SOURCE: Norwick, Steve. “Nietzschean Themes in the Works of Edward Abbey.” In Coyote in the Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words, edited by Peter Quigley, pp. 184-205. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Norwick explores Abbey's understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought in his works.]

Most readers find many of Edward Abbey's images and statements interesting but puzzling, troubling, challenging, and even nonsensical. I believe that most of these confusing, and bold, passages are Nietzschean. The influence is pervasive, evidenced by numerous quotes and several Nietzschean themes in his novels and essays. The purpose of this chapter is: (1) to shed light on the Nietzschean quality of Abbey's thought, and (2) to give a few examples of how understanding his brand of Nietzscheanism sheds light on his artistic and political motives.

There is no doubt that Abbey was familiar with Nietzsche, whom he had certainly read as a philosophy student. There are direct quotations from Nietzsche in many of Abbey's books, including ironic references to professional outdoorsmen and -women as “Ubermenchen” (1984, 170), though Abbey did not actually use the concept. Several times he repeated Nietzsche's call to be “True to the earth” (Nietzsche 1964 11:7). At the Grand Canyon, Abbey quoted Nietzsche's admonition, “Gaze not too long into the abyss, Lest the abyss gaze into thee” (Abbey 1984, 118). In A Fool's Progress Henry Lightcap contemplates suicide, saying, “The thought of suicide, as Nietzsche says, has got me through many a bad night” (Abbey 1990, 6) and “The married philosopher is a figure out of a stage farce” (37). Abbey's posthumously published poem “Due Notice” is a paraphrase of several of Nietzsche's aphorisms (1994b, 66). The title itself is clearly a reference to the famous dream in which Nietzsche ate the green Earth like an apple.

Most major turn-of-the-century English-language authors were moved by the bold originality of Nietzsche's writing style, which was often aphoristic, but few wrote like him (Bridgwater 1972). Even though his writing often seems bombastic and hysterical in English translations, he was extremely antisentimental. This antisentimentalism contrasts sharply with the rhythmic poetic prose that Abbey read in the Oscar Levy translations, much of whose diction is quasi-King James biblical. Abbey's style in his novels and nature essays was not noticeably influenced by Nietzsche except in the most important passages. In short, passionate paragraphs, Abbey delivers his message using powerful, rhythmic, long lines. Consider, for example, the following description from Desert Solitaire: “Despite its clarity and simplicity, however, the desert wears at the same time, paradoxically, a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting—but waiting for what?” (1971b, 270-71).

Abbey was aware of his tendency to rely on rhythm, and he feared it was not appropriate for his audience. In his journal he recorded his efforts to remove rhythm from his prose (1994a, 82, 130, 156), but in other selections from his journals (Confessions of a Barbarian [1994a]) and in his aphorisms (A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Vox Clamantis in Deserto [1994c]) we can see that Abbey was secretly using a style very much like the Oscar Levy translations, just for his own amusement and as inspiration for his other writing.

Nietzsche used startling phrases, often oxymorons that seem to be nonsense. He did not use the rhetorical forms that accompany most supposedly “rational” arguments, and he did not generally write syllogistically. Instead he advanced ideas through metaphors and parables and even contradictions. He was often paradoxical and believed that “In order to interest clever persons in a theory, it is sometimes only necessary to put it before them in the form of a prodigious paradox” (1964, 6:270). Abbey followed this tradition by emphasizing the unity of dissimilar objects. According to him, World War II brought “Hitler, war and general prosperity” (1971b, 4). He described smog as “tender, velvety smog” (1971, 1). He loved the beautiful flowers of the dangerously barbed desert plants (28), a visual contradiction of danger and beauty. He ironically described the “Friendship Dance” at which the Havasupai and Haulapai Indians dance, get drunk, and brawl (224).

A striking example of one of his many oxymorons is Abbey's description of the desert wilderness as “remote and at the same time intimate” (190). In a naive sense this is simply physically impossible. In a visual sense, the desert is strangely remote because, unlike most landscapes, one can see for miles. Yet unlike a forest or city, the desert is intimately exposed to the casual viewer. In a poetic sense, the desert remains remote even to a hiker and naturalist like Abbey because it is so strange to European culture. And yet, at moments, it seems like a surrealistic dream, which is an intimate, interior, personal process. Abbey repeatedly called attention to the desert's dreamlike character. A dream—in which things happen that are physically impossible and socially and personally unacceptable—is remote from our waking experience, and yet our dreams express our most intimate feelings.

Although Nietzsche wrote often of the “Joyful Wisdom” (1964, vol. 10) and a need to laugh heartily, the Levy translations do not carry a convincing merriment to most English readers (e.g., 1964, 11:187, 193). In fact, Nietzsche and his famous literary followers—including H. G. Wells, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence—were not generally a cheery lot. Barring his disciples Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and H. L. Mencken, there was not a belly laugh in the bunch. In contrast, Edward Abbey was a clown, and a very funny one at that. Most readers laugh at Abbey or with Abbey in many places. Of all his books, only two lack a relaxed, pleasant sense of sarcasm and self-irony: Cactus Country, a natural history text, heavily edited by the Time-Life staff, and Black Sun, the powerful tragedy dedicated to his young wife who died of leukemia. In general, however, Abbey tackled important topics with humor and a well-developed sense of fun. Given Nietzsche's recognition of joyfulness as a sign of authenticity, he likely would have approved.

Everything in Nietzsche seems both strongly physical and deeply symbolic. He used concrete images and gave them a sense of symbolic importance, although the underlying meaning of the symbol is often obscure. Similarly, Abbey is famous for his stark and striking descriptions of strange desert landscapes. He often hinted that these places are haunted or have symbolic meaning. For example, his favorite juniper tree “stands half-alive, half dead, the silvery wind-rubbed claw of wood projected stiffly at the sun. A single cloud floats in the sky to the northeast, motionless, a magical coalescence of vapor where a few minutes before there was nothing visible but the hot, deep, black-grained blueness of infinity” (1971b, 155).

The literary persona of Abbey and his conscious act of masking are also strikingly similar to Nietzsche. Masking was a major theme in Nietzsche's work (see Alderman 1977, 1-17), and he and Freud are considered the founders of the modern belief that each personality has many different parts, which are created not only by the physical and social environment of the individual but also by the person. Nietzsche called this process of self-creation “masking,” and he equated having original thoughts with creating one's own mask. Nietzsche, who was a very complex person with many masks, wrote that “Every profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more, around every profound spirit there continually grows a mask” (1964, 12:56). Edward Abbey also presented himself that way, “I'm so complicated a person I don't know what role to effect, and I'm not clever enough to pass myself off as what I truly am, a complicated person” (1994a, 116). Abbey also admitted that some of his protagonists were personal portraits and masks (311).

Like Nietzsche, Abbey was complexly aware of himself making his own mask. In his journal entry of November 29, 1976, Abbey wrote, “The Edward Abbey of my books is largely a fictional creation, the true adventures of an imaginary person. The real Edward Abbey? I think I hardly know him. A shy, retiring, very timid fellow, obviously. Somewhat of a recluse, emerging rarely from his fictional den only when lured by money, vice, the prospect of applause” (1994, 246-47). The “I” here is the literary persona speaking as if he did not know the real personality who writes the books. What are we to make of a person who writes as his literary persona in a very personal journal that he nearly destroyed before he died (Clarke Abbey, pers. comm.). The complex, introverted self-consciousness with which Abbey's self creates selves is truly Nietzschean. Perhaps Abbey had absorbed so much of Nietzsche's antitranscendentalism that he really believed that only the surface of nature and the mask of people are real, that perhaps even “man is a dream, thought an illusion” (Abbey 1971b, 144).

Nietzsche portrayed himself and his other persona, Zarathustra, as “honest fools” (1964, 5:41; 11:5, 73). He vowed “To cling to life, blindly and madly, with no other aim … with all of the perverted desire of a fool” (5:149). He insisted that “looking down on ourselves … we must discover the hero and likewise the fool that is hidden in our passion for knowledge … in order not to lose the free dominion over things” (10:146). Abbey also presented himself as a fool. He mocked his foolish nature exploits, as when describing how he faced the cataracts of the Grand Canyon in an undersized dingy after forgetting his life jacket (1971b, 173-220), or when he walked alone across a waterless 115 miles of Sonoran Desert for the sheer pleasure of experiencing his strength and the otherness of the desert (1984, 1-49). Abbey's fictional autobiography, The Fool's Progress, is subtitled “an honest novel,” an oxymoron echoing Nietzsche's wish to be “an honest fool.” In Desert Solitaire, a visitor asks, “Any dangerous animals out here, ranger?” to which Abbey replies, “Just tourists.” The tourists laugh, but Abbey thinks to himself, “Tell the truth, they never believe you” (1971b, 263).

In The Fool's Progress, Abbey not only has his protagonist do foolish things, but he also points out that the truth is funny to ordinary people, whom he considers to be less wise than the protagonist, who seems foolish to them. The ancient concept of the truth-telling wise fool is common in many pagan religions and in Native North American, Greek, and Nordic mythology. Saint Joseph was portrayed as a holy fool in the Middle Ages. Saint Francis (Armstrong 1973; Sorrell 1988) and Henry David Thoreau (as noted by Emerson in February 1838 in his journal) deliberately presented themselves as fools. Erasmus (In Praise of Folly) and John Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress), both devout Christians, wrote that Jesus and true Christians are fools from the worldly point of view. The most famous wise fool in English literature is the court jester in King Lear. Nietzsche's Zarathustra is also a fool (e.g., 1964, 11:186), and so are Abbey's fictional protagonists.

Most modern literary nature writers present a pleasant, friendly, mild, and placid persona, even those who are, or were, not so in real life. Consider the voices of mainstream canonical nature writers such as Gilbert White, John Burroughs, John Muir, Enos Mills, Mary Austin, Henry Beston, Joseph Wood Krutch, Aldo Leopold, Sigrud Olson, and John Hay. Rachel Carson, who was called “shrill” by the chemical pesticide producers, also had a sweet, poetic, lyric style in most of her work. Nietzsche suggested, however, that the true nature lover “might be disagreeable, stingy, and conceited” (1964, 7:35), and Abbey seems to have set out to prove the point. He was the first modern English-speaking nature writer to present himself as a humorous but somewhat unpleasant, self-mocking curmudgeon. In this he was followed by Edward Hoagland, Charles Bowden, Colin Fletcher, and others, including a new brand of tough, world-wise women nature writers such as Gretel Ehrlich, Ann La Bastille, and Terry Tempest Williams.

Nietzsche's prose is complexly ironic. Although he accused Socrates of being doubly ironic—that is, of mocking his own ironic statements—Nietzsche was also capable of being ironic about his own irony without canceling the first by the second. This complexity is a deep sign of circular self-consciousness and the awareness of masking that is central to all Nietzschean enterprises (Alderman 1977, 1-17). It is also one of the profoundly Nietzschean aspects of Abbey's work. This complex irony sets Abbey apart from all other environmental writers, who are often ironic about others but rarely about themselves, and never doubly ironic. For example, most nature writers have at least a few ironic passages in which they mock commercial enterprises, especially land developers who would destroy important habitat. Calvin Rustram would be one well-known but not very literary example. Only a few nature writers make ironic self-references, although Muir did mock himself when admitting his fear of falling from Mount Ritter in chapter 4 of The Mountains of California (1894).

Abbey, in contrast, was often ironic about his own irony. Writing about his parents' home in Appalachia, he described it as “shotgun country, redneck territory, hillbilly heaven. A lounging sullen homicidal primitive in every doorway. My people” (1990, 460). This passage begins with a comic ironic comment on the stereotype of the Appalachian residents. Then the irony becomes so exaggerated that it is clear that Abbey's protagonist is mocking himself for acting superior to his peasant roots. To my knowledge, no other nature writers in English use this double irony, though it is well developed in some popular general writers, including the Midwestern radio humorist Garrison Keillor and the playwright and screenwriter Wallace Shawn.

The admiration of natural dangers expressed by Nietzsche and Abbey goes back to the notion of the sublime in seventeenth-century landscape painting. The great Italian and Dutch landscape painters accepted the danger of the ocean or mountains or storm as a manifestation of God (Nicholson 1959). Danger was popularized in nature writing by John Muir, but it continued to be described in a sentimental and Christian tone. Nietzsche accepted and affirmed the aesthetic of violence but challenged the religious and sentimental part of the tradition. He asked, “Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to fullness of existence?” (1964, 1:2). Abbey can also be considered Nietzschean in this way. He admired the violence of nature and even the ugly sides of his human characters because his own exuberant persona was so strong that he was not spiritually endangered by evil or physical hazard, even if he was physically in danger. For Nietzsche and Abbey, one of the things that makes life worth living is the joy of surviving violence.

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century natural history essayists presented a rather puritanical persona. For example, Thoreau (“Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” Walden), John Muir (My First Summer in the Sierra), and Mary Austin (Earth Horizon) were all teetotalers and happy to say so. Most twentieth-century nature writers appear clearly descended from the New England tradition, adopting personas that are almost universally modest. Until recently, there was neither sex nor strong drink in American nature writing. Then we were introduced to the persona of Abbey's essays: a swaggering, macho, physically strong, healthy, lusty, often drunken, nature-loving, and, on a few occasions, mildly evil satyr. This was unique in American literary natural history writing. Nietzsche, however, identified the satyr as the “archetype of man” and “the true man” (1964, 1:63). In the late nineteenth century, numerous British Nietzscheans adopted this playful, anarchic, Pan-like stance (Bridgman 1972), but only Abbey has gone so far as to call himself a “satyr-maniac” (1994a, 216).

The following is a rather long list of themes. Because Nietzsche was an early advocate of many ideas that became commonplace in American nature writing and environmental-activist circles, no one of them proves that Abbey was a Nietzschean. For example, Nietzsche wrote that “The earth hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called man” (1964, 11:157). Abbey also used the notion of urban humanity as a disease (usually cancer) in essays and especially in the novels The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives!, and Good News. This by itself proves nothing, but the large number of similar themes is very strongly suggestive, though clearly not positive proof, that Abbey was reading from Nietzsche as he wrote.

Both Abbey and Nietzsche opposed the common conceit that nature is a book written by God. Nietzsche insisted that nature is “no text” (1964, 6:19, 12:32). Abbey turned the metaphor completely around when he described his own book, Desert Solitaire, his attack on the urbanization of the national parks: “This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You're holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don't drop it on your foot—throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?” (1971, xii). Not only is the earth not a book, but this political book about a very rocky part of the earth is itself not to be read but to be used as a rock.

Nietzsche repeatedly advised, “Flee into thy solitude,” and he also wrote, “I love the forest. It is bad to live in cities” (1964, 11:61, 144). At times, however, Zarathustra had to leave the wilderness for the city, as did Abbey at the end of Desert Solitaire. Most American environmental writers express a distaste for cities at all times. Abbey hated cities and mocked the life of city dwellers at every opportunity, but he had Nietzsche's ambivalence. There were times when he wrote with humor and irony about wanting to go to the city: “Space-age sleaze. High-tech slums. Nothing new. But the streets and sidewalks are full of people, during business hours, and that too, like the pool-rooms and cigar shops, is a pleasing sight” (1990, 212).

Most English-speaking nature writers are sentimental “nature lovers.” Nietzsche hated “The insipid and cowardly notion ‘Nature’ invented by Nature enthusiasts” who desired to “live according to Nature” (1964, 14:274). Nietzsche mocked them and pointed out that nature is “boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain” (12:13). He insisted that “To be natural means, to dare to be as immoral as Nature is” (14:98). Abbey was also very antisentimental. His desert is “cruel, clear, inhuman … motionless and emotionless at the same time” (1971b, 286) with utter “indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going” (301). This view of the natural world is still repugnant to most “nature lovers.”

Nietzsche and Abbey both disliked domestic animals, especially herd animals, and they liked most wild animals. Nietzsche called modern urban man “the domestic animal, the gregarious animal, the sick animal—the Christian” (1964, 16:129). Abbey hated cows and sheep (1971b, 66), and he loved all wildlife except perhaps ants and gnats. He hated ants because he associated them with urban life and fascism. He wanted a flash flood to drown the “great ant-civilizations” (139), and he enjoyed destroying “their evil nests” (152).

Nietzsche was an early advocate of visualizing the feelings of animals from their perspective (1964, 10:200). He was far ahead of his time in opposing the anthropomorphism and personification of nature (152). Modern nature writers try to see the world from the animals' point of view without anthropomorphism. Abbey is a master of this. For example, in Desert Solitaire, he explores a snake's view of the world (1971b, 22), the feelings of a frog (143), and a vulture's perspective (154). Abbey's usually successful avoidance of anthropomorphism did not come without a struggle. He wrote, “The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself” (6).

Nietzsche was interested in the “doppelganger,” the mysterious other person who is oneself. He wanted “to see one's self transformed before one's self, and then to act as if one had really entered into another body, into another character” (1964, 1:67). In nineteenth-century German romantic poetry and fiction, and also in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (“The Man in the Crowd”) and Joseph Conrad (“The Secret Sharer”), the double is a mysterious person. To Nietzsche the double was also sometimes a totemic animal, and he likened himself to a lion, a camel, and an eagle (1964, 11:120-21, 234). Abbey's most memorable animal characterizations are of the buzzard (a recurrent figure in his work) and the moon-eyed horse (1971b, 157-71). Abbey uses the horse to expose all of the human virtues and quirks that he admired and abhorred in himself. Both Abbey and the horse are independent, spoiled, antisocial, crazy, desert loving, rigid as stone, like a statue of Don Quixote by Giacometti. These likenesses allow Abbey to analyze and lampoon himself just as Nietzsche proposed.

Both Nietzsche and Abbey were lovers of solitude and wilderness. Nietzsche's persona is a “lonely wanderer” (1964, 6:405). Sometimes he saw himself as Icarus escaping from the Labyrinth, flying toward the light, falling into the sea, and somehow returning. “I see thee follow thy path … with unfathomable eyes, wet and sad as a plummet which has returned to the light … out of every depth” (12:251). He wandered mostly in wild places. These places offered solitude, something unavailable for a “pious” man because God is always reading his mind or talking to him (10:328). But an atheist is a wilderness traveler who can hear “the voice of nature … in the mild sunshine of a constant mental joyfulness” (6:265). Nietzsche associated freedom of mind and wilderness and silence (11:122), and he bragged about his mental wilderness exploits. “Where silence is required—If we speak of freethinking as of a highly dangerous journey over glaciers and frozen seas, we find that those who do not care to travel on this track are offended, as if they had been reproached with cowardice and weak knees” (7:20).

Nietzsche's persona Zarathustra said that he admired “him who goeth into God-forsaken wildernesses, and hath broken his venerating heart. In the yellow sands and burnt by the sun, he doubtless peereth thirstily at the isles rich fountains, where life reposeth under shady trees. But his thirst doth not persuade him to become like those comfortable ones: for where there are oases, there are also idols” (11:121). This one passage involves the recurrent themes of wilderness, loneliness, renunciation of false comforts of traditional religion, and the seductive dangers of city life that also appear in the essays and novels of Edward Abbey.

Nietzsche called his persona Zarathustra “The Solitary” (7:295) and “The Recluse” (313). Abbey (quoting Robinson Crusoe) called himself “a solitaire.” Nietzsche believed that in nature's solitude “we enjoy those short spans of deep communion with ourselves and with Nature. He who fortifies himself completely against boredom fortifies himself against himself too. He will never drink the most powerful elixir from his own innermost spring” (295). Nietzsche's Recluse was not avoiding the needs of society; he was saving “forces which will some day be urgently needed by culture” (314). Nietzsche was never really alone because “We are only in our own society always,” and he felt that “all that is akin to me in nature … speaks to me, praises me, urges me forward and comforts me” (10:188). Zarathustra's apotheosis is his “stillest hour; that is the name of my terrible mistress” (11:175). At the stillest hour, “the dream beginneth,” and this sensation makes him ask, “Did the ground give way?” (176).

Abbey's essays all come to their climaxes in the stillness of the desert, where he also experienced his own inner struggle to quiet his mind in the presence of wilderness. He often mocked himself because, alone in areas of great natural beauty, he usually became lonely for female companionship when he should have been overcome by the glories of the wilderness. And yet he was able to create powerful literary climaxes recounting moments of great peril and self-discovery in utter solitude. For example, in “Havasu” (1971b) he describes being stuck alone on a ledge while descending a dry watercourse miles from any other human being. Alternating between resignation to his fate, a resolution to try anything, and calling uselessly for help, he comes to understand the beauty and indifference of the wilderness. In a remarkable admission for a usually macho character, he tells us that he cried twice: first when he realized that he was doomed, and then when, almost beyond belief, he was able to climb up and over the overhanging face without equipment.

Nietzsche's description of true artists, wanderers, and poets reads like a description of Abbey's desert wanderings: “the spirit and the power of the dream come over us and we ascend, with open eyes and indifferent to all danger, the most dangerous paths, to the roofs and towers of fantasy, and without any giddiness, as persons born to climbing—we the night walkers by day! We artists! … We moon-struck and God-struck ones! We death-silent, untiring wanderers on heights which we do not see as heights, but as our plains, as our places of safety!” (1964 10:98). Abbey repeatedly wrote that one major purpose of wilderness areas was to serve as the refuge for free people and even as the base for revolutionary armies. Nietzsche stated that “in mountains, forests and solitudes [are] all the free spirits … who like himself, alternately merry and thoughtful, are wanderers and philosophers” (6:406, 11:122). He also associated wild country and radical ideas. “A true believer must be to us an object of veneration, but the same holds good of a true, sincere, convinced unbeliever. With men of the latter stamp we are near the high mountains where mighty rivers have their source” (7:49).

A number of Nietzschean social themes reappear in Abbey's work. Nietzsche advocated a simple but not ascetic life (12:66). He opposed and mocked both ostentatious consumption and asceticism: “We … want to be the poets of our lives, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters” (10:233); “Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty” (11:57). Abbey expressed similar opinions, especially in his later books, such as Fool's Progress, where his protagonist mocks his two closest college friends, a self-indulgent, wealthy drunk and a hippie, eco-freak ascetic (1990, 181-244).

Nietzsche often attacked materialism and the gospel of progress (1964, 14:72-73). He hated unnecessary commercial activity. “One is now ashamed of repose. … Thinking is done with a stop watch as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper” (10:254). He warned that “in the face of the monstrous machine, the individual despairs and surrenders” (14:29). This is the underlying political theme of all of Abbey's political nonfiction, especially Desert Solitaire, and his novels The Brave Cowboy, Fire on the Mountain, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Hayduke Lives!. Abbey especially attacked roads, dams, cities, and commerce, which all cause destruction of nature. His novels have become “the texts” of the Luddite elements in the United States today, especially the Earth First! movement.

Nietzsche was an advocate of social anarchy. He wrote that before civilization there was a “natural war of all against all,” but the wars that created the modern nation-states were worse than that. To him, the state used violence to preserve itself: “The State [is] for the majority of men a continually flowing source of hardship” (1964, 2:10-11). He felt that we all live in “the state, where the slow suicide of all—is called life” (11:55). He literally demonized the government: “A state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: I, the state, am the people.” He denied that the state should hold property, saying, “what ever [the state] hath it hath stolen” (54). Nietzsche attacked some of the German idealists who had provided philosophical support for the German national government, writing, “the doctrine … that the state is the highest end of man and there is no higher duty than to serve it: I regard this not as a relapse into paganism, but into stupidity” (4:135). He also attacked the government's use of religion. He said that the state uses priests to subvert freedom and to make the state “something wholly sacred” (6:338). He felt that this collusion between church and state had created “the new idol!” which is served by the “preachers of death” (11:54-55).

Nietzsche believed that “There where the state ceaseth—there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous … there where the state ceaseth … Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman?” (57). The image of the rainbow bridge is taken from Norse myth—the bridge connecting the pagans' heaven-on-Earth of the gods. At the end of the world, the giants will storm the bridge and set it afire (MacCulloch 1964, 23). Nietzsche was strongly opposed to the belief in gods or God. Perhaps this passage represents the end of the reign of ordinary humans by the evolution of Supermen, whom Nietzsche expected to symbolically destroy the bridge between the gods and humanity.

Even though he was an anarchist, Nietzsche did not offer specific plans to demolish the state, and he did not picture a utopia. He did not approve of nineteenth-century working-class anarchists because they acted out of envy of the rich, not out of their own creative power: “The Christian and the Anarchist—both are decadents” (1964, 16:87). “The Anarchist and the Christian are offspring of the same womb” (220).

Edward Abbey considered himself an anarchist (1994a, 59, 257) and at the University of New Mexico he titled his master's thesis “Anarchism and the Morality of Violence.” Abbey, like Nietzsche, thought of anarchism as a social movement. He wanted to ignore the state and the demands of polite society. Neither Nietzsche nor Abbey was the type of political anarchist who personally wanted to blow up state buildings or assassinate political leaders. Abbey wrote that “Anarchism is a secret yearning toward brotherhood. Anarchism is the demand for community” (1994a, 139). When he was near death, Abbey asked his friends to “Wrap my body in my anarch's flag” (276). Like Nietzsche, Abbey was not an advocate of any of the political forms of anarchism, even environmental anarchism such as Murray Bookchin's. Abbey did not have any specific plan to reach anarchy and did not design or advocate any particular utopian scheme. Abbey's and Nietzsche's anarchism is instead characterized by advocating extreme individualism. And for both writers, social anarchism was perhaps their most important issue.

To some readers who do not appreciate his irony, Nietzsche sounds like an anti-Semite, racist, and social Darwinist, but not to the late-nineteenth-century Nietzscheans who were liberals and who opposed overt racism. Here, too, Abbey resembles Nietzsche. Whereas most modern literary natural history writers in English also are liberals, antiracists, and opponents of anti-Semitism (Bridgman 1972), the persona of Abbey's essays is a mild, self-mocking racist (although he clearly disapproved of racism) (1971b, 97-98; 1994a, 220, 285, 305-7, 316, 333, 336, 352).

Nietzsche was an early advocate of population control, believing that overpopulation would lead to tyranny: “Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!” (1964, 11:55). Abbey believed that overpopulation leads not only to political tyranny but also to environmental damage. His mocking proposals for several politically unacceptable forms of birth control as well as U.S. immigration enforcement appeared in Mother Jones and several newspapers in 1983 (1994a, 307).

Abbey and Nietzsche also seem to have similar attitudes about women. Nietzsche, who seems to be a misogynist in some passages (1964, 11:75, 16:198), but many important modern feminists have found inspiration in his works (see Patton 1993). Abbey also seems sexist to some readers, and he actually mocked himself for it. His review of Susan Brownmiller's Femininity and Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts is a self-mocking, sexist essay in which he goes out of his way to insult both authors as well as Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, and to outrage feminists by quoting Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, and Margaret Mead out of context so that they appear to agree with his ironic, self-deprecating, comic sexism (1988, 199-205). Black Sun and The Fool's Progress both explore the problems that sexism created for Abbey and the women in his life.

Most of the English-speaking Nietzscheans were socialists or other leftists. Most American environmental or nature writers also tend to be anticapitalists, often dwelling on the ravages of industry on the natural environment. Nietzsche himself was very antisocialist. Abbey was not pro-industry, but he was primarily concerned with the destruction of the natural environment by federal agencies and other socialized segments of the American economy. “Industrial Tourism and the National Parks” (1971b) is primarily an attack on the U.S. Park Service for building too many roads and not promoting walking in the wilderness. Fire on the Mountain (1962) is an attack on the U.S. military. The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and The Journey Home (1977) are directed at federal agencies, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Corps of Engineers, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and federally funded highway projects.

Nietzsche and Abbey both revered the descriptive field sciences, though they deplored the effects of science and engineering on the culture of their times. The simplest facts of natural history had special value to them both. Nietzsche wrote that “natural History … should be expounded that every reader or listener may be continually aroused to strive after mental and physical health and soundness, after the feeling of joy” (1964, 7:99). Abbey believed “that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth in simple fact” (1971, x; see also p. 69).

Much of Nietzsche's work is an attack on professional academics, including philosophy teachers and writers (1964, 11:31, 12:257, 16:106). Abbey criticized English professors and literary critics (1971, x; 1990, 192-96) and also philosophers: “Heidegger was wrong, as usual, man is not the only living thing that exists” (1971b, 279). This is perhaps an unfair caricature of Heidegger, but it is typical of both Abbey and Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Abbey changed his mind about people he knew and writers he read. Later in life he praised Heidegger and likened him to Nietzsche and Zarathustra (1994a, 259).

The most important issue in Nietzsche's work is the belief in free will. He admired the ancient prophet Zarathustra because the latter believed strongly and fundamentally in human free will. Nietzsche was not convinced that it really existed, but he demanded that we believe it possible. Sometimes he feared that free will was an illusion (1964, 5:41, 106; 10:153) and that all actions in the world are predetermined (15:140). In other places he seems to believe that there truly is free will. Abbey epitomized the same ambivalence in one sentence: “I am free, I am compelled, to contemplate … the human labyrinth of hope and despair” (1971b, 155).

One of Nietzsche's greatest contributions to Western thought is the idea that value and meaning are given by people to the world. Nietzsche wrote that “it is absurd to praise and blame nature” (1964, 6:107). Abbey emphasized the different meanings of the desert. For tourists who look at Delicate Arch, the most famous attraction in Arches National Monument, he says, “Suit yourself. You may see a symbol, a sign, a fact, a thing without meaning or a meaning which includes all things” (1971b, 41). Later he explains his feeling that “the desert reveals itself nakedly and cruelly with no meaning but its own existence” (155). And again, at the end of Desert Solitaire, he repeats the idea forcefully: “What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualifications” (219).

Both Nietzsche and Abbey denied that morality comes from God. Nietzsche's anti-Christian position is still notorious, even among people who know nothing else about him. Abbey was not just an atheist but an active anti-Christian, and he made mocking references to Christianity. He wanted to sacrifice lambs to a coyote (1971b, 35); he claimed that a “Higher Power” helped him ruthlessly and needlessly kill a rabbit with a stone (38); tourists were “pilgrims” (40) who should be seeing the beauty of the countryside but who “find only God” (41). When a fisherman makes an obscene gesture at him, Abbey asks, “Invoking the Deity?” (198). And Abbey never wrote “the Bible”; he instead had to write, ironically, “the Holy Bible” (e.g., 256). Glorious sunsets were “God's own celestial pizza pies” (298). He stated flatly that Protestantism is a form of mental illness (118), and he claimed that he was “Beyond atheism, nontheism. I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth” (208). The last sentence is a direct quote from Nietzsche (1964, 11:7).

Unlike any other nature writer today or in the past, Abbey doubted the possibility of unmediated contact with the world, yet he also avoided being an idealist. He was able to do this because his attitudes toward the nature of reality and the act of knowing are the same as those of Nietzsche. The latter wrote that “semblance” is truth (1964, 12:50-51); “The real world … was always the world of appearance over again” (15:70; 84 sec. B); “consciousness remains on the surface” (15: sec. 676). Abbey emphasized appearance and surface. In the preface of Desert Solitaire, Abbey wrote, “It will be objected that the book deals too much with mere appearances, with the surface of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence. Here I must confess that I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any” (1971b, xi).

The attitude that there is only appearance is exemplified even by Abbey's favorite tree, a twisted, half-dead juniper. “The essence of the juniper continues to elude me unless, as I presently suspect, its surface is also the essence” (30). Unlike most nature writers from Emerson to the present, Abbey did not fool himself into thinking that he was mystically in touch with the spirit of nature. He wrote of his favorite tree, “Intuition, sympathy, empathy, all fail to guide me into the heart of this being—if it has a heart.” (30-31). He often expressed his belief that the land is indifferent “to our presence” (301). This is perhaps Abbey's most important contribution to nature writing, to break openly and totally with the transcendental tradition from which American nature writing descends.

Nietzsche felt that the personal apprehension of beauty in nature or art was only the beginning of a long process by which we became ennobled by thinking and even dreaming of the experience. “The noblest kind of beauty is that which … slowly filters into our minds, which we take away with us almost unnoticed, and which we encounter again in our dreams; but which, however, after having long lain modestly on our hearts, takes entire possession of us” (1964, 6:156). This is an excellent description of the developing love for the desert that Abbey fosters in readers, especially those from temperate climates.

Nietzsche wrote that the dreaming imagination creates the illusion of being (6:26, 14:14, 15:177). “There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is just another such error as God” (10:153). Nietzsche wrote that “there are no things”; they are fictions invented by us (15:117). This is probably the root of Abbey's interest in the dream state. He is unique among English-language nature writers in his playful suggestion that nature is a bad dream. He wrote about troubling dreams of nature, a very unusual topic for a nature writer, though it is becoming more common. He loved the desert, but he usually described it with words that emphasize its surreal aspect, such as “weird” (1971b, 2, 41, 102, 151, 193, 272), “fantastic” (3, 41, 205, 282), “monstrous” (6), “strange” (11, 13, 28, 29, 43, 137, 225), “grotesque” (11, 271), “bizarre” (29), “haunted” (40), “queer” (40), “illogical” (41), “unholy” (137), “malevolent” (204), and “unearthly” (218, 245). In Abbey's books the desert has hobgoblins (2, 133), ogres (6), skulls (37), voodoo (43), gargoyles (133, 165), ghosts (171, 204, 222, 233), phantom deer (248), and banshees (235). It is “a hoodoo land” (218, 245).

The Nietzschean interpretation that I have proposed above explains many odd passages in the writings of Edward Abbey. For example, there are many references to a flowing, returning, and becoming in nature that are treated very differently from the usual nutrient cycling in nature writing. This is because Abbey, like Nietzsche, sees the biogeochemical cycle as a Viconian returning (Vico 1948, bk. 5). This view is reflected in Abbey's essays, in which everything is moving and flowing; it could be his central theme. This is common enough in nature writing, but with Abbey it was an obsession. Desert Solitaire is constructed by the intertwining of a series of mythic images of flow, birth, thread, river, the maze, death, and return that unify and direct the landscape descriptions, travel notes, and political propaganda into a powerful symphonic whole. It is not unusual for nature writers to dwell on a theme of flow when describing rivers and nutrient cycles, but Abbey's flux and return images have an odd Nietzschean twist. For example, his hero Hayduke returned from the almost-dead once, and Jack Burns from The Brave Cowboy was brought back to life five times to be a character in Fire on the Mountain, Good News, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Hayduke Lives!.

The theme of the Viconian flux and the eternal return are central to Nietzsche's thought. The central test of each human being is the question, Do you love life so much that you can bear to live it over and over again? It is not clear if Abbey completely accepted the challenge because many of his references to the eternal return are humorous. But it is clear that the returning hero makes sense and fits into the natural flux that is the source of such important imagery in his work. If Abbey is not a Nietzschean, then his eternally returning hero Jack Burns is just peculiar.

Edward Abbey's treatment of the food chain is another example of a theme that seems very odd unless one employs a Nietzschean interpretation. For the past twenty-five years I have taught a course in which about twenty students read Desert Solitaire. I have only had two or three students who were not disgusted by the passage describing how Abbey needlessly killed a harmless cottontail rabbit with a rock (1971b, 38). I find that young readers, in particular, many of whom idealized Abbey up to this point, are put off and hurt by this passage. It is one of the most puzzling and troubling aspects of Abbey's works for most of my students. Worst of all, he does not even skin and eat the remains but leaves the body there to feed the vultures. However, this section of the book is much more understandable, perhaps even more acceptable, if one considers that Abbey is challenging us to accept that we are part of the food chain. This challenge was first raised by Nietzsche, who wrote, “Every moment devours the preceding one, every birth is the death of innumerable beings; begetting, living, murdering, all is one” (1964, 2:8). Of course, Nietzsche was partly being ironic because the nature enthusiasts he was mocking all said that they longed to merge with nature, but they did not mean they wanted to be eaten by a bear.

Nietzsche's alter ego, Zarathustra, returned from hunting in the wilderness, “but even yet a wild beast gazeth out of his seriousness—an unconquered wild beast!” (11:139). For Nietzsche and Abbey, the hunter and hunted become one at the moment of death and consumption. The back cover of The Journey Home is a self-portrait of Abbey as a buzzard. Abbey wrote often of his wish to die in the desert and to be eaten by buzzards, “transfigured into the fierce greedy eyes and unimaginable consciousness of a turkey vulture. Whereupon you, too, will soar on motionless wings high over the ruck and rack of human suffering. For most of us a promotion in grade, for some the realization of an ideal” (1971b, 135). Did Abbey remember the following passage from Zarathustra and imagine himself as the human buzzard that he later drew? “Awake and hearken, ye lonesome ones! From the future come winds with stealthy pinions, and to fine ears good tidings are proclaimed” (1964, 11:89). Nietzsche may have had angels or eagles in mind, but he also knew that the real Zoroastrians who followed Zarathustra did not bury their dead but left them on towers to be eaten by vultures.

Nietzsche wrote, “The weaker vessel is driven to the stronger … if possible to become one with it” (15:130). Abbey dramatized this in numerous passages, most of which involve predation. Abbey mused,

One can imagine easily the fondness, the sympathy, the genuine affection with which the owl regards the rabbit before rending it into edible portions.

Is the affection reciprocated? In that moment of truce, of utter surrender, when the rabbit still alive offers no resistance but only waits, it is possible that the rabbit also loves the owl?

(1971b, 112)

He noted ironically that young American Indians dress and act like drug store cowboys; is this another case of the loser loving and becoming one with the winner, as with the rabbit and owl?

I have not yet had a student who agreed with the fancy that the rabbit loves the owl, but Nietzsche and Abbey demanded that the “nature lover” accept the true personal meaning of the food chain as a test of honesty to the Earth. Abbey killed a rabbit and left it for the vultures. He wrote, “We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth” (38). This last passage is fully Nietzschean, and if you accept the Nietzschean interpretation of the love of the rabbit and the Indian for their destroyers, these passages make sense. If Abbey is not a Nietzschean, these passages are not only disturbing and puzzling but also repugnant and out of place in these books about nature.

In conclusion, it is obvious that Edward Abbey read and valued the works of Nietzsche. Abbey's poetry in Earth Apples (1994b) and his book of aphorisms, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1994c), are unmistakably Nietzschean in feeling and subject matter. He used many themes in his works that had been used earlier by Nietzsche, and he used them so often and as such a profound part of his writing, I believe that he should be called a Nietzschean. Many readers often find Abbey's images and statements contradictory, challenging, and even nonsensical, but as I have argued, some of these confusing and bold passages are understandable from a Nietzschean perspective.

When critics explain that Shelly was a Platonist, it is illuminating because Platonism is commonly included in a college education. Even though deconstructionism, which began with Nietzsche, is now popular in some literary circles, few English scholars or literary critics have read, much less digested, the philosophy of Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I hope that other readers of nature writing will be tempted to carry out more intensive Nietzschean analyses of Abbey's work. For example, examining the act of masking in Abbey would require careful study; and closer looks at the influence of Nietzschean social anarchism and its relationship to political anarchism in Abbey's work would certainly have positive results. The influence of Nietzschean epistemology on Abbey's perception of the desert might also give valuable insights into the author's way of presenting landscape. Another interesting project would be to develop a chronology of Abbey's taste in philosophers and his writing subjects and styles.

I hope that other readers will find that a Nietzschean perspective is helpful in interpreting some of the puzzling and even troubling ideas and images that make Abbey's writing so interesting to the general public, environmentalists, and to academic readers. He is only one of a set of important nature writers whose works can be illuminated by some background in Nietzsche. Jack London considered himself a Nietzschean, and it is likely that the influence extended, directly or indirectly to his literary circle, including George Sterling and perhaps Mary Austin. It has been suspected for many years that Nietzsche was a major influence on Robinson Jeffers—also a friend of London, Austin, and Sterling—and it seems likely that William Everson and Richard Shelton are Nietzschean. Abbey quoted both Jeffers and Shelton more than once.

It is time for the readers and writers of literary natural history essays to realize that Nietzsche, as much or perhaps more than Emerson, was a philosopher of nature and that he influenced many of the most important writers in Europe and America in his day. Through them, many of his positive feelings for nature have been transmitted to people who have never read his books. Most of all, we must recognize, even celebrate, the rebirth of his philosophy in the works of Edward Abbey, who has inspired so many young people to care for the natural world. Nietzsche and Abbey were prickly and problematic people—and demanding writers—but they have captured the imagination of a generation that cannot be reached by sentimental nature writing, but who have taken up the challenge Nietzsche presented over a century ago: “Be true to the earth.”

Note

I received significant assistance in understanding Nietzsche by reading Nietzsche's Gift (1977) by Dr. Harold Alderman of the philosophy department at Sonoma State University, and he was kind enough to read this essay in an early form and when nearly completed, in the process correcting several errors. Clarke Abbey graciously took the time to answer my questions andy clarify several matters of importance. Dr. Ann Ronald of the University of Nevada, Reno, generously read an early version of the paper. The editor of this volume, Dr. Peter Quigley, made numerous suggestions concerning both style and substance that greatly improved this contribution.

Works Cited

Abbey, Edward. 1956. The Brave Cowboy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

———. 1959. “Anarchism and the Morality of Violence.” M.A. thesis, University of New Mexico.

———. 1962. Fire on the Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

———. 1971a. Black Sun. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra.

———. [1968] 1971b. Desert Solitaire. Reprint, New York: Ballantine.

———. 1973. Cactus Country. New York: Time-Life.

———. 1975. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

———. 1977. The Journey Home. New York: Dutton.

———. 1979. Abbey's Road. New York: Dutton.

———. 1980. Good News. New York: Elsevier-Dutton.

———. 1981. Down the River. New York: Dutton.

———. 1984. Beyond the Wall. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

———. 1988. One Life at a Time, Please. New York: Henry Holt.

———. 1989. Hayduke Lives! Boston: Little, Brown and Co.

———. 1990. The Fool's Progress. New York: Henry Holt.

———. 1994a. Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey. Ed. David Petersen. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.

———. 1994b. Earth Apples: The Complete Poetry of Edward Abbey. Ed. David Petersen. New York: St. Martin's Press.

———. 1994c. A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Vox Clamantis in Deserto. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Picture Books

———. 1970. Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains. Photos by Eliot Porter. New York: Dutton.

———. 1971. Slickrock. Photos by Philip Hyde. New York: Scribner's.

———. 1977. The Hidden Canyon. Photos by John Blaustein. New York: Penguin.

———. 1979. Desert Images. Photos by David Muench. New York: Chanticleer Press.

Alderman, Harold. 1977. Nietzsche's Gift. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Armstrong, Edward A. 1973. Saint Francis: Nature Mystic. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bridgman, Patrick. 1972. Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of Nietzsche's Impact on English and American Literature. Leicester, England: University Press.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1911. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.

Hepworth, James, and Gregory McNamee, eds. 1985. Resist Much, Obey Little: Some Notes on Edward Abbey. Salt Lake City: Dream Garden Press.

Kauffmann, LeRoy C. 1963. “The Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on American Literature.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.

Lutts, Ralph H. 1990. The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Press.

MacCulloch, Canon John A. 1964. “Eddic Mythology.” In Mythology of All Races, vol. 2. New York: Cooper Square.

McCann, Garth. 1977. Edward Abbey. Boise State University Western Writers Series, no. 29. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press.

Morland, M. A. 1958. “Nietzsche and the Nineties.” Contemporary Review (Apr.).

Muir, John. 1894. The Mountains of California. New York: Century.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1909] 1964. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. 16 vols. Ed. Oscar Levy. Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell.

Nicholson, Marjorie Hope. 1959. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Patton, Paul, ed. 1993. Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory. London: Routledge.

Ronald, Ann. 1982. The New West of Edward Abbey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Sorrell, Roger D. 1988. St. Francis of Assisi and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vico, Giambattista. 1948. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. 3d ed. Trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.