Nietzsche and the Rebirth of the Tragic (review)

The Birth of Tragedy, conceived and written by Nietzsche when he was just past his mid-twenties, has exerted a sway going well beyond its originally intended audiences. Even individuals who haven’t yet wrestled with the book’s youthful excesses and sloppy writing are dimly aware of Nietzsche’s vivid distinction between the “Apollinian” and the “Dionisyan” (with preference for the latter). Indeed, “Dionysian” long ago became part of the critical-cultural vernacular, and his binary opposition would eventually give rise to such notorious grand schemes as Spengler’s Decline of the West.

In this collection, Mary Ann Frese Witt gathers eight learned essays that examine the presence of young Nietzsche’s speculations in subsequent works of theatre, fiction, verse, philosophy, and film. Her useful introduction, “Nietzsche as Tragic Poet and His Legacy,” summarizes the main ideas—his emphasis on sacrificial offerings and on lyrical, rhapsodic, and agonistic elements, his threefold repudiation of Socrates, Euripides, and Aristotle—and then situates these notions within Nietzsche’s overall development and his changing relationship to Wagner. “The Tragic” in Witt’s title denotes not just a dramatic genre but also an attitude, an ethos, a structure of feeling. Most of the articles themselves provide concrete instances of Nietzsche’s tragic theory influencing Strindberg, D’Annunzio, Yeats, the Russian thinkers Shestov and Berdiaev, and the Czech novelist Weil. Other contributors read Artaud, Wilder’s Our Town, and Godard’s Prénom Carmen through the early-Nietzschean optic.

Some of the earlier artists’ ties to Nietzsche are quite specific and inherently interesting in terms of both literary and cultural history. Strindberg and the German exchanged some lively correspondence in 1888. In the 1890s D’Annunzio wrote essays on Nietzsche for Italian dailies. Yeats received a gift of several English translations of the philosopher from John Quinn, the New York literary patron and collector, in 1902. The impact of Nietzsche on fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Russian and Czech letters constitutes an entire episode in itself.

In “Pausing before Being: Nietzsche, Strindberg, and the Idea of Tragedy,” Michael Stern examines The Gay Science and Ecce Homo in some depth before analyzing the genesis of the Swedish novelist-playwright’s system of oppositions and his theory of drama through the lessons he learned from the German. Mary Ann Frese Witt’s essay, “D’Annunzio’s Dionysian Women: The Rebirth of Tragedy in Italy,” surveys most of the Italian’s narrative and dramatic output, demonstrating his sexual and aesthetic recasting of his mentor’s theory, especially in his female characters. Of particular interest is the close attention Frese Witt pays to the personal marginalia and annotations in D’Annunzio’s copies of Nietzsche’s works.

John Burt Foster has spent much time studying Nietzsche as shown by his Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism (1981). Here, in “Lidless Eyes, Story Places, Vibrant Spectators: Nietzschean Tragedy in Yeats’s Lyric Poetry,” he offers a close look at Nietzsche’s intertwining presence and influence on the Irishman’s literary growth. Yeats, as an occasional man of theater with an interest in the audience for tragedy, felt a natural kinship with Nietzsche, as evidenced by Foster’s discussion of specific metaphors taken straight from the philosopher by the Irish bard. After 1914, as events in Ireland and Europe darkened, the poet further distilled and eventually transcended his Nietzscheanism. Foster makes the valuable observation that Nietzsche was never forced to test his ideas in a world gone tragically awry; Yeats, by contrast, needed to adapt and humanize his Nietzschean vision as time and history continued their dreary march through the beginnings of the twentieth century.

A broadened approach is undertaken by Edith W. Clowes in “Groundlessness: Nietzsche and Russian Concepts of Tragic Philosophy,” which presents an ample overview of the influx of Nietzschean ideas into Russian thought. Lev Svestov (1866–1938) formulated a familiarly tragic, “existentialist” system; Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948) actually dubbed himself a “Dionysian...