upon them the most enduring obligation. The great liberation comes for those who are thus fettered suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: the youthful soul is all at once convulsed, torn loose, torn away—it itself does not know what is happening. A drive and impulse rules and masters it like a command; a will and desire awakens to go off, anywhere, at any cost; a vehement dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames and flickers in all its senses. “Better to die than to go on living here”—thus responds the imperious voice and temptation: and this “here,” this “at home” is everything it had hitherto loved! A sudden terror and suspicion of what it loved, a lightning-bolt of contempt for what it called “duty,” a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically erupting desire for travel, strange places, estrangements, coldness, soberness, frost, a hatred of love, perhaps a desecrating blow and glance backwards to where it formerly loved and worshipped, perhaps a hot blush of shame at what it has just done and at the same time an exultation that it has done it, a drunken, inwardly exultant shudder which betrays that a victory has been won—a victory? over what? over whom? an enigmatic, question-packed, questionable victory, but the first victory nonetheless: such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great liberation.

  In Nietzsche’s case, disillusionment (of which he became the magician in chief) seems to have been a gradual, even a gentle process, despite the “shock of recognition” just described. He is sent to Schulpforta, a fine school, where he is a successful student; his mother watches his progress with a wary but deferential eye, and his sister dotes. Adolescent ambitions, inflated dreams, a not unmerited conceit, continue into middle age. His ideas will undergo a radical change, but the metamorphosis of his emotions will be incomplete. Nietzsche offers his worship, his belief, with a youthful—though, later, a suspicious—ease, only to withdraw his injured soul as if his body has been burned. He will idolize anything—a field of endeavor, a period of history, ideas and individuals—and each with equal ardency, only to see them come up short when measured, not only against his own over-the-rainbow expectations, but against the far more agreeable standards they set for themselves and claim to meet.

  Nietzsche is headed for the clergy, of course, but he applies the critical methods of research, then popular at his school in the study of the classics, to traditional Biblical texts (much as an early hero of his, David Strauss, had done in his revisionist Life of Jesus), and with predictably catastrophic results, too, because secular techniques will secularize their object, just as the Cabalistic methods of the Deconstructionists allow their hermeneutical suspect to confess to any crime; but his disaster had its own thrill, like Samson bringing down the temple, because Nietzsche now had the inside dope, the lowdown on those high ideals, and could wear his intellectual superiority as a medal. It became difficult, in Nietzsche’s eyes, for a social form or a system of ideas to escape its origins, however hard it struggled, and this allegedly scientific, etymological method gave God’s Word a natural source, an all too human mouth.

  Although every philosopher has a hometown, time of life, and troubles, and no one is so naive as to imagine these may not intrude upon, deflect, or aim his work, philosophical ideas and their development are traditionally not supposed to stand or fall upon the character of their source or the environment of their birth, even though a knowledge of both may help us understand the philosopher’s point of view; nevertheless, Nietzsche (like Socrates) will not allow his work to be adopted like a stray dog looking for a home. Philosophical positions should not pop up like billboards along the highway (PLOTINUS IS THE ONE!) (PLATO HAS THE FORMS!), as if an ad had been sent from an agency on high, or the message were pretending to be a pronouncement of Reason itself. Nietzsche wishes to persuade us, certainly, but not to think what he has thought or write what he has written; rather, he wants us to do what he has done (an attitude shared, apparently, by the later Wittgenstein). He wants us to become an exceptional kind of self, so that our speech and writing may have an exceptional sort of source. It is a quintessentially romantic attitude.

  Most of his arguments appear in the form of parables, and much of his evidence is obtained from his profound understanding of himself as a psychological subject. It is not characteristic of philosophers to be so personal or concrete. In the passage I just quoted, we have only to measure our own rough awakening with the one it describes in order to accept or reject the account in general terms—hardly a decisive method of demonstration, yet, after all, something. David Hume, that renowned empiricist, looked into himself, by my count, only once, and failed to find an impression he could call “David”; the remainder of his evidence derives, as is so often the case, not from the sensations he esteems, but from the shortcomings of his forerunners—or forestumblers, as they always turn out to be. Nietzsche is neither genially sloppy in the gentlemanly-English and cultivated-amateur manner, nor ponderously solemn and cloudy in the professorial-German style. Is he, in fact, a philosopher at all? Perhaps he is a kulturkritik.

  Some of the sophists peeved Plato; there is no doubt about it. Envy and malice and petty spite are not unknown among philosophers, who have aimed many a low blow at one another, made snide remarks, and written splendidly caustic pages. F. H. Bradley and George Santayana were two of our better mudslingers. But their sense of disgust or superiority—Bradley’s toward Mill, for instance—is not a functional part of their philosophy. Having exposed the shallowness of Mill’s mind by traditional philosophical arguments (presumably), Bradley then paddles the puddle as if it were an errant pupil’s backside. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is anger and outrage; he wants to hear idols break; he wants to cry out, as Amos did, that “God spits upon your sacrifices!” People are to wake up to the pain of their oppression, the shame of their exploitation; they are to understand the campaigns of hypocrisy being waged against them; they are to stop following false prophets, and listen to Zarathustra. Passion, not thought alone, inks his pages. Dismay, exasperation, anger, outrage, disgust, humiliation, disappointment: they fuel his philosophy, and
it is little without them. Exhilaration, joy, exuberance, excess: they feed it too. How he hates being duped, being lied to. Especially by himself. How he loves life when his headaches will let him.

  So to write about Nietzsche, as is naturally and normally done, in a scholarly, sobersided manner, analytically, striving for cool clarity and academic understanding, or unhistorically, as if ideas were blossoms which never saw stems, is already to deny him his claims and fall foul of his criticisms. To write about him in the Germanized French fashion now popular, or to Heideggerize him, is to tarnish his gleam and cover his confusions with confusion. The very pomposities he punctured now surround him with an atmosphere of self-serving artifice.

  Gilles Deleuze, for instance, in an essay anthologized by David Allison (The New Nietzsche), writes about Nietzsche in a style at once pretentious and barbaric:

  The Eternal Return is the being of becoming. But becoming is double: becoming-active and becoming-reactive, as well as the becoming-active of reactive forces and the becoming-reactive of active forces. Only becoming-active has any being; it would be contradictory for the being of becoming to be affirmed by a becoming-reactive—that is, by the becoming that is itself nihilistic.