Clearly, there is no survival here unless the reader turn to Haraway’s manifesto, to do her or his own work, which alone can restructure mine. (RW 118)
The universe of discourse these essays begin to map out is not monolithic, eternal, always-already complete. It is evolving, historical, subject to dialogue and revision. We can revise it ourselves, with our own creative and critical work. All we need to do is enter it — with all the analytic vigilance (and sense of play) we can muster.
The universe of discourse is an open universe. With these essays, Delany invites us in.
Longer Views
Wagner/Artaud:
A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions
For Cynthia Belgrave
and Ethyl Eichelberger
What follows is a work of popular cultural history, not of original research. It required not one foray into any other library save my own. Here is its only justification:
This scholar is often chary of quoting the first-hand sources of that one, tending to summarize rather than repeat. It waits, then, for a work of assemblage such as this to retell the social tale with the immediacy and richness of shared original accounts through judicious quotation. To make points, I have put together what struck me as the most exciting parts of the stories around Artaud’s final year at Ivry (and his earlier encounter with Jacques Rivière of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise) and of Wagner’s participation in the Dresden Uprising of 1849. Lest some scholar chide me for ignorance or willful distortion, I state here that in neither case have I told the whole story; there are many facts that are known about both that do not fit into the neat and headlong narratives I have constructed. A reader would never know, from this account (for example), that the composer’s young niece, Johanna Wagner, was a singer in Wagner’s company in Dresden, who, since premiering Elizabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser in October 1845 at age nineteen, was coming to rival Schröder-Devrient in popularity, and that from time to time throughout the fighting Wagner was concerned for her safety; nor will the reader find any mention of some of Artaud’s more tempestuous relations with any number of fascinating figures of ’30s and ’40s Paris (such as his brief, intense pursuit of Anaïs Nin) that laid another layer of legend over an already legendary man. This work is selective, then, not exhaustive. I urge anyone intrigued by it to pursue the stories into the realm of detail (my briefest of bibliographies will only be a beginning) where narrative neatness crumbles and — very possibly — knowledge, with its real limitations, begins.
I
Were two men more alike in their designs on an audience, in their desire to thrust theater, even art itself, to the horizon of its time, then shatter that horizon, to call up new images, sounds, emotions at the behest of spectacle? There is at least one level where — cruel, after all (Artaud explains to us in The Theater and Its Double), not because of its violence or its pain but because of its rigor, its demand for committed audience attention, for complete artistic dedication — Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty is the performance site for Wagner’s Total Artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Here is a passage from the opening page of a biography of one of them:
[He] was both a visionary and a mystic. He saw the theater as had the people of antiquity, a ritual able to give rise to a numinous or religious experience within the spectator. To achieve such experience theatrically, he expanded the spectator’s reality by arousing the explosive and creative forces with man’s unconscious in determining man’s actions. By means of a theater based on myths, symbols, and gestures, the [work]… became a weapon to be used to whip up man’s irrational forces, so that a collective theatrical event could be turned into a personal living experience.
This is Bettina L. Knapp writing about Antonin Artaud. But anyone who knows of Wagner’s articulate study of German mythology, from the Eddas and the Volsungasaga to the German legal records edited by Grimm, of his fascination with classical Greek theater or his desire to make his “music-dramas”—the term he devised to replace “opera”—strike effects of the most basic and profound emotional sort in his hearers, akin to moments of religious ecstasy, must pause a moment to be sure which man is being talked of. It would take almost no revision to make it a perfectly accurate description of Richard Wagner.
Were two men more dissimilar in the material reality of their artistic productions, in the immediate effect of that art on the world?
In February 1883, at Venice, in his apartments at the sumptuous Palazzo Vendramin, with an international entourage in attendance and an even greater audience in awe of him, favored by a king who had funded for him a temple at Bayreuth to the art of his own creation — yes, the “music-drama”—Wagner died in his wife’s arms at age sixty- nine, of diverticular gastric complications and a ruptured heart vessel. His last words were “My watch!” It had fallen from his pocket as Cosima tried to comfort him in the terminal agony that had seized him at his work desk.
Behind him were ten major and three minor operas, a youthful symphony, various preludes and much occasional music, as well as volumes of literary and theoretical works — Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future, the notorious anti-Semitic article “Jewry in Music,” and Opera and Drama — as well as volumes of autobiography, music reviews, essays on the organization of orchestras, music schools, and opera companies, historical speculations, political essays and pamphlets, poems, plays, and stories, as well as the thousands on thousands of letters sent throughout his life.
Artaud’s death?
On the chill morning of March 4th, 1948, an old man at 52, all but toothless and emaciated as only a lifetime opium addict can be, his body eaten out by rectal cancer, his bloodstream thick with the chloral that he’d used to dampen the pain once the opium and morphine had ceased to have any effect, in a room in the small eighteenth-century pavilion without heating or water at the Ivry-sur-Seine clinic on the outskirts of Paris, seated at the foot of his bed not far from a fireplace filled with the ashes from the previous day against winter’s ending cold, Artaud was found dead by the gardener who was, as he had been doing for some months now, bringing Artaud his breakfast. Ivry had been Artaud’s home for two years since his release from his most recent confinement at the Rodez Asylum. The walls of his room, in which the mad poet Gérard de Nerval had once been confined, were covered with Artaud’s drawings. A stout wooden block, which sometimes served as a table, and which a few months before Dr. Delmas had put in his room, telling him to hammer or stab it with a knife in order to take out his hostile feelings, was chopped nearly to bits. But almost a third of Artaud’s life had been passed in one mental hospital or another.
Thirteen months prior to his death, Artaud may have had his best hours. The Theater and Its Double (1938) — Artaud’s finest book and his greatest claim to our attention — had been reprinted in 1944. His essays from the ’30s on the Tarahumara Indians had been gathered into a book, A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara (republished in the U.S. as The Peyote Dance), at the end of 1945. The previous spring, the five long letters he had written to Henri Parisot about his drug addiction, language, poetry, and art, Letters from Rodez (1946), had appeared. And in June, after nine years, he had been released from Rodez and had moved into the comparatively benign Ivry-sur-Seine clinic, where he shortly was allowed to take up residence in the pavilion at the edge of the property, apart from the main building. Artaud had been released on condition that his livelihood would be taken care of; and a group of leading painters — among them Picasso, Braque, Arp, Léger, Duchamp, and Giacometti — had donated paintings for a benefit to raise the money; Gide, Sartre, René Char, Tristan Tzara, and more had given manuscripts and autographs that were also sold; and France’s theater community staged another benefit on Artaud’s behalf at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, at which various writers delivered appreciations of Artaud, Artaud’s works were read, and where Jean-Louis Barrault took part in a forty-minute reading from The Cenci, Artaud’s single full- length play — while Artaud himself waited, nervously, happily, in a cafe with a friend a few streets away. Interest in the haggard but brilliant man was, at this point, higher than ever before.