Nietzsche Foresees the Future of Literary Criticism

Nietzsche Foresees the Future of Literary Criticism

            ‘The Will to Power is the Eternal Return of every event,

                even – God  help us! – of post-structuralist criticism’.

                                                                                                F. Nietzsche (slightly adapted.)

‘When you go in to woman, take your whip!’

Mad Nietzsche lay spreadeagled on the rug

In Madame Fifi’s[i] boudoir, with her spurred

And booted foot set firmly on his neck.

Her tingling lash cracked fast across his back,

Urging the spirochaetes that filled his blood

To swarm into his syphilitic brain

And fill his mind with wild philosophy.

‘One must admit that Newton got things right.

In his mechanic, clockwork universe,

Each atom, being eternal, must return

To just that place which held it once before,

And that being so, all Nature is a stage

On which we actors strut and strut again

In infinite recurrence. It must be

That Madame Fifi’s sharp-spurred boot and whip,

This Persian rug, this boudoir’s cloying scents,

Those ghastly vases on her mantle-shelf,

And even that loathsome pug upon her couch

Which yaps around my ankles twice a week

Among these keen accoutrements of pain –

And first and foremost, even I myself,

I, Friedrich Nietzsche – all must come again,

Over and over. All must come again!’

And then, like Dionysius in his joy,

Cavorting with Bacchantes in the hills,

– Fair Dworkin’s[ii] flock, clad in the purloined pelts

Of phallic oafs and patriarchal poets –

Around the University of Basel[iii]

When Zurich bankers raise the interest rates,

And dour Geneva’s gloomy banks rejoice,

He came and came again. Then went his way,

Having paid Madame Fifi twenty francs

(Ten centimes for each lash-mark he received),

Musing aloud: ‘Twas cheap at twice the price,

Even though paid in sold, Switzer gold,

To give me inspiration for my book

Where Zarathrustra will appear again,

Great sage, descending to the market-place

To voice sublime thought to a brutish herd

Who cannot recognise the Ubermensch,

Being sunk in sickly Christianity

And other craven values of the weak.

And I foresee, in glorious Wars to come,

Germania’s soldiers shall this volume bear

Within their knapsacks, by Imperial order,[iv]

Until a Leader rises who shall purge

Our sacred soil of baser elements

And prove, by His own deeds, that God is dead.

Nor, when the Gay Science[v] comes, will men forget

I prophesied this time of blut und boden,[vi]

For sweet Elizabeth [his sister’s name]

Will see that even Jews applaud my fame.’[vii]

That said, he paused beneath a gas lamp’s glare,

And wrote down in a calf-bound diary

With a slim pencil – present from dear Liz –

A lengthier version of his earlier thought:

‘When you go into Woman, take your lash!

She may have lost that instrument of pain

So won’t inspire philosophy (for cash)

Within th’alembic of your teeming brain,

Which one day ponderous Teuton dons will loot,

And cunning French Idealists plagiarize,

Blackening the groves of Literature with soot

And burying Art in self-refuting lies.

So even Shakespeare, chief of Albion’s glories,

Will find his plays reduced to doubtful stories,

And grim Aporia, of all gods the queerest,

Transform the hapless Will to Cultural Theorist.

The New Historians show he loved a lord

And semioticians prove that he was bored,

While deconstructionists – all undersexed –

Will claim that nothing ‘Is’ outside the Text.

Bourdieu, Bataille, Irigaray, Foucault,

Greimas, Le Doeuff, Lacan and Adorno,

Genette, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, Eco,

Lacan, Hjelmslev, Dumezil and Blanchot

Touraine, Levinas, Laclau, Barthes and Mauss,

My followers, base slaves devoid of nous,

Idealist trash, lashed on by Will to Power,

Will heap their scorn on literature’s fair flower,

Destroy true genius, overthrow the strong,

Banish all Art and confound right with wrong.

Dull Theory will arise to spread her pall

And darkness and confusion cover all.’

He closed his book; then shrinking from the light,

Like Truth and Knowledge fled into the night[viii].

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[i] Certain scholars allege that her name was actually Lucy. However, it is clear that they are confusing this dominatrix with Wordsworth’s beloved, who, to the best of our knowledge, was both too rustic and too naïve to have indulged in such Swinburnian practices.

[ii] A leading contemporary feminist, whose intellect is excelled only by her ethereal beauty and her studied elegance of dress.

[iii] The university where Nietzsche held his Chair until invalided from service by syphilis etc.

[iv] During WWI, all German soldiers were issued with a copy of Thus Spake Zarathrustra to while away dull hours in the trenches.

[v] Die frohliche Wissenschaft – the crisis of Nihilism that only the strong will rejoice in.

[vi] ‘Blood and soil’, a Nazi shibboleth.

[vii] Elizabeth married Richard Forster, one of the most notorious anti-Semites of the time. After Nietzsche’s death in 1900, she edited her brother’s works in such a way that her late husband would have approved of them.

[viii] Post-structuralism, heir to Nietzsche’s doctrine of Perspectivism, states that it is true – a matter of common knowledge – that truth and knowledge do not exist. Logic too, one presumes?

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM