Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 3, December 2003
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Žižek, Slavoj and Dolar, Mladen, Opera’s Second Death New York: Routledge, 2002. 235 pages ISBN 0415930170. $14.99 pbk
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Opera’s
Second Death
is really two books masquerading as one, each one an essay concerning the works
of a great composer of opera. The
Introduction attempts to find a common ground for the two studies, but it’s
not clear whether this attempt was made after the fact or not; on the one hand,
although there is the arbitrariness of the two separate projects that were
brought together, the fit is convincing, so much so that perhaps the two authors
decided to split the world of opera before they began.
The two halves of the book reflect the personal styles and interests of
two authors, each apparently writing about their passion.
And each essay’s style is entirely right for its subject; whereas
Mladen Dolar’s reading of Mozart flows with a manifest logic that might lead
one to believe that the Enlightenment is still underway and has just reached its
climax in the works of the great composer, it presents the perfect prelude for
what follows. The second essay is Zlavoj Žižek’s flamboyant study of Wagner,
a meditation on related phenomena in the modern cultural remnants of the past.
Dolar is not well known compared to his co-author, having been published
exclusively in German as far as I can tell.
Žižek in contrast has built a popular
following for his books that span several disciplines, whose wit can be briefly
glimpsed even in such titles as Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in
Hollywood and out and For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a
political factor.
Dolar’s
discussion of Opera’s “first” death in its context with Freud, the
simultaneous rise of psychoanalysis and fall of opera, goes a long way towards
justifying the focus of his study and the importance of opera.
The
secret of [opera’s] posthumous success and increasing popularity
may well lie in something one could call a redoubled or mediated fantasy. Throughout three centuries, the opera was a privileged place
for enacting the fantasy of a mythical community, and by virtue of this
presentation, the “imagined community” (to use Benedict Anderson’s term)
spilled over into the “real” community, as it were: first as the supporting
fantasy of the absolute monarchy and then as the foundational myth of the
nation-state—the court opera evolved into the “state opera.”
Opera
is studied to know the myths of the past, myths that are relevant to who we are.
Whereas
anthropologists have to travel to the primeval forests of South America and to
the islands of the Pacific to find relics of ancient social rituals, we merely
need to go to the opera.
Mozart’s
creations represent for Dolar “the pinnacle and the culmination of the first
two hundred years of opera”, making him the ideal subject for a study of that
period. Although I struggled
against the arbitrariness of the division, I was sold by Dolar’s argument,
that opera is born from the spirit of absolutism.
Identifying Mozart with the ideals of the Enlightenment is hardly new
territory, but that does not mean that this formulation leaves Dolar nothing to
investigate; this opening essay is more than just a study of Mozart,
representing a brief history of opera up to that time, with particular emphasis
on his last great works. This study
resembles a personal investigation rather than a deeply probing musicological
study. Its newness lies not in what is revealed about the operas so
much as the stylish observations of cultural dynamics.
For
example, Dolar offers the following connections between works and their context.
Fidelio is described as Beethoven’s sequel to Die Zauberflöte.
After citing Goethe’s dark text that was to be an unfinished attempt to
replace Schikaneder’s libretto, Dolar suggests the reason that the old
libretto would no longer suffice:
The
distance that separates Sarastro’s rays of sun that dispel the darkness at the
end of Die Zauberflöte from the verses written by Goethe five or six
years later is the distance between the triumph of the Enlightenment and the
beginning of modernity. One could
even venture a provisional definition of modernity from here: It began at the
moment when we became aware that the triumph of the light pushes us into a
darkness deeper and more radical than that which had been dispelled.
Goethe’s choir seems to speak our own language, and Mozart stands as
the final milestone of an age forever gone.
Dolar’s
syntheses seem almost too pat, perhaps because, given their subject, the
conclusions can be expected to be coherent.
But, while not wishing to denigrate his work, it suffers from its
juxtaposition with another writer of exceptional originality and charisma; Dolar
appears reductive, but only in comparison to Žižek’s vivid and fearless
explorations of Wagner’s mythology.
For
example, Žižek confronts the reader with a chapter titled “Run, Isolde,
run”, followed by “The Cyberspace Tristan”: a subheading that complicates
rather than clarifies. Without a
massive quote, I’d like to suggest the reader’s circuitous path.
Žižek begins with Walter Benjamin’s idea that “every art form shows
critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be
fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new
art form.” [Illuminations ] We then encounter several examples of works
from previous eras suggestive of multiple plot trajectories, suggesting that
“hypertext is this new medium in which this life experience will find its
natural, most appropriate objective correlative so, again, it is only with the
advent of cyberspace that we can effectively grasp what Altman and Kieslowski
were effectively aiming at.” From
there, we hear about Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run, a film with three
outcomes; and so Žižek then adapts Lola as the template for his
treatment of Tristan, identifying three comparable implicit outcomes to
the plot for Isolde. The analogy is
not to be seen as a precise connection (indeed, the parallel is in some respects
true for any good story), but rather, as the standard tune that occasions Žižek’s
jazzy improvisation. The virtuosity
of the connections invite admiration, and it’s the pleasure in negotiating
these leaps that is one of the joys of Žižek’s essay.
Opera’s
Second Death
confronts the reader with mystery. When
I first beheld the cover image of Kathryn Harries shaggy haired Kundry (from an
ENO Parsifal) I felt I was being invited into a realm of complexity.
And then the title stopped me short.
Opera’s first death would be one that would accord with expectation,
the death that has been pronounced over the corpse of this art-form frequently
through the latter part of the 20th Century.
But while death number one is a common departure point in scholarly
papers, death number two poses a problem, one that spurred me on, as I read the
book cover to cover in a very short period of time.
The book is enlivened by a most pleasant tension between ambiguity and
clarity. As I wandered through this allusive forest, shooting the
occasional rapids of extended metaphors, I didn’t want the virtuoso
performance to end.
Dolar
displays confidence in his ability
to answer every question that he raises, never transgressing beyond his own
capacity to solve his own conundrums, but Žižek bravely stumbles into danger
at every turn, raising questions as though he were Houdini, while making the
reader wonder how he will get out of the impossible questions he has posed.
Yes, Žižek’s virtuosity creates this illusion, but this is an
illusion entirely in keeping with the subject, coaxing the reader to merge with
the material as thoroughly as if his prose were a music-drama and not just an
essay.