FOUR

Festival, Carnival,
and Parody

(Zarathustra IV)

With the fourth part of Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s writing displays an obvious transformation of style, tone, and thought; and the change, most of the critics have argued, is not for the better. Since Nietzsche had the fourth part printed privately, distributed only some of these copies to a few friends, and then attempted to retrieve those, the case against giving serious attention to this part of the text acquires some circumstantial plausibility. But the question of whether Zarathustra’s adventures with the higher men, the “last supper” that they share, the worship of an ass, and the odd songs that are sung in this part contribute something of significance to Nietzsche’s “greatest gift” to mankind must finally be settled by a careful look at what he has written. Eugen Fink, whose book on Nietzsche’s Philosophy is an illuminating and lucid statement from a generally Heideggerian perspective, makes the case against the fourth part on immanent grounds, and he does so, in part, by appealing to considerations of narrative tone and style:

Fink is right in pointing to an abrupt change of tone, but I think it is a mistake to see such a change as unique to this part; I have been claiming that each of the book’s major parts represents something of a new departure in style, language, and thought. While there is an intensification of narrative outline, it is important to ask what the genre of this narrative is; and I suggest it is one in which the abrupt transitions of which Fink complains are completely appropriate. Fink is closer to the themes of the text in suggesting that Zarathustra IV is a satyr play than in his view that what Nietzsche is aiming at here is an image of the form of Zarathustra’s existence, or an existential model.

Nietzsche himself suggests a literary and philosophical category that is appropriate to understanding the fourth part of Zarathustra in his explication of the possibility of carnivalizing the history of culture. Earlier Zarathustra had spoken “Of the Land of Bildung” (education or culture; actually the notion is a deeply embedded cultural ideal, for the comprehension of which English speakers require the mediation of a thinker such as Gadamer). This is a chapter that must arouse some fear and trembling in anybody who would venture to teach Nietzsche, that is to make his thought an assimilable part of a common culture. For there Zarathustra attacks the historicist ideal of the nineteenth century, comparing its men to motley collections of fragments from many times and places, portraying them as masks. “Written over with the signs of the past and these signs overdaubed with new signs; thus have you hidden yourselves well from all interpreters of signs” (Z, 142; 4, 153). By turning themselves into universal interpreters of all of the human record the men of culture think that they, as the transmitters of that record, are themselves not susceptible to interpretation. But the hermeneut is not beyond all interpretation; he seems so only because of his temporary monopoly of the disciplines of culture. Should Nietzsche’s anticipation that one day a chair will be endowed for teaching of his works ever be realized, its occupant may shudder when he expounds Zarathustra on Bildung; for he will wonder whether or not he has simply added Nietzsche to the great collection of masks and disguises that constitute so much of the standard repertoire of what we call the humanities. Are we not all caught up, to some extent, in this historical spirit? Are we colorless skeletons underneath the motley trappings of our learning? I want to suggest that Zarathustra IV is a celebration in which the motley and the over-inscribed can become transvalued. The key to this transvaluation is the eternal recurrence and its accompanying weakening of the identity of the self, but the specific nature of the transvaluation can be understood when we look at a section of Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche, after a description of the “hybrid European” and his “historical spirit,” suggests how we can find

I propose that the fourth part of Zarathustra can be read as a commentary on this passage, for it is a product of Nietzsche’s highest philosophical and poetic invention—the model of a “carnival in the grand style” (Karneval grossen Stils) and a consummate parody during which Zarathustra himself becomes the Hanswurst, the buffoon or carnival clown.

Yet the atmosphere of carnival is hardly present at the very beginning here. Zarathustra, we are told, has grown older and his hair has turned white. Living in the mountains, he no longer needs to develop his own vision or to confront the establised views and powers of the world “down there.” Rather he proposes to become a fisher of men while remaining on the mountain, suggesting that he will have the best of the two worlds which were incompatible for Jesus. Jesus was tempted by the devil with the things of the world and the promise to be “lord of the earth” high upon a mountain from which one could survey as much of the world as possible; Zarathustra is invited by his animals at the beginning of part four to “climb a high mountain” today where “one sees more of the world today than ever before” (Z, 251; 4, 296). Unlike Jesus Zarathustra does not need to give up the charms or the visions of the world in order to spread his message through becoming a fisher of men. Part four then begins as parody and eventually reaches heights of comedy and burlesque in an ass-festival that mocks the Christian sacraments. Zarathustra’s great struggle in this part is with his tendency to feel pity; again this is an inversion of the pity which Jesus feels for suffering humanity. The motley collection of higher men who are assembled finally at Zarathustra’s cave for a parodic version of the Last Supper are not meant to form the nucleus of a church. To the extent that they form a temporary group, their goal is to overcome the illusions of false community associated with institutions such as churches. This theme of dissolution is carried further insofar as the action of part four does not affirm even an integral individual as opposed to the communal or institutional world. This, of course, is a continuation, or enactment, of the revision of individuality which has been accomplished by the thought of eternal recurrence. Not one of the higher men who appear in this part could be called an integral individual; each is a fragment, a type, or an allegorical personage. If Zarathustra presents a contrast to this collection of his guests he does so not by way of being a stable and well rounded figure but by always being in motion, that is, by always ironizing in relation to the higher men.

There is some truth, then, to the suggestion that part four is analogous to the satyr-play which followed the tragic performance at the Greek theater or festival of Dionysus.² Yet this observation could also be misleading. First, it is incorrect to suppose that the first three parts of Zarathustra form an unbroken stylistic continuity which leaves only an exceptional fourth part to be explained. Each part turns upon its own distinctive mode of thought and language, as I have already claimed, perhaps too frequently. There is also the more subtle danger of an error in literary or generic classification here. The fourth part of Zarathustra is not a comic or satyric drama because it is (like the other parts) not a drama at all, but a narative. That is, it is a story which is being told to us, rather than performed before us; it is not mimetic, but diegetic. In this respect it is like Plato’s Symposium, to which it bears some other striking resemblances, in being neither tragedy nor comedy but a narrative that contains them. In fact Zarathustra IV playfully calls attention to itself as a narrative, as in this passage from “The Drunken Song”:

This same uncertainty about the legitimacy and origin of the story being told to us is found at the beginning of the Symposium, another drinking party which assembles a variety of “types” and includes the eiron Socrates, and where we learn that the story has been filtered to us through a succession of narrators. This is of course a classical device to call attention to the irony of a discourse and to alert the reader to the artfulness of the story’s telling. In the case of the Symposium the indirection at the beginning of the narrative parallels Socrates’ need, within the story, to present the nature of love by resorting to the fictitious figure of Diotima who must herself resort to mysteries and obscure language. Here the device emphasizes the allegorical nature of the narrative which we are reading and its many parodic relations to Plato, the Bible, and other texts.

As Fink says in dismissing this part of Zarathustra, one significant variation from what has been encountered so far has to do with the progression and structure of the story. We are much closer to conventional narrative here than in the rest of the book. A purpose is announced (Zarathustra will be a fisher of men; he will resist the temptation to pity); one by one the higher men make their appearance on Zarathustra’s mountain and deliver themselves of their various allegorical messages; finally they are shown in assembly, celebrating the last supper and the ass-festival; at the end Zarathustra declares himself contented when he takes sight of the laughing lion and the flight of birds, which had been predicted as meaningful signs. Zarathustra, then, is no longer speaking to an amorphous group or to himself, but to a continuing cast of characters who will not only form part of a determinate action of his, but who will also eventually become significant actors for each other. At the same time the culminating events of this last part are in certain respects non-narrative or anti-narrative; the last supper and the ass-festival recall the carnival and the popular feast in which the hierarchies and distinct identities that we require in narrative are challenged and dissolved. In literary terms it is as if a Rabelaisian celebration were superimposed upon an allegorical medieval romance. Yet this is not a sign of artistic or philosophical ambivalence; it is a way both of recognizing the claims of the aspirants to Zarathustrean wisdom (including the reader) and of teaching those aspirants a lesson about the rather tenuous character of the official public self or the allegedly integral deeper self of otherworldly philosophy and religion.

The key is clearly sounded in the first episode, “The Honey-Offering.” Zarathustra is discontent, complaining that his animals don’t understand him. In their conversation there is much bantering about the proper metaphor to describe Zarathustra’s condition. Gazing out from his cave at the sea and winding abysses (already identified in part three as metaphors for self-dissolution), Zarathustra’s melancholy is puzzling to the animals. Solicitously, they attempt to remind him that he should have no cares because he lies in “a sky-blue lake of happiness.”

Zarathustra had called his animals buffoons once before when they had attempted to tell him the meaning of eternal recurrence. It seems that they have still to learn that “es gibt kein Aussen” (there is no outside). The controversy about the appropriate metaphor shows that metaphors cannot be simply assigned, as they were in part one; the “radiant virtue” of the master of metaphor leads to incomprehension rather than strength. Moreover, even though Zarathustra is at home, and his animals are in some sense an extension of himself, there is no longer a pre-established harmony of the sort suggested in “The Homecoming” between the metaphors of home and one’s own feelings. The “sky-blue lake of happiness” is an inept image; as opposed to the unbounded sea at which Zarathustra had been gazing, the lake is limited and self-contained, with no suggestion of the abyss. If the issue of happiness is to be raised metaphorically it might as well be likened to sticky molten pitch, for Zarathustra has reached a point at which he is stuck and in need of a change. But for his own purposes Zarathustra hits on an image which is less fluid than water but more congenial than pitch: “What is happening to me, happens to every fruit when it grows ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker and my soul calmer.” Yet this last metaphor is a deception; metaphor itself has become problematic for Zarathustra because he sees how variable and undependable it is; he ironizes metaphor. By introducing the image of honey, he is able to leave his animals at the summit of the mountain, ostensibly so that he can perform the (necessarily solitary) ritual of the honey-sacrifice. Once his animals have left, Zarathustra is proud that he has concocted a bit of cunning “and, verily, a useful folly. Up here I may speak more freely than before hermits’ caves and hermits’ domestic animals.”

Zarathustra’s animals, his snake and his eagle, are aspects of himself, his cleverness and pride. When Zarathustra discourses with his animals, especially in part three, he is moving within the circuit of self-contained language. To leave part of himself through deception is part of an ironic movement which continues throughout part four. Every expectation that Zarathustra has reached a final, determinate conclusion of some sort is attacked in the text. Zarathustra’s own approach to the honey-sacrifice recalls his need, announced in the Vorrede, to pour out his wisdom (which is likened to honey there): “Offer—what? I squander what is given me, I’m a squanderer with a thousand hands; how could I call that—an offering? (Z, 252; 4, 296).”

Zarathustra lacks the stability required for the almost contractual arrangements implicit in sacrifice. His honey (wisdom) cannot be parcelled out to preserve such stability. Instead it will be “bait” to catch “the queerest human fish.” Zarathustra’s ironic movement in this part is already present in outline: it involves a distancing from the self, a mocking attitude toward his own wisdom, and the idea of snaring others in order to force them to come up to his own level. The last process will, of course, never be completed because Zarathustra is always climbing higher in a game of catch-me-if-you-can.

Because of this constant movement, there is no single chapter or episode in this part which offers a sustained treatment of the topos of discourse. The point of the ironic trope which prevails here is just to explode any appearance of centrality. In his long episodic series of meetings with the higher men Zarathustra sees nothing but parodies, misunderstandings, and fragments of himself. His conversation with each emphasizes his distance from all of them, so that the only community and solidarity attainable is the comic and parodic ass festival in which the higher men begin to see that wisdom is also folly. Zarathustra’s great struggle in this part is with his own pity for the higher men. As Aristotle points out, pity presupposes community and identification; we can only feel sorry for those who are somewhat like ourselves. Zarathustra does not begin from such community but he is concerned not to be seduced to it. His defense is not the fear which, as Aristotle says, drives out pity, but a laughter which celebrates distance. In his series of conversations with the higher men Zarathustra exhibits his own self-overcoming by making it clear that he cannot be identified with any of these versions or parts of himself. He does this not to suggest some substantial self or ego which underlies these partial selves, but in order to exhibit the need to revise and dissolve our desire to find substance in the self.³

Why does the fourth part continue by intensifying the ironic movement that Zarathustra began by leaving his animals? Rhetorically and dramatically we could say that this part of Nietzsche’s text is the satyr play following the tragic trilogy; or, to use Northrop Frye’s categories, it is the satiric mode which follows those of romance, tragedy, and comedy; or that it is the traditional completion of the four classical rhetorical tropes identified by Kenneth Burke and Hayden White: metaphor, metonomy, synecdoche, and irony. Yet irony is also a first way of understanding eternal recurrence, which is affirmed at progressively deeper levels in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Now it is, in general, the purpose of the thought of eternal recurrence to destroy, or at least to weaken, a central or integral conception of the self. As Nietzsche suggests to his reader in The Gay Science, “if this thought gained power over you, it would transform you as you are or perhaps crush you.” Unlike all the other “great thoughts,” whether of Christianity, Marxism, or other faiths, eternal recurrence does not offer a convenient way of dividing one’s life into a before and an after. For the moments (Augenblicke) of all my past are as eternal, as significant, as all of my future. In affirming recurrence I will all those moments in which I had never suspected that there was such a thought. So the thought requires us to will its own forgetting. Rather than providing a technique of self-integration it emphasizes the eternity of each of those many Augenblicke, those “twinklings of the eyes.” These moments, we recall, are personified in “The Tomb Song” as having lives and deaths of their own.

The expression of this loosening of the self, this weakening of the boundaries of the ego, is laughter—the laughter which Zarathustra foresaw once in a riddle that followed a vision. Zarathustra asked many questions about the riddle but that which lured him most was the laughter:

We misunderstand Zarathustra’s laughter so long as we fail to understand his conception of the self and the dissolving tendency of eternal recurrence. Philosophers who themselves exemplify the spirit of seriousness, like Hobbes, will presuppose the separation of individuals and the singleness of the laughing selves in their accounts of laughter. According to Hobbes’s reductionistic formula,

In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche suggests that there may be

Nietzsche’s notebooks show an association of the thought of recurrence and the festival or carnival as early as his first notes on the former idea. For just a few pages after the entry dated “the beginning of August 1881 in Sils Maria, 6000 feet up and much further than that beyond all human things!” he says “I want to teach a higher art against the art of artworks: that of the invention [Erfindung] of festivals” (9, 506). Hans-Georg Gadamer makes a similar observation in the course of a critical analysis of the aesthetic consciousness. Attempting to account for the nature of artistic time in which multiple performances or experiences of a work of art are neither copies nor deviations from an original, he suggests, in the spirit of Nietzsche’s last remark, that the festival might be a more inclusive and adequate category than that of the supposedly autonomous work of art:

The festival then is a higher art than the art of artworks because of the sense that it provides of the return of the same. Of course the periodic celebration of the “same” festival within a lifetime or an historical epoch will not exhibit the exact recurrence of the same which, according to Nietzsche, characterizes the cycles of eternal recurrence. But in attempting to tell a story that suggests what life might be like if one were to affirm that thought, it is appropriate to think of the temporality of festivals as exhibiting a certain analogy to the temporality of recurrence. The use of an analogical pattern of thought here, diverted from its traditional ends, is similar to Nietzsche’s inversion of the traditional metaphysics of analogy that is implicit in his account of metaphor (see above, chapter 3).

The figures whom Zarathustra encounters and invites to his festival on a single long day of travelling through his own mountains and forests are partial reflections or refractions of some aspects of himself. The first is “the prophet of the great weariness” whom we have met before; he teaches that “it is all the same, nothing is worth while, seeking is useless, and there are no blissful islands anymore” (Z, 256; 4, 302). In part this is Schopenhauer, but it is also the side of Zarathustra which is overcome with the great nausea of mankind; Zarathustra, we remember, once dreamed himself as this prophet (in “The Prophet,” part two). Knowing that he can resist pity as he has overcome nausea, he invites the prophet to wait for him in his cave, telling him that he will become Zarathustra’s “dancing bear” before the evening is over. The other meetings are similar. The two kings, it turns out, are confusedly seeking Zarathustra and the higher man, mouthing imprecations against the mob (which sound less like Zarathustra’s than his ape’s). They recite his words back to him (“It is the good war that hallows every cause”) in such a way as to provoke “no small temptation to mock their eagerness” (Z, 260-61). Just as the sad prophet will be turned into a dancing bear, so the kings must return to Zarathustra’s cave to wait as if they were courtiers.

Perhaps the most suggestive of these encounters is the one with the Enchanter (Zauberer). The Enchanter, like Zarathustra and like some of the other partial selves of part four, is an author of sorts. As several attentive readers of Nietzsche have recently suggested, the Enchanter can be seen as Nietzsche’s own incursion into the text of Zarathustra. Like Nietzsche perhaps, the Enchanter claims an indifference to any audience in his first song, where he pretends to be alone; yet this charade is enacted for Zarathustra’s sake. Later, the Enchanter will entertain the group of higher men (in Zarathustra’s absence) with a long song of melancholy in which he professes to be “only a fool, only a poet.” He thus parodies the author who writes “for all and none”; in seeking to manipulate Zarathustra and the higher men he embodies a traditional conception of the author as one who achieves a mastery of men’s consciousness through the mastery of his text.

Zarathustra rejects such claims to authorship in his response to the Enchanter’s first song. That song purports to be a lament addressed to the unknown god whom the magician has somehow disposed of or dispensed with. He would rather have his god back, with all his torments, than the pain of solitude.

Zarathustra, as audience and critic, is stronger than this author who could regret his own banishment of God, and responds not to what is said—he has no use for gods or their lamenters—but to the manner of the singer. As Fred Allen says in another context, the audience rose as one man—which it was—and struck the wailing man with with a stick “with all his force” and “with furious laughter.” This thrashing is already a carnivalesque ritual in which the apparent king is dethroned and then beaten. Such thrashing, as Mikhail Bakhtin the student of carnival says, “is as ambivalent as abuse changed into praise. . . . The one who is thrashed or slaughtered is decorated. The beating itself has a gay character; it is introduced and concluded with laughter.”⁶ Zarathustra may have forgotten his whip, but he has not forgotten his umbrella (the umbrella would be an appropriate prop for the performance of this scene).⁷ The Enchanter confesses his imposture, admitting finally that he was playing the “penitent of the spirit” whom Zarathustra had described earlier. But Zarathustra and the Enchanter have somewhat different understandings of what it is to be a “penitent of the spirit” (Büsser des Geistes). In “Of Poets,” Zarathustra denounced the poets for their rhetorical craving for an audience and their use of metaphor in an attempt to attain the unattainable: “Alas, how weary I am of all the unattainable that is supposed to be reality! [Ach, wie bin ich all des Unzulanglichen müde, das durchaus Ereignis sein soll!] (Z, 150; 4, 165).” Zarathustra seems to be thinking of the new poets as reformed rhetoricians and metaphorizers. They will write poems of this world which give up the vain quest of fame and the concern with any form of the beyond. Here we might think of Mallarmé, or Rilke, or the various forms of the Dinggedicht. But the Enchanter emphasizes the bad conscience of the Busser rather than his reformed product:

But Zarathustra replies that this confession is “not nearly true enough and not nearly false enough for me!” because it masks a sense in which the magician is charged with insufficient irony; for the genuine ironist’s sayings are both true and false, not simply the false disguises of a true reality. The unmasking theme in which we find out the truth behind the poet’s song means one thing in the first reductive appearance of the topos and something quite different in this ironic conclusion. We should note that the Enchanter has expressed his own bad conscience through a rhetorical form (he is playing to an audience, if only of one) and by means of outlandish metaphors suggesting his torture by the unknown god. In attacking the magician Zarathustra is attacking the illusion of authorship. Those who have thought of the magician as an analogue of Wagner are right to the extent that for Nietzsche Wagner does represent an artist with the highest pretensions to mastery. But Nietzsche has these pretensions himself; unlike Wagner he at least occasionally allows his creations to rebuke him for such megalomania. Nietzsche and Zarathustra—but not Wagner—could say with Rimbaud “I is another”; and Nietzsche does say “I am all the names of history.”

What Zarathustra aims at with the Enchanter is a more undecideable and ironic language. Eventually, the higher men will produce a genuinely playful and undecideable discourse of their own. This happens only some time after they have all assembled together at Zarathustra’s cave and issued a mighty collective cry of distress which brings him back from his wanderings. Zarathustra now recognizes them as the higher men, but he plainly takes them to be not yet capable of living up to their name:

Zarathustra says, in effect, “I will be that someone else,” “I will be another.” While Zarathustra is telling the higher men that they need to be liberated from their melancholy and despair he is also tendering them a formal greeting. The formality is marked by the courteous silence at the end of Zarathustra’s address and by the delegation of one of the kings to make a reply in the name of the entire group. The king praises Zarathustra and predicts that more and better men will soon be seeking him out: “all the men of great longing, great nausea, of great disgust” (Z, 292; 4, 349). Zarathustra concludes the formal greeting by replying that the higher men are simply not high enough for him; they are not the “children” who will one day be his. Now this greeting is ambiguous; Zarathustra is himself carried away a bit by the despair of his guests at the same time that he is proposing to enliven them by playing the clown. What seems to be happening here is a radical shift in the narrative from the mode of allegory to that of carnival and festival. As individual allegorical figures, each of the higher men is in despair in one way or another. The last pope is like a retired servant who has nothing to do, now that God is dead, but honor the memory of his departed master. The conscientious man of the spirit who pursues scientific inquiry by concentrating on an increasingly smaller area (he has now dedicated himself to the brain of the leech) is living through the ascetic renunciation which accompanies such self-restraint. The Tolstoyan voluntary beggar has found no human audience for his message and is reduced to preaching the virtues of rumination and vegetarianism to cows. Each one of their histories, and those of the other higher men, is a moral vignette, much like Dante’s separate encounters with the figures in the Divine Comedy.

Yet the narrative act of bringing the higher men together leads to a very different kind of story. The components of this second story follow a carnivalesque pattern: a great communal dinner (mockingly called “The Last Supper”), an invigorating talk (Zarathustra’s “Of the Higher Man”), a series of songs punctuated by bantering; a festival in honor of the ass, which parodies both Christ and Zarathustra at the same time; and the general frenzy at midnight which is the setting for Zarathustra’s “The Drunken Song.” The whole series, and the book, is then brought to an end by a brief chapter in which Zarathustra finds his signs fulfilled (the bird flight and the laughing lion) and so knows that his children are near. Now such a series of events has its antecedents in the popular culture of the late middle ages. It is the comic spectacle or the festive play that Mikhail Bakhtin has reconstructed in his study of Rabelais and His World. If this identification seems implausible at first, consider Nietzsche’s use of the following themes which Bakhtin notes as belonging to the popular carnival: the “sacred parody,” often in a form centering around an ass; song and dance; a great indulgent meal; a general attitude of playfulness; and an emergence of sexuality. So far most of these features have already been noted in Nietzsche’s narrative; it might be worth observing that his great meal also does double duty as religious parody. Zarathustra’s party is a bit short on explicit sexuality, although there is a long and important sexual after-dinner song sung by Zarathustra’s Shadow. In his other writings, beginning with The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was much concerned with Dionysian festivals, Saturnalias, and other ways which human society has for periodically loosening its restraints. In a note of 1888 Nietzsche lists some things which have been harmed by the church’s misuse, among which are “the festivals” (die Feste):

In The Genealogy of Morals, as we will see in the next chapter, Nietzsche makes the spectacle or festival into an important structural principle for the understanding of history.

One apparent and striking distinction between the traditional carnival form and Nietzsche’s use of it must be clarified. The traditional carnival is a popular and democratic form which is opposed to the official hierarchical life of the middle ages, especially to the hierarchy of the church. Accordingly its proper locale is in the marketplace and during carnival all distinctions of social or ecclesiastical rank are inverted. It is “a world turned upside down” (die verkehrte Welt), in which, as in Breughel’s painting of carnival time, both social and conceptual distinctions are reversed.⁹ In the version of the festival found in Zarathustra IV, the participants form a small group whose tastes are far from democratic and the setting is far from that marketplace where Zarathustra first announced the Übermensch; they include kings and a pope and all are there because of their admiration for Zarathustra. Yet the carnivalesque spirit still reigns. At Zarathustra’s party no social distinctions are allowed; as the ironic master of the feast instructs his guests, “whoever would join in the eating must also help in the preparation, even the kings. For at Zarathustra’s even a king may be a cook” (Z, 295; 4, 354). Even in their first appearance the kings and the pope are the dethroned kings and popes who are mocked at the carnival. The Pope is out of a job, the kings have no apparent power, the voluntary beggar lacks a human audience for his preaching. So they are all examples of the carnivalesque destruction or inversion of hierarchy. The carnival is not only a democratic form but one whose democratic tendencies are part of an opposition to established structures in so far as they are seen as repressing a vital and spontaneous life. Now in Zarathustra’s (and Nietzsche’s) assessment, the contemporary world is becoming increasingly constricted in these ways; “the last man” is a regimented democrat. Part of the point at issue here is captured by the distinction between the measured pleasure of the last man and the comic laughter of Zarathustra’s festival. The last men “have their little pleasure [Lüstchen] for the day and their little pleasure for the night; but they respect health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the last men and blink” (Z, 46; 4, 19). The disparaging sense of Lüstchen is to be contrasted with the genuine Lust or delight of which Zarathustra sings, as in “alle Lust will Ewigkeit” (“all delight wants eternity”). This is the contrast between a measurable and predictable pleasure, on the utilitarian model, which can be associated with specific objects, and a more general sense of delight which is expansive and does not reinforce the narrow ego associated with the last man. In French one would speak here of the distinction between plaisir and jouissance. Nietzsche’s carnival is at one with the traditional form in seeking a delight which undercuts established divisions and repressions.

In his long talk to his mock-disciples at the Last Supper, Zarathustra connects the self-overcoming of the Übermensch with the carnivalesque spirit of song and laughter. This discourse “Of the Higher Man” deals successively with three themes. At the beginning Zarathustra reiterates the connection between the death of God and the demise of the doctrine of equality; when it is no longer possible to say that we are all equal before God we should recognize the superiority of the Übermensch. For this to happen, man must become “better and more evil” (Z, 299). In the second part of his talk, however, Zarathustra moves downward from talk of the superman to advice to the higher men themselves. Here he tells them to “will nothing beyond your capacity” (Z, 300) and even more surprisingly to

One could read such advice as reflecting a realistic and humanistic side of Nietzsche’s teaching. This is no doubt accurate so far as it goes, but we must not forget the context of Zarathustra’s talk. He is celebrating with the higher men at a feast which mocks Christianity by its glorification of the body. Bakhtin observes that it is part of the atmosphere of carnival to praise the “lower stratum of the material body,” that is sexuality, procreation, and eating. An appropriate talk at such a feast then will be a eulogy of “lower” rather than “higher” things. We can read Zarathustra’s talk as a parodic inversion of Socrates’ speech about love in the Symposium; he moves downward to the body rather than upwards to the spiritual mysteries of Diotima.¹⁰

The last part of Zarathustra’s address is an accelerating incitement to laughter and dance. Zarathustra claims to be “the laughing prophet” who has “canonized laughter” (Z, 305; 4, 366). It was a saying of Pliny, well known during the Renaissance (and likely to be known to the classicist Nietzsche) that Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) was the only man who began to laugh as soon as he was born; this was taken as a sign of his prophetic mission.¹¹ Zarathustra becomes the leader of the feast of fools. As the born leader of the feast of fools and the Hanswurst whom the higher men need, he declares that the clowns of the mob have all become sad. In effect he is claiming that the carnival and its spirit have died out among the people and that only he and the higher men are now capable of embodying it. He exhorts his audience to be “foolish with happiness” and to “learn to laugh” (Z, 306; 4, 367-68). Yet Nietzsche’s rejection of the people fails to appreciate those carnivalesque outbursts of the counter-culture that have punctuated our history from the French Revolution to the days of the late sixties and which will doubtless recur. In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx has given a fine analysis of the inevitable turn to farce and parody in the bourgeois state, an absurdity typified by the comedian or actor at the center of power.

Here again Bakhtin is helpful in describing the nature of carnival laughter and its ontological meaning. Such laughter, which Zarathustra participates in and provokes here as the Hanswurst of his own carnival, is festive, universal, and ambivalent. It is festive in the sense of being responsive to the gaiety of the entire occasion, rather than directed at a specific object or isolated comic event. It is universal because directed at all by all; the distinction between audience and spectator does not apply here and one laughs at oneself as well as at others. It is an ambivalent laughter because it is simultaneously triumphant and affirmative, on the one hand, and mocking and deriding on the other. In all these respects carnivalesque laughter must be distinguished from a satiric attitude which would be directed toward a specific object other than oneself. Such satiric laughter perhaps deserves the low valuation Thomas Hobbes placed upon it. Now Zarathustra has spent a good deal of time attempting to convince the higher men that they are not of great eminence; certainly the laughter which he provokes is not directed against the mob (there the emotion to be feared is nausea) but is a function of the festive context. He will be the catalyst of the situation, the Hanswurst, who sees to it that the occasion itself is rich in laughter. Carnival laughter of the sort described cannot leave intact a conception of the self as an isolated and independent being with its own integral history. The tradition represented by Hobbes can envision laughter only as the expression of such a self’s implicit measurement and comparison of itself with others. Laughter which is festive, universal, and ambivalent suggests a quite different conception of the world. Jacques Derrida has given a rather explicit account of the ontology of carnivalesque laughter in his essay “From Restricted to General Economy” (formally a commentary on the writing of Georges Bataille). The standard philosophical tradition (which for Bataille and Derrida is represented by Hegel) has no place for such laughter because it depends upon the effort to conserve a definite ground or base, such as Hobbes’s independent ego or the Hegelian life which must be enriched and aufgehoben through the confrontation with death. The enemy of a generalized laughter, and therefore of a “general economy” that would not depend on the conservation of a fixed self or meaning, is an ontological one. It is the belief that there is something which is or ought to be present (the self or Absolute Knowledge, for example) and which therefore must be preserved at all costs. But in Derrida’s formulation it is just this effort which is comical (in the satiric sense):

Here we must think of the measured enjoyment of the last man with his little pleasure (Lüstchen) for the day and for the night and his high regard for health. The regularization of such little pleasures requires a “restricted economy.” Genuine delight (Lust), on the other hand, in its desire for eternity knows that all is lost, that there is no final return on one’s investments, and that the ego itself cannot maintain its strict and conserved identity in the flux of becoming.

Just as the established structures of a philosophy concerned with maintaining presence and an economy devoted to the conservation of investments presents an obstacle to the advent of a general economy of delight, so Zarathustra’s carnival has its own obstacles in the resistance of some of its all-too-serious participants. As soon as the Last Supper is completed and Zarathustra is through with his talk he rushes out into the fresh night air, oppressed, as he says, by the smell of his guests. Yet at the same time he is playing the ironic clown; he deserts his own party so as to avoid being placed in a position of mastery. For the carnival spirit to be realized he must be at least as much clown as he is host. Now when Zarathustra leaves it is the melancholy Enchanter who cannot resist doing battle with his clownish host. Before beginning his “Song of Melancholy” which is a spell designed to subdue the spirit of carnival, the Enchanter explains his ambivalence toward Zarathustra in his unexpected role of Hanswurst.

The Enchanter then would place the responsibility for his melancholy on some exterior melancholy spirit, presumably the same unknown god to whom his earlier duplicitous song was addressed. But as the narrative remarks, he is always disingenuous in such claims, for he “looked around cunningly and then reached for his harp.” The suggestion is, then, that the spirit of melancholy is indeed his own spirit, the bad conscience which he had previously confused with a reformed conception of poetry.

Since the Enchanter’s song will soon be followed by another, sung by Zarathustra’s shadow, the whole sequence should be seen as a poetic agon that manages to combine the laughter of the carnival with a reminiscence of the comic succession of speeches in praise of love in the Symposium. The latter analogy becomes more compelling when we notice that both songs have to do with desire, the first being concerned with the poet’s desire and the second with the impotent desire of the European skeptic among Oriental girls. The Enchanter’s song is a seductive lament. He addresses himself or, we might say, his own poetic genius, recounting the history of the poet’s desire. The first form which that desire took was a boundless craving for truth that can now be recollected with some tranquility in the quiet and dew of the evening:

But the high desires of the poetic soul were smashed when he was subjected to a skeptical jeering (perhaps like the one administered by Zarathustra in “Of Poets”):

The charge which is levelled against the Enchanter is the same which Nietzsche had made earlier against all human language. In “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” he had argued that our language, despite its claims to correspond with reality, is in fact all creation and fabrication, nothing more than a “movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished.”¹³ When Zarathustra turned against the poets he had also charged them with using “deceitful word-bridges” and making false connections

So the Enchanter, under such attack, is making one more attempt to be a Büsser des Geistes. He will give up the search for truth, in general, but he wants to stimulate our pity for his loss and renunciation by dramatizing his melancholy. Moreover, he will give up more than he had in his earlier attempt, which Zarathustra had brought to an end by assaulting him with a stick. The Enchanter no longer pretends to be unconcerned with his audience but sings quite publicly. It is this public side of his performance which he refers to, in part, by using the language of carnival that Zarathustra had introduced. For he recounts the charge that he is dressed in motley (Buntes), speaks motley, is masked in motley and stalks around on motley rainbows. This may be the point at which to note that Buntes is a crucial term in Zarathustra, and not exclusively in its fourth, carnivalesque, part. The tightrope walker whom the people in the marketplace took for the Übermensch that Zarathustra had announced was toppled from his rope by “a fellow in motley clothes, looking like a jester” (Z, 47; 4, 21). This might suggest that the serious, all-too-serious, attitude of Zarathustra in the marketplace, an attitude expressed in his linking himself to the tragic tightrope walker, is in need of correction.¹⁴ When Zarathustra returns to speak to a few, he sojourns in the town called “The Motley Cow” (Z, 56; 4, 31). The modern polity, Zarathustra tells us in his criticism of education and culture, is a mixed, motley collection of styles and forms; it is not one thing. The transvaluation of this condition is the transformation of a liberal, historicist pluralism into the vital world of carnival.

For the Enchanter, to be dressed or masked in motley is to appear as merely the clown or fool (Narr) at the carnival, one whose purpose is amusement rather than truth. To be “Only a fool! Only a poet!” (“Nur Narr! Nur Dichter!”) is to be reduced to a sideshow entertainment after pretending to the highest wisdom. Yet the Enchanter’s way of recounting Zarathustra’s charge shows that he has not understood the idea of carnival laughter in the way that Zarathustra has. For Zarathustra is far from dissociating the carnival and truth. Carnival laughter is congruent with the truth of eternal recurrence, although not with the narrow sense of truth as correspondence to an unknowable reality which lies at the origin of the epistemological attack on poetry to which the Enchanter alludes.¹⁵ The Enchanter, let us recall, has just confessed that he is perplexed and attracted by Zarathustra’s “masquerade” although he does not comprehend it. If he did, he would welcome the carnivalesque epithets rather than regarding them as a new critique of his vocation.

Since the Enchanter does believe that his poetic dignity is under attack he replies by giving an alternative account of poetic desire. If the desire for truth must be abandoned, he suggests, then let the poet be filled with the strong and aggressive desires of the jungle cat or the eagle. Rather than build a beautiful statue of a god and guard it before the god’s temple, the poet will become an

The Enchanter, then, is attempting to reverse what he sees as Zarathustra’s attack on poetry. Characteristically, he praises his own lusty courage and aggression only with Zarathustra safely gone from the gathering, just as he had previously pretended to be alone while seeking pity from Zarathustra whom he knew to be listening to him then. If all language is nothing but the expression of animal desires, then the poet will not be content to be a contemptible fool; under the mask of the fool he will be lurking ready to pounce:

The Enchanter’s fantasized laughter is destructive, spiteful, and envious; it has none of the celebrating depth of the carnival spirit. That this is a vengeful and a spiteful laugh becomes clear in a final extended image and one last claim to truth, despite all previous renunciation. In the extended image the Enchanter returns to the motif of the landscape of evening with which he began, and suggests that the moon is green with envy at its enemy the day. The point of the image is that the poet too sank, like the moon, from his delusion of truth.

The Enchanter has indeed become more ironic since his meeting with Zarathustra; yet while Zarathustra’s irony has deepened into a carnivalesque laughter, the Enchanter’s has frozen and hardened into the irony of resentment that clings enviously to its one truth and goes on the attack because it cannot be productive and radiant. Envy, based on invidious comparison, is parallel to Hobbesian laughter and is the antithesis of carnival. The Enchanter has allowed the poet’s ancient playful difference (diaphora) with philosophy to turn into an envious quarrel. After his first song we heard that his eye shot a “green lightning bolt” at Zarathustra; in the second he sees himself as a moon green with envy of the sun.

The Enchanter’s spell is almost completely successful, for “all who were gathered there went unwittingly as birds into the net of his cunning and melancholy lust” (Z, 311; 4, 375). Appropriately the sham abandonment of truth-seeking by an ambiguous Büsser des Geistes is caught and ridiculed by the Gewissenhafte des Geistes (the Conscientious Man of the Spirit). He is genuinely interested in truth, and although unable to seek it outside the confines of his research on the brain of the leech, he angrily contests the right of the Enchanter to claim any truth at all. He gives a good rhetorical analysis of the Enchanter’s irony: “you are like those whose praise of chastity secretly invite to voluptuous delights”; and he rebukes the higher men for having given up their freedom “like men who have been gazing long at wicked girls dancing naked.” It may not be immediately clear why the Conscientious Man’s accusation should take on this apparently prurient tone. The suggestion is that there is something self-indulgent about the melancholy, self-pity, and resentment of the Enchanter’s song, and that this self-indulgence is like that of men who are bewitched by a sexual spectacle. So it is not so much chastity as such that is being praised (although the Conscientious Man certainly intends to praise a chastity of the intellect); rather the point is to distinguish both chastity and a life of active desire from the slinking and cunning melancholy of those who watch sex shows or fantasize about how they could be great poets. The Conscientious Man of the Spirit offers science as the alternative to this melancholy, claiming that it is the only security in a world of fear. Although he says that science is embodied in Zarathustra, the object of his praise repudiates the obsession with fear and calls for “courage and adventure, and joy in the unknown” (Z, 313; 4, 377).

None of these interchanges is decisive but they do heighten the atmosphere of playful contest. So far the pretentious and deceptive song of the Enchanter still holds the field. Now Zarathustra’s Shadow enters the fray by seizing the Enchanter’s harp and singing a song of his own. It is an after-dinner song, which relates an old memory; it was devised, he claims, to please Oriental girls like the ones described in the song itself; so its first audience and its subject (in part) are the “Daughters of the Desert” of the chapter’s title. Some commentators have seen this as an obscure poem, worthy of metaphysical commentary.¹⁶ In fact it is a song full of erotic imagery which, in competing with the song of the Enchanter, carries poetic self-parody a step further. At the same time, it adroitly picks up the theme of desire which motivated the Enchanter’s song and, enlightened by the literary criticism of the Conscientious Man, attempts to deflate that desire with a more playful song. The song does not lend itself to a somber reading of the sort that Heidegger practices on Hölderlin; it is part of a playful agon with some echoes of the song-contests in Die Meistersinger and Tannhauser.

The form of the song of Zarathustra’s Shadow, like that of so many of Nietzsche’s poems outside of Zarathustra, a parody of a recognizable poem or genre. In this case the genre is one with which English-speaking readers will have little familiarity. It is the self-consciously exotic and romantic poetry of the Orient written by Europeans in the late nineteenth century.¹⁷ Such “Oriental” poems tend to celebrate the passion and mystery of the East, contrasting it with the boredom or exhaustion of the West. The Oriental poem is a poem of desire; more specifically, of a desire for the strange and foreign as seen through an erotic and fantastic haze. In this respect it is an appropriate rival to the Enchanter’s “Song of Melancholy”; Zarathustra’s Shadow offers it as an after-dinner song, a piece of occasional poetry designed for an occasion of self-indulgence. What had been implicit in the Enchanter’s song becomes rather explicit here. Self-indulgence is no longer disguised, as it was by the “cunning” Enchanter, as the vitality of the panther and the eagle. Here it is expressed as the passive desire of the “European under palm trees” who basks luxuriously while the desert maidens perform their erotic dance for him:

The oral imagery is extended by the suggestion that the European has been swallowed by the tiny oasis in the way that Jonah was swallowed by the whale, so that he has not only been taken in by the mouth but rests content in the belly:

Here the European links his fantastic self-indulgence to his skepticism. This skeptical impotence is the truth of European imperialism; it is the condition of the Flaubertian hero whose sentimental education includes a sexual tour of the East. The confession of impotence becomes explicit in the last stanza of the poem which unmasks the psychological reality behind the moral indignation with which the European is tempted to rationalize his attitude toward the luxurious and seemingly child-like East:

The parodic references here are complex. There is first Luther’s declaration of faith and principle, transformed into skeptical weakness. This is consistent with Nietzsche’s general view of Protestantism and suggests his reading of modern subjectivism as a crucial stage in the development which culminates in passive nihilism. There is also an echo here of the Symposium, that great model, of a contest of discourses about desire. That dinner party also contains a great confession of unconsummated desire: the beautiful Alcibiades tells how Socrates, despite all his entreaties, spent an entire night with him in brotherly chastity. Yet the Symposium tells of an ascending hierarchy of desires, such that Socrates’ refusal becomes intelligible on the basis of his stronger and more real desire (from the Platonic point of view) for beauty itself, as opposed to its lesser forms. The succession of songs at Zarathustra’s party present a descending hierarchy of desire, in which it is suggested that it is just such desires for unworldly beauty which eventually lead to an inability to enjoy and take pleasure. Perhaps it was this passage that inspired Joyce’s “also spuke zerothruster.” Socrates suggests at the end of the Symposium that the true poet would be able to write both tragedy and comedy; the implication for the reader is that Plato has accomplished that in the very text in question. Similarly, Nietzsche has given us first a tragic and then a comic poem about desire. We suspect a private joke here. We wish that the sex at Zarathustra’s party were better, and that he had affirmed sexuality in the way that Finnegans Wake does. Just as Socrates in his own person presents a paradigm of desire (or love) which stands in contrast to the lesser versions of desire expressed at the dinner party, so Zarathustra through his clowning and irony is suggesting a way in which desire can escape the traps of bad conscience (of the Enchanter’s song) and impotent skepticism (of the Shadow’s song). The choice that he offers is desert or carnival.

“Among the Daughters of the Desert” has become something of a fixture of the Nietzsche legend through the work of Thomas Mann. In a lecture of 1947, Mann attempted to tie the image of the Oriental dancing girls in their fluttering skirts to Nietzsche’s shocking, involuntary visit to a brothel in Köln in 1865. As Nietzsche related the story in a letter to Paul Deussen, a porter who had been showing him the city took him there, although the young scholar had asked to be directed to a restaurant. Nietzsche reported being immobilized with shock in the midst of a number of girls in “flitter and gauze” until he saw a piano in the back of the room. He played a few chords, as if to free himself from a spell, and then left. What Mann adds to this account is his own theory that Nietzsche was haunted by the memory of the place and returned to a similar establishment twice, deliberately infecting himself with syphilis. The story is also given a fictional form in Mann’s Doctor Faustus where the nihilistic composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, partially based on the figure of Nietzsche, does just that. The biographical data seem somewhat weaker than Mann supposed; in any case it is evident that his narrative is constructed in order to facilitate the theme of the inseparability of genius and disease that runs constantly through his writing. Given Mann’s biographical interpretation, “Among the Daughters of the Desert” is “an orientalizing poem whose frightful jocosity with tortuously bad taste betrays a repressed sensualism and its needs whilst normal inhibitions are already crumbling.”¹⁸

Now whatever Nietzsche may have done (or not done) in the 1860s, the poem is not so alien to the narrative of the book that it demands the exclusively symptomatic reading that Mann offers. The song completes an important movement in the articulation of the carnivalesque laughter which is the focus of the fourth part of Zarathustra. As a linguistic and poetic exercise (it is certainly not great poetry) the song shows a way of carrying further the enterprise of the Büsser des Geistes to which the Enchanter pretends. The “Song of Melancholy” is heavy with serious claims and anguished memories of loss. It renounces truth only to claim it again by rhetorical appeals for pity. While encapsulating some of Nietzsche’s own skeptical critique of human knowledge, it would finally (and illegitimately) save itself from that critique. “Among the Daughters of the Desert” is much more consciously ironical and parodic than the Enchanter’s false renunciation. It is presented as a mere memory or fancy, a song which just might be entertaining after dinner. Yet it goes further than the Enchanter in confessing a real incapacity, rather than making a show of such abnegation. And the confession itself is couched in a series of amusing, often amusingly grotesque, images and anecdotes, contrasting sharply with the contempt for the motley in the Enchanter’s song. The European of the song is able to parody himself and the poetic tradition as he proceeds. The song parodies its own melancholy as well as the Enchanter’s “Song of Melancholy.” After describing his hesitations and confusions around the two tempting houris, Dudu and Suleika, he says neologistically that he felt “ensphinxed” (“umsphinxt”) and follows this with a playful reflection on his own language:

Similarly the lengthy and outrageous comparison of a swaying palm to a one-legged dancing girl ought to be seen not as a stylistic lapse on Nietzsche’s part but as a deliberate exaggeration of the rhetorical excesses of European poetry of the exotic. The two songs juxtapose a true irony to a false one, with Zarathustra’s Shadow (who is and is not Zarathustra) completing the carnivalesque dethronement of the Enchanter that was begun earlier. If anyone in Zarathustra is the Büsser des Geistes whose coming was anticipated, it is the Shadow.

From a structural point of view, “Among the Daughters of the Desert” confirms Derrida’s attempt to demonstrate the undecidability of the figure of woman in Nietzsche. Each of the four parts of Zarathustra contains a distinctive attitude toward woman and the erotic. In part one there is the notorious motto “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” (Z, 93; 4, 86), which, it must be recalled, was said by Zarathustra only in reporting how it was told to him by a “little old woman.” Woman, in part one, is a plaything, albeit “the most dangerous plaything” (Z, 91; 4, 85). She is that which insures that he will be continuously playful and childlike; she is the permanent possibility of metaphor. Part two varies this metaphorical dimension by introducing erotic rivalry and jealousy as Zarathustra is torn between Life, whom he loves, and Wisdom, whom he finds most seductive (“The Dancing Song”). This is in keeping with the focus on fragmentation and hostility that colors all existence in so far as it is merely will to power. The third part concludes with the image of marriage—a traditional representation of the integration and union of different elements. In the concluding part the Shadow introduces woman ironically and indirectly as the player in the paradigmatic erotic farce in which maximum opportunity is accompanied by minimum performance.

Zarathustra’s guests are entertained by the song, for after it is over “the cave suddenly became full of noise and laughter” (Z, 319; 4, 387). Unlike Goethe who proceeded from the chaos of the Northern carnival to the emerging order of the classical Walpurgisnacht, Zarathustra’s party moves toward the disorderly and the Dionysian. Even so, Zarathustra is still uncomfortable with the higher men, and leaves once more, noting that “if they have learned laughter from me it is not my laughter they have learned.” Yet he has high hopes for these higher men, and his expectation that “before long they will be devising festivals and erecting memorials to their old joys” is soon realized when he returns to find them “kneeling like children and devout little old women and worshipping the ass” (Z, 321; 4, 388). Just as irony by itself can become an empty exercise of wit, so carnival laughter can become fixated on specific performances like the songs; it may be festive without being universal and ambivalent; that is, it may still hesitate to let one’s self and one’s highest ideals become objects of laughter. For this higher laughter, parody is necessary. It is the Ugliest Man, who could not bear God’s seeing him, who makes a spectacle of himself by leading the litany in praise of the ass. The litany itself is a parody of the mass, the sacra parodia of carnival, and it is punctuated regularly by a refrain from the ass himself. The ass’s “I-A” is both the German version of our “hee haw” and also sounds very much like the affirming “Ja” which Zarathustra urges the higher men to say to their lives and to eternity. So it is not only Christianity but the “religion” of Zarathustra that is mocked, as in this section of the litany: “He does not speak, except to say Yea [Ja] to the world he created: thus he praises his world. It is his subtlety that does not speak: thus he is seldom thought wrong. The ass, however, brayed ‘Yea-Yuh’ [‘I-A’]” (Z, 322; 4, 389).

Zarathustra interrupts the litany and challenges the higher men to justify what appears to be their backsliding to a degraded form of religion. Earlier he had explained that absolutely universal and indiscriminate affirmation—omnisatisfaction—is bad taste (Z, 212; 4, 244). It is not clear whether Zarathustra at first suspects that the ass festival is entirely sincere or whether he is testing the higher men to determine the quality of their laughter. But the Ugliest Man becomes the spokesman for the festival which he has been conducting and explains, in Zarathustra’s own words, that “Whoever would kill most thoroughly, laughs” (Z, 324; 4, 392). This is one of the few places in the book—perhaps the only one—in which Zarathustra’s words are quoted back to him in a meaningful way. In fact there is a double edge to this quotation which Zarathustra does not explicitly acknowledge. For the laughter of the ass festival has as its objects both Christianity and Zarathustra’s teachings. The ass’s “I-A” reminds us that affirmation is not exempt from being turned round by parody. This may happen in “ordinary language” as well as in the rather stagy spectacle that Nietzsche has invented here. Among Anglophone philosophers there is a story that J. L. Austin, while conducting one of his select Sunday discussions of linguistic nuances asked “Isn’t it odd that while two negatives may be combined in English to make a positive statement, two positives will not make a negative?” To which Sidney Morgenbesser instantly replied “Yeah, yeah,” in a mockdepressive tone that immediately effected the supposedly impossible equivalence.

That the guests are able to “roast” their own host, of whom they stood in awe just a few hours ago, suggests that the spirit of carnival and its ambivalent laughter has been well understood. This is what Zarathustra confirms when he pronounces this blessing upon the higher men and consecrates the ass-festival:

The Ugliest Man is not only the spokesman for the ass festival; not coincidentally he is the one character in the book who comes to affirm eternal recurrence through Zarathustra’s teaching. If Zarathustra is the teacher of recurrence, the Ugliest Man is perhaps his only successful student. At the ass festival Zarathustra says to him “You seem changed, your eyes are glowing, the mantle of the sublime covers your ugliness” (Z, 324; 4, 392). The Ugliest Man, then, has found his own carnival mask which reverses his ordinary status and appearance. Having begun as the recluse who lived in the Valley of Snakes’ Death he has now become the impresario of a public entertainment, a new festival. The Ugliest Man, it must be remembered, is God’s killer; he murdered God because he could not bear to be seen and pitied. Zarathustra was not serious enough to murder, although he knew that God was dead. Rather he speaks of being able to believe only in a god who could dance; Zarathustra is closer to a playful polytheism than to an atheism based on revenge.

Just before midnight the Ugliest Man announces that “one day, one festival with Zarathustra, taught me to love the earth” and he quotes his host once more, like a diligent student “ ‘Was that—life?’ I will say to death. ‘Very well! Once more!’ ” (Z, 326; 4, 396). Why does Nietzsche select the Ugliest Man to affirm Zarathustra’s teaching of eternal recurrence and what is the significance of his affirmation? I suggested earlier that the Ugliest Man’s reference to “one day, one festival with Zarathustra” can at least protect us against a misinterpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence. The Ugliest Man’s ability to base his affirmation on a brief episode suggests that one need not see one’s entire life as an aesthetic totality in order to make the requisite affirmation. Rather the thought of recurrence, when understood in circumstances that dramatize its sense, shows itself to be affirmable. In becoming another—by transforming himself from recluse to impresario and by the transfiguration of his inexpressible ugliness into sublimity—the Ugliest Man comes to understand the appeal of that thought which loosens the boundaries of the self and allows the delight of the moment.

As the murderer of God, the Ugliest Man was determined to rid the world of any spectator who would know him and pity him for his ugliness. At the beginning of his “one day” with Zarathustra, he is living in the Valley of Snakes’ Death, which shows us one version of a world that lacks a divine witness or, for that matter, any form of universal spectator. It is a world that contains no life except for the snakes that come there to die. This is perhaps the desolate, twilight world of positivism in which not only is God dead but nature itself must be conceived as lifeless; such a positivistic consciousness is the death of wisdom, for the snake (the wisest animal, according to Zarathustra) dies here. Now as conceived through the thought of eternal recurrence the world also necessarily lacks any universal spectator. That is, if everything recurs and there is nothing that does not recur, there cannot be any consciousness, agent, or mechanism that would observe or count the various recurrences of events or cycles. In the world of recurrence there is no author of the world and no omniscient narrator. There is not a constant text to be read as an ideal reader might construe it but a text to be made and enjoyed in the making. In Zarathustra IV the festival, the carnival, and their freedom to parody any presumably fixed, monumental, or authorized text are the forms of existence that make vivid the possibility of writing and interpreting that can take place apart from any conception of a universal writer or interpreter. Surely this is the reason that the Ugliest Man’s affirmation is followed immediately by a reflective passage that undermines any claim for the narrative authority of Zarathustra itself, in which after the uncertainties of the unnamed narrators (Erzähler) and story-tellers are mentioned, the guest for narrative authority is dismissed: “In brief, as Zarathustra’s saying has it: ‘What does it matter?’ ” (Z, 327; 4, 396). The story may be one thing or it may be another; the very uncertainties of the situation are conditions of the affirmation of recurrence.

Now Zarathustra sings and comments on “The Drunken Song” which celebrates not only his intoxication and that of the higher men but the drunkenness of the world itself. When next we hear of him he is waking refreshed while the higher men still sleep; now he is met by the flock of birds and the laughing lion which he takes as a sign that his children are near. He knows that he has been successful in his struggle with pity and so leaves his cave “glowing and strong, like a morning sun emerging from behind dark mountains” (Z, 333; 4, 405).

This end of the book heightens the air of allegory and myth which has been present throughout Zarathustra IV. The narrative is brought to a conclusion by certain signs being fulfilled, although Zarathustra (like Odysseus for whom signs are fulfilled at the end of the Odyssey) still has much to do. In a larger sense, all of part four is an interpretation and fulfillment of Zarathustra’s prophetic dream of himself as the night watchman in the land of death (in “The Prophet”). There Zarathustra had been unable to interpret the “thousand masks of children, angels, owls, fools, and butterflies as big as children” which “laughed and mocked and roared” at him, shattering the monotonous sleep of death (Z, 157; 4, 174). Now it is disclosed that the true prophet is Zarathustra, not the one who had taught that “everything is empty, everything is one, everything is past.” As Bakhtin notes, the parodic prophecy was a regular part of carnival festivity.¹⁹ Its point is to deflate the gloomy official and nihilistic prophecies of the coming end of the world. Rather than looking for mysteries in Zarathustra’s signs we should see them as parodically countering the prophecy of nihilism.

That which has happened is that which was to be fulfilled; as such the narrative achieves a mythical status which invites comparison with other philosophical myths. Of these, the most prominent are the Platonic stories in the Symposium and Republic which also revolve around the themes of the party, drunkenness, and the alternation of day and night. The aim of parody is to renew time; here that is done through a transformation or transvaluation of philosophy’s sacred Platonic myths. The Symposium begins by a series of indirections as we learn that the story to be told is filtered through several narrators and many years; it ends, however by a reminder of the authority of Plato whose controlling authorship is evoked by the discussion of the true poet who can write both tragedy and comedy. Zarathustra IV, however, calls its own narrative into question at the end, leaving us without such a principle. Zarathustra’s drunken song shows that he knows the proper uses of intoxication. Unlike Socrates, however, who used such an occasion to explain how desire leads us beyond the world, Zarathustra teaches that “so rich is joy that it thirsts for woe, for hell, for hatred, for shame, for the lame, for world—for it knows, oh it knows this world!” (Z, 332; 4, 403). Socrates, it will be remembered, stayed up all night discoursing until his companions dropped off to sleep one by one. Zarathustra honors the alternation of night and day, rather than the light alone, and so he pays the proper respect to night and the body by eventually going to sleep. In fact Zarathustra lives in a cave, an obviously dark place which recalls the Platonic myth about our emergence to genuine knowledge. But for Zarathustra both the darkness of the cave (and midnight) and the “great noon” have their own claims. The return to the cave is not, for him, a compromise with the limits of our condition, but an affirmation of the continuous play of all extremes that is opened up by eternal recurrence.