GUIDANCE NOTES FOR TALK NO 5 ON WAGNER ("SEXUAL FAMELICITY IN 'DAS RHEINGOLD'")

Substack, I note, makes an excellent automatic transcription of all podcast talks/lectures available along with the audio, so all the following material is already available, at least in its basic substance, in the transcription of audio lecture no 5. I know, however, that some of you appreciate these “guidance notes” as texts in their own right, so here is a copy of the actual notes I spoke from when giving talk no 5.

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How can this schema of “’The Ring’ as the drama of Wotan’s ‘kenotic’ salvation of Alberich” be filled out and made more substantial?

How do we go beyond this mere clue of the double nomenclature “Lichtalberich / Schwarzalberich”?

Well, I think that this schema begins to be filled out right from the opening scene of the opening opera.

Alberich does indeed present himself in this scene not under the aspect of a villain but under the aspect of a wretch.

I will have more to say later in these talks about the notion of the “wretch”. It is itself one of the threads that binds the various parts of the “Ring” drama together.

But for the present it will suffice to remind ourselves that this figure of the “wretch” plays a key role in the drama of “kenotic salvation” as I have presented it.

Perhaps the portrait of “the wretch” in the canon of Western culture is Isaiah 53

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

I have repeatedly said that this marks the point in the history of soteriological thought at which such static, rather than merely pragmatic, aspects of the “man needy of salvation” as physical ugliness enter into the salvific equation.

It is by no means just by chance that Isaiah 53 is the only Old Testament passage cited – and indeed one of the most substantial scriptural citations generally – in what I have presented as the really definitive synoptic statement of the Judaeo-Christian salvific problematic: Borges’s “Three Versions of Judas”.

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Now Alberich, in the opening scene of “Das Rheingold”, very definitely presents himself under this aspect – as the ugly man rather than as the evil / sinful man, as the wretch rather than the villain.

I said in the last talk that, if this scene moves me and speaks to me, it does so as a staging of “the incel experience”: the experience of an irremediably ugly man –

a man so genetically ugly that no “maxxing” is going to change his destiny –

wooing “Stacies” reserved for “Chad” alone.

This certainly, still speaking very personally, is what seals my experience of “The Ring” as a whole as a drama of kenotic salvation.

For me, very much in the continuity of the Isaiah passage, it is the ugly, hopelessly needy “incel” that is the real “ideal type” of “the one who is to be saved” that corresponds to “the one who saves”.

This incel is the modern type of the Bethesda paralytic.

A passage from Kafka’s diaries sums it up

I don’t believe people exist whose inner plight resembles mine; still, it is possible for me to imagine such people. But that the secret raven forever flaps about their heads as it does about mine, even to imagine that is impossible.

The incel condition drives into this terrible solitude. There is a shamefulness in being unable to satisfy one’s basic sexual needs that there is not, for example, in being unable to satisfy one’s basic nutritive needs.

One may die, indeed, in the latter case and not in the former. But there is a dignity in dying of starvation that there is not in lingering on as a “sexual famelic”.

In the latter there is a special wretchedness that links up to the great figures envisaged in the soteriological tradition.

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It might be retorted, of course, that the opening scene of “Das Rheingold” is precisely a portrayal of the transformation of the wretch into the villain –

or, in other words, the “wretch”, the “incel”. is dispatched and dispensed with in this opening scene after all.

Does not, indeed, Alberich renounce his identity as

“the ugly man vainly seeking the attention of beauty”?

This is the meaning of the famous Entsagungsmotiv which here becomes one of the first Motivs sounding in “The Ring”.

Woglinde sings it first

Nur wer der Minne Macht entsagt,
nur wer der Liebe Lust verjagt,
nur der erzielt sich den Zauber,
zum Reif zu zwingen das Gold

And Alberich sings it again a few lines later

Der Welt Erbe
gewänn’ ich zu eigen durch dich?
Erzwäng’ ich nicht Liebe,
doch listig erzwäng’ ich mir Lust?

Alberich substitutes then, for the “incel”’s pathetic hunger for sexual love, another hunger to whose satisfaction he does have a path: namely, the hunger for gold and the power that gold brings with it:

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Clearly, though, this formula whereby the figure of the wretch as incel is banished from the “Ring” problematic has its problems and its internal tensions.

More, indeed, for the non-German-speaker than for the German speaker.

The English speaker, in particular, will be struck and puzzled by the substitution evoked in the last two lines, which seems to be the replacement of a thing with something else close to identical with it:

Liebe / Lust

“love” and “lust” are, in English, very closely affined.

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But this problem seems to be solved and dissolved by the fact that in German the meaning of “Lust” is much broader:

The German “Lust” covers the whole spectrum of human pleasures and enjoyments.

The act of Alberich in the opening scene of “The Ring”, then, appears in this light as a very familiar one.

Anyone who has been himself that particular “wretch” whose wretchedness consists in the radical inability to acquire the creaturely comfort of sexual intercourse will have had said to him many times:

“things will work out for you if you just stop obsessing about women and concentrate on your career, on making money; when you are successful and rich the women will just fall naturally into your lap”.

A classic articulation of this is Iago’s speech to Roderigo:

Come, be a man! Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies. I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving

with cables of perdurable toughness. I could never better stead thee than now. Put money in thy purse.
Follow thou the wars; defeat thy favor with an usurped beard. I say, put money in thy purse. It
cannot be that Desdemona should long continue
her love to the Moor—put money in thy purse—
nor he his to her. It was a violent commencement in
her, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration. —put but money in thy purse. These Moors are
changeable in their wills. Fill thy purse with money.
The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts
shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida.
She must change for youth. When she is sated
with his body she will find the error of her choice.
Therefore, put money in thy purse. If thou wilt
needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than
drowning. Make all the money thou canst.

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There is, however, yet another twist.

I would argue that much in “The Ring” suggests that the “Renunciation” evoked here through the “renunciation motif” is essentially a failed renunciation.

The “swapping out” of one thing for another that it seems to thematize is in fact the thematization of a painful impossibility because there is no translatability of the two things:

We find the articulation of this idea in a well-known short story by Thomas Mann, “Der Kleine Herr Friedemann”

Mann’s world – especially in this early period of the 1890s – is saturated with Wagner and Wagnerianism.

One of the key scenes in this novella takes place at a performance of “Lohengrin” and Mann often centred whole stories on a Wagner opera (“Walsungenblut”).

“Der Kleine Herr Friedemann”, however, articulates precisely the idea of the unsubstitutability of Liebe by a more general Lust that I have alluded to here:

Er setzte sich an den Schreibtisch am offenen Fenster und starrte geradeaus auf eine grosse, gelbe Rose, die jemand ihm dort ins Wasserglas gestellt hatte. Er nahm sie und atmete mit geschlossenen Augen ihren Duft; aber dann schob er sie mit einer müden und traurigen Geberde beiseite. Nein, nein, das war zu Ende! Was war ihm noch solcher Duft? Was war ihm noch alles, was bis jetzt sein »Glück« ausgemacht hatte?...

The sexual love of woman is indispensable and unsubstitutable – and any idea we have that we “have found a substitute for it” is a delusion.

We have here to do with a prefiguration of Houellebecq’s idea, expounded in his first novel “Extension du Domaine de la Lutte”:

Décidément, me disais-je, dans nos sociétés, le sexe représente bel et bien un second système de différenciation tout à fait indépendant de l’argent ; et il se comporte comme un système de différenciation au moins aussi impitoyable.

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In this light, the whole plot-point of Entsagung takes on a certain phantom, misdirective quality.

Alberich does not carry out “the decisive act of renunciation” that he seems to carry out.

He does not become a power-and-money-focused “villain” and thereby push the wretch and “incel” that he began as out of the drama of the “Ring” as soon as he had entered it.

Rather, the wretch/incel lingers as central to “The Ring”

We might read as a clue to this one of the most-remarked-on “problems” of “The Ring”

The “Renunciation motif” sounds out, as every critic recognizes, at the most dramatically anomalous moments.

It sounds out, for example, at the moment of Siegmund’s seizing of Notung:

Heiligster Minne hoechste Not

Sehnender Liebe sehrende Not

What can this possibly mean?

I will go into this when I look at the figure of Siegmund,

Who is indeed proof of the persistence of the wretch deep on into “The Ring” and far beyond this opening scene.

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But long before the appearance of Siegmund in the second opera, this first work of the tetralogy already provides rich illustration of how

the renunciation of love is a fundamentally flawed, “impossible” renunciation.

As Alberich makes off with the Rhine-Gold, there is a long orchestral transition – during which the “renunciation motif” once again sounds out, without vocal overlay and in especially protracted, melancholy form – which takes us from the depths of the world into the heights of heaven: Wotan awakening beside his wife Fricka on the morning on which the building of the gods’ new home of Valhalla is finally complete.

This second scene opens with a combative dialogue between Wotan and Fricka that is anticipative of the tetralogy’s most soteriologically crucial dialogue – between the same two interlocutors – in the second act of “The Valkyrie”.

Wotan needed the Giants Fasolt and Fafnir to build Valhalla and he had offered them, as reward for their labours, what 19^th-century anthropologists believed to be the earliest form of alienable wealth: a woman.

Fasolt and Fafnir’s wages for their work is Freya, Fricka’s sister.

Very relevant to the topics I have raised is the dialogue between Wotan and the Giants when they arrive to claim Freya and the God-Father attempts to argue his way out of the deal.

Wotan at first has recourse, we might say, to that argument of essential transitivity and translatability between the value-order of sex and womanhood and the value-order of money which we noted that Houllebecq, in the sociology he sketches out in his “Extension”, undertakes to challenge.

He initially brusquely proposes that Freya be “translated into some other currency”:

Seid ihr bei Trost mit eurem Vertrag?
Denkt auf andern Dank: Freia ist mir nicht feil.

The way in which the retort to this is spread out between the two brother Giants is also extremely relevant to the schema I am trying to sketch out.

The habitué of “The Ring” has an odd feeling listening to this early scene because the brother Fafnir is, of course, more familiar – seen from the viewpoint of “The Ring” as a whole – in his non-human form as the “worm”, or dragon, slain by Siegfried in his process of becoming a man.

That we know this of Fafnir underscores, then, the fact that it is Fasolt, his brother, who speaks with the voice of the needy human creature here, then: the voice of the being with whom the drama of kenotic salvation is concerned.

Fasolt, in any case, speaks here by far the more of the two.

It is Fasolt who – in one of the most beautiful passages in the whole tetralogy – opposes a sort of “Houllebecquian value-universe” to the value-universe of Wotan:

opposes, that is to say, to Wotan’s universe of infinite exchangeability a universe in which sexual womanhood is something so precious that it cannot be exchanged or “swapped out” against some other “Lust”:

Wir Plumpen plagen uns
schwitzend mit schwieliger Hand,
ein Weib zu gewinnen,
das wonnig und mild
bei uns Armen wohne:
und verkehrt nenn’st du den Kauf?

His brother Fafnir, indeed, takes Fasolt aside here and informs him that the womanhood of Freya is indeed “translatable” – if not into money then into strategic power – and that she must be taken away for this reason:

Freias Haft hilft wenig doch viel gilt’s
den Göttern sie zu entreißen

But precisely herein he betrays that he is, potentially and internally, the monstrous, non-human being that his degeneration into a “giant worm” will later actualize.

It is Fasolt here who speaks for the human – and the legacy of humanity that he takes up is the legacy of the hopeless incel that the Rhine Maidens believed Alberich to be: the legacy of the man so needy specifically of the love of woman that gold should be indifferent to him.

At the end of the following complex sequence, in which Loge enters the scene and draws the whole story of the Rhine-Gold, the Rhine Maidens and Alberich into the equation, it is Fafnir who “takes the bait” of that system of “value-translatability” that Wotan had originally offered.

The stage directions indicate that, if Fasolt too agrees, he does so “wider Willen”; his instincts are still the profoundly human ones of the absolute incommensurability of the treasure of sex and femininity.

(Fasolts Gebärde deutet an, daß er sich wider
Willen überredet fühlt.
Fafner tritt mit Fasolt wieder an Wotan heran.)

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Likewise after the scene in Nibelheim where Wotan and Loge secure the gold, including the ring that has been forged from it, for themselves, it is Fasolt who expresses that “Houellebecquian” attitude of uncertainty about whether such a commodity is really substitutable for the uniquely precious commodity “woman”.

Finally, however, he wagers on a “transformation of quantity into quality”.

If enough gold can be piled up before him, its accumulated value will “make the leap” into the heterogenous value-realm of sex and woman.

Das Weib zu missen,
wisse, gemuthet mich weh’:
soll aus dem Sinn sie mir schwinden,
des Geschmeides Hort häufet denn so,
daß meinem Blick die Blühende ganz er verdeck’!

Also in this scene, however, the difference between the two brother Giants is very clear.

Their relation to the operation that is carried out now – the gold’s being piled up so high and tight that the whole of a human being (the woman Freya) is covered and hidden by it – is in fact a directly contrary and inverse one.

Fafnir clearly unconditionally embraces the principle of the translatability of “woman” to “gold” and if he wants the gold piled ever higher and tighter around the woman, then this is purely with a view to maximizing the quantity of gold. The woman herself is just a means to this; her value has been totally transferred into the metal.

For Fasolt, equally clearly, the experience presents an entirely inverse aspect. The purpose of the adding of ever more gold is above all to hide the woman, whose value, as long as it is perceived and thereby effective, is experienced by him, à la Houellebecq, as untranslatable and unsubstitutable.

Freia, die Schöne, schau’ ich nicht mehr:
so ist sie gelös’t? muß ich sie lassen?
(Er tritt nahe hinzu und späht durch den Hort.)
Weh! Noch blitzt ihr Blick zu mir her;
des Auges Stern strahlt mich noch an;
durch eine Spalte muß ich’s erspäh’n.
(außer sich)
Seh’ ich diess wonnige Auge,
von dem Weibe lass ich nicht ab!

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Fasolt’s adherence here to the “Houellebecquian” value-system is a problem solved, of course, by one of Wagner’s most ingenious pieces of narrative invention:

Wotan must give up the Ring of Power – the one part of the Nibelungenhort that really mattered to him – to shut Freya’s “wonnige Auge” off from Fasolt’s sight.

This – according to what I called last week the “MacGuffin” logic of “The Ring”: the logic which seems to govern the action but is in fact peripheral or even irrelevant to it – is the setting in motion of the whole complex drama of the next three operas:

Wotan must get the Ring of Power back but cannot do so directly because of the net of “contracts” which binds him. He needs a “hero” to act for him without being merely his underling etc.

But I want, as I say, to treat this “surface logic” of “The Ring” as precisely a “MacGuffin logic”. In fact, some entirely different logic is structuring “The Ring” at a deeper level.

We will see this emerge only gradually.

It clearly has something to do, though, with the figure of the “wretch” specifically as an incel, a sexual famelic, someone for whom the (unfulfillable) need for the woman as sexual being forms an “untranslatable” central preoccupation.

This figure, as we have seen, passes from bearer to bearer throughout the “Rheingold”.

First Alberich incarnates it; then it passes to Fasolt.

At the end of this first opera, this “incel” identity is seemingly extinguished, as it is at the opera’s beginning.

Fafnir kills Fasolt. The voice of true creaturely humanity – the voice of the subject/object of the salvific relation – is blotted out and something non-human takes its place.

But it does not hereby vanish from “The Ring”, any more than it did at its first extinguishing. This “incel” identity becomes, we may say, a “free radical” that can return again later in the work, investing a new “bearer”.