Longer Views (21 page)

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
un
critical, 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.