The essay’s ostensible analytical goal is to read the fragmentary aesthetic of Artaud against the discourse of “High Art” as embodied in the theatrical practices institutionalized by Wagner. To carry out this reading, Delany reconstructs events in Wagner’s life which have either been suppressed by Wagner himself or, when brought to the surface and analyzed by others, have been misinterpreted due to the predispositions imposed by subsequent discursive practices. Delany thus takes biographical elements which have proved most susceptible to the colorings of discourse — to mythopoesis — and renders them vivid, concrete, and contextually specific. As we’ve noted earlier, this is a key move in discourse analysis. In place of a pervasive set of artistic practices which are usually accepted without question or even notice, Delany substitutes a life, its socioeconomic context, and the materially specific foundations of those artistic practices — which can be noticed and questioned.
The strategic placement of the two autobiographical passages near the beginning and end of “Wagner/Artaud” creates a conceptual frame within which the transformation of the myth of Wagnerian discourse can be observed. In the first passage, we are given a vivid account of the chaotic goings-on backstage during a Wagner performance at the newly opened Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center:
The proscenium is not before you to frame what you see: costumed chorus members in their intense make-up mingle with workmen in their greens and blues and technicians in sweaters and jeans, with metal scaffolding all around (invisible from the seats), lights hung every which where, and music always playing through the lights and motion and general hubbub, so that the effect is more like watching a circus rehearsal scattered about the floor of some vast hangar than an artistic performance.[20]
We are then immediately given a metaphorical reading of this episode:
… one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner’s influence is because we are always within it. We can never get outside it, never see it as an organized stage picture. There is no vantage from which we can slip into the audience and look at it objectively. (W/A 21)
By this reading, the all-engulfing backstage experience becomes an image of the ubiquity of Wagnerian aesthetic practices — in ironic contrast to the spectacle of transcendence which those practices strive to generate onstage. Yet there seems to be more to this anecdote than a metaphor for pervasiveness — the images are too vivid, too concrete. There is an excess of signification.
In the second passage near the essay’s close, Delany considers Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” of the work of art. Arguing (contra Benjamin) that the aura is precisely what is preserved in the mechanical reproduction of art, rather than what is lost, Delany shows how a biographical account of a direct encounter with a work of art — such as his own with Picasso’s Guernica — can serve as an empirical counter to the mythic “aura” that Wagnerian discourse places around reproductions (W/A 78). This conception of biography as empirical counter provides a second reading for the backstage passage: what stands out now is less the all-engulfing quality of the space than its intense material specificity. Backstage at the Met now looks less like an image of all-encompassing Wagnerism and more like an inadvertent manifestation of Artaud’s insistently corporeal Theater of Cruelty. The guiding metaphor — theater as discourse — has, by its own signifying excess, overturned and revealed its subversive underside.
The deployment of a self-deconstructing framing structure here recalls the beginnings-and-endings of several of Delany’s novels, most notably Dhalgren and Neveryóna. Like the framing structures of those earlier works, the theater-metaphor framing “Wagner/Artaud” yields up two equally viable yet mutually subversive readings, neither of which can crystallize out into “the” definitive interpretation. Moreover, the closer we look at these two readings individually, the richer and more complex they seem to become within themselves. This self-complexifying quality suggests an explanation for the intriguing pile-up of ironies and subversions in the essay’s closing pages: the simple thematic opposition of Wagner as the Elder God of the discourse of “High Art” to Artaud as the deranged Trickster God of postmodernism has begun to crumble under the weight of the analytical pressure Delany has applied to it. In its form, then, “Wagner/Artaud” is a classic deconstruction — an analysis which “dissolves the borders that allow us to recognize [a theme] in the first place” (NFW 8).
The notion of reading a metaphor or theme into its own radicalness is given its most explicit consideration in “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs.’” As in “Wagner/Artaud,” the privileged critical method is the argument from empirical evidence — and as in “Wagner/Artaud,” the steady accumulation of evidence leads to an overturning or inversion of the guiding theme: through an extended consideration of Haraway’s notion of cyborg-as-metaphor, Delany arrives at the notion of metaphor-as-cyborg. A significant distinction between the two essays is that in “Wagner/Artaud,” Delany supplies the guiding metaphor, whereas in “Reading at Work,” the guiding metaphor in question is Haraway’s, which Delany proceeds to re-frame. This process of re-framing continues on many levels throughout the essay: over its course, we are given a reading of Haraway’s essay, and a reading of that reading; we are given a Lacanian reading of castration imagery in pop culture, and a reading of Lacanian readings in general; we are given an explication of the notion of radical metaphor, even as the form of the explication is revealed to follow from the conclusion it itself yields up. In terms of sheer economy of means, the number of simultaneous readings Delany manages to orchestrate in this 32-page essay is a bit dizzying. And as with “Wagner/Artaud,” the vertiginousness of our experience is in direct proportion to the rigor of our own reading — a reading which reveals, once again, the cohering and dissolution of a rhetorical object (in this case, the traditional conception of metaphor itself) within a posited discursive space.
But beyond the textual transformations going on inside “Reading at Work,” there are texts outside the essay with which it is clearly engaged as well. Readers familiar with contemporary theory will recognize in the discussion of castration and the images of theft and reciprocity clear references to the “Purloined Letter” debate, inaugurated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s short story. Although it is in no way necessary to be familiar with this debate to follow Delany’s argument, we might nevertheless want to consider the relation between them. In Lacan’s conception, the paralysis that seems to fall upon each character in “The Purloined Letter” after he or she gains knowledge of possession of the letter is an image of the “truth of castration,” a metaphor for the subject’s entry into the Symbolic realm. “The letter,” says Lacan, “always arrives at its destination”: castration is inevitable.[21] Jacques Derrida counters that this image of inevitability is an artifact of the phallocentrism underlying psychoanalytic thought — an artifact conjured up by the surrounding discourse in order to ensure its own stability. Against this image Derrida posits the notion of the material contingency of society, which the image of castration exists specifically to conceal and contain. By this conception, the “truth of castration” is not that “the letter always arrives at its destination,” but rather that
21
Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, from