The Devil's Pleasure Palace (15 page)

One of Meyerbeer's greatest successes was the satanic opera
Robert le diable,
from whose themes Liszt fashioned one of his most popular concert showpieces. Wagner himself picked up the Meyerbeerian thread with his early opera
The Flying Dutchman
(1840), bringing the circle of resentment and imitation to completion. Art imitating life, or life imitating art? Or something even more elemental, the unity of the two?

Robert le diable
, shockingly for the day, featured a chorus of dead nuns rising from the grave, casting off their habits, and writhing temptingly nude before the hero. In
Dutchman
, by contrast, the temptation is toward goodness and the light, as exemplified by Senta, the village girl who eventually frees the Dutchman from the power of his terrible curse, sending his doomed ship to the bottom and both him and her to Heaven through her
Selbstmord
(suicide). Both operas, though, feature the
Ewig-Weibliche
to drive home the elemental point: Eros and Thanatos, together again, with Eros triumphant.

Wagner's heroines are a panoply of redemptive femininity: Senta, Elisabeth (
Tannhäuser
), Elsa (
Lohengrin
), Isolde (
Tristan und Isolde
), Eva (
Die Meistersinger
), Brünnhilde—strong women who often outlive the men they love. They are the musical and dramatic idealizations of Gretchen, both temptress and redeemer, the spark of the divine made flesh that drives their poor, often weak heroes to their deeds of glory. All of them owe a debt of gratitude to the archetypal operatic feminist heroine, Beethoven's Leonore in
Fidelio
, who rescues her imprisoned husband, Florestan, by disguising herself as a boy and then holding the evil governor of the prison, Don Pizarro, at gunpoint until the cavalry finally arrives.

And yet this most elemental force in human life, the
Ewig-Weibliche
, is routinely scorned and denigrated by the offspring of the Unholy Left, the increasingly deracinated “feminist” harpies whose anti-male rhetoric bespeaks not so much impotent rage as sexual jealousy.

The attack on normative heterosexuality—led by male homosexuals and lesbians, and invariably disguised as a movement for “rights,” piggybacking on the civil rights movement of the 1960s—is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory, which went straight at the hardest target (and yet, in many ways, the softest) first. The reason was simple: If a wedge could be driven between men and women, if the nuclear family
could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men, to see them as unnecessary for their happiness or survival—if men could be made biologically redundant—then that political party that had adopted Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs.

And so Eve was offered the apple: In exchange for rejecting a “traditional” sex role of supposed subservience and dependency (slavery, really), she would become more like a man in her sexual appetites and practices (this was called “freedom”), and she would be liberated from the burdens of motherhood via widespread contraception, abortion on demand, and the erasure of the “stigma” of single motherhood (should it come to that) or spinsterhood. Backed by the force of the government's fist, she would compete with men for jobs, high salaries, and social status, all the while retaining all her rights of womanhood. The only thing she had to do was help destroy the old order.

The result has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work in the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the “hookup culture” depicted by novelist Tom Wolfe in
I Am Charlotte Simmons
to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male “rape culture” hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.

Crucially, at every step of the way, “change” from the old norms was being offered as “improvement” or “liberation”—more fulfillment, more pleasure, more experience. And yet, with each step, things got worse—for women. Eve's bite of the apple sent humanity forth from the Garden, sadder but wiser. Today's transgressive Western woman is merely sadder and often ends her life completely alone, a truly satanic outcome. G.K. Chesterton's parable of the fence comes to mind, in “The Drift from Domesticity,” in
The Thing
(1929):

In the manner of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which probably will be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law, let us
say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don't see the use of this, let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you destroy it.”

A splendid example of Chesterton's Fence was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. “Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area,” said the Massachusetts senator. “In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. . . . The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” Half a century on, those predictions have proven dramatically wrong; the question is whether Kennedy and his fellow leftists knew quite well at the time that their forecasts were bogus—although (as someone or other famously said) what difference, at this point, does it make?

In the same way, much of contemporary “reform” is marked by impatience, ridicule, and haste, cloaked in “compassion” or bureaucratic “comprehensivity,” disguised as “rights” prised out of the Constitution with a crowbar and an ice pick, and delivered with a cocksure snort of derision against any who would demur.

The last words of
Faust
, Part One, belong not to Faust or even Mephistopheles, but to Gretchen as her soul ascends to heaven, calling out to her lost lover: “Heinrich! Heinrich!” He has failed to rescue poor, mad Gretchen; now she must rescue him, if only beyond, in the next life. But the drama continues nonetheless.

English readers may not at first appreciate the familiarity and intimacy of this last line. Goethe does not use Faust's Christian name until Scene Sixteen, directly after the famous “
Gretchen am Spinnrad
” verses (also famously set to music by Schubert). Faust and Gretchen have exchanged their first kiss; her virgin world has been turned upside down; her body now aches for his, as suggested by her use of his Christian name, Heinrich, in the next scene. It's an extraordinarily
intimate moment—Germans of that period and well into the twentieth century did not easily move from the formal terms of address to the more intimate “
duzen,
” using the second-person familiar “thou” with each other. Even close friends and married couples might wait years before using the intimate form of address, if they ever did at all. Faust's problem is that he can't see the light until it's too late for his love and almost too late for him.

What is to awaken
us
from the long slumber of reason that has marked American culture since the end of World War II? The Frankfurt School intellectuals found the perfect moment to attack their host country, not when it was weak but when it was strong. In times of trouble, societies often coalesce around their core values, but when times are flush, people are more inclined to a little social experimentation, especially if it contains a basket of forbidden fruit. Prior to the American victory in the Second World War, men like Adorno, Horkheimer, Gramsci, Lukács, Reich, and Marcuse would probably have been shunned, their philosophy rightly considered the ravings of bitter, dangerous malcontents. But the very fact that America emerged with a high moral standing after its defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, whose crimes were inarguable, left the homeland open to the serpents who slithered in while nobody was looking and hissed, “Why not?”

Why not question authority? Why not overturn your moral code? Why not do it if it feels good? The secure children of the 1950s had become the spoiled college students of the 1960s and '70s; their natural inclination as youths was to regard their parents as fools and idiots. The civil unrest of the 1960s added racism to the mix; Vietnam contributed futility and, paradoxically (as things turned out), suspicion of government. (Can government save us from government?)

The Unites States may have crushed Fascism, but what had it done for us lately? In for the long haul—fashioning the long march through the institutions in the same way that one of their icons, Mao, had effected his Long March to escape the Kuomintang in China and ultimately win control of the country—the leftists set about their business. It would take time, but the game was worth the candle. Besides, as Mephistopheles observes to an angry Faust, “There's nothing more ridiculous in the whole world than a Devil who despairs.” They radiated confidence in their morals and their mission of cultural “liberation.”

Gretchen's cry of “Heinrich! Heinrich!” to Faust is a cry of despair, but it contains within it a seed of hope; he is her husband, and she the
Ewig-Weibliche,
his better half. Critical Theory's purpose was to remove any shred of such emotion; purposelessness became an end in itself. The slightest glimmer of hope (in this case, doubt about the correctness of the leftist cause) would be the candle in the darkness, illuminating the universe. That could not be.

When Gretchen, in extremis, calls out her lover's name, it is her final attempt to break through Mephisto's darkness and send a ray of Heaven's light stabbing down into the hollowness of Faust's soul. She has long been suspicious of his strange companion; Mephisto gives her the willies. His appearances never lead to anything good. As the dawn breaks on the day of her death, Gretchen alone forces Faust to see the Devil for what he is: a vampire, the spawn from deepest darkness. “What does he want in this holy place?” she cries to Faust. “He wants me!” Just as, one might observe, the Serpent wanted Eve in the Garden.

So, there it is. In the end, the Devil is interested not in Faust but in the woman, the Eternal Feminine, she who will eventually crush him under her feet. Faust's soul, Mephistopheles believes, he already possesses. But the innocent, corruptible Gretchen—she is the one he really wants. In a sense, the entire poem (like
Paradise Lost
) has been a gigantic misdirection, and Mephisto's (and the poet's) true intentions are revealed only at the end. But then Faust steps forward and tells Gretchen, “You shall live.” She consigns her soul to God, confident in Eve's revenge upon the Red Dragon.

       
MEPHISTOPHELES

Sie ist gerichtet! (She is damned!)

       
A VOICE FROM ABOVE

       
Ist gerettet! (Is saved!)

Defeated, Mephisto claims the only prize left. He turns to Faust and, beckoning, says: “Here, to me!” And as they both vanish in brimstone, we hear the last lines of the first part of Goethe's masterpiece, spoken by the ascendant Gretchen: “Heinrich! Heinrich!” Hers is the voice of hope in the wilderness, the light in the darkness of what otherwise would
be eternal night, and the promise that, no matter what our sins, if only we have faith, this, too, shall pass. Even in death, the Eternal Feminine draws us ever onward, into the Light. And so it is to the Light that we now must turn.

CHAPTER SEVEN

OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS

G
od's first words in Genesis are “Let there be light.” They are, in a very real sense, the beginning of our ur-Narrative, both in story and in physical reality. Whether you accept the existence of God as an article of faith or see him as merely a character in the longest-running story ever told, even the most ardent atheist must agree that the universe had some sort of beginning. We know the universe is expanding (expanding
where
?). The commonly accepted Big Bang theory, when played in reverse, must have an origination point, the moment when light combusted out of darkness and sent fiery suns and planets whirling on their merry celestial journey to somewhere.

We use the word as metaphor—the “light” of knowledge, the “light” of reason, “seeing the light.” Things dawn on us, become clear. We have moments of clarity. The discovery and taming of fire brought our cave ancestors heat, but it also brought light. Life is impossible without it. So why, then, the rush to return to darkness?

The struggle between light and darkness is, as the conservative commentator Bill Whittle has pointed out, unequal. For darkness—Satan's realm—to triumph, it must be complete and total, infinite blackness. And yet the light of a single candle, somewhere in the universe, defeats it; there is now light where formerly there was none. Either there is Light or there is not; there can be no synthesis. The most important element for 93
our survival is ridiculously potent. No wonder Genesis begins with it, for God's creation of Heaven and Earth cannot truly exist until it can be seen.