The Dionysian and the Apollinian (I guess I’ll go with Kaufmann’s spelling to reflect my indebtedness to him) “appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling ultimately generate an equally Dionysian and Apollinian form of art--Attic tragedy.” What does that mean? Well, For Nietzsche, the Apollinian is represented by beautiful images. The Apollinian overcomes a sort of “primal” terror; it has overthrown the order of Titans that ruled before the Olympians. Yet, Apollinian art is not just a kind of beautiful “healing;” it is also an “illusion:” it hides from the viewer the brutal, primal energies and terrors that lie beneath the phenomenal world.
Dionysian art does not work through dream or illusion, but through music.
OK, so a marriage of sorts leads to tragedy, but what kind of knowledge do we gain from it? What kind of knowledge do we gain from seeing the Oresteia, or watching Hamlet, or going to a Slipknot concert? Well, Aristotle insists that we attain some kind of catharsis, and that’s true, but I think that Nietzsche goes a bit further than Aristotle in his understanding of tragedy. He says that “the metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images;” those who enter the Dionysian become for a moment “primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in existence…. We are pierced by the maddening stings of these pains just when we have become, as it were, one with the primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy.” That is, Nietzsche doesn’t say that when fear and pity are purged from us, tragedy has achieved its effects: he says, “in spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.” This type of rapturous experience is something of what Dmitri Karamazov understands in the early chapters of The Brothers K: “I’m a Karamazov. For when I do leap into the pit, I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that degrading attitude, and pride myself upon it. And in the very depths of that degradation I begin a hymn of praise.” I can’t help but draw parallels between the attitude of those caught up in the Dionysian tragedy and the Psalmist: “De profundis clamavi ad te Domine,” or even Job, scraping his back with a potshard; in such moments, “Man, Jack, joke, poor potsherd; / Patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond….”
This is all well and good, but what does it have to do with Slip or Rage? I suggest that Slipknot and Rage are continuing in the tradition of tragedy in the opera such as that produced by Wagner centuries ago, and which greatly influenced Nietzsche in his understanding of tragedy. How do they participate in that tradition? Well, this essay keeps goofing around with “tragedy,” and the “Dionysian,” but I’ll get around to a couple of parallels between tragedy as a coupling of Apollinian and Dionysian and what’s going on in heavy metal.
