Longer Views (22 page)

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

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

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

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

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

— New York City
October '83—December '87

 

Adorno, Theodor.
In Search of Wagner
, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: NLB, 1981.

———.
The Jargon of Authenticity
, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Arnold, Matthew.
Poems
, ed. Kenneth Allott. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1954.

Artaud, Antonin.
Selected Writings
, ed. with intr. by Susan Sontag; trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

———.
4 Texts
, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Norman Glass. Los Angeles: Panjandrum, 1986.

———.
The Theater and Its Double
, trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

———.
The Cenci: A Play
, trans. Simon Watson Taylor. New York: Grove Press, 1969.

———.
The Peyote Dance
, trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

Auden, W. H.
Collected Poems
, ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976.

———. “Introduction” to
Victorian and Edwardian Poets: Tennyson to Yeats
, ed. W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. New York: Viking, 1950, pp. xv-xxiii.

Benjamin, Walter.
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism
, trans. Harry Zohn. London: NLB, 1973.

———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Illuminations
, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 217-51.

Blunt, Wilfrid.
The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria
. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970.

Lord Byron [George Gordon].
Poetical Works
, ed. Frederick Page; new ed. corr. John Jump. London: Oxford University Press, 1945.

Derrida, Jacques. “La parole souflée” and “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,”
Writing and Difference
, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 167-95 and 232-50

Eagleton, Terry.
Literary Theory: An Introduction
. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Esslin, Martin.
Antonin Artaud
. London: Fontana, 1976.

Gilbert, Stuart.
James Joyce's Ulysses
. New York: Random House, 1930.

Gregor-Dellin, Martin.
Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century
. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980.

Hayman, Ronald.
Nietzsche: A Critical Life
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Katz, Jacob.
The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism
. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1986.

Knapp, Bettina L.
Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision
. New York: David Lewis, 1969.

Magee, Bryan.
Aspects of Wagner
. New York: Stein and Day, 1969.

Newman, Ernest.
The Life of Richard Wagner
. 4 vols. New York: Knopf, 1937–46.

———.
Wagner Nights
. New York: Putnam, 1949.

Nietzsche, Friedrich.
The Birth of Tragedy
and
The Genealogy of Morals
, trans. Francis Golffing. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-Anchor, 1956.

———.
The Birth of Tragedy
and
The Case of Wagner
, trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1967.

Porges, Heinrich.
Wagner Rehearsing the ‘Ring': An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival
, trans. Robert L. Jacobs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Schorske, Carl E.
Fin-de-siécle Vienna: Politics and Culture
. New York: Knopf, 1980.

Shattuck, Roger.
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I
. New York: Random House, 1955.

Shaw, George Bernard.
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
. New York: Dover, 1967.

Taine, H[ippolyte]. A.
History of English Literature
, trans. Henri Van Laun. New York: A. L. Burt, undated.

Wagner, Richard.
My Life [Mein Leben]
, trans. Andrew Gray, ed. Mary Whittall. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

———.
Letters: The Burrell Collection
, ed. John N. Burk. New York: Vienna House, 1972.

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Wagner: A Biography
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From Ritual to Romance
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“Thank you. Would you like to see my work?” Helva asked, politely. She instinctively sheered away from personal discussion . . .

“Work?” asked the lady.

“I am currently reproducing the Last Supper on the head of a screw.”

—Anne McCaffrey,
The Ship Who Sang

Isn't there something—could it really be missing from the text above—urging us to read this passage from Anne McCaffrey's series of science fiction tales about the young cyborg Helva as irony? Pin down (or up) that irony, and we admit at the same time: Our laughter only checks a more violent urge to dash the screw from Helva's metal grip, to declare: “Fool, fool! Blind metal fool! For all your microscopic vision, that is no work at all!
”

Work? we go on, to ourselves, stalled between laughter and rage in the uncertainty between responses that is irony's sign. “Work!” we do not quite ejaculate into a silence that, for all we know, is as likely formed of Helva's ignorance (she does not suspect the vanity of her labor) as by her terror (even at age twelve she must know what her audience—at least the male fraction—might do or say) as by her indifference (she is not human; she is only something we—the males among us—make: though, in this case, she has been written by a woman). The silence, now, is Helva's: she is doing something—work—that is, maddeningly, not responding to us. A few (of us) may even notice what we have left out—that what is missing is our own terror at work on an historical indifference we can hardly bear and, therefore, will not bare. . .
because it flies in the face of all (or only: male/heterosexual) desire. (Metaphorically identifiable with any other kind? by extension of any sort of logic or psychology?) “This is work?” we go on. “Oh, no! If that is what you think—” we silently inveigh—“there is something
decidedly
missing. “As we perceive the futility of Helva's task, our anger turns on her precisely as we would use it to unlock her silence, her ignorance, her error—this victim of an impoverished notion of production:

Angels on a pin?

Apostles on a screw?

We want to snatch its emblem—drawn and patterned so incisively by a woman—violently from her! Certainly writer McCaffrey intended something like this. . . from us. (“I bet she laves it,” grunts my grosser brother, with a snicker. “I believe this was her intention, ” declares my more refined, with a smile.) We want to commit some violence against this deflated notion of work that will leave Helva's claw empty, will leave her lights and lenses and paint brush fixed or blinking or probing about in some brutal absence, an illuminated space from which an object has just vanished, a space that is saturated with meaning precisely because something is no longer there. (Art? Labor? What confusion of boundaries between presence and absence is written in that violent, violated, void locus whose legibility we would unlock—to read into it our own words, our own meanings—even as it fades to pure blankness, even as we watch, under the combined mechanical/human gaze—hers, ours—still, somewhere, backed by human brain?) Among the more articulate of us, this turn of the lock, this rape of the screw—this violence motivated wholly by a conflict of interpretation—goes on in silence even as we admit that the fictive creators of this metal and glass and nervous creature (whose genitals have already been removed, like a phrase snipped from the body of the text by the closure of parentheses) are our brothers. They exist only in the empty margin writer McCaffrey has assigned them, yet their operations stall us—the men, that is—on some confused level between experience and myth, before a contradictory gap in the logic or poetics of bodies or machines. For the moment we do not know which . . .

As of yet we cannot name it
.

Something is still missing
.

Still, in excess of the silence, of the absence, of the incompleteness, don't we all understand (whether that “we” is the pathologically “socialized” few who sympathize with, or the morally “civilized” many who abominate) this rape fantasy by which we have just indulged in an ugly and overextended metaphor of desires we would rather not admit that we, some of us, have or admit that we, all of us, have seen rampant throughout “civilized” (read: patriarchal) society: despite whatever religious image has been incised on it by Helva's vice-like virginal grip, certainly one screw less in this collection of metal and glass and wire that is cyborg Helva (extended or, better, constituted by her technology as much as writer McCaffrey, writing in 1959, was extended or, better, constituted by typewriter, printing, etc.),
in which the organic—reduced to pure subject, pure ego, pure nerve (or over-wrought nerves)—is wholly hidden behind some hard and inanimate shell
, couldn't
be a theft, an appropriation, a rape—could not
possibly
create an absence in any way missed or mourned in the face of any understanding of work, or art, or desire, or rage
. . .

Well, as long as it remains
only
a fantasy . . . but what we all know now is that where all these ellipses, pauses, gaps hide, veil, cover, and even violently destroy the possibility of completion to the thoughts either side of them, obliterate the work that might have gone on within them, there is something wrong. For such elisions are the visible and resonant marks of an error we can all at last read: it is precisely in these moments of silence that fantasy returns to trouble—that is, to present us with the possibility of its realized fact that must, certainly, be based upon it, that must be construed, if not constructed, by it
.

There, certainly, we can find—definitely—something troubling, something missing
.