transcending Nietzsche

TONY AND JANE CHRONICLES

The consciousness of appearance.— How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer,—I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the conciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a somnambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall.—Nietzsche GS

Tony and Jane are clearly dreamers – a pair of cultural somnabulists – caught up in the ramifications of living in their post-liberation-war contemporary Zimbabwean culture. Tony clearly has aspirational desires, initially to keep his head above the water. He is a dreamer of a conservative sort. Such is the nature of his dreaming solely within the conservative paradigm that he cannot see that nature of Jane, or of her dreaming. Her dreams take her outside of the cultural paradigm of conservatism, in which Tony resides. The nature of her dreaming exposes her to animistic dangers that Tony, with his limited scope on his own life, is unable to protect her from. The conservative male dream that one becomes the head of the suburban household by toeing the line at work and by embracing “rationality” in one’s life’s goals is shown to be severly undermined by the daemonic forces brought into play within the nice suburban home, on the basis of Jane’s dreaming. Tony and Jane – or Tony-Jane, as the author occasionally refers to them, for their dreaming is compensatory of each-other’s shortfalls with regard to full participation in life – are participating in life as products of their society and culture. Only a shaman can enter their world, through dream-states, in order to appraise the situation they are in for what it is. Only he can truly laugh, and critique the absurdities that ensue because of their blind cultural participation in the status quo. The shaman passes between dream states of cultural normality into an alternative state of consciousness, and in so doing he reflects tacitly the degree to which a life which they could fully call their own is not within the reach of Tony and Jane.