SOME EXTREMELY TENTATIVE NOTES ON 'THE RENUNCIATION OF ALBERICH'

Some supplementary written remarks on "a road not taken" in the fourth audio lecture on Wagner's "Ring" just posted as a podcast.

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“The Ring” begins with a deeply touching portrait of writhing sexual neediness

Must the opening scene of the Ring necessarily be read as low, broad comedy?

Can it be read with “sympathy for the Devil”, for Alberich?

Surely only with an “incel mentality”….

Without the incel mentality, the scene establishes nothing more than the beginning of the shallow mechanism we are familiar with

The gold has been displaced, a scoundrel has disturbed the natural order etc. (Even a reading as acute as Locchi’s goes no deeper than this).

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But the habitué of Houellebecq knows to take very seriously and feel very deeply the specific fairy-tale scenario developed.

The key point made by Houellebecq’s first novel is that creaturely sexual need is something incommensurable.

This is the meaning, for example, of his insisting, in Extension, that there is not, as a certain reductionist Marxist critique of our “negative” condition would have it, a single social hierarchy to which all social exclusion and inclusion can be reduced but rather two such hierarchies, each sui generis and irreducible to the other:

The material hierarchy (the “hierarchy of gold”)

and

the hierarchy of sexual famelicity

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Do the early scenes of “The Rheingold” not convey the very same lesson?

It is striking, in Scene One, that the Rheingold has no material wall or any other material protection surrounding it. If the vision of “The Ring” really were – as Shaw and many others have suggested it to be – a vision reconceivable, without remainder, in Marxist materialist terms, this would make no sense.

The “exposed”, unprotected gold only makes sense if we have in “The Ring”, as we do in Houellebecq’s “incel” vision, a world governed and structured by two mutually incommensurable principles.

The gold is protected by a spell that has been attached to it and that answers to an order entirely alien to and incommensurable with it:

Nur wer der Minne Macht entsagt,

Nur wer der Liebe Lust verjagt,

Nur der erzielt sich den Zauber

Zum Reif zu zwingen das Gold

We must “translate” this a little. Its meaning surely is:

At a certain humanly decisive level, the gold is protected by its own worthlessness.

As the opera iterates here and elsewhere

sated or unsated sexual need is the thing at which any chain of “exchange” that can be set up by “gold” must halt and be broken

the decisive core of creaturely existence the only thing that impels to action and appropriation is something that “the gold” contains no particle of

It is “protected”, in the last analysis, by this.

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It should, of course, be noted in passing that, if this recognition that the moral universe of “The Ring” is one governed not by one single principle of “gold” but rather by two mutually incommensurable ones of “gold” and “sex” forces the abandonment of one sort of Marxian exegesis – the Shavian sort – it effects rather a rapprochement with another sort of Marxian exegesis.

For a writer like Adorno the key to a truly Marxian understanding of the world lies not in recognizing the general prevalence of a logic of equivalence and money-mediated commensurability but rather in identifying the cases in which this general equivalence is breached and precisely the incommensurable – the ganz Andere – asserts itself.

Adorno, in his own study of Wagner, cites certain episodes from “The Ring” in which precisely this occurs: Sieglinde becomes an “incommensurable” for Siegmund, for example. To Bruennhilde’s bafflement he is unwilling to treat her poor and pitiful particularity as something “exchangeable” against the glories of Valhalla.

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But we seem to be missing the central point.

Of course, it is blindingly obvious that the entire drama of “The Ring” is set in motion – and indeed is sustained throughout – by, precisely, the breaching, the failure of this “protection” which consists in the immaterial wall of mere incommensurability, inexchangeability.

Alberich does seize the unprotected gold – and seizes it, indeed, as an equivalent precisely for the thing that we just said it is “unequivalentizable” with:

Erzwaeng’ ich nicht Liebe

Doch listig erzwaeng’ ich mir Lust!

What can we say about this?

It may seem to be a mere slipping out of the question but the retort here must be:

Incommensurability is affirmed in and by this very breach of incommensurability; Alberich’s act has, in a second moment, the very inverse meaning to the one it appears to have in its first moment.

It is a matter of something we will become very familiar with below: “Euripidean irony”.

The fact that Alberich does what he does so easily is really a kind of allegory for the absolute impossibility of doing what he does.

The scenario that actually plays out – Alberich’s simply seizing the unprotected gold and running away with it – is not so psychologically implausible if we do full cognitive justice to the incredible anthropological weight of this act

The weight is conveyed by the beauty and intensity of the music. One must, as I say, speak subjectively but for me the minutes that follow here – the first sounding out of the “renunciation” motif and this motif’s weak, plaintive repetition as the Rhine scene melds into Valhalla – are the first emotional acme of the tetralogy. The beauty of the music conveys the truth that

The sacrifice that Alberich has made here is a sacrifice greater, really, than any living being can make. (This is why it was so plausible, after all, to think that neither he, nor anyone, would make it; that a hoard of gold and power required no wall around it to protect it).

Wotan’s (Licht-Alberich’s) sacrifice of his eye to win Fricka is but the faint prefiguration of this unthinkable sacrifice.

What Alberich tears out of himself here is all his innards, all his being.

The thing that he gains “in exchange” for love is a thing that cannot fill out even an inch of the vast chasm left by love’s lack – and he bears it around with him thenceforth only as an emblem of his pain.

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We see, in fact, this same “Euripidean” irony being repeated in the three following scenes.

We see throughout “The Rheingold” parallel instances of:

the ‘gold/sex’ non-equivalence being breached

the two becoming equivalizable “after all”

but

the very staging of this “equivalization”’s becoming itself a sort of proof that no such equivalization is possible

For example, from Scene Two onward the role and pathos borne by Alberich in Scene One passes over onto the Giants

(Here, there is a kind of signalled equivalence – although here it is an equivalence of parallel opposites: “dwarf” / “giant”)

Initially, their stance is as directly and intensely expressive as is Alberich’s in Scene One of an incommensurable creaturely need, a “wretchedness”. Again, one must be guided by one’s own emotional responses here – so I can only speak for myself in saying that the lines

Wir Plumpen plagen uns

the rhythmic thump of which softens, almost miraculously, into the unexpected lyricism of

Ein Weib zu gewinnen, das wonnig und mild

form a second emotional acme of the tetralogy.

Inasmuch as Wotan remains stubbornly insensitive to this appeal, Scene Two of the “Rheingold”, indeed, may be rightly characterized as marking a “pre-kenotic” point in the drama. But it is “pre-kenotic” in the sense both of “pre-kenotic” and of “pre-kenotic”.

That is to say, on the one hand Wotan seems at this point entirely oblivious to the need for him, the sexual plutocrat, to seek conciliation and even identity with the figure of the sexual pauper. He seems simply unable to comprehend the fundamental anthropo-ontological problem that has been clearly stated in Act One: namely, that creaturely sexual need is something incommensurably primordial and sui generis, that it cannot be “traded away” against something else by those “for whom it’s not meant”:

Die liebliche Goettin, licht und leicht,

Was taught euch Toelpeln ihr Reiz?

Wotan fails to see here what we have already learned: that this Reiz is fundamental, universal, incommensurable.

And indeed, toward the end of Scene Two, and entirely in Scene Four, Wotan’s stance seems to be vindicated.

The Giants do accept that Freya’s charm can be “equivalized” and that, as such, it represents a smaller quantity for them of the same “stuff” as they would enjoy through the enjoyment of the gold:

Hör’, Wotan, der Harrenden Wort!
Freia bleib’ euch in Frieden;
leicht’ren Lohn fand ich zur Lösung:
uns rauhen Riesen genügt
des Niblungen rothes Gold.

But the same must ultimately be said of this as we have said of Alberich’s act.

It has the inverse meaning to its meaning

Wagner’s consummate artistry fashions a scene (Scene Four of “The Rheingold”) which enacts, on the surface, a denial of the “double hierarchy” into something which is recognizable, with the eyes of the heart, as this “double hierarchy’s” affirmation.
The poignant demand of Fasolt that the gold cover Freya – not really because she is to be used as the “measure” of it but precisely because of the sense that it is incommensurable with her.

The final image of the beam of her eye shining out even from under all the gold…

The act of (com)mensuration is, in the end, its own denial.

This scene above all, as I have said above, shows that there is a deep unconscious logic within the “Ring” tetralogy to which the “ring of power” plot itself stands only in an oblique, obscuring, retroactively shallowly “rationalizing” relation.

The whole latter part of the fourth scene is really entirely superfluous to the true driving core of the drama.

Wotan’s reluctance to part above all with the tiny ring, Erda’s appearance, the enunciation of the idea of a curse on the ring etc.

All this is just artificially and distractingly added to a scenario that is of consummate, compelling tragic beauty just in itself:

Every last ounce of the gold – even the final ounce that has the form of a ring on Wotan’s finger – must be heaped upon Freya in order to counterbalance her charm – which it never CAN counterbalance.

The real message conveyed here is a message about the compelling cosmological power of the wretchedness that is sexual need. All the intimations of curses, power etc is just “interference” scrambling the message Wagner did not know he was sending.