Literary Form and Self-construction in Writing: A Study of Narrative Self-consciousness in Selected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

Literary Form and Self-construction in Writing: A Study of Narrative Self-consciousness in Selected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

Abstract:

This study examines, from a deconstructionist perspective, the interface of literature and philosophy through a literary-critical study of selected works of the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose corpus has historically been appropriated by academic philosophers as a contribution to the truth-conditional propositions of philosophy. In spite of their philosophic inclination, Nietzsche’s works also have a powerful attraction to literary scholars who find in his work modes of exploring the relationship between fact and fiction, philosophical and literary discourse, text and author, text and truth, text and reader, perspectivism and interpretation, writing and narrativity, and representation and rhetoric. Using the conceptual resources of Deconstruction, this study contends that Nietzsche’s texts demonstrate why the arbitrary nature of the relationship between signifier and signified makes meaning-making of any kind problematic since meaning itself is not grounded in some absolute contact with reality, but is carried in language. Thus through a close reading of his key texts such as “The Birth of Tragedy”, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and “Ecce Homo”, the study shows how these works bring together, through the agency of language, narrativity, form and style, philosophical and literary discourses and their modes of presentation. This conflation of the philosophical and the literary domains foregrounds Nietzsche’s desire to get people to become what they truly are, namely “works of art” or “literature” which give birth to themselves through the techniques of narrative perfection. The study as a whole also highlights the complicated ways in which Nietzsche has exploited the resources of narrativity, laughter, dance and literary form in his writings, thus demonstrating the manner in which his writing shows great sensitivity towards literary form and the style of presentation. This trend as illustrated by Nietzsche’s creative and unique deployment of a complex structure based on a stylized combination of such artistic or literary resources as aphorisms, fragments, hyperboles, metaphors, verses, wordplay, fictions and fictionalizations, all intended not for integration into an over-arching narrative structure, in effect a “meta-narrative”. In their own way, then, the selected works of Nietzsche are veritable literary-philosophic discourses on Tragedy (plot and characterization), Speech (as laughter), the Self (as dance), Writing (as play), and Representation (as narrativity and literary form). Nietzsche occupies an eminent position in post-modern culture through the integration of literary and philosophical modes of representation that creates the space for diversity and relativism, for open-endedness in thought and for the authenticity of divergent modes of signification.

Literary Form and Self-construction in Writing: A Study of Narrative Self-consciousness in Selected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche