Thus he addressed ten thousand literate middle-class Englishmen on that spring day in 1814. Had he addressed fewer of them or had he addressed them differently, he would not have been.
To understand what art — in light of such artists — was, however, which means to understand, with more than a smile, such pronouncements about those artists with whom we began this section, we must investigatively reanimate a nineteenth-century Europe where greatness was based on a notion of character, of nobility, of spirit, a spirit that was at once both political and aesthetic.
The young Hegel had articulated the idea of a spirit for his century in 1807, with his concept of the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Times, National Character, the Soul of the Race. Today, we tend to see Nietzsche as a figure in opposition to the totalizing systematization of Hegel’s sweeping reductions. But Nietzsche’s concept of the Weltanschauung, from his inaugural lecture of 1869 at the University of Basel (only two years after Arnold had given that final lecture at Oxford, “Culture and Its Enemies”), when the twenty-five-year-old German philosopher was an intimate member of the Wagner family circle at Triebschen, seems far more in keeping with Hegel’s concept than opposed to it:
All philological activity should be embedded and enclosed in a philosophical Weltanschauung so that all individual or isolated details evaporate as things that can be cast away, leaving only the whole, the coherent.
For Hegel, writing in the first, glorious years of the Napoleonic onslaught, history and progress were forces that marched hand in hand. For Nietzsche, writing sixty-two years later, history was a nightmare and progress a joke. (His older friend Wagner, in his projected Ring cycle, through a recourse to myth, had taken on precisely the job of redeeming the historical concept without recourse to the degraded notion of progress.) But the conceptual screen both Hegel and Nietzsche worked against was one with the concept of unity put forth by Aristotle and Poe. This nineteenth-century reductionism, this plea for a unity in which all that is anomalous can be ignored, this appeal to rationalism over empiricism, is behind the whole deadly concept of race; by the end of that century we will see its fallout in the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair, in what we now speak of as British imperialism, and in Rhodesian and South African racism. Such reductionism when essentialized becomes the philosophical underpinning of this century’s totalitarianisms, whether Hitler’s or Stalin’s or, in its so much milder form, that most social of social constructs — the “human nature” which everyone seems so reluctant to do battle with in the name of pleasure in this country today.
Our current history is the history of the abuse of such reductionism and such essentialism. It is the chronicle of their genocidal failure to support humane behavior within and between nations, within and between institutions, between individuals and institutions, and between individuals of unequal power. So much is this the case that the contemporary historian Carl Schorske can write,
What the historian must now abjure, and nowhere more so than in confronting the problem of modernity, is the positing in advance of an abstract categorical common denominator — what Hegel called the Zeitgeist, and Mill “the characteristic of the age.” Where such an intuitive discernment of unities once served, we must now be willing to undertake the empirical pursuit of pluralities as a precondition to finding unitary patterns in culture.
But how can we truly accept such a program until we truly understand what it is we are against: the spirit of the age, the nation, the race, as it became something that might be manifested in the greatest artist of the times, the age, the nation: in a Byron, a Sand, a Hugo, a Wagner. The entire Annales school of history, from Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, would seem to confirm the currency of Schorske’s position in the field of contemporary historical studies: that is, of analyzing great men and great events down into the socioeconomic matrix of needs, conventions, and desires that position them. This particular view of history, when transferred to art, is tantamount to a certain dismissal of the notion of “greatness” itself and fosters a movement toward the occasional/disposable poem, as in Frank O’Hara, or Ted Berrigan, or the courting of hermetic banalities carried on so luminously and daringly by W. S. Merwin in one direction and John Ashbery in another. But could anyone have better prepared us for this inevitable fallout from the continuing rise in the functionally literate population, sometimes called “the death of the author,” than Artaud?
The death of the author follows, of course, on the death of God so vigorously noted by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, whose first two parts were published in the year of Wagner’s death, 1883; and whether Foucault is right that the author’s death precedes the death of Man, we still have some way to go before we find out for sure. My personal suspicion is that all three are pretty much aspects of the same thing.
But England’s replacement of the ideology of religion with the ideology of literature was only the provincials’ catching up with a process that had been going on all through the European century: the replacement of the general ideology of religion with the ideology of art. While Arnold was speculating on the religious aspects of revolution from across the moonlit channel, Wagner was a wanted political criminal with a price on his head, who had just managed to emerge from the fighting and bloodshed at the barricades. To articulate his situation is to articulate most clearly, if not most importantly, the continental manifestation of that nineteenth-century trend in art, a trend in the vision of what art was and might do, a trend that, paradoxically, went hand in hand with the rise of the ideology of science.
What Arnold and his followers wanted to do with literature, Wagner, of course, had set out to do with music. The theoretical works of 1849 and 1850, written during his exile in Zurich after the calamity of Dresden’s uprising of 1849, are where Wagner formulated his attack on the future of art.
With the accomplishment of the Ring and the other music-dramas that followed this three-volume-plus elaboration of the social function of art in general and music in particular, Wagner came to be considered, for better or for worse, the embodiment of the spirit of his times; which is to say, at the time, the spirit of the modern — that spirit which, in the postmodern view, modernism must dismiss in order to become politically responsible.
Is the lesson we are about to abstract from Wagner, then (to anticipate ourselves just a bit), the idea that all High Art — all Great Art, all Serious Art — is necessarily conservative, or even fascist, because there is no way it can avoid reifying the anterior (and always social) system that prepares the labels “Great” or “High” in the first place? I do not believe we have to do this — not so long as we bear in mind the problematics of a figure, a mind, a creator such as Artaud.
V
If Wagner is kitsch, then the status we have claimed for Artaud’s work should also apply to his.
But of course the operas stand there, a mosaic of one impressively telling psychological moment laid down after another, this one five seconds long, that one forty-five seconds, one lasting a whole six minutes, now another that endures thirty seconds (for Nietzsche, Wagner was finally — with no mean paradoxical intent — the “great miniaturist”), until a massive structure has been bridged, exhausting not because of its duration, which is considerable, but because of the intricacy of its articulations, which are near numberless. They were not always kitsch. And it is our critical duty to look at art that can still speak to us in, as far as possible, its historical context.