A Short Essay on Aspects of The Rope Dancer
I won’t blame you if you can’t be bothered reading the long essays on this site. Briefly, then, I want to point out that the whole of The Rope Dancer is my rendering a number of key ideas from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s been good to hear that, for many readers, the connections between The Rope Dancer and Zarathustra aren’t too obvious. I worked hard to make the novel function as a story in its own right, but it still is primarily a work of philosophy - but then all worthwhile novels are.
If you look at the chapter headings in The Rope Dancer you will see that they act as signposts to sections of Zarathustra. The characters live out key themes taken from Nietzsche’s work – e.g. the need to create one’s own meaning in life grounded on an appreciation of life’s suffering; the importance of living dangerously in order to live fully; the decadence of society and the way in which it deadens our sensitivity to the beauty of life; the dangers of being trapped by past events; the cyclical nature of life; the story teller’s influence on the meaning of a narrative, and, of course, many more.
All of the characters in The Rope Dancer are representations of either people from Nietzsche’s life, or else voices from Nietzsche’s work. Rick is (Friedrich) Nietzsche, Sara is Zarathustra; Louise is Louise Salome, the woman with the whip in the famous picture of Nietzsche in horse-harness. Rick’s biography is essentially Nietzsche’s - i.e. son of a Lutheran minister, brought up by mother, sister and aunts etc - and the symptoms that Rick describes at a result of HACE are the symptoms that Nietzsche suffered from possibly - though quite possibly not - due to syphilis.
A great deal of the narration and the dialogue in The Rope Dancer is a rephrasing of Nietzsche. For example, Michael’s telling of the story of Silenus is from The Birth of Tragedy. Sara’s comments on writing in the interview with Duncan are from a variety of sources in addition to Zarathustra, for example, from The Gay Science, The Will to Power, and Beyond Good and Evil. Sara’s dream of weighing the world, Rick’s visions while on heroin, and his dream in the Alps, are all from Zarathustra. About a quarter of the text of The Rope Dancer is direct paraphrasing of Nietzsche’s work.
The three of Nietzsche’s books that most influenced The Rope Dancer are Thus Spoke Zarathustra, of course, The Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzsche’s strange autobiography, Ecce Homo – How One Becomes What One Is. For someone totally unfamiliar with Nietzsche’s work, the best introduction to Zarathustra is George Myerson’s Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra – A Beginner’s Guide. The one to look at after that is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra by Kathleen Higgins. The book to avoid at all costs – unless you want to explore the depths that academic verbosity and obfuscation can sink to (something that infuriated Nietzsche) – is Staley Rosen’s The Mask of Enlightenment – Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. The best biography of Nietzsche is Nietzsche – The Man and His Philosophy by RJ Hollingdale. This last title provides a very readable account of Nietzsche’s life and an excellent overview of his thought.
To me the fundamental existential questions that Nietzsche asks fit nicely with the metaphor of climbing - the higher you go, the further you see, but the harder the comedown when you fall. Is life worth it? Is it better not to have been born at all, and is our second best fate to “die soon”? Personally I think life is worth living. That, as Nietzsche says, “…whatever superficial changes may occur, life is at bottom indestructibly powerful and joyful”. But it is important to realise that, if you live deeply, there is nothing simple, and nothing painless, about being a human being. After all, who hasn’t stood at the edge and felt the urge to jump?