Alexander Lin, PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, will be presenting a draft paper titled ‘Narrative Mask-Making in Nietzsche and the Novel’.

Professor Nancy Ruttenburg (English, Stanford) has kindly agreed to act as respondent.

Abstract
As part of a developing dissertation project on 18th-20th century German and Japanese imbrications of modernist literature, criticism, and philology, this draft chapter argues for a rereading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy that emphasizes Nietzsche’s use of masks or personae—and thereby for a reconsideration of narrative person and voice in the novel theory of Gérard Genette and novels by Thomas Mann and Yukio Mishima.
The chapter begins with Mishima’s endorsement of Mann as the embodiment of a post-romantic novel tradition opposing “art” to “life” and traces back to Nietzsche, the major reference point for both writers. Nietzsche, working in discourses of post-Kantian aesthetics and Schopenhauerian metaphysics, uses an analysis of masks in the tragedy genre to theorize and dramatize the relation between “the world of appearances” and a quasi-artistic “will.” I argue that he places special focus on the very process of mask-making as active and temporal.
Mann both picks up on this aspect and makes “Nietzsche” one of several masks for his own narrative theory. Mann’s privileging of the voice of the narrator as the “ensoulment” of its characters leads me to a reconsideration of the antinomies of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narratorial voice in Genette’s theory.
In the second half of the chapter, I read Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) and Mishima’s Sea of Fertility (1969-71) as novels that work with the abovementioned issues through the peculiar device of personifying the antinomy of Genette’s two positions as a friendship between protagonist and narrator.

The event will take place in person in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall on Thursday, April 21th, from 5-7pm.