![]() ![]() Subjective ideals are sacrificed on the altar of the more primal intersubjectivity they annul. The music of Dionysus counters Apollo’s “pictorial world of dreams” with “drunken reality, which likewise does not heed the unit man, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness” (28). 24-5).Īgainst the singular perfection of sculpted Apollo, Nietzsche describes a Dionysian aesthetics of “drunkenness” and “the narcotic draught”-the “emotions awake” and “the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness” (26). Thus, we are left with “a measured limitation,” “freedom from the wilder emotions,” and “that philosophical calmness of the sculptor-god” (p. A superficiality haunts the perfection, a phantasmal supplement that maintains the totality by assigning each part its place. The Apollonian style emphasizes “the beauteous appearance of dream-worlds,” in which “all forms speak to us there is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous”-save the whole edifice, which has, “glimmering though it, the sensation of its appearance” (21). In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues, with “the immediate certainty of intuition,” that Attic tragedy reconciles these aesthetic modalities, which are otherwise involved in “perpetual conflicts” throughout “the continuous develop of art” (21). The difference between the approaches to weirdness presented in these novels suggests Nietzsche’s distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian styles. I resolved to swallow the one with the other and indeed, they present such an interesting contrast that the differences between them prove more fruitful than either would be on its own. This oddly shaped (9 x 9”), self-described “workbook” in the arts of “unlanguage” promised to be, as I mentioned at the end of my previous post, “the weirdest novel of 2018.” Then two things happened: I found Unlangauge, true to its name, nearly impossible to read, and I heard a Weird Studies podcast extolling the strangeness of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, published in 2020. My original intention for this post was to close a series of contemporary weird novel reviews with an analysis of Michael Cisco’s Unlanguage, published in 2018 by Eraserhead books. ![]() James S Arroyo on Weird Fiction Review #9: The C… Matthiasregan on Weird Fiction Review #9: The C…Īlia storino on Weird Fiction Review #9: The C… Weird fiction… on Weird Fiction Review #9: The C… ![]() Weird Fiction Review #9: The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay.Weird Fiction Review #10: On the Apollonian and Dionysian in Weird Fiction Today–Piranesi and Unlanguage. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |