34
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the patent impotence of his formidable intellect in dealing with
pain and indisposition. The best stratagem was to remind himself that
his psychological insights derived from self-observation, and that his
talent for it might never have developed but for his malaise. And in
concentrating on the voluntary element, the cruelty necessary to self–
conquest, he could forget what was beyond his control.
This secret self-ravishment, this artistic cruelty, this lust to impose
form on oneself as on a tough, resistant, suffering material, cauteris–
ing into oneself a will, a criticism, a contradiction, a contempt, a
negation; this uncanny, weirdly enjoyable labour of a voluntarily
divided soul making itself suffer out of pleasure in causing suffering,
finally this whole,
active
"bad conscience" -you can guess already–
as the true womb of all ideal and imaginative experience.
The affinity with Kafka depends partly on masochism: once the soul is
divided, the pleasure of the one half is fed by the pain of the other.
"Everything I possess," wrote Kafka, "is directed against me; what is
directed against me is no longer a possession ... I am nothing but a
mass of spikes going through me." Triumphantly passive, the sadistic
self takes notes while the masochistic self wriggles. Nietzsche in his cult
of the cruelty necessary
to
self-conquest had more elaborate stratagems.
The self is kept more deeply submerged.
In
Kafka's fiction desire is
often apparent, if seldom gratified; Nietzsche rightly castigates idealist
philosophers for leaving the body out of account, but in his own work
sexuality is either repressed or sublimated. Eroticism is sometimes
admitted to his verse but seldom to his prose, except in the second book
of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883). "Night has fallen: only now do the
songs of lovers come
to
life. My soul too is the song of a lover ... Light
am
I.
Would I were night! But this is my loneliness, to be girdled with
light. Would I were dark, nocturnal. How I wanted
to
suck at the
breasts of light." But here the memory of sexual humiliation at the
hands of Lou Salome was adding a morbid piquancy to the literary
experience.
But I live in my own light. The flames that break out of me I drink
back into myself. I do not know the bliss of receiving and I have often
dreamed it must be still more blessed
to
steal than
to
receive. That is
my poverty: my hand never rests from giving ... Hunger grows out
of my beauty: I wish
to
hurt those I enlighten, steal from those who
benefit-this is my evil appetite.
The mask is slipping: Zarathustra
IS
speaking directly out of
