It was, of course.
But from inside such a production is simply not the way to experience an opera—especially one new to you; even if, as I had, you’ve read the libretto in preparation.
Now the drummers came out to stand beside us. In rehearsal everyone had been in street clothes. Nor had they carried any actual drums. The great bass instruments they hauled out on their bellies now were streaked with paint to dull their stretched skins. Their rims were blotched with brown and gilt. One of the drummers stood no more than eighteen inches from me.
Diaz rendered the prize song.
Eva presented him with the medallion.
There was a terrifying roar—
Because of the paint, I’d assumed the drums were props (to the extent I’d thought of it at all)—and that any actual drumming would occur down in the percussion section of the orchestra pit. But, no. These drums were real; they were played by on-stage costumed musicians!
The sound of six bass drums in a fortissimo roll, starting all at once, no more than two feet from your ear, is louder than any cannon-shot or thunderclap!
I nearly vaulted over the edge of the bridge in heart-thudding astonishment, sure that something huge had fallen onto the stage. I lost my balance, staggered from one of the bridge’s steps to the step below, and had to be steadied by the burgher behind me.
The chorus began its joyful “Ehrt eure deutschen Meister . . .” and soon the real curtain closed, its inner lining for the first few feet of its journey before us looking no different from the black into which I’d been staring and at which, since the drum roll, I’d been blinking and panting—till suddenly it swung into the light and turned gold.
It was my last Met production.
But how can one really speak of one’s first exposure to Wagner’s music? How can one speak of a first exposure to “Here Comes the Bride,” that, in the years since it first opened the second act of Lohengrin at the Weimer premiere on the 28th of August in 1850 (during Wagner’s Zurich exile after his part in the Dresden Uprising of 1849), has wound throughout our lives, now seriously, now as parody, from childhood on? How can one speak of a first exposure to the Liebestod that has yearned throughout the three acts of Tristan und Isolde since its first performance—commanded by young King Ludwig of his idol—in 1866? When I was a child, played on a diapasoned studio console it was the radio, then television, theme song for two different soap operas! As an adult, I’ve encountered its strains, uncredited, on the soundtracks of at least three “adult” movies. How can one speak of a first exposure to “The Ride of the Valkyries,” that opens the third act of the Ring cycle’s second opera, Die Walküre? Such music is so ubiquitous that to quote it anywhere outside a production of the opera in which it initially occurred is to lampoon it in much the same way that the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Rossini’s William Tell Overture produce a similar air of self-mockery.
What is being mocked in all these cases is, of course, the very concept of High Art as expressed by opera—just as the Venus de Milo or the Mona Lisa are, at this point, self-parodic works, as they are brought round to represent art itself.
Wagner’s influence as a shaper of the notion of art that all these icons both present at the level of sublime experience and re-present in satiric self-pollution (and buxom sopranos in horned helmets—Wagner’s virginal warrior goddesses—are another image from the same gallery) is totally pervasive. Indeed, one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner’s influence is because we are always within it. We can never get outside it, never see it as an organized stage picture. There is no vantage from which we can slip into the audience and look at it objectively. We try to contain it by saying that Wagner’s legacy (along with Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s) is that which we call modernism in art. But, for better or worse, it would be more accurate to say that Wagner’s legacy is that which any modern or post-modern—at the gut level—recognizes as art itself, whether our response is to go nodding off in boredom at the whole scattered operation, whether we wander about, gazing appreciatively up at this or that grandly engineered effect, or whether, now and again, some aesthetic thunderclap galvanizes us for moments, hours, or years, shaking us to our footsoles.
In 1982, I began to listen seriously to Tristan und Isolde and the four operas of the Ring. But there were (and still are) at least a dozen composers, classical and modern, who, in terms of pleasure and significance, have meant more to me for years—and will always mean more. Today, we must remember that in the marketplace of culture, all judgments of taste are personal; none are fixedly canonical, and it is only illiterates either in the synchronic array of artistic rhetorical provender or the diachronic sweep of developing cultural discursive practices, who, hoping to achieve some dubious authority if not mere momentary stability before nearchaos, let themselves think that great art and not-great art, major art and minor art, or strength and weakness in poets has any meaning outside a given community, communities which themselves are always partial, which by themselves never constitute a people: that is one of Artaud’s lessons.
Listening to Wagner, I have found him instructive, definitely. He is enjoyable, certainly. His music is beautiful, undeniably—in the terms in which he chose to make it so. Yet for me he remains a kind of super kitsch, and his philosophical aspirations far outdistance any possible achievement. But of such philosophical failures our age makes heroes: that is Artaud’s other lesson.
* * *
So far, in writing of Artaud, I have written only of Artaud-the-Myth. I have quoted him, synopsized him, and narrated his life only to highlight Artaud-the-Personality: the obscene, sensitive, energetic man, obsessed with the sensual, repelled by the sexual, critical, crusading, and at once hopelessly wounded, who is Artaud-le-Mômo.
But till now I have purposely avoided writing of Artaud-the-Mind—the problem of Artaud-the-Mind. For that problem, especially when paced at the center of such a personality, as it manifests itself (once we have located it) with each Artaudian sentence that strays to the edge of coherence to claw its way across into a derangement that, hopelessly mixed with the poetic, nevertheless signs itself as something outside of craft, consciousness, or considered reflection, that problem is what keeps Artaud outside of literature as well—hence outside of art. And, hence, allows us to use Artaud to construct a dialogue with all that is art itself, all that resides within the precincts of art, all that is Wagnerism in the broadest sense.
. . . the whole problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and the physical clarity of a feeling, to have it to such a degree that it is impossible for it not to be expressed, to have a wealth of words, of acquired turns of phrase capable of joining the dance, coming into play; and the moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me panting as if at the very door of life.
And now suppose that I feel this will physically passing through me, that it jolts me with a sudden and unexpected electricity, a repeated electricity. Suppose that each of my thinking moments is on certain days shaken by these profound tempests which nothing outside betrays. And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.
That is the twenty-seven-year-old Artaud writing to the editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, the well-known poet Jacques Rivière, ten years Artaud’s senior. It is also the clearest presentation of the problem’s core we have from Artaud himself. The story of the Correspondence with Jacques Rivière (1923-24) has often been recounted. But it is necessary to review it here, in order to locate precisely how the problem it atomizes so astutely finally allows, informs, and encourages the dialogue we must trace out.
Artaud was born at Marseille in 1896, into a close family, part French but mostly Levantine Greek. He was a
brilliant, energetic, and—from certain angles—demonically good-looking young man. But an attack of meningitis, when he was seven or eight, may have been the physical origin of the mental problems that were to plague him throughout his life. Five years after starting a literary review at the Collège du Sacré Coeur and publishing his first poems in 1910, Artaud had his first breakdown and in his nineteenth year entered the first of the several mental asylums in which he would spend his early twenties. Between bouts of confinement, he spent nine months in the military, but was released on medical grounds. By twenty-four he’d begun to take laudanum. Still, by twenty-five, he had left the asylums to establish himself as an actor, both in plays and in films.
Artaud was talented, intelligent, good-looking, and luck broke in his favor on several occasions. While he never became an overwhelmingly popular public acting success, still his early theatrical years—now with Lugné Poe, now with Cocteau—were the stuff of legend. And he was also, now, writing and publishing poems and articles in various periodicals. Toward the end of April 1923, Artaud sent a small group of poems to Rivière at the NRF.
On May 1st, Rivière rejected them. “But,” Rivière wrote, generously and encouragingly, in his rejection note, “I am interested enough in them to want to make the acquaintance of their author. If it were possible for you to stop by the review some Friday between four and six, I would be happy to see you.” A month later, on June 5th, Artaud dropped in for a late Friday afternoon visit and chat. That same evening, Artaud composed a letter to Rivière, asking him to reconsider his rejection of the poems. His reasoning was most unusual.
“You must believe, sir, that I have in mind no immediate or selfish goal; I wish only to settle a desperate problem.” The problem that Artaud spelled out is the one with which we began this section. But that more articulate expression of it that we’ve already quoted is from later on in the correspondence. Here is Artaud’s first elaboration of it from his first letter to Rivière:
I suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind. My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words. Words, shapes of sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind—I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for a fear of losing the whole thought. I lower myself, I know, and I suffer from it, but I consent to it for fear of dying altogether. . . .
This is why, out of respect for the central feeling which dictates my poems to me and for those strong images or figures of speech which I have been able to find, in spite of everything I propose these poems for existence [i.e., that Rivière reconsider taking them for the NRF]. These figures of speech, these awkward expressions for which you reproach me, I have noticed and accepted. Remember: I did not contest them. They stem from the profound uncertainty of my thought. . . .
In showing you the poems, it seemed to me that their faults, their un- evennesses were not sufficiently flagrant to destroy the overall impression of each poem. . . .
I cannot hope that time or effort will remedy these obscurities or these failings. . . . And the question I would like to have answered is this: Do you think that one can allow less literary authenticity and effectiveness to a poem which is imperfect but filled with powerful and beautiful things than to a poem which is perfect but without much internal reverberation? . . . The question for me is nothing less than knowing whether or not I have the right to continue to think, in verse or in prose.
Artaud concluded with a promise to drop by on another Friday and bring Rivière the two small booklets of poems of his that had just been published, Trie Trac du Ciel and Douze Chansons.
Rivière’s answer—a reconfirmation of the rejection—was still generous in tone: But “. . . what prevents me for the moment from publishing any of your poems in La Nouvelle Revue Française [is that] . . . you do not usually succeed in creating a sufficient unity of impression.”
This “unity of impression” has been, of course, the smokescreen against just this problem at least since Poe pulled the phrase “unity of effect” out of Aristotle’s classical constraints on tragedy and put it into his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, in 1842. We are directly within that critical system for which flawed transitions are the privileged error.
Seven months passed.
The correspondence did not resume until the last days of January, 1924. In a new and sudden letter, Artaud confesses that he’d resented Rivière’s last answer. Artaud more or less says: I came to you as a mental case looking for sympathy. You answered with a literary judgement on “some poems which I did not value, which I could not value. I flattered myself that you had not understood me.” But, he goes on, “I see today that I may not have been sufficiently explicit, and for this too I ask your forgiveness.” He then proceeds “to finish that confession” which he had begun about his “distressing state of mind.”
He explains to Rivière:
This scattered quality of my poems, these defects of form, the constant sagging of my thought, must be attributed not to a lack of practice, a lack of control of the instrument I was handling, a lack of intellectual development, but to a central collapse of the soul, to a kind of erosion, both essential and fleeting, of the thought, to a temporary non-possession of the material benefits of my development, to an abnormal separation of the benefits of thought (the impulse to think, at each of the terminal stratifications of thought, passing through all the stages, all the bifurcations of thought and of form). . ..
I only want to say enough about it to be at last understood and believed by you.
Artaud concludes by telling Rivière he is sending along “the latest product of my mind,” i.e., another poem.
The poem in question, “Cri” (“Cry”), is in quatrains that link a series of surreal images, in which skies collide, a stable boy is ordered to guard wolves instead of horses, stars eat, slugs walk, angels return, and the sea boils. It begins and ends with “the little celestial poet,” who opens the shutters of his heart, and, at the end of it all, “Leaves his celestial place / With an idea from beyond the earth / Pressed to his long-haired heart.” There is an asterisk, then; and the terminal quatrain reads:
Two traditions met.
But our padlocked thoughts
Did not have room:
Experiment to be repeated.
It would be very hard, I suspect, for anyone to take “Cri” other than as a self-conscious embodiment of just the “awkwardnesses,” “oddities,” and “divergent images” Rivière had chided Artaud for in his response to the first submission. As such, there is something disconcerting and rather undergraduate about this second. It’s certainly not a poem that the editor of the NRF would be likely to have published in 1924—if only because of its fairly clear intention to ridicule, however ironically and by example, Rivière’s well-meant—and well-put—criticism.
Rivière did not get around to answering this one. I think it’s understandable why. He had rejected Artaud’s poems. And because he had presented himself as accessible and open on a personal level, he was being badgered to change his mind and take them anyway. There is one level where Artaud’s argument, no matter how intriguing, parallels one that anybody who has ever taught creative writing has gotten at least once from the belligerent student who has had his (it is almost always a he) work criticized and is unhappy about it: “What you call my mistakes aren’t that at all. They’re exactly what I intended to do. The uncomfortable and awkward effects they produce were what I wanted. They document how I was feeling about it all when I wrote it. You just didn’t understand that. But now that you do, don’t you think it’s better than you did?”
Indeed, the only thing that separates Artaud’s argument from that of the wounded student defending his run-on and fragmentary sentences, protesting that his misplaced modifiers, clichés, and wrongly used words are exactly what he meant to write, is the language Artaud uses to detail hi
s position, the energy with which he expresses his ideas, and the general insight, acuity, and level of abstraction at which he pitches his argument. Artaud was canny enough not to say that he placed flaws in his work intentionally. Rather, he argues, because of his mental condition, he could not avoid flaws. Nevertheless, once they’d been committed, he recognized them as signs—documents—of that condition, and decided—intentionally and for aesthetic reasons—to let them stand because that’s what they were.
The problem that Artaud brings us to the edge of (and that the contemporary philosopher Derrida pulls out of Artaud’s arguments in two brilliant essays on the French poet and dramaturge) is whether or not we ever really think—and, by extension, whether or not we ever really create—anything “intentionally.” We create things that bear signs of order or disorder. We say, “I’m going to write a novel or a poem about X,” and then we go on to write a novel or a poem that may turn out to be about X or about something entirely other. Or we may not write anything at all. As the language centers of the brain offer up words to put down on paper, we decide to accept those words, or we decide to reject them and wait for others with which to replace them. But in terms of the offering-up itself, does intention really have anything to do with it? The blocked writer can intend to write until the cows come home; but he or she sits before the blank page and the wells yield no language.
Isn’t writing, finally, a responsive and non-understood process as opaque in its workings as life itself, which consciousness only oversees, overhears, and which the fiction of intention only tries to tame?
Perhaps intention is an empty philosophical category to mask this profound split in the consciousness of all speaking and writing subjects, a split where language never really cleaves to intention but is always in excess of it, or escapes it entirely, or contravenes it openly, or even fails to come near it.