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Olsen,
Lance. Nietzsche’s Kisses. Normal/Tallahassee:
Fiction Collective Two, 2006. 244 p. Paperback. ISBN 9781573661270.
Lance
Olsen’s latest novel is a darkly beautiful portrait of
the schizophrenic trauma Friedrich Nietzsche experienced during
his final night before succumbing to a mysterious mental condition
(possibly induced by a syphilitic infection) that plagued him
for the last decade of his life. Oscillating between different
tenses, temporalities and settings, Nietzsche’s Kisses
represents the nineteenth century German philosopher as a diseased
human being as much as an intellectual maharishi; in his head
he continues to philosophize with a hammer, but in reality he
pisses and shits down his leg like a child, speculating as to
the meaning of the fecal act. Written in clear, crisp, dynamic
prose, Olsen shows us the many faces of Nietzsche the Dionysian,
the invalid, the lover, the asshole, the German, the brat, the
poet, the whiner and the visionary. This is the Passion of the
Anti-Christ.
Appropriately,
the text of the novel is disjointed, fragmented and ultimately
schized. Olsen often uses stream-of-consciousness to depict
Nietzsche’s voyage back and forth between the diagetic
present and past, both of which are filtered through Nietzsche’s
complex subjectivity and emotional spectrum. The chapter parts
and titles range from time periods (5 p.m.,
6 p.m., 7 p.m., etc.) to body
parts and internal organs (tongue, stomach,
teeth, hands, liver,
nervous system) to more philosophical tracks
(on the vision & the riddle, raids
of an untimely man, on the spirit of gravity,
historia abscondita). The first group charts
the linear progression of time on Nietzsche’s night of
death. The third group refers to his writing (on the
vision & the riddle and on the spirit of
gravity, among others, are chapter titles in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra). The second group calls attention to
one of the novel’s dominant themes: writing as organism.
Repeatedly
the human body (or bodily function) is connected to narrative
and syntax: “Every sentence is a kiss ... every
paragraph [is] an embrace ... They aren’t
sentences at all sentences being too soft a word for
what they are they are teeth ... the corpse of philosophy
. . . in the heart of a paragraph, you know your longitude and
latitude” (15, 20, 44, 45, 149). This connection is most
effectively conveyed in the following passage at the end of
the chapter called tongue:
writing
isn’t expansion but compression a texturing into fragment
saying in seven sentences what everyone else says in a book
saying in seven sentences what everyone else doesn’t say
in a book employing the figure or aphorism because you do not
want to be read but learned by heart and this is how you will
construct a particle philosophy for a particulate world bringing
together what is shard and riddle and chance engineering with
your flesh and from that day forward this will be what you will
mean when you say the word tongue. (68)
The
subject matter here is one of the things Nietzsche wrote against
throughout his career. Most nineteenth century Western philosophers
viewed the body and the mind as two distinct parts of human
nature constantly battling one another. Nietzsche rejected this
dualism, arguing that the body and mind should be viewed as
one entity, one self. The body is not a mere exterior inside
of which the mind reigns supreme. Rather, it is an organism
in which the mind functions on a subordinate level. The mind
is the prison of the body, in other words, not the other way
around. Acknowledging and transcending this idea played a pivotal
role in manifesting the body of the übermensch.
Nietzsche directly addresses non-believers in On the
Despisers of the Body, a chapter in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, claiming that they “are not bridges
to the superman” and that the body is “a great intelligence,
a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and
a herdsman” (61). Not coincidentally, part one of Nietzsche’s
Kisses is entitled on the despisers of the body.
The
great irony that Olsen’s novel portrays is how Nietzsche’s
body became an enemy of his mind in his old age, if for no other
reason than it prohibited him from writing and further pursuing
his philosophical goals. In the end, the minutia of reality
and the tedium of the bodily apparatus are more difficult for
Nietzsche to negotiate than the creation of a new ideology,
culture and futurology. “Friedrich has smote history into
two halves. Surely he can hold his fluids another few seconds”
(51). Such passages elicit a sense of sympathy for Nietzsche
in contrast to most of his own narratives (including Thus
Spoke Zarathustra as well as Beyond Good & Evil,
Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, Human,
All Too Human and especially Ecce Homo) where
his speakers are invariably strong-willed, outspoken and often
megalomaniacal. Olsen’s Nietzsche is not Nietzsche’s
Nietzsche. Both figures are inevitable representations, one
being a representation of Nietzsche as ordinary guy-genius-sickboy-shizo,
the other of Nietzsche as utopian-romantic-desiratum-superhero.
Nietzsche’s
Kisses is a first-rate docufiction that retains an air
of historicity while telling a good story. Nietzsche enthusiasts
and scholars will appreciate it for its allusions to the philosopher’s
writing and the way in which Olsen brings his character to (real)
life. But you don’t need to know Nietzsche’s work
to appreciate this novel. Olsen is a talented and masterful
prosist who composes a type of music with words that Nietzsche
himself (despite himself) couldn’t help but admire.
—
D.
Harlan Wilson
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