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1. With Romanticism, music
changes its role: it is no longer a mere accompaniment of the message
delivered in speech, it contains/renders a message of its own,
"deeper" than the one delivered in words. It was Rousseau who first
clearly articulated this expressive potential of music as such, when he
claimed that, instead of merely imitating the affective features of verbal
speech, music should be given the right to "speak for itself" - in
contrast to the deceiving verbal speech, in music, it is, to paraphrase
Lacan, the truth itself which speaks. As Schopenhauer put it, music directly
enacts/renders the noumenal Will, while speech remains limited to the level
of phenomenal representation. Music is the substance which renders the true
heart of the subject, which is what Hegel called the "Night of the
World," the abyss of radical negativity: music becomes the bearer of the
true message beyond words with the shift from the Enlightenment subject of
rational logos to the Romantic subject of the "night of the world,"
i.e., with the shift of the metaphor for the kernel of the subject from Day
to Night. Here we encounter the Uncanny: no longer the external
transcendence, but, following Kant's transcendental turn, the excess of the
Night in the very heart of the subject (the dimension of the Undead), what
Tomlison called the "internal otherworldliness that marks the Kantian
subject." What music renders is no longer the "semantics of the
soul," but the underlying "noumenal" flux of jouissance beyond
the linguistic meaningfulness. This noumenal is radically different from the
pre-Kantian transcendent divine Truth: it is the inaccessible excess which
forms the very core of the subject.
2. In history of opera, this sublime excess of life is discernible in two
main versions, Italian and German, Rossini and Wagner - so, maybe, although
they are the great opposites, Wagner's surprising private sympathy for
Rossini, as well as their friendly meeting in Paris, do bear witness to a
deeper affinity. Rossini's great male portraits, the three from Barbiere
(Figaro's Largo il factotum, Basilio's Calumnia, and Bartolo's Un dottor
della mia sorte), plus the father's wishful self-portrait of corruption in
Cenerentola, enact a mocked self-complaint, where one imagines oneself in a
desired position, being bombarded by demands for a favor or service. The subject
twice shifts his position: first, he assumes the roles of those who address
him, enacting the overwhelming multitude of demands which bombard him; then,
he feigns a reaction to it, the state of deep satisfaction in being
overwhelmed by demands one cannot fulfill. Let us take the father in
Cenerentola: he imagines how, when one of his daughters will be married to
the Prince, people will turn to him, offering him bribes for a service at the
court, and he will react to it first with cunning deliberation, then with
fake despair at being bombarded with too many requests... The culminating
moment of the archetypal Rossini aria is this unique moment of happiness, of
the full assertion of the excess of Life which occurs when the subject is
overwhelmed by demands, no longer being able to deal with them. At the
highpoint of his factotum aria, Figaro exclaims: "What a crowd /of the
people bombarding me with their demands/ - have mercy, one after the other /uno
per volta, per carita!, referring therewith to the Kantian experience of the
Sublime, in which the subject is bombarded with an excess of the data that he
is unable to comprehend. The basic economy is here obsessional: the object of
the hero's desire is the other's demand.
3. This is the excessive counterpoint to the Wagnerian Sublime, to the hoechste
Lust of the immersion into the Void that concludes Tristan. This opposition
of the Rossinian and of the Wagnerian Sublime perfectly fits the Kantian
opposition between the mathematical and the dynamic Sublime: as we have just
seen, the Rossinian Sublime is mathematical, it enacts the inability of the
subject to comprehend the pure quantity of the demands that overflow him,
while the Wagnerian Sublime is dynamic, it enacts the concentrated
overpowering force of the one demand, the unconditional demand of love. One
can also say that the Wagnerian Sublime is the absolute Emotion - this is how
one should read the famous first sentence of Wagner's "Religion and
Art," where he claims that, when religion becomes artificial, art can
save the true spirit of religion, its hidden truth - how? Precisely by
abandoning the dogma and rendering only the authentic religious emotion,
i.e., by transforming religion into the ultimate aesthetic experience.
4. Tristan should thus be read as the resolution of the tension between
sublime passion and religion still operative in Tannheuser. The entreaty at
the beginning of Tannheuser enacts a strange reversal of the standard
entreaty: not to escape the constraints of mortality and rejoin the beloved,
but the entreaty addressed at the beloved to let the hero go and return to
the mortal life of pain, struggle, and freedom. Tannheuser complains that, as
a mortal, he cannot sustain the continuous enjoyment (Wenn stets ein Gott
geniessen kann, bin ich dem Wechsel untertan; nicht Lust allein liegt mir am
Herzen, aus Freuden sehn ich mich nach Schmerzen). A little bit later,
Tannhauser makes it clear that what he is longing for is the peace of death
itself: Mein Sehnen draengt zum Kampfe, nicht such ich Wonn und Lust! Ach
moegest du es fassen, Goettin! (wild) Hin zum Tod, den ich suche, zum Tode
draengt es mich! If there is a conflict between eternity and temporal
existence, between transcendence and terrestrial reality here, then Venus is
on the side of a terrifying eternity of unbearable excessive Geniessen.
5. This provides the key to the opera's central conflict: it is not, as it is
usually claimed, the conflict between the spiritual and the bodily, the
sublime and the ordinary pleasures of flesh, but a conflict inherent to the
Sublime itself, splitting it up. Venus and Elisabeth are both meta-physical
figures of the sublime: neither of the two is a woman destined to become a
common wife. While Elisabeth is, obviously, the sacred virgin, the purely spiritual
entity, the untouchable idealized Lady of the courtly love, Venus also stands
for a meta-physical excess, that of the excessively intensified sexual
enjoyment; if anything, it is Elisabeth who is closer to the ordinary
terrestrial life. In Kierkegaard's terms, one can say that Venus stands for
the Aesthetic and Elisabeth for the Religious - on condition that one
conceives here of the Aesthetic as included in the Religious, elevated to the
level of the unconditional Absolute. And therein resides the unpardonable sin
of Tannheuser: not in the fact that he engaged in a little bit of free
sexuality (in this case, the severe punishment would have been ridiculously
exaggerated), but that he elevated sexuality, sexual lust, to the level of
the Absolute, asserting it as the inherent obverse of the Sacred. This is the
reason why the roles of Venus and Elisabeth definitely should be played by
the same singer: the two ARE one and the same person, the only difference
resides in the male hero's attitude towards her. Is this not clear from the
final choice Tannheuser has to make between the two? When he is in his mortal
agony, Venus is calling him to join her again (Komm, o komm! Zu mir! Zu mir!);
when he gets close to her, Wolfram cries from the background "Elisabeth!",
to which Tannheuser replies: "Elisabeth!" In the standard staging,
the mention of the dead sacred Elisabeth gives Tannheuser the strength to
avoid Venus' embrace, and Venus then leaves in fury; however, would it not be
much more logical to stage it so that Tannheuser continues to approach the
same woman, discovering, when he is close to her, that Venus really is
Elisabeth? The subversive power of this shift is that it turns around the old
courtly love poetry motif of the dazzlingly beautiful lady who, when one
approaches her too much, is revealed as a disgusting entity of rotten flesh
full of crawling worms - here, the sacred virgin is discovered in the very
heart of the dissolute seductress. So the message is not the usual
desublimation ("Beware of the beautiful woman! It is a deceptive lure
which hides the disgusting rotten flesh!"), but the unexpected
sublimation, elevation of the erotic woman to the mode of appearance of the
sacred Thing. The tension of Tannheuser is thus the one between the two aspects
of the Absolute, Ideal-Symbolic and Real, Law and Superego. The true topic of
Tannheuser is that of a disturbance in the order of sublimation: sublimation
starts to oscillate between these two poles.
6. We can see, now, in what precise sense Tristan embodies the
"aesthetic" attitude (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term):
refusing to compromise one's desire, one goes to the end and willingly
embraces death. Meistersinger counters it with the ethical solution: the true
redemption resides not in following the immortal passion to its
self-destructive conclusion; one should rather learn to overcome it via
creative sublimation and to return, in a mood of wise resignation, to the
"daily" life of symbolic obligations. In Parsifal, finally, the
passion can no longer be overcome via its reintegration to society in which
it survives in a gentrified form: one has to deny it thoroughly in the
ecstatic assertion of the religious jouissance. The triad Tristan-Meistersinger-Parsifal
thus follows a precise logic: Meistersinger and Tristan render the two
opposite versions of the Oedipal matrix, within which Meistersinger inverts Tristan
(the son steals the woman from the paternal figure; the passion breaks out
between the paternal figure and the young woman destined to become the
partner of the young man), while Parsifal gives the coordinates themselves an
anti-Oedipal twist - the lamenting wounded subject is here the paternal
figure (Amfortas), not the young transgressor (Tristan). (The closest one
comes to lament in Meistersinger is Sachs's Wahn, wahn! song from Act III.)
Wagner planned to have in the first half of Act III of Tristan Parsifal to
visit the wounded Tristan, but he wisely renounced it: not only would the
scene ruin the perfect overall structure of Act III, it would also stage the
impossible encounter of a character with (the different, alternate reality,
version of) itself, as in the time travel science fiction narratives where I
encounter myself. One can even bring things to the ridiculous here by imagining
the third hero joining the two - Hans Sachs (in his earlier embodiment, as
King Mark who arrives with a ship prior to Isolde), so that the three of them
(Tristan, Mark, Parsifal), standing for the three attitudes, debate their
differences in a Habermasian undistorted communicational exchange.
7. And one is tempted to claim that the triad of Tristan-Meistersinger-Parsifal
is reproduced in three exemplary post-Wagnerian operas: Richard Strauss' Salome,
Puccini's Turandot and Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron. Is not Salome yet
another version of the possible outcome of Tristan? What if, at the end of
Act II, when King Mark surprises the lovers, he were to explode in fury and
order Tristan's head to be cut off; the desperate Isolde would then take her
lover's head in her hands and start to kiss his lips in a Salomean Liebestod.
(And, to add yet another variation of the virtual link between Salome and Tristan:
what if, at the end of Tristan, Isolde would not simply die after finishing
her "Mild und leise" - what if she were to remain entranced by her
immersion in the ecstatic jouissance, and, disgusted by it, King Mark would
give the order: "This woman is to be killed!"?) It was often noted
that the closing scene of Salome is modelled on Isolde's Liebestod; however,
what makes it a perverted version of the Wagnerian Liebestod is that what
Salome demands, in an unconditional act of caprice, is to kiss the lips of
John the Baptist ("I want to kiss your lips!") - not the contact
with a person, but with the partial object. If Salome is a counterpart to Tristan,
then Turandot is the counterpart to Meistersinger - let us not forget that
they are both operas about the public contest with the woman as the prize won
by the hero.
8. Salome twice insists to the end in her demand: first, she insists that the
soldiers bring to her Jokanaan; then, after the dance of seven veils, she
insists that the king Herod bring her on a silver platter the head of
Jokanaan - when the king, believing that Jokanaan effectively is a sacred man
and that it is therefore better not to touch him, offers Salome in exchange
for her dance anything she wants, up to half of his kingdom and the most
sacred objects in his custody, just not the head (and thus the death) of
Jokanaan, she ignores this explosive outburst of higher and higher bidding
and simply repeats her inexorable demand "Bring me the head of
Jokanaan." Is there not something properly Antigonean in this request of
her? Like Antigone, she insists without regard to consequences. Is therefore
Salome not in a way, no less than Antigone, the embodiment of a certain
ethical stance? No wonder she is so attracted to Jokanaan - it is the matter
of one saint recognizing another. And how can one overlook that, at the end
of Oscar Wilde's play on which Strauss' opera is based, after kissing his
head, she utters a properly Christian comment on how this proves that love is
stronger than death, that love can overcome death?
9. Which, then, would be the counterpart to Parsifal? Parsifal was from the
very beginning perceived as a thoroughly ambiguous work: the attempt to
reassert art at its highest, the proto-religious spectacle bringing together
Community (art as the mediator between religion and politics), against the
utilitarian corruption of modern life with its commercialized kitsch culture
- yet at the same time drifting towards a commercialized aesthetic kitsch of
an ersatz religion, a fake, if there ever was one. In other words, the
problem of Parsifal is not the unmediated dualism of its universe (Klingsor's
kingdom of fake pleasures versus the sacred domain of the Grail), but,
rather, the lack of distance, the ultimate identity, of its opposites: is not
the Grail ritual (which provides the most satisfying aesthetic spectacle of
the work, its two "biggest hits") the ultimate
"Klingsorian" fake? (The taint of bad faith in our enjoyment of
Parsifal as similar to the bad faith in our enjoyment of Puccini.) For this
reason, Parsifal was the traumatic starting point which allows us to conceive
of the multitude of later operas as reactions to it, as attempts to resolve
its deadlock. The key among these attempts is, of course, Schoenberg's Moses
und Aaron, the ultimate pretender to the title "the last opera,"
the meta-opera about the conditions of (im)possibility of the opera: the
sudden rupture at the end of Act II, after Moses' desperate O Wort, das mir
fehlt!, the failure to compose the work to the end. Moses und Aaron is
effectively anti-Parsifal: while Parsifal retains a full na•ve trust in the
(redemptive) power of music and finds no problems in rendering the noumenal
divine dimension in the aesthetic spectacle of the ritual, Moses und Aaron
attempts the impossible: to be an opera directed against the very principle
of opera, that of the stage-musical spectacle - it is an operatic
representation of the Jewish prohibition of aesthetic representation.
10. Is the buoyant music of the Golden Calf not the ultimate version of the
bacchanalian music in Wagner, from Tannheuser to the Flower Maidens' music in
Parsifal. And is there not another key parallel between Parsifal and Moses
und Aaron? As it was noted by Adorno, the ultimate tension of Moses is not
simply between divine transcendence and its representation in music, but,
inherent to music itself, between the "choral" spirit of the
religious community and the two individuals (Moses and Aaron) who stick out
as subjects; in the same way, in Parsifal, Amfortas and Parsifal himself
stick out as forceful individuals - are the two "complaints" by
Amfortas not the strongest passages of Parsifal, implicitly undermining the
message of the renunciation to subjectivity? The musical opposition between
the clear choral style of the Grail community and the chromaticism of the
Klingsor universe in Parsifal is radicalized in Moses und Aaron in the guise
of the opposition between Moses' Sprechstimme and Aaron's full song - in both
cases, the tension is unresolved.
11. What, then, can follow this breakdown? It is here that one is tempted to
return to our starting point, to Rossinian comedy. After the complete
breakdown of expressive subjectivity, comedy reemerges - but a weird, uncanny
one. What comes after Moses und Aaron is the imbecilic "comic" Sprechgesang
of Pierrot Lunaire, the smile of a madman who is so devastated by pain that
he cannot even perceive his tragedy - like the smile of a cat in cartoons
with birds flying around the head after the cat gets hit on the head with a
hammer. The comedy enters when the situation is too horrifying to be rendered
as tragedy - which is why the only proper way to do a film about
concentration camps is a comedy: there is something fake in doing a
concentration camp tragedy.
12. Is, however, this the only way out? What if Parsifal also points in another
direction, that of the emergence of a new collective? If Tristan enacts
redemption as the ecstatic suicidal escape from the social order and
Meistersinger the resigned integration into the existing social order, then
Parsifal concludes with the invention of a new form of the Social. With
Parsifal's "Disclose the Grail!" (Enthuellt den Graal!), we pass
from the Grail community as a closed order where Grail is only revealed in
the prescribed time a ritual to the circle of the initiated, to a new order in
which the Grail has to remain revealed all the time: "No more shall the
shrine be sealed!" (Nicht soll der mehr verschlossen sein!). As to the
revolutionary consequences of this change, recall the fate of the Master
figure in the triad Tristan-Meistersinger-Parsifal (King Marke, Hans Sachs,
Amfortas): in the first two works, the Master survives as a saddened
melancholic figure; in the third he is deposed and dies.
13. Why, then, should we not read Parsifal from today's perspective: the
kingdom of Klingsor in the Act II is a domain of digital phantasmagoria, of
virtual amusement - Harry Kupfer was right to stage Klingsor's magic garden
as a video parlor, with Flower Girls reduced to fragments of female bodies
(faces, legs...) appearing on dispersed TV-screens. Is Klingsor not a kind of
Master of the Matrix, manipulating virtual reality, a combination of Murdoch
and Bill Gates? And when we pass from Act II to Act III, do we not
effectively pass from the fake virtual reality to the "desert of the
real," the "waste land" in the aftermath of ecological
catastrophy which derailed the "normal" functioning of nature? Is
Parsifal not a model for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, with Laurence Fishburne
in the role of Gurnemanz?
14. One is thus tempted to offer a direct "vulgar" answer to the
question: what the hell was Parsifal doing on his journey in the long time
which passes between Acts II and III? That the true "Grail" are the
people, its suffering. What if he simply got acquainted with human misery,
suffering and exploitation? So what if the new collective is something like a
revolutionary party, what if one takes the risk of reading Parsifal as the
precursor of Brecht's Lehrstuecke, what if its topic of sacrifice points
towards that of Brecht's Die Massnahme, which was put to music by Hans
Eisler, the third great pupil of Schoenberg, after Bert and Webern? Is the
topic of both Parsifal and Die Massnahme not that of learning: the hero has
to learn how to help people in their suffering. The outcome, however, is
opposite: in Wagner compassion, in Brecht/Eisler the strength not to give way
to one's compassion and directly act on it. However, this opposition itself
is relative: the shared motif is that of cold distance compassion. The lesson
of Brecht is the art of cold compassion, compassion with suffering which
learns to resist the immediate urge to help others; the lesson of Wagner is
cold compassion, the distanced saintly attitude (recall the cold girl into
which Parsifal turns in Syberberg's version) which nonetheless retains
compassion. Wagner's lesson (and Wotan's insight) about how the greatest act
of freedom is to accept and freely enact what necessarily has to occur, is
strangely echoed in the basic lesson of Brecht's "learning plays":
what the young boy to be killed by his colleagues has to learn is the art of Einverstaendnis,
of accepting his own killing which will occur anyway.
15. And what about the misogynism which obviously sustains this option? Is it
not that Parsifal negated the shared presupposition of the first two works,
their assertion of love (ecstatic courtly love, marital love), opting for the
exclusively male community? However, what if, here also, Syberberg was right:
after Kundry's kiss, in the very rejection of (hysterical-seductive)
femininity, Parsifal turns into a woman, adopts a feminine subjective
position? What if what we effectively get is a dedicated "radical"
community led by a cold ruthless woman, a new Joan of Arc?
16. And what about the notion that the Grail community is an elitist closed
initiatic circle? Parsifal's final injunction to disclose the Grail
undermines this false alternative of elitism/populism: every true elitism is
universal, addressed at everyone and all, and there is something inherently
vulgar about initiatic secret gnostic wisdoms. There is a standard complaint
of the numerous Parsifal lovers: a great opera with numerous passages of
breathtaking beauty - but, nonetheless, the two long narratives of Gurnemanz
(taking most of the first half of Acts I and III) are Wagner at his worst: a
boring recapitulation of the past deeds already known to us, lacking any
dramatic tension. Our proposed "Communist" reading of Parsifal
entails a full rehabilitation of these two narratives as crucial moments of
the opera - the fact that they may appear "boring" is to be
understood along the lines of a short poem of Brecht from the early 1950s,
addressed to a nameless worker in the GDR who, after long hours of work, is
obliged to listen to a boring political speech by a local party functionary:
"You are exhausted from long work / The speaker is repeating himself /
His speech is long-winded, he speaks with strain / Do not forget, the tired
one: / He speaks the truth." This is the role of Gurnemanz - no more and
no less than the agent - the mouth-piece, why not - of truth. In this precise
case, the very predicate of "boring" is an indicator (a vector
even) of truth as opposed to the dazzling perplexity of jokes and superficial
amusements. (There is, of course, another sense in which, as Brecht knew very
well, dialectics itself is inherently comical.)
17. And what about the final call of the Chorus "Redeem the
Redeemer!", which some read as the anti-Semitic statement
"redeem/save Christ from the clutches of the Jewish tradition,
de-Semitize him"? However, what if we read this line more literally, as
echoing the other "tautological" statement from the finale,
"the wound can be healed only by the spear which smote it (die Wunde
schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug)"? Is this not the key paradox of
every revolutionary process, in the course of which not only violence is
needed to overcome the existing violence, but the revolution, in order to
stabilize itself into a New Order, has to eat its own children?
18. Wagner a proto-Fascist? Why not leave behind this search for the
"proto-Fascist" elements in Wagner and, rather, in a violent
gesture of appropriation, reinscribe Parsifal in the tradition of radical
revolutionary parties? Perhaps, such a reading enables us also to cast a new
light on the link between Parsifal and The Ring. The Ring depicts a pagan
world, which, following its inherent logic, must end in a global catastrophy;
however, there are survivors of this catastrophy, the nameless crowd of
humanity which silently witnesses God's self-destruction. In the unique
figure of Hagen, The Ring also provides the first portrait of what will later
emerge as the Fascist leader; however, since the world of The Ring is pagan,
caught in the Oedipal family conflict of passions, it cannot even address the
true problem of how this humanity, the force of the New, is to organize
itself, of how it should learn the truth about its place; this is the task of
Parsifal, which therefore logically follows The Ring. The conflict between
Oedipal dynamics and the post-Oedipal universe is inscribed within Parsifal
itself: Klingsor's and Amfortas' adventures are Oedipal, then what happens
with Parsifal's big turn (rejection of Kundry) is precisely that he leaves
behind the Oedipal incestuous eroticism, opening himself up to a new
community.
19. The dark figure of Hagen is profoundly ambiguous: although initially
depicted as a dark plotter, both in the Nibelungenlied and in Fritz Lang's
film, he emerges as the ultimate hero of the entire work and is redeemed at
the end as the supreme case of the Nibelungentreue, fidelity to death to
one's cause (or, rather, to the Master who stands for this cause), asserted
in the final slaughter at the Attila's court. The conflict is here between
fidelity to the Master and our everyday moral obligations: Hagen stands for a
kind of teleological suspension of morality on behalf of fidelity, he is the
ultimate Gefolgsmann.
20. Significantly, it is only Wagner who depicts Hagen as a figure of Evil -
is this not an indication of how Wagner nonetheless belongs to the modern
space of freedom? And is Lang's return to the positive Hagen not an
indication of how the XXth century marked the reemergence of a new barbarism?
It was Wagner's genius to intuit ahead of his time the rising figure of the
Fascist ruthless executive who is at the same time a rabble-rousing demagogue
(recall Hagen's terrifying Maennerruf) - a worthy supplement to his other
great intuition, that of a hysterical woman (Kundry) well before this figure
overwhelmed European consciousness (in Charcot's clinic, in the art from
Ibsen to Schoenberg).
21. What makes Hagen a "proto-Fascist" is his role as the
unconditional support for the weak ruler (King Gunther): he does for Gunther
the "dirty jobs" which, although necessary, have to remain
concealed from the public gaze - Unsere Ehre heisst Treue. We find this
stance, a kind of mirror-reversal of the Beautiful Soul which refuses to
dirty its hands, at its purest in the Rightist admiration for the heroes who
are ready to do the necessary dirty job: it is easy to do a noble thing for
one's country, up to sacrificing one's life for it - it is much more
difficult to commit a crime for one's country when it is needed. Hitler knew
very well how to play this double game apropos the holocaust, using Himmler
as his Hagen. In the speech to the SS leaders in Posen on October 4 1943,
Himmler spoke quite openly about the mass killing of the Jews as "a
glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never
can be written," explicitly including the killing of women and children:
"I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men - that is
to say, to kill them or have them killed - and to allow the avengers in the
shape of children to grow up for our sons and grandchildren. The difficult
decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth."
22. This is Hagen's Treue brought to its extreme - however, was the
paradoxical price for Wagner's negative portrayal of Hagen not his Judifizierung?
A lot of historical work has been done recently trying to bring out the
contextual "true meaning" of the Wagnerian figures and topics: the
pale Hagen is really a masturbating Jew; Amfortas' wound is really syphillis.
The idea is that Wagner is mobilizing historical codes known to everyone in
his epoch: when a person stumbles, sings in cracking high tones, makes
nervous gestures, etc., "everyone knew" this is a Jew, so Mime from
Siegfried is a caricature of a Jew; the fear of syphillis as the illness in
the groin one gets from having intercourse with an "impure" woman
was an obsession in the second half of the 19th century, so it was
"clear to everyone" that Amfortas really contracted syphillis from
Kundry. Marc Weiner developed the most perspicuous version of this decoding
by focusing on the micro-texture of Wagner's musical dramas - manner of
singing, gestures, smells - it is at this level of what Deleuze would have
called pre-subjective affects that anti-Semitism is operative in Wagner's
operas, even if Jews are not explicitly mentioned: in the way Beckmesser
sings, in the way Mime complains.
23. However, the first problem here is that, even if accurate, such insights
do not contribute much to a pertinent understanding of the work in question.
One often hears that, in order to understand a work of art, one needs to know
its historical context. Against this historicist commonplace, one should
affirm that too much of a historical context can blur the proper contact with
a work of art - in order to properly grasp, say, Parsifal, one should
abstract from such historical trivia, one should decontextualize the work,
tear it out from the context in which it was originally embedded. Even more,
it is, rather, the work of art itself which provides a context enabling us to
properly understand a given historical situation. If, today, someone were to
visit Serbia, the direct contact with raw data there would leave him
confused. If, however, he were to read a couple of literary works and see a
couple of representative movies, they would definitely provide the context
that would enable him to locate the raw data of his experience. There is thus
an unexpected truth in the old cynical wisdom from the Stalinist Soviet
Union: "he lies as an eye-witness!"
24. There is another, more fundamental, problem with such historicist
decoding: it is not enough to "decode" Alberich, Mime, Hagen etc.
as Jews, making the point that the Ring is one big anti-Semitic tract, a
story about how Jews, by renouncing love and opting for power, brought
corruption to the universe; the more basic fact is that the anti-Semitic
figure of the Jew itself is not a direct ultimate referent, but already
encoded, a cypher of ideological and social antagonisms. (And the same goes
for syphillis: in the second half of the 19th century, it was, together with
tuberculosis, the other big case of "illness as a metaphor" (Susan
Sontag), serving as an encoded message about socio-sexual antagonisms, and
this is the reason why people were so obsessed by it - not because of its
direct real threat, but because of the ideological surplus-investment in it.)
An appropriate reading of Wagner should take this fact into account and not
merely "decode" Alberich as a Jew, but also ask the question: how
does Wagner's encoding refer to the "original" social antagonism of
which the (anti-Semitic figure of the) "Jew" itself is already a
cypher?
25. A further counter-argument is that Siegfried, Mime's opponent, is in no
way simply the beautiful Aryan blond hero - his portrait is much more
ambiguous. The short last scene of Act 1 of The Twilight (Siegfried's violent
abduction of Brunhilde; under the cover of Tarnhelm, Siegfried poses as
Gunther) is a shocking interlude of extreme brutality and ghost-like
nightmarish quality. What makes it additionally interesting is one of the big
inconsistencies of The Ring: why does Siegfried, after brutally subduing
Brunhilde, put his sword between the two when they lay down, to prove that
they will not have sex, since he is just doing a service to his friend, the
weak king Gunther? to whom does he have to prove this? Is Brunhilde not
supposed to think that he IS Gunther? Before she is subdued, Brunhilde
displays to the masked Siegfried her hand with the ring on it, trusting that
the ring will serve as protection; when Siegfried brutally tears the ring off
her hand, this gesture has to be read as the repetition of the first
extremely violent robbery of the ring in the Scene 4 of Rhinegold, when Wotan
tears the ring off Alberich's hand. The horror of this scene is that it shows
Siegfried's brutality naked, in its raw state: it somehow
"depsychologizes" Siegfried, making him visible as in inhuman
monster, i.e., the way he "really is," deprived of his deceiving
mask - this is the effect of the potion on him.
26. There is effectively in Wagner's Siegfried an unconstrained
"innocent" aggressivity, an urge to directly pass to the act and
just squash what gets on your nerves - as in Siegfrid's words to Mime in the
Act I of Siegfried: "when I watch you standing, / shuffling and shambling,
/ servilely stooping, squinting and blinking, / I long to seize you by your
nodding neck / and make an end of your obscene blinking!" (the sound of
the original German is here even more impressive: seh'ich dich stehn, gangeln
und gehn, / knicken und nicken, / mit den Augen zwicken, / beim Genick
moecht'ich den Nicker packen, / den Garaus geben dem garst'gen Zwicker!). The
same outburst is repeated twice in Act II: Das eklige Nicken / und
Augenzwicken, / wann endlich soll ich's / nicht mehr sehn, / wann werd ich
den Albernen los? "That shuffling and slinking, / those eyelids blinking
- / how long must I / endure the sight? / When shall I be rid of this
fool?", and, just a little bit later: Grade so garstig, / griesig und
grau, / klein und krumm, / hoeckrig und hinkend, / mit haengenden Ohren, /
triefigen Augen - / Fort mit dem Alb! / Ich mag ihn nicht mehr sehn.
"Shuffling and slinking, / grizzled and gray, / small and crooked, /
limping and hunchbacked, / with ears that are drooping, eyes that are bleary...
/ Off with the imp! I hope he's gone for good!" Is this not the most
elementary disgust, repulsion felt by the ego when confronted with the
intruding foreign body? One can easily imagine a neo-Nazi skinhead uttering
just the same words in the face of a worn-out Turkish Gastarbeiter.
27. And, finally, one should not forget that, in The Ring, the source of all
evil is not Alberich's fatal choice in the first scene of Rhinegold: long
before this event took place, Wotan broke the natural balance, succumbing to
the lure of power, giving preference to power over love - he tore out and
destroyed the World-Tree, making out of it his spear on which he inscribed
the runes fixating the laws of his rule, plus he plucked out one of his eyes
in order to gain insight into inner truth. Evil thus does not come from the
Outside - the insight of Wotan's tragic "monologue with Brunhilde"
in the Act II of Die Walkure is that the power of Alberich and the prospect
of the "end of the world" is ultimately Wotan's own guilt, the
result of his ethical fiasco - in Hegelese, external opposition is the effect
of inner contradiction. No wonder, then, that Wotan is called the "White
Alb" in contrast to the "Black Alb," Alberich - if anything,
Wotan's choice was ethically worse than Alberich's: Alberich longed for love
and only turned towards power after being brutally mocked and turned down by
the Rhinemaidens, while Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying the fruits
of love and getting tired of them. One should also bear in mind that, after
his moral fiasco in Die Walkure, Wotan turns into "Wanderer" - a
figure of the Wandering Jew like already the first great Wagnerian hero, the
Flying Dutchman, this Ahasver des Ozeans.
28. And the same goes for Parsifal which is not about an elitist circle of
the pure-blooded threatened by external contamination (copulation by the
Jewess Kundry). There are two complications to this image: first, Klingsor,
the evil magician and Kundry's Master, is himself an ex-Grail knight, he
comes from within; second point, if one reads the text really close, one
cannot avoid the conclusion that the true source of evil, the primordial
imbalance which derailed the Grail community, resides at its very center - it
is Titurel's excessive fixation of enjoying the Grail which is at the origins
of the misfortune. The true figure of Evil is Titurel, this obscene père-jouisseur
(perhaps comparable to giant worm-like members of the Space Guild from Frank
Herbert's Dune, whose bodies are disgustingly distorted because of their
excessive consumption of the "spice").
29. This, then, undermines the anti-Semitic perspective according to which
the disturbance always ultimately comes from outside, in the guise of a
foreign body which throws out of joint the balance of the social organism:
for Wagner, the external intruder (Alberich) is just a secondary repetition,
externalization, of an absolutely immanent inconsistency/antagonism (of
Wotan). With reference to Brecht's famous "What is the robbery of a bank
compared to the founding of a new bank? ", one is tempted to say:
"What is a poor Jew's stealing of the gold compared to the violence of
the Aryan's (Wotan's) grounding of the rule of Law?"
30. One of the signs of this inherent status of the disturbance is the
failure of the big finales of Wagner's operas: the formal failure here
signals the persistence of the social antagonism. Let us take the biggest of
them all, the mother of all finales, that of The Twilight of Gods. It is a
well-known fact that, in the last minutes of The Twilight, the orchestra
performs an excessively intricate cobweb of motifs, basically nothing less
than the recapitulation of the motivic wealth of the entire Ring cycle - is
this fact not the ultimate proof that Wagner himself was not sure about what
the final apotheosis of The Ring "means"? Not being sure of it, he
took a kind of "flight forward" and threw together all the motifs.
So the culminating motif of "Redemption through Love" (a beautiful
and passionate melodic line which previously appears only in Act III of Die
Walkuere) cannot but make us think of Joseph Kerman's acerbic comment about
the last notes of Puccini's Tosca in which the orchestra bombastically
recapitulates the "beautiful" pathetic melodic line of the
Cavaradossi's E lucevan le stelle, as if, unsure of what to do, Puccini
simply desperately repeated the most "effective" melody from the
previous score, ignoring all narrative or emotional logic. And what if Wagner
did exactly the same thing at the end of The Twilight? Not sure about the
final twist that should stabilize and guarantee the meaning of it all, he
took recourse to a beautiful melody whose effect is something like
"whatever all this may mean, let us make it sure that the concluding
impression will be that of something triumphant and upbeating in its
redemptive beauty." In short, what if this final motif enacts an empty
gesture?
>
31. It is a commonplace of Wagner studies that the triumphant finale of Das
Rheingold is a fake, an empty triumph indicating the fragility of the gods'
power and their forthcoming downfall - however, does the same not go also for
the finale of Siegfried? The sublime duet of Brunhilde and Siegfried which
concludes the opera fails a couple of minutes before the ending, with the
entry of the motif anouncing the couple's triumphant reunion (usually
designated as the motif of "happy love" or "love's bond")
- this motif is obviously a fake (not to mention the miserable failure of the
concluding noisy-bombastic orchestral tutti, which lacks the efficiency of the
gods' entry to Walhalla in Das Rhinegold). Does this failure encode Wagner's
(unconscious?) critique of Siegfried? Recall the additional curious fact that
this motif is almost the same as - closely related to - the Beckmesser motif
in Meistersinger (I owe this insight to Gerhard Koch; Act III of Siegfried
was written just after Meistersinger)! Furthermore, does this empty bombastic
failure of the final notes not also signal the catastrophy-to-come of
Brunhilde and Siegfried's love? As such, this "failure" of the duet
is a structural necessity. (One should nonetheless follow closely the inner
triadic structure of this duet: its entire dynamic is on the side of
Brunhilde who twice shifts her subjective stance, while Siegfried remains the
same. First, from her elevated divine position, Brunhilde joyously asserts
her love for Siegfried; then, once she becomes aware of what Siegfried's
passionate advances mean - the loss of her safe distanced position - she
displays fear of losing her identity, of descending to the level of a
vulnerable mortal woman, man's prey and passive victim. In a wonderful
metaphor, she compares herself to a beautiful image in the water which gets
blurred once man's hand directly touches and disturbs the water. Finally, she
surrenders to Siegfried's passionate advances and throws herself into the
vortex.) However, excepting the last notes, Act III of Siegfried - at least
from the moment when Siegfried breaks Wotan's spear to Brunhilde's awakening
- is not only unbearably beautiful, but also the most concise statement of
the Oedipal problematic in its specific Wagnerian twist.
32. On his way to the magic mountain where Brunhilde lies, surrounded by a
wall of fire which can be tresspassed only by a hero who does not know fear,
Siegfried first encounters Wotan, the deposed (or, rather, abdicated) supreme
god, disguised as a Wanderer; Wotan tries to stop him, but in an ambiguous
way - basically, he wants Siegfried to break his spear. After Siegfried
disrespectfully does this, full of contempt in his ignorance for the
embittered and wise old man, he progresses through the flames and perceives a
wonderful creature lying there in deep sleep. Thinking that the armored plate
on the creature's chest is making its breathing difficult, he proceeds to cut
off its straps by his sword; after he raises the plate and sees Brunhilde's
breasts, he utters a desperate cry of surprise: Das ist kein Mann! /
"This is no man!" This reaction, of course, cannot but strike us as
comic, exaggerated beyond credulity. However, one should bear in mind a
couple of things. First, the whole point of the story of Siegfried till this
moment is that while Siegfried spent his entire youth in the forest in the
sole company of the evil dwarf Mime who claimed to be his only parent, mother-father,
he nonetheless observed that, in the case of animals, parents are always a
couple, and thus longs to see his mother, the feminine counterpart of Mime.
Siegfried's quest for a woman is thus a quest for sexual difference, and the
fact that this quest is at the same time the quest of fear, of an experience
that would teach him what fear is, clearly points in the direction of
castration - with a specific twist. In the paradigmatic Freudian description
of the scene of castration (in his late short text on "Fetishism"),
the gaze discovers an absence where a presence (a penis) is expected, while
here, Siegfried's gaze discovers an excessive presence (of breasts - and
should one add that the typical Wagnerian soprano is an opulent soprano with
large breasts, so that Siegfried's Das ist kein Mann! usually gives rise to a
hearty laughter in the public?).
33. Secondly, one should bear in mind here an apparent inconsistency in the
libretto which points the way to proper understanding of this scene: why is
Siegfried so surprised at not encountering a man, when, prior to it, he
emphasizes that he wants to penetrate the fire precisely in order to find
there a woman? To the Wanderer, he says: "Give ground then, for that
way, I know, leads to the sleeping woman." And, a couple of minutes
later: "Go back yourself, braggart! I must go there, to the burning
heart of the blaze, to Brunhilde!" From this, one should draw the only
possible conclusion: while Siegfried was effectively looking for a woman, he
did not expect her not to be a man. In short, he was looking for a woman who
would be - not the same as man, but - a symmetric supplement to man, with
whom she would form a balanced signifying dyad - and what he found was an
unbearable lack/excess. What he discovered is the excess/lack not covered by
the binary signifier, i.e., the fact that Woman and Man are not complementary
but asymmetrical, that there is no yin-yang balance - in short, that there is
no sexual relationship.
34. No wonder, then, that Siegfried's discovery that Brunhilde "is no
man" gives rise to an outburst of true panic accompanied by a loss of
reality, in which Siegfried takes refuge with his (unknown) mother:
"That's no man! A searing spell pierces my heart; a fiery anxiety fills
my eyes; my senses swim and swoon! Whom can I call on to help me? Mother,
mother! Think of me!" He then gather all his courage and decides to kiss
the sleeping woman on her lips, even if this will mean his own death:
"Then I will suck life from those sweetest lips, though I die in doing
so." What follows is the majestic awakening of Brunhilde and then the
love duet which concludes the opera. It is crucial to note that this
acceptance of death as the price for contacting the feminine Other is
accompanied musically by the echo of the so-called motif of
"renunciation," arguably the most important leitmotif in the entire
tetralogy. This motif is first heard in the Scene 1 of Rhinegold, when,
answering Alberich's query, Woglinde discloses that nur wer der Minne Macht
versagt / "only the one who renounces the power of love" can take
possession of the gold; its next most noticeable appearance occurs towards
the end of Act 1 of Walkure, at the moment of the most triumphant assertion
of love between Sieglinde and Siegmund - just prior to his pulling out of the
sword from the tree trunk, Siegmund sings it to the words: Heiligster Minne
hoechste Not / "holiest love's highest need." How are we to read
these two occurrences together? What if one treats them as two fragments of
the complete sentence that was distorted by "dreamwork," that is,
rendered unreadable by being split into two - the solution is thus to
reconstitute the complete proposition: "Love's highest need is to
renounce its own power." This is what Lacan calls "symbolic
castration": if one is to remain faithful to one's love, one should not
elevate it into the direct focus of one's love, one should renounce its
centrality.
35. Perhaps a detour through the best (or worst) of Hollywood melodrama can
help us to clarify this point. The basic lesson of King Vidor's Rhapsody is
that, in order to gain the beloved woman's love, the man has to prove that he
is able to survive without her, that he prefers his mission or profession to
her. There are two immediate choices: (1) my professional career is what
matters most to me, the woman is just an amusement, a distracting affair; or
(2) the woman is everything to me, I am ready to humiliate myself, to forsake
all my public and professional dignity for her. They are both false: they
both lead to the man being rejected by the woman. The message of true love is
thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive without you, I am ready
to forsake you for my mission or profession. The proper way for the woman to
test the man's love is thus to "betray" him at the crucial moment
of his career (the first public concert in the film, the key exam, the
business negotiation which will decide his career) - only if he can survive
the ordeal and accomplish successfully his task although deeply traumatized
by her desertion, will he deserve her and she will return to him. The
underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be
posited as a direct goal - it should retain the status of a by-product, of
something we get as an undeserved grace. Perhaps, there is no greater love
than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to
abandon the other at any moment if revolution demands it.
36. What, then, happens when Siegfried kisses the sleeping Brunhilde, so that
this act deserves to be accompanied by the Renunciation motif? What Siegfried
says is that he will kiss Brunhilde "though I die in doing so" -
reaching out to the Other Sex involves accepting one's mortality. Recall here
another sublime moment from The Ring: in the Act II of Die Walkuere, Siegmund
literally renounces immortality. He prefers to stay a common mortal if his
beloved Sieglinde cannot follow him to Walhalla, the eternal dwelling of the
dead heroes - is this not the highest ethical act of them all? The shattered
Brunhilde comments on this refusal: "So little do you value everlasting
bliss? Is she everything to you, this poor woman who, tired and sorrowful,
lies limp in your lap? Do you think nothing less glorious?" Ernst Bloch
was right to remark that what is lacking in German history are more gestures
like Siegmund's.
37. But which love is here renounced? To put it bluntly: the incestuous
maternal love. The "fearless hero" is fearless insofar as he
experiences himself as protected by his mother, by the maternal envelope -
what "learning to fear" effectively amounts to is learning that one
is exposed to the world without any maternal shield. It is essential to read
this scene in conjunction with the scene, from Parsifal, of Kundry giving a
kiss to Parsifal: in both cases, an innocent hero discovers fear and/or
suffering through a kiss located somewhere between the maternal and the
properly feminine. Till the late 19th century, they practiced in Montenegro a
weird wedding night ritual: in the evening after the marriage ceremony, the
son gets into bed with his mother and, after he falls asleep, the mother
silently withdraws and lets the bride take her place: after spending the rest
of the night with the bride, the son has to escape from the village into a
mountain and spend a couple of days alone there in order to get accustomed to
the shame of being married. Does something homologous not happen to
Siegfried?
38. However, the difference between Siegfried and Parsifal is that, in the
first case, the woman is accepted; in the second case, she is rejected. This
does not mean that the feminine dimension disappears in Parsifal, and that we
remain within the homoerotic male community of the Grail. Syberberg was right
when, after Parsifal's rejection of Kundry which follows her kiss, "the
last kiss of the mother and the first kiss of a woman," he replaced
Parsifal-the-boy with another actor, a young cold woman - did he thereby not
enact the Freudian insight according to which identification is, at its most
radical, identification with the lost (or rejected) libidinal object? We
become (identify with) the object which we were deprived of, so that our
subjective identity is a repository of the traces of our lost objects.
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