Zarathustra Style

As many devoted readers already know (personal communication) I have embarked on a Zarathustra bender.  The complex reasons for this grog-on would be of interest only to other music nerds; suffice it to say that I'm reorganizing my bookshelf autobiographically.  The current reading list is:

1. The complete two volume transcriptions of the seminar Carl Jung gave on Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1934-39.
2. All four volumes of Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures given around 1935.
3. The first English translation of Pierre Klossowki's influential Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, which marked the emergence of the 'French Nietzsche' in 1969.
4. Whatever sundry secondary material or other works by Nietzsche that may be useful along the way.  

It's been 26 years since I read Nietzsche's masterpiece though, so I needed to go back to the original first.  To my surprise, I discovered that there have been two new English translations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the past few decades.  You can find an interesting review of both translations, together with a critique of the old Kaufmann version, over here.  I chose Parkes' translation mainly because it was a whole lot cheaper, but, following the advice in that review, I also read a pdf version of Adrian Del Caro's introduction -- it was indeed a great essay, certainly much more organized and illuminating than the one Parkes' provides.

Since I'm going to be working with TSZ for a while here, I don't feel the need to organize all my thoughts about it into a single post.  Which is a relief, because I really don't feel like I understand it very well.  Zarathustra is truly one of the strangest books in the history of philosophy.  The weirdness begins with Nietzsche's decision to put his ideas in the mouth of a prophet, and to tell the story of the life of this prophet, rather than adopt a more propositional form of discourse.  What results is some combination of novel, parable, psalm, sutra, gatha, and dialogue that defies generic description.  But this unclassifiable style is only the beginning the weirdness.  When we try to pin down what content fills this strange new form we run into seemingly insurmountable obstacles.  Unlike with a lot of modern philosophy though, the problem is not the language itself.  Nietzsche is an absolutely superb writer.  Zarathustra's speeches are brilliant, witty, visceral masterpieces of oratory.  Many of the narrative images, like the man choking on a snake (pg. 137), or Zarathustra's shadow flying into a volcano (pg. 113), or the concluding Ass Festival (pg. 274), are vividly clear and unforgettable.  As far as I know you have to go all the way back to Plato to find a philosopher who can stand beside Nietzsche on literary grounds.  

So the problem is not that we literally don't understand him.  We actually have the opposite problem.  There are too many wonderful ideas and catchy phrases and moving images.  But they don't all point in the same direction.  In fact, many of them are blatantly contradictory.  Others appear to be related as variations on a theme, but since the book has a constantly shifting series of contexts, you can never be sure quite how they relate.  And then there's the dawning realization that TSZ is not merely complex and multifaceted, but that Nietzsche is actually out to deliberately trick you.  Consider just one example that Deleuze has pointed out.  Nietzsche repeatedly said that the idea of Eternal Return was the central idea in the book.  However, this idea isn't even mentioned in a recognizable form until the beginning of part 3 (ie. more than halfway through the book on pg. 135), and when we get the seemingly definitive statement of it towards the end of that same part, it doesn't come from the mouth of Zarathustra himself, but from his animals (pg. 190).  Almost everything is shrouded in multiple levels of indirection like this.  Nietzsche's thought, as he himself would be the first to admit, is truly wicked.  

How do we think about a book with such mysterious contents written in the style of an unknown genre?  I can only throw out a few suggestions that pop into my head.  

It might be useful to see TSZ as a form of science fiction, or more broadly, speculative fiction.  Of course, Nietzsche has invented and developed this character.  But what if we were to read the book as if it were non-fiction, as if it were exactly what it claims to be -- the chronicles of a prophet who launched a new sort of anti-religious religion?  In what kind of future world is Nietzsche's text the new Avesta?  After all, if there's one clear thing in all of TSZ, it's the constant concern with overcoming the present and producing the future.

One of the best things about this new translation is the footnotes, which cite many letters Nietzsche wrote to friends.  Many obscure images and phrases are illuminated by the context of Nietzsche's life.  It becomes clear that the book was intensely and searingly personal for Nietzsche.  Specific passages are related to specific feelings experienced at specific places.  There are thinly veiled references to friends like Wagner and philosophical mentors such as Schopenhauer.  And the whole works is written in the wake of a breakup with his special lady friend, Lou Andreas-Salomé.  Maybe the best way to read the book, then, is as one soul's dialogue with itself.  Nietzsche isn't presenting what he already believes, but working out what he needs to believe in order to keep working.  He is dramatizing an inner turmoil that he experienced as simultaneously personal and spiritual or metaphysical.  Looking at the book as a dialogue of sorts has the advantage of placing it into relation to Plato.  I found that reading TSZ produced a similar feeling to reading some of the longer Platonic dialogues like, say, Phaedrus, or The Sophist.  Since different characters and perspectives are in dialog, you never know quite where the author himself stands.  So when you reach the end, instead of finding a clear cut conclusion, you are forced to retrace your steps and consider how each of the twists and turns fit together.  Plato's dialogues, with their long narrative context and mythic contents, are also a good model for the genre-bending aspect of TSZ.

Finally, we might consider TSZ as a piece of music.  In his introduction, Parkes talks explicitly about how he wanted his translation to "restore the musicality of the text".  And there is something clearly musical about the way the book works.  Themes are announced, and then repeated with the same sense of variation and development you find in a symphony.  The scenes of climax especially have a certain tone and rhythm.  So you might look at the whole works as a type of long poem, or perhaps better as the libretto to an opera.  The prologue, for example, and much of part 4, definitely read as something that should be staged or filmed.