[Originally posted on Positive Liberty on Aug 17th 2005 08:18 pm]

Continuing with re-examining old favorites….

It might seem strange that I’m so fond of A Separate Peace, given that the novel commemorates all that is contemptible in the human soul. It is a novel of overwhelming ressentiment. It is the autobiography of the “second-hander.” It makes a fascinating contrast with The Fountainhead.

Finny is a model of Nietzsche’s yes-saying natural aristocrat: inherently joyful, relishing every experience he encounters, including even punishments, if original enough. He is supremely charismatic; healthy; strong; he asks nothing of the world except experience. Finny may not even realize how lonely he really is; he doesn’t seek proteges: they simply gravitate toward him. When Finny trips Gene, and Gene responds by wrestling with him, Finny is delighted. He doesn’t seek power over others, just a responsive show of strength. Finny is the “dancing god,” as when Gene’s describes him balancing on a canoe, or calls his gait “relaxation in motion.” Finny wants no cowering, timid obedience. He wants a challenge, an echo of his joy of existence. As the “boy on the bicycle” thinks to himself in The Fountainhead, “Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers--show me yours--show me that it possibl--show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.” This is how Finny sees the world. But Gene cannot comprehend it. He is pulled toward Finny’s natural leadership, yet secretly hates his strength of personality. He feels himself conquered by it. He wants to follow the rules, not to be faced with the challenge of confronting the universe on his own, which is what Finny represents. Gene secretly wants to see Finny punished for wearing the school tie as a belt, and is flabbergasted and angry that Finny gets away with it. He wants to see Finny brought down a peg. Finny, as a creator, is concerned with the conquest of nature (he jumps into the river from a tree directly) while Gene, the second-hander, is concerned with the conquest of men (when he falls into the river, it is because he feels pressured by his friends, or is literally pushed by Quackenbush).

Gene does recognize that all that is beautiful in the world comes from Finny’s personality. On the beach, while Finny sleeps like a dead man, the world is grey and empty. Only when he awakens does the world come to life. Finny is concerned with breaking the swimming record just for its own sake--he doesn’t care whether others know it or not, because their approval means nothing to him. He is the “free spirit”; the natural aristocrat for whom popular applause is nice, but unimportant. To Gene, this is astonishing. Gene is the “bound spirit.” He tells us that for him the world is frozen in the unquestionable certainties of 1942, and that nothing will ever change. He studies, but not for the joy of learning--Moliere and Voltaire are all the same to him. He is never happier than when, at the end of the novel, he falls into step with the marching cadence. Service, and life by rules imposed by others, is his only way of making sense in the world.

For Finny, rules, and authority, and trigonometry tests don’t matter, because life is what matters--the experience; the confrontation with nature; the joy of being. Gene lives through others, and he cannot believe that Finny just lives as he lives, for the sake of existence. There simply must be an ulterior motive, he thinks--Finny must be trying to sabotage his academic standing. And so Gene’s secret ressentiment of Finny’s strength and joy and charisma morphs into a dark hatred of Finny for daring to be so good and so noble. Gene has a secret desperation to be independent, but he lacks the strength to simply be himself, the only real path to meeting Finny on an equal plane. While Finny is away, Gene considers the possibility of enlisting in the Army, and it gives him an exhilarating, and finally terrifying, sense of independence:

To enlist. To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everyting down to my last bit of clothing. To break the pattern of my life. That complex design I’d been weaving since birth with all its dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set against a conventional background of domestic white and schoolboy blue. All those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to keep flowing. I yearned to take giant military shears to it. Snap--bitten off in an instant, and nothing left in my hands but spools of khaki which could weave only a plain flat khaki design, however twisted they might be…. There was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted; anything I loved…. It was a night made for hard thoughts. Sharp stars pierced singly through the blackness. Not sweeps of them or clusters or milky ways as there might have been in the south, but single, chilled points of light as unromantic as knife blades…. There was no one to stop me but myself. Putting aside soft reservations about what I owed Devon and my duty to my parents and so on, I reckoned my responsibilities by the light of the unsentimental night sky and knew that I owed no one anything. I owed it to myself to beat this crisis in my life when I chose, and I chose now. I bounced zestfully up the dormitory stairs.

But immediately after this first experience of fearlessly facing nature, Finny returns, and Gene reverts into his old habits. He cannot be Finny; he doesn’t know how to try; how to want to try. Instead, he must either serve him or rule him. Usually, he chooses to serve: “And a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.” Gene doesn’t want to go to the tree to jump in with the rest of the Suicide Society, but each time--looking into the distance at the figures who appear like “white flags”--he gives in without a word of protest. He always gives in. He is constantly looking for what others will say or do or think or be. He never approaches life directly, but always in the light coming off of other people. He is fundamentally afraid, and hates Finny for not being afraid. Visiting him in the hospital, Gene has a revealing conversation with him:

“I thought I could reach out and get hold of you.”
I flinched violently away from him. “To drag me down too!”
He kept looking vaguely over my face: “To get hold of you, so I wouldn’t fall off.”

The idea of trying to drag Gene down is utterly alien to Finny, but it’s the first thing Gene thinks of. Finny is the Dionysian, who feels “overfulness of life,…[a] desire for destruction, change, and becoming [which is] an expression of…future-pregnant strength,” while Gene is the typical figure of ressentiment, feeling “the hatred of the misdeveloped, needy, underprivileged, who destroys, who must destroy, because the existing, and even all existence, all being, outrages and provokes him…who as it were revenges himself on all things by impressing on them…and burning into them his image, the image of his torture.” Nietzsche, Gay Science § 370

Describing his ideal man, Friedrich Nietzsche writes,

The highest type of free man should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by “tyrants” are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar.

Twilight of the Idols IX § 38 And Knowles uses this analogy to Caesar. Finny is reading the Gallic War; on the tree before the fall, Gene notices the white stadium in the distance; Finny later flees a sort of senatorial chamber, falls down marble stairs as others look on, like Caesar on the capitol steps, and lies on his bed muttering to himself in Latin.

Rather than putting his need for psychological independence to good use, in making himself, Gene resorts to assassination. To again quote Nietzsche (in a passage on why Brutus assassinates Caesar in the Shakespeare play): “Independence of soul--that is at stake here! No sacrifice can then be too great: even one’s dearest friend one must be willing to sacrifice for it, though he be the most glorious human being, embellishment of the world, genius without peer.” (The Gay Science § 98). He jounces the tree limb.

In the end, Gene cannot conquer nature, he has to make a “separate peace” with it by betraying his ally in the midst of this “war”: tearing down the strength that stands as a permanent rebuke to all that he might have been. The excellence in A Separate Peace consists of its perfectly consistent description of Gene’s inability to face nature head on--his need to live through, above, or under other human beings; his incapacity. (It’s a feeling very common to high school and college-age boys. I know, I was one. But while A Separate Peace brilliantly describes the illness (much like Catcher in The Rye) it says nothing as to the solution. To my knowledge, only The Fountainhead does that.) And the salvation of A Separate Peace is that Gene at least has the minute decency to regret his treason, and call it what it was.