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Review |
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Alex
Falzon, Le nozze alchemiche di Salomé.
Oscar Wilde e la tradizione ermetica [Salomé’s alchemical wedding. Oscar Wilde and the hermetic tradition], Pisa, Pacini editore, 2007
(174 pp., 15,00 euros). |
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by Elisa Bizzotto |
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The myth of Salomé, amongst the most representative of Decadence,
allowed Wilde to gain visibility and enter literary discourse at a European level.
Such cross-cultural dimension was pursued in his most famous tragedy not
simply through the linguistic medium – as everybody knows, Salomé was originally written in
French and then translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas – but more
intricately through intertextual and subtextual strategies. |
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Both the latter are specific fields of investigation of Alex Falzon’s
fine volume Le nozze alchemiche di
Salomé. Oscar Wilde e la tradizione ermetica, that examines Salomé’s rootedness in coeval and past
Western culture by emphasising its diffused allusions to Hermetism, with a
special focus on alchemy. Salomé –
Falzon argues – is “a ‘revolutionary’ play not only at a strictly
formal-expressive level, but also for the disquieting message, of an
allegorical-alchemical nature, that the author has hidden underneath the
deepest structures of the text” [my translation]. |
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As a matter of fact, “revolutionary” seems to be an appropriate
definition not only for Wilde’s work, but also for Falzon’s essay, which
unravels an unsuspected cluster of allusions to alchemic codes and procedures
within Salomé, thus offering the
possibility of illuminating readings. Falzon draws special attention to the
mythopoeic value of such hermetic presences, which were typical of the European
fin-de-siécle (the most immediate
example within British culture being W.B. Yeats’s imaginary portrait “Rosa
Alchemica”) and paved the way to the mythical method of Modernism. Hence Salomé emerges as a text ready for the
twentieth century, as well as necessarily conclusive – as the second chapter
“Un requiem per i vittoriani” (A Requiem for the Victorians) makes clear – of
the previous age. The latter issue is interestingly discussed in relation to
the character of Herod, who combines autobiographical with symbolic and
symbolist inspirations. |
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In the third chapter, “La Confraternita dei Senza Padre” (The
Fatherless Brotherhood), Falzon discloses copious Masonic implications in Salomé. Wilde, as his father before
him, was a Freemason, quite conversant with the occult imagery and
Pagan-Christian syncretism of the Order, both of which are traceable not only
in Salomé, but also in the Poems and in Vera, or the Nihilists. With these necessary premises in mind, in
the remaining part of his study Falzon embarks on a fascinating close reading
of the tragedy that opens up unexpected hermeneutic paths. As he declares,
his analysis aims at pointing out how the alchemic allegory interacts with
the deepest structures of the text and throws new light on them, thus offering
explanations for episodes hitherto either considered “obscure” or too
facilely dismissed as “symbolist”. This is especially highlighted in chapter
5, “Il giglio e la rosa” (The lily and the rose), that re-interprets the
central role of the Moon in the tragedy in order to prove how its presence
keeps dramatic time by conforming to the three conventional stages of the
alchemical process. Whereas alluding to the three lunar phases, and thus to
the vegetal cycle of birth, death and resurrection, in fact the recurrent
black, white and red chromatism related to the Moon reflects the Nigredo-Albedo-Rubedo sequence
of the opus alchymicum. In the same
way, the semantic field of sphericity, also insistently present in Salomé, is seen as an allusion to the
circularity of the alchemical transmutation and to the Alchemical Vase,
wherein conflicting principles co-exist and generate the Rebis, or philosopher’s stone, the product of a marriage of
opposites. Another intriguing connection to the hermetic tradition is represented
by Salomé’s dialogism with the Song of Solomon, a reference text for
exoteric scholarship ever since the Renaissance. |
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Chapter 6, “I sette sigilli di Ermete” (The seven seals of Hermes),
expands the idea that the seven alchemical operations (Calcinatio, Solutio, Coagulatio, Sublimatio, Mortificatio, Separatio, Coniunctio) find transposition in precise moments of Wilde’s
drama. Obviously enough, such transposition culminates in the dance of the
seven veils, read by Falzon as a mystical and exoteric performance, a
metaphorical uncovering of Salomé’s – i.e. the Moon’s – soul to Herod – i.e.
the embodiment of Saturn. Moreover, the dance enacts the seven stages of the
alchemic process by means of their correspondence to the seven planets of the
old world, starting from the Moon-Salomé and ending up with Saturn-Herod. |
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The last chapter, “L’uomo rosso di Edom” (The red man of Edom),
focuses on the chromatism of red associated to Wilde’s Herod, the most
crucial figure of the drama in Falzon’s view. Red is perceived as
synaesthetically alluding to the process of warming, and thus to the
activation and working out of alchemical practices that are present
throughout the text but reach their climax in the description of Herod,
corresponding to the distillation of the Elixir
Vitae through Rubedo, or the
Work in Red. Many are the examples of the isotopy of red as linked to Herod
and Falzon is particularly persuasive when showing the pertinence and
relatedness of this chromatic connotation of the Tetrarch to various exoteric
doctrines which stem both from Hermeticism and heretic Christianity. In
Falzon’s view, Herod is a syncretic figure, close to the Antichrist, that
catalyses unstable harmonisations of opposites through hermetic, and in
particular alchemic, procedures. On these bases, Herod is finally interpreted
as a mediator, whose closeness to different rituals allows him to conflate
the Hebraism of Jokanaan and the Hellenism of Salomé. |
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Already noted by Ellmann, but analysed in depth only by Falzon, such
dissolution of the Hebrew-Hellene binary in Herod represents an important
interpretative clue that contrasts with accepted notions of Salomé – for example in Edward
Burnes’s essay “Salomé: Wilde’s
Radical Tragedy” (1994) – as illustrating the defeat of Paganism by
Judaic-Christian order. This and other critical tenets, convincingly advanced
as they are, deserve attention. It would not be surprising in fact to see Le nozze alchemiche di Salomé become a
classic of Wilde criticism. |
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