Nietzsche Biographies: Dichtung und Wahrheit

Rarely does a chance discovery give the reader an opportunity to examine the fundamental bases of a literary genre. This, however, is what Mark Anderson has accomplished with the article at hand. Although his immediate subject seems limited—explanations for similar wording in two biographies of Nietzsche—the terms he offers and the themes he introduces take the reader beyond the authors in question into more fundamental issues such as the interplay of scholarship and artistry in biography. This response will examine Anderson's assumptions and show how these allow readers to cast a critical eye on biographies in general and on two dealing with Friedrich Nietzsche in particular.

I

Professor Anderson begins by taking exception to a remark made by a previous reviewer (this writer) that every biographer of Nietzsche necessarily tells the same story.1 He rightly notes that the word 'story' can refer either to the events of Nietzsche's life, the story to be covered, as it were, or to a narrative account of those events, the story that is told. The former in theory is as fixed as the myths Greek dramatists used when fashioning their plays. The "story," on the other hand (and that word will be put in quotation marks when referring to the story told), is likely to vary significantly from one writer to another depending on sensibility, thematics, and presentational skills. As a conspicuously successful example of "story" in the second sense, Anderson proposes Curtis Cate's Friedrich Nietzsche, a biography published in the United Kingdom in 2002 and republished in the United States in 2005.2 Anderson claims of Cate that his research was thorough and that he synthesized the results in storytelling of exceptional accuracy and grace.

More recently (2010) Julian Young published Friedrich Nietzsche:A Philosophical Biography, a book that has received considerable praise.3 Repairing to his assumption that every biography will be different, Anderson is surprised to find that Young's book includes passages strikingly similar to sections in Cate's. These parallelisms are of two kinds, wording and narrative structure, and Anderson presents examples of each. Unable to account for these echoes, he faces an apparent contradiction. Every biographical story will be told differently, he believes, yet here is a case where two overlap.

Young has responded with a disarmingly short and graceful explanation in which he informs readers that during a project that took years to complete he recycled passages from Cate's book, transferring them from one draft to another until he lost or forgot these quotations' provenance. While one is grateful to Professor Young for replying so simply and clearly, the issues are by no means resolved. For a start, we may regretfully accept the loss of an occasional footnote. More difficult to understand is how he could have lost all those relating to Cate and, more generally, how he could have forgotten that he used that author so extensively in the first place.

Moreover, Young imported two kinds of material from Cate. Obviously, there was the duplication of language, which Anderson has noted and Young has acknowledged. But this was not just a question of stylistics. Cate's language summed up research and distilled hours spent in the libraries. This labor was Cate's, and in the process of repeating his words Young implicitly annexed these findings as his own.

Ultimately, one must note that while Young appeals to forgetfulness to account for his lapse, it is the task of the biographer or historian not to forget—to bear witness to what memory has abandoned or suppressed. Here it is Professor Anderson who has played the role of the true scholar, for he has discerned in a "new" text traces of an unacknowledged ancestor and restored Cate's authorship and a sense of his achievement to the reader's view.

II

My principal concern, though, is the distinction Anderson makes between story and "story." First, it must be observed that by focusing on the similarities between Young's book and Cate's, Anderson has somewhat overemphasized the resemblance and undercut his own hypothesis. In fact, the two books are strikingly different...