The Theater and Its Double would appear fourteen years later in February 1938, just after Artaud returned from a trip to Ireland — in a strait-jacket, to be handed over to the French authorities, thirteen years after Rivière’s death in 1925.
For now, however, we can only ask if, when, at fifty-two, his looks (and teeth) gone, his demeanor changed from that of a handsome devil to that of an emaciated ghoul, Artaud chose the title for what was to be his last work, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, did he recognize it — did he take the title intentionally — as a posthumous gift from Rivière, who had picked out the phrase “to cure us of the judgment of others” from those early letters and re-presented it to Artaud in Rivière’s own slightly varied context?
In terms of an attitude toward art, in terms of art’s very definition, the organization of its entification inscribed within the discourse of those generations that, since the middle of the nineteenth century, have called themselves modern — in terms of those gut responses all of us are still constantly arguing with as to what is and what is not art — in terms of art’s hidden, inner-dimensional matrix and its external mythical and social moorings, Wagner may well have been the largest influence on Western culture we have yet known. Nor am I talking about a few phrases or paragraphs in his work that can be seen to embody, after the fact, the seeds of future trends. (For that, finally, is much the way Artaud works on us — nor would he, mystic that he was, have had it otherwise.) I am talking about the massive imposition of theatrical practices, supported by the state, coupled with a public fascination so great that, for nearly fifty years after his death, practically any European who aspired to any level of culture had in some way to be molded by the Wagner phenomenon. How intense was this phenomenon? Recall Proust’s Mme. Verdurin, who, still at the turn of the century, would not allow Wagner to be played at her soirées, as the music was too exciting to her nerves. Whether one was for him or against him, the nerves that shivered and quivered under the Wagnerian onslaught were those of the entire European bourgeoisie. Wagner represented the birth of “the modern” in art, not as a fashion, but as a program, a practice, and a philosophy. That is how artists from Baudelaire and Berlioz up through T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce heard him.
Even with the early nineteen-eighties’ resurgence of interest (1983 marked the centennial of Wagner’s death), it is still hard for many of us to imagine the extent of Wagner’s influence. But we get some inkling of it when we remember that by World War I, the three human beings about whom more books, more monographs, and more articles had been written than any others in history were Jesus Christ, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Richard Wagner.
IV
“We have no artists today whose nobility, stature, and greatness of spirit equal that of Lord Byron, George Sand, Richard Wagner…”
Considering herself or himself more or less in touch with the evanescent shifting of late modernist and postmodern aesthetic values, the contemporary listener must smile at such a statement. I resuscitate it here to invoke what we might call today, somewhat clumsily, the establishment aesthetic of the last decades of the Victorian age, when such a sentence (yes, it is part of my fiction) might have been uttered. Certainly this particular galaxy of judgments (which probably would have been momentarily extended to include Victor Hugo and, as it turned to England, would have looked with almost equal favor on Edward FitzGerald’s Rubá’iyát and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and would have turned expectantly to Swinburne well before Yeats) becomes rarer and rarer through the Edwardian coda to the nineteenth century until, by Edward VII’s actual death in 1910 (when, wrote Virginia Woolf, human nature changed), such pronouncements either cease or at least come to take on some of the connotations of a certain mental fossilization that this value matrix, once so quintessentially European, has for us today.
For us, that thirty years from 1880 to 1910 is a rather bleak period in, say, English poetry. Yeats and Hardy are its high points. The first of these decades includes some of Hopkins’s working period, but that work will not be discovered until later. Rudyard Kipling, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Bridges, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson — and A. E. Housman was read so ubiquitously, of course, as to make him a kind of misanthropic Rod McKuen of minuscule output — do not mark out for most a major poetic epoch.
Yeats aside, whatever one’s personal enthusiasms for the English poets of this period, one has the feeling that they are just that: personal. And this is, of course, the period to which my reconstructed pronouncement belongs, even more so than it belongs to the years contemporaneous with the artists it evokes.
“The nineteenth century,” as Auden tells us, “is the European century. Insofar as neither England nor America is part of Europe… [they] can be called provincial.” And it is the provincials’ justly-awed view of Europe, a view that took a while to filter down and become commonplace, that our “Bryon/Sand/Wagner” pronouncement reflects. Europe herself was busy during this same time inventing the avant-garde. But that had not yet come across the various waters.
What kind of world was it for, say, an Englishman concerned with art? For one thing — and it is perhaps the most surprising thing for us today — during this period there was no course in any English university called “English Literature.”
The populations of the industrial nations, like England, were rising — doubling, tripling, quadrupling. Religion simply could not constrain the actions of the swollen urban laboring class in the way it had served as a sanctioned set of guiding superstitions for a rural peasantry.
Try to imagine a great city without written signs!
A minimum level of literacy is an urban necessity for maintaining minimal order. Add to that the necessary socialization that schools provide in that most anti-social construct, the big city, and we begin to understand the necessary rise in public education that accompanied the rise in urban populations.
Walter Benjamin notes in his work on nineteenth-century Paris that, with the new size of cities and the advent of public transportation necessary to get about in them, for the first time in history a sizable number of people were now spending comparatively long periods of time every day in horse-drawn trolleys and rattling trains, sitting across from and surreptitiously looking at people they did not know and to whom they were not going to speak. From this new, unnatural, and (at first) wholly urban experience, Benjamin speculated, the whole air of social mystery and the resultant hunger for social analysis grew up that was answered first by a now-long-vanished genre of writing called “physiologies.” These were collections of literary sketches — not quite short stories, not quite essays — that simply described or analyzed the various types you might see moving about in the city. They were extraordinarily popular in the mid-years of the nineteenth century, until the novel, under the pressure of Thackeray, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and Wilkie Collins, adjusted its great and generous chambers to include an equal range of character types in even more interesting and mysterious interplay — thus satisfying that hunger even more (and making obsolete the physiologies). The urban crowd itself became a kind of mythic phenomenon, hiding within it mystery, crime, romance, desire… Again and again in those nineteenth-century novels, menacing or desirable (or simply ambiguous) characters emerge from it, or turn to become lost in it.