Modernist Mythopoeia

The Twilight of the Gods

S. Freer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137035509
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137035516
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Modernist Mythopoeia argues that the experimental modernist form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of metaphysical perspectives that fall between material secularism and dogmatic religion. The book is a timely addition to the 'post-secular' debate as well as to the 'return of religion' in modernist studies.

1

Zarathustra: Nietzsche’s New Redeemer

Friedrich Nietzsche’s poetic-philosophy is the starting point for modernist mythopoeia by encapsulating the implicit issues of the logos–mythos debate through a highly metaphoric style. Nietzsche rejects religious literalism because it constrains self-becoming in closed metaphors – fixing the self to conditions, the commonplace or norms. Nevertheless, Nietzsche tries to preserve something that religion could offer in its best and early form, a language of self-transcendence – one that is honest with the laws of nature in its refusal to hide reality in metaphysical dogma. Mythopoeia, as an open and reflective metaphoric mode of comprehending being in the world, is exemplified in the poetic expanse of Nietzsche’s writings that twist and turn through competing metaphorical discourses and that occupy the space between dogmatic atheism (an absolute conviction for materialist thinking) and metaphorical theology (the indirect poetic expression of the transcendent). In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche sets out his mythopoeic agenda – to recuperate from Euripidean tragedy a redemptive aesthetic for a godless age, where both the tragic vision and the redemptive force lie in the same aesthetic source. Art, as Nietzsche sees it, is the non-theological means of experiencing something akin to the sacred.

In this sense, Nietzsche differs from secularists who simply reject Christian dogma from a scientific point of view. Bertrand Russell, in What I Believe (1925), states: ‘Man is a part of Nature, not something contrasted with Nature.’¹ Russell goes on to say that our thoughts and bodily movements follow the same laws and that the fear of Nature gave rise to religion. Belief in God and other humanizing myths served, according to Russell, to humanize the world of nature. One of the functions in the process from mythos to logos, which both Nietzsche and Hans Blumenberg identify, is the historical power of myth to kill fear of the unfamiliar.² Nietzsche does not contrast humanity with Nature but neither does he deny the existential effect of primal terror when encountering an indifferent cosmos, and so he returns to a pre-God world to recover a tragic aesthetic from the genesis of a mythico-religious folk wisdom that gave rise to a transfigurative poetic. The Birth of Tragedy is an attempt to define an aesthetic of pagan metaphysics as a means of coping with the alienating forces of nature. What Nietzsche condemns is the subsequent Christian deformation that created a false antithesis between sacred art and death-nature. The Anti-Christ (1895) thus castigates the apostle Paul for translating the secular language of human transcendence that exists in Christ’s living poetics into mass mythology – or for converting mythos into logos.

The constructionist-nihilism of Nietzsche has been overstated, and more focus should be given to his cherishing of the poetic genesis of the sacred theme – the estranging metaphoric means of overcoming the normative self. This is an important concept for various modernists, because mythopoeia does not offer any positivistic claim, and cannot be reduced to a belief statement of certainty. W. H. Auden states: ‘The Artist [ . . . ] is less important to mankind [ . . . ] than the apostle, the man with the message.’³ For Nietzsche, art is the means of understanding that the message of belief stands on the slippery foundations of metaphor. The message of Nietzsche’s apostle, Zarathustra, is that the artist is better placed to be the creator of spiritual values. As Auden also points out, the human individual holds some set of beliefs that are not of his own invention.⁴ In collapsing the traditional dialectic between poetic truth (mythos) and belief (logos), for many Nietzsche lays the way open for the destabilizing effects of postmodernist thinking – metaphysics is either textual playfulness or an act of interpretation. But in fact, Nietzsche’s philosopher surpasses the claims of New Criticism: that poetic truth is of intrinsic worth and an end itself.⁵ In exposing the inventiveness of metaphoric thinking as the basis for religious belief, Nietzsche teaches his reader the secular language of beyond – a ‘gospel’ that is psychological, temporal, existential and human. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5) is the founding classic of modernist mythopoeia, for the poet-prophet, Zarathustra, who preaches self-becoming via the hermeneutics of mythos is the pro-active response to the nihilism of absolute despair or emptiness.

The rebirth of myth out of the spirit of modern tragedy

A feasible alternative title to The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music could be the Rebirth of Myth Out of the Spirit of Modern Tragedy given that this is where Nietzsche first attempted to define a redemptive aesthetic that could simultaneously convey and confront the death of a metaphysical god. In portraying extreme suffering without recourse to otherworldly idealism, Greek tragedy was a suitable aesthetic for expressing the modern human condition – a non-discursive art form that speaks of a sublime horror and at the same time contains the redemptive means to overcome ‘suicidal nihilism’. Even though Nietzsche denounced Christian metaphysics, he understood the human need for redemption in existentialist terms. The Birth of Tragedy is generally perceived to be a strange mixture of modernism and nostalgia.⁶ Nietzsche’s aim was to retrieve from ancient Greek culture a distinct holistic aesthetic for modern purposes. This was to be found in Euripidean Greek tragedy that upheld a worldview that resonated with the nihilistic spirit of a modern godless age: ‘The best of all things is something entirely out of your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you – is to die soon.’⁷ The wisdom of Silenus speaks of a senseless universe in which, according to a common pagan worldview, the gods are indifferent to human fate. Nietzsche was drawn to the folk wisdom of Euripidean tragedy, because it shared a commonality with ours: the deities are not benign and do not order the world according to human need. Thus for Nietzsche, profound Greek tragedy reveals a sublime horror: ‘all man can now see is the horror and absurdity of existence’.⁸ The terrible and primal truth is that there is no logical, teleological or divine justice in life: death and misfortune are visited on everyone. According to John Macquarrie, primitive mythology can be read as a pre-philosophical account of humanity groping towards self-understanding, in particular in terms of a death-awareness. ‘In the early myths man is already wrestling with the mystery of his own being and trying to find answers to its apparent contradictions.’⁹ Because they lived in a pre-Christian and pre-philosophical world, for Nietzsche, the pre-Socratic Athenians were thus better placed to give voice to tragic suffering and its irresolvable tensions and paradoxes. Greek tragedy is a befitting art form for a post-religious world in which human existence is lived out in an equally indifferent cosmos.

For Nietzsche, what is absent in modern culture is an art form that can tame as well as reveal the ‘sublime horror’ of tragic suffering. Via tragic affirmation, the Athenians had the aesthetic means of expressing a profound and terrible truth without having to resort to self-defeating nihilism or metaphysical redemption: ‘the whole vision of the poet is nothing but that light-image that healing nature holds up to us after we have glimpsed the abyss’.¹⁰ Tragic art contains both the revelation of tragic suffering and its aesthetic panacea. Aaron Ridley argues that Nietzsche’s perspective of the ‘primordial artist’, who ‘transcends ordinary human experience altogether, [ . . . ] presupposes a metaphysical level’, which is in itself the ‘ultimate rebuff to the wisdom of Silenus – his ultimate paean to the redemptive possibilities of art’.¹¹ When Nietzsche is enthusiastically Wagnerian in his rhetoric, he states that tragic art is a ‘metaphysical supplement to that truth of nature, coexisting with it in order to overcome it’.¹² For Nietzsche, tragic art did not rationalize or make sense of the ‘abyss’, and the redemptive value inherently existed in Greek culture, because art and religion once functioned together. In this sense, Greek tragedy exemplified the mythico-religious dimension of art, in which the deities were played out on stage, dramatizing the inner conflicts of human nature and existence:

These terms [Apolline and Dionysiac] are borrowed from the Greeks, who revealed the profound mysteries of their artistic doctrines to the discerning mind, not in concepts but in vividly clear forms of their deities.¹³

The essential combination and dynamic of the Dionysian and the Apollonian allowed for the aesthetic containment (the Apollonian) and revelation of primordial chaos (the Dionysian). The epistemic purpose of Greek affirmation can be effective only with the two principles functioning simultaneously. The Apollonian principle softens the impact of the existentialist crisis, and Nietzsche associates its palliative force with ‘the beautiful illusion of the inner fantasy world’.¹⁴ In this sense, it is equivalent to Jacques Lacan’s notion of the imaginary order, which frames the trauma of the real: art is an essential means of distancing us from a terrible truth that we struggle to confront. As explained by Terry Eagleton: ‘Tragic art is a containment of tragic breakdown [ . . . ] and is a way of living permanently with the horror.’¹⁵ It is necessary that the two creative principles be kept in equilibrium. As Walter Kaufmann states: ‘Nietzsche does not extol one God above the other.’¹⁶ It is here that Nietzsche anticipates Sigmund Freud’s typography of the human psyche, in which the censoring super-ego is at odds with the primal Id, with the agency of the ego keeping two opposing psychic forces in check – making sure that neither triumphs over the other. Without the Apolline, life may be chaotic and unbearable. Without the Dionysian, we may become dependent upon illusory forms of metaphysical relief:

But our image of Apollo must incorporate the delicate line that the dream image may not overstep without becoming pathological, in which case illusion would deceive us as solid reality.¹⁷

When the coupling of the two drives is distorted, self-becoming is hindered.

Tragic art is also bound up with an existentialist wisdom, that helped to conceptualize human nature in poetic terms, and one that Nietzsche identifies in the plays of Prometheus and Oedipus. He argues that Sophocles was a ‘religious thinker’ and ‘a poet’.¹⁸ However, with the emergence of religious orthodoxy, Nietzsche bemoans the separation of art from religion and thus the bifurcating of a redemptive source from the revelation of painful human truths. For Nietzsche, this robs Greek tragedy of its ‘mythopoeic power’.¹⁹ When the mythico-religious dimension of art is abandoned, religion becomes used in dogmatic and non-poetic terms, and themes of the human condition are inadequately expressed – we are offered instead a restricted view:

For this is how religions tend to die: the mythic premises of religion are systematized, beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events; one begins nervously defending the veracity of myths, at the same time resisting their continuing life and growth.²⁰

For Nietzsche, the ‘mythic premises of religion’, the metaphoric expressions of human fate, were superseded by moral theologies. For instance, Nietzsche cites the Semitic myth of the Fall as being largely responsible for reducing the poetic tensions or themes of irresolvable alienation to doctrinal or moral absolutes. The religious version translates man’s search for knowledge into the theme of ‘passive sin’ – temptation is deemed the prima causa in the defiance of God’s law. On the other hand, Greek tragedy upholds a profounder view of man as instinctive over-reacher, whose search for knowledge is his undoing:

What distinguishes the Aryan version is the sublime idea of active sin as the truly Promethean virtue: this provides both the ethical background to pessimistic tragedy and the justification of human evil, and hence of human guilt as well as the suffering it brings.²¹

According to Nietzsche, the ‘Aryan version’ (i.e. classical and pagan) accepts a pessimistic worldview and perceives the theme of individuation a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Modernist Mythopoeia – The Language of the In-Between and of Beyond
• 1 Zarathustra: Nietzsche’s New Redeemer
• 2 ‘Hieronymo’s mad againe’: The Waste Land as Tragic Mythopoeia
• 3 Kafka’s Sick Ovidian Animals
• 4 Hilda Doolittle and D. H. Lawrence: Polytheistic and Pagan Revisionary Mythopoeia
• 5 ‘Death is the mother of beauty’: Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index