The Ring As A Whole: Embracing Die Walküre
By Paul Heise
Embracing Die Walküre
Die Walküre is, among other things, an allegory of the waning of religious belief and its direct influence on human affairs. Wotan, fearing that the gods’ days are numbered, and striving to ensure the survival of man’s religious impulse through the influence of his (religion’s) moral idealism on the social conscience of the revolutionary hero Siegmund, is forced to acknowledge that Siegmund’s heroism and love, his moral impulse to sacrifice himself for others, are merely the product of Wotan’s own fear and self-deception. The atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach contended that the only truly good gift which Christianity bestowed to our modern world was its moral advocacy of sacrificing oneself for others. Siegmund offers himself as a love sacrifice both for a total stranger, who has been coerced into a loveless marriage by her brothers, and for his own sister-bride, Sieglinde (likewise the victim of a loveless marriage), and renounces any hope of heaven, any divine co! mpensation for his earthly struggles.
Yet Wotan is compelled by his own religious conscience, represented by Fricka (the virtual embodiment of tradition’s, and religious faith’s, insistence that we should never examine our assumptions), to recognize that Siegmund’s motivations stem from humankind’s religious heritage; in other words, Siegmund’s moral impulse was placed in him by Wotan, and Siegmund is therefore not the free hero Wotan is seeking. However, what Fricka does not know, and what religious faith cannot afford to acknowledge, is that the hoard of knowledge that Wotan is acquiring in his interaction with Erda (Nature, the real world) will inevitably destroy not only religious belief and dogma, but also the morality of self-sacrifice, love, which is our most precious religious legacy. Science may, in the end, compel us to recognize that egoism is the root of all our actions, for good or ill, as Feuerbach eventually did (though even he wished to retreat from the terrible implications of this truth). As! Alberich foresaw, gods and mortals will someday seek only gold (power) and forsake love.
Wotan has learned that our religious legacy is based on self-deceit and fear, and that no hero whom Wotan (our religious legacy) influences can ever be free from these motives. Recognizing that he (the idea of divinity) is compromised and can no longer intervene in human affairs directly, Wotan turns inward for consolation. Fully aware that the gods can no longer rule human hearts because the self-deceit and egoism inherent in religious belief are being exposed, but unable to reconcile himself to the loveless, scientific worldview that Alberich’s rule would impose, Wotan has no other recourse than to give up the futile fight between religion and science, and nihilistically anticipates the destruction of his ideal world as almost a relief from an insupportable burden.
But though he must acknowledge that Alberich’s (that is, Hagen’s) victory over the gods is inevitable, there is still one refuge. He can seek consolation in the inwardness of pure feeling, in art. Having inexorably accumulated—compelled by Alberich’s curse—a hoard of knowledge of himself (of human nature) and the world (Mother Nature, Erda), which in time will inevitably destroy belief in the gods and humankind’s transcendent value, Wotan now prepares to transfer that primevally unconscious inspiration which originally gave birth to religious belief, to his heir, the artist-hero Siegfried. Brünnhilde, Wotan’s and Erda’s daughter, Wotan’s “wish’s life-giving womb,” is the product both of Wotan’s fear of the truth (which led him to seek union with Brünnhilde’s mother, Erda, in the first place) and of his desire to consign the truth to oblivion and forget his fear of it. She is Wagner’s metaphor for that unconscious, involuntary, dreamlike creative impulse which the religiou! s call divine revelation, a religious mystery, and which the secular acknowledge as artistic inspiration. However, as Feuerbach wrote, since humans involuntarily invented the religious mysteries, they are ultimately destined to plumb the mysteries’ very depths and expose them as their own creation.
Why did Wagner say that Wotan’s confession to Brünnhilde is the most important scene for the development of the drama? During his confession Wotan tells Brünnhilde that her mother, Erda (Nature), declared that Alberich’s victory over the gods, through his proxy and son (Hagen), will be inevitable. Wotan recognizes he can no longer openly war with Alberich for supremacy, just as religion ultimately cannot win its fight with science over the power of truth (the Ring), since religion’s claim on truth is indefensible. The world, our only world, belongs to Alberich. Historical man is destined to overcome the fear of truth (Fafner) and thus to break faith with religious belief. Thus Wotan knows the gods will be overthrown if Alberich regains the Ring from Fafner.
Filled with self-loathing, Wotan reflects that his chosen hero Siegmund failed to redeem the gods from Alberich’s curse because Siegmund’s heroism and self-sacrificial love are merely expressions of Wotan’s own fear-inspired self-deception. Wotan had hoped that religion’s moral idealism—loving self-sacrifice—would live on in the social conscience of the revolutionary hero Siegmund, but Wotan now acknowledges that the idea of divinity can no longer, not even covertly, intervene in human affairs. He therefore turns inward for consolation, to Brünnhilde, his “will.”
When Wotan confides in Brünnhilde and tells her the reasons for his divine “Not” (anguish), he is not merely motivated by his longing for a sympathetic ear. Just prior to his confession he tells Brünnhilde that he fears he will lose the grip sustaining his “will” if he speaks “aloud” what is ailing him. That is, he fears losing his mind. When Brünnhilde answers that she herself is Wotan’s “will,” he realizes he is speaking only to himself and says that what he tells her will remain “forever unspoken.”
Brünnhilde is, in relation to Wotan, what Wagner said Elsa is in relation to Lohengrin in his essay “A Communication to My Friends”: “Elsa is the unconscious, the undeliberate, into whom Lohengrin’s conscious, deliberate being yearns to be redeemed.” Wagner also described Elsa as “the other half of his [Lohengrin’s] being.” Not surprisingly, Brünnhilde tells Wotan that she is “one half of yourself.” Arthur Schopenhauer attributed madness to the inability to tolerate awareness of some traumatic insult to our self-image, with the result that our mind involuntarily represses the abhorrent knowledge and replaces it with a consoling fantasy. The madness that Wotan suffers from is Wahn, the collective madness of religious belief which substitutes illusion for truth and stores knowledge of the truth out of sight and out of mind. In his confession to Brünnhilde, Wotan represses into his unconscious mind a hoard of knowledge of his loathsome self, his true identity, and of ! his certainty that Alberich will expose his self-deception, knowledge that is so destructive to his (that is, to our) self-image and beliefs that he cannot bear to be conscious of it. Brünnhilde is thus Wotan’s unconscious mind, in whom his conscious mind hopes to find redemption.
This scene in Act 2 is the key to the Ring because Wotan asks what use his “will” can be to him, since he cannot create a free hero. But Brünnhilde’s (Wotan’s will) use to him is, precisely, that she can create—or figuratively give birth to—his free hero. Wotan needs a hero free from all that Wotan abhors in his own nature, the egoism hidden behind his pretense of nobility. He needs a hero who, unaware that it is Wotan’s fear of the truth (Fafner) which motivates and inspires him, will redeem humanity from Alberich’s threat to expose the bitter, mundane truth hidden behind those religious and artistic mysteries (such as divine revelation, unconscious artistic inspiration, and selfless love) which make life worth living.
Wagner himself complained that the sole purpose of the modern, scientific man of knowledge seems to be to expose all the mysteries of being as mere illusions. Since Brünnhilde is Wotan’s “will,” his unconscious mind, and since Wotan has stored the abhorrent knowledge of his true identity, and all that he fears, in her during his confession, he can now be reborn as Siegfried.
Siegfried is the foolish hero in whom Wotan regains his lost innocence, because, unlike Wotan, Siegfried does not know who he is. (This brings to mind Oedipus, whose tragedy lay in the fact that he did not know his true identity.) Thanks to Brünnhilde, who holds knowledge of Siegfried’s true identity (as Wotan), Wotan will be reborn as Siegfried, minus a conscious knowledge of who he is. Siegfried, unlike Wotan, will be fearless, since the magic of Brünnhilde’s love protects Siegfried from Wotan’s foreknowledge of the gods’ fate, their inevitable, shameful end.
Siegfried is Wagner’s self-image as the artist-hero who has fallen heir to the religious impulse to flee the curse of conscious thought (knowledge) and to flatter feeling without limit. Siegfried, unlike Wotan, is free from the burden of religious belief and dogma, which, because they stake a false claim to the truth (the Ring), are vulnerable to contradiction by scientific knowledge.
As both Wagner and Feuerbach wrote, art’s advantage over religion is that it need not fear the truth because art stakes no claim to the power of truth. Art admits it’s a fiction, a game, and in its purest form, as music (feeling), has no concern with truth or falsehood. Music is free to play with the world. If Siegfried is a metaphor for the secular artist who falls heir to religious feeling when religious thought must be sacrificed to, and replaced by, science, Hagen represents modern science, which inherits the godless world. As Feuerbach noted, secular art and science are the heirs of dying religious belief. Wotan confessed to Brünnhilde Erda’s prophecy that with the birth of Alberich’s son the gods’ (religion’s) end will not be long delayed. Wotan, resigned to his fate, acknowledges the Nibelung’s son as heir to all he despises.
Wotan intends to punish Brünnhilde for trying to further his plans for attaining redemption from Alberich’s curse within the real world, since Wotan’s conscious, objective mind has already given up all such hope as futile, having acknowledged that the world belongs to Alberich and will be inherited by Alberich’s son, Hagen. Wotan has therefore renounced the Wälsungs Siegmund and Sieglinde, and all hope that Siegmund can redeem the loveless world through love in action. But perhaps Brünnhilde can redeem Wotan from Alberich’s curse in a way less vulnerable to Alberich’s threat. By protecting his heir, the artist-hero Siegfried, from the consciousness of Wotan’s insupportable knowledge of the truth, and inspiring Siegfried to create redemptive works of art which consign this fearful knowledge to oblivion and substitute for it a consoling illusion, Brünnhilde can co-create with Siegfried a Valhalla of art, a new refuge from Alberich’s host of night. Thus, when Brünnhilde ask! s Wotan, “Will you take away all that you ever gave me?” and he responds, “He who subdues you will take it away!” he alludes to his repressed hoard of knowledge, the contents of his unconscious confession, to which his hero Siegfried will fall heir. This knowledge will sleep for everyone except the authentic artist-hero, who alone can safely draw inspiration from it to create artworks that redeem man’s religious longing for transcending of reality, from the threat of science.
Paul Heise, an independent Wagnerian scholar, has studied the Ring Cycle for more than 30 years.
