or unconscious, conscious. In his dramas, in other words, he retraced the forgotten or unconscious steps back from his music to its original source of inspiration. And that's precisely what not only Siegfried did in translating the Woodbird’s tune, its music, into words for his audience, the Gibichungs (under Hagen’s, bitter consciousness’s, influence), but what I’m doing in attempting, in my allegorical reading, to reveal the hidden source underlying Wagner’s inspiration in creating his Ring, by interpreting innumerable thematically linked clues in the libretto and music, and disclosing an allegorical coherence underlying them. I suppose it’s implicit that one might “kill“ Wagner’s Ring as a subject, an aesthetic experience, by disclosing its innermost secrets and thereby transforming it into an object of study, just as the artist-hero Siegfried betrayed his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Brünnhilde and virtually committed suicide by interpreting the Woodbird’s tune for his audience, but if that’s the case my allegorical interpretation is as necessary to grasping Wagner’s Ring in its ultimate meaning as Wagner’s need to explain Siegfried’s unwitting suicide (Siegfrieds Tod) by tracing its first cause to its roots in the dawn of human history was the seed from which his Ring tetralogy grew. My act of interpretation, in other words, is an integral part of the Ring’s plot, and was actually written into it. On this view I’ve become Hagen to Wagner’s Siegfried. My only objection to my self-indulgent thesis is that Wagner’s Ring remains for me, in spite of what seems to be my reductive tendency, the most magical and numinous of experiences, the experience closest to divine revelation or mystical reunion with the one I can conceive.
However, just as Kitcher and Schacht expressed some after-the-fact reservations about their demotion of Siegfried, Scruton seems to have had some reservations about his critique of my allegorical reading in his following acknowledgment that my conception of the Ring allegory is “more plausible” than that of George Bernard Shaw, and in his outlining several of my key insights which make sense of the Ring as a whole:
“From the artistic point of view allegory presents a … danger: … the allegorical meaning risks breaking away entirely from the dramatic vehicle, so as to become irrelevant to the aesthetic experience, a mere intellectual commentary which has no status in our emotional response. (…) That observation warns us, I think, against giving a straightforwardly allegorical interpretation of the Ring cycle. Nevertheless several such interpretations have been ably defended, including one in Marxist terms by George Bernard Shaw, besides the Feuerbachian one by Paul Heise.” [P. 189]
“Heise’s Feuerbachian allegory is more plausible [than than of George Bernard Shaw in his The Perfect Wagnerite]. It is surely true that, at one level, the tetralogy concerns the eruption of consciousness into the world and the departure from the natural order that ensued from this. It concerns the birth of the gods out of fear and aggression, and dramatizes the illusions of religion on which we depend for the rule of law and political order. It concerns the erosion of those illusions by thought, and our need for some other source of hope in the face of the bleak vision offered by scientific knowledge. And in some way Siegfried was to embody that hope as well as inviting all the things that conspire to defeat it. All those ideas are developed in Heise’s narrative, which repays detailed study.” [P. 191]
But Scruton rises to the occasion again and launches the following salvo:
