Wagner as Dramatist and Allegorist
Fredric Jameson
Modernist Cultures. Volume 8, Issue 1, Page 9-41, ISSN 2041-1022, May 2013
Wagner’s architectonic and metaphysical excess, particularly in the
Ring, does not encourage modesty in the critic, who also ends up
wanting to say everything, rather than one specific thing. If I had to do
the latter, like a good scholar or philologist, an erudite commentator,
I would probably try to say something about the magic potions in
Wagner; and may still briefly touch on that. But as a specialised topic
that would also require us to deal more centrally with Tristan; and here
clearly it is the Ring that demands our full and complete attention, not
least on account of the interpretive controversies it continues to cause.
So perhaps one guideline should be, not so much what Wagner
really ‘meant’, but rather what interpretation and meaning might
actually be in the ‘case of Wagner’. This is a dialectical problem that
greatly transcends the traditional questions about the Ring: namely,
whether it is about Wotan or Siegfried, and also what ‘the gods’ can
be said to mean (in order for them to undergo a twilight, indeed a
wholesale conflagration and extinction). On a philosophical level, this
problem traditionally confronts Feuerbach with Schopenhauer; and
meanwhile, in another part of the forest, lurks the question about the
meaning of the ring itself and how much it may be said to represent
capitalism, as Shaw famously argued.
What it is now dialectically important to do is to suspend all the
alternatives such questions ask us to choose, to step back in order
to ask what such questions themselves mean. We need to ask what
meaning means in this situation, and therefore what interpreting it
might involve. And it is crucial to retain our specification ‘in this instance’, and to remember that the discussion engages Wagner alone,
or rather his historical situation, and not music in general, drama in
general, interpretation in general, or reading in general (for it is about
reading that we must focus on here). Still, it seems fair minimally to
generalise Wagner’s aesthetic situation to that of an early moment of
artistic modernism as such, so I will venture a few tentative parallels in
what follows.
The first problem interpretation faces in this historical situation of
nascent modernism is a gap between what sociological jargon calls the
macro and the micro: in other words between overall form, the action
or plot as a whole, and individual detail, here not merely language but
also musical scoring. It is suggestive, if not altogether correct, to think
of this as an opposition between the project as a whole and its pageby-page
execution. In fact, though, the gap here constitutes a more
dialectical distinction, between totality and the individual or empirical
phenomenon. Totality is necessarily always absent, the phenomenon
as its name suggests is always perceptually present in one way or
another. The two levels are both dialectically inseparable and at the
same time incommensurable: no synthesis is possible between them,
and interpretation always ends up choosing one or the other for its
focus, as much as it would like to posit some ultimate unity, some
organic form, in which detail and whole might be at one.
Now this dialectical opposition is no doubt a permanent dilemma
for the human mind (otherwise it would not have been necessary to
invent the dialectic). But I want to argue that it is exacerbated in the
modern period, and very specifically in all the arts we characterise
as modernist; and that it is exacerbated in the modernist period
for a specific historical reason, namely the process of differentiation
characterising modernity in general. ‘Differentiation’ is a useful
term and concept invented by Niklas Luhmann, and it designates
the tendency of reality in the modern period to differentiate itself
into distinct semi-autonomous levels which we come to think of as
multiple and coexisting realities with their own specific intelligibilities,
each semi-autonomous and relatively distinct from the other.1 Thus,
to take an easy example, that of the academic disciplines: their
differentiation from that initial, primordial magma which is theology
can be documented and dated with some accuracy. The trajectory
of this immense historical process – in which Philosophy separates
itself out from Theology, and the Law and the Natural Sciences from
Philosophy, only then to undergo further differentiation themselves,
as when Chemistry and then Biology become separate disciplines in
their own right – this process can stand as a kind of model of the kind of dynamic of differentiation that is seemingly reversed in our
own postmodern period (where, for example, Biology folds back into
Astronomy, and Linguistics and Anthropology back into the thing we
now call Theory).
This last also happens in the arts. It will thus be an interesting
question to determine whether the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk is a
premonition of such postmodern de-differentiation or, on the other
hand, like Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondances’, whether it is simply
(as I would be tempted to argue) an apparatus, a formal device,
designed to intensify difference – either in the arts or the physical
senses themselves – by way of their identification with one another. We
can return to that too; and I should stress, in passing, that Luhmannian
differentiation is only one philosophical language or code among
others in which this historical process could be articulated.
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