Audiovisual Companion
to my Spring 2021 seminar on
Nietzsche and Modern Literature

Roderick T. Long


Nietzsche (center); Mann (upper left); Gide (upper right); Lawrence (lower left); Rand (lower right)



WEEK EIGHT:


The Hidden Claw

Here’s a photo of young Nietzsche (around age 16) in a Napoleonic pose:




Part of an Original Crowd

I mentioned in class the similarity between Nietzsche’s lines in the Zarathustra prologue –

An insight has come to me: let Zarathustra speak not to the people but to companions. Zarathustra shall not become the shepherd and dog of a herd. To lure many away from the herd, for that I have come.


– and the following lines from Kierkegaard, in That Individual: Two Notes Concerning My Work as an Author:

[N]o witness for the truth dare become engaged with the crowd. The witness for the truth – who naturally has nothing to do with politics and must above everything else be most vigilantly on the watch not to be confounded with the politician – the God-fearing work of the witness to the truth is to engage himself if possible with all, but always individually, talking to everyone severally on the streets and lanes, in order to disintegrate the crowd – or to talk even to the crowd, though not with the intent of educating the crowd as such, but rather with the hope that one or another individual might return from this assemblage and become a single individual.


I also mentioned the contrasting line attributed to Hitler:

At a mass meeting, thought is eliminated. And because this is the state of mind I require, because it secures to me the best sounding-board for my speeches, I order everyone to attend the meetings, where they become part of the mass whether they like it or not, “intellectuals” and bourgeois as well as workers. I mingle the people. I speak to them only as the mass.


Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the Hitler quote is from Rauschning’s Conversations With Hitler (a.k.a. The Voice of Destruction a.k.a. Hitler Speaks), which means its authenticity is fairly dubious.


Nietzsche: Ecce Homo: Zarathustra

BW, p. 751: Here’s Silvaplana / Sils Maria, the Swiss region where Nietzsche conceived the idea of Zarathustra:



This is believed to be the rock he refers to:



It’s also on the cover of the Hackett edition of the Genealogy:



Here’s a video; the rock is at 0:36-0:51:



The following photo of the rock was taken by my friend Jeff Mezzocchi of the Eternal Return Bookshop:



It’s also incorporated into the logo of his bookstore:



Check out my interview with him; our discussion focuses heavily on Nietzsche. We discuss the rock in particular – as well as Sils Maria, Schopenhauer, and this very website – at 28:22-35:44:



BW, p. 753: Now in Italy: Nietzsche describes walking from Rapallo to Portofino via Zoagli; here’s the view in question:



BW, p. 758: Here’s a view of Rome’s Piazza Barberini, to which Nietzsche “resigned” himself, and the fountain that inspired his “Night Song” (Zarathustra II.9):




Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil 1-6

BW, pp. 209-210: While Nietzsche disses Kant and praises Boscovich, Kant (especially in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) was independently developing ideas very similar to those of Boscovich, e.g., reducing material substance to force.

BW, p. 256: On the possibility of religion without theism.

BW, p. 257: Here Nietzsche refers to the Hindu school of Vedanta, and specifically of Advaita (“nondual”) Vedanta, which denies the genuine existence of separate selves, regarding the underlying world-spirit, Brahman, as the only true reality.

BW, pp. 301-302: Mixed races can produce either weakness or strength. (So, remarkably unhelpful information.)

BW, p. 305: “Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality”: This seems to contrast with his claim in Human, All-too-human (BW, pp. 147-148) that “[o]ur current morality has grown on the soil of the ruling tribes and castes.” As we’ll see soon, Nietzsche’s considered position seems to be that modern morality contains both master-moral and slave-moral strands (which would explain why we admire both bold self-assertion and humble self-denial).

BW, p. 325: The claim that Kant was “merely a great critic” is a play on the fact that three of Kant’s major works have “Critique” in the title.


Magee: “Philosophy of Schopenhauer”

p. 154: Here Magee says that for Kant the noumenal realm not only cannot be sensed, but also cannot even be thought. This seems an infelicitous way of putting his point, since a central theme of Kant’s philosophy is that we are not only able but obligated (albeit practically rather than theoretically) to think of the noumenal realm in a certain way, namely as characterised by God, freedom, and immortality (contrary to what Magee goes on to say about obligation on p. 161).

p. 164: “Hindu philosophy teaches that abiding reality is immaterial, spaceless, timeless, and above all One, and that it is impersonal, unknowable and indescribable”: Well, no this is not what “Hindu philosophy” teaches; rather, it is what one particular school of Hindu philosophy – namely, the Advaita Vedanta school – teaches. There are other schools of Hindu philosophy (e.g., Nyaya-Vaisheshika, Purva Mimamsa, Samkhya, Vyakarana), including other branches of Vedanta itself (such as Dvaita [or dual] Vedanta), that would reject much or all of that description.


Lawrence: Women in Love, chs. 21-30:

ch. 22: The unification of Italy into a single country out of many small states (as mentioned in connection with Magee on nationalism earlier) had been completed only fifty years before Women in Love was published.

ch. 23: “Glory to thee, my God, this night”:



ch. 27: The book began with Gudrun suggesting marriage and Ursula being skeptical, but now they seem to have reversed.

Ursula mentions the “Little Grey Home in the West,” which is a 1911 song by Hermann Frederic Lohr and D. Eardley-Wilmot:



The “model in Chelsea” is the aforementioned Pussum.

ch. 28: The incident with Gudrun in the Pompadour walking off with Birkin’s letter is based on a real incident with Katherine Mansfield in the Café Royal; see p. 533 of the Penguin edition for details.

ch. 29: Here is Innsbruck, Austria, where Ursula and Birkin meet Gudrun and Gerald at the hotel:



ch. 30: Ursula sings the old Scottish folksong “Annie Laurie.” (The Germans mispronouncing “Laurie” as “Lowrie” presumably means they made the first syllable rhyme with “plough” instead of “dough.”)



The “Mach mir auf, du Stolze” folksong is about a miller‘s wife who is too tired to cater to the miller’s needs when he comes home because she has been “grinding” all day with a handsome young man:



A possible model for Loerke is the artist Mark Gertler, whom Lawrence knew. Here he is, in both photo and self-portrait:



Loerke’s name has also been suggested to be an echo of “Loki”; he certainly feels as though he has wandered into a Lawrence story from out of a Mann story.

The Penguin editor suggests Gertler’s “Merry-Go-Round” as an inspiration for Loerke’s factory frieze, though the two are clearly not identical:



Loerke’s statue of a girl on a horse, by contrast, seems to have escaped identification by the Penguin editor, but it is unmistakably and exactly this piece by Josef Moest:



Lawrence’s geographic symbolism runs opposite (in a sense) to Gide’s and Mann’s; where for Michel and Aschenbach, transition from the cold and orderly north to the luxuriant and indolent south is a metaphor for a descent into decadence and disorder, for Lawrence’s Gerald it is the flight to the frozen north that represents decadence and disorder. (The 2011 miniseries for some reason subverts this by transferring the relevant incidents from the Alps to the African desert.)

Nevertheless, Gide and Lawrence describe the transit from the Alps to Italy in very similar terms:

Gide (The Immoralist, III.1) Lawrence (Women in Love, ch. 30)
The journey down into Italy was as dizzying as a fall. The weather was fine. As we came down into the warmer, denser air, the rigid regularity of the larches and pines of the mountains gave way to a richer, softer, more naturally graceful vegetation. It was like exchanging abstraction for life, and even though it was still winter, I thought I could smell scents everywhere. Now suddenly, as by a miracle she remembered that away beyond, below her, lay the dark fruitful earth, that towards the south there were stretches of land dark with orange trees and cypress, grey with olives, that ilex trees lifted wonderful plumy tufts in shadow against a blue sky. Miracle of miracles! – this utterly silent, frozen world of the mountain-tops was not universal! ... She wanted to see the dark earth, to smell its earthy fecundity, to see the patient wintry vegetation, to feel the sunshine touch a response in the buds.






Nietzschean Tune of the Week

“Da geht ein Bach” (“There Flows a Brook”):




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