I.11: PN, p. 163: “Where the state ends – look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?”: Quite a change from Nietzsche’s proclamation back in “The Greek State” that we should live for the state. Is he an anarchist now? If so, it doesn’t stop him from continuing to make nasty remarks about anarchists whenever the subject comes up. Of course most anarchists oppose not only the state but all forms of domination or aggression; hence they represent what Nietzsche will later call “misarchism” (hatred of rule), i.e., “the democratic idiosyncrasy which opposes everything that dominates and wants to dominate,” (Genealogy of Morals II.12), which Nietzsche associates with the “Last Man.” In rejecting the state, Nietzsche is not rejecting domination as such. (In any case, in later writings he still seems to have some use for the state.) Ironically, many anarchists (e.g. Emma Goldman) have been fans of Nietzsche, and in particular fans of his denunciation of the Last Man; they see themselves, too, as opposing the bourgeois complacency, comformity, and passivity that the Last Man represents. Obviously they do not agree with Nietzsche that a society that renounces aggression and domination must be a society of Last Men.
Nietzsche’s reference to “the rainbow and the bridges of the overman” may be a nod to the idea in Norse mythology (and in Wagner’s Ring) of the rainbow as a bridge from our world to the realm of the gods. (More about this below.)
I.12: PN, pp. 163-166: This is Nietzsche’s fullest account so far of the attitude he will later call ressentiment.
I.15: PN, pp. 170-171: The first ideal that Nietzsche lists is the Greek; the second is the Persian (“the people who gave me my name”); the third is clearly the Jewish. The fourth is less clear; my first thought was the Roman, but Kaufmann thinks it’s the German, and maybe so.
I.18: PN, p. 179: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!”: one of the least beloved lines in Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s defenders point out that the line is spoken by the old woman, not by Zarathustra; but Zarathustra shows no sign of rejecting it, and it’s a not unnatural conclusion to what Zarathustra has been saying throughout the chapter.
On the subject of women and whips: I’ve mentioned previously the sort-of romantic triangle among Nietzsche, his friend the Prussian-Jewish philospher Paul Rée, and the Russian psychonalyst Lou Salomé in whom they were both interested. At a time when the three of them were considering living together (in what precise relationship is not clear), they posed for the following photograph. It was Nietzsche who had the idea of having himself and Rée be pulling a cart while Salomé sat in the cart holding a whip. This seems to be some sort of comment on the whip passage in Zarathsutra – perhaps a bit of self-parody in Nietzsche’s part?
Salomé wrote an interesting book on Nietzsche.
I.22: PN, p. 186-187: In the first course I took on Nietzsche in college (I took four in all, and then a fifth in grad school; yes, I needed an intervention!), the professor told the class that Nietzsche’s conception of the “gift-giving virtue” showed how different Nietzsche was from Ayn Rand and why he shouldn’t be given “an Ayn Rand reading.” I was puzzled, since the basic idea seemed quite Randian. But who knows if he’d even read Rand?
II.2: PN, p. 198: Here we see Nietzsche’s conception of the good kind of will to truth: “that everything be changed into what is thinkable for man,” as opposed to the kind of will to truth that seeks for some kind of reality beyond the bounds of possible thought.
Lawrence: Women in Love, chs. 5-9:
ch. 5: Gerald’s claim that life is “artificially held together by the social mechanism” echoes his distrust of spontaneity in chapter 2.
In the piano discussion, I suspect that Birkin’s phrase “upright grandeur” is a play on the “upright piano” (which was invented in 1826, and would have been the kind of piano that some workers might have been able to buy for their homes – unlike a grand piano). The word “piano” was originally short for “pianoforte,” which means “soft-loud” in Italian (because by striking the keys, rather than plucking them as in a harpsichord, one could produce a greater variation in loudness).
The “Brocken Spectre” is a natural optical phenomenon in which one sees a gigantic image of oneself projected onto mist or fog:
Piccadilly Circus is London’s equivalent of Times Square; it’s a “circus” in the sense of a traffic circle:
Here’s what it looked like in Lawrence’s day:
The Pompadour is based on the Café Royal at Piccadilly; it looks today much as it looked then:
We’ll be seeing more of the Pompadour in the next chapter.
“Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles”: here’s the poem.
ch. 6: Julius Halliday is based on the composer Philip Heseltine (who later went by the pseudonym “Peter Warlock”). “Pussum” is based on Heseltine’s girlfriend (and later wife), the model Minnie Lucie Channing, whose nickname was “Puma.” Changing her nickname from that of a wild predator to that of a housecat (even leaving aside the sexual connotation) is only one of the many ways in which Lawrence’s depiction is insulting. Heseltine and Channing were less than thrilled with Lawrence’s use of them.
Heseltine/Warlock
Puma
Gerald initially mistakes Halliday’s manservant Hasan for a gentleman from Oxford. Lawrence’s somewhat racist joke here is that Hasan is based on Heseltine’s Indian friend Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, who in fact was a gentleman from Oxford and not a servant.
Suhrawardy, Heseltine, and Lawrence
ch. 8: “Silent upon a peak in [Darien]”: Here’s the poem. (Herschel’s discovery of Uranus was recent news. Keats has confused Cortez with Balboa, leader of the first European expedition to see the American shore of the Pacific.)
Joshua Malleson is supposedly based on Bertrand Russell, although his role is so small that the identification isn’t obvious:
No, Ottoline Morrell didn’t try to bash Lawrence’s brains in (though after reading Women in Love, she probably wanted to). If anyone had done such a thing it would have been Frieda. Lawrence’s and Frieda’s marriage was physically abusive on both sides; he would beat her, and she would break crockery over his head. Katherine Mansfield (the main model for Gudrun) recalled: “I don’t know which disgusts one worse – when they are very loving and playing with each other or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda’s hair and saying ‘I’ll cut your bloody throat, you bitch’ ....” Yet just a few minutes after one of these savage fights, Mansfield reports, “she and L. glided into talk” and “began to discuss some ‘very rich but very good macaroni cheese,’” and the next morning found him “running about taking her up her breakfast.” (quoted in Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, pp. 319-20)
(Of all the folks we’re studying in this course, Lawrence seems to have been the most personally unpleasant. Wagner and Rand come across like teddybears by comparison.)
Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra II.5-IV.20
II.5: PN, p. 211: Here deliverance from revenge (closely connected with what Nietzsche will later call ressentiment) is associated with the bridge-and-rainbow imagery previously introduced in I.11.
II.20: PN, pp. 251-253: This notion of willing the past is closely connected with Eternal Recurrence; recall the thought experiment in The Gay Science (PN, pp. 101-102).
III.2: PN, pp. 269-270: And here for the first time the Eternal Recurrence is introduced not just as something to will but as a factual thesis.
III.10: PN, p. 302: Is Nietzsche’s praise of selfishness here consistent with his claim that we should live for the sake of producing the Overman? Or is it only the Overman who gets to be selfish? It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if selfishness were forbidden to the weak and base; but what about those who are strong, noble, “higher men,” but not yet the Overman? Do they get to be selfish or not? Or is working toward the Overman somehow consistent with selfishness?
III.11: PN, p. 305: “one suffers little children”: a reference to Matthew 19:14, Mark 10:14, and Luke 18:16.
III.12: PN, p. 310: More on willing the past.
PN, p. 321: Zarathustra’s avowed desire to push declining phenomena into declining faster contrasts with his advice in Human, All Too Human to be very cautious about trying to accelerate, e.g., the (probably inevitable) withering away of the state.
III.13: PN, p. 331: The paradox of willing the Eternal Recurrence is that one must be strong and healthy enough to will the recurrence not just of strength and health but of their opposites. (Nietzsche repeatedly confessed that he himself was not up to the task.)
IV.19: PN, p. 435: Another version of the same paradox. “Abide, moment!” is another nod to Faust’s aforementioned vow to be carried to hell if he ever finds himself saying to the passing moment, “Linger a while, thou art so fair.”
Magee: “Wagner’s Discovery of Schopenhauer”
pp. 132-133: Magee sings (not literally) the praises of Act I of Die Walküre; here’s a sample:
p. 137: The feminist writer Malwida von Meysenbug was a close friend of both Wagner and Nietzsche; she wrote an admiring biography of Germaine de Staël, whom Nietzsche detested. She also introduced Nietzsche to Lou Salomé.
p. 180: In our day, when movies and tv shows about Thor, Odin, and Loki are multimillion-dollar blockbusters, and Neil Gaiman’s book on Norse mythology debuts at #1 on Amazon, Schopenhauer’s reported surprise that something “alive and meaningful for modern audiences” can be made from “such distant and unpromising material as mythical tales about the Nordic gods” is likely to strike us as incongruous. Given that Greek myths and legends had been the basis of a sizable proportion of popular entertainment throughout Europe for centuries, providing plots for such playwrights as Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, and such composers as Mozart, Händel, Monteverdi, and Gluck, it may seem odd that anyone would assume that a similar use couldn’t be made of Norse sources. Remember, though, that ancient Greece was widely seen as the wellspring of all western culture, whereas the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples of the middle ages were generally regarded as uncouth barbarians; the idea that Nordic mythological traditions might be comparable in value to Greco-Roman ones would have struck many as dubious. Nevertheless, Norse myths and legends were already about to become fairly popular within a few years of Schopenhauer’s receiving Wagner’s libretto, and independently of Wagner, through the efforts of such writers as George Webbe Dasent and William Morris. The very “barbarousness” of the Norse tradition would make it attractive to many of the Romantics.
(Of course Shakespeare had already popularised one Nordic legend, that of Hamlet; but his treatment of the story owed more to Greek influence – specifically the tale of Elektra and Orestes – than to the story’s Danish sources. Oberon, Shakespeare’s King of the Fairies, is also a variant version of Alberich the Nibelung (via the French “Alberon”), though Shakespeare places him in the forests of Attica during the reign of Theseus.)
Lawrence: Women in Love, chs. 10-20
ch. 13: Birkin’s remarks about love resemble some of Lawrence’s verses from 1929, though the later reflections don’t seem to hold open the same hope that Birkin does of a significant meeting or stellar equilibrium of these primal selves:
There is love, and it is a deep thing
but there are deeper things than love.
First and last, man is alone.
He is born alone, and alone he dies
and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.
Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy
and alone.
Love is a thing of twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.
(Complete Poems, p. 844)
“Wille zur Macht” and “volonté de pouvoir” mean “will to power” in German and French, respectively; but there’s a difference that Birkin is appealing to. “Macht” is purely a noun; but “pouvoir” can function either as a noun, meaning “power,” or as an infinitive verb, meaning “to be able.” Hence “volonté de pouvoir,” unlike “Wille zur Macht,” can alternatively be translated as “will to be able” which has fewer connotations of power over other people than does “will to power.” We might think of Birkin’s proposed version as something like a “will to efficacy.” The editor of the Penguin edition reads the latter as a will to enable (p. 545), but “pouvoir” can’t mean “enable,” (Is Lawrence offering a reinterpretation of Nietzsche, or a correction of him?) Of course, this revisionary approach to the will to power is somewhat undermined by the fact that it comes in the middle of what seems to be a defense of male dominance.
ch. 14: This chapter features a number of songs, plus a drowning. Here are the songs —
“Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep: ”:
“Ännchen von Tharau”:
“My Gal’s a High-Born Lady”:
“Way Down in Tennessee”: Many songs with this title or refrain, but the specific 1893 song that Lawrence has in mind here (see the Penguin endnotes) was on YouTube in 2017 but is gone now; sorry!
The editor of the Penguin edition suggests (p. 545) that Gudrun’s dance starts off in the classical style of Isadora Duncan, and then develops into the expressionist style of Mary Wigman. Here are samples of each (footage of Duncan is very rare):
Gerald should take seriously Gudrun’s threat to strike the last blow.
Just as Lawrence based Gerald’s accidental killing of his brother in childhood on a similar incident in Thomas Philip Barber’s childhood, so the drowning of Gerald’s sister along with her attempted rescuer is based on the real-life drowning of Barber’s daughter and her attempted rescuer, likewise at a water-party. Lawrence’s appropriation of these two family tragedies infuriated Barber.
ch. 16: Birkin’s unsuccessful attempt to get Gerald to swear a Blutbrüderschaft (blood-brotherhood) with him echoes Lawrence’s similarly unsuccessful attempt with Murry.
ch. 17: Gerald’s mechanistic conception of life contrasts with Birkin’s organic one. Lawrence’s description of “mechanical organisation” as the “finest state of chaos,” when most people (whether they liked it or not) would instead call it order, shows us something about Lawrence’s conceptions of order and chaos. This will be relevant in contrasting what counted as a slide into decadence in the case of Aschenbach or Michel with what will count as a slide into decadence in the case of Gerald. One might say that the version of decadence that threatens Gerald is anti-Dionysian – a matter of freezing into rigidity rather than dissolving into amorphousness.
ch. 19: I couldn’t find an image that quite matched Lawrence’s description of the West African statue; but my mother used to have a figurine that matched it perfectly. However, I believe it was East African, not West African.
Nietzschean Tune of the Week
This week’s musical piece is the “Hymn to Life” with music by Nietzsche and words by the aforementioned Lou Salomé; here’s a translation by Herman Scheffauer:
So truly loves a friend his friend
as I love thee, O Life in myst’ry hidden.
If joy or grief to me thou send,
if loud I laugh or else to weep am bidden,
yet love I thee with all thy changeful faces;
and should’st thou doom me to depart,
so would I tear myself from thy embraces
as comrade from a comrade’s heart.
With all my strength I clasp thee close:
oh, send thy flame upon me like a lover,
and ’mid the battle’s rage and throes
let me thy Being’s inmost self discover.
To think, to live till time alone shall drown me –
with all thy floods my measure fill;
and if thou hast now left no bliss to crown me,
lead on! thou hast thy sorrow still.
Although the words are Salomé’s, the sentiment is clearly Nietzschean (especially the last two lines). Here’s the piece itself:
p. 180: In our day, when movies and tv shows about Thor, Odin, and Loki are multimillion-dollar blockbusters, and Neil Gaiman’s book on Norse mythology debuts at #1 on Amazon, Schopenhauer’s reported surprise that something “alive and meaningful for modern audiences” can be made from “such distant and unpromising material as mythical tales about the Nordic gods” is likely to strike us as incongruous. Given that Greek myths and legends had been the basis of a sizable proportion of popular entertainment throughout Europe for centuries, providing plots for such playwrights as Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, and such composers as Mozart, Händel, Monteverdi, and Gluck, it may seem odd that anyone would assume that a similar use couldn’t be made of Norse sources. Remember, though, that ancient Greece was widely seen as the wellspring of all western culture, whereas the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples of the middle ages were generally regarded as uncouth barbarians; the idea that Nordic mythological traditions might be comparable in value to Greco-Roman ones would have struck many as dubious. Nevertheless, Norse myths and legends were already about to become fairly popular within a few years of Schopenhauer’s receiving Wagner’s libretto, and independently of Wagner, through the efforts of such writers as George Webbe Dasent and William Morris. The very “barbarousness” of the Norse tradition would make it attractive to many of the Romantics.