For my generation of New York children, who, during the fifties and sixties, walked into that gallery of the Museum of Modern Art displaying Picasso’s monumental Guernica (before, in the initial years of the eighties, it was returned to its Spanish home), before any of the horrific and angular images from that night of violence during the Spanish Civil War could register as content, the first and overwhelming experience was of the sheer amount of paint, white and black, spread ceiling to floor, edge to edge, over an entire wall! There simply was no art object within the doors of any other museum in the city that used as much!
Now, after perusing the above account (its verbal reduction straining after the historical ding an sich with italics and exclamation points), suppose a reader (who may or may not have walked into that gallery on the second floor of the 53rd Street museum during those years) then goes on to gaze at the next three-by-five postcard of that awesome work (or, indeed, even, in Spain, at the work itself), trying to get some feel of that scale, of that material. For that reader, then, something generated by my childhood experience of the painting will have been exchanged with something of the social “aura,” in all their shared semiotic complexities, repairabilities, interpenetrations, articulations, and flexibilities.
The assumption implicit in Benjamin’s essay, that this “aura” is the result of a simple historic, and uncritical imposition by the powerful on the weak, is one of the places Benjamin skirts vulgar Marxism. But because they are constituted of absence/difference, signs can only be transformed/exchanged. It is almost impossible simply to “impose” them in an allegory of unidirectional power. The influence of royalty on the “aura” cannot be denied any more than can the influence of popular art and social poverty: in the play of fictions, in the “aura’s” construction, there is as much work, both positive and negative, from below as there is from above.
This is what Benjamin (as well as Adorno!) misses. And that construction — that “aura”—is what Wagner, more than any other nineteenth-century artist, helped engineer throughout the Western bourgeoise. Against that “aura,” Artaud’s esthetic enterprise was to take precisely the plasticity, the dimensionality of art — all that was lost in mechanical reproduction, all that was material about any and every medium of reproduction, all that was in excess of the “aura”—and seize it as the domain of the theater, use it as the substance of art.
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.