Literature and the Gods

III. Incipit parodia

Of the ideas that were to fashion the twentieth century in ways for the most part disastrous, one that stands out above the others, so far-reaching and indeed immense were its consequences, is the idea of the good community, where relationships between individuals are strong and a powerful solidarity is founded on common feeling. Nazi Germany was the most drastic manifestation of this idea, Soviet Russia the most long-lived and territorially vast. And the world is still full of those who will champion this idea. Why is the phenomenon so tenacious? On what does it depend? First and most crucially, as is ever the way, on a desire: many still feel that a community, any community, in the sense of a group — be it the merest criminal association — where much is held in common and where ties between individuals are meaningful, is the ideal place to live. So intense is their desire to live in such a community that the reasons for and nature of those ties hardly seem important. What matters is that they be strong and close-knit. And this when all the evidence before us should at least prompt us to inquire: might there not be something pernicious in the very idea of community, at least when it manifests itself, as has frequently been the case, in a world where technology has extended its grip over the whole planet? This is the crux of the matter: are community and technology somehow incompatible? Not in the sense that a community cannot be established in a technology-driven world — we know all too well that it can — but in the sense that once established, such a community can only lead to results that are radically different from those originally intended.

The question is an urgent one and demands a response, if only because such responses as it gets can prevent or precipitate one of the many massacres someone is forever on the brink of perpetrating. Each one of these disasters comes fitted out, like some grotesque puppet, in peculiarly local dress and regional arguments; but once the many vernaculars have been translated into the lingua franca, the question is always the same, so much so that it has now invaded a vast area of our field of vision. It’s an ancient question, whose beginnings, as Italo Calvino once slyly remarked, swing back and forth, according to one’s point of view, “between the end of the Paleolithic and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.” And it’s a question that has to do with the whole. Clumsy as it may be, the word “globalization” at least has the merit, constructed as it is around the word “globe,” the largest conceivable whole, of being symptomatic. Now, communities conceived as a whole — or “holistic societies,” as Louis Dumont referred to them — have been the norm in the history of humanity, in all its phases and all its many forms, while the society based on technology stands out as an extraordinary novelty. Here all kinds of equivocations raise their heads: on the one hand, it would be absurd to blame community, as such, for the terrible crimes that plagued the last century; on the other hand, one cannot help wondering whether the traditional criticisms leveled at the technological society — that it fragments and atomizes, leaving people rootless and alienated — are not in fact aimed at a false target, or at least at something that is no more than a façade. Meanwhile behind that façade another powerful holistic machine is at work, a machine as big now as the planet itself and intent on weaving together a community, exclusive of all others, yet capable of accommodating all those others within itself like so many Indian reservations, some of them seething with natives and vast as subcontinents. It will be obvious that in some respects this new entity is radically different from those that came before it. Here for the first time the natural world is no longer that which surrounds and encloses a community, but that which is itself enclosed. As in China the park of the Son of Heaven is home to examples of every kind of living creature, but only as samples and emblems, so the Earth is now no longer the place “on which the altar is circumscribed,” but has itself become that circumscribed place whence the materials for our experiments can be collected. No one knows now how to invoke it so that “dressed in Agni [Fire] the black-kneed Earth” might make us “resplendent, keen.” And no one could now claim to recognize in its fragrance the same scent “that at the marriage of Sury? Daughter of the Sun, impregnated the immortals on the edge of the times.” It was then that “as a horse frees itself from dust, the Earth shook off the peoples who had dwelt on her since her birth.” Those motes of scattered dust now have the earth in their grip, yet have almost forgotten how to caress the body of the “golden breasted” woman to whom they long clung as parasites. This new and boundless community is governed by rules based on phantoms and procedures — rules no less binding than those of ancient communities. Before such an all-embracing power could establish itself, a coup d’état had to take place, a long and extremely slow coup d’état by which the brain’s analogical pole was gradually supplanted by the digital pole, the pole of substitution, of exchange, of convention, on which are based both language itself and the vast network of procedures in which we now live. This phenomenon, at once psychic, economic, social, and logical, is the consequence of a revolution that has been going on for thousands of years, and is still going on: the one truly permanent revolution we know of. Its Zeus is the algorithm. From this revolution all else follows. Yet it is a process still largely unrecognized, and perhaps we cannot even hope to recognize it in its entirety, since we are still immersed in it — submersed, even. In which case the questions we should be asking lie elsewhere: Is the technological community compatible with itself? Or will it be overwhelmed by the very process that brought it into being?

Certainly whoever it was who wrote the short text that usually goes by the name The First Systematic Program of German Idealism could hardly have been thinking of all this. Was it Schelling? Or Hegel? People still argue the point. The manuscript has been dated at around 1797 and was found among Hegel’s papers and in his handwriting. In any event, whether Schelling or Hegel, the author was struck by an idea that he not unreasonably declared to be new: “I shall speak of an idea that so far as I know of has never occurred to anyone before: we must have a new mythology.” Now then, this idea belongs to the vast web of implication that spreads out from the word “community”—a fact that did not escape the unknown author, who continued thus: “So long as we are unable to make our ideas aesthetic, which is to say mythological, they can be of no interest to the people.” There it is, the fatal word “people,” a word that is no more than a stronger formulation of the more subdued “community.” The assumption looks forward to the premise Nietzsche would one day announce in characteristically peremptory tones: “Without myth every civilization loses its healthy and creative natural force: only a horizon drawn by myths can hold together a process of civilization in a single unit.”

Like a whisper, or a light-footed messenger, the idea of the “new mythology” would set out from this obscure manuscript buried in Hegel’s papers to visit other minds. Friedrich Schlegel’s, for example. A few months later, on the pages of the Athenaeum, he would be writing: “We don’t have a mythology. But I am telling you: we are about to have one, or rather, for a long time now we have been working hard to produce one.” As so often, Friedrich Schlegel is displaying a remarkable effrontery here: true, the essential question is briefly illuminated, but immediately the mind is obliged to go a step further and ask: can one really “work hard to produce” a mythology, in the way one might produce a literary review? There is something strident in the words, but Schlegel doesn’t want to dwell on that. Nobly ebullient as his concepts become increasingly vague, he goes on: “The new mythology must be elaborated from the most profound depths of the spirit; it must be the most artistic of all works of art, since it will have to embrace all others, be a new riverbed and recipient for the ancient eternal and original spring of poetry, and be itself the infinite poem that contains hidden within it the germ of all other poems.” The final thrust runs as follows: “You may smile, perhaps, at this mystic poetry and the disorder that such a throng and profusion of poetry would produce. But the supreme beauty, nay, the supreme order, is still and only the beauty of chaos, and to be precise of a chaos waiting only for the contact of love to open out into a world of harmony, like the world of ancient mythology and ancient poetry. For mythology and poetry are one and the same, indivisible.” More than a critic, Friedrich Schlegel was a formidable literary strategist. He had a talent for the impetuous and ambiguous — the which he deployed so as to illuminate one way forward while obscuring a great many others. One day it would be plain that that way was in fact the chosen path toward a literature Schlegel himself was born not to practice but to prophesy — something that I shall be calling absolute literature.

There was no solid theory to what Schlegel was suggesting. His comments more closely resemble a lightning military strike than a piece of reasoning. People must be made to accept an act of appropriation. The whole of mythology was brusquely annexed to poetry. Henceforth the gods would no longer be mere inert material dragged out of rhetoric’s warehouse to decorate the friezes and pediments of neoclassicism, but the very stuff and spring of literature itself. And, like a gambler who keeps on raising the stakes, Schlegel adds: there is no question of speaking of just the one mythology, for “insofar as they are profound, beautiful, and wise, the other mythologies must also be reawakened to hasten the formation of the new mythology.” This is the decisive move: to rend the heavens to the East and let a swarm of unknown divinities settle on the European scene with the same rights as the Olympians: “Oh, that the treasures of the Orient were as accessible to us as those of classical Greece! What new springs of poetry might flow to us from India if only some German artists with the universality, the depth of comprehension, the genius of translation that is naturally theirs, could take advantage of the opportunity that this ever more brutal and obtuse nation little knows how to seize. It is in the East that we must look for the Romantic supreme.” This sentence was indeed the reckless supreme of the Romantic endeavor. But the Romantics would never get to the Orient. Rather, they were themselves the Orient of Europe, an Orient whose music rang out on piano keys. The Orient in the literal sense remained far away and was allowed to filter through only with prudence. But this should hardly surprise us: it is still far away today and continues to provoke an unspoken fear whenever its texts and images are approached. Not that Schlegel didn’t make an honest attempt: a few years after the piece in Athenaeum and having taught himself some Sanskrit, he was to publish a book called On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians. And yet we find too little in those pages to justify such an ambitious title, and only as a nostalgic farewell does Schlegel allow himself, in passing, as it were, the fine definition of mythology as “the densest weave of the human spirit.” This sudden paralysis of an otherwise febrile mind can be attributed to a hidden motive that we haven’t as yet touched on: there is a perennial duplicity in the early Romantics whenever they talk of the gods, the myths and mythology. At first the subject had been presented in purely literary terms: the gods and the mythological fabric around them (only the ancient gods? only the Greek? or the modern as well? and the Oriental too?) offered the possibility for a grandiose reshuffling of the literary pack. It was as if forms left barren by the Enlightenment were longing to take in these divine guests, not just as ornamental walk-ons now, but in all the fullness of their powers. At the same time it was clear to everybody that evoking the gods meant evoking the communities that had celebrated their cults. So the Romantics looked around outside their small kingdoms, countries thrown into turmoil by the Napoleonic whirlwind, and couldn’t find anything that would serve their purpose. Neither the society that was falling apart nor the one that seemed ready to form had anything to do with those antique communities that had experienced the adventures of the gods in the Mysteries, or, at the end, in that ceremony that was Greek tragedy. At which point Romantic eloquence ran dry. They drew back as if afraid of being surprised by the police, and chose to let a convenient curtain come down upon the scene. Speculations about the “new mythology” soon petered out.

All the same, a fuse had been lit and would continue to burn, winding slowly and tortuously back and forth for the whole century. The sulphurous smell of that fuse was strongest round one name in particular: Dionysus. Last of the Olympians, a foreigner, an Oriental, a dissolver of ties, Dionysus set foot in Germany after a long absence from Europe, an absence that stretched back to the times of Pico and Ficino, Poliziano and Botticelli in a Florence where he was worshiped as the god of mysteries and divine rapture. All those centuries ago the memory of one plain and cutting remark of Plato’s had been enough to get the god’s cult going: “Madness is superior to temperance [sophrosýnē], because the latter has a merely human origin, while the former belongs to the divine.” The Germany of the early nineteenth century, however, was a great deal more shy and prudish, so much so that the illustrious translator of Homer Johann Heinrich Voss rendered the “nocturnal orgies” of Dionysus as his “light entertainments.”

How much more astonishing, then, is the naturalness with which Dionysus turns up in the poetry of Hölderlin. At the beginning of “Brot und Wein” it is the night that takes our breath away, in eighteen lines all in the present tense. Rarely has the pure power of naming showed itself so very clearly. Then from the isthmus of Corinth comes Dionysus, “the god who arrives unexpected.” And this time he’s not the last god, but the penultimate; he comes before him who “brought to completion and closed, consoling, the celestial feast.” The last, unnamed, is Christ. Such an exalted and silent concentration of the divine is not easily borne. Withdrawing it from man is an ironic act of grace on the part of the gods:

Denn nicht immer vermag ein schwaches Gefäss sie zu fassen, Nur zu Zeiten erträgt göttliche Fülle der Mensch.

As a weak vase isn’t always able to receive it, Only at intervals can man bear divine fullness.

So, no sooner was he back than the “advent god” had to go into hiding again, in the form the gods had come to prefer: among the pages of scholars. And, if possible, of scholars under fierce attack from those of their colleagues who were always ready to smell out the menacing footprint of the god in a forest of texts and, like Pentheus at Thebes, stop him getting through. In 1808, still grieving over the suicide of his beloved Karoline von Günderode, Friedrich Creuzer published, in Latin, his Dionysus, which he opened by saying that in the “almost infinite” multitude of the Greek fables, “ulla unquam tarn late patuit, quam illa, quae per Bacchicarum rerum amplissima spatia ducit”—“none underwent such a huge expansion as the story of the Dionysiac adventures, that takes us across vast spaces.”

And immediately he pays homage to the vast Dionysiaca of the poet Nonnus, a work that for centuries had lain “situ squaloreque obsita,” “covered in dirt and debris.” As if to insinuate that since ancient times the name Dionysus had been the object of a Western conspiracy that sought to suppress, through him, any influence from the East.

Other links would be added to this chain of erudite men: Joseph Görres, in whose Amazonian exuberance myth surfaces like the ruins of a sunken world; K. O. Müller, who died of sunstroke in Greece after having introduced the term “chthonian” into classical studieS, as though until then Winckelmann’s gods had had no contact with the soil — and even less with the subsoil where Hades reigns: “But Hades and Dionysus are the same god,” said Heraclitus. And finally there is the visionary Bachofen, who discovered the most menacing Dionysus of all, the Dionysus who is in league not only with the East but with female sovereignty too.

Until one day — June 18, 1871, to be precise — a young professor at Basle University, one Friedrich Nietzsche, went into the library and borrowed both Creuzer’s Symbolik and Bachofen’s Gräbersymbolik. He was close to finishing The Birth of Tragedy. Through that book, Dionysus was preparing to burst out onto a stage which now amounted to the whole world.

Only in Nietzsche do the gods reappear with an intensity comparable to that we find in Hölderlin. From The Birth of Tragedy to The Dithyrambs of Dionysus, and the last “notes of madness,” we sense the vibration of something like the same pathos, assuming, that is, that we use the word “pathos” in the way Aristotle meant it, as a technical term which describes what happens in the Mysteries where “ou matheîn ti deîn, allà patheîn kaì ” —“one must not learn but suffer an emotion and be in a certain state.”

Unlike their contemporaries, Hölderlin and Nietzsche didn’t write about the Greeks; rather, from time to time they could themselves become Greeks. The opening of a hymn of Hölderlin’s immediately makes one think of certain opening lines in Pindar. In Nietzsche’s notebooks we find fragments that might easily be attributed to one of the pre-Socratics, or to Plotinus perhaps — like this one which was written early in 1871: “In man primordial oneness turns towards itself, looking through appearance: appearance reveals essence. Which means: primordial oneness looks at man — to be precise, at the man who is looking at appearance, the man looking through appearance. For man there is no way toward primordial oneness. He is all appearance.”

Beyond Schopenhauer, this passage gestures toward the ultimate mystery of Eleusis: the double gaze that binds Hades to Kore, the girl who is the pupil, the gaze or look that observes the person looking — and opens up every secret knowledge. Likewise the form of this fragment — all a play on the verb “to look,” schauen—makes one think more of a Neoplatonist than of a soldier of Bismarck’s, which is what Nietzsche had just been, albeit in the role of a nurse.

In those tempestuous days Nietzsche was convinced, as time and again he wrote in his notebooks — that, like tragedy in ancient Greece, myth was about to be reborn “from the spirit of music.” Here “music” must be understood as a synonym for Richard Wagner. All one had to do, then, was recognize it, since “in the presence of music we behave as the Greek behaved in the presence of his symbolic myths.” Result: “Thus music has generated myth once again for us.” Music was the amniotic fluid needed to protect an obscure process, thanks to which we would once again be able to “feel mythically.” And here the recurrent dream of the good community would lead Nietzsche to make a fatal mistake. Section 23 of The Birth of Tragedy is entirely given over to the claim that if “the gradual reawakening of the Dionysiac spirit in today’s world” was to be magically brought about by Wagner’s music, then its true subject would be the “German nature,” a euphemism behind which the German nation was barely concealed. The reference here is no longer to the Mysteries but to the theatre of European politics, where Germany is being spurred on, albeit with lofty words, to assert its hegemony: “And if the German should look around, hesitant, in search of a guide to lead him back to that long lost homeland, to which he has almost forgotten the path, the road — let him listen to the wonderfully alluring call of the Dionysiac bird, who hovers over him and will show him the way that leads in that direction.”

But the ardent decisiveness of these proclamations was complicated, in Nietzsche, by his awareness that the Germany of his time was headed in exactly the opposite direction. While he was writing The Birth of Tragedy, sketching out the shape of a civilization that had been radically renewed, Nietzsche was also preparing The Future of Our Schools, the most formidable attack ever launched on what is the foundation of the modern conception of culture: education. Nietzsche’s premise was that the very institution that ought to represent the culture of the time in its most severe and exemplary form — the illustrious German high school — in fact bore witness to a “growing barbarity in the duties assigned to culture.” Behind the progressives’ mirage of a “generalized culture,” Nietzsche saw only the ferocious determination of the state — and first and foremost the German state — to breed reliable employees. “The factory rules,” he noted, summing up the century to come in just a few words. Whenever we claim that culture must serve some purpose, he goes on, then sovereignty passes from culture to utility: “You only need to start thinking of culture as something useful and all too soon you’ll be confusing what is useful with culture. Generalized culture turns into hatred against true culture.” Hence, precisely in its most enlightened and celebrated endeavor, its attempt to bring education to everybody, the modern world was actually guided by a profound aversion to culture. In a fanciful moment immediately after the war with France, Nietzsche had written that perhaps “the Germans had fought the war to free Venus from the Louvre, like a second Helen of Troy.” This, he went on, as far as he was concerned, could be the “pneumatic explanation of this war.” All the more brutal would be his return to reality a few months later when he heard that the Communards had set fire to the Tuileries. And the Louvre too, insisted the first confused — and, as it turned out, false — reports. Appalled, Nietzsche wrote a letter to Gersdorff over which looms the specter of the “war against civilization.” A war waged not, in this instance, by a modern state seeking to make us all slaves to its goals, but by a shapeless multitude, excluded from culture and fundamentally hostile to it, so much so that they sought only to destroy it. Yet Nietzsche couldn’t bring himself to condemn the arsonists. He wrote: “It is we who are guilty of bringing these horrors to light, all of us, and with our entire past: so we absolutely must not put on pious airs and blame this crime of waging war against civilization on these wretched people alone.”

Nietzsche’s feelings were divided: on the one hand, he saw European civilization as being on the threshold of a radical regeneration led by Germany; on the other, he saw the modern state in its most advanced form — which is to say the German state — as involved in a systematic project of barbarization, whose first enemy and victim could only be culture itself. But the Germanic infatuation would soon fade. Ahead of Nietzsche lay a life of wandering, a life without a homeland. “Among today’s Europeans,” he would write, “there are those few who have the right to claim, in the sense of a distinction and an honor, that they are without a homeland.” It was to these few that he intended to transmit the gay science, a science that would include some of the most precise and ferocious observations ever made against Germany, the most vicious being those scattered across the pages of Ecce Homo. The only other person who would prove able to wound Germany and German culture so deeply was Gottfried Benn.

The trap Nietzsche had almost fallen into when he was writing The Birth of Tragedy was that of fantasizing a future national community behind the variegated surface of the myths: “Knowledge and music allow us to foresee a German rebirth of classical Greece — it is toward this rebirth that we shall work,” he wrote in his notebooks at the time. But his mind was too lucid not to foresee something else as well: “All that is required of us now is that we be slaves of the mass, and in particular slaves of a party.” When the sonorous Wagnerian cloud dissolves, even the word “myth” all but disappears from Nietzsche’s writing and Dionysus retreats to the wings. But he would be back, with a great clanging of sistra and tambourines: first when he creeps into the voice of that “Dionysiac demon called Zarathustra,” and later when from the shadows he maneuvers the enthralling drama that was the last phase of Nietzsche’s life. This really did look like an example of a renewed Dionysiac spirit; certainly it was a far cry from the arrogant productive fervor of an imperial Germany. But to be understood, that drama needed a prelude, a sort of summary in shorthand, at once impudent and allusive, of what Nietzsche had come to believe had happened over the course of civilization from the Greeks down to his own time. This is the section “How the ‘real world’ ended up as a fable” in Twilight of the Idols:

1. The real world accessible to the wise man, the pious man, the virtuous man — he lives in it, he is this world.

(The oldest form of the idea, relatively shrewd, simple, persuasive. Transcription of the principle “I, Plato, am the truth.”)

2. The real world, for the moment inaccessible, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous (“to the sinner who does penance”).

(The idea progresses: grows subtler, more menacing, less easy to grasp—becomes woman, becomes Christian …)

3. The real world, inaccessible, indemonstrable. unpromissable, but just having thought of it is a consolation, an obligation, a binding imperative.

(In the background the ancient sun, but seen through a fog of skepticism; the idea become sublime, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

4. The real world — inaccessible? In any event not acceded to. And, in so far as not acceded to, unknown. Hence, what’s more, not a consolation, not a salvation, not binding: what could something unknown bind us to? …

(Gray morning. First yawn of reason. Cock’s crow of positivism.)

5. The “real world”—an idea of no use to anyone, and not even binding on us — an idea that has become useless, superfluous, and consequently an idea refuted: let’s be rid of it!

(Bright daylight; breakfast time; return of good sense and serenity; Plato blushing for shame; demonic uproar of all free spirits.)

6. We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well!

(Noon; when the shadows are shortest; end of the longest error of all; zenith of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

This page — which according to an outline drawn up in the spring of 1888 was to be the first of the unfinished Will to Power, an opening clash of the cymbals, as it were — should be read together with Hölderlin’s prophecies vis-à-vis the “turning back to nativeness.” There too we have an attempt to identify the obscure movement that guides history and is such that with the mere passing of time the color of events and the very consistency of the material world is altered. But what a difference in tone! Where Hölderlin is elliptical and solemn, Nietzsche is as brazen as a circus presenter. The jerky rhythm is shot through with an alarming euphoria — and a certain sarcasm too. Yet the process described is grandiose: nothing less than the successive phases of the history of the world, six of them, like the six days of Creation. And it’s as though, instead of advancing with dash and confidence, the world were gradually regressing toward its indecipherable origins, a place where, because these categories have yet to split apart, the distinctions “real world” and “apparent world” no longer hold. Here we are, announces Nietzsche, and it would be hard not to hear a mocking ring in his voice. We thought we were living in a world where the fog had lifted, a disenchanted, ascertainable, verifiable world. And instead we find that everything has gone back to being a “fable” again. How are we to get our bearings? To which fable should we abandon ourselves, knowing as we do that the next one to come along might overwhelm it? This is the paralysis, the peculiar uncertainty of modern times, a paralysis that all since have experienced. Nietzsche presents it as an ordeal we have to go through: we have been condemned, or elected, to pass through a world without substance, pure specter, where it is true of course that “many new gods are still possible,” their feet falling in with a new step, a new dance, “many gods endlessly fleeing each other, searching out each other, blessedly contradicting each other, many gods hearing each other once again, once again belonging to each other,” yet at the same time a subtle, indomitable mockery embraces everything and renders it all uncertain, ephemeral: parody. It is a frightening development, and Nietzsche had tried to prepare us for it when, at the end of The Gay Science, he drew the picture of a “spirit who ingenuously, without wanting to, that is, and out of an overflowing fullness and strength, begins to play with everything hitherto considered sacred, good, untouchable, divine,” thus giving rise to the “ideal of a human-superhuman well-being and kindness, that may often seem inhuman, if set, for example, beside all the terrestrial seriousness that came before it, or indeed beside any sort of solemnity of gesture, speech, expression, gaze, morality, duty, as if this new ideal were their living and involuntary parody.” There it is, the bow twangs, the word “parody” is let fly — and at once one senses that this light, reckless, composite, and sparkling intermezzo serves above all to announce the moment when once again “the destiny of the soul is at a turning point, the hand on the clock face shifts, the tragedy begins …”

Dazzled by this shiny and deceptive theatre, this boundless, merry, sinister stage where — the words are Nietzsche’s again—“something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut,” because, as we said, incipit parodia, we suddenly realize that too many beginnings are going on at the same time. Incipit tragoedia, incipit parodia, incipit Zarathustra (inspired by Dionysus). And all at once the answer, the obvious answer, comes to us: they’re all the same beginning, at the same moment — and that doesn’t just hold for Nietzsche; on the contrary, it sets its seal on the whole world ever since. At this point, what more could Nietzsche do but entrust a last note to the symbolic hands of Jacob Burckhardt? “Actually, I would far rather be a professor at Basle University than God: but I didn’t dare push my private selfishness so far as to neglect, just for myself, the creation of the world.”