Philosophy of Seneca and Nietzsche in Gabriel

¶ … philosophy of Seneca and Nietzsche

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's the challenge.

From the birth of humankind, the individual's propensity to suffering has caused great turmoil, both on the individual level, and in societal discourse.

Two of the greatest issues within the problem of suffering, or of "difficulties," include the misguided notion that problems and pain are impediments to success, and the notion that inevitable suffering, whether from sudden chance, or deliberate action (although, that, too, is always influenced by chance), is just or unjust.

Fredrich Nietzsche, after spending the years of his youth under a mistaken belief in the avoidance of suffering though avoidance of life, reversed his position and, instead, championed the philosophy that suffering is good and inevitable, due to its purifying and improving influence upon life, understanding, and art. He writes that one must be someone who "no longer denies..."

Goodness, success, happiness arises out of the lowest misfortune, failure, and misery. One may not grow or achieve true greatness without suffering, negative experience and emotions. We should not be distressed by our problems and difficulties themselves, but from our ability to better ourselves through them... "We no longer marvel at dentists who pull out teeth to stop them from hurting."

Out of ancient Rome came another philosopher who proposed that freedom from the anxiety, suffering, and despair of negative events can be prevented by the simple elimination of expectation. He wrote, "You say, 'I did not think it would happen.' Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen?" By this, he means, good or bad, painful or not, one must expect every possibility of disaster (or goodness) as a possibility of Fortune.

The Challenge is a personal history story of "a young writer proving himself," and it can be used to illustrate the application of Nietzsche and Seneca's ideas on the nature of difficulty.

Marquez opens his story with the words, "I never imagined..." -- this, already is in violation of Seneca's rule of anticipation. He goes on, to describe the happy events surrounding the publication of his first written work.

Throughout, Marquez comments repeatedly on being "surprised" at fortunate events, which he attributes to "luck," the writing of the introductory note, the books he obtained by luck, the availability of new translations of work that would influence his piece. Further, he also believes that his intense interest in these translations is due to the financial difficulty he experienced as a student. Here, again, he regards it as a "chance" that the translations were available, and that they were usually unavailable to him, and thus sparked his interest. This also evokes Nietzsche's philosophy that adversity can produce good effects.

Nietzsche was a proponent of full living -- joy, experience, sex...and believed that good art and life suffered without these experiences (even if they produced negative consequences). We see in the Challenge, that the young writer begins his experience under the false notion that "living" is a distraction from art or work (instead of a necessary component in its evolution), he writes, "...they tended to talk more about women...than about their work or art." We will soon see that this will not work for him.

Nietzsche also believes that success in anything involves intense, perhaps, unpleasant and confusing, work -- work that might mislead the lesser individual to resignation. Marquez mirrors this idea in his description of his reading of Ulysses:

read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. This was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set myself the task of reading it again in a serious way, and it not only resulted in the discovery of a genuine world that I had never suspected inside me but also provided me with the invaluable technical help in freeing language and handling time and structure in my own books.

Again, Marquez continues to reference "chance," including his acquisition of the Metamorphosis which was, "chosen at random." He then goes on to describe feelings of envy -- that he might, too, be able to produce such work, and a sense of challenge to the words of Eduardo Zalamea regarding "the lack of memorable names" among Columbian writers, and goes on to describe the extensive work he applied in his reaction to Zalamea's words. He writes, "I reread and corrected my story until I was exhausted..." -- both of these ideas, painful feelings, envy, pride, challenge, and difficult, hard work are reflective of the theories of Nietzsche.

When Marquez comments on his surprise regarding the rapid publication of his work, it illustrates Seneca's idea that chance, or fortune can be both positive and negative. Again, he also evokes Nietzsche when he laments his inability to gather the five centavos to buy the paper the story was published in (the positive power of adversity to improve...).

Fortune appears several more times in the story, the man with the newspaper, the surprise at the crushing power of print, but, with Marquez's introduction of Jorge Alvaro Espinosa, and his desire to lessen his anxiety through his approval, "I wanted to see him right away to resolve my uncertainty once and for all...," he also introduces Seneca's idea concerning the pain of anxiety, and how the pain of that anxiety is often worse than the actual fear (that his work was bad), itself -- an idea Marques quickly realizes when he writes, "His was the only opinion that could affect me...and I was petrified. But before he finished speaking I decided to preempt him with what I considered...to be the truth: "That story is a piece of *****." (There...that wasn't so bad, was it... )

Again, Marquez illustrates the alchemy of "*****" to good work, with difficulty, perseverance, doubt and failure: the necessity of reading the Greeks, the clumsiness of writing and the ignorance of the human heart, yet, here again, he goes another layer into Nietzsche's theory that nothing produces greatness (especially in art), better than a fully lived life, and that the "abuse of invented notions....carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction."