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The Pursuit of Knowledge
Shocking the Bourgeoisie
Worn-out gestures of rebellion before an audience that long ago lost the capacity for outrage.
In the mid-nineteenth century the bourgeoisie were apparent everywhere. You met them in theatres and restaurants, in churches and clubs, on beaches and river boats, in woods and parks, often walking arm in arm, dressed in respectable outfits and crowned by ridiculous hats. They sent their children to reputable schools, took respectable vacations, and worked in clean but arduous jobs. They owned property, both fixed and portable, and looked aghast at the radicals and socialists who threatened to take it away. They believed in marriage and the family, in decency, domesticity, and deference to the law. They stare at us now from picture postcards with eyes that are both proud and shy, upholding the moral order even while paddling in the sea. We glimpse their world in the stuffy interiors of Vuillard, in the fêtes galantes of Renoir, in the picnic scenes of Seurat, and it is a safe and domesticated world, and also a world tinged by romantic sadness.
In the eyes of their intellectual observers, however, the bourgeoisie were symbolic and exotic creatures, the subject of elaborate theories and fairy tales. Marx invented a world-historical role for them, Flaubert set out to disconcert them, and Matthew Arnold denounced them as the "Philistine class." They were the perfect foil for wit, exuberance, and iconoclasm, and for a hundred years following The Communist Manifesto of 1848 they filled an evident dramatic need. For the bohemian artist the bourgeoisie were visible, shockable, and obviously bad. They justified art as no class before had justified it, by being the defenseless target of abuse and satire.
For the last 50 years, however, the bourgeoisie have been slipping quietly away. Those who seem to fit the bill from the property-owning point of view don't always dress as they should or uphold the right kind of domestic values. Church attendance has fallen off, along with visits to theatre and restaurant. Parks and beaches are populated by people who show no respect for bourgeois dress or bourgeois manners, and the idea that there are bourgeois values, connected to marriage, home, and family, has only a scant chance of survival in a world where more and more people see marriage as a burden, children a bore, and property not for sharing.
In such circumstances the intellectual iconoclast, brought up to épater le bourgeois, suffers from a lack of targets. Who can he offend in the post-bourgeois world, and how can he put on display the originality and freedom of his thinking, when there are no customs, no norms, no manners, and no dress codes to offend? Of course, he can do something cheeky, like displaying a urinal in an art gallery. But he will be haunted by the fear that someone got there before him, and in any case the galleries are frequented by people as unshockable as himself.
The disappearance of the bourgeoisie has therefore led to a crisis in the arts. How can we track down the defeated remnants of the philistine class, in order to disturb them with the proof of their irrelevance? Theatres, galleries, restaurants, and public resorts all offer impeccable post-modern fare, addressed to non-judgmental people. TV has been dumbed down below the horizon of bourgeois awareness, and even the churches are rejecting family values and the marital virtues. Yet, without the bourgeoisie, the world of art is deprived of a target, condemned to repeat worn-out gestures of rebellion to an audience that long ago lost the capacity for outrage.
ALL IS NOT LOST, however. There is one last redoubt where the bourgeoisie can be corralled into a corner and spat upon, and that is the opera. Believers in family values and old-fashioned marriage are romantics at heart who love to sit through those wonderful tales of intrigue, betrayal, and reconciliation, in which man-woman love is exalted to a height that it can never reach in real life, and the whole presented through heart-stopping music and magical scenes that take us, for an enchanted three hours, into the world of dreams. Siegfried's love for Brünnhilde, shot through with unconscious treachery; Butterfly's innocent passion built on self-deception like an angel on a tomb; Grimes's death wish, rationalized as a longing for Ellen's maternal love -- these are dramatic ideas that could never be realized through words, but which are burned into our hearts by music.
Is it surprising that our surviving bourgeoisie, surrounded as they are by a culture of flippancy and desecration, should be so drawn to opera? After a performance of Katya, Pelléas, La Traviata, or Figaro, they stagger home amazed at those passions displayed on the stage, by creatures no more godlike than themselves! They will come from miles away to sit through their favorite fairy tales and drive home singing in the early hours. They will pay $200 for a mediocre seat, in order to hear their chosen prima donna, and will learn by heart the arias which they are never satisfied to hear unless in the flesh. Take any performance of an operatic classic anywhere in the world, and you will find, sitting in close confinement, motionless and devout for the space of three hours, the assembled remnant of the bourgeoisie, innocent, expectant, and available for shock.
The temptation is irresistible. Hardly a producer now, confronted with a masterpiece that might otherwise delight and console such an audience, can control the desire to desecrate. The more exalted the music, the more demeaning the production. I have come across all of the following: Siegfried in schoolboy shorts cooking a sword on a mobile canteen; Mélisande holed up in welfare accommodation, with Pelléas sadistically tying her to the wall by her hair; Don Giovanni standing happily at ease at the end of the eponymous opera while unexplained demons enter the stage, sing a meaningless chorus, and exit again; Rusalka in a wheelchair from which she stares at a football in a swimming pool, while addressing the moon; Tristan and Isolde on a ship divided by a brick wall, singing vaguely of a love that hardly concerns them since each is invisible to the other; Carmen trying in vain to be a center of erotic attention while a near naked chorus copulates on stage; Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail set in a Berlin brothel; Verdi's masked ball with the assembled cast squatting on toilets so as to void their bowels -- not to speak of the routine Hitlerization of any opera, from Fidelio to Tosca, that can be squeezed into Nazi uniform. Wagner is always mercilessly mutilated, lest those misguided bourgeois fall for his seductive political message; and as for Madame Butterfly, what an opportunity to get back at the Americans for that bomb dropped on Nagasaki!
Not all opera houses are guilty of the sacrilege that has effectively destroyed the publicly funded opera houses in Britain and Germany. Here and there in Italy things are done properly, so as to present the drama as the music requires. And one opera house above all others deserves praise for its fidelity to the original artistic inspiration, and that is the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which strives for perfection and often achieves it. Sarcastic postmodern productions invariably muffle the musical impact, by preventing the singers from identifying with their roles. But when, as frequently happens, a performance is broadcast from the Met around the world -- including to us opera-starved bourgeois in Britain -- the result is likely to be a musical experience of the highest order, with singers fully at one with the drama, and the orchestra moving in deepest sympathy. Of course, the Met tries to obtain the very best singers, and has, in James Levine, a world-class conductor who finds his way to the heart of the music. But these two factors could never guarantee an expressive performance when the drama is being overtly mocked on the stage. Opera-lovers everywhere should be grateful, therefore, that there is one place that respects their dreams, and does not see opera as a way of puncturing them.
Those thoughts came vividly to mind when listening to the truly great Met performance earlier this year of Berg's Lulu, with Fabio Luisi conducting and Marlis Petersen wonderfully in command of the title role. If ever there were an operatic slap in the face for bourgeois values it is this work, which Berg left unfinished, and the libretto of which he put together from Wedekind's horrible Lulu dramas. Those dramas were written to make the scales drop from the eyes of Wilhelmine Germany. But they also luxuriate in the author's sex-obsessed view of women in general, and of the psychopath Lulu in particular. Thanks to the wonderful production, the visual brilliance of which was audible even to us in rural Wiltshire, the singers gave a performance of a kind that could never be reproduced in a studio, truly slapping us all in the face in a way that was, after all, not demeaning but genuinely troubling. For, having slapped it around for a while, Berg takes the bourgeois face by the ears and drags it down to the gutter, so as to stare at the lowest forms of human life. "There, but for the grace of family values, go you lot," he tells us. And we shyly listen to him.
What should we make of this opera now? Is it just a period piece, another example of the tiresome nihilism that stifled central Europe between the wars, like the cabaret paintings of Georg Grosz, the dramas of Brecht, or the inhuman architecture of Walter Gropius? Or is it offering to Lulu and her kind the hope of some redemption, remaking her selfish life as somehow worthwhile, even in that final pointless murder at the hands of Jack the Ripper? Berg surely took the second view, since he composed for Lulu a leitmotif that is without doubt the greatest and most tender 12-note melody in existence. And, in the punctilious markings of the score, he tries to create an impression of absolute order, if only an artistic order, in the chaotic-seeming life that floods the stage. He was fully persuaded that he could redeem the most sordid life through music, just as Wagner had tried to redeem the old bourgeois decencies in Die Meistersinger. And who but a bourgeois would attempt such a task?
About the Author
Roger Scruton is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book is The Uses of Pessimism (Oxford University Press).
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Appleby| 7.14.10 @ 6:30AM
We are all Proles now ... or so they tell us. Time to read, or re-read, Brave New World. As Mustapha Mond explains succinctly to John Savage, the secret is to keep the proles in a continual state of adolescence, when nothing is interesting or important except taking off your clothes and spewing obscenity (much as you did, in fact, when you were two). When this is extended to the whole society, it is easy to keep everyones attention away from all that they have lost or abandoned, or that is not offered anymore. Just try suggesting to anyone, for example, that good manners used to require a curbing of ones saltier language in the presence of ladies, and you will get barraged with potty-talk requests to go back to your nursing home. As Brave New World demonstrated in the 1940s, focus the immature on sex and drugs and entertainment featuring both, and you can do what you like with the world. That is what we have now.
Kipling| 7.14.10 @ 1:12PM
Several years ago I read an interview with Tom Lehrer, now deceased, I believe, who was once a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth and Harvard and who had a funny caberet act in the late 1950s and the 1960s. (His music can still be bought today.) Lehrer said that when he was young, there were certain things that could not be said to a girl. Now, however, Lehrer said, you may say all those things, but you may not say "girl."
Alan Brooks| 7.14.10 @ 5:05PM
An interesting case is Frank Zappa, who spent the years 1965 to his death in '93 attempting to gain revenge for being arrested for obscenity in '65.
His sex lyrics were the equivalent of a 12 year old shouting 'penis!' or 'vagina!'
Alan Brooks| 7.14.10 @ 5:11PM
This is how powerful revenge is:
"In March 1965, Zappa was approached by a vice squad undercover officer, and accepted an offer of $100 to produce a suggestive audio tape for an alleged stag party. Zappa and a female friend faked an erotic recording. When Zappa was about to hand over the tape, he was arrested, and the police stripped the studio of all recorded material. Zappa was charged with "conspiracy to commit pornography".This felony charge was reduced and he was sentenced to six months in jail on a misdemeanor, with all but ten days suspended.His entrapment and brief imprisonment left a permanent mark, and was key in the formation of his anti-authoritarian stance."
Recitative| 7.19.10 @ 2:23AM
@ Appleby
Proles? Of course, Karl Marx had his own special economic theory about the bourgeoisie and the "proletariat".
However, the original distinction hovering behind this is between *aristocrat* and bourgeois (citizen). The former were basically hereditary military castes who were brought up to believe that pride was actually a virtue and winning/dominating was more important than life itself. (Firearms dealt something of a blow to that ethos, which revolved around readiness to engage in close-quarter combat.) Thomas Hobbes, in effect, taught a citizen-morality - that fear of violent death was reasonable, and "vainglory" was a vice.
Now right-wing nineteenth-century Frenchmen would cast a sceptical eye at the solid, boring men who epitomized citizen-morality. And that became a stock-in-trade for artists (as did pointing to the inability of some to practice even these more domestic and pacific virtues). Notice who attracts Emma Bovary's eye at the banquet. (Note, also the way the pharmacist in the book is obsessed with *safety* and puts his children in crash hats.)
If opera producers believe themselves to be adopting an anti-bourgeois posture - in effect carrying out the role of a nineteenth-century French artist, then we've finally reached absurdity. A composer or a librettist may be an artist; an opera producer is merely a kind of bureaucrat of the arts world. Put all this back in its original terms, and the absurdity becomes even more obvious. Would an opera producer *really* reject the Hobbesian morality? I doubt battlefields and opera producers mix. One sight of blood and smashed bone, and the average producer would probably run screaming.
Kenny| 7.14.10 @ 6:46AM
"In such circumstances the intellectual iconoclast, brought up to épater le bourgeois, suffers from a lack of targets. Who can he offend in the post-bourgeois world, and how can he put on display the originality and freedom of his thinking, when there are no customs, no norms, no manners, and no dress codes to offend?"
Who can be offended? The targets are right before your eye -- the elite and those weak-minded fools who toe the politically correct party line.
Alan Brooks| 7.18.10 @ 5:54PM
I know this is tendentious and protesting too much, but what is most surprising about personal mores today is how they were influenced in one discrete (or perhaps not so) discrete way: as a child in the '60s the inchoate fear was that Playboy Philosophy (practically PG-rated by 21st century standards) would lead to over-excitement.
But it could be I have it backwards again, maybe it is supposed to be dull and unappetizing to appeal to the lowest common denominator-- which is very low. In general, the tastes of adolescents these days is even worse than I remember it in the '70s, and that is very bad.
It is not 'dumbness', the kids are getting bad advice from their peers and parents. Plus the apparently heightened pressures of today exacerbate it all.
If memory serves, it was not too bad from the late '40s to the late '90s, say; but I would not want to be a youth today.
Alan Brooks| 8.10.10 @ 12:08AM
To be perfectly cynical: perhaps it is a good thing sex is becoming disgusting: if it becomes hideous someday, miscreants might lose interest and not procreate as much.
At a rightwing blog such as AS, one can't dismiss hate radio, however;
would you might if I put down hate TV?
D. Singh| 7.14.10 @ 8:21AM
Sir
What an insightful piece on the consequences of the thought and action of the liberal and progressive world-view: ’Yet, without the bourgeoisie, the world of art is deprived of a target, condemned to repeat worn-out gestures of rebellion to an audience that long ago lost the capacity for outrage.’
The Liberal and (or) the Progressive have nearly destroyed the high ethical values embedded in great art and literature. They have destroyed the goose that laid the golden egg.
For what is there now to rebel against? What can the Liberal and (or) the Progressive now use to shock? Every moral and ethical value that kept western civilisations confident has been smashed.
And on which core ethical value did the Liberal and (or) the Progressive first tread upon on their road to destruction? It began with the sanctity of life ethic trumped by the quality of life ethic.
This is the final result of what the late Malcolm Muggerridge called ‘The Liberal Death Wish’.
I think the philosopher Nietzsche put it best in the Parable of the Madman (1882):
THE MADMAN----Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
Brian Mc| 7.14.10 @ 9:19AM
What is the meaning of life?
The simple answer: "To love God..."
God can only shake his head as a vast portion of His creation turns from the light and headlong, screams for redemption towards the darkness.
I cringe in the knowledge that God is just.
Can you boys and girls say, Sodom and Gammorha? Pardon the spelling, if incorrect...my bible is not close at hand.
L. Ross| 7.14.10 @ 11:37AM
While you're at it, Bible is always capitalized.
Petronius| 7.14.10 @ 10:48AM
The late Fuhrer, Adolph Hitler once declaimed in a sudden snit that, "I want no intellectuals." Yet it was they who facilitated his reign of ruin. Our current crop of nihilistic trash are determined to eliminate everybody who refuse to be ruled by them, through political calumnies , lifestyle restrictions, prohibitions, social ridicule, and any other way they can conjure up to persecute the remaining middle class whom they regard as a stain on their universe, as if denying us places in their society matters. Who in their Right mind wants to be one of them? They wield all the power of state yet they are miserable wretches. All their high minded machinations have given this world is a bucket too big for any crabs to escape.
There is no way the bleating babies of their infantile electorate can be defeated at the polls.
The president has openly repudiated the concept of individual liberty of any kind. He intends to "perfect" us, under pain of, (see above).
I have secured and secreted copies of my favorite books and am preparing for the worst.
Dave Williams| 7.14.10 @ 1:33PM
I believe the esteemed Mr. Lehrer is still very much with us, although no longer wielding his razor-sharp wit publicly....Too bad; the times cry out for his commentary.
cuban pete| 7.14.10 @ 2:17PM
Dave:
I agree. The problem is Tom's satire requires a knowledge of "the canon of Western civilization " which is often denigrated let alone being taught to our young people today.
Lehrer's work along with that of men such as Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar and Steve Allen presumed a basic familiarity with Shakespeare, etc. That is what made their stuff really funny.
All the best.
JohnD| 7.14.10 @ 1:59PM
Yes, Tom Lehrer is still with us. He is 82 years old.
Marc Jeric| 7.14.10 @ 3:01PM
Oh those confusing names! Let me simplify: here in America we had first the proud progressives from 1900-1917. Then after the Lenin revolution we had the same people calling themselves proudly the communists. This lasted until 1939 when Hitler and Stalin signed their pact to divide Europe; our guys renamed themselves as socialists, this phase lasting until the nass murders and utter poverty of communism could not be hidden away any longer. Thus the same scum renamed themselves as liberals - it is similar to the criminals of North Korea calling their Gulag state as People's Democratic Republic. After 30 years of exposure that name liberal acquired a certain nasty smell - and now we are faced with progressives - going backwards about 100 years. But it is same deadly group of marxists through all those years - hungry for absolute power through their faith in that 1848 document of slavery called the Communist Manifesto.
lordsomber| 7.14.10 @ 3:06PM
These days, to "shock the middle class" is itself middle class.
Bill| 7.15.10 @ 11:18AM
What is humorous to me at this stage in our history in Europe and the U.S. is that the group most likely to be shocked by conduct that is out of the mainstream, words that defy convention, art that intends to be representational, and behavior that is intended to be shocking are the practitioners of high art and the non-bourgeois elements of society.
There would be great commotion in the art world if a modern-day Raphael suddenly found his art on display at, say, the Broolkly Museum of Art when that art suggested the sanctity of Saint Mary or the divinity of God and Jesus, or depicted in a respectful and worshipful manner, say, the Annunciation or the lowering of Christ from the cross.
darragh| 7.16.10 @ 6:31PM
Our culture has come to hate beauty, one of the three transcendentals of Christian thought. When spurned, beauty comes back in an act of mysterious vengeance, in the degradation you describe. We die from its lack.
Christine| 7.17.10 @ 3:16PM
As a frequent Metropolitan Opera attendee, I enjoyed this article, especially the little tour through various concepts of regietheater, but please note that Fabio Luisi conducted this past season's Lulu, in place of James Levine, who was not well.