HENRY McDONALD
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pioned in the French Revolution while lauding the potential for
"freedom" which that revolution gave birth to.
James, of course, was no Arnold, and Nietzsche,still less,no
Goethe. Both were in the grip of an intense, fragmenting
aestheticism that made their ideal of wholeness a nonorganic
one. For each, the seed from which character and consciousness
spring rests not on the "natural" soil of self but on a historically
contingent, artificially fertilized soil, continuously being laid
down even as it gains the capacity to act on and become a new
form of "nature." Crucial to the concept of self for both is the role
of deception, artifice, performance, and play-acting, a concept
that strikes at the heart of the modernist notion of the self as
autonomous, privatized, and essential.
James and Nietzsche's concept of the aesthetic, like James's
concept of self referred to here in my opening, is both conserva–
tive and revolutionary. It is conservative in its emphasis on
wholeness and revolutionary in its refusal to give such whole–
ness a natural or metaphysical basis. The distinctive feature of
such revolutionary conservatism is tragic affirmation. Both
Nietzsche and James were saturated in classical and
Shakespearean tragedy from an early age; their lifelong struggle
to formulate a new aesthetic, traditional yet radical, was played
out in the artistic language of tragedy. Nietzsche even called
himself "the first tragic philosopher." But if that is the case, then
James deserves to be called the first tragic novelist. The implica–
tions of the latter's notion of tragedy are no less philosophically
profound than those of Nietzsche's.
In his first major work,
The Birth of Tragedy,
Nietzsche at–
tacked what might be called "rationalistic" accounts of tragedy.
The principal characteristic of such accounts is that they offer
justification for the suffering of the hero by reconciling him to
some existing social, moral, or religious order. Such justification
might take the form of a fortunate fall in which the hero recog–
nizes his guilt or at least his mistake and undergoes a redemptive
process. What Nietzsche objected to about these accounts, whose
source he traced to Socrates and the
deus ex machina
device of
Euripides, is that they see tragedy as explaining rather than
showing its meaning; such accounts approach tragedy as though
it were a problem to be solved rather than an action to be ren–
dered. They posit a preestablished form or object, such as a heav-
