A Medium Essay on Aspects of The Rope Dancer
On the surface, The Rope Dancer is a narrative about a group of people in contemporary Melbourne, some of whom write, party, have sex, take drugs, go climbing and occasionally die. At the same time, I wrote The Rope Dancer as a fictional exploration of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. The title, The Rope Dancer comes from a section in Zarathustra’s Prologue where Zarathustra arrives at a town next to a forest. Here Zarathustra finds many people assembled in the market square waiting for a tightrope walker to perform. Zarathustra initially thinks the people have come to hear him talk, and he begins expounding his doctrine of the Superman: “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss”. The crowd fails to understand Zarathustra and begins to call for the tightrope show to begin. Hearing the noise, the performer emerges from a little door and proceeds across the rope. Just as the tightrope walker reaches the middle of his course, the little door opens again and a brightly dressed fellow like a buffoon springs out and follows the former with rapid steps. ” ‘Forward, lame-foot!’ cried his fearsome voice, ‘forward sluggard, intruder, pallid-face! Lest I tickle you with my heels’ ” Following that, the buffoon jumps over the tightrope walker, breaking his concentration and causing him to fall. The tightrope walker is fatally injured and just before he dies he laments the meaninglessness of his life. Zarathustra, however, says: “You have made danger your calling, there is nothing in that to despise. Now you perish through your calling: so I will bury you with my own hands”. The dying man is comforted by these words and, though he speaks no more, he motions with his hand to thank Zarathustra.
In Thomas Common’s translation of Zarathustra, the acrobatic performer is called a “rope dancer” rather than a tightrope walker. After reading Common’s version I immediately changed my novel’s title from The Adder’s Bite to The Rope Dancer. If you’ve ever seen a good climber scale a cliff-face, you’ll have noticed the almost balletic grace with which they ascend. It’s as if they dance upwards trailing a rope. This is an observation Rick makes the first time he takes Sara climbing:
Sara climbed better than any beginner had a right to…[She moved] with the poise and balance of someone born to it. She…put the moves together, flowing like a dancer on the end of the rope. She was beautiful to watch. Her limbs were long and flexible, and she was surprisingly strong for someone who had never climbed before. Her grey cotton-lycra tights finished at the knee and her calves were shaped like diamonds.
The term “rope dancer” links strongly with the organising metaphor of climbing that is used throughout The Rope Dancer. In addition to this, the tightrope walking episode in Zarathustra represents key existential themes in the novel. The tightrope walker’s fate portrays the irony of human life. We can be expert performers and yet still, and perhaps inevitably, be brought down by a fool. Zarathustra says: “Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning: a buffoon can be fatal to it” The only way to deal with the triviality of our lives is to live as best we can while we can; Nietzsche says: “For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously!”. Rock climbers and mountaineers live out this principle in a literal way. Nietzsche is, however, focused on the life of the mind. He encourages us to think for ourselves, to reject authority and take responsibility for our own lives. In The Rope Dancer, Sara takes chances with her writing; she’s prepared to experiment and risk her reputation as a successful novelist. The difficulty Zarathustra has communicating his message in the marketplace is echoed in the problems that Sara has in getting her novels understood: people are more interested in entertainment than edification. For Rick, the ultimate risk lies not in climbing, but in allowing himself to fall in love. Both Rick and Sara have to deal with the consequences of their choices, but there is nothing to despise in the decisions they make.
The Rope Dancer is populated by characters that are inspired by, but who are not imitations of, people in Nietzsche’s life. Ideas for Lou, for example, came from Louise Salome. She is the woman holding the whip in the famous photograph of Nietzsche in horse-harness, and the woman Nietzsche proposed to in 1882. Salome was by all accounts an extraordinary person: intelligent, independent and one of the first practising psychologists in an era when females were rare in any of the professions; she become Rilke’s mistress and, later, a disciple of Freud, winning his favour through her work on anal eroticism. Most of the other characters are also derived from Nietzsche: Sara’s husband, Michael, with his Dionysian insight into life, represents Silenus as found in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Rory Wilde comes from Richard Wagner and Cat from Cosima; Sara is of course Zarathustra and Rick is Nietzsche himself.
Much of Rick’s biography – being the progeny of a long line of Lutheran ministers, growing up in a rural area in a household of women, suffering from debilitating headaches etc – is adapted from Nietzsche’s own life. At different times all of the main characters are voice pieces for Nietzsche’s ideas. Even Rory gets his chance when, for example, towards the end of the novel he says: “What kids haven’t had cause to complain about their parents?” (Zarathustra says: “Laugh not at such marriages! What child hath not had reason to weep over its parents?”)
A superficial reading of The Rope Dancer might find the Nietzschean concept of the Superman in Rory Wilde: he is intelligent, clearly uninterested in adhering to social norms, and a superior physical specimen. However, whilst there are aspects of Rory that are engaging, he is ultimately an unappealing character. Sara, on the other hand, is closer to a female version of the Ubermensch. She is physically attractive, yes, but her most important attributes are her creative insights into life. Her aim is not to defeat others, but to overcome her own life’s challenges. Specifically, Sara has to confront her guilt over the New Zealand climbing trip. She then faces the broader struggle of recreating her life in the wake of Michael’s death. Rick has his own obstacles to deal with and, as with Sara, guilt and grief predominate. Whether or not Rick has the strength to prevail over these is a question the novel asks rather than answers.
One of the major mental sicknesses that Zarathustra encourages us to overcome is the fragmentation of, and alienation from, our self. The specifics of what Nietzsche sees as the decadence of his society are obviously different to ours. Nevertheless, there are some strong parallels. Nietzsche is concerned about religion and the state. For us, perhaps it is commerce and the state. We too suffer from the “Thousand and One Goals”; we are constantly told to value this and value that, constantly bombarded into accepting society’s values even when they conflict with our own. We despise our bodies just as much as Nietzsche’s Christians do, though our high priests have commercial rather than theological degrees. This is what Sara rages against when she condemns “the great hoax of modern life, the deodorised, disinfected, deflavoured world we live in”. When Rick makes critical social observations, The Rope Dancer is not targeting the publishing industry or horse racing per se. Rather, it is a more general critique of the forces and values that dominate our lives. Nietzsche is primarily concerned with a society that wants to subdue the individual to either the church or the state. Perhaps we should be concerned about a society that subdues our selves to market forces. Everything is measured by how well it sells, whether it’s a book or a hamburger. Duncan’s final criticism of Sara’s The Adder’s Bite is that it didn’t sell many copies. Commerce has taken the place of religion: our moral and aesthetic judgements are now economic ones. The people in Zarathustra’s market square are more interested in gymnastics than philosophy, and the market in our lives is more important than anything else. We are not encouraged to look deeply into things, to know ourselves; entertainment is more important than truth; being productive is more important than being insightful.
How is this alienation from self to be addressed? One of Nietzsche’s answers is that, by having the strength to take personal responsibility, we can create our own world and, in this way, we can live self-fulfilling rather than self-denying lives. The first step is to realise that everything is value laden. There is no objective truth. As Sara says, “Facts are what there are not…We create the truth when we create truly”. Once this is grasped, then it is possible to construct our own story, our own metaphor for life. Rick and Rory do this, though in an inarticulate way. They create their own world through climbing. It’s an unthought-out resistance against the self-alienation that modern society creates. Rick says,
I found working in the bank very hard. The manufactured office atmosphere was more wearying than the thin air of high altitude, the grinding monotony of turning up each day more draining than long hikes with heavy packs. You need a lot of willpower to allow yourself to be ground down into a factor of production in the global economy, to spend your days worrying about bits of paper and what to wear. In truth I found the dangers of serious mountaineering less intimidating than the slow suicide of working for a living. The anxieties of climbing are relatively unalloyed. They simplify life. When you’re high in the mountains you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about credit-card debt or how you look to others. Climbing was the one thing that made me feel like I wanted to feel – focused, intense and alive.
This attempt at protest is limited in that it lacks genuine insight. It’s not until Rick spends time with Sara that he comes to see climbing as a positive engagement with the world rather than merely an escape. Climbing, then, is a metaphor in The Rope Dancer used both as a mechanism to provoke change in the characters, and by the characters themselves as a way of creating their own world. Sara observes that life doesn’t make sense. Rather, “We make it make sense”. And we make it make sense through metaphor. Being an Ubermensch is being able to create your own world; we cure ourselves by creating our own metaphors.
Nietzschean images are used throughout The Rope Dancer and to list them all would be an arduous process. Suffice it to say for the moment that mountains and abysses are obvious Nietzschean metaphors, and that the novel is infused throughout with the symbols and allegories of Zarathustra. D.H. Lawrence observes that, “…Because a novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in the light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background or the structural skeleton of some theory of being, some metaphysic”. The structural skeleton of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra gives The Rope Dancer its theory of being. Indeed, there is a strong intertextual relationship between my novel and Nietzsche’s great work. I have always believed that Nietzsche’s ideas are life affirming, and that the criticisms of him as a pessimist miss the point. “Live dangerously,” he says, in order to live a fulfilled life. Nietzsche was, I believe, referring to intellectual adventure, but the concept fits nicely with the rationale behind the more extreme forms of mountaineering. Thus, Nietzsche’s existential messages about how to live, marry well with the use of mountains as metaphors.
All of this by no means exhausts the Nietzschean elements in The Rope Dancer. To do that would take too long. A final, parting comment is that The Rope Dancer’s use of Zarathustra is just one more instance of fiction inspired by Nietzsche – a literary tradition that includes the works of London, Kundera, Yalom, Lawrence, Satre, de Beauvoir and Camus. I could say much more, but fear I may have already said too much!