Nietzsche's Last Laugh: Ecce Homo as Satire by Nicholas D. More (review)

Ever since its posthumous release in 1908, Ecce Homo has thwarted interpretation. Indeed, scholars still puzzle over this quasi-autobiography, often marginalizing it from the greater corpus of Nietzsche's writings, sometimes even dismissing it as troubled testimony of his incipient madness. The real problem for posterity (not of course for Nietzsche, who appears to have amused himself heartily while composing this amalgam of self-parody and self-hagiography) lies in Ecce Homo's singular status as a genre-bending text. Put plainly, if not crudely: Just what the hell is it? In more conventional scholarly terms: How are we to read, interpret, and categorize it? Short answer: Get your hands on Nicholas D. More's boon of a book, which offers readers of Nietzsche something new and satisfying to sink their interpretive teeth in, affording them a better grip on the authorial intentionality of this hyperbolic opus.

The title of More's study basically says it all: Nietzsche goes to great lengths and spares no jocular expense in bequeathing to the intellectual world a self-reflective work of satire. Given his academic training in classical philology, more specifically his knowledge of the satiric tradition in ancient Greece and Rome, it seems only logical that Nietzsche would capitalize on the age-old genre of satire, especially of the Manippean variety. But scholarship has tended to overlook this fact or at least not explored it in depth. More rectifies this situation through a multipronged approach—which is surely the most effective way to tackle Nietzsche and his multifarious modes of philosophizing. More's introduction outlines productive "ways of reading Nietzsche" in light of four major issues that have dominated the scholarly discussion for well over one hundred years: 1) the problem of Nietzsche's doctrines, most of which are inchoately formulated and scattered throughout his oeuvre, versus the organic coherence of the works themselves; 2) the long-standing debate of published books versus posthumously issued notes; 3) inventive ("hot") interpolations of Nietzschean phrases and metaphors versus more staid ("cool") efforts to contextualize his ideas within a comprehensive hermeneutic framework; and 4) the various schools of thought—analytical, deconstructive, psychological, biographical, and reconstructive—that have all done their best to crack Nietzsche's manifold textual code. Then follows an overview of Ecce Homo's reception, which has largely been deconstructionist in bent (cf. Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Derrida, and above all Sarah Kofman). If earlier interpretations have been dismissive at worst or reductive at best, such deconstructive approaches verge on the overly poetic or idiosyncratic. More's own self-professed methodology is "holist" (18), that is deeply contextualized within the broader body of Nietzsche's pre-Ecce Homo publications. In what may be considered a post-postmodernist move, More privileges the material books over the diffuse Nachlass. This is of course precisely Nietzsche's own approach in Ecce Homo, over half of which reexamines his creative output from Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872) to Der Fall Wagner (1888). Correspondingly, the bulk of More's study comprises a thorough analysis and commentary of every single textual chunk of Ecce Homo, from the multivalent title and subtitle, to the preface and postpreface, to Nietzsche's re(e)valuations of his individual works in the lengthy chapter entitled "Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe."

Hardcore literary theorists and historians may find fault with More's brief if not brusque chapter on the genre-specific aspects of satire (27–35). Here the author reviews a handful of norms and criteria proposed by diverse scholars (most notably Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin) in order to provide an at least preliminary outline of the rhetorical tropes, narrative strategies, and other generic conventions that typify satire—in contradistinction, for instance, to parody, irony, and comedy. This chapter could easily have been expanded, perhaps however at the risk of becoming bloated in dull historical-theoretical detail. In his defense, More revisits these components...