Secrets and Surfaces

Abstract

‘Both art and life,’ says Nietzsche, directing a ‘critical backward glance’ at the youthful Schopenhauerianism of The Birth of Tragedy, ‘depend wholly on the laws of optics, on perspective and illusion; both, to be blunt, depend on the necessity of error.’ (Nietzsche 1956: 10) As often with Nietzsche, it is unclear whether the implications of this thought are joyful or depressing ones. Does it redeem art by showing it to proceed on the same principles as life, or damn life by showing it to be the same kind of painted sham as art? For the late Nietzsche ‘life’ is too privileged a category for there to be much doubt which way the argument will go: put the same point in the hands of Frank Kermode and doubts, as chilly as they are no doubt salutary, come seeping in.