Nietzsche and Modernism

Nihilism and Suffering in Lawrence, Kafka and Beckett

Stewart Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319755342
• eBook ISBN: 9783319755359
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reconfiguring Nietzsche's seminal impact on modernist literature and culture, this book presents a distinctive new reading of modernism by exploring his sustained philosophical engagement with nihilism and its inextricable tie to pain and sickness. Arguing that modernist texts dramatize the frailty of the ill, the impotent, and the traumatised modern subject unable to render suffering significant through traditional religious means, it uses the Nietzschean diagnoses of nihilism and what he calls 'ressentiment', the entwined feelings of powerlessness and vindictiveness, as heuristic tools to remap the fictional landscapes of Lawrence, Kafka, and Beckett. Lucid, authoritative and accessible, this book will appeal internationally to literature and philosophy scholars and undergraduates as well as to readers in medical and sociological fields.

© The Author(s) 2018

Stewart SmithNietzsche and ModernismPalgrave Studies in Modern European Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75535-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Nietzsche, Nihilism and Modernism

Stewart Smith¹

(1)

Independent Scholar, Dorchester, UK

End Abstract

Nietzsche and Modernism

In 1913 the tormented Franz Kafka wrote to break off his engagement with Felice Bauer :

It certainly was not my intention to make you suffer, yet I have done so; obviously it will never be my intention to make you suffer, yet I shall always do so. […] Felice, beware of thinking of life as commonplace, if by commonplace you mean monotonous, simple, petty. Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time—I doubt whether I am a human being. (Kafka 2000: xiii) ¹

While acknowledging that life is constituted by inevitable suffering , Kafka reveals his own particularly sensitive nature. Furthermore, his confession to possessing such an acute sensibility, and the juxtaposition of this acknowledgement with a condemnatory evaluation of life, evokes a passage from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche ’s The Gay Science (1882–1887). This entry is revealing of Nietzsche’s perception of modernity:

Knowledge of distress.—Perhaps nothing separates human beings or ages from each other more than the different degrees of their knowledge of distress—distress of the soul as well as of the body. Regarding the latter we moderns may well, in spite of our frailties and fragilities, be bunglers and dreamers owing to lack of ample first-hand experience, compared with an age of fear, the longest of all ages, when individuals had to protect themselves against violence and to that end had themselves too become men of violence. […] But that is how most people seem to me to be these days. The general inexperience with both sorts of pain and the relative rarity of the sight of suffering individuals have an important consequence: pain is hated much more now than formerly; one speaks much worse of it; indeed, one can hardly endure the presence of pain as a thought and makes it a matter of conscience and a reproach against the whole of existence. The emergence of pessimistic philosophers is in no way the sign of great, terrible states of distress; rather, these question marks about the value of life are made in times when the refinement and ease of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and malicious, and the poverty of real experiences of pain makes one tend to consider painful general ideas as already suffering of the highest rank. (48: 60–1)

This passage may be used to characterise Nietzsche as a cruel philosopher, insensitive to human suffering . ² I shall argue, however, that Nietzsche remained consistently sensitive to the issue of human suffering , that his central doctrines revolve around this theme, and his analyses of various cultures rest upon his examination of their respective responses to suffering . Moreover, what is worth stressing here is that Nietzsche regards the especially modern, heightened sensitivity to distress to foster ‘a reproach against the whole of existence’: the experience of suffering is bound to one’s evaluative interpretation of life; in our case, according to Nietzsche, ‘suffering is always the first of the arguments marshalled against life’ (OGM II 7: 47). Suffering is thus entwined with nihilism, the pessimistic view that life is not worth living.

Nietzsche’s explosive impact upon literary modernism is widely acknowledged. However, there is a paucity of critical literature exploring these central aspects of his thought with regard to its relationship to modernism . It may be argued that all four of the writers I am exploring in this study, Friedrich Nietzsche , Franz Kafka , D. H. Lawrence , and Samuel Beckett , were particularly sensitive to suffering and perhaps therefore predisposed to experience feelings of futilitarian resignation. ³ But this biographical point aside, what I wish to do in this study is to examine their shared concern with suffering and nihilism as it is presented in their respective work in order to offer a new perspective of modernist cultural output. By taking Nietzsche’s thought on suffering and nihilism as a heuristic lens through which to explore these modernist figures, I shall diverge from related studies that chart Nietzsche’s relation to modernism .

A common entry point for critics discussing the heterogeneous streams of modernist literary practice and outlook is to emphasise its discontinuity with previous cultural forms: the complex phenomenon of literary modernism can be generally understood as an ardent response to the imperative enunciated by one of its leading promoters, the poet and critic Ezra Pound , to ‘[m]ake it new!’. This call to aesthetic innovation, with its implicit critique of traditional forms, parallels Nietzsche’s philosophical project. Otherwise put, critics studying Nietzsche’s seminal impact upon modernist literature primarily figure the thinker as an iconoclast, as a revolutionary prophet.

The putative view of Nietzsche’s heretical programme is evident within studies discussing Nietzsche’s relationship to early twentieth-century literary culture. Robert B. Pippin , for instance, claims that Nietzsche is a ‘paradigmatic “modernist”’ insofar as he embodies the ‘irremediable break with the past’ that defines modernist work (Pippin 1983: 151–2). Robert Gooding-Williams in his Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (2001) similarly argues that Nietzsche’s relationship to literary modernism is premised on an unprecedented ‘creative break with the past’ (Gooding-Williams 2001: 3). Roger Griffin identifies Nietzsche as the paradigmatic figure in what he calls programmatic modernism . This term considers modernism as ‘a mission to change society, to inaugurate a new epoch, to start anew. It is a modernism that lends itself to the rhetoric of manifestos and declarations’ (Griffin 2007: 2). ⁴

Nietzsche’s early reception corroborates this dominant view of the thinker and his relation to literary modernism . Nietzsche’s thought first came to prominence in European intellectual circles in 1888 when the esteemed Danish critic Georg Brandes lectured on the philosopher and, noting both his elitism and iconoclastic appeal, defined his work as expressing an ‘aristocratic radicalism ’ (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976: 79). Nietzsche himself eagerly approved of this epithet. In terms of the early Anglophone response to the philosopher, for instance, accounts of his reception and dissemination reinforce this interpretation . ⁵ Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche’s radical voice was primarily disseminated in publications emphasising the pursuit of individual expression: Nietzsche arrived at a time when aesthetes were involved in a struggle to overcome the expectations of an ethical or didactic commitment proscribed by Victorian moralism. Nietzsche thus featured heavily in journals such as The Eagle and the Serpent, The Egoist, and The New Age along with other iconoclastic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle (see Bridgwater 1972; Thatcher 1970). Contributors such as A. R. Orage , Bernard Shaw and Havelock Ellis celebrated Nietzsche’s radical emancipatory rhetoric not only because Nietzsche emphasised a rejection of what were held to be the prevalent nineteenth-century virtues of altruism and self-abnegation, but also as he was seen to privilege an individualistic or aesthetic engagement in its place. Thus Malcolm Bradbury points out that Nietzsche was part of the wider cultural shift in which the newer emphasis upon individual expression existed in conflict with outlooks that implicitly demoted the value of the individual (see Bradbury and McFarlane 1976: 75–9). Writers revolting against the twin hegemonies of Victorian religiosity and the generalising, abstracting theories of scientific discourse, as exemplified by scientific positivism and Darwinism, thus found in Nietzsche’s romantic heroism, with its grand rhetorical gestures and devastating critiques, a renewed poetic resilience and a celebration of individual creation.

For the most part, then, Nietzsche is seen to be adopted as an elitist, sceptical voice championing individual self-creation and calling for a radical reappraisal of dominant social codes and conventions associated with traditional religion and mass democracy. Patrick Bridgwater thus argues that ‘[f]or most of those who fell under his spell, Nietzsche’s aristocratic idea, his anti-democratic stance, was at the centre of his appeal’ (Bridgwater 1972: 243). Otherwise put, the modernists can be aligned with Nietzsche’s notion of an ‘active nihilism ’, or his project of carrying out a ‘revaluation of all values’ (WP Preface 4: 3): Nietzsche encourages an active deconstruction and renewal of the ‘directing viewpoints through which human beings orientate themselves’ (Muller-Lauter 2002: 74). Both John Burt Foster ’s Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism (1981) and Keith M. May ’s Nietzsche and Modern Literature (1988) make this argument. Foster works from the premise that Nietzsche’s thinking ‘is nothing if not radically distrustful of continuity, since he envisions a total revaluation of values’ (Foster 1981: 4). May, too, argues that ‘Nietzsche’s overwhelming concern was always with values’ (May 1988: 8), before aligning modernist writers with Nietzsche’s fictional madman’s ‘opinion about the “greatness” of the deed of killing God’ (150). As I shall demonstrate, however, Nietzsche’s acute awareness of modern nihilism stands t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Nietzsche, Nihilism and Modernism
• 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nihilism and Meaningless Suffering
• 3. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Erotic Transcendence of Nihilism
• 4. Franz Kafka’s The Trial and the Interpretation of Suffering
• 5. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and the Economy of Ressentiment
• 6. Conclusion: Affective Modernism
• Back Matter