round the Cape of Good Hope because of physical conditions which made it impossible, he swore he’d never stop trying until he rounded it. The Devil (a sort of cryptic synthesis of Alberich and Loge) took him at his word, leaving him to strive futilely to transcend the laws of nature throughout world-history. The Devil’s curse is a model for Alberich’s curse on his Ring, and both curses are metaphors for man’s unhealing wound, man’s inherent inability to accept the world as it is, which produces man’s futile, metaphysical longing for redemption from the real world in an “other world” which is purely the product of imagination. And, like Wotan, the Dutchman, though forever unable to find earthly or heavenly redemption, reluctantly gathers a hoard of treasure (a metaphor for man’s historical experience of the real world through his advancement in knowledge) during his endless voyage without rest (akin to the Nibelungs’ labor without rest) which is useless to him and makes redemption seem ever further from reality. We find here, in Wagner’s notion of woman’s (Senta’s) love as an alternative to the Dutchman’s Nihilist longing for world-end (paralleled by Wotan’s longing for world-end), Wagner’s anticipation of his concept that art (represented by the redemptive woman, Senta, here identified as the muse for art, and particularly as music) can offer man’s religious impulse a means of expression even in the face of the futility of seeking an actual religious redemption from the real world:
[P. 307] “The figure of the ‘Flying Dutchman’ is a mythical creation of the Folk: a primal trait of human nature speaks out from it with heart-enthralling force. This trait, in its most universal meaning, is the longing after rest from amid the storms of life. (…) The Christian, without a home on earth [i.e., suffering from the unhealing wound of man’s inherent inability to accept the world as it is], embodied this trait in the figure of the ‘Wandering Jew’: for that wanderer, forever doomed to a long-since outlived life, without an aim, without a joy, there bloomed no earthly ransom; death was the sole remaining goal of all his strivings; his only hope, the laying-down of being. At the close of the Middle Ages a new, more active impulse led the nations to fresh life: in the world-historical direction its most important result was the bent to voyages of discovery [which is Wagner’s metaphor for the spirit of objective scientific inquiry and the advancement of knowledge of nature and man]. (…) [P. 308] Like Ahasuerus, he [the “Hollandic Mariner”] yearns for his sufferings to be ended by Death; the Dutchman, however, may gain this redemption, denied to the undying Jew, at the hands of – a Woman who, of very love, shall sacrifice herself for him. This yearning for death [i.e. the Christian longing for redemption from this world] thus spurs him on to seek this woman; but she is no longer the home tending Penelope of Ulysses, as courted in days of old, but the quintessence of womankind; and yet the still unmanifest, the longed-for, the dreamt-of, the infinitely womanly Woman, -- …: the Woman of the Future [i.e., the muse of Wagner’s music-dramas].
… this was the first Folk’s-poem that forced its way into my heart, and called on me as man and artist to point its meaning, and mould it in a work of art. From here begins my career as a poet, and my farewell to the mere concoctor of opera-texts.“ [562W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 307-308]
And of course Wotan’s similarity to the Dutchman was not lost on Wagner:
“I read ‘The Nibelung Myth’ and ‘Siegfried’s Tod’ and talk to R. about them. Later he tells me that he originally designed this more in the mode of antiquity; then, during his secluded life in Zurich, he became interested in Wotan’s downfall; in this work he was more a kind of Flying Dutchman.” [957W-{1/23/79} CD Vol. II, p 258]
