Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  This poem is actually quoted by Frankenstein himself in Mary Shelley’s novel — it had by this point become part of the canon, and Wordsworth was an elder statesman. Mary was only nineteen years old when she wrote Frankenstein — she’d never known the world Wordsworth had been born into and was already living in a very different one. By this point, France’s monarchy had been restored, and Europe had settled into a period of extreme political conservatism. The cautious reforms that many governments had been implementing in the pre-Revolutionary period were abandoned, and the general feeling was that if you give the people an inch, they’ll take a mile. Frankenstein is typical of the new role of the gothic in this era. The early nineteenth-century horror story represents the threat of chaos, and perhaps even a repressed desire to see that chaos unleashed — to smash society, finish the job and see it all come down. This is why Tim Burton instinctively connected the gothic horror of Bride of Frankenstein with his desire to destroy his suburban surroundings. The monster himself is — like his cousin Dracula — an image of romanticism on the rampage, a terrifying, irrational force turned loose on an over-ordered world.

  But Frankenstein, with its Old Testament morality, also points to another side-effect of the Revolutionary period on the romantic imagination. The failure of the eighteenth-century dream of a society based on rational principles to materialise had been bad enough; that what had emerged had been something closer to a medieval bloodbath was enough to convince the romantics that the ideal of human perfectibility was dead in the water. Indeed, the arguments for seeing humanity as basically flawed and doomed to repeat its mistakes began to look more and more convincing — especially to those who, as Leigh Hunt had said of Mary Shelley, had ‘a tendency to look over-intensely at the dark side of human things’.2

  Mystery

  IN 1988 NICK CAVE was flying from Australia to London. It’s a long trip, and it tends to bring out the worst in people. ‘The other passengers were basically gearing up to tear my girlfriend and me to bits if we continued to go the way we were going’, he later confessed to Simon Reynolds.1 On this flight, Cave almost became a born-again Christian:

  Two days sitting on the plane and fifty bourbons later I had this young born-again advocate holding my hand and praying for me at the top of his voice.2

  To hear Cave tell it, the missionary was quite surprised to find that the evil-looking rock singer he’d just latched on to knew his Bible quite well — better, even, than the missionary.

  He started quoting things from his modern translation which I find really irritating…to find it so utterly demystified by these modern religions keen to allow people of today to understand…it really appals me.3

  People have been trying to demystify the Bible since Descartes, and during the Enlightenment, it became something of a craze. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘mystery’ Cave likes so much in his King James Bible was seen as one of those things the human race was better off without — a point of view championed by the English physicist Isaac Newton. ‘’Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and therefore to like best what they understand least’, he once wrote.4 Mysteries, for Newton, had kept people in the dark for centuries. Therefore as a scientist and a Christian he considered it his business to rationalise his religion. This was no easy task, Christianity had over the past thousand or so years accumulated a lot of strange dogma and superstition, but Newton fearlessly set about trying to strip all of this back so as to reveal the true, rational religion underneath. Miracles, of course, would have to go, as would the doctrine of the Holy Trinity — which to Newton was a sop to the superstitious pagans. He even went so far as to deny the divinity of Christ.

  The job of bringing Christianity into line with reason would continue well into the next century. This was the time during which the philosophy of Leibniz became popular. Leibniz argued that since God is all-powerful and infinitely good, he must have created our world as the best of all possible worlds. Evil, in Leibniz’s system, is thus explained as a necessary part of the greater good. This was a religious philosophy which appealed to the profoundly optimistic mood of the Enlightenment. In his famous Essay on Man, Alexander Pope wrote:

  All nature is but art unknown to thee;

  All chance, direction which thou canst not see;

  All discord, harmony not understood;

  All partial evil universal good:

  And spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite

  One truth is clear, whatever is, is RIGHT.5

  The Essay on Man did much to popularise Leibniz’s thought in both France and England. But though Pope’s verse is impeccable, his philosophy — and Leibniz’s — is full of holes. To look at the world with all its trouble and strife and say ‘it’s all good’ seems unconscionable today — and it wasn’t much better in 1732. The glibness of Pope’s brand of optimism didn’t escape the sharper eyed critics of the Enlightenment. The French philosopher and poet Voltaire mercilessly sent up the Leibnizians in his satire, Candide. Candide’s tutor, Professor Pangloss, is a metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigologist, who insists, in the face of a great deal of evidence to the contrary, that he is living in the best of all possible worlds. His philosophy makes him an idiot — worse, a shit of a human being, who won’t lift a finger to help the victims of wars or natural disasters.

  Candide had been wounded by splinters of flying masonry and lay helpless in the road, covered with rubble.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he cried to Pangloss, ‘fetch me some wine and oil! I am dying!’

  ‘This earthquake is nothing new,’ replied Pangloss; ‘the town of Lima in America experienced the same shocks last year. The same causes produce the same effects. There is certainly a vein of sulphur running under the earth from Lima to Lisbon.’

  ‘Nothing is more likely,’ said Candide; ‘but oil and wine, for pity’s sake!’6

  Voltaire, as historian Norman Davies has said, was expert at using the techniques of the Enlightenment to expose its flaws — which, in a sense, made him the ultimate embodiment of the age.7 The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, after all, insisted that the obstacle to enlightenment was not our lack of understanding, but our lack of courage in putting that understanding to work, and Voltaire was fearless in his unmasking of outmoded or useless ideas.8 He saw it as his life’s mission to clear away the accumulated junk of Western thought wherever he found it, and he hated dogma and superstition above all. But Voltaire would not abandon God, and he always believed Christianity was compatible with reason. Two decades after Newton’s death, he laid out the principles of a rational religion in his Philosophical Dictionary:

  Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible…?9

  This reasonable Christianity, this religion for the Enlightenment, is not Nick Cave’s preferred variety. Since that fateful plane trip twenty years ago, Cave has never stopped looking into his Bible. He’s quoted it in his songs and caught its grave rhythms in his prose. But he never went to it looking for glorified commonsense, or with a view to hunting down inconsistencies so as to bring them in line with reason. For Cave, a religion which has been purged of its madness, sadness and bloody-minded violence is not a religion at all; and ‘believing in things which are impossible’ — as Voltaire put it — is both an essential part of religious experience and a key requirement of his day job as a singer of love songs.

  Speaking at London’s South Bank centre in 1999, Cave insisted that the words of the Old Testament Psalms and the words of a song like Kylie Minogue’s ‘Better the Devil You Know’ are both born from the same profoundly unreasonable impulse. The love song, Cave said, ‘is a howl in the void for love and comfort, and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of their loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplica
nt petitioning his god.’ For Cave, both the love of God and romantic love are ‘manifestations of our need to be torn away from the rational, to take leave of our senses’.10

  To an eighteenth-century ear, this lecture would have exposed Cave as an ignorant superstitious goth. Cave, of course, has often been called a goth — even the ‘king of the goths’ — and just as often denied it. But if ‘gothic’ means — as it did in 1750 — irrational, superstitious and unhealthily obsessed with hellfire and damnation, then Cave is gothic to the tips of his well-tailored black suits.

  Utopia

  ‘THE TIME WILL come,’ wrote Voltaire’s colleague the Marquis de Condorcet in 1793, ‘when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master than their reason.’1 Like Voltaire, de Condorcet was a member of the society of Philosophes and a firm believer in human perfectibility. His Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind demonstrated that science and mathematics would improve every aspect of life in post-Revolutionary France, and eventually, the whole world. Population control, sexual equality, religion, law, language and love would all benefit from the application of mathematics to their specific problems, and given time, poverty, civil strife and war would become things of the past.

  As a utopian, de Condorcet firmly supported the republic, but as a liberal humanist he could not condone the execution of the king. This automatically made him a Royalist in the eyes of the Committee of Public Safety. So, even as he set down his vision of a mathematically perfectible utopia, Robespierre’s police were coming for him. He spent most of 1793 in hiding, and then tried to flee France the following year. He was caught, thrown in prison, and found dead in his cell the next morning, having taken poison.

  The Terror ensured that there would never be another period of sustained optimism like the Enlightenment. But the Philosophes’ vision of a society that works remained a powerfully attractive one for many years to come. Long after the romantic movement parted company with universal reason, works such as de Condorcet’s had become the basis for the nineteenth century’s belief in progress, which survived virtually unchallenged in the world of industry and science right up until the mid-twentieth century. Even in artistic circles, romantic gloom would occasionally give way to bursts of utopian optimism over the next two centuries. Strong traces of Enlightenment thought can be detected in the arts and crafts movement, the Vienna Secession, at the Dessau Bauhaus, among the Russian constructivists and — curiously — in London’s post-punk scene of the late ’70s.

  Like the Enlightenment itself, punk is often understood as a reaction to what came before — in this case, the grandiose mysticism of mid ’70s prog-rock. ‘We tend to keep away from the present’, said Genesis’s Steve Hackett in 1974, ‘we’re very hesitant to make any commitment to how we feel about what’s happening now.’2 Punk, on the other hand, would admit no other subject matter than ‘what’s happening now’. The lyrical abstractions of prog-rock, like the introverted navel gazing of the West Coast groups, seemed to create music with no social purpose beyond pure escapism — and the punks were adamant that music should be about more than that. In theory, if not always in practice, punk bands wrote songs about what it was really like to live on a council estate or what was in the papers or what their record company did last week. Heroic quests, mystical allegories and song cycles were banished, never to return.

  Having cleared away the useless clutter and mystical obscurantism of prog, it was now left to the groups who emerged in the wake of punk’s first wave to build a new songwriting ideal. Now, all bets were off, everything could be questioned. Gang of Four applied the Philosophes’ favourite question: ‘is it rational’ to that oldest of rock institutions, the love song, and found that it was not. Guitarist Andy Gill muses on ‘Love like Anthrax’:

  …most groups make most of their songs about falling in love or how happy they are to be in love…these groups go along with the belief that love is deep in everyone’s personality. I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love; we just don’t think what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery.3

  Like Newton, Gill has no time for mystery; mysteries keep people stupid, and the mysteries of love are no exception. When Gang of Four did write about love, they stripped off the ornament and reduced love to a social agreement or a coupling of bodies; there were no hearts and flowers, no burning fire or pure desire in these songs. Love was presented as difficult but never mysterious. In the post-punk love song, as music critic Simon Reynolds writes in Blissed Out, ‘the acknowledgement of the dark side was always grounded in progressive humanism, the belief that what was twisted could be straightened out…shadows could be banished by the spotlight of analysis.’4 According to Reynolds, punk had established the idea that ‘demystification was the road to enlightenment.’5

  Nick Cave: Moody and miserable.

  Utopiate

  IF PUNK RE-ENACTED the Enlightenment, then it was left to a ‘moody, miserable’ kid from rural Victoria to play the part of the entire romantic movement. As early as 1977, punk’s year zero, when everyone else was poring over Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord, Nick Cave started reading the Bible — the King James, of course.1

  The brutal, bitter tales of the Old Testament confirmed Cave’s suspicion that human beings are not infinitely perfectible, but born in sin and bound for hell. Cave knew at an early age he was either destined or damned — or maybe, like Napoleon, a little bit of both. As he grew older, he found that this basic fact of his personality remained unchanged, and nothing he saw after that could convince him that we come into the world as ‘lumps of dough that are later moulded by our parents and so forth’.2

  Cave’s first band, The Boys Next Door, had a hit in 1978 with a song called ‘Shivers’ — a song that the producers of Countdown refused to allow the band to perform because the lyrics mentioned suicide.3 ‘Shivers’, written by guitarist Roland S Howard, is a confessional in the early Byronic mould. The hero is detached and strangely static. He’s been thinking about suicide, but he’ll only do it if you’re watching, and if you think it’s fashionable. In the end, he remains paralysed by ennui. Howard takes up the theme with a long, plaintive guitar solo, which sounds like a lethargic replay of Pete Shelley’s famous two-note refrain in the Buzzcocks’ ‘Boredom’.

  On the day Bon Scott was buried, The Boys Next Door left Melbourne for London, changing their name on arrival to The Birthday Party. Post-punk was in full swing, and superficially, The Birthday Party fitted right in — the lopsided Magic Band guitar parts, the tribal thump of their rhythm section, their singer’s anguished, alienated squawk. At a moment when Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica represented the musical ideal, and PiL’s Metal Box the cutting edge, The Birthday Party had every reason to think their success was assured.

  But even as England learned to love The Birthday Party, The Birthday Party were learning to despise England — English bands especially. Cave quickly realised that he hated all the post-punk/new wave groups that were so heavily feted at the time. His old-fashioned sense of sin and retribution chafed badly against then-fashionable topics such as ‘personal politics’. For Cave, love was not, and could never be ‘a contract in our mutual interest’ as one Gang of Four song put it; love was madness, sorrow, despair, violence, a deeply mysterious and irrational force.

  ‘Zoo Music Girl’, the first song on the Birthday Party’s debut album is a blood-soaked ballad. ‘Oh God,’ cries Cave ‘let me die beneath her fists!’4 In ‘Wild World’ the lovers are crucified, in ‘Six Inch Gold Blade’ the singer sticks a knife in his girl’s head. We are already a long way from the world of personal politics.

  In ‘Hamlet Pow! Pow! Pow!’ Cave re-casts Shakespeare’s tragic hero as a gun-toting gangster. ‘Wherefore art thou baby face?’ he sneers (having ended up, not only in the wrong century, but in the wrong play).5 It makes perfect sense for Cave to turn Hamlet into a killer with a gun, because for the singer, the tragic Da
ne and the murderer are burdened with the same heavy load — passion that can find no outlet in society. They stand side by side in the Nick Cave pantheon with Saint Sebastian, Iggy Pop, Count Dracula, Beethoven, Dostoyevsky, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Captain Ahab, Robert Mitchum (in Night of the Hunter) and Jesus Christ.6 Cave will always side with geniuses, freaks, monsters and outcasts — as opposed to the society that could not accommodate them — because to him society is not only hateful, it’s a bad bet; doomed to fail, no matter what the positivists, empiricists and neo-Marxists try to tell you. ‘To see yourself as part of some greater humanist scheme,’ he said to Reynolds in 1988, ‘I can’t really abide by that myself. I’m someone who has very little concern with any kind of social problems, someone who’s very much concerned with their own plight.’7

  Two years, and two extraordinary albums later, The Birthday Party self-destructed — and you can hear it happen on their swansong, ‘Mutiny in Heaven’. The lyrics of ‘Mutiny’ run on from an earlier song called ‘Dumb Europe’, written with Die Haut in 1983. ‘Dumb Europe’ describes a night out in Berlin where ‘the cafes and bars still stink’. An early draft of the song features a coda, ‘Hey! Dumb Europe! Utopiate! European Utopiate!’8

  Here, Cave stands up in his ‘bleak Teutonic hole’ and calls time on the Philosophes’ dream of a heaven on earth. The perfectibility Jacques Turgot promised his eighteenth-century audience at the Sorbonne, the mathematical utopia de Condorcet was still dreaming about as Robespierre’s police hunted him down, the hope of Universal Reason Wordsworth clutched at during his crisis of 1795, where are they now? Utopia, Cave puns, is a Utopiate — a drug which has enslaved the European mind as surely as any of the crackpot dogmas it was supposed to destroy. And the positivist is a junky, on the nod in a corner while the Continent falls apart around his ears. In ‘Mutiny in Heaven’ Cave invites us to look around at dumb Europe and admit that utopia has long since turned into a slum. The place is overrun with trash and rats — and now even the rats are leaving, crawling up his arm in search of higher ground. This is never a good sign. If this is heaven, he says, ‘Ah’m bailing out!’9 But how do you get out of the modern world? Over The Birthday Party’s terrifying rumble, accompanied by a guitar that sounds like the peals of a church bell, Cave talks us through it: