Presumably a primary cause for Scruton’s discomfort with key aspects of my allegorical reading is my assumption that (as they say of themselves) Siegfried and Brünnhilde are one person, not distinct characters. This is also a stumbling block for Kitcher and Schacht, and I confess my allegorical reading is counter-intuitive. What this means is that Siegfried and Brünnhilde can’t be understood purely on a common-sense basis as typical protagonists in a play or opera, but have a deeper symbolic significance when understood as one persona, even though Wagner presents them as wholly distinct, believable personalities. Siegfried represents the artist-hero, or if you will the poetic-dramatist, and Brünnhilde is his unconscious mind, his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration, which Wagner identifies with music, their loving union giving birth to the revolutionary, redemptive music-drama, the artwork of the future. As his unconscious mind Brünnhilde knows for Siegfried what he doesn’t know, his true but hidden prehistory and identity and fate, which was imparted to Brünnhilde by Wotan in his confession to her. This explains why Siegfried presents himself as the hero who doesn’t know who he is, who's terminally naive, unconscious, and fearless (where Wotan, by contrast, is paralyzed by fear of the end), and acts on what seems to be pure instinct, when in fact Siegfried is inspired subliminally, or musically, by Wotan’s desperate need for redemption from Alberich’s Ring Curse which he imparted to Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde is the womb of Wotan’s wish (for a free hero who can redeem the gods from Alberich’s Ring Curse) and Siegfried’s metaphysical (as opposed to literal) mother. Brünnhilde, knowing for Siegfried what he doesn’t consciously know, compensates for his deficit of self-consciousness. Not grasping this, and not grasping that it was Siegmund whom Wagner identified as a potential political or social revolutionary, not Siegfried, Scruton, like Kitcher and Schacht, incorrectly distinguishes the “self-affirmation of the sword-wielding Siegfried” from the “self-sacrifice of his suffering wife” Brünnhilde, as if their fates and identities are distinct:
“Gradually, as the message of his own music sank in, Wagner recognized that liberation is not a political but a spiritual process, and that what is being asked from us is not the self-affirmation of the sword-wielding Siegfried, but the self-sacrifice of his suffering wife. (…) You might say that, in composing The Ring, Wagner put the optimistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians [Feuerbach, etc.] to the test of drama, and the drama refuted it.” [P. 187]
However, in spite of Scruton’s skepticism towards my notion that the Ring can best be grasped allegorically, throughout his book he’s often unable to make sense of this or that aspect or incident of the Ring without referencing my allegorical insights or even proposing his own allegorical readings. The following passages from his book are testimony to - though not always a precise reflection of - the influence of my allegorical reading on Scruton:
“In Wagner’s remarkable mind the scientific and the poetic outlooks converged. (…) But it is not usual for a work of art to anticipate the results of science, or to present them in poetic form in full consciousness of what they mean.” [P. 36]
“… The Ring displays in temporal order a timeless truth about society, displaying relations of contemporaneous dependence as though they arose from crucial moments of decision. We could never understand Alberich’s theft of the gold in its philosophical meaning if we believed it to be an event that occurred only once … .” [P. 262]
