CHAPTER 1
Mother Mime: Wagner and the Metaphysics of Sexual Difference
In a letter to Theodor Uhlig in 1851, Richard Wagner writes that his Young Siegfried âhas the enormous advantage that it presents the important mythos to the audience in a playful manner, the way one presents a fairy tale to a child.â1 Even when Young Siegfried, the prelude to a projected Siegfriedâs Death, transformed into the âsecond dayâ of the Ring Cycle, the opera remained something of a hybrid: Siegfried is mythos condensed into a fairy-tale setting, or conversely a fairy tale that hides a mythos. The doubleness that Wagner seems to find so advantageous, however, also constitutes Siegfriedâs central contradiction. Act 1 of Siegfried, in particular, sees the story of the Nibelungs and the gods of Valhalla grind to a halt, as the cast pauses to stage a production of the Grimmsâ story of the âyouth who went forth to learn what fear was.â2 The hybridity at the heart of the opera plays out both in the erotics and the music of Siegfried. The fairy-tale setting and the mythos that frames it come to speak about the music drama as form (as Gesamtkunstwerk), but they do so through the medium of sexuality.
As Carl Dahlhaus suggested with respect to Siegfried, a classic fairy tale is characterized by both timelessness and immanence.3 In setting up its protagonist, in outlining that protagonistâs travails and their eventual resolution, a fairy tale does not draw on any external resources, be they social, historical, or even logical. It answers exactly the questions that it poses, without leaving anything unresolved. Both mythos and fairy tale of course are centrally concerned with family and parentage, but they deploy it altogether differently. Where mythos concerns itself with origins, lineage, and causation, often with a connection to the present, the fairy tale tends to present its families as a static constellation of types. Insofar as they have mothers and fathers at all, they act only as ciphers, be they the absent parents of âHansel and Gretelâ or the classic evil stepmother. When Wagner distinguishes between Mythos and MĂ€rchen, he seems to be drawing on the same distinction between the historical axis and dynastic concerns of the epic/mythos, and the compressed and self-contained temporality of the fairy tale.
In Wagnerâs Ring des Nibelungen, this contradiction between genetic temporality and pure, ostensibly static form becomes a contradiction of genres. The cycleâs âsecond day,â Siegfried, as Dahlhaus argued, constitutes not only a fairy tale, but one upon which something foreign, namely the mythos, is always already encroaching: Instead of a âhappily ever after,â this fairy tale inaugurates a lengthy narrative, but that narrative âtakes place outside of the world of the fairy tale and destroys it. The fairy tale of young Siegfried is like one of the Fortunate Islands, which is swallowed up by the myth[os].â4
A stark dualism seems to characterize Wagnerâs understanding of mythos and fairy tale, but at the same time the operaâs undertakes to overcome that dualism. Siegfried stages an opposition between an epic plot, namely the story of the Nibelungs and the end of the gods of Valhalla, and a fairy-tale plot, the story of Siegfried leaving his forest and reaching (sexual) maturity. And since the intersection between the epic plot that needs to be advanced and the fairytale antiplot that attempts to suspend its development occurs precisely in the realm of sexuality, sexuality becomes a central thematic node of Siegfried. What is more, the dualism of self-enclosure and epic development plays itself out in Siegfriedâs music as well, in ways that raise important issues for the immanence not just of the fairy tale, but operatic form itself. They were issues the generation of composers immediately after Wagner had to confront in thinking through the twinned legacy of Wagnerian erotics and Wagnerian operatic form.
The hero of both mythos and fairy tale persists in, or rather exists as, the intersection of fairy-tale timelessness and mythic provenance. He emerges from somewhere outside concrete historical sequence (like Romulus and Remus suckling on the teat of the she-wolf), yet comes to influence and even inaugurate historical sequence (the foundation of Rome). The spot where timelessness and development intersect is inherently contradictory, and the heroâs position at that point in the story overdeterminedâhe or she belongs to two worlds at once. In Siegfried, more importantly, the hero is not alone at the intersection of myth and fairy tale: his foster parent and cunning exploiter, Mime, occupies that same vexed spot. In Mimeâs case, the opera obsessively asserts the impossibility of his position, turning him into the tortured citizen of two worlds. In the case of Siegfried, however, it just as strenuously denies that he is in an impossible position. Mime becomes in many respects the sacrificial lamb of Siegfriedâs hybrid plot, or perhaps what Julia Kristeva has termed âthe abjectââa loathed quasi-object, whose obsessive and repeated exclusion allows the opera to repress its own generic contradictions.5 Mimeâs object is to preserve the immanence of the self-enclosed, imaginary space of the enchanted forest. What undoes him are the rumbles of the Mythos that, to return to Dahlhausâs image, threatens to engulf Mimeâs little island. And the rumbles become audible in Siegfriedâs music.
Through the medium of sexuality, Wagner allows his Siegfried to transcend the limitations of the fairy tale toward the greener pastures of the mythos. Conversely, he forces Mime to act out the contradictions between the two through a sexual charade, by associating the epic with familial, dynastic sexuality and the fairy tale with a kind of asexual reproduction. In the course of act 1, Siegfried is launched on a quest to discover his provenance. And an increasingly panicked Mime, desperate to maintain the illusion that he is the boyâs (sole) point of origin, begins to take on all roles, culminating in his desperate claim that âI am your father / and mother as well.â Siegfried wants to know where he comes from, and suspects that it might not be Mime: âNow Mime, where have you got / your loving wife, / so that I may call her Mother?â6 While Siegfried associates the woman he wants âto call motherâ with sexual love, Mime refuses to acknowledge that link between sexuality and motherhood. Instead, he lays claim to being a nonsexual mother, an example of âcunningâ manipulation based on the causal chains of instrumental reason. But it is sexual causation, of which Mime appears incapable, that proves to be his downfall.
Mimeâs dizzying carousel of sexual personae is at once strangely desexualized (in many ways it is the simple fact of sexual difference that proves Mimeâs undoing) and a kind of drag, and it is clearly played for a laugh in the opera. Mimeâs voice and use of figurative language already subvert the claims his charade forces him into, in the eyes of both Siegfried and the audience, for whose benefit Wagner supposedly turned mythos into fairy tale in the first place. As Mimeâs claims become increasingly outlandish, his voice, his mien, and the music that he is given to sing disclose with spectacular eloquence that for Mime sexuality is but a cunning machination. He tells Siegfried that he is his âfather and mother,â but his musical means betray that he is incapable of sexual reproduction and parental love.
Of course, being incapable of sexual love is not an incidental affliction in Wagnerâs system of thought, in which sexual love (Geschlechtsliebe) occupies a central position. Wagnerâs unsent letter to Arthur Schopenhauer speaks of âthe predisposition toward sexual loveâ as âa path to salvation, to self-knowledge and self-negation of the will.â7 Being capable of love is the same as being capable of transcending the narrow bounds of the selfâlove âdrives the subject beyond itself and forces that subject to connect with another:â But not everything that goes by the name âloveâ can claim to accomplish this much: âNot that ârevealedâ love, imparted, taught and forced upon us from aboveâwhich for that reason has also never become realâlike the Christian [love], but that love which springs from unalienated, real human nature; which is in its origin nothing other than the most active living assertion of this nature, which expresses itself in pure joy over sensuous existence, and which, starting with sexual love, progresses via the love of children, brothers, and friends to the love of all mankind.â8 Only sexual love is real in a concrete and effective way, as opposed to abstract kinds of love that are âtaught and ordered.â Thus when Mime tells Siegfried that he has taught him to love âhis Mime,â when he tells him that âyou have to love himâ (so muĂt du ihn lieben), he is clearly imposing this false kind of love rather than the love on which the metaphysician Wagner pinned his hopes.9
The figure of Mime is central to any consideration of Wagnerian metaphysics and Wagnerian aesthetics, but above all to any discussion of Wagnerian anti-Semitism. Mimeâs cunning corresponds to a common topos of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, and Wagnerâs score and stage instructions strengthen this parallel. Nevertheless, I do not contend that Wagner thinks of Mime as Jewish and of Jews therefore as somehow external to the metaphysics of sexual difference. Not because that argument cannot be made, but rather because, as Slavoj ĆœiĆŸek has pointed out, one cannot âcharacterizeâ a Jewish stereotype.10 Indeed, although Mime appears undersexed and emasculated, Alberich has been read in precisely opposing terms.11 Wagnerâs image of the Jew is not self-consistent, since a racist phantasm derives its force not from an inner stringency but rather from its functionality. In Siegfried, a particular set of organizing oppositions stages the coherence of Wagnerâs spectacle, as well as that of his intended audience;12 in doing so, these oppositions overlap, but are by no means coterminous, with Wagnerâs anti-Semitism.
TWO HOUSEHOLDS UNALIKE IN DIGNITY
In German, the word Geschlecht can refer to both gender and to a dynasty or family. Siegfried could be described as a tale of two Geschlechter in that double sense. It concerns the existence of two sexes and the fact that they reproduce, and thus the question of motherhood. But behind this question looms the standoff between not just two families, but rather two kinds of families, which differ precisely with respect to reproduction.
In his 1908 article âFamily Romances,â Sigmund Freud points to a common fantasy that replaces the subjectâs own family with another.13 This âfamily romanceâ (Familienroman) unfolds in two stages. Children as yet unaware of sexual procreation believe themselves to be switched or adopted, or their older siblings to be bastards; once children become aware of sexual procreation, they understand that pater semper incertus est, the mother certissima. Children then turn to the fantasy that a mysterious, unknown father from a higher station has sired them.
In many respects, the first act of Siegfried presents us with this kind of constellation: Siegfried, the orphaned spawn of the illicit love between siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde, is raised in complete isolation by the Nibelung blacksmith Mime. Mime is perfectly aware of his chargeâs illustrious provenance but tries to keep the youth in the dark about it, hoping to use him to reclaim the treasure of the Nibelungs. Scene 1 of act 1 traces Siegfriedâs discovery of his true origins; in scene 2, those origins themselves arrive in the guise of his grandfather Wotan.
And yet, the two scenes diverge in significant ways from the scenario Freud describes. For one thing, throughout Siegfriedâs attempt to decipher his true parentage, it is Mime who is certissimus; the mysterious object of the young manâs fantasies is his mother. For another, Siegfriedâs interpretations are not firmly rooted in either awareness or unawareness of sexual difference, for he knows sexual difference but only by having observed it in the animal kingdom. At issue in his interrogation of Mime is sexual difference as suchâwhether it pertains to humans and what it means. Mimeâs sole concern in laying claim to androgynous parenthood is to keep Siegfried from realizing that there is such a thing as love between mothers and fathers.
In trying to convince Siegfried that they are a family, Mime recreates something along the lines of what psychoanalysts have described as the imaginary configuration between infant and mother, a dyadic construction in which the self is caught in a complex web of identifications and misidentifications with the mother. Mime himself suggests as much when he pleads with Siegfried to appreciate the fact that he âcared for you / as if you were my own skin.â14 This puzzling line sets up a strange parallelism in which narcissism is adduced as the metaphoric support for love: I love you as exclusively as I love myself. The way in which Mime sets up this imaginary circuit that knows no outside eventually undermines his attempts, hinting that the fairy tale is a defective form of myth, just as Mimeâs and Siegfriedâs dyad is a defective or pseudofamily. There is, in other words, something necessary in the unraveling of their dyadic pseudofamily and the fairy-tale world Mime sets up around it.
Wotanâs appearance on the scene might seem to complete this defective family. But this itinerant father figure does not stabilize Mimeâs mother role. To the contrary, Mime notes with chagrin that âweak before [him] grows / my mother wit.â15 When Mime speaks of his Mutterwitz, his choice of words betrays the complex interplay between his subterfuge and questions of family and heredity. Prima facie Mime is simply complaining that Wotan is outsmarting him in their guessing game. Mime, as Theodor Adorno noted, represents for Wagner the failings and moral shortcomings of instrumental reasonâthe ability to manipulate the causes of the outside world without any insight into their quiddity or their raisons dâĂȘtre, a preoccupation with mechanical causes and effects.16 It is central to his attempts to manipulate the forces of nature (above all Siegfried) before which he is by himself powerless.17 The word Mutterwitz links the idea of instrumental reason with maternity and thus heredity. In nineteenth-century German, the word designated nothing more than what modern German knows as Gewitztheit, âcunning.â I...