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From Lady Fair to Femme Fatale

An Allegorical Morphology of the Artistic Will
Benjamin Boyce

If we read the Wilde/Strauss opera Salom as a rubbing taken from the artistic and social
issues, anxieties, and products of the Romantic (pre-Modern) period, a number of possible
interpretations present themselves. Already, Salom (and by extension, the Femme Fatal) has
been equated with the work of art, but I would like to go one step further, and show her as
the intention of the artist manifested through the work of art. My intention here is to describe Salom
as an embodiment of that intention (rather than an anthropomorphism of the work itself),
and to detail, using the readings from this program, how that relationship transforms (as
depicted in the 1974 production of the opera) from this, to this:













We first see Salom, spied by the Persian Captain through a doorway. She is
disinterestedlyeven statuesquelyseated in the midst of Herods orgy. She is sitting at the
feet of the king and she is perfectly bored, with a hint of distain tightening her lips, but in no
ways marring her features. I see her, here, as the embodiment of Novalis description of the
art of poetry: [From Heinrich von Ofterdingen]: [Poetry] is all internal; and as other artists fill
the external senses with agreeable emotions, so in like manner the poet fills the internal
sanctuary of the mind with new, wonderful, and pleasing thoughts. [The Poet] knows how to
awaken at pleasure the secret powers within us, and by words gives us forces to see into an
unknown glorious world. Novalis is famous for being betrothed to a girl of 12; and this
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shows throughout his poetry and prose: a
longing for and an institutionalizing of an
idyllic aesthetic, with ideals of purity, magic,
and a nostalgia for the great by-gone eras
being sounded time and again throughout
his work. Yet to adore (for example) a 13-
year-old girl must be the adulation of a
potency that resides more in the fantasy
than in the mutual exchange. A developed
man cannot be understood by an
undeveloped girlmentally she is just as
incapable of taking him into her as physically. And so there is a barrierperhaps for Novalis
a delicious, sublimated barrierwhere the threat of actuality is suspended, until such a time
as she, his beloved, is more adult than child.

This transition, from child to womanthis transformation of the relationship between artist
and his workis portrayed in Saloms quitting of the orgy, and entrance onto the great
terrace in the Palace of Herod. Here she arrives, taking a deep breath and expelling the
stuffiness of Herods orgyshaking from herself her step-fathers lustful gaze, which gaze
she likely catches from every man she encounters. She, as the artists intention, escapes from
the hedonistic aristocracy, for that relationship is poison. The art that serves only the pleasure of
the benefactor becomes mere adornment and status symbol.
And so the artist breaks freeand in that breaking free there is a great release of energy.
I would equate such an outpouring with the career of Hugo and of Dickensstill innocent,
and still relying on innocence, but serving a wider purview: the public at large. What
becomes the arts object, perhaps ironically, is the individual. From Honours Romanticism: It
is here that one essential, distinguishing characteristic of Romantic art becomes evident:
the supreme value placed by the Romantics on the artists sensibility and emotional
authenticity, as the qualities which alone confer validity to his work.
And here is the seed of the next transformation. For to be free from Church or
Aristocracy (or both) only opens the art up to the question: who do I serve now? And what
do I serve now? Perhaps it is the weakness of art that it always longs for a purpose (even if
that purpose is purposelessness). In Salom, the girls song of liberation is halted by a greater
voice. And she is transformed by the sight of a great, unshorn, filthy, imprisoned man
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(himself imprisoned by her captor): Jokanaan.

Here we see a transformation by means of longing; a longing for either of two types of
revealing; a fatal longing (fatal to innocence), to know and to be known by either of two
Truths: Natural Truth, or Divine Truth.
If it is Nature that the artist at this stage beholds, and is overcome with awe, veneration,
and (from the last frame of the above triptych) hysterical desire for, then the art, the act of
art, the artistic desire (Salom) becomes Nature: sensual, electric, and evident, as she falls in
love with the Prophetic or Organizing Principle of the Great Manthe Zarathustian speaker,
who is blind to her as Nietzsche was perhaps blind, or antagonistically derisive of all forms
of submission, slavery, and surrender. Jokanaan is the grisly, gnarly Willful Manyet oddly
he speaks of another man, greater than himself. Salom, the working of art, the act of creating,
would that he love herbut he loves One who is not herewho is transcendent, who is not
present: The unnatural character of wisdom is revealed in its hostility to art. To want to
know precisely where appearance constitutes salvationwhat a reversal, what an instinct for
Nothingness! (Neitzsche, Posthumus Fragments 8/85-8/87)
That which is Nothing might actually be
that which Is Not Something (which is my
own preference, for I am not enamored of
Abyss)but to all intensive purposes God or
Abyss are equal, so far as they lie beyond Art,
beyond Ration, beyond Realizationand the
servant of Nothing/Everything, Jokanaan
he denies the dame, and returns to his hole.
Then things get weird.


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I told him that [the World] was all over and
that we must be prepared for death. He called his
wife, who asked me Whats the matter? I dont
know, I said, I am lost. [Nerval, Aurlia]
There must be an artist or group of artists that
speak from and explore this in-between point.
This dejected state, this brewing, percolating not-
quite-innocent but not-yet-decadent place,
brooding against the wall whilst the orgy, longing for that which has fled it, comes outside
onto the porch. The king misses art! All his pleasure gets boring without her around. He
would have her dance. She is unresponsive; she is changing.
In a pinch, I would assign Grard de Nerval to this duration of artists arc. Nerval, who
in his Aurlia details the experience of being at once in dream and in realitywithin
madness and sanitywithin self-purposive, creative will, and lost within depression. In
Aurlia we find another man grasping after the unattainable woman. And, like Novalis, the
she they are both after cannot ever be got. Unlike Novalis, Nerval seems aware that is
longing for her is not exactly healthy. He is gripped with sorrows, he feels that the end (of
art) has come: The illusion will never be reality, and yet it will always matter more that reality.
Nerval bowed out of the dance
entirely. Salom, and one very much
enamored of her dance, strikes on
another idea: to achieve her desire by
using anothers desire. She makes a deal
with the hedonistic Herod. Starving for
her beauty, he agrees to almost anything.
She goes off to get dressed. Enter
Baudelaire.

Salon de 1859: It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of
sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It
disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only
to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation
of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious
sense), it is just that it should govern it.
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Without truth, without content, without its obligations to the Church, to the King, to the
Moral Edification of Societywhat is left of the act of art but art? Scents and colors
passion and delighta never-ending expenditure of surfaces. Art becomes the object of
Artbut only at first glance. The artist still wants somethingthough he knows, perhaps,
that it cannot be stated anymoreTruth cannot be brought out until the endand it is the
viewer who must serve Truth up to the artist, even though the viewer wont easily give it up.
It is almost as though the artist were a reaper of experience Now, her hair is let outshe
offers her every contour to his gaze! The way paint rests on the canvas itself is part of the
dance

Once the finery is expended (and I believe one of
the big reasons for Baudelaires influence was that
artists after him precipitated the problem that
follows this expenditure) what is left but will? Thus
her willthe will of art, which has been denied the
adoration of Truth, demands payment for the
pleasure it has given. In my reading of both
Huysmanns Des Esseintes and Manns Achenbach they both cling to the veil-game to the
bitter end. From Death in Venice: Desire is born of defective knowledge. From Rebours:
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instead of satisfying men at once, these women were skilled in the subterfuges of delay.
At bottom, one might say that human wisdom consisted in the protraction of all things, in
saying no before saying yes, for one could manage people only by trifling with them.
Intuitively, I feel that decadent romanticism stops here: stops at the unveiling of the
fatal willthe will of the art that would have Truth dismembered and rendered on a silver
platter for her. The logical step would be fascismwould be the endless maze of Kafkas
bureaucracies, the war machines and cultural facsimile machines that were produced after the
end of the long 19
th
centurythat is, after World War I. From the end of Walter Benjamins
Work of Art essay: Fiat arspereat mundus, (Let art flourish, and the rest pass away) says
fascism, expecting from war the artistic gratification of a sense of perception altered by
technology. This is evidently the consummation of lart pour lart. [Humankinds] self-
alienation has reached the
point where it can experience
its own annihilation as a
supreme aesthetic pleasure.
It is either of two things,
the last change of Salom, and
what she represents: either she
becomes politicized /
commercializedshe either
becomes revolutionary poster
or marketing sloganor the process leaves behind entirely the external sphere, and becomes a
psychological, a deeply intimate process within both artist and audience.
At some point, Art must either serve a Truth, or devour it. Salom chose the latter, and
for that she was executed: for her monstrous nature was revealed. This nature, which was
rapine, internecine, hysterical, sacrilegious.
The will toward beauty brings us to the Abyss/Surface tensions explored throughout this
course. Were it that Jokanaans prophesied Greater One arrived were it that out of the
cistern was brought a singing head, then who knows but that the Orphic lips would have
transformed Salom into a reborn Eurydice?