Noel’s Reviews > Essays and Aphorisms > Status Update

“…Wilhelm Meister! Even Don Quixote has relatively little, and what there is is very trivial, amounting to no more than a series of jokes. And these four novels are the crown of the genre. Consider, further, the marvellous novels of Jean Paul and see how much inner life is set in motion on the narrowest of external foundations. Even the novels of Walter Scott have a significant preponderance of inner over outer life, and the latter appears only with a view to setting the former in motion; while in bad novels the outer action is there for its own sake. The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life: for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest. – The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.”

I really enjoy Schopenhauer’s views on aesthetics. This would have been good to read before The Birth of Tragedy, since Nietzsche breaks with Schopenhauer on a number of counts. What struck me the most was that, while Nietzsche declares the text of a music drama as a necessary complement to the music and a protective veil for its overwhelming power, Schopenhauer derides the text as a distraction, arguing that music—the highest music—demands the undivided attention of the mind. In fact, Schopenhauer doesn’t have a high opinion of opera at all especially, describing it as a “barbaric conception”:

“Strictly speaking one could call opera an unmusical invention for the benefit of unmusical minds, in as much as music first has to be smuggled in through a medium foreign to it, for instance as the accompaniment to a long drawn out, insipid love story and its poetic pap: for a spirited compact poem full of matter is of no use as an opera text, because the composition cannot be equal to such a poem.”

Nietzsche's dominant musical reference point was Wagner, who was influenced by Schopenhauer and was trying to create a total work of art rather than music as an abstraction. Whereas Schopenhauer's main reference weirdly seems to have been Rossini, although it's not as if German Romantic operas like Fidelio or Der Freischutz weren't available to him.

Thanks for clearing that up, Richard. Could you explain what you mean by music as an abstraction? (As opposed to a total work of art.)

Absolute music might be a better way to put it, as that was the term Wagner coined for the purpose i.e. music that lacks explicit conceptual content but which was able to transcend to a higher, more spiritual realm, because of that absence. It meant an appeal to the emotions rather than to reason, although Wagner wanted to create a synthesis of the two, hence the idea of uniting lyrics, staging, dance and music to a common end.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

I like the interrogation brought up by Schopenhauer on this! Thanks for sharing it, Noel. This is a topic that resurfaced for me recently, as I was bound to compare the writing style of Michaël Dichter in his first novel "On l'appelait Bennie Diamond", in which his main profession of director and screenwriter shows vividly: the action is nearly always shown from an exterior point of view, contrasting sharply with William Johnston's English translation of "Silence" by Shusaku Endo, much more concerned with displaying the inner state of the characters, through the use of letters notably!

Thanks, PE :) Tbh I’m not sure I can agree entirely with Schopenhauer’s assessment. I did think this passage was kind of funny, since the works he mentions are pre-realist/modernist and certainly pale in this respect to Flaubert -> Tolstoy/Dostoevsky -> Proust/Joyce/Woolf/Faulkner. It’s as if there’s been a general tendency of “great” Western literature to become more inward, which I guess would make Schopenhauer happy.

I'm not sure either, and he does seem to tip the scales somewhat now that you mention it! ;) Still, it's good food for thought! :)

I often catch myself musing about the specificity of the novel as an art form compared to the visual arts, in particular! :) Does that strange habit inhabit you too? ;)

Haha it feels like it’s been ages since I’ve read a proper novel. I’ve completely fallen off fiction these days. I guess I do since I read so many comics and watch so many movies.