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Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources
Notes to Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Chapter 9 |
 Gustave Moreau, 1864 oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY |
[set up Antigone for connection below]
45 surface of Apolline part of Greek tragedy looks simple, transparent, and beautiful (Apolline part = characters in dialogue)
therefore chorus = Dionysian
46 dialogue = image of the Hellene, revealed in dance
language of Sophoclean heroes: Apolline precision, lucidity [Apolline associated with reason?]
[Antigone, opening scene of Antigone & Ismene, ll. 57-ff, 77; or Antigone-Creon, l. 593; dialogue as dialectic > democracy as dialogue: Antigone 760, 781, 838]
> innermost core, but short way
hero = light-image on dark screen, appearance
penetrate myth projected in bright reflections
opposite of familiar optic phenomenon
remedies?
light patches > terrible depths of night
Greek cheerfulness: vitality, robustness
Sophocles's Oedipus: terrible suffering > magical, beneficial power [preview Oedipus at Colonus]
noble man doesn't sin: natural order is destroyed
>higher magic circle of effects
Nietzsche on Tragic Flaw?
46-7 Sophocles saw the most suffering character on the Greek stage, the unhappy Oedipus, as the noble man who is predestined for error and misery despite his wisdom, but who finally, through his terrible suffering, exerts a magical and beneficial power that continues to prevail after his death. The noble man does not sin, the profound poet wishes to tell us: through his actions every law, every natural order, the whole moral world can be destroyed, and through these actions a higher magic circle of effects is drawn, founding a new world on the ruins of the old, now destroyed. . . . [S]uch is the truly Hellenic [Greek] delight in this dialectical unravelment that it casts a sense of triumphant cheerfulness over the whole work, and takes the sting from all the terrible premises of the plot. In Oedipus at Colonus, we encounter this same cheerfulness, but elevated in a process of infinite transfiguration. . . .
new world founded on ruins of old [Dionysian ecstasy of destruction]
47 Oedipus at Colonus: elevated, process of infinite transfiguration [suffering as shared fate, pains of progress]
divine counterpart of the dialectic
light-image after we have glimpsed the abyss [light dark dialectic]
vision of poet
"Oedipus his father's murderer, his mother's husband, Oedipus who solved the riddle of the sphinx! What can we learn from the cryptic [mysterious] trinity of these fateful deeds?
Oedipus like
ancient folk belief from Persia: wise
magus < born of incest
wisdom = monstrous crime against nature
unnatural acts force secrets from nature
Oedipus: man
who solves the riddle of nature must also transgress sacred codes of nature [Tragic Flaw?]
Dionysiac wisdom = abominable crime against nature, experience dissolution of nature
48 like a beam of sunlight, the Hellenic poet touches the sublime and terrible
Memnon's Column of the myth
Prometheus = true hymn of impiety
Aeschylean longing for justice
individual and gods, power of both suffering worlds
compelling reconciliation, metaphysical unity
49 artist creates men and destroys gods > atones with eternal suffering [cf. ch 8, pp. 42 (true poet), 43 (chorus)]
story of
Prometheus for Aryans [stealing fire]
"The Greeks" PBS +
painting below + Aeschylus
cf. myth of Fall for Semite [stealing knowledge]
two myths are
siblings
fire = true palladium of any rising culture > man controls fire = sacrilege > consequences
palladium:
49-50 blessing won by sacrilige > consequences: dignity conferred on sacrilege; contrast original sin as "origin of evil" [> origin of human heroism]
50 feminine attributes; semitic sins of curiosity, mendacious deception, susceptibility, lasciviousness [Nietzsche's original sin]
sublime idea of active sin as the truly Promethean virtue
ethic background to pessimistic tragedy
contradiction at heart of world, confusion of divine and human
Aryans: sacrilege as man; Semites: sacrilege as woman [Nietzsche's original sin: disdain for feminine virtues + disdain for Christianity as "slave religion"]
innermost core of Promethean myth: necessity of sacrilege [& punishment] for titanically striving individual (> non-Apolline)
Apollo seeks to pacify individual by drawing boundaries b/w them
self-knowledge and moderation
danger of Egyptian rigidity & coldness
51 Dionysiac flood-tide destroys
[Apolline-Dionysiac dialectic]
unites Promethean and Dionysiac: 2-faced Aeschylean Prometheus
Titan Prometheus was punished by Zeus for stealing fire from gods for humans
by
having a vulture daily eat his liver (which heals for the next day's torment)