Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The test is subtractive, and it bites hardest in the first two parts. The spine is required: the Prologue’s failed descent, with the fall of the tightrope walker and the corpse Zarathustra carries; the turn from the crowd to companions; the thought he cannot yet speak in “Die stillste Stunde”; its confrontation at the gateway; the collapse and recovery of “Der Genesende”; the higher men of the last part. Each part ends on a withdrawal or a seal, and the order cannot be shuffled. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the speeches between. In Parts I and II many are freestanding sermons, “Vom Biss der Natter” and “Von Kind und Ehe” among them, and several polemics against priests, scholars and poets repeat one gesture of contempt; the argument would lose no step without them. Part IV earns its length by comedy and the midnight song, though “Von der Wissenschaft” and the Ass Festival are slack. The scale is permitted more than compelled.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What the book brings into the open can be stated, and much of it holds. The death of God comes as news that has not arrived: the old saint in the forest has not heard it. The last man is its most exact prophecy, a humanity that has made comfort its end and calls it happiness: “Wir haben das Glück erfunden”, we have invented happiness, the last men say, and blink. The spirit of revenge is found at the root of morality, the will’s ill will against time and its “Es war”, it was. And life is shown as self-overcoming: “Wo ich Lebendiges fand, da fand ich Willen zur Macht”, where I found the living, there I found will to power. Held below the top because the counter-teachings, the Übermensch and the recurrence, are disclosed as tasks rather than as conditions that hold when stated, and some claims do not hold at all, the speeches on women first among them.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Height is reached often, and in more than one key. The lyrical, in “Das Nachtlied”, one of the great lyric passages in German prose. The visionary and dreadful, at the gateway named Augenblick, with a dog howling under the full moon and a shepherd who bites off the head of the black snake in his throat and rises transformed, laughing. The ecstatic, in “Die sieben Siegel” and its refrain, “Denn ich liebe dich, oh Ewigkeit!”, for I love you, O eternity. Then the midnight song, and the close, Zarathustra leaving his cave “glühend und stark, wie eine Morgensonne”, glowing and strong, like a morning sun. Held below the top by frequency: between the heights run long flats of exhortation in one cadence, and the sublime register is sometimes insisted on rather than reached.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Myth built, not evoked, and built from nothing traditional except a borrowed Persian name turned against its bearer: the founder of moral dualism is made to undo it. The book makes figures that have since become common property: the Übermensch; the last man; man as a rope over an abyss, a figure literalised at once by the tightrope walker; the camel, lion and child of the spirit’s three metamorphoses; the eagle and the serpent; the spirit of gravity as a dwarf on the shoulder; the gateway; the great noon. They are load-bearing. The recurrence is never stated as doctrine but met as a vision and a riddle. Held a step below the top because Zarathustra himself is more figure than person, and the particular in the archetype is thin: we learn that he was thirty when he went into the mountains and stayed ten years there, and we learn his moods; little else.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The inheritance is the German philosophical treatise, the aphorism Nietzsche had practised since Human, All Too Human, and, as model and target at once, the Gospel and Luther’s Bible. The swerve is total: philosophy written as a prophetic narrative with parables, songs and a comic fourth part, its prophet a teacher who drives away his disciples and laughs at his own animals when they recite his doctrine as a “Leier-Lied”, a barrel-organ song. No book in German before it did this with philosophy; the nearest forms, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, the wisdom books and Emerson, are partial. The stake was real and paid: the parts sold almost nothing, the fourth was printed at the author’s own cost for a handful of friends, and the form cost him the hearing of academic philosophy for a generation. Held off the very top only because the scriptural register, his chosen instrument, is also an inheritance he could not wholly bend.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Change the form and much of what the book knows goes. A teaching that warns against followers cannot be given as a treatise without contradicting itself; it must be dramatised, and the drama is the knowledge: Zarathustra’s fear of his own thought, his silence before it, his illness after it, his laughter at its paraphrase. The recurrence exists in the book as an ordeal undergone, not a proposition proved, and that is the point. The comic fourth part, where the higher men worship an ass, tests the teaching by its parody. Held below the top because in Parts I and II the form is often a container: those speeches could be set as numbered aphorisms without loss, and Nietzsche did set much of the same thought so, in The Gay Science and in Beyond Good and Evil.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence, not promise: more than a century of readings that have not closed it. Whether the recurrence is a cosmology, an ethical test or a myth; whether the Übermensch is a type, a goal or a provocation; why the fourth part turns to farce, and whether it is the book’s end or an interlude; whether Zarathustra ever speaks the thought himself. Philosophers and critics have read it to opposed ends, and the questions they divide on are the book’s own. Formal depth yields too, on return: the Prologue’s rope comes back as the bridge of “Von der Erlösung”, the dwarf comes back at the gateway, and the corpse the prophet carries in the Prologue is answered in the last part by the ugliest man, the murderer of God. Held off the top because the dramatic surface is thinner than the doctrine, and readers return more for the ideas than for the persons.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The field is German literature and thought of the nineteenth century, and the book pressed on both. Its intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what philosophical writing could be: the thinker as poet and prophet speaking in persona, and a new rhetoric of German prose after Luther and Goethe. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Richard Strauss’s tone poem (1896) and Mahler’s setting of the midnight song in his Third Symphony; Stefan George’s circle, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Musil, Benn and German Expressionism, which took up its rhetoric; Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and Kazantzakis; and, in thought, the existentialists and Heidegger. The reach has a dark side, in the book’s claiming by National Socialism, which is reach and not credit. Held below the top because much of the reach runs through the ideas more than the form, which few could imitate without parody.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over some one hundred and forty years. The text is whole: Nietzsche saw all four parts through the press himself, and the later tampering of his sister fell on his notebooks, not on this book. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any German book of its century: in print without a break, translated into most written languages, and read far outside the academy by every generation since the 1890s. It stands at the top of the usual step for its span. Not higher: the Lutheran pastiche has dated as a surface, readers now come to it as much for its slogans as for the book, and its reception carries the charge of appropriation, which fame does not offset. A survival of a century and a half does not stand level with the millennia.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on the German as far as it can be held from knowledge; the sound of the whole German line is neither credited nor charged. Nietzsche is one of the masters of German prose, and the book shows it at its best: the short sentence turned like a proverb, “Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können”, one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star; the wordplay that translation loses, in Übermensch, untergehen and Untergang, overcoming and going under; the rhythm of the songs; the comedy of the fourth part’s voices. Charged: the pastiche is uniform for long stretches, the apostrophes, the exclamations and the archaisms recur until they become a manner, and the coined compounds are sometimes strained. Nietzsche wrote leaner and sharper in the books on either side of it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the midnight song of the fourth part and the Ass Festival a few sections before it, or the Prologue’s sermon in the market and “Das Nachtlied”. One law is claimed for them, laughter and the affirmation of all things: “Ich würde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstünde”, I would believe only in a god who could dance. The comedy is meant to belong to the sublime, and mostly it does. But the law shifts as the book goes. The Übermensch, which governs Part I, recedes behind the recurrence and is hardly the centre by Part IV; the higher men are first mocked and then made the audience of the culminating song; and the contempt of the polemical speeches works against the affirmation the book ends on. Some of the tension is designed, the teacher outgrowing his teaching. Not all of it is.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Many orders, and one figure holds them, more by address than by scene. Consciousness, in Zarathustra’s solitude, fear, nausea and convalescence. The sacred, in the death of God, the last pope out of service, a parody of the Last Supper and the worship of an ass. The state, attacked as a new idol. The body, defended against its despisers. Marriage, children and friendship. Learning, in the scholars and the conscientious in spirit. The natural order, in the sun, the sea, the mountain and the animals. Time and the cosmos, in the recurrence. Held at this mark because the orders are argued about more than held in lives: there is no family, no labour and no history acted out, and almost every person is a type.

Score: 8.4 / 10