Over the past several years, I’ve been working my way through the oeuvre of the Australian novelist Patrick White. One of his books I wrote about a couple of years ago was Riders in the Chariot. Since I happened to pick it up immediately after re-reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I couldn’t help but compare the two writers. I described Dostoevsky’s writing as masculine and White’s feminine. My reasons? All of Dostoevsky’s heroes are men, and his writing makes use of action and dialogue as the primary storytelling tools. By contrast, White’s heroes are usually women, and his writing relies on subjectivity rather than action and plot. These brief impressions occurred to me at the time, but I didn’t think any more about them.

The Solid Mandala also has obvious references to Jung (the Swiss psychologist became interested in mandalas later in his career). But it is the Dostoevsky reference that is the key. White uses it to create one of the pivot points that occur in seemingly all his novels. These force the reader to completely re-evaluate the story until that point while also opening up a new and unexpected development afterwards.

For those who haven’t read Dostoevsky’s great work, the story revolves around the relationship between four sons and their father. The boys’ mothers died when they were young, and their father, who is a drunken old letch and miser, sent them away to be raised by others. At the beginning of the story, they have all returned to their hometown for different reasons. The main drama in the story revolves around the murder of the father and the trial of the eldest brother, Dmitri. But it is the character of the youngest brother, Alyosha, who is both the real hero of the story and the centre point of a psychological dynamic which is present in all of Dostoevsky’s work but which reaches an apotheosis in Karamazov. In Nietzschean terms, it’s the psychology of ressentiment.

Alyosha is a saint, a paragon of virtue. In the Christian tradition, you can only become a saint after you have died. This is called canonisation. One of the results of this is that saints are abstract figures whose virtue is symbolised in legends, relics, and holy places. Dostoevsky’s brilliant question was to ask what would happen to a person who was a real-life saint? What would happen if even Jesus himself returned to earth?

The Brothers Karamazov deals with this question theoretically via its most famous section: the Grand Inquisitor. However, this philosophical exposition sits alongside the main body of the story, where Dostoevsky explores the same dynamic via Alyosha and his interactions with those around him, including his own family. Alyosha is the Christ-like paragon of virtue. The other characters in the story know that. They acknowledge it openly. But they cannot worship Alyosha, because he is not claiming to be either god or saint, and, in any case, he is their son, their brother, and their neighbour. He is just a normal person who happens to manifest saint-like virtue.

What response would we expect from people confronted with a saint? We might naively assume that Alyosha would be praised and the others would try to live up to his standards. But Dostoevsky knew that this is not what happens in the real world. In the real world, the presence of a virtuous individual causes other people to become ashamed because the virtuous one makes them look bad. When they are unable to rise to the same level, shame turns into resentment, and resentment turns into hatred and revenge. The psychological complex that Dostoevsky shows us involves people who fully understand Alyosha’s virtue but hate him for it. Unable to raise themselves to the higher standard, they try to drag him down to their level by tempting him into sin.

Once you learn to see the psychology of ressentiment as so beautifully portrayed by Dostoevsky, you realise it is everywhere in the world around us. Any time you hear somebody denouncing an individual, organisation, or idea that has not actively harmed them, and which they therefore have no legitimate grievance against, it is almost certain that resentment sits beneath the surface. The seeming paradox is that the resentful individual secretly admires what they claim to hate. The hatred is really self-hatred. It is a cover for shame and impotence, the inability to live up to the higher standard. 

In The Solid Mandala, Patrick White begins with the same premise as Dostoevsky. The saint in the story is Arthur Brown. He is an idiot savant. Most people would have met an idiot savant in their life. I remember we had one at my school, a young boy who knew the birthday of seemingly everybody because he could remember after being told only once. Another kind of savant is the one who can do incredibly complex arithmetic in their heads and give correct answers immediately.

The special talents of idiot savants make up for the fact that they lack skills in other areas, most notably social niceties. They are the kinds of people who are called “a little slow” and, as adults, are often assumed to still be children from an intellectual viewpoint. That’s why they used to be called “retards”. However, it is precisely this childlike quality that is assumed to be saintly. Thus, both Arthur Brown’s and Alyosha Karamazov’s virtue rests in the fact that they retain a childlike belief in truth and virtue while those around them have long since become cynically attuned to the “real world”.

It is this latter category to which Arthur Brown’s twin brother, Waldo, belongs in The Solid Mandala. For him, Arthur is mostly a source of frustration and social embarrassment. Nevertheless, Waldo also realises that Arthur’s naivete is a kind of purity. All of this is presented in a very subtle way for the first two-thirds of the novel. In fact, the connection with Karamazov never even occurred to me during this part of the book. The story is typical of White. He shows us the lives of two ordinary people doing ordinary things in post-war suburban Sydney. Waldo’s frustration with his brother is understandable and we are not invited to hold it against him.

As he always does, White builds his story slowly and methodically, laying the groundwork for the dramatic re-evaluation that overturns the reader’s understanding leading into the third act. Waldo Brown is the intellectual brother. In that respect, he is similar to the character of Ivan Karamazov. But Waldo is a failed intellectual who, unlike Ivan, never has any ideas of his own. He ends up becoming a librarian.

Waldo’s increasingly bitter nature throughout the novel seems to stem from his failed ambitions not just at work but also in his love life. As an idiot savant, it is not surprising that Arthur never marries. For Waldo, not marrying is a failure, just like the rest of his life. That failure is symbolised by the fact that Waldo still lives with his brother, even though the two of them are in their sixties when the novel begins. We assume Arthur is still mentally a child, yet Waldo is still living in the home of his parents. Isn’t he also still a child?

Waldo is resentful of his life. However, his resentment is not directed towards Arthur for the first part of the novel. We assume his attitude to his brother is just part of his general grumpiness. That is what gets overturned in the most extraordinary fashion when Arthur suddenly takes an interest in The Brothers Karamazov. We learn that both Waldo and his father had always hated the novel (read: resented). Sibling rivalry rears its head, as it has numerous times throughout the story.

One day, Arthur goes into the library where Waldo works and picks a copy of Karamazov off the shelf. There’s no question that this is a deliberate provocation by Arthur. After all, he’s an idiot savant and is too pure for that kind of thing. Waldo discovers his brother with the book and an argument ensues over the meaning of the Grand Inquisitor. Arthur is nominally doing what he has done throughout the story, i.e., embarrassing his brother in public. In that way, the scene shouldn’t be anything new. But, this time it’s different.

Arthur may be an idiot savant, but he is not a complete dope. His brother and father may have hated the book, but Arthur realises that it resonates with him. In fact, he has started to grasp the true meaning of the work, and he is raising questions that Waldo, the arch-rationalist, does not want to think about. This would all be a purely academic exercise except that the questions that Arthur is asking relate directly to the relationship between the two brothers. Arthur has accidentally gone straight to the heart of the resentment complex that has been building in Waldo his whole life.

Waldo realises that Arthur does understand Karamazov. He is not a complete dummy. Maybe he never has been. Is it possible that Waldo has spent his whole life misunderstanding his brother? Or is it the case that Waldo always knew perfectly well what was going on but repressed the truth? It doesn’t matter much because Karamazov is the trigger that opens up the ressentiment. Waldo realises he hates Arthur. It’s the same kind of hatred that the other characters in Karamazov have for Alyosha, i.e., he secretly admires his brother’s virtue but cannot attain it.

The brilliance of all this is that the revelation that Waldo goes through is the same one we go through as the reader. All of a sudden, the correspondences with Karamazov become obvious, and we re-evaluate the entire story in light of them. Of course Arthur is Alyosha. It’s so obvious. As for Waldo, although he bears some resemblance to Ivan Karamazov, his resentment links him also to the other characters who try to subvert Alyosha’s virtue. In fact, we realise with Waldo that he may have spent his whole life trying to subvert his brother.

That in itself is a testament to the power of stories and their ability to re-align our understanding of the world. Once we have read Dostoevsky’s brilliant portrayal of the psychology of resentment, we can see it everywhere in the “real world”. Great works of art can make us re-evaluate in this way. It’s this exact same re-evaluation that White shows us in his novel. All of the facts about Arthur and Waldo were in the story from the start, but they only come to light once we learn to see them through the prism of Karamazov. If that can happen to us as the reader, then we also understand at a visceral level what has just happened to Waldo. The Brothers Karamazov is forcing him to re-evaluate his whole life.

All that would be brilliant enough, but White goes a step further by pulling the same trick he employed in Voss. Not only does the Karamazov revelation force a re-evaluation of the story so far, but it also opens towards an unexpected ending. In Voss, the hero dies at the end of act 2, and we realise that it is Laura Trevelyan who is the real hero. In The Solid Mandala, it is Waldo who dies and Arthur who steps forward. The final act of the book involves a retelling of the story through the eyes of Arthur.

That is a fascinating reversal in itself. But it is no mere intellectual trick. What White is going to do is call into question not the psychology of resentment but the psychology of the saint.

Waldo dies, but White deliberately obfuscates the cause of death. One thing we do know for sure is that Waldo was so incensed with his brother that he thought about killing him. This is the same heightened resentment which leads to the death of the father in Karamazov. Waldo goes from being an intellectual like Ivan to a resentful potential murderer like Smerdyakov. However, it is clear that Waldo does not succeed in his mission because Arthur is still alive.

Partly because of this, and partly because of our understanding of Arthur as an idiot savant, what happens next is quite extraordinary. Waldo has died in mysterious circumstances. Arthur is going to be held responsible for the death of Waldo. Could the saint be a murderer? In the last section of the book, White forces us to re-evaluate not just the Brown brothers but The Brothers Karamazov too. Of all of the reversals that White created in his novels, this may be the most spectacular.

Let’s return to the psychology of resentment. It begins with the virtuous individual who attains a higher standard than those around them. The others recognise this virtue but also feel ashamed because they have been made to look bad. Different people will respond to this in different ways. Some will redouble their efforts and attempt to lift their game. Others will simply dissociate and not even recognise the virtue at all. The resentful ones are those who recognise the virtue but can’t raise themselves to meet it. They externalise their shame onto the virtuous person and despise the saint for making them look bad.

White’s dangerous question is this: isn’t there an element of validity to this resentment? Doesn’t the saint bear some responsibility for what happens? Isn’t it true that the saint is the cause of the shame and resentment?

This may sound absurd, but it is not that different from what Dostoevsky does in Karamazov. In that story, it is bitter and resentful Smerdyakov who actually commits the murder. The middle brother, Ivan, did nothing to directly help. In fact, Ivan is completely unaware of Smerdyakov’s plot. However, Dostoevsky also holds Ivan responsible because he had put philosophical ideas into Smerdyakov’s head (“everything is permitted”), which convinced the bitter young man that it was acceptable to commit murder. If Ivan can be responsible for that in Dostoevsky’s novel, then why can’t Arthur be held responsible for the death of Waldo in White’s novel?

The question here is not a legal one. There is no law against propagating philosophical ideas. There is certainly no law against being virtuous. Ivan Karamazov is not called to answer before a court of law. He is called to answer before his own conscience, and his conscience finds him guilty. White follows the same idea, only it is Arthur Brown who feels himself guilty at the death of his brother. The saint feels guilt for causing resentment in the sinner.

White’s alteration to the psychology of ressentiment actually sheds a fascinating new perspective on Dostoevsky’s novel. One of the things that always struck me as strange about The Brothers Karamazov was the way in which Alyosha plays almost no role in the events of the second half of the book when his brother Dmitri is being charged for the murder of his father. Alyosha’s journey is to receive initiation from the Elder Zosima, to process the pain of Zosima’s death, and then to come out the other side and become an Elder too. Dostoevsky shows us this in the second half of the book where Alyosha helps a family through the trauma of the death of their son while also assisting the young boy’s classmates to come to terms with the tragedy.

All of that is fine, except Alyosha’s own father has died in the meantime, and his brother has been wrongfully charged with the murder. Meanwhile, both Ivan and Smerdyakov are going through their own inner turmoil. While Alyosha is off helping another family, he pays scant attention to his own. For a man who is supposed to be a saint and paragon of virtue, there is an implied indifference to the sufferings of his own kin. It’s all rather strange.

White must have noticed this too because in his novel the domestic side of the equation takes predominance. In fact, the story is almost suffocatingly housebound. White presents us with twin brothers who never marry and spend their whole lives living together in the house of their parents. That is also deeply strange. But the result is that Waldo and Arthur are the main characters in each other’s lives. There is no escaping from that fact and therefore no escaping from the responsibility that Arthur feels when Waldo dies.

Arthur is virtuous in a way that Waldo never could be, and Waldo spent his whole life resenting Arthur for it. That is the revelation that drives Waldo to his death. However, it is also true that Arthur has been completely oblivious as well. The reason why Arthur’s conscience is triggered when Waldo dies is because he comes to realise that he accidentally spent his whole life tormenting his brother. It was his own saintliness that did it. But, of course, the big question is whether it was “accidental” at all. Perhaps Arthur was wilfully ignorant. Perhaps Waldo was too.

If we again transpose this dynamic back into The Brothers Karamazov, we can see that the same line of thought raises some uncomfortable questions about Alyosha. If Alyosha was such a saint, how come he was unable to prevent his brother from murdering his father? Why did Alyosha make little attempt to diffuse the situation? Why does he afterwards show seemingly no remorse for what happened and no guilt about his own ineffectiveness in stopping it? Why does he have such enormous grief for Zosima but seemingly none for his own family?

Of course, these questions are similar to those which can be asked about the gospel story. Jesus knows full well that Judas will betray him, and he must also know that Judas will commit suicide afterwards. Nevertheless, he allows events to unfold. Doesn’t that make Jesus at least partly responsible for the death of Judas?

It may be blasphemy to ask such questions about God, but Alyosha is not God. White’s re-evaluation reveals a vital flaw in Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s great insight was to place a saint among the living. But there’s a reason why saints are only canonised after their death, because only then can it be known that they lived without sin. Since Alyosha is a human, there is always the potential for sin. The living saint is therefore a contradiction in terms.

If Alyosha is a human, then he is at least potentially a sinner. He may not have sinned yet in his life, but there will always be the possibility of sin as events unfold. Dostoevsky tries to prove Alyosha’s saintliness by having other characters tempt him. We see him pass the test. Fine. But he is still a human and the next sin is always potentially just around the corner.

More importantly, there is a different kind of sin which can work retrospectively. It’s the sin that both Waldo and Arthur Brown experience: a re-evaluation of the past not based on any new actions but on a mental re-alignment. A revelation. Dostoevsky clearly knows about this kind of sin since it’s exactly what happens to Ivan Karmazov: he realises he was partly responsible for the death of his father. That message is even reinforced by Dostoevsky in the character of Zosima who actually says earlier in the novel that we are all responsible for each other.

Why is Alyosha immune to the same thing? Why should he take no responsibility for the murder? Dostoevsky avoids this whole question by leaving Alyosha out of all the difficult machinations that unfold in the second half of the novel. That’s the only way that he can he ensure his hero remains a saint.

But isn’t this also true of saints themselves? Isn’t the only way to remain a saint to stay above the fray and not get involved in affairs that might tarnish one’s reputation? Hasn’t the saint removed themselves from the dirty business of life? Moreover, isn’t it only possible to uphold the image of the saint by believing that you are not capable of sin? Isn’t the saint therefore guilty of pride? And if the saint nevertheless constructs for themselves an aura of sinlessness, aren’t they also responsible for the resentment they cause in others who know that they cannot meet the same standard? All of this could be avoided if the saint would only be honest and admit that they, too, are at least potentially a sinner.

That is what White shows us in the character of Arthur Brown, the saint who comes to realise that he has sinned. In truth, Arthur is far less responsible than Alyosha because Alyosha has a public image as a saint, and he could use that to influence those around him. Arthur, on the other hand, is viewed more like a village idiot. Even if he tried to make a difference, nobody else in the story would take him seriously, not even Waldo.

Another pressing problem for Arthur is the question of whether he really is an idiot at all. Clearly, he is not as dumb as he looks. Maybe he has spent his whole life living up to the projection that others had placed on him. Maybe it suited him fine to be thought of as an innocent fool. Maybe he used it to his advantage. If so, then he had also not lived up to his potential, just like Waldo. If that’s true, then Waldo may actually be superior to him on this score because Waldo at least recognised his own failings while Arthur coasted along allowing himself to be thought of as sinless. The lack of resentment in the saint now looks like not just pride but dissociation. Maybe Arthur has been wilfully blind to himself, just as Alyosha has been wilfully blind to his family.

What White shows us in The Solid Mandala is that The Brothers Karamazov is actually a hagiography of Alyosha. The character may be fictional, but Dostoevsky’s portrayal of him is religious in form. Dostoevsky, the great realist writer, stumbled at the moment of his greatest triumph. This implicit critique of Karamazov is also a critique of art itself. Dostoevsky was writing at a time when he and others really believed that art could fill the void left by religion. But he crossed the line out of the former and into the latter. This is the lesson that Nietzsche had to learn through his break with Wagner. (Actually, it’s the lesson that Wagner taught Nietzsche and, as I noted in my book on the subject, it’s an incredible coincidence that Wagner was writing Parsifal at literally the exact same time that Dostoevsky was writing Karmazov).

As a 20th-century writer, Patrick White couldn’t help but have a less idealistic approach art. For White, whenever we make an abstraction, whether it be a great work of literature or a blog post such as this one, we potentially fall into the trap of Ivan Karamazov and Waldo Brown: we become caught up in the Jungian Thinking function. We run the risk of mistaking the map for the territory. We can imagine White saying to Dostoevsky, Yes, that’s a great work of art, my friend. But aren’t you and I also just Ivan Karamazov and Waldo Brown whenever we make art? Aren’t we also detaching ourselves from life? Aren’t we losing ourselves in religion?

There is no way around this. It is simply the cross that the artist and the intellectual must carry. Patrick White’s bore that cross while still producing great works, unlike the rest of the (post)modernist tradition, which threw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s for that reason that I rate him the greatest novelist of the 20th century. 

All posts on Patrick White:
Review of Voss
Review of Riders in the Chariot
Review of The Vivisector
Review of The Solid Mandala

If you’d told me a year ago that I was going to write a book about Nietzsche and Wagner, I’d have said you were mad. I stumbled ass-backwards into the whole concept about nine months ago when I realised a correspondence between Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamzov and Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal. Thinking that I’d finally cracked the code of Parsifal (famously Wagner’s most difficult story), I remembered that Nietzsche had hated the opera and went back to see what he wrote about it. That led me to investigate the relationship between the two men in more detail.

I’d never really known much about how the two men came together or how they had split up. Imagine my surprise, then, when I realised that Wagner was not just an accidental episode in Nietzsche’s life but the man responsible for turning him into a philosopher in the first place. That’s incredible enough, but the way in which it happened is even more incredible.

This book tells the story of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner from beginning (1868) to end (1878). Although the analysis has major implications for an understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I avoided any discussion of this since it would not be of interest to those who haven’t read Nietzsche, and anybody who has will quite easily be able to draw the relevant conclusions. In short, the book is written for anybody who loves a good story. What makes this so incredible is that nobody wrote this story. It happened in real life, and yet it has all the hallmarks of a Wagnerian opera (not to mention more famous stories).

Here is the introduction to the book for those who want more of a feel for the work. Details on where to buy it can be found here.

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Introduction

About one hundred and fifty years after their deaths, why should we in the modern West care about the relationship between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche? This question is worth asking at the outset since many commentators have sensed something special in the bond between the two, and yet very little in the way of satisfactory explanations has been forthcoming. What’s more, as time has gone on, the influence of Nietzsche has arguably now surpassed that of Wagner in the broader culture. This has had the result of adding a further layer of confusion due to the fact that most analysts approach the subject through the prism of Nietzsche’s mature works, all of which are vehemently anti-Wagner. It could be argued that these have served to subdue interest in Wagner. The story is more complex and much more interesting than that, however.

Although the composer retains a hardcore following who gather each year at the Mecca of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth to pay homage to his works, and although many of those works still form part of the canon of classical music, Wagner’s influence on modern culture is limited. In many respects, this is deeply unfair since Wagner can be seen as the forerunner to a number of modern trends. The Gesamtkunstwerk, his modification to the operatic art form, had anticipated almost all of the qualities of modern film. Like film, Wagner had insisted that the story be the centrepoint of the work. Like film, Wagner made use of music to highlight and accentuate the story. He also paid great attention to acting, costume, props, sets, and all the rest. A Wagner opera required a small army to put into production, something that is also true of a modern film.

The parallels do not end there. Wagner also presaged the rise of modern pop culture by demanding that his Gesamtkunstwerk be a true expression of the culture of a people (a Volk) and not just a frivolous amusement for the elites of society. Furthermore, in order to break the dependence on aristocratic money, Wagner experimented with modes of fundraising that bear an uncanny resemblance to modern crowdfunding. Thus, a very strong argument can be made that Wagner laid the groundwork for both modern film and modern pop culture. That is true not just in theory, but in practice. At the height of his popularity, he really had turned the art of opera into something very similar to the modern blockbuster.

A final correlation between Wagner’s work and more modern counterparts is that his use of grand quasi-mythological narratives and characters can also be seen as the precursor to the modern genres of fantasy and science fiction. Consider how popular Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy are in modern culture, and then consider that Wagner had explored very similar motifs in his Ring Cycle and final opera, Parsifal.

Bearing in mind how much Wagner seemed to be ahead of his time and had anticipated many of the artistic innovations of the twentieth century, it is an irony that he is now put in a nice neat little box with the label “Opera Composer” on the front. In his own time, he had explicitly tried to distance himself from that world by stating that his art should not be called opera at all. He wanted to call it “Drama” and he wanted it to be popular outside of the snobbish and cloistered world of classical music.

We could find all kinds of ad hoc reasons why this happened, including technological changes, social and political ructions, or the fact that history tends to simplify reality down into easily memorable categories and it’s simply easier to remember Wagner as a composer of operas. What we will see in this book, however, is that there is some justice to the way in which Wagner has been treated by history because, despite the successes he had, he really did fail to achieve the vision he set out earlier in his life. He did so by quite explicitly betraying that vision. His posthumous punishment is therefore to be included with the group of people who he despised and who despised him in return. He is now thought of as just a composer, when he had always wanted to be so much more.

That is only half of the story, however. The other half is that there was one, and seemingly only one, man who realised that Wagner had betrayed his ideals, and that man was none other than Friedrich Nietzsche. The historical misunderstandings that surround Wagner are only amplified when we add Nietzsche into the mix. If we assume that Wagner was just a composer and Nietzsche was just a philosopher, then the relationship between the two seems rather strange since these are seemingly discrete fields of endeavour with little to do with each other. Things get even weirder when we understand that Nietzsche was not even a philosopher when the two men first met; he was a university student studying philology, a discipline that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Therein lies the secret to the story because Nietzsche was not a philosopher when he first met Wagner, but he would become one just a few years later as a direct result of the influence of the composer. Furthermore, what is regarded as Nietzsche’s mature philosophy began immediately after the break with Wagner and was, in fact, predicated on that break. We might even go a step further and argue that it was Wagner’s betrayal of his ideals that saw Nietzsche become the philosopher he is remembered as by history. In other words, it was Wagner who turned Nietzsche from a philology student into a philosopher, one of the greatest in the Western canon.

How on earth could an opera composer train a philosopher? Well, again, this comes back to the confusion around Wagner. He always considered himself more than just a composer. Although Wagner’s art was in many ways the precursor to modern film and modern pop culture, we have to remember that he was advocating for these ideas at a time when it was genuinely dangerous to do so. 19th century Germany, and Europe more generally, was a hotbed of competing ideologies and a time of major uncertainty where different visions for the future were all competing with each other for prominence and power. Wagner had dabbled in political revolution as a young man, but he would later channel his energy into what he believed was a revolutionary form of art and culture. It was Wagner’s thrilling and passionate avowal of these ideals that attracted Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s first published books were essentially co-written with Wagner in that the ideas they contained were jointly developed during the intimate discussions the two men shared over a three year period at Wagner’s house in Lucerne, a time which served as Nietzsche’s philosophical apprenticeship.

In response to the question of why we should care about the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, the first answer is that it’s a hell of a story in and of itself. Wagner was a grand visionary, a dangerous revolutionary who had been exiled from Germany for ten years, and then returned like the prodigal son to realise the vision he had laid out in his earlier life. Nietzsche was a brilliant young scholar who got swept up in the composer’s vision for the future and then, miraculously, met his hero and found himself a regular guest at Wagner’s idyllic mansion on the shores of Lake Lucerne. The series of events that made all that possible are incredible, and the entire relationship is as full of extraordinary coincidences and symbolic resonances as any of Wagner’s operas. Thus, the story of their relationship is worth telling just because it’s a great story.

The break between the two men would also be as dramatic as a Wagner opera, revolving around the betrayal of the younger man by the older. We said earlier that Wagner had sold out his ideals; well, Nietzsche was perhaps the only one at the time who realised that fact. Why this affected him so profoundly was because he had come to believe those ideals. He did so because Wagner taught them to him.

This leads us to the second reason why we should care about the story of Nietzsche and Wagner: because the ideals and ideas the two men explored are worth understanding in more detail. One of the main planks in Wagner’s thought was that art was the supreme metaphysical task of life. In his language, he wanted art to be fundamentally connected to Life and Nature. But Wagner was never interested in ideas for their own sake. He wanted to put them into practice. He genuinely dedicated his life to art, and he made that decision not while sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire but at a time when he was faced with complete ruin. As a result of his dedication, the differences between art and life started to break down. Wagner stepped into the archetype of the heroic Artist which was quite specific to 19th-century Germany and included great men such as Goethe, Mozart, and Beethoven. There was a quasi-religious tone to this in that the Artist was expected to fulfil a role that had been left vacant by receding Christianity. Thus, Wagner’s life can be thought of as an experiment in the idea that life and art could merge together. More poetically, he wanted to live life as if it were a work of art.

Wagner achieved his goal to a very large extent, and a big part of the reason why Nietzsche became so enamoured of the composer was because he found himself sucked up into the same vortex where the boundary between reality and art seemed to break down. From the very first time he met Wagner, Nietzsche remarked how it felt as if he was “living in a novel” and that the coincidences that kept occurring were like something out of a fairy tale.

Our analysis of the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche will therefore also be a case study in the idea that life and art can merge and what that might look like. What we will show in this book is that the evolution of the bond between the two men must be thought of in terms of a story. This is not a metaphor or vague symbolic statement. We can be very precise about what it means by following the scholarship on stories done in the 20th century, including and especially that of Joseph Campbell. Thus, we can show in detail that Nietzsche and Wagner’s relationship follows what we will call the Orphan Story pattern, a pattern it shares with two of the most important relationships in Western history. What we will argue is that Wagner was Socrates to Nietzsche’s Plato, Jesus to Nietzsche’s Peter.

It is fitting that our subjects will be two men from the 19th century since it was in that century that a question arose of whether life imitated art or vice versa. Our analysis will call into question whether there exists any meaningful difference to begin with. If reality is already structured in the form of art (i.e., a story), then life is already art and art is already life. Whether that is true by default or whether it was only true because Wagner and Nietzsche made it true is a question that is difficult to resolve. But, even if it is the latter, then that simply means that Wagner had successfully turned his life into a work of art such that the boundaries between the two broke down. Nietzsche would develop a similar idea in his mature philosophy, i.e., the notion of self-creation through art, philosophy, etc.

Thus, in answer to our original question of why we should study the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche, we have several answers. Firstly, to tell the incredible story of how Wagner took a young philology student under his wing and turned him into one of the greatest philosophers in Western history. Secondly, to show that the relationship between the two men must be understood in the form of a story (a journey into the sacred). Thirdly, to marvel at the incredible “coincidence” that the story between the two men would play out almost identically to those in Wagner’s operas. All of which will lead to a conclusion that Wagner and Nietzsche were right and that we can become the authors of our own story rather than just characters in someone else’s.

For the introductory volume, I tried to strike a balance between presenting the model in itself and also showing to what purposes it can be used. Thus, the book contains an extended case study of the early life of Martin Luther, the rise of modern feminism, and the loss of the Elder archetype in the 20th century. These may seem like unrelated topics, yet viewed within the archetypology framework, they all revolve around problems during the Orphan phase of life (adolescence). Accordingly, the book does feature the Orphan and Elder archetypes most heavily as these are the most problematic ones for us in the modern West. In short, Volume 1 is both an introduction to archetypology and an analysis of modern Western culture.

The book should now be available at most online retailers, including Booktopia (AUS), Barnes and Noble (USA), AbeBooks, Amazon, Amazon Kindle (ebook), Kobo (ebook), Everand (ebook), and more.

For Australian readers, Booktopia actually has the book available at a non-gouging price of $25. This is a nice change from past books of mine which opened at double the listed price. I assume the $25 is exclusive of postage. If any Australian readers would like to buy a copy direct from me, I can do it for $25 including postage. Shoot me an email if you’d like to do it that way and cut out the middlemen (my email address is on the home page of this website).

For those who’d like to read more on archetypology, I’ve given a more detailed introduction to the concept here. You can also read the sample chapter of the book on the Amazon page here. These are the main themes of the book:-

Now that I have finally presented the model in full, I’ll be moving on to Volume 2 which applies the idea of the Orphan-Elder relationship to the relationship between the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the composer Richard Wagner. Working title is Archetypology, Volume 2: The Initiation of Nietzsche.

Trying to figure out a genre for the book has been a nightmare. Where does an “archetypal calculus” fit in the grand scheme of things? The closest works I can think of are those of Gregory Bateson, Gerald Weinberg and Jean Gebser. I’d call it Humanist Cybernetics, although there’s no complicated mathematics involved. Rather, I make extensive use of story (literature and film) to drive the analysis. The central concept of the book is that of the archetype and its extension beyond the field of psychology to encompass history and also biology, anthropology, literature and more.

Here is the table of contents:

And the synopsis of the book:-

Synopsis

In this sequel to his 2021 book, The Devouring Mother: The Collective Unconscious in the Time of Corona, author Simon Sheridan follows the archetypal breadcrumbs in search of the historical basis for the psychological drivers that increasingly dominate our modern world. Drawing on the work of the great comparative scholars Joseph Campbell, Arnold van Gennep, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee, Sheridan expands the concept of the archetype beyond the domain of psychology to integrate biology, anthropology, literature, and, especially, history. The result is a unique synthesis that posits that the unfolding of civilisation proceeds according to the same pattern as an individual human life: a cyclical process punctuated by dramatic periods of transcendence.

Having developed the model, Sheridan then uses it to provide an archetypal history of western civilisation. He finds that the development of the modern West can best be understood as an alternation between the idolisation of the archetypal Father inherited from the late Roman Empire – the medieval era, the Renaissance, Napoleon etc. – and the rebellion against the Father which begins with the Reformation, proceeds through the British Civil War, the US War of Independence, and more. Sheridan combines analysis from psychology, anthropology, literature, film, and history to demonstrate that the archetypal patterns resonate across the biological, social, psychological, and spiritual realms.

The book culminates in a luminous account of the post-war years with the ascendancy of the nation that, more than any other, had rebelled against the Father: the United States of America. Sheridan argues that the peculiar form of politics wielded by the US is the direct result of the rejection of the archetypal Father, leading to an empire that has become increasingly run not on masculine forms of dominance but on feminine; in short, the Devouring Mother.

The Universal State of America is a brilliant work of synthesis. Inspired by the work of Gregory Bateson, it looks for the pattern which connects. It is a hero’s journey about the hero’s journey of civilisation, a descent into the unconscious mind of the modern West, and a return from the belly of the beast. It is a modern response to an ancient challenge: know thyself!

It’s been almost exactly one year since I finished my Age of the Orphan series of posts. I had always intended to turn those posts into a book which would be the follow-up to The Devouring Mother focusing on the other half of the archetype: The Orphans (aka the rebellious and acquiescent children). I’ve revisited the idea several times over the last year but always felt I was missing something.

Well, yesterday I had my eureka moment. Sadly, I don’t own a bath and so the opportunity to jump out of it and run around naked shouting the idea to all and sundry went by the wayside. Nevertheless, I’m quite excited as the idea allows me to connect both the Jungian archetypal analysis of the Age of the Orphan with the ideas I explored in the Unconscious Empire and Rethinking Spengler series of posts. The working title for the book is The Age of the Orphan: an Archetypal Analysis of Modern Western Civilisation.

Given I’ve already done a substantial amount of work on the book, I’m hoping I can incorporate the new orientation quickly. In fact, I’m hoping I can knock it over in a couple of weeks, but perhaps that’s just the enthusiasm talking.

In any case, regular readers should know that I won’t be writing any new blog posts for the next couple of weeks as I focus on getting the concept into shape. With any luck, my next post will be a book announcement!