Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  One practice is to pair off the greatest dancers as representing two ideal alternatives. The most astute dance writer of the nineteenth century, Théophile Gautier, so contrasted the reigning dancers of his era, Elssler and Taglioni. Elssler was pagan, earthy; Taglioni was spiritual, transcendent. And critics a decade ago, when absorbing the arrival of a second male Kirov refugee of genius in our midst, tended to compare Nureyev and Baryshnikov in the same way. Nureyev was Dionysian, Baryshnikov was Apollonian. Such symmetries are inevitably misleading, and this particular one does an injustice to Nureyev, who was a supremely gifted and expressive dancer and in the early years an ideal partner (with Fonteyn), as well as to Baryshnikov. For although Baryshnikov has perhaps never in his career been an ideal partner, it has to be said—without any disrespect to the grandeur of Nureyev’s dancing and to his heroic tenacities—that the younger dancer proved to be a genius of another magnitude.

  Of a magnitude without parallel. Guided by his generosity, his intellectual curiosity, and his unprecedented malleability as a dancer, Baryshnikov has given himself to more different kinds of dancing than any other great dancer in history. He has danced Russian ballet, Bournonville, the British recensions (Ashton, Tudor, MacMillan), Balanchine, Roland Petit, and a range of Americana from jazz dancing (a duo with Judith Jamison, choreographed by Alvin Ailey) to Robbins, Tharp, and Karole Armitage. He may, on occasion, have been abused or misused by his choreographers. But even when the role is not right, he is always more than the role. He is, almost literally, a transcendent dancer. Which is what dance strives to make actual.

  [1986]

  Lincoln Kirstein

  BORN IN 1907, the “107th year of the nineteenth century,” as he once dubbed it, Lincoln Kirstein devoted his life to promoting and exemplifying standards that were both confidently old-fashioned and recklessly visionary. His widest claim to fame is that, through his initiative and unflagging attentions, both a great art and the cultural life of a great city were transformed. Lincoln Kirstein made classical ballet an American art by giving America its first ballet school and giving an American home to one of the supreme artists of the twentieth century. And that artist, George Balanchine, made New York the dance capital of the world: the best dances being made anywhere, performed by consummately trained great dancers, created the most knowledgeable audience anywhere, one better prepared than audiences in any other metropolis to welcome and evaluate dance in all its varieties, “modern” as well as ballet.

  Kirstein’s actual titles were: general director of the New York City Ballet and president of the School of American Ballet. But his association with dance was only one aspect of his genius. Like Diaghilev, who is often (if not too accurately) invoked when assessing Kirstein’s role and importance, he started off as someone with interesting, fiercely partisan tastes in all the arts and literature, a connoisseur and proselytizer of indefatigable appetite, charm, social energies—who narrowed his focus to dance. Great tastemakers need a capacious institution to bend to their will, a vehicle. Diaghilev started, precociously, by founding a magazine (The World of Art), well before the Ballets Russes was thought of; Kirstein in the late 1920s, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, founded a magazine, a splendid magazine, Hound & Horn, to write for and to discover other talents, new and forgotten. He might have had a career not unlike other exceptionally prescient aesthetes of his generation, such as A. Everett (“Chick”) Austin and Julien Levy, who used museums and an art gallery to celebrate and sponsor their disparate enthusiasms: a museum or a gallery is an anthology institution, as is a magazine or a publishing house. But Kirstein had the means, the daring, and the tenacity to put all his avidity, all his piety, into an institution exhibiting one genius. One genius only. And unlike a publishing house or a gallery or a museum or a magazine, institutions that are invaluable in the soliciting and disseminating of work but are not indispensable to its creation, a dance company is a living organism that inspires and makes possible the work which it then exhibits to the public. It was Kirstein’s vision, his stamina, his fidelity, that brought into being and guaranteed the survival of the greatest dance company of our time, without which most of the dances made by the genius he imported, who turned out to be the greatest choreographer of all time, would not have been made.

  These roles, of tastemaker and supreme enabler of another’s genius, are service roles, and Kirstein was devoted to the idea of service. The magnificent Movement & Metaphor and many other books (and articles) about the history and ideology of dance made him an important author. What made him something larger, an important, thrilling writer, was the quality of his prose. (I exclude the early novel and volume of poems—interesting mainly because he wrote them. The novel, Flesh Is Heir, relates how he happened to be present in Venice at Diaghilev’s funeral in 1929; Rhymes of a PFC, about his military service during World War II, tells how he loved being in the army.) What’s more, when his work with the great institution he founded and kept alive for decades was virtually over (“Après moi, le Board,” as he quotes Balanchine as saying), his work with English sentences was not. There is more than fifty years of writing, going back to Hound & Horn, and he got better all the time, more subtle, more sonorous, more intense. I am thinking of the articles that appeared in the 1980s in The New York Review of Books and, in particular, of four stupendous pieces of autobiographical writing—triumphs of elliptical prose and anguished, ecstatic sensibility—published in the literary quarterly Raritan. In 1991 a generous sampling of Kirstein’s writing on all subjects (including photography, painting, film, and literature as well as dance) was published under the title By With To & From: A Lincoln Kirstein Reader, and in 1994 Mosaic: Memoirs appeared, which incorporated some but not all of the material in Raritan. And there is much, much more, still to be collected or brought back into print.

  A votary of systems of ideal order, Kirstein more than once expressed his love of ballet as a commitment to certain spiritual values—to an exalted abnegation of self. But as the attraction to the impersonal is sometimes the good taste of a truly strong personality, so the militant attraction to ideally regimented communities is, usually, the hallmark of a truly eccentric temperament. The collective enterprise to which Kirstein devoted his life does illustrate the ideals he said it did: perfect discipline, service, devotion. His own life, like any individual life when examined closely, yields a double meaning. Kirstein’s life and accomplishments supply model lessons about the necessity of eccentricity—about being eccentric (including being “difficult” personally) as a spiritual value and a precondition of real seriousness.

  We were fortunate to have had this noble and complicated man among us.

  [1997]

  Wagner’s Fluids

  WATER, BLOOD, HEALING BALM, magic potions—fluids play a decisive role in this mythology.

  Wagner’s stories are often launched from a water-world. An arrival by water and a departure by water frame the plots of The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin. The Ring saga begins literally in the water, below the Rhine’s surface (to end, four operas later, with a cosmic duet of water and fire). Wagner’s most delirious exploration of fluidity, Tristan und Isolde, begins and ends with journeys over water. Act I takes place on a noble vessel commanded by Tristan that is taking the Irish princess Isolde, who is affianced to Tristan’s uncle, King Marke, to Cornwall. Preceding this journey was an earlier sea voyage, when Tristan, grievously wounded, had set off alone in a frail skiff for Ireland, in hopes of being ministered to by Isolde, renowned for her healing arts. Since the foe who wounded him and whom he killed was Isolde’s fiancé, he could not say who he was. (Solitary people with mysterious or disguised identities—Lohengrin, the Dutchman, the wounded Tristan at the Irish court—usually arrive by water.) Act III takes place on a rampart overlooking the sea, where Tristan, re-wounded mortally at the end of Act II, waits for a boat to arrive bearing Isolde, who has been summoned not as his lover but as his once successful healer. But as she appears Tristan dies, and she fo
llows him in death. Journeys over water are associated in Wagner’s mythology with a redemption that does not happen, as in Lohengrin, or happens in terms other than those originally sought, as in Tristan und Isolde, which has almost everybody die, either senselessly or beatifically.

  Parsifal, like Tristan und Isolde, is very much a story of fluids. However, in this last of Wagner’s thirteen operas, what is defined as redemption—finding someone who will heal, and succeed, the wounded king Amfortas—does take place, and in the hoped-for terms. A virgin, this time male, a holy fool, appears as foretold. Perhaps this fulfillment of expectations makes it inevitable that the water-world is largely excluded from the opera. A majestic outdoors, the forest, and a vast sanctified indoors, the Grail Hall, are its two positive locations (the negative ones, Klingsor’s domain, being a castle tower and a garden of dangerous flowers). To be sure, Act I has water just offstage: a lake to which the wounded king is brought for his hydrotherapy, and a spring where Kundry procures water to revive the fainting Parsifal after brutally announcing to him his mother’s death; and in Act III, there is water for a consecration, for a baptism. But the main story of fluids is about blood: the unstanchable hemorrhaging of the wound in Amfortas’s side, Christ’s blood that should stream in the Grail chalice. Amfortas’s essential duty as king of the Grail knights, which is to make Christ’s blood appear in the chalice on a regular basis, for the knights’ eucharistic meal, has become agony for him to perform—weakened as he is by this wound, inflicted by Klingsor with the very spear that pierced Jesus’ side while He hung on the Cross. The plot of Parsifal could be summarized as the search, eventually successful, for a replacement for someone who is having trouble making a fluid appear.

  SEVERAL KINDS OF FLUID enter the body in Wagner’s stories, but in only one form does fluid leave it, blood, and this in male bodies only. Women have bloodless deaths: usually they simply expire abruptly (Elsa, Elisabeth, Isolde, Kundry), or they immolate themselves, in water (Senta) or in fire (Brunnhilde). Only men bleed—bleed to death. (Therefore, it doesn’t seem too fanciful to regard semen as subsumed, metaphorically, under blood.) Though Wagner makes the prostrate, punctured, hemorrhaging male body the result of some epic combat, there is usually an erotic wound behind the one inflicted by spear and sword. Love as experienced by men, in both Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, is tantamount to a wound. Isolde had healed Tristan, but Tristan had fallen in love with Isolde; Wagner’s way of signaling the emotional necessity of a new physical wound is to make it, shockingly, virtually self-inflicted. (Tristan drops his sword at the end of Act II and lets the treacherous Melot run him through.) Amfortas had already been seduced by Kundry; Klingsor’s spear just made that wound literal.

  In Wagner’s misogynistic logic, a woman, who characteristically doubles as healer and seducer, is often the true slayer. This figure, of whom Isolde is a positive version, appears in Parsifal with both the negativity and the eroticism made far more explicit. The person who flies in, early in Act I, bearing a vial of precious medicinal balm for the stricken king—it can relieve but not cure him—is the same person who caused the King’s wound. Wagner makes Kundry systematically dual: in her service role, a bringer of fluids; in her seducer’s alter ego, a taker of them.

  Seduction is eloquence; service is mute. After the failure of Kundry’s maximal eloquence, her attempt to seduce Parsifal in Act II, she is represented as having nothing left to say. “Dienen! Dienen!” (To serve! To serve!) are the only words she is allowed in all of Act III. In contrast, Isolde, who is characterized first as a healing woman, one who successfully administered balm (the background of the opera’s story), and then as a focus of desire, becomes more and more eloquent. It is with Isolde’s rush of ecstatic words that Wagner concludes the opera.

  THE FLUID ADMINISTERED by Isolde in her role as healer is in the past. In the story Wagner has chosen to tell, the fluid she offers Tristan is what they both believe to be a lethal poison. Instead, it is a disinhibitor, which makes them—just as the boat is about to land—con—fess their love for each other.

  A fluid-that-changes-everything is essential to the Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde that has been circulating through the veins of European culture for more than seven centuries. In the fullest account, from the thirteenth century, Gottfried von Strassburg’s novel-length verse epic Tristan, it is a love-philter concocted by Isolde’s mother (also named Isolde, and the healing woman in the original tale) for her daughter and King Marke to drink on their wedding night which, during the voyage, an ignorant servant offers to Marke’s nephew and the bride-to-be as wine. Wagner’s version turns accidental calamity into necessity. “Der Liebestrank,” the draught of love that Brangäne, Isolde’s servant, has deliberately substituted for the poison, does not make Tristan and Isolde feel their own feelings—they already feel them, are being martyred by them. It simply makes it impossible for them to go on not acknowledging their love.

  The love-potion is treated in a comic register in another opera, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (1832), which opens with the well-to-do heroine reading to a group of peasants a reduction of the Celtic legend to a tale of conventionally unrequited love with a happy ending. Handsome Tristan procures from a “saggio incantatore” (a wise sorcerer) a “certo elisir d’amor” (a certain elixir of love); no sooner has the beautiful but indifferent Isolde taken a sip than a matching love is created—instantly. “Cambiata in un istante / quella beltà crudele / fu di Tristano amante / visse Tristan fedel.” (Changed in an instant / that unkind beauty / became Tristan’s true love / and lived faithful to him.) The drink that makes someone fall in love belongs to the same family of potions, spells, and charms that transforms princes into frogs and mermaids into princesses: it is the instant metamorphosis of fairy tales. Mere fairy tales. Donizetti’s buffa realism has no place for magic: the fluid sold by an itinerant quack to the opera’s hero to woo the woman he thinks (wrongly) doesn’t love him is actually Bordeaux. Instead of what is given as wine being really a magic potion, what is fobbed off as a magic potion is just wine—the inevitable, comic deflation of the fantasy.

  Its tragic dissolution is Wagner’s, a quarter of a century later: a potion that, rather than making something possible, heightens impossibility, loosening the tie to life. The fluid that Brangäne gives the hapless pair does not just reveal (and therefore unleash) a feeling. It undoes a world. Love subtracts them instantly, totally, from civil society, from normal ties and obligations, casting them into a vertiginous solitariness (rather than a romantic solitude à deux) that brings on an inexorable darkening of consciousness. Where are we? asks Isolde at the beginning of the opera. Where am I? she asks Tristan at the end of Act I, after they have drunk the potion, as the boat lands in Cornwall. The king is here, someone says. What king? asks Tristan. And Tristan does not know where he is when he awakens in Act III. What herds? what castle? what peasants? he asks, as his loyal retainer Kurwenal explains that he has been brought home to Brittany, his own kingdom, that he is lying on the rampart of his own castle. Love is an anti-gnosis, a deknowing. Each act begins with a tormented, paralyzing, anguished waiting by one for the other, followed by the longed-for arrival—and concluding with other, unanticipated arrivals, which are not only disruptive but, to the lovers, barely comprehensible. What duty? What shame?

  Passion means an exalted passivity. Act I opens with Isolde on a couch, her face buried in the cushions (Wagner’s stage direction), and Act III has Tristan in a coma at the beginning and supine throughout. As in Parsifal, there is a great deal of lying down and many fervent appeals for the surcease of oblivion. If the opera ended after its first two acts, one could regard this pull of the horizontal in Tristan und Isolde, the paeans to night, the dark, the equating of pleasure with oblivion and of death with pleasure, as a most extravagant way of describing the voluptuous loss of consciousness in orgasm. Whatever is being said or being done on the stage, the music of the Act II encounter is a thrillingly unequivocal rendering of an ideal co
pulation. (Thomas Mann was not wrong when he spoke of the opera’s “lascivious desire for bed.”) But Act III makes it clear that the eroticism is more means than end, a platform for the propaganda against lucidity; that the deepest subject is the surrender of consciousness as such.

  Already the emotional logic of the words of the Act II duet is a sequence of annihilating—and nihilistic—mental operations. The lovers do not simply unite, generically, as in the unsurpassably elegant formula of Gottfried von Strassburg’s medieval German Tristan:

  A man, a woman; a woman, a man;

  Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.

  Imbued with the elaborate understanding of solitude and the exploration of extremes of feeling that seem the most original achievements of the Romantic movements in the arts of the last century, Wagner is able to go much further:

  TRISTAN: Tristandu, ich Isolde, nicht mehr Tristan!

  ISOLDE: Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Isolde!

  (TRISTAN: Tristan you, I Isolde, no more Tristan!

  ISOLDE: You Isolde, Tristan I, no more Isolde!)

  When the world is thought to be so easily negated by the pressure of extreme feeling (the still regnant mythology of the self we owe to the nineteenth-century writers and composers), the feeling self expands to fill the empty space: “Selbst dann bin ich die Welt” (I myself am the world), Tristan and Isolde had already sung in unison. The inevitable next move is the elimination of the self, gender, individuality. “Ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen” (no names, no parting), they sing together … “endlos, ewig, einhewusst” (ever, unendingly, one consciousness). For one self to seek to fuse with another is, in the absence of the world, to seek the annihilation of both.