Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée

The Dionysian Vision of The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

In 1872, Nietzsche released The Birth of Tragedy, his first published work on the philosophy of art. Much more than a simple aesthetic treatise, The Birth of Tragedy presented a critique of modern German culture and a reflection on the relationship between art and life, as well as an attempt to identify an antidote for what Nietzsche regarded as modern decadence. A central dimension of the book was Nietzsche’s perspective on the origin of the Greek tragedy, which argued for the importance of its reinterpretation in the context of modernity. The Birth of Tragedy (henceforth BT) raised many of the concerns that Nietzsche would later reformulate and refute but to which he would ultimately return. Nietzsche himself considered this work to be an early exploration of his philosophical intuitions, as he acknowledged in his prefatory essay “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (henceforth “ASC”), which he published fourteen years after the original edition of The Birth of Tragedy. Among the key philosophical explorations was the concept of the Dionysian, which Nietzsche used to frame his attack on Christian morality, on the “hatred of the ‘world,’ a curse of affect, fear of beauty and sensuality, a world beyond, invented in order better to slander this world” (“ASC” 9). The Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy later came to be regarded by critics as an early formulation of an anti-Christian attitude, challenging the morality that Nietzsche considered as contaminating Western culture through its refusal to celebrate [End Page 319] life as worth living in itself, rather than as a preparation for death.

The harsh criticism that Nietzsche himself directed at his early work does not invalidate the value of many of the ideas he presented. One of the most innovative aspects of The Birth of Tragedy was its comparative method. The study of Greek Antiquity, specifically of Greek tragedy, was superimposed onto the philosopher’s contemporary period in order to develop a critique of the present. Nietzsche’s combination of metaphysics, cultural anthropology, and philosophy was met with resistance from his peers, and yet the transcendence and transgression of traditional boundaries between academic disciplines and methods that characterize The Birth of Tragedy renders this work a model of comparative literary thinking. In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi refer to The Birth of Tragedy as “a major early example of comparative study as a mode of oppositional cultural criticism, blending linguistic, literary, and philosophical analysis to pose a stark challenge to the moral norms, and the intellectual protocols, of his day” (27). Following Nietzsche’s comparative spirit, this article offers an interpretation of the Dionysian as the foundation of fantastic literature, the latter understood here as an aesthetic phenomenon that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as a critique of rationalist optimism.

The main thesis of The Birth of Tragedy is apparent from the first sentence of this work. The opening passage contains some of the most important concepts, indebted to Schopenhauer, concepts to which Nietzsche, in an echo of the Wagnerian style of motif recurrence, later returns:

We will have achieved much for the discipline of aesthetics when we have arrived not only at the logical insight but also at the immediate certainty of the view that the continuing development of arts is tied to the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, which are engaged in a continual struggle interrupted only by temporary periods of reconciliation.

(BT 19; emphasis in original)

A key thesis of this book concerns two fundamental and opposing impulses in the understanding of artistic practice: the Dionysian and Apollonian. As the work develops, it becomes clear that these antagonistic concepts define the essence not only of art but also that of the human being. The young Nietzsche understands art as a human metaphysical activity; the Dionysian and Apollonian are thus...