Tratamiento

That Wagner‟s music continued to haunt Nietzsche, even to the very end, is of course remarkable, insofar as it testifies to a certain enduring beauty at the very heart of sheer loss. And yet, even as early as 1871, we find that the artistry of Wagner‟s Tristan had already become linked, for Nietzsche, with the fullest extremes of both ecstasy and sorrow. Consider the following lines from a letter to Gustav Krug, written in late December 1871: “Even pain must be surrounded by such a halo of dithyrambic ecstasy that it drowns in it, to some extent; this I feel about the greatest example of all, the third act of

26 Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Wagner and Nietzsche. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1978. 201. 27 Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries. Translated by David J. Parent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. 218.

28 It is interesting to note that, in Gottfried von Strassburg’s rendering of the Tristan tale, it is precisely through an impromptu concert (“Lovely Isolde…attended closely to Tristan as he sat and played his harp”) that the young knight, who had just arrived at the royal court, first attempted to woe the young princess. Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. Translated by A.T. Hatto. London: Penguin Books, 2004. 145.

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Tristan.”29

Here, it is once again the exemplarity of Wagner‟s opera which asserts itself – an exemplarity which Nietzsche will, of course, continue to reiterate until his final published works. But wherein precisely does this exemplarity reside? It is in the opera‟s ability to offer us ecstasy even in pain, he writes. And whilst these words certainly anticipate, rather unmistakably, the rhetoric encountered within The Birth of Tragedy, they also hint at an additional significance. For one can‟t help but wonder if the allusion to ecstasy, here, might perhaps also hint at those secret, shared moments of feverish improvisation which he shared with Cosima – moments in which the two of them, through the very spirit of Tristan, came to approach some semblance of mystical complicity, or even erotic transmogrification.

We know, for instance, that by the autumn of 1888, Nietzsche had come to identify Cosima, rather explicitly, with the figure of Isolde. The occasion for this is an early notebook sketch from Ecce Homo, in which he writes that Wagner‟s marriage to her had amounted to “a simple case of adultery…the case of Tristan.”30 And yet, could it be that, as early as December 1871, an infatuation on Nietzsche‟s part had already begun to assert itself? Could it be that Tristan‟s pain, that pathos of distance, which Wagner‟s third act (in Nietzsche‟s words) exemplifies so incomparably, had already somehow metamorphosed into his own pain – the pain of yearning for a woman that he simply couldn‟t have?

We know that less than a week before Nietzsche‟s letter to Krug, on December 25, he had sent Cosima, for her birthday, an original musical composition accompanied with a flattering dedication (unbeknownst to the recipient, the composition in question actually dated back to 1863). And a week prior to

that, Nietzsche had been granted the noted privilege of accompanying Cosima alone, by train, to a performance of Wagner‟s work in Mannheim. The press accounts from that day seem to depict him almost in the manner of a suitor:

29 Letter to Gustav Krug. December 31, 1871. 30 Nietzsche and Music. 49.

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“…the train from Lucerne arrived bringing Frau Wagner from Tribschen. She left the train on the arm of a young man of middle height, with dark brown hair, large mustachios, and the high broad, forehead of a scholar and a thinker…He was presented to the executive committee of the society: „Gentlemen, Prof. Friedrich Nietzsche!‟ ”31

Here, Nietzsche seemed to be granted, for the first time in his adult life, access to the upper-echelons of German society. He enters the artistic world, so to speak, on the arm of a famous composer‟s wife – this very same woman with whom he has been feverishly conjuring musical spirits for the past several months.

And what, we might ask, was performed that night in Mannheim, at the concert to which Nietzsche was to escort her? It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, none other than a programme of music concluding with the “Vorspiel” and “Liebestod” to Tristan – the very sections of the opera which appear to flow directly into one another, forming that great circle, bereft of completion. The very sections, moreover, which give voice to the ceaselessness of desire and the implacable persistence of spatio-temporal distance. The very sections in which the hollowness of consummation and the inexorable pulsing of erotic deferral most audibly resound.

Indeed, it was this very performance which came to elicit, only days later, the letter to Gustav Krug in which Nietzsche most enthusiastically evoked the work‟s incomparable exemplarity. Still months before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, and nearly a decade before the famous revelation at Sils- Maria – the ecstasy and pathos of an eroticism freed from all ends had already mesmerised the young professor. And a single individual, it seems, had increasingly found her way to the centre of his fantasies. It was this woman with whom he had conjured, in rare moments, as if stolen from time, the ecstasy of transmogrification and the re-enactment of love‟s absolute

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unfulfilment.

But what had quickly evolved into a most fortuitous relationship, for Nietzsche, would soon find itself complicated and ultimately threatened by what was to come next. Less than four months after the Mannheim concert, Nietzsche would arrive at Tribschen, on a spring day in 1872, only to find Frau Cosima deep in the task of packing. “Whilst she moved from one room to another,” we are told, “he sat at the piano, weaving into his improvisations all his grief, his inexpressible hopes and fears, his precious memories and the acute realisation that something irretrievable was being taken from him. The strains, now jubilant, now mournful, echoed through the dismantled rooms, conjuring up ghosts of past joys and sorrows.”32

The end of the Nietzsche‟s Tribschen-idyll was now at hand. For the Wagners, as we know, were soon on their way to Bayreuth. The catastrophe of Nietzsche‟s eventual rift from the great composer – the very rift about which he would later write: “something like a deadly offence came between us”33 – was already not long in coming. It would be a rift, as we know, which would profoundly influence the entire development of Nietzsche‟s thinking from the mid-1870s onward, and transform the memory of his association with Wagner into a source of both immeasurable anguish and endless provocation.

It is not our intent, as we have previously stated, to explore the nature of this rift in any significant detail.34 _{It is well known that Wagner‟s name is largely}

absent from Nietzsche‟s works of the middle period – and yet, we also know that these works, as well as the ones that follow, are written by Nietzsche at least partially in response to his profound disenchantment, or disillusionment, with the hypocritical posturing and perceived passive nihilism of the

32 The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence. 112. 33 Letter to Overbeck. February 22, 1883.

34 Interestingly, it is has been alleged by at least a handful of scholars that Cosima’s role in precipitating the Nietzsche-Wagner rift was perhaps much more central than it has been customarily alleged. Sarah Kofman, in a fascinating article, has gone so far as to suggest that Cosima herself “was quite possibly the real cause of Nietzsche’s rupture or divorce with the man he claims as his closest relation.” And while we refrain from unequivocally endorsing this statement, there can be little doubt that Kofman’s remarks, here, are more than reconcilable with our own findings. “A Fantastical Genealogy: Nietzsche’s Family Romance.”

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Wagnerian milieu. We also know, rather importantly, that after the passing reference to Tristan and Isolde in the pages of Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche makes little or no mention of the opera itself until 1888, when he refers to it, once more, as a work of incomparable genius “which has no parallel, not only in music but in all the arts.”35

The question we must ask is what, exactly, takes place in the course of those intervening years. Why is there no mention of Tristan for almost a decade? And most importantly, what becomes of that enchanted eroticism which had been generated through Nietzsche‟s formative exposure to it? Does this eroticism simply disappear? Or could it be that it remains lingering just below the surface – within Nietzsche‟s thinking and writing of the 1880s – waiting to emerge at certain select moments, and in certain sublimated forms?

Indeed, one such moment seems to occur in the pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where we find the title of the discourse, “On the Great Yearning [Von der grossen Sehnsucht],” lifted directly from the libretto of Wagner‟s opera. – An important moment in Nietzsche‟s work, when the latent eroticism, so to speak, threatens to break through the surface. But as a consultation of Nietzsche‟s notebooks reveals, the aforementioned title was indeed notably absent from an early draft of the discourse in question. It was only later on, closer to the time of publication, that the section‟s original title was ultimately replaced by Nietzsche with this reference to Wagner‟s opera.

And what, we might ask, was this original title? Strangely, perhaps, it was none other than “Ariadne.” A name whose significance within Nietzsche‟s writings has long defied even the most inspired attempts at exhaustive elucidation.

Is its appearance, here, merely a coincidence? Or could it be that, in the very relation between these two titles – and in the intersection of the Ariadnean and Tristanian lineages more broadly – a quintessentially Nietzschean eroticism might perhaps announce itself? A fascinating suggestion. And one

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whose plausibility seems difficult to deny. For we are already aware of the incontrovertible ties linking both the names Isolde and Ariadne to the figure of Cosima – just as we understand Nietzsche‟s mania and capacity for transmogrification to be nothing less than formidable.

And yet, the question nevertheless remains, what kind of eroticism are we talking about here? And how, exactly, are we to characterise the nature of this

grossen Sehnsucht which comes to link Tristan‟s beloved, rather

unexpectedly, with the bride of Dionysus?

With these questions we come to approach, for the very first time, the domain of Nietzsche‟s great, hitherto unrecognised contribution to thought: his attempted rehabilitation of erotic distance. A project which leads Nietzsche from his formative and unforgettable immersion within the tableau of Tristanian romanticism, to the threshold of a wholly unprecedented affirmation of erotic forbearance.

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The Secret

If the riddle of Ariadne, which so conspicuously haunts Nietzsche‟s later writing, continues to evoke, to this day, an alluring, enigmatic lustre – then this can largely be attributed to two factors: first, its notorious inclusion within the scenography of madness in Turin; and second, its obscure association with the doctrine of eternal recurrence. It is well-known that Cosima Wagner, in the early days of January, 1889, received no fewer than three notes from Nietzsche, all bearing the signature of “Dionysus.” The last of these notes, which contained the words, “Ariadne, I love thee,”36 _{has been}

the subject of much commentary and speculation ever since. Could it be, as many critics have supposed, that Nietzsche, in his final moments of lucidity, had finally determined to reveal the identity of his elusive muse? Or might his communication, from the threshold of a swiftly encroaching darkness, have had some other – more oblique – significance?

Over the past century, there have been no shortage of attempts to explain the significance of Ariadnean imagery in Nietzsche‟s texts – and yet, despite this effusive outpouring of scholarly material, we have seemingly come no closer to the definitive answer which we seek.37 _{Indeed, this difficulty of coming to}

36 Letter to Cosima Wagner, January 4, 1889. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated and Edited by Christopher Middleton. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969. 346.

37 “In keeping with Ariadne’s labyrinthine character,” writes Karsten Harries, “different interpretations can be supported: Ariadne as Arachne, the spider woman, the monster in the web of language; Ariadne as Jung’s anima…” “The Philosopher at Sea.” Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics. Edited by Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988. 40. Of course, for every one of these readings, there are dozens more. For Alan D. Schrift, Ariadne is the emblem for the “philological rigour” that ensures the multiplicity of Dionysian perspectives “follow the walls of the labyrinthine text.” Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation. London: Routledge, 1990. 197. Whilst for Robert Gooding-Williams, Ariadne is Nietzsche’s name “for the human body’s power of receptivity to the advent of the coming Dionysus.” Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 181. For Karl Jaspers, Ariadne is a symbol which represents death itself. Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity. Translated by Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 226. For Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, Ariadne’s marriage to Dionysus constitutes to the secret to the double affirmation of the eternal return, whereby becoming assumes the character of being – “the highest pinnacle of meditation.” Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by High Tomlinson. London: Athelone Press, 1992. 186-9. For an astute survey of the main trends in Ariadne scholarship dating back to

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terms with one of Nietzsche‟s most notorious and impenetrable riddles has led more than one critic to suggest that “the figure of Ariadne is altogether resistant to philosophical interpretation.”38 _{But is this really the case? Or have}

these scholars and critics simply been too naïve in their manner of courting Ariadne? Could it be that they have pursued her too directly, too violently – and that they have not sufficiently acknowledged the indispensable priority of distance in all erotic endeavours? In the pages that follow, we propose to rectify these shortcomings by situating the riddle of Ariadne, for the first time, within the larger context of Nietzsche‟s rehabilitation of erotic distance – a project which he inherits from the courtly troubadours of the 12th _{century and}

which culminates, as we will show, in the thought of the eternal return.

●

The ancient myth of Ariadne is well-known. It begins on the isle of Crete, where Ariadne‟s father, King Minos, had famously decreed that every year seven boys and seven girls were to be sent into the labyrinth as a sacrifice to the Minotaur. In a gesture of great bravery, a young man named Theseus volunteered himself for this blood-sport in hopes of slaying the Minotaur and putting an end to the king‟s cruelty. As the story goes, Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and subsequently gave him “secret instructions in how to kill the beast,”39 _{in addition to providing him with “a clew of yarn to help him out of}

the maze.”40 _{As a result, Theseus was not only able to accomplish his original}

mission, but also navigate his way out of the labyrinth. The two lovers then set-off for Athens together, but upon disembarking, momentarily, on the Isle of Naxos – Theseus inexplicably deserted Ariadne, leaving her “spurned and

the turn of the century, see Adrian de Caro “Symbolizing Philosophy: Ariadne and the Labyrinth.” Nietzsche-Studien 17. 1988. 38 David Farrell Krell. Postponements: Women, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 109. 39 Oscar Mandel. Ariadne: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Gainesville: University of Florida, 1982. 47.

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wounded...seeking an end to her life.”41 _{Whilst the details of what happened}

next are subject to varying accounts, it is commonly held that the god Dionysus, “in the course of his triumphant progress through the world,”42

heard Ariadne‟s lament and came to her rescue – wedding her and assuaging the sorrow of her abandonment.

It was this very lament, summoned from the basin of the deepest despondency, which came to be immortalised by Nietzsche under the title, “Ariadne‟s Complaint,” one of nine, ostensibly Bacchic, hymns compiled by him in the summer of 1888 under the title Dithyrambs of Dionysus. As scholars have long been aware, the entire hymn, with the exception of its concluding lines, had already been featured several years earlier as the speech of the sorcerer in Part IV of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.43 _{In this original}

context, there was “no hint of either Dionysus or Ariadne,”44 _{and the words‟}

feminine endings were replaced by masculine ones. As a result, the text conjures much less an image of mythical Naxos than it does the tableau of Wagnerian Romanticism, with the afore mentioned sorcerer presumably a stand-in for the late composer himself.45

Upon its revision for publication in 1888, however, Nietzsche elected to make a crucial addition to the text which would profoundly transform it both in tone and emphasis. This addition took the form of the dithyramb‟s famous, concluding exhortation, proffered in the voice of Dionysus: “Be wise, Ariadne! You have little ears, you have ears like mine: let some wisdom into them! Must we not first hate each other if we are to love one another? I am thy

41 Joachim Köhler. Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation. Translated by Ronald Taylor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 2.

42 Ariadne: A Tragedy in Five Acts. 47.

43 Part IV of Zarathustra was printed in 1885, but only circulated privately amongst a handful of Nietzsche’s closest friends. 44 Karl Reinhardt. “Nietzsche’s Lament of Ariadne.” Interpretation 6. October 1977. 4.

45 Or, more precisely, the sorcerer may be considered a composite of both Wagner and Schopenhauer – the two towering intellectual influences of Nietzsche’s youth. In his essay “Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Ariadne Fixation,” Hermann J. Weigand makes the highly provocative, though completely unsubstantiated, claim that the lament was in fact intended for Ariadne all along – only being given to the sorcerer as an afterthought, and then switched back to its “original” form in 1888. To my knowledge, his