by Susan Sontag
FOR WAGNER, who created the idea of opera as overwhelming experience—and whose supreme dramatic subject is the progression of consciousness through ecstasy into oblivion—certain strictures about the story still held. Wagner could not have accepted as satisfying any drama left unresolved by an epiphany of acceptance, of understanding. Since Wagner, however, the stories that operas tell are more likely to end with collective dismay, with the defeat of understanding.
To be sure, some of the greatest operas (L’incoronazione di Poppea, Così fan tutte, Fidelio, Don Carlo, Moses und Aron) carry real arguments, real debate. But more commonly favored in opera are stories which are, in effect, tragedies of cognition. This is particularly true of what we could properly call modern opera, the transition to which is made by Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal, whose protagonist enters the story as a child, a holy innocent, a fool. Subsequently, Parsifal does attain enlightenment—offstage. In later versions of this story the naif remains in a state of unknowing. The central figure of modern opera is often someone in a state of deficient consciousness, of pathological innocence.
Pelléas et Mélisande is one of the masterpieces in this evolution. Onto one of the most traditional opera stories, that of a young man whose love for a woman his own age or younger is thwarted because she is promised or already married to an older relative (Tristan und Isolde, Don Carlo, Eugene Onegin, inter alia), is grafted the modern story about not understanding, not knowing, being balked by a mystery; or creating a mystery, by being afflicted by an unexplained injury or suffering.
Debussy’s opera (following the Maeterlinck play used almost in its entirety as the libretto) has its special inflections. We are in the world without clear borders and fixed dimensions of Symbolist enigma: where appearances are known by their shadows or reflections, where debility and inexplicable affliction are equated with voluptuousness, and the emblematic object of desire is a languid childlike woman with Art Nouveau long hair.
In this kingdom of stretched, fairy-tale dualities—ancient and juvenile, ill and well, dark and light, wet and dry—is set a neo-Wagnerian tale of yearning and thwarting, of incurable vulnerability. Maeterlinck’s drama can be read as an idealization of depression. It can also be seen as a representation, a literalizing, of once widely accepted ideas about physical illness—which attributed many illnesses, tautologically, to an illness-producing atmosphere (“miasma”). The story is set in precisely such a damp, sun-deprived environment, replete with water sources and subterranean spaces. Debussy began at the play’s second scene, with Mélisande at a forest spring: “Une petite fille qui pleure au bord de l’eau.” (It was surely not for lack of thematic aptness that he cut the first scene of Maeterlinck’s play: a chorus of castle servants calling for water.) The omnipresence of water, which generally signifies purity—or emotional volatility—here signifies a generalized unhealthiness.
Most characters are ill (Pelléas’s father, Pelléas’s friend Marcellus) or wounded (in the course of the story, Golaud) or infirm (the grandfather, Arkel) or physically weak (Golaud’s little son, Yniold, who sings of his inability to lift a stone). Mélisande, of course, is the epitome of fragility—and dies of a wound that, the doctor says, would not kill a bird. (In Maeterlinck’s play, the doctor adds, “Elle est née sans raison … pour mourir; et elle meurt sans raison.”) Every reference to Mélisande emphasizes her smallness (her hands are always her “petites mains”), her untouchability (her first words are “Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!”). Her benign discoverer, Golaud, who appears to her like a giant—and possibly a rapist—wins Mélisande by promising not to touch her, and by avowing his own vulnerability (“Je suis perdu aussi”). But when he brings Mélisande back to his family and begins to treat his child-bride as a woman, he becomes, despite himself, a brute.
The love of Pelléas and Mélisande cannot be consummated not because the young woman is married to an older relative of the young man’s, the usual story, but because she is too fragile, sexually immature. Any adult sexuality would constitute an aggression against the heroine. Golaud is the story’s one normally mature male character—in contrast to the ancient grandfather, whose request to kiss Mélisande is ostentatiously chaste, and to Golaud’s young half brother, still a boy, who, when he wishes to embrace and be embraced by Mélisande, wraps himself in the part of her body that is not solid, not flesh: her hair. Mélisande seems endowed with a body only for others to marvel at its delicacy. It is startling to realize (I have never seen it depicted in any production of the opera) that Mélisande would be nine months pregnant when she and Pelléas finally do confess their love to each other, only immediately to be torn apart by the jealous Golaud. But her altered, swollen body is unmentionable, perhaps unstageable, and, in a certain sense, unthinkable. It is as if Mélisande herself cannot realize she is pregnant (and therefore a woman), for the same reason that, at the story’s close, she cannot take in that she now has a daughter and is about to die.
Eventually the lovers do embrace, body to body, but this moment of shared immolation-in-feeling is cut short, to be followed by amnesia (Mélisande) and excruciating mental confusion (Golaud). Mélisande doesn’t remember that Pelléas has been slain by Golaud, isn’t aware that she has just given birth (“Je ne sais pas ce que je dis … Je ne sais pas ce que je sais … Je ne dis plus ce que je veux”), and is genuinely incapable of giving the frantically bereaved Golaud the relief of knowing that, however much he regrets what he has done, he was not wrong in suspecting that Mélisande and Pelléas were in love.
The well-intentioned Golaud has turned into one of opera’s remorseful, inadvertent murderers who kills an innocent woman whom he truly loves. For in this story in which not just a protagonist but everyone feels inadequate, helpless, baffled by what she or he is feeling, Golaud is the only character physically capable of violence. Mental deficiency or frustrated understanding (combined with feelings of helplessness) is indeed a recipe for violence. Like Wozzeck and Lulu, like Bluebeard’s Castle, Pelléas et Mélisande is a story of blind cruelty, with the difference that the cruelties perpetrated are not transactions between adult men and women but acts of adults against children. Mélisande is a lost child whom Golaud rescues and pledges to protect but cannot help destroying; in the anguish of jealousy he also manhandles his little son. But all this does not make the ogre any less a victim—like Wozzeck, like Peter Grimes, Golaud is innocently guilty—and therefore a proper object of the audience’s pity.
Pity for the innocent lovers; pity for Yniold and the infant Mélisande has left; and pity for Golaud—Pelléas et Mélisande completes the process begun long ago whereby opera exalts the feelings regarded as feminine. No work that is now part of opera’s standard repertory is so devoid of the triumphalist accents by which opera, traditionally, gives such pleasure. A robust art (compared with, say, chamber music), opera has specialized in broad—broadly contrasting, broadly legible—emotions. The emotional stream of Debussy’s masterpiece is deliberately narrower: he wagers on a more harrowing, more finely calibrated intensity. But the great modern tragedies of deficient consciousness propose their own voluptuous standards as they rise to an ecstasy of lament. Debussy’s portrayal of lacrimae rerum is unlike any other in opera. It must be the saddest opera ever composed. (The only rival of Pelléas et Mélisande in this respect is Wozzeck, which also ends on the excruciating presence of a just-orphaned child.) As the heartbroken Arkel sings: “Mais la tristesse, Golaud, mais la tristesse de toute que l’on voit!”
[1997]
One Hundred Years of Italian Photography
ITALY: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY announces a double narrative: a century of Italy as well as a century of photography.
The earliest photograph in the book, taken in 1884, of the large conservatory of the Italian Horticultural Society, shows us a place frequented by well-off people of a century ago, some of whom probably owned cameras and practiced photography at a very expert level as a hobby; a picture like this could have been taken by
one of the Society’s members. The most recent photograph, taken in 1984, shows us not a real place (not an Italian interior, not even something in Italy) but a portion of the world (Europe) of which Italy is a part; an aerial view, it’s a picture not so much taken as arranged, by professionals, aided by computers.
There is nothing distinctively Italian about either photograph, though both photographs bespeak their period. In the first one we see a lush example of the glass-and-iron shape given to new exhibition halls, markets, and railway stations all over Europe in the mid- and late nineteenth century. The aerial photograph is also an example of a subject that could have been photographed elsewhere in the same way; what dates it, though, is not what we see but that we can see it. It is an example of something that can be seen only in the form of a photograph, and could only be photographed (thanks to the existence of other, allied technologies) now.
The subjects of both photographs have an obtrusive geometry; neither includes people. But the conservatory is a site that appears to be just temporarily vacated of people, to get this picture of the overbearing architecture and the valiant plants. It is very much a human, historically specific world. One easily imagines people reinserted in this place, milling about in it. The world of the aerial photograph is a world of things beyond the human scale from which people are necessarily absent. Here the human, historical fact has no place.
But history—time—is the unifying topic of this seemingly random collection of subjects. How striking, then, that the anthologist, Cesare Colombo, has selected as the most recent photograph one in which history is annihilated in favor of geography; in which the accents of time are made irrelevant by the scale of this uniformly marked distribution of space.
Are we to read this as a history-minded comment on the part of the anthologist: an acknowledgment of the Euro-destiny of Italy, its demise as a distinctive culture and absorption into the homogenizing system of greeds created by multi-national capitalism? Or is it simply a formal device: the anthologist’s perhaps overemphatic way of decreeing a closure for the collection? If only the latter, the device is, of necessity, arbitrary. For it defies the very nature of photography, and of collections of photographs, which is that they are open-ended; that they cannot conclude. There can be no definitive or summative or terminal photograph, or collection of photographs. Only more photographs. More collections …
A COLLECTION OF IMAGES of the Italian past published by Alinari—though most of the photographs aren’t from the Alinari archives—reminds us that a photograph is rarely a work of individual seeing but almost inevitably a (potential) unit in an archive. The archive can be that of the Alinari enterprise, which appears less as the very successful business it was than as a cultural operation, a vast collective endeavor for documenting Italian society that extended over many decades, in which the names of individual photographers have been suppressed, like those of the artisans who worked on the Gothic cathedrals. More often, the archive is that of single photographers—prolific professionals with studios from the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and also contemporary photographers whose manipulations of their subjects, in the service of fashion and other kinds of advertising, produce results that are most unlike the innocently scrupulous documentation practiced by older forms of commercial photography. Avowed proponents of bad taste such as Carlo Mollino and celebrants of celebrity such as Elio Luxardo are now museum-worthy, no less than such illustrious proponents of the serious and beautiful in photography as Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The most eccentric, partial view could constitute an archive of invaluable images of (from, about) the past. Even the soft-focus superimpositions of the self-styled Futurist Anton Bragaglia which are located nowhere and the staged al fresco fantasies of the erotomane Baron von Gloeden located in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Taormina have their period charm, their status as documents.
(Though the destiny of all photographs is to end up in an archive housed in a museum, they can still lead, singly, a life outside the museum—the extramural life of a document being that of a souvenir; here, too, time effects its droll mutations. In a journal entry of 1952 Jean Cocteau relates the story of a forty-year-old fisherman in Taormina, furious because one of the shops in the main street was exhibiting von Gloeden’s photographs of his grandfather completely naked with a crown of roses. Surely it was just a few years later that, in all shops in town catering to tourists, von Gloeden’s daintily erotic photographs of naked local youths of yesteryear were to be found as postcards.)
Italian photography is exceptionally rich in superb photographs which have a primary status as documents. One thinks, first of all, of the best images from the Alinari holdings and of the work of Giuseppe Primoli, the most fascinating figure in the history of Italian photography, who was himself something of a one-person Alinari enterprise. (A photograph by Primoli—of someone taking a photograph—begins this book.) If the collective activities of the Alinari firm and the ultraindividual enterprise practiced by the dilettante aristocrat Primoli were both supremely archive-creating ventures, it should be noted that the word “archive,” with its implicit claim of disinterested curiosity, conceals much of the complex ideological agenda behind this glorious burst of picture-taking.
Consider the Alinari collection, more than a hundred thousand pictures. It seems like a nineteenth-century updating of the eighteenth-century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, which was less an instrument of learning than an expression of collecting mania, the appetite for accumulation and classification; wonder, a favorite sentiment of that era, and one unburdened by historical understanding, depends on ignorance as much as on knowledge. But it also seems an example of a distinctively nineteenth-century ideological project, shared by some of the century’s greatest novelists, which was to provide an encyclopedic understanding of social reality, from the highest to the lowest levels, as something that unfolds historically. Last, and perhaps most decisively, it seems like a proto-twentieth-century project: a mode of advertising, of creating needs and boosting consumption.
The Alinari photographers started by specializing in the great works of art of their native city, Florence. For a small, wealthy class of travelers on their Grand Tour, Italy had long been the country where one came to look at the art, and the art in Florence more than in any other Italian city. Collectible photographic documentation played an essential role in the democratizing of this construction of Italy by the happy few, which has made the country into the world’s single most desired, most prestigious target for the instant appreciations of mass tourism.
The dissemination of art in the form of photographs—a first version of what André Malraux, who lifted the idea from Walter Benjamin, described as the museum without walls—was soon extended to the whole physical environment, which could be collected as pictures. Exhaustive documentation meant, in fact, a preference for the strongly contrasting: feats of urban renewal (as that was understood in the last century) juxtaposed with ancient sites and monuments, the vitality of the swarthy poor as well as the glamour and remoteness of the rich and powerful. Photographs disseminated not just art (the art of the past) but all of the past—and the present, inexorably on its way to becoming the past (that is, art). The notion of art is extended to include the past as such: we look at the past, any part of it, aesthetically.
PHOTOGRAPHS ARE NOT windows which supply a transparent view of the world as it is, or more exactly, as it was. Photographs give evidence—often spurious, always incomplete—in support of dominant ideologies and existing social arrangements. They fabricate and confirm these myths and arrangements.
How? By making statements about what is in the world, what we should look at. Photographs tell us how things ought to look, what their subjects should reveal about themselves.
Photographs taken in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely fail to make visible the markers of status. We associate this with posing. The process itself took time: one couldn’t take photographs on the r
un. With posing, whether in a studio portrait or in pictures of people taken on the sites of work and recreation, there can be a conscious construction of what is seemly, appropriate, attractive. The way most old photographs look expounds the value of uprightness, explicitness, informativeness, orderly spacing; but from the 1930s on, and this cannot only be due to the evolution of camera technology, the look of photographs confirms the value of movement, animation, asymmetry, enigma, informal social relations. Modern taste judges the way workers in the old photographs of building sites and factories were stiffly posed to be a kind of lie—concealing, for instance, the reality of their physical exertion. We prefer to see the sweat, in informal, unposed-looking shots in which people are caught in a movement—that is what looks truthful (if not always beautiful) to us. We feel more comfortable with what features exertion, awkwardness, and conceals the realities of control (self-control, control by others), of power—revelations we now judge, oddly enough, to be “artificial.”
Two contrasts, a century apart.
On the front endpaper, a celebrated image. It is the ordered, heavily signifying decor and spaciousness of the bourgeois photography studio (in fact, the Alinari salon). Deep space: everyone is seen full figure, remotely, discreetly. Someone (seated, weighty) is being photographed. People seem becalmed. Everyone is taking his or her time.