CHAPTER THREE

Pana

STUDY OF NIETZSCHE’S plans and sketches for the various stages of the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra corroborates what we have heard Karl Reinhardt suggest; namely, that the principal difficulty with the figure of Zarathustra is that he refuses to die, that is, to fulfill his tragic destiny. As I suggested earlier, it may well be that Heidegger’s 1937 lecture course on Nietzsche, “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same,” which asserts that Nietzsche never entertained any other notion concerning Zarathustra than Untergang, tragic downgoing, is a protracted response to Reinhardt’s suspicion.¹ Not a little hangs in the balance: Nietzsche’s principal thought and heaviest burden, eternal recurrence of the same, necessitates our looking into the question of Zarathustra’s death, which, as we shall see, is postponed indefinitely. We will not be surprised to learn that this postponement has something to do with woman and sensuality. But before examining Nietzsche’s unpublished sketches for a Zarathustran drama, sketches that are highly reminiscent of the abortive Empedocles, let us review briefly the sundry postponements of Zarathustra’s death within Thus Spoke Zarathustra.²

That the book commences with downgoing has been universally noted: downgoing both as Zarathustra’s mission (the teaching of overman) and as his demise (his collapse, convalescence, and postponed death). The entire book is caught in the tension and pull of “over” man, “down” going, and going “over”: Übermensch, Untergang, Übergang. The meaning of the über is itself bifurcated along vertical and horizontal axes. Übermensch is somehow above mankind and beyond human history; Übergang is a crossing over or going across the bridge of the future to a new kind of humanity. No wonder commentators today are wrestling with the problem of the relation between historical mankind and overman! For the ambiguity, the double axis of the project, is ineluctable and irreducible.³ Such ambiguity marks the task of descensional thinking as such—the problem as to how Zarathustra is to go down and under.⁴ Thus Spoke Zarathustra commences with downgoing. Each of its four parts tries to end with downgoing. Tries but fails. Postpones the Untergang.

Even after the tightrope walker has shown Zarathustra the way down, Nietzsche’s hero beguiles himself with false goals. By the end of the Prologue he has adopted the speech and the mannerisms of the practical joker, the actor, the gravedigger. Indeed, a note from the year 1883 explicitly identifies Zarathustra as the Possenreisser (10, 531). “Let my going be their downgoing!” he cries (4, 27), already oblivious of the downgoing that can only be his own.

The penultimate episode of Part I, “On Free Death,” an episode to which Heidegger will not be blind,⁵ envisages Zarathustra’s own death. Envisages it and then executes it by ruse, as it were, suddenly introducing the imperfect tense into Zarathustra’s speech, as though the downgoing were already accomplished. Envisages, executes, and then postpones it by means of an untranslatable pun. As follows:

In the final episode of Part I, “On the Gift-giving Virtue,” Zarathustra reminds his disciples to remain “true to the earth.” He then cautions them to be chary of him. “And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he betrayed you” (4, 101). At “Midday,” in Part IV, hundreds of pages later, Zarathustra is still tossing that ball (see 4, 344), still malingering.

Part II begins with announcements of Zarathustra’s pregnancy (with the doctrine of overman) and ends with Zarathustra’s “stillest hour.” The latter Zarathustra calls his “terrifying mistress,” the mistress of his loneliness. She utters the voiceless cry, “What do you matter, Zarathustra? Speak your word and shatter!” (4, 188). Yet Zarathustra does not deliver, does not collapse; again he goes to embrace his solitude.

The postponements of Part III are considerably more complex. Perhaps all of them devolve upon the curious fact that in the original manuscript the second episode, “On the Vision and the Riddle,” is set within the narrative frame of the much later episode, “The Convalescent.” Nietzsche originally began “On the Vision and the Riddle” with the sentence (crossed out at the proof-stage), “But what is it I dreamt not long ago as I lay on my sickbed?” (14, 309). The suggestion is that the vision (the glance of an eye, or moment of time) and the riddle (the shepherd writhing in nausea) are intrinsic to convalescence itself; they are not illnesses that one might leave behind, maladies from which one might totally convalesce. Indeed, what would it mean to convalesce from the moment of time? Surely one would then owe a cock to Aesclepius? At all events, the longing that Zarathustra experiences at the end of the riddle, when he hears the shepherd’s golden laughter, induces the dream of death: “My longing for this laughter gnaws at me: Oh, how can I bear to go on living! And how I could bear now to die!” (4, 202). Yet in the episode “The Convalescent,” near the end of Part III, Zarathustra’s animals beg him not to die; they transform the burden of eternal recurrence into a ditty that promises immortality. They now speak in Zarathustra’s name, arrogate his voice, proclaim the “end” of his downgoing as such.

Meanwhile, Zarathustra hears nothing of the words his animals would put into his mouth—for the sighs of Oedipus have now become the musings of Zarathustra’s animals. He lies still, “communing with his soul.” In the original manuscript, as we know, his “soul” bears the name Ariadne. The episode that tells of his communing, “On the Great Longing,” preserves a number of allusions to Ariadne: hers is the vine heavy with golden grapes hanging in clusters like udders (see 4, 279, 401; and 10, 447). Her wine is a whine (Wein-Weinen), a lament or complaint (Klage-Anklage). And the imagery suddenly becomes ambiguous as the overripe soul begs for the vintner’s knife: “In flowing tears pours out all your suffering, your suffering from abundance and from the cluster’s urge to go to the vintner and the vintner’s knife!” (4, 280). A note from the summer of 1883 fashions a similar image, although Zarathustra’s soul here exhibits a new name (10, 447): “And what shall I do with your knife, Pana? Shall I sever the yellow grapes from the vine? Behold, what abundance surrounds me!”

Traces of Ariadne persist in the following episode of Part III, “The Other Dance Song,” originally entitled “Vita Femina.” “I dance after you, I follow you along the barest trace,” says Zarathustra (4, 283), as though he were Theseus. Or Dionysos. For life, as we soon learn, has “delicate ears.” Yet in the “Seven Seals, or Yes and Amen Song,” Zarathustra appears to spurn life, growing “ardent for eternity.” “Never yet have I found the woman from whom I want children, unless it be this woman, whom I love: for I love you, O Eternity!” (4, 287).⁶ It is not clear how Zarathustra’s ardor for eternity will conform to his tragic fate. Unless he and we stop our ears to the animals’ ditty and return to the gateway of eternity, the portal of time and mortality.

In the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra a hoary Zarathustra announces that he is still not ready, that there is still time to go under (4, 297). Not that Untergang can be postponed forever (4, 298):

Yet the “high dramatic tension” of this fourth and final part is sustained, not by Zarathustra’s approaching destiny, but by his ceaseless, bootless search for the Higher Men. The latter, Zarathustra’s sundry shadows, are all ultimately rejected—even the “ugliest man,” who clearly achieves the affirmative thought of eternal recurrence (4, 396). Rejected in order that Zarathustra can perpetuate his search and so lay claim to a new morning: “Thus spoke Zarathustra, and stepped out of his cave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun emerging from dark mountains.—End of Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (4, 408). How differently Nietzsche’s classic work would have resounded if Nietzsche had adopted for it an ending he had sketched during the winter of 1884–85, and if he had altered the final episodes of Part IV to attune them to that ending (31 [20]^† 11, 365):

Do these postponements of Zarathustra’s demise have anything to do with the postponements examined earlier, those having to do with sensual love and woman? Among the notes from July through August of 1882, that is, from the period of The Gay Science, we find references to sexuality and death as the two fundamental themes of Nietzsche’s projected book Plowshare. The ninth point of a ten-point plan (10, 21) raises the question of the “ ‘Preservation of the species’ and the thought of eternal return.” The first five points read:

The same notebook contains a detailed plan on the question of woman (10, 24–25). Its final point: “Sensuality different in man and woman.” When Nietzsche recopied these notes into the “Tautenburg Sketches for Lou von Salomé” (10, 42), he dropped this final point. Yet earlier in the sketches we find (10, 37): “Love is, for men, something altogether different than it is for women. For most men, love is of course a sort of possessiveness [Habsucht]; for others, love is adoration of a suffering and veiled godhead.”

The interlaced themes of sensual love and death emerge much more clearly from the plans for Part II of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (summer, 1883). Here we find a number of startling reminiscences of the Empedocles plans sketched a dozen years earlier. Here the very same problem arises out of the matter or “stuff” of Zarathustra. Like Empedocles, Zarathustra is searching for his tragic destiny. He has a mission, yet must learn to interweave mission and fate. His speeches in Part I have failed to fulfill that destiny. Looking forward to Part II, Nietzsche jots one such reminiscence of Empedocles (10, 366):

Zarathustra’s conversation with the hound of hell preserves its Empedoclean setting in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II. Indeed, there may be grounds for identifying the city of Motley Cow with ancient Acragas, and Zarathustra’s island habitat as Sicily. Be that as it may, the episode “On Great Events” (4, 167–71; cf. 10, 373) begins as follows:

However, the hound of hell who guards the portal turns out to be a yapping “fire dog”: a potentially Empedoclean destiny for Zarathustra dwindles to a chastisement for socialists and anarchists.

Nevertheless, the theme of Zarathustra’s death is not so readily quashed. We soon find in the notebooks, underlined several times, directions for Zarathustra’s “last speech,” and nearby the following “prophecy” (10, 372):

Hard upon the prophecy appear the first plans for a Zarathustran drama, in which death—though not yet woman—plays a crucial role. The final three notes of N VI3, from June through July of 1883, read as follows (10, 377–78):

Nothing about these plans is obvious or entirely straightforward. The “temptations” of Act I refer to Zarathustra’s shame and pity, virtues (that is, vices) he must learn to outstrip. As we shall see in the next chapter, the very last Zarathustra plans invoke the same Versuchungen. Zarathustra’s “selected people,” a parody of the “Chosen,” are the Higher Men, the bridges to the future that is overman. “Magnificent midday” is the moment when Zarathustra communicates his most burdensome thought, thus precipitating a crisis or “catastrophe” for those who cannot bear eternal recurrence. Yet in these plans catastrophe strikes Zarathustra himself, who dies of grief and disappointment. The plaint of those who reject him, “We killed him,” recalls the cry of the madman in The Gay Science (number 125) who proclaims the death of God (3, 480–82). The obsequies (Leichenfeier) mentioned here find their echo in the wake (Totenfeier) portrayed in subsequent plans (10, 379–82); yet as the plans proceed it becomes clear that the wake will not be Zarathustra’s, insofar as his death will have been postponed indefinitely.

The role of the jester in the second plan is unclear, even though he appears more than once in the notebooks (cf. 10, 382); the two Kings and their donkey are unmistakable foreshadowings of the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (4, 304). The plague-ridden city (Peststadt) is transported directly from the pages of the Empedocles plans of 1870–71. “The forest” may be the habitat of the pious old saint in Zarathustra’s Prologue. It is mentioned in later notes (e.g., 10, 415 and 583) and will eventually become the primeval forest or jungle of the final plans for Zarathustra.

The third plan introduces a strange ambiguity into the drama plans: whereas Act IV in the first note has our hero lying in state, the commentary has him perched on the ruins of a church! The dilemma of the Zarathustra-type is nonetheless clearly stated: the necessity of Zarathustra’s “becoming hard” will reverberate throughout plans to the third and fourth parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and this rigorous project will serve to keep Zarathustra alive. The “collision” stressed here is surely the catastrophe that occurs when Zarathustra teaches the doctrine of eternal return before its time: the doctrine is itself intended for overman, who alone can endure it. Yet in this third plan it is not a matter of the others turning away or of Zarathustra’s death from grief: here Zarathustra dies because he has trespassed onto the ground of overman, a ground he does not command, so that the vision of eternal recurrence becomes (or should become) his own final, irrevocable Untergang.

As we approach the next plan for a Zarathustran drama in Nietzsche’s notebooks, a number of pertinent yet disjointed notes rise to meet us as echoes of “Zarathustra’s holy laughter.” Here again (10, 442) are fragments of Zarathustra’s “last speech,” citing pity as the danger for overman and downgoing as Zarathustra’s destiny (“But it is my felicity now to go down”). Suddenly a woman’s voice is heard (10, 443^†), as though hers were the voice of Zarathustra himself: “ ‘Thus I gladly die! And die countless times more! And live in order thus to die!’ And as she died she smiled: for she loved Zarathustra.” The following four notes (ibid.^†) invoke “catastrophe,” and introduce the woman herself. Which woman? The second and fourth notes betray her identity, if not her name.

We know that the woman is Corinna, herself a shadow of Ariadne, whatever she will call herself now. The next detailed drama plan appears, still among notes for Part II of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (10, 444–45):

We recognize the child with the mirror from the first episode of Zarathustra, Part II. And the sailors observing the volcano we know from the episode “On Great Events.” Yet in that episode, as I have already noted, the impressive backdrop to the Empedoclean and Zarathustran tragedies seems overdrawn and out of place, inasmuch as it becomes the scene of yet another speech. Zarathustra’s death among children, amid the ruins of a temple, reminds us of Nietzsche’s Heraclitean heritage, of the universe in which play is king; his plunge into the volcano that towers over the plague-ridden city is however altogether Empedoclean.

The crucial act involves several elements: the betrayal by Zarathustra’s animals, the flight of his pride; his excess of pity for the Higher Men, disciples who are not yet ready for his teaching; and the woman who embodies love (as the corpse which Zarathustra in his folly embraces) and plague (which again breaks out in her, an dem wieder die Pest ausbricht). Only a kind of sacrificial killing (cf. 10, 152: der heilige Mord) will heal her. And perhaps not even that: is she not still a source of infection when Zarathustra embraces her? Whatever the case, it is but a moment from that embrace to “the most magnificent of wakes” and the plunge of Zarathustra’s coffin into the crater.

The moment of betrayal by the animals (or the moment when their fidelity becomes lethal), a moment that is utterly foreign to Thus Spoke Zarathustra as we know it, receives elaboration in two further notes (10, 446–47^† and 513^†), from the summer and autumn of 1883:

And several months later:

The woman who cries out in distress, who in an excess of pity calls for Zarathustra’s death, is presumably the very woman Zarathustra himself murders out of pity—although the interchangeable roles and sexes ought to give us pause. She is no longer called Corinna, but Pana, and she is designated in several notes from this period.⁷ The first note (10, 446^†):

The second note (10, 447^†) we have seen already in the context of “[Ariadne:] The Great Longing”:

By this time, it is impossible to tell who is wielding the knife against whom, as when Quentin Compson threatens Caddy and himself in The Sound and the Fury (“it wont take but a second then I can do mine I can do mine then”). The third note proceeds to confound the two thoroughly (10, 512^†):

It is difficult to know what Nietzsche means by “everything in the Prologue,” although one might expect Zarathustra’s irrecoverable Untergang to be among those things. And now his downgoing is bound to the fatality called Pana. Indeed, the two figures are nearly identical; the smallest gap separates them. That gap is marked by the parentheses in the phrase “the moment of great contempt (supreme felicity!).” The smallest gap (10, 437^† and 449^† [cf. 366]):

Because of Heidegger’s interpretation we are accustomed to think of the smallest gap in terms of the distance between Zarathustra’s thinking of eternal recurrence and the caricatures of that doctrine produced by the spirit of gravity and Zarathustra’s animals.⁸ How disconcerting to have to think of the rainbow and the asses’ bridge as links to Pana!

Later notes (10, 468) seem to reduce the figure of Pana to one of piety: she who cries “Zarathustra, die!” is transformed into one of those “pious ones” cited in an earlier plan who are ripe for seduction. Or to a figure of comedy (10, 469): the woman Zarathustra murders responds in religious puns: “How well you heal, O healing Savior!” Furthermore, these later plans (10, 471–73) remove “the wake” from its position of climax in the drama of Part II; and, as we know, the published text of Thus Spoke Zarathustra contains no Totenfeier, certainly none featuring Zarathustra himself. Plans for Part III do continue to call for Zarathustra’s demise: “In the last speech the Grave Song too must be fulfilled!” (10, 480). Yet that demise is deferred by calls for Zarathustra to become “legislator,” calls that begin to resound here and that grow more and more clamorous until the notebooks are suddenly blank.

In the autumn of 1883 a third cluster of plans for a Zarathustran drama crystallizes—two of its notes we have cited already. The principal plan follows an important statement concerning the impact of the thought of eternal return (10, 495–96):

The resemblance to the first drama plan is evident, although here the religious parody is more pronounced. Central to this plan is the incommunicability of eternal return, or at least the fatality of premature communication. Another note in the same series warns (10, 520), “N.B.: The thought itself will not be expressed in the third part: merely prepared. First of all, critique of everything taught heretofore.” Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra does communicate the thought of return, but only in altercations with the dwarf and the animals, always masked and encrypted, always across the smallest gap. The dramatic import of Zarathustra’s shame begins to be felt now, his feeling of weakness in the face of his own teaching, his awareness of the likelihood of self-deception. We recall that the salient characteristic of Dionysos philosophos, to whom Nietzsche will soon turn, is his lack of shame.

However, the drama now reverts to its initial form, abandoning its female personage and the theme of plague. The emissaries of Zarathustra’s “Selected People” now invite him to celebrate life. Here there is no call for heroic decision. Here no Pana threatens him with her pity, her piety, or her knife. Here there is no womanly nature to kill or be killed by.

If she shrinks to piety before disappearing altogether from the drama, it nonetheless will not do to forget that Pana entered on the scene wearing the mask of Ariadne. Pan-a is the mate, if not of Dionysos, then of the great god Pan, with whom Empedocles contended on Etna. She is perhaps the universe of nature herself (τò πν), plurality and diversity in the flesh. Perhaps her name reflects Nietzsche’s passion to demythologize, to cross out the reference to divinity: Pan-thei-a. Whatever the case, Pana’s story is now postponed, the feast of life celebrated without her. And without the pestilence.⁹

Yet Zarathustra manages for a time to meet in these plans his tragic destiny without her aid. As though the place and function of Pana are now occupied and performed by the thinking of eternal recurrence itself. Zarathustra’s euphoria now betrays him, induces him to speak out of turn. The havoc his words wreak among the Last Humans, who can only gnash their teeth at the thought of return, occasions Zarathustra’s gravest temptation: his pity for humankind. “Midday and Eternity,” a title that becomes ever more prominent during the last years of Nietzsche’s active life, is now transferred from the third to the fourth act, from the announcement of return to “the wake” itself. The wake is now without an act designated especially for it, as though it were on its way out. In the remaining Zarathustra plans, for Parts III and IV, the tension waxes between two poles; that is, between Zarathustra’s task to become hard, to overcome shame and pity, to teach recurrence, and Zarathustra’s tragic destiny, to go down to human beings, to speak his word and shatter, to make way for the overman. The tension does not subside. If some notes insist on the “transition from the free spirit and hermit to the necessity to dominate” (10, 516; cf. 532, 542), others expose the vulnerability of the Zarathustra-type itself (10, 500 and 517):

The same tension lends form to the final cluster of plans. The work is no longer conceived as a drama, although the plans still show signs of their dramatic provenance. Indeed, there are grounds for saying that Part IV of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the most “dramatic” of the four books, the one in which actions finally speak louder than words—as they did in the Prologue—and in which deeds and omissions stretch across the entire expanse of the text. The first of these final plans (see 10, 518^†) reads:

The question we might pose to this plan—and Nietzsche himself poses it (10, 519)—is whether Zarathustra “finally grasps the fact” that it is not enough to teach recurrence; that one must “also forcefully change the human beings who adopt” the teaching. The oath-takers at Zarathustra’s gravesite (who are mentioned also in later plans for a book to be entitled The Eternal Return; see 11, 10) themselves testify to the fact that Zarathustra fails to grasp it. Further plans interpret the notion of self-overcoming as implying Zarathustra’s withdrawal from the scene in favor of overman (10, 522–23^†):

At the same time, other fragments of plans (10, 525–26) imply that Zarathustra has all the time in the world, that he is tranquil and unperturbed. Far from plunging headlong to hell, Zarathustra enjoys recuperation and convalescence. After which he “stands there like Caesar.” And not on the Ides of March. It becomes clear that the plague and the wake will be deflected in such a way that Zarathustra himself carries the former and attends the latter (see, for example, 10, 559–60, 591–92, and 611).

Yet Zarathustra’s convalescence applies only to the plans for Part III. Zarathustra’s death and the plague of Pana have once again merely been postponed. Some extracts from a detailed plan for Part IV of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, drawn up in the autumn of 1883 (10, 593–94):

Once again Pana wields the knife; once again, by a kind of doubling or reversal, she is “shattered.” Zarathustra, going through all the transformations Empedocles underwent before him, but now “victorious,” reacts in a new way to Pana’s death. Nietzsche marks the difference with a distancing dash: Zarathustra—laughs. The laugh of the shepherd who has bitten off the head of the snake and spewed it out, the golden laughter that induces Zarathustra’s dream of death. “And how I could bear now to die!”

A second “Plan for Zarathustra 4,” ramified into twenty-two points, abandons the dramatic form but preserves the melodramatic traits. Some excerpts (10, 598–600):

The howling dog we recognize as the hound that bays in both “On the Vision and the Riddle” and “The Convalescent.” It is more hound of hell than tame Dalmatian. The hound howls in such a way that both the vision of time and eternity and the riddle of nausea and nihilism no longer precede Zarathustra’s convalescence but constitute the very dream of his delirium. Which augurs his death. The “two paths” alluded to in “22. etc.” can only be the avenues that meet in the gateway Augenblick, “Glance of an Eye.” But that would mean that Nietzsche’s original manuscript must be restored: the vision and the riddle must be held back from their precocious appearance in Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (that is, they must be postponed), in order to be made the backdrop for the oath-takers who stand over Zarathustra’s corpse.

One of these oath-takers—whose terrific pledges bind them all to Untergang—is Martin Heidegger, inasmuch as what I have just described is no mere fantasy but Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought of thoughts during the summer semester of 1937. “Convalescence” is thought confronting ineluctable downgoing.

However, by 1884 Pana has vanished forever, even though we still hear of “the woman who murders” Zarathustra (11, 134). Plans continue to demand that he “become hard,” that he develop his capacity for annihilation. Some plans emphasize his role as “physician-priest-teacher,” after the manner of Empedocles (11, 208 and 280–81). Others describe his search for those human beings who “will not perish on account of” the thought of return (11, 338). Several plans pause on the verge of Zarathustra’s death (11, 343), while others plunge into the crater (e.g., 11, 341^†): “the dying Zarathustra holds the earth in an embrace.—And although no one had told them, they all knew that Zarathustra was dead.”

Here Nietzsche’s hero embraces the earth, rather than the corpse of Pana, in death. Nor is Pana present in other later accounts of Zarathustra’s demise, from late spring, 1885, after the completion of Part IV. One of these (11, 468), a plan for Midday and Eternity, shows four “stations,” the last entitled “Rise and Fall,” Aufgang und Untergang. The following directions precede the plan: “He leads his friends ever higher, up to his cave, and finally to the mountaintop: there he dies./—blessing: cavern, Isle of Graves.” The preceding plan, marked nota bene, reads as follows (11, 468^†):

It remains ambiguous whether Zarathustra dies in the fullness of time, at his acme, affirming and blessing; or in abashed silence and embarrassment, his fundamental teaching not yet having found the words that Zarathustra himself would give it. Or the ears he would elect to hear it. That teaching itself is remarkably ambiguous. In a range of plans drawn up during the autumn months of 1884 through spring of 1885 Nietzsche identifies eternal recurrence as the petrifying head of Medusa.¹² And in these months of explosive poetic creativity Nietzsche composes a large number of lyrics which he hopes to publish as a cycle of Medusen-Hymnen. The affinity of eternal recurrence and Medusa emerges from the following fragments (11, 344, 360, 362–64):

Yet the last-mentioned plan exhibits the full ambiguity of eternal recurrence when in its ultimate point, which recounts Zarathustra’s final farewell to his mountain cave, it adds the parenthetical remark that here “the consolatory power [das Tröstliche] of eternal return shows its face for the first time” (cf. 11, 488). Eternal recurrence: the face of consolation on the Head of Medusa! As duplicitous as Pana herself! As though the name Medusa deserved to join those of Ariadne, Corinna, and Pana, claiming a chapter for herself. The last.

Madonna, 1895. Lithograph. Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The William B. Jaffe and Evelyn AJ. Hall Collection.