For the (dubious) benefit of
overseas readers, who may until now have been living in blissful ignorance of
Lord Tebbit of Chingford, his reappearance on the British political stage might
prove, short of Margaret Thatcher’s resurrection, the ultimate in ‘80s retro.
Notorious for stances that threatened to make the Prime Minister herself
resemble a woolly-minded liberal – his advice to the unemployed was that they
should follow his father’s lead, getting on their bikes to find some work, and
he suggested a ‘cricket test’ for immigrants, to assess their loyalty on the
basis of which team they supported – he seems more recently to have become
obsessed with homosexuality, to the extent that a friend of mine suggested he
should consider seeking asylum in Iran or Saudi Arabia. (The idea of him as the
Abu Qatada of Teheran is not entirely without its amusing side.) He certainly
has longstanding form, having
written to The Daily Telegraph in 1998,
perturbed that gay men might do each quasi-Freemasonic ‘favours’, were they to
be permitted to attain political office. His latest intervention, an interview
with The Big Issue reported today
(click here)
has as its context a failed bid by the extreme Right of the Conservative Party
to derail legislation to enable gay marriage; Tebbit now finds himself
exercised by the possibility of a lesbian queen who might have an artificially
inseminated heir. Other interesting light is cast upon his subconscious by his
concern that gay marriage might lead to his marrying his son in order to avoid
inheritance tax. (If I were Tebbit Jr, I should probably now be in the departures
lounge, nervously consulting my wristwatch.)
On the eve of Wagner’s 200th birthday, I wondered initially whether this story might draw a few threads together. Might we out Tebbit as a Wagnerian? Had he simply been listening to too much of Die Walküre (see the clip below for Siegmund and Sieglinde, brother and sister, declaring their love for each other, the curtain falling just in time to spare too many Chingford blushes.)
On the eve of Wagner’s 200th birthday, I wondered initially whether this story might draw a few threads together. Might we out Tebbit as a Wagnerian? Had he simply been listening to too much of Die Walküre (see the clip below for Siegmund and Sieglinde, brother and sister, declaring their love for each other, the curtain falling just in time to spare too many Chingford blushes.)
But alas, not. I reminded myself that in the world
of Tebbit, the issue is about inheritance. He does not seem so much as to
consider the possibility that some of those gay couples might wish to marry out
of love. One might claim Wagnerian influence in that respect too; Wagner was at
best ambivalent concerning marriage, arguing rightly, in Proudhonian fashion,
that it was little more than an instantiation of bourgeois property relations,
and having his Jesus of Nazareth stand as a liberator of mankind – and
womankind – from all such constraints to human flourishing. Inheritance – ‘the
world’s inheritance’ of the Ring and
the Ring’s ring – is equally deadly.
Yet in Die Walküre, Wagner
straightforwardly offers us a portrayal of two human beings who fall in love,
unconcerned with society’s judgement upon them, unconcerned even by the
discovery that they are brother and sister. Their love, of the moment, refusing
to be set in stone either by the runes of Wotan’s spear of law or Fricka’s dead
hand of custom, defies bourgeois marriage, yet not after the fashion of Norman
Tebbit’s Thatcherite reduction of all to financial and contractual concerns;
quite the opposite. Now it may well be, as Wagner's intellectual development
tends to suggest, that the hopes placed by many in love are illusory, that we
should do better to attend to Schopenhauer than to Feuerbach, and that marriage
may certainly not prove to be the best way forward for anyone of any sexual orientation; Brünnhilde belief that she is married,
cruelly symbolised by the ring itself, does her and Siegfried no good at all.
But Wagner points to renunciation; he certainly does not suggest that we
retreat to a world of loveless marriages, such as those of Sieglinde to
Hunding, or others conducted purely for reasons of inheritance. Wagner’s relevance? (Wagners Aktualität, as an essay by Adorno has it.) It has never
been stronger.
