English 2423-01: World Literature 2
Spring 2008 : T/Th 11:00-12:20 (PY 201)
Dr. Evans Lansing Smith
Office Hours: MWF (8:00-10:00); TR (9:30-11:00; 2:00-3:00)
BW 235; 397-4355; lansing.smith@mwsu.edu
Texts:
The Norton Anthology of Western Literature Volume 2.
Requirements: Reading, class attendance, and participation. Though not calculated as
numerical grade, participation will be a factor in your final grade. Two tests and two
papers, of about five pages in length, using one or more texts read during the semester to
develop a thesis. Plagiarized papers (i.e., copied from the Internet or any other
source) will receive a zero, no questions asked.
Grades:
Two Tests
One Papers
Jan 15 :
Tues: Introduction
Thu:
Jan 22
Tues: Molière, Tartuffe (10f..)
Thu:
Jan 29
Ibsen, Hedda Gabler (1410)
Tues: Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1503)
Thu:
Mar 4 :
Keats Odes (757-63)
Tues: Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind” (751)
Thu:
Feb 26:
Keats, “La Belle Dame” (757), “Bright Star” (757)
Tues: Film Library Media Center
Thu:
Feb 19:
Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (737)
Tues: Film Library Media Center
Thu:
Feb 12
Racine, Phaedra (159f.)
Tues: Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” (696)
Thu:
Feb 5
Pope, An Essay on Man (368.); The Rape of the Lock (350f..)
Tennyson, “In Memoriam” (825f.)
Tues: Browning, “Childe Roland” (850)
Thu:
Mar 11
Baudelaire, “A Carcass,” “Invitation to a Voyage” (1547-49)
Rimbaud, “ The Drunken Boat” (1576-79)
Film Library Media Center
Thu:
Test #1 and Paper #1
Mar 18
Spring and Easter Break
Mar 27
Th:
Apr 1
Tues: Proust, “Swann’s Way” (1781f.)
Thu:
Apr 8
Calvino, Invisible Cities (2327f.)
Tues: Film Media Center Library
Thu:
May 6
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (2179)
Tues: Walcott, Omeros (2361f.)
Thu:
Apr 29
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (2003)
Tues: Film Media Center Library
Thu:
Apr 22
Mann, Death in Venice (1816f.)
Tues: Yeats, Poems (1723F.)
Thu:
Apr 15
Modernism Slides
Test #2 and Paper #2
Tues: Final Exam 11:00-1:30
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
1660
1687
1688
Restoration Charles 2nd
Enlightenment Newton's Principia
Glorious Revolution: William and Mary
1711
1712-14
1715-19
1733-34
An Essay on Criticism
The Rape of the Lock
The Iliad
An Essay on Man,
Iambic pentameter couplets
Rosicrucianism: Fludd Anima Mundi (1617)
Neoclassical: Homeric and Virgilian epics
Rationalization of myth: Psychologizing
Mock epic:
1. Invocation (1. 1-11)
2. Dream Visions (1. 25f.)
3. Arming of the Hero (1.121f.)
4. Sea Voyages (2.47-70)
5. Banquets (105-124)
6. Battles (Cantos 3-4)
7. Descent into Hades (4.1f.).
8. Labyrinth (1.92; 2.23; 2.139)
9. Apotheosis (5.113-50)
Molière’s Tartuffe and the Enlightenment (1660-1770)
Enlightenment:
Louis XIV at Versailles; Newton’s Principia (1684)
Production
1664-69 Compagnie du Saint Sacrament and Jesuits
Prosody
Alexandrine Couplets (Hexameter, Pentameter)
Neoclassicism:
Aristotle’s Poetics: Complex action
Plato’s Republic: Reason: Ideal, False, Practical
Act 1: Exposition:
Tartuffe’s usurpation; Orgon’s gullibility
Orgon’s marriage plans for Marianne
Cléante’s Ideal Reason (320f.)
Act 2: Rising Action:
Dorine intervenes between Orgon and Marianne
Dorine intervenes between Valère and Marianne
Dorine’s Practical Reason (70f. and 370f.)
Acts 3-4: Rising Action / Revelation (Anagnoresis)
Tartuffe’s seduction and False Reason (110f.)
Damis reacts and disinherited
Cléante attacks Tartuffe’s warped reason (30f.)
Tartuffe unmasked and further False Reason (300f.)
Act 5: Trickster Tricked and Reversal (Peripeteia)
Cléante’s Moderation and Right Reason (35f.)
Monsieur Loyal and legal conspiracy
King intervenes and Royal Reason (330f.)
Intervention of King and Royal Reason (330f)
Racine: Phaedra (1677)
Abbey School :
Port-Royal-des-Champs
Cornelius Jansen (1640): Original Sin, Predestination
Pascal’s Pensées (1670) : Deus absconditus, Faith
Classicism :
Aristotelian complex plot and unities
Vraisemblance (Verisimilitude), Bienséance (Propriety),
Péripétie (Reversal)
âté vs. arête, hamartia (hybris), catharsis
Genealogical curse, Sacrificial Suicide
Psychologizing of Myth (Nekyia and Labyrinth)
Minos, Pasiphae, Ariadne, Theseus, Daedalus, Minotaur
Plato’s Charioteer (5.6.11f.)
Confessio d’Amantis
Hippolytus to Theramenes (1.1)
Phaedra to Oenone (1.3.116f.)
Aricia to Ismene (2.1.70f.)
Hippolytus to Aricia (2.2.61f.)
Phaedra to Hippolytus (2.5.54f.)
Nekyia and Labyrinth
Theramenes (1.1.10-12)
Hippolytus (1.1.36, 82, 89)
Oenone (1.3.75f.)
Ismene (2.1.14f.)
Phaedra (2.5.44f.)***
Theseus (3.5.34f.)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
1787:
St. John's College, Cambridge
1790-91:
Swiss, Italian Alps, France
1798:
Lyrical Ballads
1850
The Prelude
“Slumber” and “The Solitary Reaper”
Ballad Quatrains: Tetrameter / Trimeter
Iamb (oS) and Trochee (So)
Octaves
Diction
Poesis and Hermeneusis
"Tintern Abbey"
Secularization of Biblical Cycle
Blank Verse
Enjambment
Caesurae
Anaphora
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Secularization of Biblical Cycle: Paradise (Mind=Nature), Paradise Lost
(Mind=Nature), Paradise Regained. Fall is loss of feeling, harmony, imagination, while
redemption achieved through their recovery. Secularized terminology for redemption in
"Tintern Abbey" (1798): "recognitions" (60), "revives" (62), "recompense" (88),
"remember" "restoration" (30).
The cycle occurs in each of the three sections of the poem (marked by line breaks
or verse paragraphs: 1-58, 59-111, 111-159). Section 1: Paradise Past and Present in
reunion with Dorothy (1-22) turns to Paradise Lost at the divided line in "towns and
cities" with their "weariness," "din," "lonely rooms," "burden," "heavy and weary
weight," and "all this unintelligible world" (22-40), back to the "tranquil restoration"
(marked by the dash) of 41-49, and then evokes Loss again in the "darkness," "joyless
dayling," "fretful stir," and "fever of the world" at close (49-58). Section 2: Revival and
Paradise of boyhood in mountains (58-83) turns in the dash to say that "time is past" and
to the "loss" felt in the present in which the poet "faints" "mourns" and "murmurs" (8388), but ends with the pantheistic ecstasy of Nature's "recompense" to complete the cycle
(88-111). Section 3: Paradisal reunion with his sister by river and recovery of "former
pleasures" of "what I was once" (111-128) lapses to "evil tongues," "Rash judgements,"
"sneers of selfish men," and "dreary intercourse of daily life" (128-134), but turns to
vision of mature ecstasies of "sober pleasure" to be "remembered" in the future (134159). Mixture of past-present-future in these moments of ecstatic memory, revery, union
with nature in which the whole cycle occurs in a single moment Wordsworth called
"spots of time."
Recurs in the "Ode" (1802-4) throughout and particularly in Sections 5 and 10,
and is the basic narrative form of The Prelude (1850), from Childhood Paradise in Lake
District, to turmoil of London and France, and the Return home to his sister celebrated in
"Tintern Abbey." In all elements of Romantic sublime (mountains, cataracts, trees,
rivers, seclusion, etc.) and of the pastoral celebraton of the innocence of the country
(lambs, loneliness, and sheperdesses) verses the corruption of the citites and towns.
Prosody: Wordsworth's marvelous rhythms -- Blank Verse, Enjambment, Caesurae,
Anaphora of "Tintern Abbey" and Prelude; Ballad Quatrains, Couplets, Triplets, and
4/3 Meter of "Ode." Diction presumably colloquial language espoused in Lyrical Ballads
(1798): "real language of men" and "incidents and situations from common life."
Coleridge and the Imagination
Biographia Literaria:
Einbildungskraft
Holograph + Hieroglyph = Hologlyph
“All in each,” Part in the Whole
Thoreau and Blake
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Frame tale:
Poeisis and Hermeneusis (1.), (7.582f.)
Necrotypes:
Sea voyage southwards (45f.)
Ornithological: Albatross (1.82); Sky larks (5.357f.)
Solar, “God’s own head” (2.97)
Serpentine “Slimy things” (126f.), (4.272)
Ship of Death and Goddess (3.176f.): Life in Death
Lunar (3.210); (5.321f.)
Ocular, Curse in a dead man’s eye (3.215), (4.259)
Corpses and Spirits (5.331f.), (6.487f.)
“Kubla Khan”
Necrotypes
Fluvian (Alph, the sacred river) and the Sea (1-10)
Lunar, waning moon (15)
Labyrinth (mazy motion) (25-26)
Feminine (15-16) and Poeisis (37f.)
Grain (22)
Fountain (19)
Poeisis and Hermeneusis (37-54)
Oneiric: Jung and a little Freudend
Prosody
Rhyme:
repetition of syllable sounds at the end of the line abab
internal, slant, sight, partial, penultimate, pararhyme
Blank Verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter
Free Verse:
no rhyme, no meter, no set stanzas
Stanzas:
Couplets, Tercets, Quatrains, Quintets, Sestets, Octaves
Euphony:
Alliteration (repeated consonant sounds)
Assonance (repeated vowell sounds)
Meter:
Foot (unit of accented and unaccented syllables)
Iambic tetrameter (oSoSoSoS)
Iambic pentameter (oSoSoSoSoS)
Trochee (So); Anapest (oos); Dacytl (Soo); Ionic (ooSS)
Feminine Ending and Elision
Syllabics and Sapphics (11/6 quatrains)
Ballad
4/3 beat Quatrains (abab, or abcb)
Incremental Repetition
Sonnet:
Shakespearean: 3 Quatrains & couplet (ababcdcdefefgg)
Italian (Petrarchan): Octave (abbaabba) & sestet (cdecde)
Hybrid, Caudal (15), Curtal (13)
Syntax:
Sentence structure (arrangement of clauses, phrases, etc.)
Enjambment: One line into next without pause, versus end stopped
Caesura:
Pause within the line
Elision:
Pronouncing two syllables as one to fit the meter
Anaphora:
Repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of lines
Parallelism:
Repetition of grammatical structure within or between sentences
Allusion:
Reference to some previous work of literature, art, myth, religion
John Keats (1795-1821)
Mother, brother died TB, abandons medical career 1815, first book 1817, Endymion 1818
gored by critics. January to September 1819 his great poems ("Belle Dame, "Lamia,"
"Agnes," "Odes") coincided with career, Fanny Brawne, early symptoms of TB. Death in
Rome.
Letters: "negative capability": living with "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason"; emphasis on the central role of the Imagination
in ascertaining truth and beauty. Praise of Wordsworth for replacing Milton's "Christian
supernaturalism with Agnostic humanism."
"Belle Dame" (1819) and femme fatale of Romantic folklore: like Coleridge, Goethe
(Walpurgisnacht), Hoffman (Falun), and Tagore (Stones), a journey to the otherworld
with emphasis on the symbolism of the feminine (Einbildungskraft combining opposites
of life and death in single image): erotic, maternal, supernatural, dreamlike, fatal, and
poetic aspects of the symbol. Ballad form and meter.
"Odes": supernaturalism of Classical allusions to Agnostic humanism, poetry of the earth.
Stanza forms: quatrain, sestet, septet combinations, with increasing focus and
compression, with varying meter in "Nightingale": Hero Journey Cycle from aching heart
(Section 1) to escape via opium (1), wine (2), Faery Poesy (4), Pastoral Poetry (5), Death
(6), Religion (7), and return to human realm of suffering in 8. Allusion and Tradition:
Milton's Lycidas (3.1) and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (Section 3), and forward to
Tennyson (5.10), Hardy (6.1), Hopkins (7.2). "Autumn": organization of imagery (fruits
and vegetables on vines in 1; harvested grain and apples in granary and press in 2; songs
of gnats, lambs, crickets, and red-breast in 3). No mythological framework, but touches
of Grim Reaper in 2. Alliteration and assonance of 3.30-33. Stevens echo 3.33.
E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822): "The Mines of Falun" (1819-21)
1796
Poland
1800
Posen serving Prussian Polish High Court
1807
Berlin
1812
Bamberg, Dresden and Leipzig
1814
Fantasiestucke in Callots Mannier
1816
Die Elixiere des Teufels
1821
Die Serapionsbruder (stories including "Falun")
J.G. Herder
Stimmen der Völker (1778): Völkseele
Brentano
Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805-08): Völkslied
Goethe
“Erlkönig” (1775), Faust (1808)
Grimms
Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812-15)
Wordsworth, Coleridge
Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800)
H.C. Andersen
Tales and Stories (1835-72): Kunstmärchen
Alexander Afanasev
Russian Folktales (1855-64)
Jung: Mother complex (loving and terrible / Ulla and Queen)
Goddess motifs of mines and caves, center (Rhea, Dactyloi, Nibelungens, Tor).
Nekyia=Individuation, Underworld=Unconscious: Dante, labyrinth, Hades (Torbern) and
Persephone (Metal Queen). Jung: anima, shadow, Chymische Hochzeit (quaternity,
stone)
Freud: repressed Oedipal complex, the Unheimlich.
Nekyia=Poesis: Lower world
associated with "power of reading" (928), "secret signs" and symbols inscribed on rock
(938), visionary states of being and imagination (Dream Caverns 928, 936).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): Faust (1790 Fragment; 1808 Part 1;
1832 Part 2)
1770
U of Strasbourg for law, met J.G. Herder, leader of Sturm und Drang
1774
Sorrows of Young Werther (Bildungsroman)
1775
Weimar diplomat; writing and science (plants, color)
Italienische Reise (1786-87); Iphigenie an Taurus
1794-1808
Schiller (Classicism, folk ballads); Faust 1 (1808)
1805-19
Elective Affinities (1809); Theory of Color (1805-10); Divan of West and
East (1819) Persian poetry and Weltliteratur
1790-1823:
Faust: Magus, Rosicrucian Alchemy (Solomon's Seal as Macrocosm).
Jungian Midlife Crisis (Nekyia /
Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche)
Individuation); German
dialectic (Hegel,
Walpurgisnacht: Sublime (Friedrich); Sturm and Drang; Folklore (Saint's Day April
30 fused with pagan May Day (orgies on Brocken in Harz mountains near Schierke) and
Classical mysteries (labyrinth; Maenads, mountains, torches, Baubo of Dionysian,
Eleusinian mysteries; Dido and Aeneas).
Ars Moriendi: End Part Two: Burial, Death, and Competition between devils and Angels
for Faust's Soul (667-73). Redemption and Heavenly ascent in "Mountain Gorges": 3
Paters: Ecstaticus (St. Anthony), Profundus (St. Bernard), and Seraphicus; 3 female
penitants (Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samartina, and Maria Aegyptica) and the Virgin
Mary; symmetrical balance beginning of the poem, replacing the three Angels (Raphael,
Michael, Gabriel) and the Lord with a feminine quaternity (3/4). The whole = Biblical
cycle, secularized?
Solomon’s Seal: Sign of the Macrocosm
Naturalism and Tennyson
1830-33
Charles Lyell The Principles of Geology
Darwin on the Beagle
Arthur Hallam’s death, one of the "Apostles"
1837
Queen Victoria’s Accession
Tennyson read Charles Lyell
1842
Darwin read Ricardo Malthus "On Population"
1st Draft Origin of the Species
1843-44
Tennyson read Herschel and Chambers
Vestiges of Natural History of Creation
1848
Karl Marx Communist Manifesto
1850
Tennyson, In Memoriam elegy
1858
Wallace letter, Royal Society
1859
Origin of the Species
1869
Karl Marx Das Kapital
1871
Darwin's Descent of Man
1882
Darwin buried beside Newton Westminster Abbey
1884
Tennyson made Lord by Queen Victoria
1900
Sigmund Freud Traumdeutung
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1901)
1894
At the age of 24 in 1894 she
married
Necrotypes:
journey by boat
mushrooms
decapitated heads
eyes in wallpaper
doorways and windows
harrowing of hell
Psychogenesis, Individuation, Poesis and Hermeneusis
Vocabulary of Form:
Male
Female
“silly, conspicuous, front
design”
“pointless pattern”
“principle of design”
“distinguish the order”
“front pattern”
“awful pattern”
“sub-pattern”
“outside pattern”
“top pattern”
Syntax and Theme
“formless sort of figure”
“sprawling outlines”
“dim shapes”
“back pattern”
“figure … seemed to shake the
pattern”
“under one”
“lame uncertain curves”
“suddenly commit suicide”
“outrageous angles”
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
"The Hungry Stones"
Bengali Renaissance
Nobel Prize (1913)
Adolph Bastian:
Völkergedanken:
Nagas
Moksha
Maya
Kama-Mara
Vajra
Elementargedanken:
Nekyia
Maze
Great Goddess
Poesis, Hermeneusis
Modernism (1890-1946): Reductio Elementa
Science:
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1905/1915); E=mc2
Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (1927)
Niels Bohr and Max Planck: Quantum Mechanics
Painting:
Wassily Kandinsky (circles)
Paul Klee (fairy tale, lines)
Piet Mondrian (rectangle and line)
Picasso (cube)
Linguistics:
Ferdinand Saussure (Deep Structures, Signified and Signifier)
Anthropology:
Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Claude Levi-Strauss: Structuralist Codes of Opposites
Psychology:
Sigmund Freud, Traumdeutung (1900): id, ego, superego
C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (1912): archetypes
Literature:
T.S. Eliot: “mythical method” (1922): shape/significance
The Waste Land (1922)
James Joyce: Dubliners (1914), A Portrait (1916), Ulysses (1922)
W.B. Yeats: Gyres: 2000 year cycles
Annunciation (“Leda”)
Apocalypse (“Second Coming”)
Phases of the Moon: Incarnation & Transfiguration
Nekyia (Byzantium Poems)
Wallace Stevens: Homo Faber “Supreme Fictions”
Thomas Mann: “Urbild” “lived myth”
R.M. Rilke: Duino Elegies (1911-1922): Angel, Nekyia
Sonnets to Orpheus (1922): Nekyia=Poesis
Jorge Borges: “ancient forms, forms incorruptible and eternal”
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
1888
Birth in St. Louis
1914/15
London, "Prufrock," Vivien, Bloomsbury
1919-21
Father, Marriage, Breakdown, Ezra Pound
1922
The Waste Land; Criterion, Faber & Faber
1927
Baptism and Citizenship
1936-43
Vivien, Hitler, End of Criterion
Four Quartets
1948
Nobel Prize, Order of Merit, Degrees
"Prufrock"
Curtal Sonnets
"Waste Land"
Allusions (Dante, Bible, Shakespeare, Valéry)
Mythical Method: Frazer, Golden Bough,
Weston, Ritual to Romance
Couples:
Literary, Mythical, Fictional, Historical
Marie & Archduke
Tristan & Isolde
Antony &Cleo
Elizabeth&
Leicester
Tereus & Philomel
Diana & Actaeon
Siegfried& Brunnhilde
"I" & Hyacinth Girl
Nameless Narrator
& Nervous Wife
Lil and Albert
Sweeney & Mrs. Porter
Typist & Clerk
Evans Lansing Smith
Professor of English
Midwestern State University
3410 Taft Blvd.
Wichita Falls, TX 76308
The Buddhist Nekyia:
Conrad, Nietzsche, Wagner, Musil, and Rilke
My paper involves an exploration of the relationship between
Buddhism and the classical nekyia (descent to the underworld) in
works of the late Victorian, early Modernist era. These works
represent conflicting attitudes towards both the Buddha and
Buddhism.
In Heart of Darkness (1889/1900), Joseph Conrad presents Marlow as a Buddha
without a lotus flower, and he includes motifs associated with the Buddha’s
enlightenment: the encounter with nothingness (Sunyata), and with the gods Kama-Mara
(fear and desire). This occurs in the paragraph devoted to Marlow’s near-death
experience, on the journey back out the Congo. Shortly after the death of Kurtz, Marlow
says “they very nearly buried me too” (71), when he succumbs to a fever. His near-death
experience parallels Buddhist visions of the Bardo, the intermediary underworld between
life and death. Marlow passes through this realm “without the great desire of victory,
without the great fear of defeat” (71). In his severe illness, he says he transcends “the
strange commingling of desire and hate” (72), which, in Buddhist thinking, binds us to
the wheel of life. Conrad reiterates the point by saying that Marlow’s nekyia is a “passage
through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire” (72). The great
temptations of the Buddha, when he sits meditating beneath the Boddhi Tree before his
Enlightenment, were those of fear and desire (Kama-Mara), and these temptations are
rehearsed at the moment of death in the visions of the wrathful and benign deities
described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Trungpa 24-29). Marlow, like the Buddha,
passes between these opposites, and achieves a very Buddhist “contempt for the
evanescence of all things” (72).
These connections suggest that the passage devoted to Marlow’s nekyia should be
interpreted with reference to the recurrent allusions to Buddhism in the novella. We first
see Marlow sitting in the lotus posture, “cross-legged right aft,” with “sunken cheeks, a
yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect” (3). With “his arms dropped, the
palms of the hands outwards,” the narrator says that Marlow resembles “an idol” (3)—
much like a Buddha performing the boon bestowing mudra. Conrad reiterates the allusion
shortly afterwards; as Marlow begins telling his famous tale, he lifts “one arm from the
elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the
pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower” (6). And
when Marlow finishes his story, the narrator once again sees him “sitting apart, indistinct
and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha” (79). We should remember the absence of
the lotus-flower; for although Marlow has, like a Boddhisattva, returned to the world
after his vision, the tone of his parable is pessimistic, unlike the joyful reception of the
teachings characteristic of Buddhist art from the beginning, at places like the Great Stupa
at Sanci.
Marlow’s melancholy may perhaps reflect the nihilistic mood of the late 19th
century, a mood which permeates Friedrich Nietzsche’s polemical dialogue with
Buddhism, which was sustained throughout his career, from The Birth of Tragedy of
1872, to Ecce Homo, written in 1888. In his Genealogy of Morals, of 1887, Nietzsche
associates what he calls a “new Buddhism,” or “Buddhism for Europeans” with
decadence, with “nihilism,” and with disease. Nietzsche sees Schopenhauer’s “will
turning against life,” and Buddhism’s yearning for “nothingness”, as “tender and
sorrowful signs of the ultimate illness” (19). The “desire of the Buddhist for
nothingness,” for “Nirvana,” Nietzsche suggests, is a symptom characteristic of “priestly
aristocracies,” in which meditation is merely a form “autohypnosis,” one which makes
men “indolent and overrefined” (32).
In opposition to Buddhism’s “nihilistic withdrawal” from existence (92),
Nietzsche proposes, (earlier in his career, in The Birth of Tragedy), the Greek model,
celebrating the “profound Hellene” who has “looked boldly right into the terrible
destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature, and being in
danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will” redeems himself, and life,
“through art” (59)—specifically, through the art of the chorus in tragic drama.
Nietzsche’s negative remarks about Buddhism in general are balanced by positive
estimations of the importance of the Buddha as an individual, perhaps we should say as a
kind of “Übermensch.” Nietzsche celebrates the Buddha’s ascetic “independence,” his
rejection of domestic life, signified by his having named his new born son Rahula, which
means “little demon” (Genealogy 107)! The Buddha rejects the fetters of domesticity,
and leaves home, thus joining the ranks of “those resolute men who one day said No to
all servitude and went into some desert” (107), a resolution which leads the
“philosopher” to “rejoice and clap his hands” (107).
Nietzsche also sees the Buddha as an atheist, who has forbidden himself the “lie
involved in belief in God” (160). For Nietzsche, this rejection of theism represents a
natural evolution of what he calls the “ascetic ideal,” but it is an evolution that reached its
climax “five centuries before the beginning of the European calendar, with Buddha”
(160). This conception presents us with an existentialist Buddha, whose “Unconditional
honest atheism” is shared by the “more spiritual men” of Nietzsche’s age (160). And, if
the Buddha is an atheist, he is, Nietzsche suggests, “even beyond good and evil. ‘Good
and evil,’ says the Buddhist—‘both are fetters: the Perfect One became master over
both’” (132). Nietzsche is quite emphatic on this point, which is of course central to his
conception of the Übermensch: the “supreme state” of Nirvana, “redemption itself, total
hypnotization and repose” transcends the categories of opposites, for the Buddha has
“‘gone beyond both good and evil,’” and idea which Nietzsche sees as “common to all
India, Hindu and Buddhist” (132).1
There seem to be traces of this notion in Conrad’s portrayal of the amoral
atrocities committed by Kurtz in the Belgian Congo. So also does an anomalous element
of cruelty and enter into Robert Musil’s musing on Buddhism in his first novel. Young
Törless, published in 1906, evinces a detailed and precise knowledge of Buddhist
thinking, revolving around a character called Beineberg, who performs rituals of sadistic
domination in the underworld of a prep-school attic, where he forces Basini to strip down
1
An internet search using Nietzsche and Buddhism indicated 5,290 sites. Recent books on the subject
include those by Morrison, Mistry, and Batchelor, listed in the Works Cited.
amidst “The darkness, the stale air, the foul, brakish smell emanating from the watertubs” (146). Beineberg then points a revolver at Basini as says “‘As a matter of fact, I am
going to kill you anyway, but you’ll come back to life again. Dying is not so alien to us
as you think it is. We die every day—in our deep, dreamless sleep’” (146). Every
moment, Beineberg continues, is a kind of nekyia, as one thought after another pops “up
out of nothingness,” and then returns to the “black hole” from which it came: “‘If you
pay attention,’” Beineberg says to Basini, “‘you can even notice the instant between two
thoughts when everything’s black. For us that instant—once we have grasped it—is
simply death’” (147).
The Buddhism Beineberg expounds (ironically while tormenting Basini) reflects
Musil’s own detailed understanding of a basic tenet of the Tibetan Book of the Dead—
that we pass moment by moment over the “nothingness” of pure consciousness, and that
“We die daily—in our deep dreamless sleep” (146). The concept is that of the sacred
syllable of Buddhist and Hindu meditation (“AUM”), the three letters of which represent
the fundamental states of consciousness—waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep—and
the power of creation, preservation, and destruction, associated with the dancing Shiva
(Zimmer 154). Beineberg’s remark that “our life is nothing but setting milestones and
hopping from one to the next, hopping over thousands of death-seconds every day,” is
consistent with the strict doctrine of Buddhism, according to which each breath and each
exhalation of the meditator proceeds from and returns to the emptiness of pure
consciousness—so that we are continually passing through the “Bardo” state, between
life and death. As Chögyam Trungpa puts it, the nekyia of The Tibetan Book of the Dead
recurs “constantly in this life,” not only during “the interval of suspension after we die”
(1). The only thing Beineberg leaves out is crucial—compassion for all sentient beings,
which is absolutely essential to Buddhist ethics.
Musil’s nekyia includes one final element found not only in The Tibetan Book of
the Dead, but in all archetypal versions of the soul’s journey to the underworld (Egyptian,
Christian, Buddhist, Muslim). That is the theme of judgement—which concludes the
novel when Törless is brought before a kind of inquisition. The judges are the
headmaster, the mathematics master, and the chaplain. These three represent the basic
tensions in the Austrian soul of Musil’s day—the bureaucrat, the scientist-philosopher,
and the theologian. None are capable of understanding the soul of the artist-in-themaking who stands before them, and who encompasses but eludes their categories of
perception (as did Musil himself).
Musil’s Buddhism is precise, and perhaps reflects the intense interest of German
scholarship in all things Oriental during the 19th century—beginning, perhaps, with
Schopenhauer, “the first major philosopher of the West to recognize the relevance of
Vedantic and Buddhist thought to his own” (Campbell, Creative 33), but going back
further to Friedrich Majer and Friedrich Schlegel, “the first German romantic to study
Sanskrit directly,” then still further to J.G. Herder, who as early as 1770 began “to exalt
the Orient (though vaguely) as the source of language” (Feldman and Richardson 349).
The enthusiasm for Oriental philosophy and mythology continues with Wagner, whose
reading of Schopenhauer in 1854 led to the Buddhist emphasis on negation of the will in
Tristan und Isolde (Feldman and Richardson 470); and with the sacred texts of the east
translated from the Sanskrit by Max Müller (published in England between 1879 and
1910).
Wagner composed his opera Tristan und Isolde while deeply engrossed in
Schopenhauer, and in Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du Boudhisme indien
(of 1844)—a book which, according to Thomas Tweed, marks the beginning both of
“European Buddhist studies,” and “the American conversation about Buddhism,”
following Thoreau’s translation of and lecture on Burnouf’s work on the Lotus Sutra
(xix.). Wagner was so taken by Burnouf’s book that he briefly considered writing an
opera about a maiden purified by her intense love for the Buddha’s chief disciple
Ananda. His remarks about the opera are cryptic: in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonk,
Wagner wrote “I frequently gaze toward the land Nirvana. But then, very soon, Nirvana
becomes for me Tristan: you know the Buddhist theory of the beginning of the world. A
breath disturbs heaven’s clarity” (qtd. Campbell 361). Perhaps the implication is that the
“Liebestod” at the end of the opera represents a climactic fulfillment, in which case
Wagner would have misunderstood Nirvana, which represents the extinction, not the
fulfillment of desire. In the end, Wagner’s lovers dissolve into “the World Spirit’s /
infinite all” (‘des Welt-Atems / wehenden All’), which one translator characterizes as
being “void of thought” (151), although the original simply says “unbewußt” (a word to
become common parlance in the psychologies of Freud and Jung). Wagner may also have
had Buddhist themes in Parsifal, in which the hero resists the temptations of KamaMara—first the flower maidens, and then Klingsor’s spear—before redeeming the Waste
Land and healing Amfortas, the Grail King (Campbell 509).
The continuing relevance of Buddhism in Germanic literature may be adduced by
such works as Rilke’s New Poems of 1907—two called “Buddha, and the last “Buddha in
Glory” (496, 528, 642); by Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, of 1922; by Heinrich
Zimmer’s Kunstform and Yoga, of 1926; and by Thomas Mann’s essay of 1936, “Freud
and the Future,” in which he discusses Jung’s “significant introduction to the Tibetan
Book of the Dead” (418), first published in 1935.
Both Zimmer and Rilke began their engagement with Buddhism by contemplating
sculptural representations of the Buddha meditating in a lotus posture. Zimmer’s Buddhas
were in the museums of Berlin and Paris (250). Rilke’s encounter occurred in Paris, one
night in 1905, when he sat looking at a statue of the Buddha, sitting in “fanatic
taciturnity,” on top of a hill at the end of a gravel walk (Mitchell 304). Here is the poem:
Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet—
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them is your flesh, your fruit
Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead. (Mitchell 69)
Rilke’s poem comes at the end of a hundred years or so of German reactions to
Buddhism, from the Romantic to the late Victorian eras. Its conception seems to be of a
pantheistic, apocalyptic Buddha, who represents the universal spirit, both immanent and
transcendent. I would like to conclude briefly with Jung’s introduction to the Tibetan
Book of the Dead, of 1935, which gives some indication of the continuing importance of
Buddhism during the Modernist period.
Jung interprets the karmic illusions of the Chönyid Bardo as an heredity not
“confined either to family or to race. These are universal dispositions of the mind, and
they are to be understood as analogous to Plato’s forms (eidola), in accordance with
which the mind organizes its contents” (517). He then points out that “in the case of our
‘forms,’ we are not dealing with categories of reason but with categories of the
imagination” (518)—that is to say, with the archetypal forms revealed by the nekyia. The
experience of these “transsubjective psychic realities” becomes possible only when we
move beyond the Sidpa Bardo (of fear and desire), thereby giving up “the supremacy of
egohood, regarded by reason as sacrosanct. What this means in practice is complete
capitulation to the objective powers of the psyche [...] a kind of figurative death,
corresponding to the Judgment of the Dead in the Sidpa Bardo” (519).
The relevance of these remarks for the Modernist nekyia cannot be
overemphasized. In nearly all the major works of the period, the descent to the
underworld catalyzes the revelation of the archetypal forms of the mind, for which the
Modernists developed a wide variety of synonyms and symbolic images. This focus on
the imaginal forms of the Chönyid Bardo is a major shift of direction in the response to
Buddhism, an important departure from Rilke’s Romantic pantheism, the nihilism of
Conrad and Nietzsche, the Christianized eroticism of Wagner, and the cruelty of Musil’s
Beineberg.
Works Cited
Batchelor, Stephen. The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and
Western Culture, 542 B.C. to 1992. London: Aquarian, 1994.
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. London: Souvenir Press,
1968.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. A Norton Critical Edition.
New York: W W Norton & Company, 1963.
Mistry, Fenry. Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study.
Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1981.
Morrison, Robert G. Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities.
New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Musil, Robert. Selected Writings: Young Törless, Three Women, The Perfecting of a
Love, and other writings. Ed. Burton Pike. New York: Continuum, 1998.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sämtliche Werke 2. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955.
---,
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Edited and Translated by Stephen
Mitchell. New York: Vintage International, 1989.
Trungpa, Chögyam. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through
Hearing in the Bardo.
Trans. Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa.
Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1975.
Tweed, Thomas A. The American Encounter with Buddhism: 1844-1912: Victorian
Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP,
1992.
Wagner, Richard. Tristan and Isolde. Trans. Stuart Robb. New York: E.P. Dutton &
Company, 1965.
Zimmer, Heinrich. Artistic Form and Yoga in the Sacred Images of India. Trans. Gerald
Chapple and James B. Lawson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.