Beyond madness, what connects Hölderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche, and what do they teach us about Romanticism and the modern consciousness?
Dominique Pagani starts from Rimbaud's "Seer" letter, which holds that Romanticism has never been properly judged. He then turns to Nietzsche's enthusiasm for the prelude to Parsifal, which contradicts his attacks on Wagner. He sees in it a split between language and music, tied to the problem of the fusion of genres that Romanticism opened up. He thus brings together Hölderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche, three "madmen" connected, beyond Greek and mythical themes, by an obsessive attention to the fusion or separation of genres, visible in Nerval as far as Les Faux-saulniers. Through them he seeks to understand the shift from the Enlightenment to the "mal du siècle."
Translated from the French. Read the original.
The specter of romanticism haunts our modernity:
On May 15, 1871, Rimbaud sends Paul Demeny his famous letter, known as the “seer” letter, in which we can read this aside that condenses the problematic underlying our subject: “Romanticism has never been properly judged; who would have judged it? The critics!! The romantics (…)?”
One might as well say that the file remains blank, or cluttered with irrelevant material: from the Parnassians or the upholders of “art for art’s sake” to the superb persiflage of modern pathos peculiar to the author of La gaya scienza, these “critics” of romanticism—no doubt our first “postmoderns”—had nevertheless believed they had exorcised forever its eternal and haunting return; that irresistible “call of the rotten wood” announcing from very far off, like a horn, emblematic timbre of the romantic elsewhere/near, a fatal and gratifying relapse into the “mal du siècle”:
In one of the posthumous writings composed during the winter of 1886/87, Nietzsche thus expresses the thoughts, impressions and feelings that came over him on first hearing the prelude to Parsifal in Monte Carlo:
“Prelude to Parsifal, the greatest boon that has been granted me in a long time. The power and rigor of the feeling, indescribable. I know of nothing that grasps Christianity at such a depth and that moves one so fiercely to compassion. Utterly sublime and moved—no painter has been able to render, as Wagner has, a vision so indescribably melancholy and tender! (…) As if, after many years, someone were at last speaking to me of the problems that trouble me, not, naturally, to give them precisely the answers I hold ready, but the Christian answers—which have been, in the end, the answers of stronger souls than the last two centuries have produced.”
Let us bear in mind that these lines were written by the penultimate Nietzsche, two years before the compassionate collapse in Turin, four years after Wagner’s “Death in Venice,” and more than ten years after the (publicly) “definitive” break with the latter; years in the course of which his publications never ceased to add weight to the charge against everything decadent, Christian; romantic and resentful, toxic and effeminate, that the spirit of the Tondrama could harbor. If one adds, finally, that by Nietzsche’s own account the text of Parsifal, the composer’s musical testament, thematically concentrates the worst of all these insalubrities, to the point of his calling it a “Witches’ Cauldron,” then one can measure the staggering distance that separates the Parisian epigones of Zarathustra, to whom the Cold War recently gave the occasion to proliferate, from the poignant musico-dramatic honesty expressed here by their idol.
The character, exceptional in every respect, of such a self-reversal thus leads us to point out here, on the occasion of the “Case of Nietzsche,” the symptom of a schiz, of an entzweiung (one recognizes here the Hegelian concept of “scission,” which lies at the root of every “need of philosophy”). We carefully refrain from the term schizophrenia, having no standing to formulate the slightest clinical statement, nor, a fortiori, the slightest diagnosis. But the “case of Nietzsche” rather makes us attentive to the fact that the splitting of the person operates here between the Nietzsche of ideological discourse and the Nietzsche of listening, that is, between language and music, libretto and score; so that the clinical aspect of the “scission” of the subject is here found to be correlated with the stakes inherent in the problem of the fusion of genres initiated by romanticism a principio.
By the same token, taking into account two other “madmen,” included, rightly or wrongly, in the “clinical” field, and whose subject matter, as well as their mode of expression, constantly prowls around this problematic of genres, forced itself upon us, coming to confirm its objectivity beyond the manifest disparity of the subjectivities thus brought together. They are Hölderlin and Nerval.
Let us unfold this trio in alphabetical order, which, for once, coincides with chronology:
Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche.
Three “madmen”; at least, designated as such, rightly or wrongly, by posterity. Three moments of “modernity,” insofar as one defines the latter, at least chronologically, by the sequence that leads from Rousseau to Nietzsche; that is, from the double revolution that occurs at the end of the century of the Enlightenment - industrial, in England, then political, in France - up to the interminable “fin de siècle,” that “Twilight of the Gods” which, like the eponymous drama, ends in the most terrible carnage ever recorded up to that date (far worse was seen shortly afterward).
If the strictly pathological element were the only link capable of connecting the three vertices of this triangle of madness, the philosophical interest of our research proposal, reduced to so poor an abstraction, would vanish accordingly; not without arousing a legitimate suspicion of voyeurism: is there not already something dubious, to the point of conflation, in taking the clinical component common to our three authors as a pretext for erasing, within such an abstract trio, the difference between genres of poetic and philosophical expression?
But by focusing attention on this apparent arbitrariness of our trio, it appears rather that this confusion of genres, or, at the very least, the tendential indeterminacy of their respective limits, is itself at the root of the mode of expression proper to each of the moments that constitute it:
Two “poets” and one “philosopher”? That remains to be seen!
Without even invoking his text entitled On the Difference of Poetic Modes, nor even any of those Essays to which editors relegate his texts with a properly theoretical aim, Hölderlin’s poetic work, from the youthful verses to the Elegies, Hymns or Fragments, never ceases to tend toward a literally unheard-of confluence of the poetic element and the speculative form. One has to wait for the author of Zarathustra to witness such an indiscernibility of genre, in modalities—and above all tonalities, it is true, very different, even opposed.
Zarathustra is an immense poem containing in its turn several “genre pieces,” among which we find that Dance Song whose refrain runs:
“You, the friend of wisdom?
Come now! Nothing but a madman, nothing but a poet!”
As for the author of The Chimeras, Nerval scholarship presents him as the most “German-romantic” of (thoroughly) “French” authors, like his great friend Heine, the most French of German poets1. And it is true that Hyperion as well as Zarathustra could countersign this second quatrain of Myrtho, which seems taken from the dithyramb of Dionysus:
“It was in your cup too that I had drunk intoxication
And in the furtive flash of your smiling eye,
When at the feet of Iacchus I was seen praying
For the muse has made me one of the sons of Greece.”
This Hellenic reference in our three authors, the conflict, manifest or latent, which in each of them sets it against “Christian unhappiness,” the continuous and fascinated reflection on the dramatic genre, the permanent reference to the mythic element, are so many themes, that is, elements of content, held in common; as such, one may rightly judge the connections they authorize to be external and contingent.
In fact, the value of a text, and singularly of a poetic text, is not measured by the depth of the themes evoked, and the poem cannot be reduced to versified thought.
But the progressive congruence of our trio makes, precisely, a qualitative leap, provided that, without contenting ourselves with these thematic connections, as inexhaustible as they are hazardous, we come to note in each of our three authors an overriding attention, to the point of obsession, paid—here we find the wolf’s ears again!—to the apparently formal, even, academic problem of the fusion, and/or, separation of genres. If the matter is “well known” in Hölderlin and Nietzsche, it has gone more unnoticed in Nerval. Yet it is in a text by the latter that the peril or threat attendant on the mixing of genres reaches its acme: namely The Salt Smugglers. A title originally intended for Angélique, the novella that opens the collection The Daughters of Fire. By way of reply to Arsène Houssaye, who had come asking him for a few verses of his youth for a forthcoming anthology, Nerval answers: “My friend, you ask me whether I could find again some of my old verses, and you even concern yourself with learning how I was a poet, long before becoming a humble prose writer. I send you the three ages of the poet—there is nothing left in me but an obstinate prose writer.”
With that literally suicidal discretion which was his own (in a very beautiful posthumous tribute, Baudelaire evokes “a discretion that resembled contempt”), Nerval thus ascribes to a subjective and arbitrary change of mood the immense caesura then taking place, at mid-century, the first attempt made by romanticism to escape from itself: that “School of Disenchantment,” to borrow a phrase of Balzac’s, which rediscovers the poetry/prose duality, by setting against the previous generation, take your pick, the verses of the Parnassians, or the miraculous fountain of “realist” novels. Cutting across these two modes of expression, socially opposed, the invariant of what then succeeds romanticism remains this “return to things”; this passage from personal lyricism, where the poetic genre necessarily dominates, to the realism of the novelists, striving to annex to the field of belles lettres new and salubrious potentialities, expressible by the “Prose of the World” alone; not to mention that at the very moment he proclaims himself an “obstinate prose writer,” Nerval expresses a growing fascination with the ideal fusion that takes place, in his view, between speech and music, at the whim of popular nursery rhymes.
This union of poem and melody, whose fulfillment Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, senses, grandiose to the point of incandescence, in Wagnerian music drama, Nerval rather hears murmuring, far removed from that “Hated original din” 1, There where
“The fair one was sitting, by the flowing brook”
That is to say, precisely, on those “happy banks” where, by the simple fact of being in contact at their respective fluvial limits, there merge three regions that one believed well separated: “Old provincial France is scarcely known,—in these parts especially—which nevertheless form part of the surroundings of Paris. At the point2 where the Ile-de-France, the Valois and Picardy meet,—divided by the Oise and the Aisne, whose course is so slow and so peaceful,—one may dream the loveliest pastorals in the world. The language of the peasants themselves is of the purest French, barely modified by a pronunciation in which the endings of words rise to the sky in the manner of the lark’s song… Among the children it forms a kind of warbling.”
It will be noted that the fusion of spaces immediately induces that of speech and song. Thus placed en abyme, the stakes underlying respect for the separation of genres, or the perilous transgression of their limits, seem to us bound to challenge the most prominent currents of contemporary thought, particularly those that have grown used to shelving dialectics in the closet of “has-beens,” thereby condemning modern consciousness to the dangerous binarity of antinomies:
To understand how we passed, so rapidly, from the century of the Enlightenment, where the prospect of happiness united all parties, Voltaire and Rousseau included, to the “mal du siècle,” itself the prelude to the century of evil: that of the great slaughters?
It may seem paradoxical, given the gravity of these stakes, to seek the answer not among the wise but among the mad; and yet, as Pascal says in a flash of rational lightning quoted by Nerval in October Nights:
Pascal said:
“Men are mad, so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would be to be mad in another way.”
La Rochefoucauld added: “It is a great folly to wish to be wise all alone.”
These maxims are consoling1.”
(note: October Nights, chap.19)