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 Parsifaclass="underline" 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 uncritical, 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.