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4. Of Tragedy and the Blues in an Age of Decadence:Thoughts on Nietzsche and African America
- State University of New York Press
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If you could imagine dissonance assuming human form—and what else is man?—this dissonance would need, to be able to live, a magnificent illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its own nature. This is the true artistic aim of Apollo. At the same time, only as much of that foundation of all existence, that Dionysiac underground of the world, can be permitted to enter an individual’s consciousness as can be overcome, in its turn, by the Apolline power of transfiguration, so that both these artistic drives are required to unfold their energies in strict, reciprocal proportion, according to the law of eternal justice. . . .That there is a need for this effect is a feeling which each of us would grasp intuitively, if he were ever to feel himself translated, even just in a dream, back into the life of ancient Hellene.As he wandered beneath rows of high, Ionic columns, gazing upwards to a horizon cut off by pure and noble lines, seeing beside him reflections of his own, transfigured form in luminous marble, surrounded by human beings who walk solemnly or move delicately, with harmonious sounds and a rhythmical language of gestures—would such a person, with all this beauty streaming in on him from all sides, not be bound to call out, as he raised a hand to Apollo: “Blessed people of Hellas! How great must Dionysos be amongst you, if the God 4 Of Tragedy and the Blues in an Age of Decadence: Thoughts on Nietzsche and African America LEWIS R. GORDON 75 of Delos considers such acts of magic are needed to heal your dithyrambicmadness!”Itislikely,however,thatanagedAthenian would reply to a visitor in this mood, looking up at him with the sublime eye of Aeschylus:“But say also this, curious stranger: how much did this people have to suffer in order that it might become so beautiful! But now follow me to the tragedy and sacrifice along with me in the temple of both deities!”1 So Nietzsche concluded his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music). Although his remarks exemplify nostalgic valorization of the ancient Greeks,they can be applied,ironically,toAfricanAmericans.I say“ironically ” because of the familiar motif of pitting ancient Greek history against black history in modern racist scholarship, as found in Comte Arthur de Gobineau’s remark, wrongly attributed to Léopold Sedar Senghor, that “Reason is Greek as emotion is Negro.”2 The criticism that Senghor made of that remark is in stream with the homage to the two gods in Nietzsche’s final sentence: It is not to rely on one of these gods over the other—the rational, ordered, beautiful Apollo versus the passionate,ecstatic,dramatic Dionysos—but to develop a higher synthesis of both3 (BT 1 and BT 8). For Senghor, a man or woman without passion was not a human being, and one locked solely in ecstatic revelry similarly falls short. These reflections from the dialectical period in Nietzsche’s thought resound the contradictions between African Americans and American (that is,“white”) society.4 In whiteness is presumed the Apolline rationalization of spirit.From modern technological achievements to the world of twentieth-century art, the role of whiteness has been consistently articulated by its major proponents as that of domestication of once chaotic forces. George Gershwin, we must remember, supposedly “made a lady out of jazz,”AfricanAmerican classical music.In contrast,African Americans have been consigned the Dionysiac world of debauchery, passion, ecstasy; intoxication; sex; and music. Yet this dichotomy misrepresents much of the story, for, as is well known, the suffering whose purpose was to break the spirit of African Americans has also been the condition through whichAfricanAmericans have created syntheses that have been the hallmarks ofAmerican aesthetic achievements:spirituals, ragtime, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and hip-hop, as well as their many offshoots, which include reggae, samba, and salsa. This achievement is more than musical performance. It is the leitmotif of African American expression.The blues and jazz thus emerge through writings ranging from those of Langston Hughes to Richard Wright 76 Lewis R. Gordon [3.90.33.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:56 GMT) and James Baldwin and, today, Toni Morrison. They emerge on the level of theoretical reflection as well. Just read and feel it in W. E. B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk through to Richard...