Nietzsche vs Postmodern Style: The Wanderer and His Shadow

This is an unused subsection from a longer chapter on N and Postmodern Style. View part 1 here. 

Nietzsche does not think about writing the way that postmodernists do.  In addition, he does not evaluate writing the way that postmodernists do.  All of his published books include statements on style and writers, so, it is easy to recite passages on style from Nietzsche.  It is also easy to find among those statements his negative judgments of assorted stylistic tendencies.  Some of those tendencies are endemic to postmodernist writing.  To demonstrate that proposition briefly, I shall review seven such judgments, all of them complete, brief aphorisms from HH III, The Wanderer and His Shadow. 

Rare feasts. – Pithy compactness, reposefulness and maturity – where you find these qualities in an author stop and celebrate a long feast in the midst of the wilderness: it will be a long time before you experience such a sense of wellbeing again. (108) 

Painted skeletons. – Painted skeletons are those authors who would like to compensate with artificial coloring for what they lack in flesh.  (147)

The typical postmodern author is more like a painted skeleton than a rare feast.  Indeed, ‘pithy compactness’ and ‘reposefulness’ describe no aspects of postmodern writing. 

Fine style. –The invented style is an offense to the friend of fine style. (120)

The postmodern style of writing is mostly a painted and artificial style.  And of course, an invented style can be painfully prolific, which must be an issue for  

The half-blind. – The half-blind are the mortal foes of authors who let themselves go.  They would like to vent on them the wrath they feel when they slam shut a book whose author has taken fifty pages to communicate five ideas: their wrath, that is, at having endangered what is left of their eyesight for so little recompense. – A half-blind man said: all authors let themselves go. – ‘Even the Holy Ghost?’ – Even the Holy Ghost.  But with him it was all right: he wrote for the totally blind.  (143)

The severely myopic Nietzsche is as good a model as any for thinking about the half-blind readers described in this passage.  Who can imagine Nietzsche spending any of the few hours of painless eyesight allotted him each day on our contemporary masters of elongated moral tedium?  The physical specimen he is militates against it, and his taste ran against it.  His understanding of human development warned him against it, too.

Plentiful authors. – The last thing a good author acquires is plentifulness; he who brings it with him will never be a good author.  The noblest race-horses are lean until they have won the right to rest and recover from their victories.  (141)

Like the authors of artificial styles, writers of the overly complex postmodern style always have a lot to say, regardless of how experienced they are.  Would Nietzsche want to read it? 

Vow. – I intend never again to read an author of whom it is apparent that he wanted to produce a book: but only those whose thoughts unintentionally became a book.  (121)

 Resolution. – Never again to read a book that was born and baptized (with ink) simultaneously.  (130)

Postmodern writing is primarily a professional activity.  It is done on the clock.  There is something forced about it.  Something about it makes the task of writing all too easy for writers. 

These few passages from the Wanderer, taken all by themselves, make it clear that Nietzsche would be unlikely to read or enjoy postmodern prose.