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October 16, 2003
Yes, I agree that Nietzsche is as important in terms of literary style as he is in philosophy. Indeed, his literary style displays the roots of modernism while the conditions under which he wrote epitomises the modern writer. He was impotent, in a literary sense, and marginalized. Nietzsche's writing represents an emerging social voice. That is why, in literary terms, his writing is close to, say, Knut Hamsun, who again was trying to find a voice for the writer that breaks with nineteenth century forms. Proust was another to express this concern, as was Karen Blixen, Robert Musil and others. I am not saying that anybody was necessarily influenced by anybody else. I am saying that, working away at their task, these people produced monads, 'windowless monads' Adorno called them.
They gave voice to their time without trying to, by turning inward and concerning themselves with literature. The same happened in painting. As Gertrude Stein noted, flying high above the US, there was the vision of the cubists, their realism, although none of them had ever been up in a plane. Then she realised that the twentieth century saw the world in a completely new and unprecedented way.
Nietzsche's contribution to the literary equivalent of this twentieth century vision makes him a foundational figure of modernism. Through Karl Kraus he brought the twentieth century German aphoristic tradition into being. Minima Moralia, which you have already mentioned, is an outstanding example of this genre, as are several books be Elias Canetti, and Walter Benjamin, of course, not to mention Kafka. Bataille's Summa Atheologica, the books Inner Experience, Guilty and On Nietzsche, are examples of the same imperative that drove Nietzsche.
I wrote a report on last Tuesday's Philosophy Jammm, which is relevant to the current discussion, so I thought I might append it.
Peter Poiana spoke at the October Philosophy Jammm, held on Tuesday 14th at Jah'z Café. Peter's topic was Marcel Proust. He focused on Proust's great work In Search Of Lost Time, describing how it expanded from a single volume that was initially rejected by publishers. Because of this, the beginning and the end of the book were established in advance but they were steadily and relentlessly pushed further apart as he author added huge masses of material to the text in between. It became his life's work.
The book has an autobiographical theme even though it is fictionalised, this being the explanation of how the writer came to be, a decidedly twentieth century preoccupation. The social milieu of the author is idle and pretentious higher bourgeoisie at the end of an era. This social group appears ridiculous because it pretends to something it can never possess: the cultural superiority of the by then defunct and impotent aristocracy. Pursuing phantoms this group loses time, which is something like authentic experience, and so the narrator's task is to redeem the situation, to regain time.
Much of the discussion following the talk focused on the purported 'greatness' of In Search Of Lost Time and in what this might consist. Someone suggested that certain ideological assumptions underlie the concept of 'greatness'. At one point the significance of the work in relation to the western literary tradition was raised, and it was suggested that it marked a formal innovation transmogrifying established genres. Joyce, Céline, Musil, Bukowski, and others were suggested as furthering or contributing to this development. One participant compared Proust's book to the 'great Australian novel', which is always an attempt to say something not previously said. Perhaps Proust's conscious drive as a writer could be seen in this context.
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