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 river Rhine’s surface (to end, four operas later, with a cosmic duet of water and fire). Wagner’s most delirious exploration of fluidity, Tristan and Isolde, begins and ends with journeys over water. Act One 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 the hope 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 Three takes place on a rampart overlooking the sea, where Tristan, re-wounded mortally at the end of Act Two, waits for a boat to arrive bearing Isolde, who has been summoned not as his lover but as his once successful healer. As she appears Tristan dies, and she follows 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 and Isolde, which has almost everybody die, either senselessly or beatifically.

Parsifal, like Tristan and Isolde, is very much a story of fluids. However, in this last of Wagner’s 13 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, does appear. Perhaps this fulfilment 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 One 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 Three, there is water for a consecration, for a baptism. But the main story of fluids is about blood – the unstanchable haemorrhaging 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’s side while He hung on the Cross. The plot of Parsifal could be summarised 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, haemorrhaging 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 and Isolde and Parsifal, is tantamount to a wound. Isolde had healed Tristan but Tristan had fallen in love with Isolde; Wagner’s way of signalling 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 Two 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 as 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 One, bearing a vial of 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 Two, 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 Three. In contrast, Isolde, who is characterised 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 de-inhibitor, which makes them confess their love for each other.