Certainly his significance as a writer is that there is so much in his texts that urges us on to this sort of reading.
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.
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