But, as many commentators have now noticed and pointed out to each other so that others would hear, that closing melody is not completely new. Clearly it’s based on some five or six seconds — no more — of what, in The Perfect Wagnerite (1896), George Bernard Shaw called “some inconsequential love music” that first sounded toward the middle of Die Wälkure’s Act III. What makes it “inconsequential” is, of course, that it is not music from any of the passionate, incestuous, heterosexual loves that shake the quadrature of operas and — often — the audience unto the foundations. The music Wagner uses for Götterdämmerung’s terminal D-flat melody are not some moments from the searing, sun-drenched love of Siegfried and Brunhilda (or, indeed, the possibly more searing, moon-drenched love of Sigmund and Siglinda). Rather, this music accompanies Siglinda’s profession of love to Brunhilda, who, after Sig- mund’s death, protects Siglinda (and the as-yet-unborn Siegfried) by sending them into the uncivilized wood where Wotan will not follow. A 19th century tradition holds that the love of two women is the single purest love — a tradition going back at least as far as the biblical tale of Ruth and Naomi. This purity is certainly part of what Wagner wished to evoke in his closing. Still, he chose this clearly Sapphic moment when, because a daughter defies her father for love of another woman, the other woman declares her love in return.
No critic overtly mentioned this sapphism during Wagner’s lifetime. Possibly that emboldened him to write his next opera, Parsifal, surely and famously — it has been so called repeatedly throughout our century — the most blatantly homoerotic of operas in the repertoire.
Some commentators (e.g., Shaw) have gone so far as to claim that the recall of those few moments of melody from Die Wälkure at the close of Götterdämmerung is an oversight on Wagner’s part. It’s the single “motif” that appears only twice in the work: surely Wagner must have forgotten his first use of it, or at least assumed no one would recognize it. But, besides the fact that such recognitions, blatant and hidden, comprise the entire structure of the Ring, critics who claim such have simply never composed an opera. Such things are not forgotten; endings are much too important; and the single previous appearance makes it that much more certain it was a considered and conscientious decision.
More recent critics have taken to calling it the “praise Brunhilda” motif — which, yes, covers the situation: when in Die Wälkure’s Act III mortal Siglinda sings those moments of melody, she is, indeed, “praising” Brunhilda, her then still immortal half-sister. Nevertheless it sidesteps the yearning, the desiring, the straining for the other that inform that wondrous melody almost as powerfully as they do the “Liebestod” of Tristan und Isolde.
They are not subtle, the tropes characterizing the “homosexual genres.” Often, they are based on the most stereotypical heterosexist assumptions about homosexuality as an inversion of the masculine or of the feminine, or of homosexuality as the replacement of one by the other, or of homosexuality as a third, neuter (i.e., unspecified) sex. Because they are generic (or very close to it), they represent the gross forms of the particular work. But that’s why they are as recognizable as they are, by isolated adolescents with only the most fleeting and hearsay knowledge of a homosexual community — and, I’m sure, were quite accessible to straight readers who were interested enough to pursue them. But, at the same time, their coding is always in an erasable mode: They register as an absence, an oversight, a formal arrangement in which the homosexual reading can always be dismissed as an over- reading. That’s what makes them, as it were, safe in a profoundly homophobic society — in which even to mention homosexuality is to risk contaminating oneself with it.
One could go so far as to argue that these forms were only visible to those (of whatever sexual persuasion) in the work’s audience who saw form itself as an articulating element in art — and that, by the same token, they remained invisible to those who saw only manifest content as defining what a given work of art was “about”; as such, they are part of a code whose complexities are certainly not exhausted by the simple signaling of a possible sexual preference. They have, rather, to do with the figuration of a formalist conception of art itself.
Even Loveman’s characterization of Voyages (“Whether it be addressed to normal or abnormal sexuality matters little”) is simply an articulate characterization of the erasability of the homosexuality built into the form of the six individual poems in the sequence — just as Loveman’s subsequent citing of Sappho and Shakespeare as his first two writers for comparison — two writers in whom homosexuality may be read in or read out at will and according to a long tradition — implicates his statement within the very genre he is, with the quoted phrase, (dis-) articulating.
But seldom, of course, are these genre forms or their tropes as pure as I have presented them here. Seldom, indeed, are they as clear as the ones I’ve already located in Crane. The problem with trying to read these texts in the light of current “gay” politics is, however, that they are already figures of an older “homosexual” politics — which, as they metaphorize the silence and the yearning behind the social silence enforced around homosexuality, are (if read “literally” and not “figuratively”) precisely limited, by their writers’ most carefully crafted presentation of the formal conventions, to an articulate statement of homosexuality’s existence — but often of almost nothing more.
What I’ve described is not the particular form of Whitman’s poems or Melville’s novels — of Shakespeare’s sonnets or Sappho’s fragments. These are not the form of Musil’s Young Törless, of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, of Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. These are all works in which the content is manifestly homosexual — though, in the case of the older works, the same erasural reading of homosexuality congenitally links them, as it were, to the ones described; and in the fifties, occasionally critics tried to dismiss the more recent ones as cautionary case histories, rather than accept them as rich and moving statements — which may well have been the start of a similar dismissive move. But these genre forms do cover, say, Thomas Beer’s 1923 biography Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters.
We have gone into this genre (again, if that is what it should be called) in this much detail because Crane from time to time employed it: again, Voyages, “Harbor Dawn,” and “Cutty Sark” (not to mention “This Way Where November…” [“White Buildings”] and “Thou Canst Read Nothing…” [“Reply”]) are all examples.
Paradoxically, the existence of such a homosexual genre and its forms as I have described (gay is the last thing one should call them), as well as their problematic, even mythic, status (they could not be talked about for what they were and remain effective in any way; whether or not they actually existed had to be kept in a state of undecidability), may represent one of the largest obstacles in the development of a historically sensitive gay studies faced with the task of diligently teasing out what, in specific examples of such genres, is in excess of their simplistic conventions.