Victimhood

Hey just here to do a little free writing after reading the Wozzeck chapter. One of the issues that came up was the martyrdom/victimhood stance, which is a theme in the Pierrot lunaire chapter already since I talk about Muteness Envy there.

To begin with, the muteness stance is not very helpful.

Here are my notes from 7/28/15:

muteness envy:

like peter sacks’s interpretation of the apollo/daphne myth in The English Elegy (discussed by Barbara Johnson 204), my interpretation might seem to replace the actual victimhood of Marie, the rape victim and economically vulnerable mother with few choices, with the allegorical victimhood of Wozzeck, whose decision to kill Marie is presented not as a choice but as an artistic necessity. Hence, “mystification of violence” in the words of Patricia Joplin (speaking of Philomela), and identification with the murderer instead of the victim. The murderer “is bought off with the aesthetic.”

I agree with this. And I think Berg’s warm treatment of Marie—who is not silenced, in fact, has more voice than Wozzeck, though in the world of the opera, she and her child are the only ones who hear it—indicates that he is not trying to turn Marie’s death into a trophy, he is not trying to silence Marie. You could even say that Marie gets the biggest voice in the opera, the D minor interlude, sung from the grave, despite the fact that I have so far been mapping Berg’s artistic perspective onto Wozzeck. The clear horror of Marie’s death suggests to me that, whether consciously or not, Berg felt ambivalently about his role in the history of tonality, that they had perhaps “killed” the wrong thing—Marie instead of the Drum Major, for instance—thus killing a sacred thing without which he could scarcely survive.

does Wozzeck “get off for a song”?

well, does Marie?

D minor interlude as Marie’s voice from the grave… the association of the interlude with Helene, Berg’s wife, the one who doesn’t care that it’s derivative, supports this interpretation.

so Wozzeck is also a fable of avant-garde music. it says: look what you will do if you continue the way you’re going, the collateral damage, the uselessness.

compearance happens in the dialogue between artist and community, and that includes the context of performance. so what compearance looks like changes depending on the circumstance.

playing the victim doesn’t count as compearance.

is there a way to do it without creating a scapegoat? without scapegoating the audience? (since scapegoating the audience, or scapegoating in general, is a way of destroying the in-common?)