Longer Views: Extended Essays

  For my generation of New York children, who, during the fifties and sixties, walked into that gallery of the Museum of Modern Art displaying Picasso’s monumental Guernica (before, in the initial years of the eighties, it was returned to its Spanish home), before any of the horrific and angular images from that night of violence during the Spanish Civil War could register as content, the first and overwhelming experience was of the sheer amount of paint, white and black, spread ceiling to floor, edge to edge, over an entire wall! There simply was no art object within the doors of any other museum in the city that used as much!

  Now, after perusing the above account (its verbal reduction straining after the historical ding an sich with italics and exclamation points), suppose a reader (who may or may not have walked into that gallery on the second floor of the 53rd Street museum during those years) then goes on to gaze at the next three-by-five postcard of that awesome work (or, indeed, even, in Spain, at the work itself), trying to get some feel of that scale, of that material. For that reader, then, something generated by my childhood experience of the painting will have been exchanged with something of the social “aura,” in all their shared semiotic complexities, repairabilities, interpenetrations, articulations, and flexibilities.

  The assumption implicit in Benjamin’s essay, that this “aura” is the result of a simple historic, and uncritical imposition by the powerful on the weak, is one of the places Benjamin skirts vulgar Marxism. But because they are constituted of absence/difference, signs can only be transformed/exchanged. It is almost impossible simply to “impose” them in an allegory of unidirectional power. The influence of royalty on the “aura” cannot be denied any more than can the influence of popular art and social poverty: in the play of fictions, in the “aura’s” construction, there is as much work, both positive and negative, from below as there is from above.

  This is what Benjamin (as well as Adorno!) misses. And that construction—that “aura”—is what Wagner, more than any other nineteenth-century artist, helped engineer throughout the Western bourgeoise. Against that “aura,” Artaud’s esthetic enterprise was to take precisely the plasticity, the dimensionality of art—all that was lost in mechanical reproduction, all that was material about any and every medium of reproduction, all that was in excess of the “aura”—and seize it as the domain of the theater, use it as the substance of art.

  What I must leave you with is not the satisfying counter that Artaud’s enterprise seems to make against what, till now, we have for the purposes of our fiction been silently considering “Wagnerism,” but rather with an irresolution, an unsettling, a disturbance:

  Notice, however uncomfortably, that Artaud, even as he opposes our Wagnerism, appropriates something pivotal from it, nor can he acknowledge its historical existence within that tradition. But he escapes that tradition no more than he escapes the critical system of “unity of impression”/“flawed transitions” that dogs him from his first letters from Rivière to his own last letter to Thévenin.

  What he appropriates is all that, Ludwig aside, Wagner had to give up to make his work support its popularity, its pervasiveness, its ubiquitous-ness—all that Wagner had to put aside to accelerate the mass acceptance of his art once it was allied with the social nostalgia for royal patronage that still makes the new baby of Prince Charles and Princess Diana or the death of Princess Grace fit subject for years and years for a presumably democratic audience the size of the National Enquirer’s; all that is implied by Adorno’s critique: for that, in terms of content, was what had contoured a “respect” (to use Artaud’s word) for the “formal” even in the most revolutionary: the desire for mass acceptance in the first place.

  Wagner’s desire to bring beauty, pleasure, and enlightenment to the people was not very different from his contemporary Matthew Arnold’s desire, as expressed in “Culture and Its Enemies,” to bring to an oppressed people “sweetness and light,” even with Arnold’s own reminder: “I mean real sweetness and real light” (italics Arnold’s).

  Making it accessible, making it popular, is nowhere near as important as making it available. That, of course, is the modern problem in a world where Wagnerism creeps everywhere without its name. How to read, we are all presumably capable of learning—even a little Latin, if less Greek.

  In 1948, the year of Artaud’s death, Auden wrote:

  Wagner was the first, as Yeats was the latest, to create a whole cosmology out of pre-Christian myth, to come out openly for the pagan conception of the recurrent cycle as against the Christian and liberal humanist conception of historical development as an irreversible process. Though the characters of the Ring wear primitive trappings, they are really, as Nietzsche pointed out, contemporaries, “always five steps from the hospital,” with modern problems, “problems of the big city.”

  Need I point out that Nietzsche did not, in 1888 when he wrote Der Fall Wagner, mean mental hospital, but rather that, once wounded, Wagner’s warriors always acted in their death-throes as if they could at any moment get up and avail themselves of the newly antiseptic nineteenth-century medicine. But much of modernism, if not the whole romantic movement, can be written of with some analytic perspicacity as a sequence of reactions to various stages in the growth of the newer, bigger, more boisterous, more sophisticated (but also more impersonal) cities that were growing about the European landscape. Whether it is the early romantics’ glorification of nature or Flaubert’s attack on the narrow-mindedness of the provinces, both presuppose the city as a foil. Baudelaire attacked the urban landscape mercilessly and directly. If, in comparison, Wagner’s art seems to be about not much more than some nineteenth-century urban architectural ornamentation brought to life for the evening, we must remember that, in terms of the Zeitgeist philosophy of unity and coherence that dominated the century Wagner’s art was created in, the knowledgeable viewer was expected to be able to read in those ornaments a commentary on the trajectory and composition of every great avenue running by them, the relationship of the various neighborhoods they joined, or the varied social classes that used them, as well as of those classes’ and avenues’ origins and destinations. And it was this sort of allegory Wagner strove to inscribe in his Festival Play. It is the desire for a vision of history the city cedes us.

  Wagner had written his four-part Festival Play, Der Ring des Nibelungren, for the enlightenment of the German peoples, in hopes of founding an inchoately German art. You are Christians now (he said in effect). But less than a millennium ago, this was our religion. Look at these gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines, dwarfs, and dragons, if you really want to see what is going on with us today. Be quiet, now, and pay attention. . . .

  But the cyclic in Wagner is largely the Ring’s allegorical repetition of the present. The development of the story is actually dialectical—Hegel’s historical dialectic. But that’s another aspect that tends, today, to suggest Marx when no Marx is there—if only because of Marx’s materialist revision of Hegel’s historical notion.

  With all respect to Auden, I wonder if it is all that easy to separate the cyclic from the progressive in “modern” thought. Each, repressed, is at play in the concept of the other. That point made, his is nevertheless another version of the observation that Wagner begins precisely what is continued in the myth of modernism.

  Myths are conservative.

  As Ernst Cassirer remarked so many years ago now, the committee nature of their composition assures it. And Wagner today, as more and more literature devoted to him fills the shelves, is more and more a myth—the conservative myth of nineteenth-century art.

  But Robert Scholes has also remarked, more recently and possibly more to the point, that myth is the opposite of literature. It is the opposite of what is personal, persistent, and idiosyncratic. To write any myth down—even Wagner’s—is immediately to subject it to ironies, to resystematize it, to make it a fiction, as dramatists as different as Shaw, Gide, Sartre, Giraudoux, and Anouilh all seemed to know as they proceeded through their
own versions of early modernism. Were Shaw’s Saint Joan, Gide’s Oedipe, Cocteau’s Orphée, or Sartre’s Les Mouches (not to mention Joyce’s Ulysses) trying to manifest something immanent in the Wagnerian enterprise? Or were they arguing against it with their own bright analytic laughter? Was Wagner himself?

  We might speculate, but that is to set out on still another side-path in an exploration that already may have veered dangerously toward the diffuse.

  And what of the elements in Wagner’s music that, kitsch or not, clearly transcend the Wagnerian fiction we are weaving here? I mean the chromaticism that Wagner, reaching after the most emotional sounds he dared, admitted into the theater with Tristan und Isolde, which became the springboard, under Schoenberg’s twentieth-century tutelage, for the austere and impersonal compositions of Webern, if not the richly personal and passionate atonality of Berg?

  Let us return to Artaud’s text:

  “I think both the theater and we ourselves have had enough of psychology.”

  Is he addressing Wagner the operatic psychologist? Is he addressing Taine?

  Taine said specifically of the novelist, almost as soon as he commenced his supplementary 1867 volume on the modern: “In my opinion he is a psychologist, who naturally and involuntarily sets psychology at work. He is nothing else, nor more. He loves to picture feelings, to perceive their connections, their precedents, their consequences . . .”

  It must be said that the domain of the theater is not the psychological but the plastic and physical [Artaud wrote]. And it is not a question of whether the physical language of theater is capable of achieving the same psychological resolution as the language of words, but whether there are not attitudes in the realm of thought and intelligence that words are incapable of grasping and that gestures and everything partaking of a spatial language attain with more precision than they. . .. It is not a matter of suppressing speech in the theater but of changing its role and especially reducing its position, of considering it as something else than a means of conducting human characters to their external ends, since the theater is concerned only with feelings and passions in conflict with one another, and man with man, in life.

  The way “feelings and passions conflict with one another, and man with man, in life,” was, of course, as Taine told us, psychology in the nineteenth century. It was only with the dissemination of Wagnerism that it ceased being what goes on between subjects and, instead, became specifically what goes on within the individual subject; for as the solitary experience, whether in public or in private, became the model for the aesthetic experience (as with bourgeois—but not working-class—religion), it also became the model for all significant experience, including the psychological. In short, Artaud unwittingly asks for a return to the nineteenth-century psychology of Taine (and of the English novelists Taine examines), precisely as he demands that we abandon the psychology Wagner helped replace it with.

  I’d also like to discuss, of course, the contemporary attempt to combine Wagner directly with a gallery of Artaudian effects in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film Parsifal: at one point Wagner seriously considered having Parsifal’s part, from the young man’s anointment on, sung by a woman. This androgyny, which Wagner finally abandoned, Syberberg returns to the opera, in his film, with some effect. In that discussion I’d only point out, however, that when such an aggressively avant-garde achievement is produced in Lincoln Center by as basilaic a figure as Francis Ford Coppola, it begins immediately to reify precisely the Wagnerism the film so vigorously tries to critique—a reification that still awaits an equally vigorous deconstruction. But, then, whenever the work of an individual artist is presented by an institution, state or private, with its attendant respect, its sense of a value—even if it is assumed to be wholly aesthetic—chosen and committed to, a value sense we cannot escape in such a situation, we are reinventing, on whatever scale (a gallery exhibit, the choice of a local theater group), Wagnerism; we are reinscribing its form in contemporary society. This is indeed why, as long as art and institutions are involved with one another, this aspect of Wagnerism cannot be rescinded by post-modernism. For it is as much the institutional framing as anything that can render the most polylogically conceived work a monologue.

  And even Julia Kristeva’s radical question for literature, “Who speaks?” is the obvious and inevitable demand before the Wagnerian monologue, transferred directly to literature by the monologues of Joyce.

  In such a light, how different her question seems from that implicit in Bakhtin, “Who contests? Who conflicts? Who is in dialogue?”—questions that can only be answered in the plural, in the social, in which the frame is always called into analytical question, rather than by individual observation of some moment of subjective individual totality in which meaning, melody, and harmony fill up the whole of the theater, the whole of consciousness, as an individual subject portrays an individual subject for an individual subject.

  Is Artaud’s theater really a refutation of Wagner, then? Or is it an appropriation, this time of what was artistically radical in Wagner, despite his conservative politics? Is it an appropriation in the same way that Bettina Knapp’s words in the first pages of this study are ambiguous not because they actually describe both Wagner and Artaud, but because, however uncritically, however inevitably, Knapp has appropriated her rhetoric from the ubiquitous Wagner fiction to describe in Artaud what is in excess of a monologic Wagner?

  To the extent that we see Artaud’s work as a single, impassioned, and—yes—deranged monologue, then he is very much a modernist. For in order to see it that way, we must evaporate “all individual or isolated details as things that can be cast away leaving only the whole, the coherent.”

  That’s Nietzsche, you recall, age twenty-five, in his most uncritical, nineteenth-century mode.

  The modernists—whether Joyce or James, Proust or Pound, Eliot or Stevens or Frost or Faulkner—are all basically monologuists. (Pound’s purpose in his cutting and critique of the original version of Eliot’s The Waste Land was basically to bring unity to it by turning it from a polylogue into a monologue.) And it is the monologue that Wagner gave to the text of modernism as something to value, to aspire to, to seek a totality in, either in terms of execution or in terms of interpretation. To the extent that Artaud’s monologue breaks up, will not remain a single cascading torrent, but fragments and becomes a dialogue between several voices, deranged, supremely rational, conservative or radical in political terms, none with a complete and totalized argument but none, at the same time, able to exist without the others, because—and after the correspondence with Riviére, is there any other way to read Artaud?—it is the existence of each that makes the others signify, Artaud implies what might be called, with whatever reservations and qualifications, a post-modern aesthetic.

  Certainly his significance as a writer is that there is so much in his texts that urges us on to this sort of reading.

  We critics never tire of reminding theater directors. But they nevertheless go on and, above the smoke wafting the stage at the end of Götterdämmerung, as they recall something of Wagner’s great and noisy “steam curtain” at Bayreuth (“which looked exactly like what it really was and made the theater smell like a laundry,” commented Shaw), project a restored ring of light on the cyclorama, thinking, hoping it sounds the note (as Auden says at the end of what may be the greatest of the modernist monologues, “Caliban to the Audience,” among that most wonderful monologue collection, The Sea and the Mirror [1944]) of the “restored relation.” Transitions are all in order. Unity is immanent. That—certainly, somehow, they believe—is what Wagner must have meant.

  How does one recall for them that at the end of the four-part Festivial Play, while the gold is restored to the Rhine, precisely its circularity, its closure, its cyclic implications, its formal properties as a ring are what are obliterated by the restoration? Whether one agrees either with its analysis or with that analysis’s presuppositions, the Ring is about what it takes to break
out of the cyclic, the mythic, and into history and progress. It is about what is necessary to get free of Nietzsche’s eternal return. It is about a cycle at last and finally shattered. With the “praise Brunhilde” motif, love survives the destruction, through Götterdämmerung’s final diminuendo D-flat major chord (musically as far away from the opening E-flat major of Das Rheingold, at least in terms of large, democratic whole tones, as it is possible to get—for those searching for developmental significance); but it survives as a spirit, in, with, and purely as music, a memory of a great and heroic love, hovering above the nineteenth-century ideal image of material and spiritual ruin Wagner had been so struck with in Bakúnin—a ruin that, with its silent inhabitants, alone could allow (if we may strain Wagner’s allegory; but can any contemporary reading of it be other than a misprision?), as Wagner or Bakúnin, or even the hard-headed Heubner might have seen it, Time and History to begin.

  Let us see, then, destruction and ruin at the end of the Ring! (Let us, too, be content—however strangely—that the House has burned down.) Certainly not restoration!

  Myself, I do not think we can “refute” Wagner’s theater with any real historical understanding; we cannot deny its effect on our concept of art, or—indeed—on our Wagnerian fiction, any more than we can “redeem” it and still remain true to Wagner’s political notions. It is currently too pervasive. It is historically too specific.

  But I do think we can use writers like Artaud (and Kristeva and Bakhtin) to subvert it at strategic points, to interrogate it, to reveal through their own appropriations from it, appropriations both from its centralities and its marginalities, the nature of its tyrannies—just as Wagner’s theater interrogated, subverted, and systemically revised the theater and the art that came before it. It is through such historical awareness that I believe we can best say “what has been said and even say what has not been said in a way that belongs to us,” with whatever fictions, for whatever strategic purposes, we undertake as writer and as reader, as audience and as artist.