Maria Tănase: The Nightingale of Bucharest

Maria Tănase (1913-1963)

 

"He who betrays love will be punished by God ..."

 

 

Whenever the Little Greek travels to Romania, her name always causes a bit of a stir, reminding the natives as it does of the still much-loved singer and actress Maria Tănase, the so-called nightingale of Bucharest ... [1]  

 

Performing both traditional folk songs and more modern numbers, Maria Tănase was as significant a cultural icon in her homeland as Édith Piaf in France and during her thirty-year career she was admired for her talent, her beauty, and her unique charisma [2].  

 

Rising to fame in the mid-1930s, she represented Romania at the World's Fair in New York in 1939, and things seemed to be going swell.  

 

However, the following year saw the establishment of the National Legionary State in her native Romania; a fascist regime mostly composed of members of the ultra-nationist, anti-communist and anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Maria was banned from performing and her radio recordings were marked for destruction (she was seen as too cosmopolitan and liberal in her outlook). 

 

Fortunately, these idiots only ruled for several months and Maria was soon back on stage entertaining the troops and government bigwigs. Post-War, she developed her career as an actress and toured widely, making many trips to the United States. 

 

Sadly, in 1963, three months shy her 50th birthday, she died of lung cancer and was buried at the Bellu Cemetery in Bucharest. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets for her funeral and she received many posthumous awards, including the honorary title Artistă Emerită for her contribution to Romanian life and culture.       

 

Her legacy lives on: in 2013, for example, Pink Martini named Maria Tănase one of their major inspirations and Google Romania marked what would have been her 100th birthday (25 September) with a doodle of her on their home page. Despite this, I must confess I remain almost entirely ignorant of the nearly 400 songs that comprise her musical repertoire. 

 

Fortunately, however, my next door neighbours are from Moldova and they tell me that the following six songs are particularly well-known and loved by her fans: Am iubit și-am să iubesc, Aseară ți-am luat basma, Cine iubește și lasă, Ciuleandra, Mărie și Mărioară, and Până când nu te iubeam [2].

 

Notes

 

[1] The surname Tănase is common in Romania and derives from the ancient Greek name Athanasios. The Little Greek's surname, Thanassa, would seem to be related, though whereas the former means immortality, the latter spells death.   

 

[2] To listen to one of these songs - Ciuleandra (a folk dance song from Muntenia, which starts slowly but picks up pace and seems crazy enough that it might have appealed to Malcolm McLaren in his Duck Rock period) - click here. 

B is for ... Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

B is for ... 

Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard

 

 

There are many French things that I love beginning with the letter B - from a big bowl of bouillabaisse served with crusty baguette slices, to Brigitte Bardot on the beach in her bikini [1]. 

 

Even four of my favourite French writers have surnames beginning with the letter B - Messrs. Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes and Baudrillard - and this perhaps explains why it is that I can never think of one without also thinking of the others [2].  

Obviously, as a 19th century poet and critic, Baudelaire knew nothing of those who came a century after him. But it might be interesting to briefly recall what Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard said about the author of Les Fleurs du mal ... 

 

 

Bataille on Baudelaire (Désirer l'impossible) 

 

In his essay on Baudelaire in La Littérature et la Mal (1957), Bataille says that the former desired the impossible as a response to the utilitarian demand that we be reasonable as well as make ourselves useful. It is in this desire for the impossible and a useless expenditure of energy, that man discovers his authenticity and poetry locates its task. 

 

This, of course, is a Romantic vision; but it is one that Bataille in his own quest for the impossible - i.e., a simultaneity of contrary experiences - continues and yet exceeds. 

 

 

Barthes on Baudelaire (La Vérité emphatique du geste)

 

Whilst it's true that he only produced one sustained piece of writing on Baudelaire - and this on a relatively marginal aspect of the latter's work, namely, his failed theatrical projects - Baudelaire nevertheless remains a point of reference throughout Barthes's oeuvre. 

 

Indeed, as one commentator has recently pointed out, the phrase quoted from Baudelaire's Exposition Universelle (1855) concerning 'the emphatic truth of the gesture in the important moments of life' is one that "punctuates Barthes's published work throughout, from one of his earliest essays to his very last book on photography, and is closely associated with another persistently recurring motif: the concept of numen, a term used to designate a static gesture expressing divine authority" [3]. 

 

Baudrillard on Baudelaire (L'Objectivation absolue de l'art)

 

By his own admission, Baudrillard's relationship with the world of art has always been one marked by a certain ambivalence: "I come from a moralist, metaphysical tradition, a political and ideological tradition that has always been wary of art and culture in general [...]" [4]

Nevertheless, he is obviously interested in how art from Baudelaire to Warhol has been involved in staging its own disappearance and meeting the challenge posed to it not only by an age of mechanical reproduction, but by consumer capitalism which turns everything into merchandise (i.e., objectifying everything in terms of market value).

 

It was Baudelaire, says Baudrillard, who first came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead of offering a defence of the traditional status of the work of art based on aesthetic value and seeking art's salvation in and on its own terms - art for art's sake - Baudelaire calls for an acceleration of the processes unfolding within modernity and for art's absolue objectification:

 

"Since aes­thetic value risks alienation from commodity, instead of avoiding alienation, art had to go farther in alienation and fight commodity with its own weapons. Art had to follow the inescapable paths of commodity indifference and equivalence to make the work of art an absolute commodity." [5]

      

This, says Baudrillard, is what a work of art should be; "it should take on the characteristics of shock, strangeness, surprise, anxiety, liquidity and even self-destruction, instantaneity and unreality that are found in commodities" [6]. 

 

The reason Baudelaire still interests and seems so relevant today is not because of his poetry, but because via his ironic logic the work of art was able to sparkle in its own venality and become "a pure object of marvellous commutability" [7].   

 

 

Notes

[1] Readers may recall that I wrote about the history and politics of the bikini in a post published in August 2016, which was illustrated with a photo of 19-year-old Bardot wearing her two-piece swimsuit on the beach at Cannes in 1953: click here.

[2] Of course, there are other reasons apart from an onomatological coincidence as to why these four writers are closely related and it would make for an interesting philosophical and literary study to trace out their shared ideas and concerns.   

 

[3] Douglas Smith, '"La Vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie": Baudelaire, Barthes and the Hysterical Gesture', Irish Journal of French Studies, Vol. 21 (2021), pp. 99-121.  

      In this essay, Smith examines the significance of Baudelaire for Barthes and attempts to answer the question of what that might tell us in turn about the former. He does this by tracing out the manner in which Barthes deploys the quotation from Exposition Universelle and by paying particular attention "on the value to be attributed to exaggeration or excess in the communication of meaning through gesture and language, a phenomenon that both Barthes and Baudelaire associate with hysteria, as either something to be ironically assumed (Baudelaire) or ambivalently exorcized (Barthes)". 

 

[4-6] Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2 (July, 2008): click here to read online. 

      This paper was given as a lecture at the Whitney Museum (New York) in 1987. It also appears in Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, 2005), pp. 98-110.

 

Yves Montand and the Drowned Woman (La Noyée)

Yves Montand and Edith Piaf in Étoile sans lumière 

(dir. Marcel Blistène, 1946) 

 

Tu t'en vas à la dérive / Sur la rivière du souvenir 

Et moi, courant sur la rive / Je te crie de revenir

 

 

I.

 

Although the singer and actor Yves Montand grew up in a poor suburb of Marseille, he was actually Italian by birth (his father - a committed communist - and his mother - a devout Catholic - decided to abandon their homeland in 1923, rather than live under Mussolini).

After working at a pasta factory, then in his sister's beauty salon, and then on the docks, the young man decided to try and build a professional career as a chanteur in the music halls of Paris where, in 1944, he had the good fortune to be spotted by Édith Piaf, who, charmed by his voice and good looks, invited him to become her protégé - and her lover. 

 

 

II. 

 

Six years older than Montand, Mme. Piaf knew a thing or two about life and how to succeed in showbiz. She it was who convinced Montand to drop his cowboy image and adopt a more romantic repertoire of songs. Critics responded enthusiastically and he was soon being hailed as a new star of the French music scene.

 

Sadly, Montand's romantic relationship with the little sparrow was relatively short-lived, Piaf ending the affair by letter:

 

Yves, we both knew it had to end one day between us and I had known for a long time that we were not made for each other. Forgive the pain I caused you. But be reassured that mine is even greater.  

 

Despite the break-up, however, Piaf continued to support Montand professionally. 

 

In 1946, for example, she helped him land his first screen role, appearing alongside her in Étoile sans lumiere [1] and, the following year, she wrote the lyrics to the amusing love song 'Mais qu'est-ce que j'ai?' in memory of their time together: click here [2]. 

  

'Mais qu'est-ce que j'ai?' is not the only song inspired by the Montand-Piaf relationship, however. There's another, equally beautiful - but much, much darker - song written by Serge Gainsbourg many years later, entitled 'La noyée'. 

 

Apparently, Gainsbourg offered the song to Montand, but the latter turned it down: I don't know why. Perhaps there are some songs that are just too painful to record ... 

 

Indeed, it might be noted that even Gainsbourg's version of 'La noyée' - which he performed live on TV in November 1972, accompanied by Jean-Claude Vannier on piano - was only released posthumously as a single in 1994 [3].    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In this same year, 1946, Montand also starred in the musical Les Portes de la nuit (dir. Marcel Carné) which, although a box office flop, provided him with the song with which he is still associated today; Jacques Prévert's 'Les feuilles mortes': click here.    

 

[2] Known in English as 'But What Do I Have?' this 1947 chanson by Yves Montand (composed by Henri Betti, with lyrics by Édith Piaf) arguably anticipates the classic punk single written by Pete Shelly of the Buzzcocks and released thirty years later, 'What Do I Get?': click here.

 

[3] To watch Serge Gainsbourg's performance of 'La noyée' on Samedi Loisirs (4 Nov. 1972), click here.

      I'm told by someone who knows this kind of thing, that the song was used in the film Romance of a Horsethief (dir. Abraham Polonsky, 1971), but was not included on the film's official soundtrack. The same person also tells me that the star of the film, Yul Brynner, would later become godfather to the daughter - Charlotte - of his co-stars Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin.  

 

 

Για τη Μαρία στην ονομαστική της εορτή

Requiem pour un con (Was Jacques Prévert a Jerk?)

Jacques Prévert: Je ne suis pas un con!

 

 

I. 

 

One of the idiomatic expressions that I hate most is: It takes one to know one. 

 

Used by someone who wishes to point out that what they're accused of being is something which also characterises the accuser, it seems a particularly lame form of comeback; the sort of childish retort that only an individual lacking in wit or intelligence would say.    

 

However, I have to admit that when I first read the title of Michel Houellebecq's short piece 'Jacques Prévert is a jerk' [a] this was the first thing that came to mind, and, having now read the text, I'm still not convinced this is a fair thing to call one of France's most celebrated poets and screenwriters. 

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear: I'm not a devoted reader of M. Prévert, nor particularly knowledgeable about his life. But I do like some of the verses in Paroles (1946), particularly 'Déjeuner du matin' - Il a mis le café / Dans la tasse ...etc. [b] 

 

That certain intellectuals often looked down on Prévert (and his sentimentalité as they saw it) only makes me admire him a little bit more. As does the fact that he infuriated André Breton, by describing him as the high priest or pope of Surrealism after the latter expelled him from the group for not taking art seriously enough.    

 

Further, Prévert should be admired for writing against the collaborationist Vichy government during the War years, helping Jewish friends, and relaying messages for members of the Resistance, whilst never belonging to any political party himself, or feeling the need to posture like some of his contemporaries who trumpeted their own activities and commitments.    

 

 

III.

 

So, what exactly is Houllebecq's problem with Prévert? 

 

Well, in a nutshell, he seems to resent the latter's enormous success and blame him for the "repulsive poetic realism" which "continues to wreak havoc" upon French cinema. 

 

Houellebecq writes:

 

"Jacques Prévert is someone whose poems you learn at school. It turns out that he loved flowers, birds, the neighbourhoods of old Paris, etc. He felt that love blossomed in an atmosphere of freedom [...] He wore a cap and smoked Gauloises [...] Also, he was the one who wrote the screenplay for Quai des brumes, Portes de la nuit, etc. He also wrote the screenplay for Les Enfants du paradis, considered to be his masterpiece. All of these are so many good reasons for hating Jacques Prévert - especially if you read the scripts that Antonin Artaud was writing at the same time, which were never filmed."       

 

Nor does Houellebecq care for the optimism which Prévert displays in his work; "faith in the future, and a certain amount of bullshit" which is, he says, boundlessly stupid and nauseating at times. Better off, he suggests, embracing Emil Cioran's pessimism. 

 

Push comes to shove, I don't disagree with this, but that needn't prevent one from listening to Yves Montand sing 'Les Feuilles mortes'. For as even Houellebecq concedes, we all need something to relax to ...    

 

And if Prévert's lyrics are a bit sickly sweet and his pun-ridden poetry mediocre - "so much so that one sometimes feels a sort of shame when reading it" - surely that just makes him a bad writer, not necessarily un con as Houellebecq says. However, the latter is insistent on this point and so I shall give him the last word:     

"If Prévert is a bad poet, this is mainly because his vision of the world is commonplace, superficial and false. It was already false in his own time; today its inanity is so glaring that the entire work seems to be the expansion of one gigantic cliché. On the philosophical and political level, Jacques Prévert is above all a libertarian; in other words, basically an idiot."

Notes

 

[a] This text by Michel Houellebecq was first published as 'Jacques Prévert est un con' in Lettres françaises, No. 22 (July 1992). I am using the English translation by Andrew Brown that appears in Interventions 2020, (Polity Press, 2022), pp. 1-3, even though I'm not entirely happy with the translation of the French term con with the (American-sounding) word jerk. 

 

[b] The English version of this poem, 'Breakfast', can be found in Jacques Prévert, Paroles, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (City Lights Publishers, 2001). Or click here to read on hellopoetry.com 

 

 

Musical bonus number one: Serge Gainsbourg, 'La Chanson de Prévert', from the album L'Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (1961).       One of Gainsbourg's most popular songs, it was inspired by 'Les Feuilles mortes', written by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma, for the film Les Portes de la nuit (dir. Marcel Carné, 1946). Click here for the 2014 remastered version.

 

Musical bonus number two: Serge Gainsbourg, 'Requiem pour un con', released as a single in 1968 from the soundtrack to the film Le Pacha (dir. Georges Lautner, 1968), it caused a good deal of fuss at the time, with censors judging the lyrics obscene and scandalous. 

      There's no reason to imagine that the track was inspired by Jacques Prévert, but the title of Michel Houellebecq's critique of the latter obvioulsy makes one think of this song. Click here for the original '68 version and/or here for the 1991 remix.    

 

 

Ce billet a été écrit avec l'aide de Sophie Stas à qui je suis reconnaissant. 

 

 

Les filles sucettes

Les filles sucettes: 

Barbie Gaye, Millie Small, and France Gall

I. 

 

My Boy Lollipop is a somewhat irritating song first recorded in 1956 by 14-year-old American singer Barbie Gaye, as a kind of R&B shuffle: click here.

 

The version that is better known today, however, was the one released in 1964 by 16-year-old Jamaican singer Millie Small, and which has a bluebeat ska rhythm: click here. 

 

Whereas Barbie Gaye's single was only a minor hit, Millie's reached number two in the charts in both the UK and US and sold over seven million copies worldwide.   

 

 

II. 

 

Whether Serge Gainsbourg was inspired by the above to compose his own paean to the lollipop and the girls who like to suck them, I don't know. But Les sucettes, famously recorded by France Gall in 1966 - a year after she'd won the Eurovision Song Contest with another Gainsbourg ditty (Poupée de cire, poupée de son) - was a far superior - and far more sexually suggestive - number.

 

For although Les sucettes was seemingly just a simple yé-yé style song about a young girl, Annie, who likes aniseed flavoured lollipops, Gainsbourg makes it fairly obvious via his lyrical inventiveness that the song is about fellatio; that's not barley sugar she's swallowing. 

 

Mlle. Gall, despite being eighteen at the time - so somewhat older than either Barbie Gaye or Millie Small - insisted that she was entirely unaware of this fact. She had sung it, she said, avec une innocence dont je suis fier, and later confessed to feeling betrayed by those around her who had been complicit in her humiliation. 

 

However, although she refused to sing Les sucettes after discovering its (not so) secret meaning, she continued to work with Gainsbourg, who wrote several of her most memorable - if increasingly odd - songs, including Teenie Weenie Boppie, which was about a deadly LSD trip involving Mick Jagger.   

 

Readers who click here can enjoy a music video for Les sucettes directed by Jean-Christophe Averty for the TV show Au risque de vous plaire, which features phallic-shaped lollipops, intercut with various young women suggestively sucking on them [1].

 

Alternatively, readers who click here can watch the song being performed as a touching - if slightly pervy - duet by an angelic France Gall and a diabolic Serge Gainsbourg [2].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A remastered version of the video for Les sucettes was made in 2017. The following year, HMGS created a short looped film with material edited from this video, emphasising the oral-erotic aspect of the song, and uploaded it to coup.com: click here.

 

[2] Gainsbourg later recorded his own version of Les sucettes with a slightly psychedelic arrangement (by Arthur Greenslade), which can be found on the album Jane Birkin / Serge Gainsbourg (1969): click here. 

 

 

Auðumbla: The Primeval Cow of Norse Mythology

Nicolai Abildgaard: Ymer dier koen Ødhumbla (c. 1777)

National Gallery of Denmark [Statens Museum for Kunst]

 

Readers might be interested to know that it's not just bear cubs and sinful human beings that require licking into shape [1]. 

 

According to Norse mythology, even the forefather of the gods was given form by the tongue of a primeval cow, Auðumbla, who, over a three day period, licked away at a salty-tasting block of ice until the figure of Búri came forth; fair of feature and mighty of build [2]. 

As if that weren't enough, Auðumbla also suckled the primordial frost giant Ymir with her milk, which flowed like four rivers from her udders (the first part of her name is thought to attest to the richness of this milk). 

 

Auðumbla is thus the mother of all; licking the Æsir into being and nourishing the jötnar. In her cowy mystery, antagonists are united and all contradictions contained. 

 

In the beginning, we might say, wasn't the Word, but a Moo ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See my recent post on being licked into shape by bears, cats, and virtuous women - click here. 

[2] The existence of Auðumbla is attested in the 13th century text composed by Icelander Snorri Sturluson known as the Prose Edda. Modern scholars have shown how her story probably derives from an earlier body of Germanic mythology and can ultimately be placed within a wider context of religious mythology concerning sacred cows, such as Kamadhenu, who is worshipped by Hindus. Readers interested in this topic might like to see a post published back in December 2017: click here.

 

On Being Licked into Shape by Bears, Cats, and Virtuous Women

 

'Bears couple in the beginning of winter, and not after the fashion of other quadrupeds; for both animals lie down and embrace each other. The female then retires by herself to a separate den, and there brings forth on the thirtieth day, mostly five young ones. When first born, they are shapeless masses of white flesh, a little larger than mice; their claws alone being prominent. 

The mother then licks them gradually into proper shape.' 

 

- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, 8. 54

 

I.

 

Because cats have psychic ablities, they know when we are feeling out of sorts and will sometimes seek to comfort their human companions. Thus it is that my cat has recently taken to not just sitting or lying on me and touching my nose with hers, but incorporating me into her grooming cycle. 

 

Sensing that I'm physically and mentally at a low ebb after more than 2,300 days of caring for my mother without a break or any assistance, I feel she is literally attempting to lick me back into shape and not merely demonstrating her affection or attempting to strengthen the bond between us.

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, this idiomatic expression arose from the endearing belief held in medieval Europe that bear cubs were born as formless lumps of flesh and had to be licked by their mothers into their kyndely ursine shape. 

 

Whilst such an idea can be traced back to the writings of the great Roman author Pliny the Elder (who cheerfully discussed it as fact in his Naturalis historia), the first mention of this belief in English is in The Pylgremage of the Sowle, a 15th-century (part prose) translation of the 14th-century French verse composition Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme, by Guillaume de Deguileville.     

 

In this text, the narrator asks his guardian angel why a devout woman is licking a deformed pilgrim. The angel replies that, just like baby bears, human beings - thanks to original sin - are also born imperfect and so need to be licked into shape by the tongue of one who knows the Word of God; otherwise they remain, as the French say, ours mal léché. 

 

But I think I'd rather that - i.e., rather retain something of the Old Adam with all his flaws and failings - than be licked into moral perfection - and submission - by a virtuous woman.        

 

 

Nietzsche Popped My Cherry: Reflections on Heidegger's Hymen

Artwork by Wesley Johnson

 

The hymen is neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, 

neither the inside nor the outside. It is that which stands between; 

the intimate binding middle that brings together two bodies whilst holding them apart.

 

 

Someone from Wisconsin - America's dairyland - who, when not making cheese, likes to read European philosophy and listen to old school punk rock, suggests with reference to a recent post that perhaps what Heidegger means by the phrase Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht is that Nietzsche was the one who took his philosophical innocence or purity - his virginity, if you will - and that the phrase might productively be read in relation to Derrida's thinking on the hymen [1].      

 

That seems to me to be a clever and helpful insight. And I do like the idea of Heidegger being broken by Nietzsche in the sense of being fucked and fucked hard (or fucked up and fucked over). One can't help recalling Deleuze's interpretation of the history of philosophy in terms of penetrating (and being penetrated by) those authors who move us most (something that ultimately results in monstrous offspring) [2].

 

The key thing is that inspiration comes not from above, but from behind and below and that there is no immaculate conception; there is, rather, pain, violence, bloodshed ... Philosophy is not an ideal love of wisdom, but a perverse form of libidinal materialism. 

 

Heidegger isn't merely stimulated by Nietzsche's ideas, he's ravished and broken by the insistence with which Nietzsche imposes himself; Nietzsche infiltrates, inseminates, and impregnates. Which is why Zarathustra's instruction to his followers to lose him and find themselves, isn't so easy. Once the hymen has been torn - and one's virginity is lost in the very act that proves its existence - there's no going back; one is fatally wedded to Nietzsche for life.      

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Unfortunately, my knowledge of Derrida is very limited; as far as I understand it, hymen indicates both proximity and separation; i.e., the relation and the difference between two bodies. But what this tells us - or how we are supposed to think la logique de l'hymen in relation to the Nietzsche/Heidegger relationship - I'm not quite sure. 

      For Derrida's description of the hymen as a kind of mediating space, see 'The Double Session', in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 210-215 

 

[2] See Deleuze, 'Letter to a Harsh Critic', in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Ache for Being

DHL Ultimate Hunger Support 

(SA/2022)

 

 

D. H. Lawrence is particularly scornful of Walt Whitman's claim to be he who aches with amorous love for everyone and everything. Better, he says, to have an actual belly-ache, which is at least localised and easily relieved via a visit to the lavatory [1].   

 

So imagine my suprise when I recently came across a verse in which Lawrence writes of an ache for being, which he describes as the ultimate hunger [2]. Written several years prior to the essay on Whitman, one might have thought Lawrence would have remembered this line about ontological craving and perhaps cut poor old Whitman a bit of slack.

 

For whilst there is certainly something ridiculous in the thought of the good gray poet having blue balls (epididymal hypertension) as the result of his amorous idealism, so too is there something equally ridiculous in Lawrence's feeling starved of being and longing to eat his full, as it were, in the fourth dimension, going beyond the bounds of daily existence and surpassing himself [3].  

 

Better he hungered for a hot dog or hamburger, which is at least something specific and which you can get your teeth into ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61. I discuss this essay in a post published on 27 March 2019: click here.

      See also Lawrence's essay 'The Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177-190, where he writes: 

 

"If, in Plato's Dialogues, somebody had suddenly stood on his head and given smooth Plato a kick in the wind, and set the whole school in an uproar, then Plato would have been put into a much truer relation to the universe. Or if, in the midst of the Timaeus, Plato had only paused to say: 'And now, my dear Cleon - (or whoever it was) - I have a belly-ache, and must retreat to the privy: this too is part of the Eternal Idea of man,' then we would never need have fallen so low as Freud." [181]

     

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Manifesto', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 218.

 

[3] Aware that readers might have some trouble understanding what he means by this, Lawrence attempts to explain: 

      

"It is the major part of being, this having surpassed oneself,

this having touched the edge of the beyond, and perished, yet not perished."

 

After that, says Lawrence, we become unique and move in even greater freedom than the angels; "conditioned only by our own pure single being" and looking neither to the past nor future, but living in the nowness of the moment. See 'Manifesto', in The Poems, sections VI-VII, pp. 218-220.

 

 

For a related post to this one - on the verb to be - click here.   

Nietzsche Broke Me

maierfiles.myspreadshop.at

 

 

Heidegger's intriguing late confession, as reported by his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, that Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht is usually translated into English as Nietzsche broke me. 

 

It's a straightforward if not entirely satisfactory translation. And still the meaning of the sentence remains unclear; what does it signify to be broken by someone? More precisely, what does Heidegger mean when he says he's been broken by Nietzsche?

 

Does he mean, for example, that reading and thinking with and against Nietzsche in an intense and prolonged manner has left him feeling exhausted, even shattered? That's possible. Nietzsche, of course, even drove himself into a state of mental and physical collapse by pursuing his own philosophy and attemping to revalue all values. 

 

Or does he mean he's ultimately been unable to overcome or surpass Nietzsche; is this Heidegger submitting or quietly conceding defeat? Again, that's possible. As one commentator says: "Heidegger never loses Nietzsche, never 'locates' him, never shakes free of him, because Nietzsche never releases his grip on Heidegger." [1]

 

But, on the other hand, maybe Heidegger means that it was Nietzsche who enabled him to find his own voice and to shine with his own light (for the silence is also broken and so is the new day) - i.e., that it was his confrontation with Nietzsche in the mid-late 1930s which helped him make a shift in his thinking away from Being and Time (and National Socialism).

 

Interestingly, the German word kaputt - which we use in English (though spell with just the one 't')  - derives from the French term être capot, which figuratively means to lose, or to be ruined, but which, more literally, means to have a bonnet pulled over your eyes, leaving you confused and unable to see. 

 

So perhaps that's what Heidegger meant when he said that Nietzsche left him feeling kaputt - not broken, or beaten, exhausted or destroyed, but hoodwinked (blinded, deceived, misled ...).   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] David Farrell Krell, 'Heidegger's Reading of Nietzsche: Confrontation and Encounter', Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Oct 1983), pp. 271-282. Line quoted is on p. 271.       

      As Krell goes on to say: "That is fortunate. The tempestuous encounter with Nietzsche prevents Heidegger from becoming what so many interpreters have taken him to be, namely, a bloodless shade of Hegel." [271]

Thanks to Maria Thanassa and Sophie Stas for their help with this post. 

 

For a follow up post - Nietzsche Popped My Cherry - click here.