of the numerous passages in which I discuss Wagner’s characters in their self-evident personas as lovers, fathers, mothers, siblings, sons, daughters, friends, enemies, etc. And frankly, when he summarizes his critique of my interpretation by declaring “… Heise’s reading of the cycle, full of insights though it is, puts cabbalistic decipherment in place of a critical response,” I haven’t the remotest idea what he means when he states my allegorical reading isn’t a critical response. How could I be in a position to decipher any of the Ring’s authentic meaning if I hadn’t approached it critically? Or does Scruton mean to imply that my “insights” aren’t authentic?
In the culminating gesture of his critique of my allegorical interpretation, he concludes, without having justified these drastic declarations, that “… it is not through allegory that we understand such deep features of the human condition,” and that “… no interpretation of The Ring can illuminate the work if it doesn’t acknowledge that the cycle is … not an allegory or a mystery but a drama”:
“The Ring is not simply about power or money or even love; it is also about original sin, what Schopenhauer called ‘the crime of existence itself’. Heise grasps this point, and tries to embed it in his complex allegorical reading of the drama. But it is not through allegory that we understand such deep features of the human condition. We understand them through the symbolism inherent in the drama, and not by looking behind the characters and actions to the abstract ideas and arguments that they supposedly represent.” [P. 193-194]
“… no interpretation of The Ring can illuminate the work if it does not acknowledge that the cycle is, in the first instance, not an allegory or a mystery but a drama.” [P. 198]
These categorical, a priori disqualifications of allegory in general, and my allegorical reading in particular, not only as a way of understanding Wagner’s Ring, but as a means to understand deep features of the human condition, comes as a shock and surprise from someone who a mere five years earlier, in 2011, wrote that much of Wagner’s Ring remained incomprehensible to him until he’d read my comprehensive allegorical interpretation, and that my interpretation is necessary to the debate about how Wagner’s Ring allows us to grasp our unique modern predicament as human beings in a way like no other modern work of art. But I also fiercely resist Scruton’s argument that my allegorical reading can’t illuminate the Ring because, he suggests, it doesn’t acknowledge that the Ring is first and foremost “… not an allegory or a mystery but a drama.” I can’t conceive of anything in the grand scope of world-drama more dramatic, more tragic, than the Ring as understood allegorically in my interpretation, in which Wotan is “us,” facing our human predicament from the beginning to the end of our history. Can you conceive of any dramatic plot more classically tragic than my reading that Wotan, representing not only collective humanity (during man’s mytho-poetic, or religious, phase), but also a single personality with his own idiosyncratic characteristics, under the shadow of a fate he not only can’t control but which he fulfills even in his efforts to escape it, lives his entire life under the illusion, his own self-deception (man’s tragic flaw), that he can find redemption from his fate, but brings his fate to pass unwittingly through his heir Siegfried? Well, that is in essence what my allegorical reading of Wagner’s Ring amounts to. That Wagner conceived its protagonists both as living, breathing, realistic personalities, and also as mythological beings of universal import (Wagner’s protagonists being particularized examples, with their own idiosyncratic features, drawn from universal archetypes), is something Scruton previously celebrated as being made possible through Wagner’s
