Nietzsche with Snow White, dwarves, and other fairy tale characters
in a whimsical, enchanted forest with a gingerbread house
We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood:
how shortsighted that is!
As though we would want at any time of life to
live without play and fairy tales! [1]
I.
As the above quotation demonstrates, Nietzsche always loved fairy tales - or Märchen, as the Germans call them - a genre of short story characterised by magical or supernatural elements, archetypal characters, a fantastical setting, and (all too often) a conventional moral lesson in which good triumphs over evil and order is restored to a chaotic world.
So, no surprise then that he should write one of his own ...
II.
Whilst in Turin, in April 1888 - only nine months before his collapse - Nietzsche scribbled an untitled short text about a giant and some dwarves into a notebook where it remained unpublished for many years [2].
Less than 150 words in the original German, it's a queer story about the mortal danger of being urinated upon when you are of restricted stature, by someone monstrously bigger in size. For it's not only unpleasant, when you're a dwarf, if a giant pisses on you, but there's the very real risk of drowning (a prospect that even the most ardent urophile might blanch at) [3].
Thus, the dwarves recognise that they have to find a way to prevent the giant from relieving his bladder - and, indeed, stop him from shitting on them as well.
(Somehow, I don't think Disney are going to be bidding for the rights to make this into a film anytime soon.)
For the oldest and wisest dwarf, this double danger presented something of a philosophical problem; clearly action needed to be taken in the face of an existential threat. But the situation necessitated not only trying to scare the giant away by tickling him and biting his toes - "customary means to encouraging and enforcing bowel and bladder control" [4] - but morally measuring up and rising to the challenge as a people.
III.
What are we to make of this ...?
The story seems to suggest that powerful individuals - in this case one who is great in size and strength - can become threatening to the well-being of others smaller in size and weaker in strength and therefore need to be restrained and, if possible, persuaded to curtail their natural instincts.
But that would be a rather surprising lesson coming from Nietzsche who not only refuses to posit a doer separate from their deeds [5], but usually writes in praise of greatness and dislikes the little people who, in the name of morality and civilisation, wish to cut others down to their own size, à la David, slayer of Goliath (1 Samuel 17) [6].
Zarathustra, for example, is forever bemoaning the fact that everywhere he looks, everything has become smaller; houses, men, virtue and even happiness [7]. Small people, he says, mistake mediocrity for moderation and fundamentally only want one thing: that nobody shall do them any harm - and that includes not pissing on them.
So, despite initial impressions, Nietzsche's tale is probably a satirical (uro-scatological) attempt to reverse values and "twist the standard Märchen perspective that establishes cultural relationships between giants and little people" [8].
Ultimately, argues Richard Perkins:
"The giant expresses a natural and cultural superfluity that squanders its great capacities. He represents 'overflowing' as such, and, in an important sense, his crude bodily eliminations illustrate the supreme value that Zarathustra designates as the 'gift-giving virtue' [...] The giant pisses away his virtue as gold glistens and as the sun radiates its creative brilliance." [9]
And on that watersporty note ...
Notes
[1] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (II. 1. 270), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 277.
[2] For those who can read German, the tale can be found in the Critical Student Edition of Nietzsche's Complete Works: KSA 13: 483: 16.
For those who can't, an English translation by Richard Perkins is available in his essay 'A Giant and Some Dwarves: Nietzsche's Unpublished Märchen on the Exception and the Rule', in Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 1-2 (Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp. 61-73.
This essay, which I shall quote from later in the post, is available to read or download on JSTOR: click here.
[3] One wonders if Nietzsche ever read Rabelais's The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua (1535), in which the famous giant urinates on the city of Paris from the heights of Notre Dame, causing the people to flee, fearful that they'll be washed away in a torrent of piss (and, indeed, over 250,000 Parisians - not even counting the women and children - do drown in the resulting flood, according to Rabelais).
[4] Richard Perkins, op. cit., p. 71.
[5] Refuses, that is to say, to fall into the metaphysical and grammatical
trap of thinking that there's a free-willing subject who can - and in certain
circumstances ought - to change their behaviour. This clever moral move allows notions of blame, guilt, and sin (i.e., bad conscience) to enter into the world; see the Genealogy where all this is examined by Nietzsche in depth.
The key point is this: to ask a giant not to express his strength and not to piss when his bladder's full, is like asking an eagle not to prey upon a lamb.
[6] One thinks also of how the good people of Lilliput are initially fearful and mistrustful of Gulliver and how, even after he has saved their land from invasion and extinguished a fire at the royal palace by, funnily enough, pissing on it, they turn on him and decide to blind him and starve him to death.
See Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels (1726).
[7] See 'Of the Virtue that Makes Small', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
See also 'On the Vision and the Riddle' in the same text, where Zarathustra (assuming the role of a giant) carries a dwarf on his shoulders in order to give the latter a glimpse of greatness. Unfortunately, however, the dwarf fails to understand the profundity of what he sees and Nietzsche is able to show why the metaphor about 'standing on the shoulders of giants' (i.e. accepting intellectual dependency on past figures) is something that needs to be critically re-examined.
[8] Richard Perkins, op. cit., p. 66.
[9] Ibid., p. 70.
Perkins also directs us towards another unpublished piece in which Nietzsche gives his philosophical project a scatological twist: a fragment dating to late 1883 (see KSA 10: 635-37), which concludes with the srartling injunction to shit and become as gods!
