Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  “Big books are big sins,” David Krell observes in his study Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche, “but big books about Nietzsche are a far more pernicious affair: they are breaches of good taste.” On the other hand, to adopt his style, to mimic his manias—who would dare? how could that be done? and would it not mean an unhealthy (certainly un-Nietzschean) submission?

  Although not a gifted linguist, Nietzsche made an exceptionally rapid advance across his chosen field, for he was offered a professorship even before he had received his degree—an unheard-of honor, and one that consoled his mother for the loss of the son she hoped would be a pastor. In short, the scholarly road was open, and Nietzsche could have been swallowed and digested by the system as easily as a raisin in bread pudding. But he had discovered Schopenhauer, and soon Wagner, the classical Greek world, was more real to him than the god of Bach, the god of his father. Nietzsche’s musical compositions were rarely esteemed, but he hammered away at the piano impressively and could lose himself in a crowd of notes, becoming as noble and energetic and poetic as they were, sweeping forward like the force of the will itself through the pure space of the spirit.

  Wagner’s pagan use of the pagan gods, his nationalism and the notion that one is best fed through one’s roots, his overwhelming oceanic style and totalitarian dream of an encompassing art, above all his depiction of even godlike life as a contest, sometimes between primitive forces, sometimes at the more sophisticated level of song itself: all these appealed mightily to Nietzsche, especially when they were as palpably embodied as they were in the composer, or so solidly set forth in the composer’s roosterlike sense of himself, where no barnyard was big enough, no walk that wide. They appealed for reasons that never reached reason, really, but, as Nietzsche himself suspected, expressed the longing that ran the length of his character—the length of his life—and essentially shaped his philosophical disposition.

  The single substance of which the world was made might have been Matter; it might have been Mind; it might have been Energy or Spirit or some biological drive to survive; but, for Schopenhauer, it was Will (believed to be Will, I think, in a reductive mood, because things were felt to be willful—whimsical, stubborn, oppressive); and when everything is Will, Will—to be Will—had to will its own enemy, an opposite with identical features, as if the right arm were to be pitted against the left. And each of us is nothing but a bit of that big Will willing its quarreling twin. Our wills build their own houses and call them bodies, just as the world’s body, at level after level, is such an objectification. Life is not suffering, exactly, although suffering is an almost inescapable consequence. In a word, life is “struggle.” In a Greek word, it was agon, the term Nietzsche would use to push aside Plato’s logos, since words were at war too. Why not?

  The most immediate of Nietzsche’s antagonists was his own body, which must have seemed an open rebellion of bones and organs, a mean and rowdy mob of ailments, altering with mood and clime, diet and exercise, capriciously coming and going in ways he could never control or reach an understanding of, although there was always the fear that his father’s madness was his mentor and his father’s death his present enemy. In Schopenhauer’s scheme, which Nietzsche for so long a time embraced, this vigorously weak self was a materialization of his own will, a self which constantly had to be overcome; but what sort of self, he had to wonder, would waylay itself like a bandit on the road?

  Aristotle’s ethics is an ethics of health, a program of biological fulfillment and perfection of function, which aims to end in a man with more soul than most—with, that is to say, more actuality, more form, more mind—the species at a particular peak. In Nietzsche’s ethics (which in some ways resembles Aristotle’s) the hunt for health is metaphorical, like the military figures that parade through his prose as though they were troops in review. The health his morality affirms has been previously despaired of, and the higher, super-, overman is not a peak but a cloud. Nietzsche’s imagery of belligerence has been discounted by some philosophers as another unfortunate case of poetry, but its metaphorical function does not make his language any less warlike, any less meant. His figures populate a dream, a dream they wish were a reality. “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,” the song says—just a figure of speech—but soon the cross that’s going on before is going off like a gun or a cannon.

  Of course, the superman doesn’t sport blue underwear: he is an artist, a saint of the lonely soul, a poet of new possibilities, a godlike creator; but never suppose that Nietzsche didn’t wish his idealized superior spirit wore jackboots and could kick in some teeth. Nietzsche’s fury is the fury of a disappointed—indeed, rejected—lover of Man, not the shrug of one who has always known Man was no bargain and not worth a baseball player’s spit; his fury is not confined to his sickroom by design; and when he compares his books to bombs, he wishes them neither to come apart harmlessly like a piñata or a handful of confetti, nor merely to alter, suddenly, the placid state of someone’s mind. He bloody well wants boom!

  How he envies Richard Wagner—the successful pariah.

  Nietzsche is forced to relinquish his professorship in Basel for reasons of health, but he has other reasons. His book The Birth of Tragedy has not been happily received by the specialists in its field: his critics see that its scholarship is unsound; that its case is based on special pleading; and for them that is its dubious originality. His students have drifted away, and disillusion—that old shade—has darkened his view of the academic life. Indeed, pursued by a clamoring throng of symptoms, he moves from hotel and inn to lodger’s little room one day, then to a gracious spa the next, as if his pain could be left behind like an overlooked sock. He suffers frequent chills and fevers, horrible headaches, cough, diarrhea, vomiting, faintness, cramp, catarrh, sleeplessness, the discomfort of hemorrhoids and shingles, anxieties that lodge themselves like sand in his eyes, so that his eyes burn and run from pain and shame and weariness until they swell shut. He is cupped and leeched and blistered. He is souped and tea’d and put on diets. He takes long walks in the company of his thoughts, and dictates to his alter ego. Occasionally a friend or woman hired for the purpose will write things down for him, but the method is awkward, and his amanuenses often have annoying habits. They jiggle their knees.

  Nietzsche’s so-called aphoristic style is partly due to the conditions of composition his manner of life forced upon him. His thought proceeds in disconnected snippets formed between distractions, or, when there is a blessed period of painless weather, in big bursts like a fragmentation grenade. Nietzsche is terse at length, and grandiosely gnomic; going on and on is natural to him, the way Zarathustra was compiled, or Human, All Too Human, by adding one more book to the book, and then another; but a volume of a thousand and one aphorisms is as odd as one of a thousand and one epiphanies. Actually, he characteristically composes in Biblical chapters, full of parables and fables, and in sentences which almost line themselves up to be numbered, as Wittgenstein’s do in his Tractatus, though, I suppose, for quite contrary reasons.

  As his heroes fail him, the way he felt Strauss and Wagner did, by selling out, and his profession seems imprisoned behind the walls of cautious, regimented scholarship; as his quarrels with his mother and his sister, because of their differing beliefs, grow more frequent and acrimonious; when his friends drift away, no longer able to bear the company of his misery, and his few enthusiastic readers, too, no longer approach him; then the habits of the solitary become even more pronounced: he writes out loud as one talks to oneself, filling the void with his voice (Zarathustra reads as if monologued to a crowd of imaginary millions). He decides to say yes, to reject Schopenhauer, at the point in his life when pessimism seems confirmed; to continue against the grain when it fills the whole field of existence. So he continues to compose, though he can’t read, can’t see his own hand. He writes when his head can scarcely hear his shouts, praising his isolation, using it to see as only an insider—outside—can see. Othe
rwise, he is in bed with a migraine or a troubled stomach, wearily riding a train, escaping skies which the clouds cross too rapidly, or ducking a persistent drizzle, an enveloping fog. He endures cold winters in stoveless corners, shrouded in sweaters, but he can barely survive enervating heat, dust, windlessness, or the glare of the sun on his sensitive eyes.

  Hyperbole is his de trope (I succumb to the temptation to say), and Alexander Nehamas’s book Nietzsche: Life as Literature demonstrates its excellence immediately with a shrewd discussion of Nietzsche’s multiple styles and his joint use of aphorism and hyperbole. Not only does the latter call out like a barker at a carnival, and even promise to reveal enticing secrets to the unsuspecting (as the sideshow may); it provokes the opposition that Nietzsche needs, because his texts, like Schopenhauer’s Will, are written into their own teeth. This expansive, inflating figure, used in conjunction with a constricting form like the aphorism, finds its scope defined and its boundaries drawn. An aphorism holds hyperbole like a balloon in its tiny fist. I would add that hyperbole, by pushing against all limits, is experimental, revealing unexpected attractions in ideas which nobody would ask to dance, uncovering hidden weaknesses in proposals which would seem to stand well enough if not pushed. “Go to women? Then take the whip!” is an exchange suspicious of itself. Exaggeration undermines. The overblown bursts. It is the correct rhetoric, all right, for an outcry in a rented room, a shout through the heart.

  Nietzsche’s chronic illness, his quicksilver intellect, his scornful attitude, his agon, yield him a very privileged point of view: a perspective on perspectives. One of his most remarkable qualities is his ability to see others as he sees himself, and then to see himself, first, as one in a mine does the ore in the earth, and then as one who breathes the dust of the roads, and then as one asway in a lofty balloon. Nietzsche praises Dionysus because Nietzsche is Apollo. He says yes because all the ordinary evidence favors no. And from the immediate weakness of his own upbringing—narrow, dogmatic, handed down—he draws his strength: an outlook that is original, wide, and free. (Not so free as not to be tethered, but tied, now, to a new tree.) Having dumped the gods, the elemental oppositions that the early Greeks employed to understand the world become checkers in his daily game. We could arrange their names in a dozen ways: forgetfulness and memory, participation and detachment, action and reflection, solitude and society, harmony and discord, sickness and health, et cetera—man and beast. And game it is. His is the only philosophy that grins.

  The concepts that engage most of Nietzsche’s commentators—the will to power, for instance, eternal recurrence, and the superman—function almost like lids, because they stop up a tendency in his thought and keep it from fully expressing itself. The genie, having worked its magic, is lured back into the bottle. Nietzsche is not a philosopher of subjects and predicates; he is a philosopher of verbs. He is not a grammarian, looking for rules, but an innovator and revolutionary who suspects syntax of many serious metaphysical sins. As a philosopher of flow, he reduces objects to the sum of their effects, denies the distinction between agency and action, and sullies every Kantian purity with his doubts and disloyalties. Like a number of other philosophers, whom he is not often believed to resemble, such as Hegel and Dewey, he hates fine lines and sharp distinctions; he habitually confuses psychology and logic; he has a smeary mind.

  Since nature has no destination, the random rules. Free will is an illusion, not because the threads of fate are spun and cut by nodding, dotty, or malicious gods, but because chance holds in its hands every absence of reins. Action, without a cause that can be counted as a reason and serve as an excuse, is as whimsically willy-nilly as any turn of the cards. Society invents both cause and agent in order to assign responsibility and indulge its vengeance.

  The argument for eternal recurrence, probably borrowed from Heine, can wear, for a time at least, a reasonable face: if the universe is made up of a finite number of indestructible elements randomly combined during an infinite space of time, then every event, and every combination of events, will certainly recur like ticks and tocks, yet more often than any watch can count. However, since Nietzsche denies the existence of elements in the ordinary sense, this argument is not of much use to him, although he employs it anyway. It is not clear what returns so eternally—in what degree of generality or in what detail: things? thoughts? courses of events? debacles? theories? crowning glories? types or cycles? my life in my favorite brown shoes—my life, as well, with a pair that’s blue?—and every other variation, including nuclear holocaust on the eighth day? or will a world arrive in which pain precedes injury, fire means smoke? one where birds will walk west in the winter? where Rome will fall first and then pick itself up to advance toward Greece? What is clear is that the river you can’t step into twice will circulate its water, its fish and its flotsam; will use and reuse its bottom and its banks; so that what passed once, and was celebrated for that fact will be back, not just twice or thrice, but thrillions of times, like a tireless loop-the-loop. Since what goes round comes round for no reason, Nietzsche treats every state of life as a culmination, an end, as if all the points our wildest arrows struck were, precisely, the bull’s-eyes aimed at. This is not easy, for he also knows that throughout all change, the world will remain full of dupes, dolts, and fools. His yes (which could have been a no to an endless wheel of meaningless suffering) has been called esthetic, since he is treating life the way one must treat—for instance—Finnegans Wake or coitus uninterruptus.

  The privileged point of view of the superman, similarly, tames what threatened to be a relativism run wild; and the same Nietzsche who marks down systems of philosophy from realities to fictions, who treats truth as an invention of predatory organizations, and regards good and evil as advertising gimmicks, dismissing free will like a faithless servant, nevertheless hires the misleading phrase “will to power” for its rhetorical effect, follows and flaunts his own truth like a fanatic, invoking it constantly in both books and letters, as well as urging fortitude, optimism, energy, honesty, and the like on all we hapless victims of circumstance, while condemning hypocrisy, willful ignorance, and every sort of cultural self-serving with the severity of a hanging judge.

  Eternal recurrence and the will to power are not the only conundrums in Nietzsche (I do think most of them are best answered with a pun), and Alexander Nehamas attacks them boldly, head on. He has a good philosopher’s handicaps, however, because Nietzsche’s ideas are principally literary and function fairly well at that level; but the ambiguities of his concepts, as we scoot across them, increase with the weight on the skate and the depth of the cut; so that, over and over again, we can see the commentator’s argument move away from the meanings of Nietzsche’s texts the way a chemical analysis of pigments must carry us past the painting they constitute. One need not always agree with the manner in which Nehamas unties Nietzsche’s tangles, or with how he harmonizes what are apparently conflicting passages, or puts up tidy fences around patches of fog, to appreciate the relative clarity of his approach and the undoubted brilliance of his results.

  Nehamas’s level of analysis is more appropriate to Nietzsche than most, but even he could profit by being obedient to the passage from The Gay Science he quotes: “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for this is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity!” The Greeks can be praised for their Apollonian pursuits (an appreciation of surfaces), because they have previously taken the Dionysian path, thus executing (as if in anticipation) one of Nietzsche’s characteristic U-turns.

  What Nehamas has done is to advance a hypothesis concerning the controlling center of Nietzsche’s thought, which, if accepted, would make marvelous sense of a great portion of what Nietzsche has written. Then Nehamas tries to show that his construction can be safely inhabited.

  Nietzsche wants to warn others against
dogmatism without taking a dogmatic stand himself. His unparalleled solution to this problem is to try consciously to fashion a literary character out of himself and a literary work out of his life. In what follows we shall examine his solution. We shall ask what is involved in the creation out of one’s own self of a literary character whose views are exclusively philosophical; what philosophical views about the world and life make this project possible; and whether the effort of turning life into literature escapes the problem of dogmatism and the necessity of turning nature against something that is also nature. [Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 137.]

  The belief that Nietzsche was willing to exchange life for language should be attractive for a number of reasons, not least of which is the habit writers have, so helpless before the big bad world, of generally doing just that. It is their version of Faust’s pact. Caught as he was in an ailing body, a body increasingly confined to a chair or bed, with a dim-eyed view from a rented room, even the painful scrawls that Nietzsche was increasingly obliged to attempt must have seemed to him shows of strength, and those features of language he felt he could control, and was healthy, alive, and at home in, a remedy for his skeptical isolation, even as he shaped, in his final work, those desperate outcries claiming greatness for himself. Ecce homo. Look in on me—upon the triumphant madness of my mind!

  Nietzsche, of course, is a classicist, and trained in linguistics. Words are the Orphic wind-eggs of his world. Then, just as the power of a line, a scene, a character, an image, or a symbol in a literary work (I am not speaking now of their psychological impact upon a reader) can be best measured by the extent to which each modifies remaining meanings (such a range and reaching out of influence being one definition of the will to power); and just as the significance of a sign depends upon its differentiating functions (according to Saussure); so does an agent disappear into the enactment of its actions, and all things, like the words which name them, find their definitions dissolving within a complex and sometimes far-reaching system of relations. Although Nietzsche is aware that “classics” are created by institutions interested in furthering their society’s cultural aims, esthetic characteristics are the only ones that seem to survive Nietzsche’s critique of conventional values. Wagner may disappoint, but music does not, nor do the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare. Not every hero has fallen, clay-footed, from his pedestal by the time Nietzsche comes to write Beyond Good and Evil. Beethoven, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer, Balzac, remain, with the sole figure of Napoleon left to represent the political, but only because Nietzsche deems him an artist, not a corporal (as if, alas! that excused this small man’s enormities). Nehamas has written a number of good pages on this.