Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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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

Reviewed by

Leslie Barcza

 

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.