Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

Without equal either in the other writings of Novalis or indeed in Romantic literature in general, this page has to be quoted in full. It’s not an argument, or a series of arguments, but a continuous flow of words about language, where one has the impression that it is the language itself that is speaking. Never before had language and reflection on language come so close together. They skim over each other without coinciding. And that they don’t quite coincide is only a heightened pleasure added to the text, as if they might coincide at any moment, but instead leave open a tiny gap, to breathe through. Heidegger, who revered this text, nevertheless objected to the way it conceives language “dialectically, within the perspective of absolute idealism, on the basis of subjectivity.” A specious objection: there is no trace of dialectical machinery in the “Monologue.” Nor does one sense any need to resort to something called “subjectivity.” What disturbed Heidegger here, one suspects, was something else altogether: the volatile, even flighty nature of the passage, its strenuous resistance to conceptualization, the effrontery with which it offers, as “contemptible chatter” about chatter , unfathomable speculations that take us as close as possible to the wellspring of the word. This is the characteristic gesture of absolute literature. And it is this that worries Heidegger; he senses it is uncontrollable, even with all his powerful strategic apparatus. In this passage, then, which bears no signature, an acephalous text, a sheet of paper mislaid perhaps, hard to date — though quite likely written in 1798, a year of important beginnings — in these few lines quickly whispered like some demonic presto, absolute literature presents itself in all its recklessness: irresponsible, metamorphic, carrying no identity card that a desk sergeant might examine, deceptive in its tone (so much so that some germanists bereft of irony would imagine that the “Monologue” itself was ironic in intent), and, finally, subject to no authority, whether it be venerable rhetoric or metaphysics, or even a system of thought like Heidegger’s that claimed to be beyond metaphysics. Because committed only to its own elaboration, like a child playing alone, absorbed in his game. “Monological art,” Gottfried Benn would one day call it, Benn who was himself to formulate the most corrosive and impudent version of this mutation of literature that the twentieth century would witness. Exhausted, his work still banned, Berlin in ruins round his clinic for syphilitics, he wrote the following letter to Dieter Wellershoff:

You speak of styles: the penetrating style, the lean style, the musical style, the intimate style — all excellent points of view, but don’t forget: the expressive style, where the only thing that counts is the seduction and the imprint of the expression, where the contents are only euphorizations for artistic exercises … In this regard, take a look at the novels and verse of the second half of the nineteenth century. The period has good intentions, it is upright, sincere (in the old-fashioned sense), certainly not without its attractions, but it depicts , states of mind, relationships, situations, it transmits experiences and knowledge, but here the language is not the essential creative power, it is not itself. And then along comes Nietzsche and the language begins, and all it wants to do, all it can do, is phosphoresce, flash, ravish, amaze. It celebrates itself, it draws everything human into its slight but powerful organism, becomes monological, even monomaniacal. A tragic style, a crisis style, hybrid, final …

A hundred and fifty years on and from behind a heap of rubble it’s as if the “Monologue” of Novalis were still going on. The tone is different now, of course. Abandoning the angelic, it inclines to the poisonous. But the voices are recognizably similar; they call to each other, twine together. Heidegger was right not to trust that page of Novalis. It announced a knowledge that refused to be subject to any other, and at the same time would seep into the cracks of all others. Literature grows like the grass between the heavy gray paving stones of thought. “And then along comes Nietzsche …”: but why should such a drastic leap in the evolution of literature appear in the writings of a philosopher? Yet we feel Benn couldn’t have chosen anyone else for the role. Why? Despite Heidegger’s grandiose determination to demonstrate the contrary in two volumes and a thousand pages, Nietzsche was the first attempt to escape from a cage of categories whose origin we find in Plato and Aristotle. What may or may not lie beyond that cage has not yet been established. But many travelers have reported that literature is the passport most readily accepted in that terra incognita where — so one hears tell — all the mythologies now pass a largely indolent life in a no-man’s-land haunted by gods and vagrant simulacra, by ghosts and Gypsy caravans in constant movement. All these beings are ever issuing from the cave of the past. They yearn only to tell their stories again, as the shades of the underworld yearned only for blood. But how can we reach them? Culture, in the most recent sense of the word, should imply the ability to celebrate, invisibly, the rites that open the way to this kingdom, which is also the kingdom of the dead. Yet it is precisely this ability that is so obviously lacking in the world around us. Behind the trembling curtains of what passes for “reality,” the voices throng. If no one listens, they steal the costume of the first person they can grab and burst onto the stage in ways that can be devastating. Violence is the expedient of whatever has been refused an audience.

This is the country that Nietzsche set out to explore, the country that swallowed him up. The country of “truth and untruth in an extra-moral he put it in the title of a brief text that dates back to the period of The Birth of Tragedy and shares with it its farsightedness and white heat, albeit with a different stylistic gesture — deft, light, digressive, as if the healthier Nietzsche of The Gay Science were here making his first outing. But from the opening lines it’s clear that what is to be at stake in these pages is nothing less than everything. At once Nietzsche sets out to tell us a story that has to do with a single minute in the history of the cosmos: “In a remote corner of the sparkling universe that stretches away across infinite solar systems, there was once a star where some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and deceitful minute in the ‘history of the world’: but it lasted only a minute. Nature breathed in and out just a few times, then the star hardened and the clever animals had to die.” The crucial point in this fable cornes when it says that knowledge is something invented . If one doesn’t discover knowledge, but invents it, the implication is that it involves a powerful element of simulation. And Nietzsche goes so far as to claim that it is precisely in simulation that “the intellect unleashes its principal strengths.” This would already be enough to undermine every previous edifice of knowledge. But with sovereign dispatch Nietzsche goes straight to the consequences and in just a few lines is posing the ultimate question: “What is the truth? A mobile army of metaphors.” That does it. All at once “the huge scaffolding and support structures of the concepts” collapse: metaphor no longer signifies an ornament that doesn’t bind, something only acceptable in the inconsistent world of the poets. On the contrary: if “man’s fundamental instinct” is precisely “the instinct to form metaphors,” and if concepts are no more or less than bleached and ossified metaphors, worn-out coinage, as Nietzsche dared to claim, then this instinct that is not placated in the “columbarium of concepts” will seek “another channel to flow in.” Where? “In myth , and in general in art.” With one quick thrust Nietzsche has attributed to art a supreme gnoseological quality. Knowledge and simulation are no longer enemies but accomplices. And if every kind of knowledge is a form of simulation, art is if nothing else the most immediate and the most vibrant. What’s more: if metaphor is the normal and primordial vehicle of knowledge, then man’s relationship with the gods and their myths will appear as something obvious and self-evident: “When once every tree can speak as a Nymph or when a god in the form of a bull can carry off a virgin, when the goddess Athena herself is to be seen beside Pisistratus crossing Athens on a fine chariot — and the honest Athenian believed as much — then, as in a dream, everything is possible at any moment, and all nature swarms around man, as though no less than the masquerade of the gods who play at deceiving us by taking on all sorts of shapes.” Here, more than anywhere else, Nietzsche is wielding the “magic of the extreme,” his greatest and most reckless virtue. So one might imagine that he had been left in glorious isolation, the only one to have situated the workings of art on such a tall gnoseological pinnacle. But not long after him we find the young Proust approaching the same position. Often depicted fatuous snob waiting to be struck by literary revelation, Proust actually looks forward to that revelation as something inevitable even before taking his first steps in society. And no sooner does he speak of literature and what it is than we note a certain toughness, an intransigence in his voice. Immediately he speaks about it in terms of knowledge .