Читать книгу The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers - Mark T. Conard - Страница 12

The Coens’ Tragic Western

Richard Gilmore

The point is there aint no point.

—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Coen Irony

No Country for Old Men (2007) is, one might say, one more step in Joel and Ethan Coen's cinematic effort to say something about this country and about being a member, a citizen of this country, the United States of America. No Country for Old Men feels like a very different kind of movie from every other Coen brothers film. It is more serious, or it is serious in a different way from their other movies. It is not unusual for the Coens to take on dark themes in their movies, but previous to No Country for Old Men there was always a level of what I will call meta-irony. That is, there was a level of detachment, a sense that their movies were meant to be taken as just stories, that you should not take them too seriously. To be offended by Fargo (1996) because it seems to be making fun of midwesterners is to take it too seriously. Irony, however, is a tricky business. People are suspicious of the ironic because those who are ironic never quite mean what they say. The ironic, for their part, are more or less invulnerable to attack, since to take them seriously is to miss the point, and not to take them seriously precludes an attack. With No Country for Old Men, the Coens have given up their ironic detachment and made a much more straightforward movie. Certainly, there is irony within the movie, but the movie itself lacks the sheen of ironic detachment that is a part of a movie like Fargo.

One reason for this change may be the fact that this is the first movie that they have made based on a novel. It is not irrelevant to the tone of the movie that that novel was written by Cormac McCarthy. That the Coens chose this novel by this writer, however, also reflects an evolution in their cinematic and storytelling concerns. It is a sign of their willingness to give up some of their ironic detachment, to give up a posture of invulnerability, in order to say something more straightforward about their perceptions of how the world is. This, it seems to me, is a step into philosophy.

The previous Coen brothers movie that has the most in common with No Country for Old Men is, in fact, Fargo. In Fargo there is an older, wiser police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her less experienced or savvy deputy, Lou (Bruce Bohne), just as there is in No Country for Old Men. In both movies, a local police officer is confronted with some grisly murders committed by men who are not from his or her town. In both movies, greed lies behind the plots. Both movies feature as a central character a cold-blooded killer who does not seem quite human and whom the police officer seeks to apprehend. No Country for Old Men, therefore, is not completely new territory for the Coens, but no one in Fargo has much of a sense of irony, although the movie itself is ironic, whereas Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), for example, certainly does have a sense of irony although the movie No Country for Old Men does not feel ironic at all.

A great moment of Bell-ian irony is when he is reading a story from the newspaper to his deputy, Wendell (Garret Dillahunt), about a couple in California who were taking in older people as tenants, then killing them for their Social Security checks and burying the bodies in the backyard. After Bell reads aloud from the paper, “Neighbors were alerted when a man ran from the premises wearing only a dog collar,” Bell comments sardonically, “You can't make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try.” Bell continues, appreciating the full irony of the story, “But that's what it took, you'll notice. Get someone's attention. Diggin graves in the back yard didn't bring any.” When Wendell fights back a smile, Bell says, “That's all right. I laugh myself sometimes.” There is a bittersweetness in that confession that shows the deep humanity that may be part of the ironist's position. His comment, “I laugh myself sometimes,” links, for me, this nonironic movie with all of the Coen brothers’ ironic movies, movies in which horrors (a Ku Klux Klan rally, a hooded kidnapped woman trying to run blindly from her killer kidnappers, the chopping off of a woman's toe, for example) are treated as things to be laughed at. There is a sadness to their funniest movies, and humor in their grimmest.

To Kill a Bird

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is another Coen brothers movie that is referenced in No Country for Old Men. The reference is indirect, as it originates in McCarthy's novel, but it nevertheless works on another level within the Coens’ oeuvre. There is a sequence in No Country for Old Men in which we see Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) driving at night. He comes to a bridge and there is a hawk, a bird of prey, perched on one of the railing posts of the bridge. Chigurh picks up a pistol from the car seat, slows down, then, as he drives by, takes a shot at the bird. What is this about? On one level, it may be a foreshadowing: Chigurh, bird of prey to birds of prey, will ultimately miss his target, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). However, on a deeper level, the scene connects with other Coen brothers films.

In the movie Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) the über-boss, Boss Godfrey (Morgan Woodward) (with an ominously theocratic name), who oversees the chain gang working the Florida state back roads, is a mirror sunglasses–wearing, all but silent figure of ominous justice. There is a scene in the film when Boss Godfrey, standing in the middle of the road, raises the cane he uses over his head. One of the chain gang workers, Rabbitt (Marc Cavell), immediately runs over to the truck, grabs a rifle off a rack in the back window, hurries back, and hands it to Boss Godfrey. At first you think, “That's a pretty risky move, entrusting his rifle to one of these hardened criminals,” but then you see Boss Godfrey take the bolt for the gun from his vest pocket. He slides the bolt home, raises the gun, and shoots a hawk flying just overhead. The scene begins with shots establishing a relationship between the chain gang workers and Boss Godfrey. One of the workers, Tattoo (Warren Finnerty), says, “Don't he ever talk?” After Boss Godfrey shoots the bird, Luke (Paul Newman) replies, “I believe he just said something.” I take this scene to indicate how brutally and arbitrarily violent this man can be and that what he is saying when he shoots the bird is that he is the bird of prey to birds of prey. Just establishing the pecking order, as it were, so the members of the chain gang can see.

This figure of the lawman who is really beyond the law, beyond, even, as Nietzsche says, good and evil altogether, is picked up by the Coen brothers in O Brother, Where Art Thou? in the character of Sheriff Cooley (Daniel von Bargen). Sheriff Cooley wears mirror sunglasses just like Boss Godfrey in Cool Hand Luke, with the similar cinematic effect of showing reflections of the world in the glasses but never showing Boss Godfrey's, or Sheriff Cooley's, eyes. Sheriff Cooley is as relentless in his pursuit of the escaped chain gang convict, Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), as Boss Godfrey is of Cool Hand Luke. Sheriff Cooley seems to be a representative of the law, but when it comes right down to it, when the law pardons Ulysses and his friends, Sheriff Cooley remains implacable in his pursuit of his own conception of justice. When Sheriff Cooley is about to string up Ulysses and his friends, even though they had been pardoned by the governor, Ulysses pleads, “It ain't the law!” To which Sheriff Cooley replies, “The law. Well the law is a human institution.”

In O Brother, Where Art Thou? Sheriff Cooley is a direct lifting from, or a direct reference to, Cool Hand Luke. I would not be surprised if Sheriff “Cooley” was not an intentional reference to the title of the earlier movie. Anton Chigurh's arbitrary and violent shooting of the hawk (the bird of prey to birds of prey) on the bridge connects him to Boss Godfrey directly and to Sheriff Cooley, indirectly. To psychologize for just a moment, it seems clear that Cool Hand Luke made a powerful impression on the Coen brothers when they first saw it. What seems to have especially impressed them is the figure of a putative lawman who is motivated by an apparent concept of justice that has nothing human in it. This figure is not always a lawman but has its counterpart in the Coen brothers’ Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men. There is a thin thread of allusion that connects these four films that is quite obvious once you see it but is invisible before you see it. Once you see it, this scene becomes richly allusive and deepens in meaning. This is why one frequently has the sense after watching a Coen brothers movie that there was more going on than one quite got. One has that sense because there is more going on than anyone ever gets. The more I see in No Country for Old Men, the more I am convinced that there is much more that I am not seeing. This is a very important realization to have in order to begin to really get what is going on in a Coen brothers film. In this sense, their films are like the world: there is always more to understand; there is always more to get. The goal, then, is, in the words of Henry James, to “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”¹ That is, perhaps, an unachievable goal, in life or in art, but it is that to which we should aspire, and certainly, the Coen brothers’ movies richly reward the attempt to find more in them.

Westerns and Greek Tragedies

The stories that the Coen brothers are interested in telling all seem to be very American stories. Their approach of choice is the genre of film. Their favorite film genre is very American, a genre the French call film noir, but No Country for Old Men is of another classic American genre, the western. Genre is an interesting way to try to say something about something because, as Jacques Derrida has made explicit, the “law of the law of genre” is that every new member of a genre set will deviate from and violate the apparent established principles of that genre. This is how Derrida describes the “law of the law of genre”: “It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.”² This description of each new member of a genre set sounds to me a lot like what it means to be a (new) member of the set of Americans. Just as each new Coen film that has genre elements adds to and transforms the genre it participates in, so too, each new American adds to and transforms what it means to be an American.

No Country for Old Men, then, is and is not a classic western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western. There is a beautiful moment when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his sidekick, Deputy Wendell, are riding along, following a trail, and Deputy Wendell remarks on the tracks they are following in a way that recalls for me a moment in John Ford's great classic (and revisionist) western, The Searchers (1956), when Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) are following some tracks that will be similarly fateful for everyone involved. It is an interesting connection (I won't claim it is a reference) because in The Searchers, Ethan says, “We'll find ’em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth”—and they do. They find ’em, sure enough; but in an odd, somewhat inexplicable twist, there is no final confrontation between Ethan and Scar (Henry Brandon), the hated Comanche chief he has been seeking for seven years. Instead, it is Martin who kills Scar, and he appears to have done it while Scar was asleep in his tepee. Sheriff Bell is pretty dogged for a while, but he will give up the search altogether before he finds his adversary, Anton Chigurh.

Anton Chigurh might as well be Melville's Moby Dick for all of the human compassion, or even human motivation, that can be found in him. It makes as little sense to speak of him as evil as it does to say that raw nature, a blizzard or a flood, is evil. He has principles, the equivalent in a man to the laws of nature. Given his principles, he does not act irrationally or from passion; he is more of an inexorable force. He is not a rampaging killer on the loose; he has been summoned by a human will, a human desire, to achieve a desired end. He appears only because he was summoned. The recognizable and clear evil lies with the one (or those, since there may be others involved; the film is not explicit on this point) who summoned him. He was summoned because of greed, lust for power, an indifference to the suffering of others, and personal gratification. He who summoned him will learn, too late, that, like the sorcerer's apprentice, he has summoned a power that he cannot control, that it was pure hubris to think that he could control it.

That evil man is of little interest to either Cormac McCarthy, the author of the novel, No Country for Old Men, or to Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of the movie.³ What is of interest to McCarthy and the Coens is rather what happens when a good, but flawed, man encounters this force of nature in human guise. In this sense, No Country for Old Men recapitulates the patterns of ancient Greek tragedy. As in ancient Greek tragedy, a good but flawed man will become enmeshed in events that will prove to be his ruin. It will be what is good in him as much as what is flawed that will engage him in these events, and his ruin will be complete. Oedipus is a kind of paradigm of the way the ancient tragedies begin and end. It is because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he ascends to the throne of Thebes and rules as a good and noble king. It is also because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he is able to complete the mysterious task sent him by the Oracle of Delphi and to find the murderer of the previous king of Thebes, King Laius.

Unfortunately, as it will turn out, it is Oedipus himself who killed the previous king, as predicted by the same Oracle of Delphi long ago. He has also married his mother and fathered his children/siblings. As a consequence, Oedipus's wife/mother commits suicide, he blinds and exiles himself, his incest-produced children will fight and be responsible for each others’ deaths. Llewelyn Moss is similarly smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate. His intelligence and competence lead him to the “last man standing” (as Moss puts it to the man he finds dying in a truck, saying, “there must've been one”) and to the money. His compassion compels him to return to the site of the drug deal gone bad to bring water to the dying man who asked for it. It is not at all clear whether or not Chigurh or the Mexicans would have ever picked up the transponder signals if he had not gone back, but it is certainly clear that once they have found Moss and his truck at the scene, they will be on his trail wherever he goes. A fate similar to Oedipus's disastrous ruin awaits Llewelyn Moss: both he and his young wife will be brutally murdered; all that he has will be lost.

Power, Hubris, and the Fatal Flaw

Anton Chigurh is a monster, in the sense that Emerson uses the word in his essay “The American Scholar,” that is, in association with “monitory” and “admonition,” drawing on its Latin derivation meaning a warning or an omen.⁴ The ancient Greek tragedies were meant to serve that same function, that is, warning about especially human temptations that would lead to disaster. Tragedy was considered a source of wisdom as well as of entertainment, and the primary wisdom that the ancient Greek tragedies taught was also written on the wall at the famous and perhaps most holy of Greek temples, the Oracle of Delphi: “Avoid hubris.” Hubris is a difficult word to recover from the Greek, but it means something like arrogant ignorance, thinking that you are better or more powerful than you really are. The Greek gods hated hubris, and one of their primary occupations as gods was punishing humans for their hubris.

Hubris was such a problem for the Greeks not because they valued timidity or even humility but because they loved power, and they loved powerful, proud people. As Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them.” The Greek ideal was to manifest all of your true power, and to be very powerful, without overstepping your own limits, without presuming to have more power than you really have. This is a very difficult ideal to achieve because one does not know what one is capable of until one tries to do things beyond what one has done before. And yet, the Greeks (Aristotle, for one) assumed that one could know what one is capable of and thereby avoid the calamities of hubris. The above quotation from Aristotle concludes, “for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly.”⁵ This Greek ideal, this wisdom, is, too, exhorted upon the wall at Delphi: “Know thyself.”

Llewelyn Moss is a man of considerable resources, but his powers have been lying more or less dormant. He has innate powers of intelligence and determination as well as some acquired abilities learned while serving in Vietnam. Virtually all of these powers are banked, the way one banks a fire, because there is no way to exercise them in his day-to-day life. He has a good job as a welder that does not require all of either his intelligence or determination. He has a lovely young wife and a comfortable trailer home but no obvious way of improving his situation beyond this level of comfort. In many ways he seems to be happy and successful, but it is a difficult thing to have powers that you have no opportunities to use. Doing pretty well in America has never been the happiest of options if there is some chance that you could be doing better. Of course, that possibility of doing better becomes real for Llewelyn when he comes upon the briefcase full of cash. He barely seems to hesitate before he decides to go for it.

A key element of Greek tragedy is the idea of the protagonist's hamartia, the fatal flaw. Hamartia is a term derived from archery and literally means “off the mark,” signifying that one's aim has been slightly off. The protagonist of a classic Greek tragedy must be essentially a good person, a person whose intentions are good but who does not really or fully know himself or herself, and this lack of self-knowledge is mixed with a bit of hubris, which puts off one's aim. This is quite literally suggested of Llewelyn at the beginning of the movie when he is hunting for antelope and ends up shooting one in the hindquarters. In a sense, the entire movie is prefigured in this scene. It is a scene that shows Llewelyn to be highly competent, an expert at hunting: the way he uses his boot for a barrel rest, the way he adjusts the sight for the distance of the shot, his patience in taking the shot, his picking up his shell after he takes the shot are all signs of his expertise. All are signs of his knowledge, his ability, his power, but the scene also shows his ultimate hubris, literally and figuratively. Instead of killing the antelope, he only wounds it, the worst possible outcome for a responsible hunter. He is clearly frustrated and annoyed with himself, and he heads out after the wounded antelope to try to finish what he has started.

It is a long shot that he thinks he can make. It is not a shot that he will make, but he is just good enough to actually hit the antelope at the distance of almost a mile. All of the elements of the movie are here, Llewelyn's talents as well as his misjudgments, as well as certain implacable facts of nature; distance, heat, the movement of the antelope are the facts of nature that will undo his best intentions. His aim is good but not quite good enough, and the worst possible consequences eventuate because he was willing to try the difficult shot. His experience is a Greek tragedy in miniature.

Our Place in the Universe

There is a problem in philosophy that is related to a problem in art and to one in science as well. The problem is, in part, epistemological, that is, it is a problem of knowledge, and it is, in part, a problem of communication. It is the problem of discovering and communicating new knowledge about the world. Take, for example, the phenomenon of gravity. Gravity is invisible. Before Newton, no one had thought of the concept of gravity to explain things as different as a falling apple and the movement of the moon. Of course, the signs of gravity were everywhere, but people did not know how to see them as signs of gravity. Then, once you have the concept of gravity and you see that this explains the movement of the moon, the movement of the planets, and even the movement of the earth, how do you explain it to someone else so that they can understand this new and powerful concept? Well, the way Newton did it was to talk about falling apples.

A more explicitly philosophical example can be found in the writings of Heraclitus. Heraclitus of Ephesus (585–525 BCE) was one of the more famous of the pre-Socratic philosophers. He was known as “the Dark One” and “the Riddler” because what he had to say about human life and the way he said it were so pessimistic, puzzling, and elusive. He said, for example (and most famously), “One cannot step in the same river twice,” which seems to be factually false and yet strangely, provocatively true.⁶ The structure that Heraclitus developed for conveying his cryptic ideas is based on a model that Hermann Fränkel calls the “geometrical mean,” which has the form A/B = B/C. Using an example from Heraclitus—“Man is stamped infantile by divinity, just as the child is by man”—Fränkel notes that this would have the form divinity/man = man/child.⁷ This is a way of trying to convey some very abstract wisdom about our human position in the universe. What he is trying to convey is the very difficult, nonhuman knowledge that we may not be the ultimate things in the universe, that not everything in the universe is about or for us. This is hard knowledge for us to see because so much of our attention is devoted to getting what we think we want, to finding in the world the things that we need, that it becomes our primary frame of reference: the world as the source of what we need. The world, in short, appears to us to be about us. Heraclitus is trying to convey a wisdom, a knowledge, that recontextualizes our place in the universe for us. He is trying to communicate this to us so that we might understand ourselves differently, and having this knowledge will help us to live better, more satisfyingly, in this world.

There is a similar structure in the movie, and, I think, a similar wisdom. That is, the scene shift from Anton Chigurh killing the nameless car driver with his cattle stun gun to Llewelyn Moss hunting antelope is bridged with a virtually identical piece of dialogue, first uttered by Anton to the driver of the car he has pulled over, then by Llewelyn to the antelope he has fixed his sight on: “Hold still.”⁸ They are the words of the hunter to his prey. The basic formula seems to be that Anton is to human beings (and to Llewelyn, in particular), as Llewelyn the hunter is to the antelope. Just as the antelope can have little or no understanding of the principles that govern and guide its hunter, Chigurh's human victims can understand about as much of what governs and guides him. It is very hard to understand people who act from motives that are very different from our own. The default position is to label such people evil or morally reprehensible, but that is more or less just a throwing up of one's hands. It is more or less a confession of being confounded. The first step toward wisdom is an acknowledgment that there may be more going on than that of which we are aware. This has always been the central goal of philosophy, to figure out what the more going on might be.

Rules and Vulnerability

Anton Chigurh is like a walking abattoir. People are just cattle to him, which makes his weapon of choice especially appropriate. He is like a modern version, one updated for a heavily meat-eating American public, of the traditional figure of Death with his scythe. One of the most profound moments in the movie, or the moment that raises some of the most profound philosophical and, especially, ethical questions, is the moment when Chigurh asks Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), “If the rule you follow brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” This is the great human question, the great philosophical question. It is the question that is central to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where he frames it in terms of the problem of how to live a life without regret.⁹ It is what lurks under Camus's claim that the only real philosophical question is the question of suicide.¹⁰ That is, is there a rule that we can follow and, in following it, be brought to a place where we can affirm our whole life? Are some rules better than others, and if so, which rules, or, what ultimate rule, is the best? The desideratum is to find a rule that will free us from the fear of death, because, following it, we will feel that we lived our lives in a way that left out nothing important. Wells seems, at the penultimate moment before his death, to regret the rule that had brought him to that place. Llewelyn Moss, with increasing awareness of just where his rule has brought him, clearly has increasing anxiety about the rule he has been following. At the very end of her life, Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) is forced to evaluate the rule she has followed that has brought her to be sitting in a bedroom across from Anton Chigurh. There is a moment when a shadow seems to pass over her face as she considers it. Even Sheriff Bell, who has some very specific ethical rules he follows, which have worked for him, seems to be undone by the end of the movie.¹¹ It is as though Anton Chigurh comes as a kind of avatar of death, a remnant of the ancient Greek gods, and his function is to undo or to make irrelevant everyone's rules.

What rule, then, does Chigurh follow? There are two scenes that mirror each other and reveal something important about the rule that Chigurh follows. The first scene is the very powerful and very creepy one in which Chigurh gets annoyed with a friendly question from the proprietor of the gas station (Gene Jones): “Y'all getting any rain up your way?” What follows is a tense exchange that subtly escalates into what is clearly a life or death situation for the proprietor. Chigurh demands that the owner call a coin toss. After some resistance he does call it: “Heads.” Heads it is. Chigurh leaves the coin and walks out. The proprietor gets a reprieve. In a similar scene, with Carla Jean, although we do not see the toss, it is pretty clear that she loses the bet and is killed. (As he leaves her house, Chigurh checks his boot soles for blood, an obvious danger in his line of work.) What is interesting about these two scenes is that in them Chigurh has vaguely human desires. In the first of the scenes, he really wants to kill the gas station proprietor. In the second scene, one feels as though he would really prefer not to kill Carla Jean. In both instances, he subjugates his desires to the flip of a coin, to chance. That is his principle. It is the principle that keeps him from a certain kind of vulnerability. As he tells Carla Jean, in the novel, when she says to him that he does not have to kill her, “You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It does not allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps.”¹² That is, he recognizes that it is precisely his feelings, his desires, that make him vulnerable. His rule—that chance must trump any desire that he might have—is in the service of maximum invulnerability. I read the sudden and violent crash that occurs right after Chigurh leaves the house where Carla Jean was staying as a sign that there are higher laws yet in the universe than Chigurh's principle. As Chigurh is to Carla Jean, so are the higher laws to Chigurh. What the nature of those higher laws is I am not sure, but Chigurh's principle is no defense against them. Since these laws are higher and counter to Chigurh's principles, there is some reason to hope that they are also more sympathetic to human wishes and desires than Chigurh is, but that is a small hope indeed.

Apollo and Dionysus: Reason and Passion

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophical movement known as existentialism can be understood, in part, as a reaction against the Enlightenment period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment was a period of great confidence in the human ability to use reason to shed light on the ways of nature. It is not that people thought they had all the answers but that they were convinced that all the answers would be forthcoming if methodological reason was applied to any given situation. This confidence applied to social contexts as well as to contexts of nature. The framing of the U.S. Constitution was an Enlightenment-influenced project producing a great Enlightenment document. Science produced technology, and technology created new industries, new factories, and new social structures. These industries and factories and social structures often resulted in new forms of abject poverty, human degradation, and war. The philosophical response to these unforeseen, unintended, but very real consequences of the Enlightenment was to question the very basis of Enlightenment ideals. Philosophers began to consider whether there might not be some fundamentally irrational principle in the world that will always evade rational accounting. Perhaps it is the very reliance on reason, at the expense of emotion and community and art, that is the problem.

Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), explicitly takes on the conflict between science and art, between reason and passion. Nietzsche saw these late eighteenth-century conflicts as a recapitulation of a similar conflict that occurred in Athens in the fifth century BCE. According to Nietzsche's narrative, the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles were philosophers with a wisdom to teach, and that wisdom had to do with the importance of balancing reason and passion into a perfectly proportioned whole. Reason without passion was empty and meaningless, while passion without reason was chaotic and dangerous. Nietzsche invoked two Greek gods to represent the two sides of the equation: Apollo (for reason) and Dionysus (for passion). The need to balance these two energies within us is what Nietzsche took to be the sublime wisdom conveyed in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Greek tragedy, however, became corrupted, according to Nietzsche, by a rather unexpected figure: Socrates. The Socratic demand, according to Nietzsche, was that everything we do be rational. When Socrates questioned people in the marketplace of Athens, his expectation was that the person he questioned should be able to give good reasons for all of his beliefs. If he could not, Socrates implied that he should not believe those things. This spirit of Socratism, as Nietzsche calls it, began to infect Greek tragedy, especially in the plays of Euripides, where the sublime elevations of feeling and passion—in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles—were reduced to much more ordinary, everyday sorts of scenarios that were well explained by the chorus and ended with the ratification of some rational moral principle.¹³

For Nietzsche, dry Apollonian reason lacked all power of creativity. The Enlightenment emphasis on reason led to a kind of social sickness, a desiccated preoccupation with order and reason that made human life more or less pointless. His physicianly prescription was for a recovery of some of those lost or suppressed Dionysian energies. The Dionysian is associated with wild nature, which can be as violent as it is reproductively fruitful.

Wildness is a central tenet of our American identity. The word “wilderness” is from the Anglo-Saxon wildëor, a wild animal or beast, so that “wilderness” means “where the wild things are.”¹⁴ Europe, on the other hand, is associated with civilization. As Roderick Frazier Nash explains in his book Wilderness and the American Mind, “The largest portion of the energy of civilization was directed at conquering wildness in nature and eliminating it in human nature.”¹⁵ That is to say, it is the progress of civilization that creates the idea of wilderness. Before there was an idea of civilization, there was no differentiation between civilization and wilderness. “Civilization severed the web of life as humans distanced themselves from the rest of nature. Behind fenced pastures, village walls, and, later, gated condominiums,” Nash writes, “it was hard to imagine other living things as brothers or nature as sacred. The remaining hunters and gatherers become ‘savages.’”¹⁶ Europeans were tamed by the social hierarchies of tradition, class, and family. To them, wilderness was something ugly. Americans, by contrast, had a wildness associated with them that came by way of the untamed land.

The history of the concept of wilderness is one primarily of opposition. The wilderness was considered a place both physically and morally perilous. The opposite of “wilderness” is “paradise,” which is Persian for “luxurious garden” (nature tamed). The Bible is full of references to the wilderness as an accursed place. Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden into a desolate wilderness. Jesus experiences his trials with Satan in the wilderness. This was the attitude of the American pioneers as well. As Nash says, “The pioneers’ situation and attitude prompted them to use military metaphors to discuss the coming of civilization. Countless diaries, addresses, and memorials of the frontier period represented wilderness as an ‘enemy’ which had to be ‘conquered,’ ‘subdued’ and ‘vanquished’ by a ‘pioneer army.’”¹⁷ The commitment of the American pioneers was to convert wilderness into civilization, a paradise.

Where there are gains, there are also losses. This is part of the wisdom of Nietzsche, that the suppression of some part of our nature can have dire consequences for our natures as a whole. The central trope of American wildness is the wild West. Early on Thoreau recognized the dangers of suppressing our own wildness and of the loss of wilderness. In his essay “Walking,” he writes, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”¹⁸