Pynchon & Wagner

Tue Sep 22 16:42:39 UTC 2020

Had to think of Wagner, too, when I re-read the following the other night:

"A number of critics have discussed Pynchon's presentation of history as 
mythopoesis. Kathryn Hume, for instance, has identified a mythic pattern 
in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW consisting of an initial paradise (the North 
American New World), a fall (the colonization of that world by 
Slothrop's forebears, serpents in the Garden), a central symbolic action 
(immachination, which creates a symbolic marriage between human beings 
and the gods defined as machines and thereby creates a 'new order'), and 
a predicted apocalypse (either holocaust or paradise, depending on how 
one evaluates this wedding of man and machine). In PYNCHON'S 
MYTHOGRAPHY, Hume illustrates how this general theme is filled by 
Pynchon with value-laden concepts drawn from numerous mythological 
systems, from ancient pagan myths, Greek and Christian mythos, and 
postsecular religions. Using a different schema, Catherine R. Stimpson 
interprets Pynchon's presentation of women in his novels as a variation 
of the 'white goddess' myth elaborated by Robert Graves. Jungian 
interpretation of Pynchon's mysticism or mythopoesis, such as that by 
Thomas Moore, are variants of this kind of reading; from this 
perspective, the Jungian 'archetype' would provide the tropes by which 
reality is organized. Furthermore, Debra Moddelmog has discussed the 
significance of Oedipus myth elements in LOT 49, while John McClure has 
discussed syncretic myth as postsecularity in Pynchon's work. These and 
other critics take pains to understand the odd mysticism, spirituality 
and religious allusions that are always a part of Pynchon's fiction. 
Pynchon's novels include symbolic references to Judaism and Christianity 
as well as pantheism, animism, Tarot and Blavatsky-like channeling, 
Orphism, Kabbalah, Hinduism, Buddhism, various scientific mysticisms, 
metempsychosis, gnosticisms, Native American dream-vision and 
Intelligent Design. These do not appear as ornamental images in his 
novels but rather as integral to Pynchon's historical vision, a mystical 
counter-history to the rationalistic, monovocal Anglo-European history 
of technocratric capitalism."

Amy J. Elias: History; pp. 123-135, here 132f., in: The Cambridge 
Companion to Thomas Pynchon, ed. by Dalsgaard, Herman & McHale.

For Ernst Cassirer myth is a SYMBOLIC FORM, the earliest form of 
meaningful structuring of the world, from which all the other symbolic 
forms - like art, religion, law, science/technology & also (elaborated) 
language - historically originated. Important to Cassirer, who did not 
intend to create a synthesis or system, is the irreducible plurality of 
the different symbolic forms. The symbolic forms - functionally 
identical insofar as they're all offering expression, presentation & 
meaning - must always be understood on their own terms. Which means in 
the given context, among other things, that myth, according to Cassirer 
operating upon the principle of similarity (dt. Ähnlichkeit; remember - 
if not: Scroll down! - Wagner's dictum that the myth "is always 
right"?), can, in its contextual validity, never be explained or 
debunked by science (be it STEM, economics, sociology or psychology). Of 
course this also is true vice versa -

Pynchon & Wagner are  both practicing mythopoesis in order to challenge 
the one-dimensional understanding of modernity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ReY89_fM0g

Wagner - Lohengrin (Bayreuth 1972)

Am 18.09.20 um 01:42 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>
> Not in terms of social psychology but in those of art & politics, 
> cinema & its soundtrack might be more interesting than rock/pop music 
> when it comes to Wagner's legacy in late modern culture:
>
> + ... “The Birth of a Nation” set the pace for a century of Wagnerian 
> aggression on film. More than a thousand movies and TV shows feature 
> the composer on their soundtracks, yoking him to all manner of 
> rampaging hordes, marching armies, swashbuckling heroes, and scheming 
> evildoers ... Action sequences are only one facet of Wagner’s 
> celluloid presence. A colorful—and often shady—array of Wagner 
> enthusiasts have appeared onscreen, from the woebegone lovers of 
> Robert Siodmak’s noir “Christmas Holiday” to the diabolical android of 
> Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant 
> <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/alien-covenant-bursts-with-pomposity>.” 
> The composer himself is portrayed in more than a dozen movies, 
> including Tony Palmer’s extravagant, eight-hour 1983 bio-pic, starring 
> Richard Burton. But the Wagnerization of film goes deeper than that. 
> Cinema’s integration of image, word, and music promised a fulfillment 
> of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” which 
> Wagner propagated at one stage of his career. His informal system of 
> assigning leitmotifs to characters and themes became a defining trait 
> of film scores. And Hollywood has drawn repeatedly from Wagner’s 
> gallery of mythic archetypes: his gods, heroes, sorcerers, and 
> questers. / This contradictory swirl of associations mirrors the 
> composer’s fractured legacy: on the one hand, as a theatrical 
> visionary who created works of Shakespearean breadth and depth; on the 
> other, as a vicious anti-Semite who became a cultural totem for 
> Hitler. Like operagoers across the generations, filmmakers have had 
> trouble deciding whether Wagner is an inexhaustible store of wonder or 
> a bottomless well of hate. But that uncertainty also mirrors the film 
> industry’s own ambiguous role as an incubator of heroic fantasies, 
> which can serve a wide range of political ends. When Hollywood talks 
> about Wagner, it is often—consciously or not—talking about itself. / 
> When the lights went down at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876, for 
> the première of the “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle, a kind of cinema 
> came into being. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, no friend of 
> Wagner’s, felt that he was looking at a “bright-colored picture in a 
> dark frame,” as in a diorama display. The composer had intended as 
> much, saying that the stage picture should have the “unapproachability 
> of a dream vision.” The orchestra was hidden in a sunken pit known as 
> the “mystic abyss”; its sound wafted through the room as if it were 
> transmitted by a speaker system. The inaugural performances took place 
> in a near-blackout. From the Festspielhaus, according to the media 
> theorist Friedrich Kittler, “the darkness of all our cinemas derives” 
> ... Wagner’s influence is nowhere more enduring than in the realm of 
> myth and legend. He manipulated Teutonic and Arthurian myths with 
> consummate dexterity, understanding how they could resonate 
> allegorically for modern audiences. “The incomparable thing about myth 
> is that it is always true, and its content, through utmost 
> compression, is inexhaustible,” he wrote. Wagner’s master array of 
> borrowed, modified, and reinvented archetypes—the wanderer on a ghost 
> ship, the savior with no name, the cursed ring, the sword in the tree, 
> the sword reforged, the novice with unsuspected powers—lurks behind 
> the blockbuster fantasy and superhero narratives that hold sway in 
> contemporary Hollywood ... The chief lesson to be drawn from the case 
> of Wagner is that the worship of art and artists is always a dangerous 
> pursuit. In classical music, the slow, fitful learning of that lesson 
> has had a salutary effect: contemporary European productions of 
> Wagner’s operas routinely confront the darker side of his legacy. 
> Perhaps it is time to contemplate the less fashionable question of how 
> Hollywood films and other forms of popular culture can be complicit in 
> the exercise of American hegemony— ... +
>
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/31/how-wagner-shaped-hollywood
> https://www.goethe.de/ins/es/de/kul/mag/20758663.html
>
> + ... Auf Wagners Einfluss auf moderne Kultur kann im Gegensatz dazu 
> gar nicht genug aufmerksam gemacht werden. Dieser ist direkter 
> erkennbar als beispielsweise der eines Mozarts oder Beethovens... Die 
> Filmmusik, die eine breite Hörerschaft auch der jüngeren Generation 
> anspricht, greift viele Methoden des Deutschen auf: Die majestätischen 
> Bläser und die dynamischen Streicher in den Soundtracks bekannter 
> Komponisten wie John Williams (vor allem/Star Wars/), Hans Zimmer 
> (/Fluch der Karibik/,/Gladiator/) oder Howard Shore (/Der Herr der 
> Ringe/) lassen sich auf die Stücke Wagners zurückführen und sind von 
> diesem hörbar inspiriert. Auch seine Art der Verwendung von 
> Leitmotiven gehört zu den handwerklichen Grundlagen der Filmmusik ... +
>
> I like the way Lars von Trier works with the prelude from "Tristan und 
> Isolde" in his movie "Melancholia".
>
>
> Am 17.09.20 um 18:26 schrieb Gary Webb:
>> Every time Wagner comes up lately I’m reminded of Allen Bloom’s 
>> comparison of the frenzy induced in the youth due to Rock/Pop music( 
>> ...this was in the 80s) to the frenzy Wagner’s music induced in 
>> Germany almost a century later...
>>
>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/06/07/is-rock-music-rotting-our-kids-minds/a9f3e90a-f31f-41b3-921e-0041e40fa9f2/ 
>>
>>
>> I don’t agree with Bloom, and I wonder what he would think of the 
>> things currently occupying our obsessive youth... probably that the 
>> souls he was intent on saving from the dread Walkman, have long since 
>> been lost, and mysteriously converted to 1s & 0s...
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>>> On Sep 17, 2020, at 12:07 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> of course, Wagner's family had much to do with the reactionary 
>>> beliefs even
>>> before Adolf came around--Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred 
>>> Wagner
>>> (both British-born), eg. Syberberg's long interview/documentary about
>>> Winifred gives some insight into the family dynamics following Wagner's
>>> death and legacy.
>>>
>>> rich
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 6:26 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen 
>>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Alex Ross:
>>>>
>>>> + ... In recent decades, scholars have reconstructed a school of
>>>> Wagnerian leftism, which gained purchase in Europe and America at the
>>>> end of the 19th century. Socialists, communists, social democrats, and
>>>> anarchists all found sustenance in Wagner’s work. After the Bolshevik
>>>> revolution, Wagner had a brief vogue as a figurehead of proletarian
>>>> culture. / The starting point for the Wagner left was the 
>>>> composer’s own
>>>> revolutionary activity in 1848 and 1849, which forced him into 
>>>> exile for
>>>> many years. His writingsArt and Revolution
>>>> <http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/11/97.pdf>andThe Art
>>>> <http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf>-Work of the 
>>>> Future
>>>> <http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf>were classic, if
>>>> eccentric, articulations of the idea that art could play a leading 
>>>> role
>>>> in the struggle for social equality. His own work became a kind of 
>>>> dream
>>>> theatre for the imagination of a future state. Of course, other
>>>> ideologies exploited the composer in the same way. It would be a 
>>>> mistake
>>>> to say that Shaw and his fellow leftists found the “true” Wagner. 
>>>> But it
>>>> would also be a mistake to say they misunderstood him... Wagner’s tale
>>>> of the corrupting power of the golden Ring matches Marx’s musings 
>>>> on the
>>>> “perverting power” of money. When, in Das Kapital, Marx speaks of the
>>>> hoarding of commodities, he notes that the hoarder “sacrifices the 
>>>> lusts
>>>> of the flesh to his gold fetish” and adopts “the gospel of
>>>> renunciation”. The word Marx uses here, “/Entsagung/”, is the same 
>>>> that
>>>> Wagner applies to the dwarf Alberich’s renunciation of love – the
>>>> gesture that wins him access to the Rhinegold. For Marx and Wagner
>>>> alike, love and power are irreconcilable ... Peter Kropotkin was an
>>>> admirer ...Patrice Chéreau
>>>> <http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1976ring.html>’s epochal Bayreuth
>>>> production of the Ring
>>>> <http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1976ring.html>(1976-80), took
>>>> inspiration from The Perfect Wagnerite, realising Shaw’s vision of 
>>>> “tall
>>>> hats for Tarnhelms, factories for Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas”. /
>>>> In 1943, the great theatre criticEric Bentley
>>>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/theater/eric-bentley-dead.html>– 
>>>> who
>>>> recently died at the age of 103 – asked a charged question: “Is Hitler
>>>> always right about Wagner?” The question hangs in the air as the
>>>> controversy rolls ever on ...+
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/17/why-did-lefties-love-wagner-alex-ross-wagnerism-revolution-hitler 
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> In "Versuch über Wagner", Adorno writes:
>>>>
>>>> "In der Liebe sterben: das heißt auch, der Grenze gewahr werden, 
>>>> die der
>>>> Eigentumsordnung am Menschen selbst gesetzt ist: erfahren, daß der
>>>> Anspruch der Lust, wäre er jemals zu Ende gedacht, eben jene autonome,
>>>> sich zugehörende und ihr eigenes Leben zum Ding erniedrigende Person
>>>> sprengen würde, die verblendet glaubt, im Besitz ihrer selbst Lust zu
>>>> finden, und der dieser Besitz Lust gerade entzieht. Wohl verweigert
>>>> Siegfried geizig den Rheintöchtern den Ring; aber indem er den 
>>>> Kreis der
>>>> Verblendung schließt, findet er die Geste, die Erdscholle hinter 
>>>> sich zu
>>>> werfen als das individuelle Leben, das der nicht mehr halten muß, 
>>>> dem es
>>>> einmal hielt, was es versprach. Daher ist Wagners Werk nicht nur der
>>>> willige Prophet und beflissene Büttel von Imperialismus und
>>>> spätbürgerlichem Terror: es verfügt zugleich über die Kraft der 
>>>> Neurose,
>>>> dem eigenen Verfall ins Auge zu sehen und ihn zu transzendieren im
>>>> Bilde, das dem saugenden Blick standhält."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Am 28.08.20 um 12:41 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>>>>>
>>>>> Did you know (cf. Christian Hänggi: Pynchon's Sound of Music, Zürich
>>>>> 2020: Diaphanes, p. 215) that Richard Wagner is the most frequently
>>>>> referenced composer & musician in Pynchon's books?
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVprS--bLks
>>>>>
>>>>> Jessye Norman - Liebestod (Tristan und Isolde)
>>>>>
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>>> .
>>>>
>>>> -- 
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>>>>
>>> -- 
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>
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