Longer Views (14 page)

Thus he addressed ten thousand literate middle-class Englishmen on that spring day in 1814. Had he addressed fewer of them
or
had he addressed them differently, he would not have been.

To understand what art—in light of such artists—was, however, which means to understand, with more than a smile, such pronouncements about those artists with whom we began this section, we must investigatively reanimate a nineteenth-century Europe where greatness was based on a notion of character, of nobility, of spirit, a spirit that was at once both political and aesthetic.

The young Hegel had articulated the idea of a spirit for his century in 1807, with his concept of the
Zeitgeist
, the Spirit of the Times, National Character, the Soul of the Race. Today, we tend to see Nietzsche as a figure in opposition to the totalizing systematization of Hegel's sweeping reductions. But Nietzsche's concept of the
Weltanschauung
, from his inaugural lecture of 1869 at the University of Basel (only two years after Arnold had given that final lecture at Oxford, “Culture and Its Enemies”), when the twenty-five-year-old German philosopher was an intimate member of the Wagner family circle at Triebschen, seems far more in keeping with Hegel's concept than opposed to it:

All philological activity should be embedded and enclosed in a philosophical
Weltanschauung
so that all individual or isolated details evaporate as things that can be cast away, leaving only the whole, the coherent.

For Hegel, writing in the first, glorious years of the Napoleonic onslaught, history and progress were forces that marched hand in hand. For Nietzsche, writing sixty-two years later, history was a nightmare and progress a joke. (His older friend Wagner, in his projected
Ring
cycle, through a recourse to myth, had taken on precisely the job of redeeming the historical concept without recourse to the degraded notion of progress.) But the conceptual screen both Hegel and Nietzsche worked against was one with the concept of unity put forth by Aristotle and Poe. This nineteenth-century reductionism, this plea for a unity in which all that is anomalous can be ignored, this appeal to rationalism over empiricism, is behind the whole deadly concept of race; by the end of that century we will see its fallout in the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair, in what we now speak of as British imperialism, and in Rhodesian and South African racism. Such reductionism when essentialized becomes the philosophical underpinning of this century's totalitarianisms, whether Hitler's or Stalin's or, in its so much milder form, that most social of social constructs—the “human nature” which everyone seems so reluctant to do battle with in the name of pleasure in this country today.

Our current history is the history of the abuse of such reductionism and such essentialism. It is the chronicle of their genocidal failure to support humane behavior within and between nations, within and between institutions, between individuals and institutions, and between individuals of unequal power. So much is this the case that the contemporary historian Carl Schorske can write,

What the historian must now abjure, and nowhere more so than in confronting the problem of modernity, is the positing in advance of an abstract categorical common denominator—what Hegel called the
Zeitgeist
, and Mill “the characteristic of the age.” Where such an intuitive discernment of unities once served, we must now be willing to undertake the empirical pursuit of pluralities as a precondition to finding unitary patterns in culture.

But how can we truly accept such a program until we truly understand what it is we are against: the spirit of the age, the nation, the race, as it became something that might be manifested in the greatest artist of the times, the age, the nation: in a Byron, a Sand, a Hugo, a Wagner. The entire
Annales
school of history, from Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, would seem to confirm the currency of Schorske's position in the field of contemporary historical studies: that is, of analyzing great men and great events down into the socioeconomic matrix of needs, conventions, and desires that position them. This particular view of history, when transferred to art, is tantamount to a certain dismissal of the notion of “greatness” itself and fosters a movement toward the occasional/disposable poem, as in Frank O'Hara, or Ted Berrigan, or the courting of hermetic banalities carried on so luminously and daringly by W. S. Merwin in one direction and John Ashbery in another. But could anyone have better prepared us for this inevitable fallout from the continuing rise in the functionally literate population, sometimes called “the death of the author,” than Artaud?

The death of the author follows, of course, on the death of God so vigorously noted by Nietzsche in
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, whose first two parts were published in the year of Wagner's death, 1883; and whether Foucault is right that the author's death precedes the death of Man, we still have some way to go before we find out for sure. My personal suspicion is that all three are pretty much aspects of the same thing.

But England's replacement of the ideology of religion with the ideology of literature was only the provincials' catching up with a process that had been going on all through the European century: the replacement of the general ideology of religion with the ideology of art. While Arnold was speculating on the religious aspects of revolution from
across the moonlit channel, Wagner was a wanted political criminal with a price on his head, who had just managed to emerge from the fighting and bloodshed at the barricades. To articulate his situation is to articulate most clearly, if not most importantly, the continental manifestation of that nineteenth-century trend in art, a trend in the vision of what art was and might do, a trend that, paradoxically, went hand in hand with the rise of the ideology of science.

What Arnold and his followers wanted to do with literature, Wagner, of course, had set out to do with music. The theoretical works of 1849 and 1850, written during his exile in Zurich after the calamity of Dresden's uprising of 1849, are where Wagner formulated his attack on the future of art.

With the accomplishment of the
Ring
and the other music-dramas that followed this three-volume-plus elaboration of the social function of art in general and music in particular, Wagner came to be considered, for better or for worse, the embodiment of the spirit of his times; which is to say, at the time, the spirit of the modern—that spirit which, in the postmodern view, modernism must dismiss in order to become politically responsible.

Is the lesson we are about to abstract from Wagner, then (to anticipate ourselves just a bit), the idea that all High Art—all Great Art, all Serious Art—is necessarily conservative, or even fascist, because there is no way it can avoid reifying the anterior (and always social) system that prepares the labels “Great” or “High” in the first place? I do not believe we have to do this—not so long as we bear in mind the problematics of a figure, a mind, a creator such as Artaud.

If Wagner
is
kitsch, then the status we have claimed for Artaud's work should also apply to his.

But of course the operas stand there, a mosaic of one impressively telling psychological moment laid down after another, this one five seconds long, that one forty-five seconds, one lasting a whole six minutes, now another that endures thirty seconds (for Nietzsche, Wagner was finally—with no mean paradoxical intent—the “great miniaturist”), until a massive structure has been bridged, exhausting not because of its duration, which is considerable, but because of the intricacy of its articulations, which are near numberless. They were not always kitsch. And it is our critical duty to look at art that can still speak to us in, as far as possible, its historical context.

At the close of the nineteenth century, in his little book
The Perfect Wagnerite
(1898), George Bernard Shaw wanted to redeem Wagner from the endless images of buxom, bull-horned blondes with spears and shields that had already become a parodic symbol of all “serious art.” To do it he took Wagner's four-paneled portrait of eternity, the
Ring
cycle—where the human, the superhuman, and the subhuman (this last in the form of giants and dwarves) lived, lusted, and battled in a world before time—and tried to read some socialist awareness into it. Was there, anywhere in that great, mythic allegory of history and psychology, some understanding—international understanding, that is—of the new currents of socialism that had blown from west to east and were now blowing back again? Shaw was certain that there were. There seemed to be everything else.

Eighty years later, in 1979 at Bayreuth, the French
enfant terrible
, then thirty-year-old Patrice Chereau, tried to do much the same.

Allegories being what they are, especially well-articulated ones, it is not too hard to read anything one wants into Wagner's panorama of the intricate and interconnected failures of gods, men, and women.

But we can reasonably ask, in historical terms, if any of these socialist ideas were, indeed, Wagner's.

It's customary to turn to the Dresden Uprising of May, 1849, as the rack on which Wagner's true political colors were displayed—or the forge at which his political convictions were hammered out. Wagner devotes considerable space to it in his autobiography
Mein Leben
(My Life). The book is a massive, colorful, sweeping account by a vigorous, inexhaustibly energetic man, as much a document of “the European century,” the century of revolutions, as Hugo's
Les Misérables
.

Wagner's twentieth-century biographers have gone on endlessly about the ways Wagner suppressed, colored, or outright lied in his book. His account of the spring of '49 in Dresden, and what led up to the calamitous events there, has fallen under particular censure. But the shortcomings of
Mein Leben
are basically two. First, Wagner wrote it at the personal request of a king, so that it is really a letter to his most powerful and influential fan. Second, he dictated it to his second wife, Cosima. The three things the book is traditionally taken to task for are, first, its incomplete coverage of Wagner's debts; second, its fragmentary account of his love affairs; and, third, its muting (and many have used much stronger words) of the active and energetic part he took at Dresden.

Feelings for his amanuensis certainly explain the second reticence. And even there, considering to whom he was dictating, I find Wagner remarkably honest: the only affair he wholly represses (and he had many),
so that one cannot even read it between the lines, was his most recent one (at the time of the writing) with Mathilde von Wesendonk. But that, of course, is the one we are most interested in, since it so deeply influenced the writing of
Tristan und Isolde
, the opera of Wagner's that, today, we are most ready to concede greatness to in purely musical terms.

Also missing is, of course, the alleged affair with the young Judith Gautier. But Cosima, who is supposed to have known of it, kept up a warm correspondence with Judith through the whole of it till well after Wagner's death. I suspect this was more likely one of Wagner's intense friendships that he instituted with young men and, more and more frequently as he grew older, young women all through his life.

If one reads only his biographers, however, one can get the notion that Wagner never once, in
Mein Leben
, mentions debt at all. Or one begins to assume that, indeed, by 1865 (when, at the request of young King Ludwig II, who had rescued Wagner and Cosima from Wagner's creditors in a move that was quite like something out of a fairy tale, Wagner began these memoirs) Wagner was presenting himself merely as a spectator to the 1849 events at Dresden. I have seen the whole book dismissed as an unreadable tissue of fabrications. But while, in his theoretical writings, Wagner's style takes on a Germanic academic recomplication that veers toward the incomprehensible, if not the meaningless, the king
Mein Leben
was written for was not yet twenty-one; and while he was “artistically sensitive” enough, he was not, in Wagner's private estimation, overly bright. Wagner was, by this time, a comparatively experienced journalist as well as a musician, and the account is straightforward and (at least in its current Andrew Gray translation—Cambridge University Press: 1983) reads far more easily today than, say, any number of Dickens's novels.

In
Mein Leben
hardly a year goes by in which Wagner does not recount some creditor or other harassing him with a bill for one or another loan. The agony of financial embarrassment seems to be his constant companion. His most famous biographer, Ernest Newman (who most rigorously and famously challenged this aspect of
Mein Leben
), seems to be trying to say that, with all the debts Wagner recounts, there were simply dozens more left unmentioned—and, frequently, unpaid. My own estimation, on considering both Newman's and Wagner's versions, is that if Wagner was not accurate to the letter in his autobiographical tally of his financial extravagances, he certainly gave the feel of his debts and doubtless recounted, if not the largest ones, the ones he remembered suffering over most.

There are, of course, numerous inaccuracies all through Wagner's
account of his life. Toward the beginning of autumn in 1847 Wagner left Dresden, the capital of Saxony, where he had been Second Royal Kapellmeister since 1843, to visit Berlin, where he had been asked to conduct several performances of his early and (moderately) popular opera
Rienzi
. The invitation had come as a result of an audience with the Queen. Wagner felt the trip would further his career and that he might even meet with the King and thus interest Friedrich August II and other powerful people in supporting performances of his newer works,
Tannhäuser
(which had already had some success in Dresden) and
Lohengrin
(on which he was still working). Though Wagner liked the man personally well enough, the Berlin tenor, around whom
Rienzi
turned, was simply inadequate—in an otherwise passable production. But King Friedrich did not attend any of the performances he himself had, at the Queen's request, commanded. Wagner was obliged to borrow money against his Kapellmeister salary to get back to Dresden, and the trip had to be written off largely as a failure—and a dismal one, given the financial considerations. Wagner came back to his Kapellmeister job that Christmas season deeply dejected. Within days of his return, he learned that his mother had died in Leipzig.