Nietzsche, Chaucer, and the Sacrifice of Art

Abstract

Characterizing the two art-inspiring deities, Apollo and Dionysos, as embodiments of rival creative tendencies (19), Nietzsche celebrates their temporary alliance in the Greek tragedy of Aeschylus. Focusing on this earliest form of tragedy, he asks, What esthetic effect is produced when the Apollonian and Dionysiac forces of art, usually separate, are made to work alongside each other? (98). Chaucer, no doubt, asked the same question of himself, for, drawing on the same mythic sources that were available to Nietzsche, he con sciously joins the Dionysiac with the Apollonian. In the Prologue to the Manciple's Tale Chaucer explicidy invokes Bacchus (O Bacus, yblessed be thy name! [IX 99]), personifies him in the intoxicated Cook, and stages the end of the storytelling contest in Dionysian excess.2 In the Manciple's Tale Chaucer presents Apollo as the god of poetry, dream, and illusion, who first destroys his muse in the form of his wife and then breaks his harp, putting music to an end. The juxtaposition of Apollo and Dionysos in this tale and its prologue is a striking, obviously intended, mythoand metapoetic moment in the Canterbury Tales, a pairing of pagan artistic deities that would have caught the eye of Nietzsche, as it does ours.3 At the closing of the Tales, Chaucer becomes intensely self-reflexive. He speaks not only as an artist, but also as a critical theorist, a profound commentator on his own art, its mythic origins, and its end. Both Chaucer's

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