Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film

INTRODUCTION

THE EXILE OF THE STAR-BLAZING QUEEN IN THE MAGIC FLUTE

The point of myths is not to answer existential questions, but rather to expel such anxieties about all that is unknown, which prove to be the source of these queries in the first place. As Hans Blumenberg argues, terror is not so much triggered by what we don’t know, as by the intimation of something radically ungraspable to our comprehension. Indeed, the terror the radically unknown elicits lies precisely in the fact that it can neither be conjured up nor assailed with magic thinking. Telling stories, in turn, allows us to overcome such anxieties by giving a name to that which is undefined. When narrated, even terror becomes meaningful, and as such bearable. If, then, all mythic narratives stand for a victory of the familiar over the unfamiliar, their apotropaic gesture is particularly poignant regarding cosmogonies given that, since antiquity, these have produced narratives of how the world came to emerge from darkness. The wager of all creation stories, after all, is that the horror of a primordial night can be overcome by virtue of the light that the act of telling a story about it sheds on primordial darkness. In his Theogony , Hesiod illustrates that the very first names have their origin in a nocturnal chaos. As discussed in more detail in chapter 1 , the children of the night—death, strife, and destiny—may be terrifying, but because mythic narratives can be told both about them, along with their mother Nyx (classical antiquity’s goddess of the night), the fear they elicit is also tamed by the magic of naming. Transformed into narrative, these embodied figurations of the night are simply the remnants of a primordial anxiety, bespeaking its cultural survival as a conceptual trace.

However, even if mythic narratives are predicated on overcoming a primordial unknown by giving it a name and, in so doing, defining it, cosmogenetic stories implicitly reinvoke the very anxiety they seek to tame. The gesture of containment includes the terrifying indeterminacy of the primordial night it also restrains, even as this ungraspable point of origin comes to be postulated in retrospect, from the position and in the language of the world created out of primordial chaos and as such irrevocably subsequent to it. The undefined that existed before any mythic storytelling re-figures it thus remains inaccessible to us, even while the gap in knowledge inscribed in any belated conceptualization must be taken into account. Indeed, the unfigurable primordial night serves as a vanishing point for any story about its banishment; eternally contained in darkness, intangible, and hence incomprehensible. Every cosmogenetic narrative, in turn, implicitly speaks about the precondition of its own origins, in a duplicitous gesture of naming that makes the incomprehensible perceptible even while acknowledging our inability to fully grasp this unknowable ground and vanishing point of all knowledge.

Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto to The Magic Flute (1791) reveals in exemplary fashion how Western culture consistently rediscovered the night, transforming the fear and fascination it evokes into meaningful narratives. I have chosen the libretto of this opera as the point of departure for my journey into night’s aesthetic refiguration because it allows me to foreground how our modern idea of the night was in fact constructed by an Enlightenment that sought to deplore it by exiling it from the realm of reason. Emblematic for the victory of modernity, The Magic Flute, more than any other operatic text, helps codify that doomed night as maternal power, magical thinking, transgression of rationality and strict discipline, but also as excessive musical display and theatrical phantasmagoria attributed to a nocturnal side of thinking, experiencing, and believing. Written on the eve of the French Revolution, it strategically deploys the Queen of the Night to discuss the transition from a more ancient political regime (based on superstition) to an allegedly more enlightened one (based on reason). By casting her as an embodiment of the realm of the night, the libretto ascribes to this terrifying yet fascinating queen not only a more primordial position of political power; aligning the maternal with darkness also indicates that her reign can and indeed must be deposed by the paternal priest, who claims hegemonic sovereignty over all enlightenment diurnal rationality affords. The critical point at stake in my own reading, however, is that for paternal rationality to be victorious, it must produce again the very regime of nocturnal power it seeks to defeat and replace. As such, the project of the Enlightenment proves to be fully implicated in the knowledge and subjectivity it ascribes to a maternal night. By beginning with Schikaneder’s libretto, my journey through night’s aesthetic refigurations thus immediately draws attention to my own investment in a different Enlightenment project: one that explicitly gives voice to the alterity it seeks to contain, not to repress nocturnal knowledge, but to give it its due and acknowledge its legitimacy.

By reading Schikaneder’s libretto against the grain, I am not making a claim for denying the paternal rationality it exposes under the sign of an all-encompassing worship of the sun of Enlightenment. Rather, my critical reading serves to show that at the acme of the enlightened period, as its progress was about to release movements of liberation both wonderful and terrible, the night it positions as its designated enemy regains its cultural value. It is rediscovered as the site and embodiment of an epistemological alterity that one can fight against only by addressing; a different knowledge that will not not be detected. As such, Schikaneder’s libretto serves to mark a cultural moment when it became politically and aesthetically necessary to find names, figurations, and narratives for precisely those dark psychic, social, and cultural energies that bourgeois society had worked to overcome, or at least restrain. The unceasing dialectic between night and day, embodied in the battle between the queen and Sarastro, serves as the overruling cipher for modernity’s anxiety about the irrepresentable, irrational, and ungraspable; an anxiety about the limit to all rational knowledge as this ceaselessly transforms into a fascination for its own limits. My reading of The Magic Flute is thus explicitly conducted in the context of an attack on the night by Enlightenment forces, and with it an attack on notions of the feminine: the irrational, vengeful, romantic, magical, animalistic, musical; indeed, the spectacle of artistic expression per se.

Although strictly speaking Mozart’s opera is not about the creation of the world (as are texts that are discussed in the next chapter), it is nonetheless a foundational narrative. After a series of fantastic events, the young lovers Tamino and Pamina relinquish the night side of their fantasy life, associated with a maternal personification of nocturnal forces, and arrive safely at the temple of the sun priest Sarastro. By finally coming round to fully abiding by his disciplinary restrictions, both have played a seminal part in the consolidation of his power over his enemy. This victory over the night is, however, duplicitous. Through Mozart’s star-blazing queen, a terrifying primordial force speaks to an opera audience in Enlightenment Europe just before the French Revolution, awaiting the downfall of obsolete political regimes off stage. If, on stage, her nocturnal power is permitted to flare up one last time with full musical force, then not least of all because it is clear from the start that she will be banished from the stage by the end of the opera. Written under the sign of invincible progress, the libretto demands her exile, regardless of the opera’s actual ambivalence toward a vengeful queen, whose maternal pain and lamentation for her stolen daughter are nevertheless genuine.

A triumph over archaism is further underscored by the fact that the unapproachable queen, whose appearance (usually accompanied by thunder) puts others in a state of shock and awe, is the one figure in the drama referred to only in relation to her allegorical function. She is given no proper, personal name. The ladies-in-waiting refer to her as their princess. The slaves of Sarastro call her a gentle mother. Her daughter Pamina terms her a good and most loving mother. Tamino speaks of her as a mighty ruler of the night, as the nocturnal queen my father so often told me about, even though he reacts to her sudden appearances with such fear that it is she who has to calm him, appealing to him: Oh, do not shiver, my dear son! Shortly before she appears, Papageno explicitly says that she is indeed incomprehensible. When Tamino asks him whether he has already seen the star-blazing queen, the bird catcher replies that it may well be that no human eye can see through her black woven veil.

The decisive ambivalence of the figure that initially engenders all phantasmagoric events on stage thus consists in her liminality. She emerges as a regal embodiment of night, even while calling forth the same terror elicited by the primordial darkness she stands in for, and as such makes it tangible for those living in a world that has succeeded the primordial state of formless chaos. The resurgence of an earlier regime of power is also found on the musical level. Mozart’s queen not only embodies the outmoded magical force of superstition, but also the old world of the opera seria of Handel and Scarlatti. The arias of the nocturnal queen, in which she sings about losing her power to Sarastro as well as her desire for vengeance, stand for a musical principle overcome by Mozart’s synthesis of popular and aristocratic styles. In the opposition between the largely static prior world of opera seria and a new, more flexible operatic language, a struggle between maternal and paternal power is negotiated as the overcoming of a more primordial, fearful, and awe-inspiring nocturnal domain by the regime of enlightened rationality.

Ambivalence overwrites the progress toward light performed by the libretto in yet another sense. In the final scene of the opera, after walking through death’s gloomy night, Pamina and Tamino appear in the brightly lit temple of Sarastro, allegedly cleansed of all traces of the night. However, the priest himself can be read in light of the way mythic narratives give shape to the very alterity they seek to contain; constructing figures of primordial terror so as to conceptually conquer them. Since the days of Epicurus, the triggering of fear and hope belonged to the repertoire of the priestly castes. If, then, Sarastro confronts Tamino and Pamina with mortal fear during their rite de passage, the punishment he threatens them with serves not only to redeem them from all anguish provoked by the queen; his disciplinary force also seeks to make them docile and obedient subjects of his rule. Indeed, at the beginning, Pamina and Papageno expect only torture and martyrdom at the hands of Sarastro, whom Tamino himself initially calls a villain and tyrant. Even if his struggle against maternal darkness is conducted in the name of paternal light, Sarastro in turn devises his own play of terror, making use of the very forces of darkness that the libretto’s drama targets. He directs the luminous phantasmagoria of the night—both its ethereal terror and its romantic promise—against the night. At the end of the first act, he shows no mercy toward the slave Monostatos, punishing him for first attempting to rape Pamina, and then helping her in her attempt to flee. Only people who unequivocally accept his law and obediently perform the duties ascribed to them can gain entrance into Sarastro’s temple.

The extent to which a nocturnal sun governs this empire is most poignantly revealed in Sarastro’s portrayal of the queen as a vengeful scheming demon who has no right to coexist in his world. To Tamino, he calls her a proud mother who, in her effort to undermine his power, tries to beguile others with sleight of hand and superstition. To Pamina, in turn, he explains that her mother threatens to separate her daughter’s heart from his sphere of influence simply because she is a proud woman. By attributing all archaic desires, all undetermined and confused affects to the Queen of the Night, Sarastro characterizes her domain of power as alien to all rational comprehension. The version of their struggle he seeks to disseminate is predicated on her yielding her nocturnal power to his regime of enlightened discipline. All the pejorative values attributed to the queen, however, only become tangible owing to the rite de passage Sarastro has devised for Pamina and Tamino. So that they might repudiate the nocturnal mother, he needs to have her present one last time on the stage; he needs to reinvoke her power so as to perform its demise. If, in Sarastro’s eyes, to achieve a state of truth means achieving victory over all irrational forces, his initiates must journey through the night. This means engaging with the night before relinquishing it. A choice can be made for a luminous day of paternal laws and against a demonic night of maternal passion only when the dark side of the psyche has first been uncovered. This is, of course, a forced choice. Once we are caught in Sarastro’s rays of an enlightened regime, we are compelled to decide against the night, even if bewildering our senses is part of the sun priest’s rhetorical strategy. The nocturnal realm, which is meant to be denied, has also been acknowledged as that knowledge one is compelled to cede.

The close of Act II heralds a new day. Sarastro not only declares the successful overcoming of the nocturnal queen’s archaic world, but also proclaims that her exile into an eternal night should be understood as an emblem for this victory. The way that Sarastro initially responds to the Queen of the Night’s wish for revenge so as to gain his victory reveals a dark kernel at the heart of Enlightenment logic. He claims that his regime of power is grounded on pity and sympathy, explaining: In these sacred halls, vengeance is unknown. Yet, he was the one to bring about the war between old maternal and the new paternal forces by taking Pamina captive. He is also utterly unwilling to acknowledge his adversary’s demands. Whatever contradicts his notion of Enlightenment is not only written off as conspiratorial, but in fact has no right to exist. However, the libretto permits an alternative reading in which the queen is thoroughly justified in demanding back the power she once possessed. Her despair becomes excessive only when Tamino betrays her trust. Furthermore, the queen’s unrelenting desire for revenge is not manifested in her own realm, but rather in the nocturnal one explicitly reproduced by Sarastro in Act II so as to test Tamino and Pamina’s resistance to the night. After appearing as a loving, suffering mother in Act I, the queen reappears in Act II obsessed by vengeance. It is as if she were the embodiment of Sarastro’s phantasmagoria. He constructs her as the outside to his project of Enlightenment so that he can banish both the night as the source of his own cultural anxiety, as well as divert the young lovers, not yet his disciples, from any thinking other than the rationality he preaches.

In Sarastro’s version of their power struggle, the queen can and must be expelled into eternal night, for in his sun temple there is a place only for those he regards as human. According to the dark logic of his Enlightenment, this designation is limited to those who yield to his interpretation of the world and accept their obligations toward him. The queen, in turn, cannot be seen as being justified in her revenge, because for Sarastro, mercy only applies in one’s own ranks: Whoever’s not pleased by such teachings doesn’t deserve to be human. What the libretto obliquely admits is that vengeance is all too familiar in his sacred halls, practiced on those who resist his teachings. Indeed, it is his revenge on the queen rather than pity for her plight that serves as the foundational act at the close of The Magic Flute. Sarastro announces his victory by pronouncing that the rays of the sun banish the night, destroying completely the hypocrite’s fraudulent power. Even if, in making this declaration, he tries to conceal the dark side of his own power, we recognize it; Sarastro has himself admitted the fraudulent means he has embarked upon to achieve his end. He never denies having usurped the sun’s circle belonging to the queen’s husband, nor having robbed his foe of her daughter. He simply declares that, because she is targeted as not being human, his cruel actions against her are justified.

At the end of Act II, the choir calls out to Tamino and Pamina, who appear on stage in their new priestly garments, illuminated by the sun: You pressed on through the night. The strong one is victorious. Honor beauty as a reward and wisdom with an eternal crown! This interpretation of their rite de passage as the enactment of a successful shift of power strangely anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of the origin of law in On the Genealogy of Morality. Notions of good and evil, he argues, come to develop as a result of a struggle between competing moral interpretations of the world; a battle incessantly carried out in the public arena. According to Nietzsche, each custom is nothing more than an idea of morality, constantly interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it. A particular custom prevails in this incessant struggle for power, becoming dominant by mastering one less powerful. A change in moral law takes place whenever, in the course of such a competition between interpretations, a prevailing idea comes to be obscured or even extinguished by the one that emerges triumphantly from the contest. The history of the development of moral values can thus be understood as a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adjustments (51).

With Nietzsche’s critical concepts in mind, one can read the victory of Sarastro’s project of Enlightenment as staging a process of interpretative domination negotiated as a contest between night and sun. In the end, the sun priest’s will to power is aimed at defeating what it has proclaimed as unreason and configured as nocturnal. The emergence of the enlightened subject is, in turn, narrated as a family romance, more precisely as the rite of passage of two young lovers who ultimately relinquish maternal magic and accept instead the strict paternal laws. Just as, in the course of the Enlightenment, an earlier form of operatic performance becomes obscured once the soprano and castrato-dominated opera seria is overcome by a new type of song, giving authority to bass and baritone voices, so too must the adult subject renounce its narcissistic attraction to the maternal body in favor of an alliance with paternal authority. The creation of the new couple at the end of The Magic Flute clarifies not only who deserves to be considered human (and who must be expelled from this designation), but also what it means for the bourgeois subject to become mature. Indeed, on a psychological level, the extinction of the Queen of the Night can also be read as a cipher for the taming of narcissistic fantasies, and tantamount to this the subject’s need to accept obligations that thwart desire so that laws of reason might triumph over or at least contain all passionate imagination.

Nonetheless, to achieve this state, Pamina and Tamino must first engage the nocturnal aspects of their psyche; they must give in to or at least acknowledge the seduction of the irrational and dangerous forces before an interpretation based on enlightened reason can prevail. As such, The Magic Flute exhibits the ambivalences surrounding any process of moral re-education in the name of diurnal laws. As I have argued, Sarastro finds himself compelled to appropriate argumentative strategies belonging to the nocturnal realm, from whose enchantment he seeks to ultimately wean Pamina and Tamino. What is first presented from the queen’s perspective and then from her opponent’s is the enactment of a hegemonic struggle, in which an attack on the night is successfully staged by Enlightenment forces. This can only end in the downfall of one of the combatants. At the acme of this will to power, Sarastro’s interpretation of the world consists in bringing the light of reason to all dark domains regarding human knowledge, psychic dispositions, and behaviors. To perform this interpretive struggle, the belief in magic, affects, and the imagination are all ascribed to the allegorical maternal embodiment of the night, so that with her exile they, too, appear to leave the scene.

LEARNING TO LEAVE THE NIGHT

To better understand what nocturnal aspects of interpreting the world must be relinquished for the Enlightenment project to emerge as dominant, let us return once more to the beginning of The Magic Flute. The queen, whose interpretive sovereignty Sarastro appropriates and refigures, is introduced as the harbinger of dreams. Having penetrated into her nocturnal domain, Tamino faints out of fear of the serpent that is pursuing him. When revived shortly thereafter, he finds himself in a dream world and does not seem to fully awaken again until the opera comes to its conclusion. In this state of being half awake, he first asks himself: Am I imagining that I’m still alive? The figures he encounters—the bird catcher, the veiled ladies, and finally the Queen of the Night herself—are unfamiliar to him. His spontaneous love for Pamina, inspired by her portrait, is also marked by dreamlike qualities, fueled as it is not by the appearance of his beloved herself, but by her mother and her call for revenge. In the story the queen tells him, Sarastro is a powerful, evil demon who kidnapped her daughter one lovely day in May. In her version of this scene of abduction, the day serves as the stage of a violent deed committed by a devious villain trying to set her daughter on the path of vice, while she could only look on helplessly. Pamina is thus endowed with a further imaginary quality, given that she is being used as collateral in her mother’s effort to reassert nocturnal power. The reunion with her daughter would reinforce the queen’s image of nocturnal morality.

For all its strangeness, the queen’s realm does not inspire fear but awed fascination in Act I of the play. What Tamino initially finds threatening is not this nocturnal site, but rather its diurnal opposite, in which an adversary has abducted the beautiful woman promised to him. And yet, although Tamino regards the captivity of Pamina as the sign of an eternal darkness, he maintains a certain skepticism toward the dreamlike aspect of the nocturnal world into which he has woken. By asking himself, Is it reality? he admits it is possible that the queen and her ladies-in-waiting are only illusions. At the beginning he supports the queen’s interpretation of events, because his love seems to depend on this allegiance. Although he will ultimately switch sides for no apparent reason except his indeterminate doubt, in his first encounter with one of Sarastro’s priests, Tamino still thinks of himself as duty-bound to save Pamina and presents himself as a representative of the queen’s nocturnal morality. Given that their conversation takes place before Tamino’s moral transformation, he still speaks of Sarastro’s temple as a setting for hypocrisy, insisting that he wants to take revenge on the villain who controls it. At this juncture, Sarastro is still a monster and tyrant to him, who caused a mother grief and sorrow when he stole her daughter without pity from her arms. The priest, in turn, calls this a form of derangement. Fueling the struggle of interpretation that will result in Tamino’s change of heart, he declares the story the queen told Tamino to be a lie, the deceptive wordplay of a woman who does very little and talks too much.

It is important to note that, in response to Tamino’s description of the abduction, the priest admits: What you say is true (II. 15). Just how irresolvable the antagonism between the two camps is becomes clear when the priest, rather than settling the controversy by argument, refuses to speak any further. Withholding all additional information has the same effect as the queen’s dissembling. Both sides operate with strategies of concealment. Like her adversary, the queen is not interested in Tamino coming up with an interpretation of his own. Instead, he is supposed to accept unconditionally a morality that is based on dehumanizing her opponent, who in turn dehumanizes her. The inhuman tyrant she tells him about when they next meet thus emerges as the mirror image of the beguiling woman in Sarastro’s account of her. Having arrived at the aporia of this struggle for interpretative supremacy, recognizing the dark feature of both sides, Tamino asks helplessly: O eternal night, when will you disappear? When will the light find my eye? By the end of the opera, this redeeming light will be equivalent to Sarastro’s solar rays. Yet we must not overlook the degree to which the final enlightenment becomes possible only through the performance of Sarastro’s fantasy of extinguishing the vanquished queen’s voice and power, which is re-enacted on stage in the course of the opera.

Without offering any clear reason for his shift of allegiance, Tamino reappears at the beginning of Act II as the unconditional ally of the queen’s adversary. Sarastro assures his priests that the youth wants to tear off his veil of the night and gaze into the holy realm of the greatest light. Tamino now regards the queen’s understanding of morality as a bundle of prejudices refuted by Sarastro’s wise and reasonable views. However, banishing the nocturnal domain also means banishing the queen’s realm of fantasy. Tamino’s obligation to be silent and virtuous has triumphed over his romantic desire. The doctrine of wisdom is victorious; Pamina is merely a reward. Casting off the nocturnal spell means giving up all skepticism, which is to say the very attitude that led him to doubt the exclusive validity of the queen’s version in the first place. In the realm of the sun, he has to subordinate himself to all laws, not even fearing death. Any contradiction to Sarastro’s way of thinking is looked upon as a form of biased gossip, even if his alliance with his new sovereign conflicts with the demands of his beloved Pamina. One of the priests warns him: Protect yourselves from female spite, / That’s the first obligation of our confederation! With the defeat of the queen, installing as it does a clear boundary between the morality of night and that of day, the difference between man and woman is established as well. The cheerfully harmonious relationship of Pamina and Papageno in Act I cannot be sustained by Pamina and her Tamino in Act II. The loss of familiarity between the sexes is part of the collateral damage done by the logic of the Enlightenment. When he meets Pamina again, Tamino privileges duty over desire, exchanging no words with his beloved. Regardless of her pleas, he does not respond to her because Sarastro has compelled him to silence. To attack the night proves to be an attack on the feminine world, in an effort to subject it to masculine logic, to discipline and silence it. Only after the radiance of the sun has frightened off her gloomy night may Tamino once again speak to her. However, he does so only after the armed men grant him permission.

The education of Pamina does not proceed as unambiguously, given that she staunchly supports the Queen of the Night and consistently sympathizes with her sorrow. In Act I, Pamina calls her own life more bitter than death because she cannot return to her mother. Yet the libretto sees her unconditional devotion to the maternal body as part of the nocturnal veil she must remove in the course of her rite of passage. Pamina herself realizes that, having been abducted by the sun priest, she cannot return to the nocturnal realm of her mother and will have to cede to the rules of the day. Nonetheless, she also embodies resistance to Sarastro’s moral project. After she and Papageno are captured while attempting to flee, she insists on telling the truth, even if it is a crime to do so. In contrast to Tamino, she will not be silenced, preferring to follow her own moral inclinations rather than abiding by the laws imposed on her. Her encounter with Sarastro also partakes in the struggle of competing interpretations. Recognizing that Pamina’s heart belongs to another, the sun priest does not force her to love him, although he insists, I will not grant you freedom. Although Pamina maintains that the name of her mother still sounds sweet, Sarastro counters that she would be deprived of all future happiness were she to return to the nocturnal realm of the queen. Even though he is prepared to relinquish Pamina to the man she loves, he will do so only if she in turn relinquishes her mother’s rule.

Like Tamino, Pamina also comes to recognize that the struggle for interpretative supremacy between her mother and Sarastro cannot be resolved. In the revenge aria she sings to her daughter, the Queen of the Night shows herself to be just as unyielding as her foe, imposing an impossible choice on her child. Pamina must either kill Sarastro, thereby defending her mother’s claim to power, or be cast out forever from her realm. In contrast to Tamino, who blindly follows the law of duty, Pamina falls into despair because of this irresolvable conflict. She can neither exercise the retaliation demanded by the queen, nor renounce her love for her. Because Tamino’s vow of silence also makes no sense to her, she is compelled to fall back on her own nocturnal resources. To oppose Sarastro’s rigid law of reason, she has recourse to an act that, from an enlightened point of view, can only be understood as dark madness. Still hounded by her mother’s curse, she attempts to direct the dagger intended for Sarastro against herself. For one brief moment, she asserts an irrational desire to be united in death with the maternal qua mother earth. Yet in Pamina’s struggle with herself, what ultimately triumphs is a less destructive trace of the night, namely, the magical power of the gaze that led the two lovers to each other in the first place. She willingly relinquishes her death wish once the three boys promise her that she will soon be allowed to see her beloved again.

Although, to counter his opponent, Sarastro makes use of the very nocturnal customs he himself deems to be slander and revenge, Pamina uses her own outburst of irrational self-destructive desire to awaken from the nightmare that began when he abducted her. Although the triumph of her love for Tamino represents a triumph of Sarastro’s power, Pamina ultimately follows her own will rather than merely giving in to the strict laws of the sun priest. At the end of the opera, she and Tamino have overcome death and fate—both children of Nyx since antiquity—and are now able to enter Sarastro’s temple. Pamina, however, walks into the rays of the morning sun bearing a gift of the night; not her mother’s dagger but the flute that her father once carved in a magical hour and the queen passed on to Tamino. Even if her mother’s power has been ritually overcome in their joint walk through death’s gloomy night, Pamina insists on carrying a remnant of her night into the day. It is a token of the nocturnal because the magic flute plays upon the passions of those who hear it. Appealing to a panoply of emotional moods rather than rational thought, it is the voice that promises a counterpoint to Sarastro’s totalitarian hegemony. The flute, after all, has been aligned throughout with the power of art, making magical things happen like the dance of the animals. Night and art, we are to surmise, need each other, even if Sarastro’s enlightened diurnal laws win out in the end. From Schikaneder’s libretto we learn that we tell stories of the night to try and tame it, along with our anxieties. But neither the sun, nor reason, can ever fully repress the night, nor the artistic mode of expression we have recourse to for this apotropaic undertaking.

THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The Magic Flute enacts an enlightened will to power over the nocturnal and the feminine, and yet the interpretive struggle Schikaneder presents takes place in an era when the primacy of nocturnal fear has already been overcome. In an early discussion with Pamina, the queen explains why she can no longer protect her daughter. When her husband died, her power went to the grave with him because before his demise he gave his all-devouring circle of the sun to his initiates, not to her. The Queen of the Night thus demands what is rightly hers from the position of a person twice disempowered: once by her husband, who had declared on his death bed that political power was incompatible with the female spirit, and once by his ally Sarastro, who by stealing her daughter tries to make sure that she will have no succession. Sarastro, in turn, seeks to exclude all nocturnal voices, including a pursuit of feminine knowledge, figured as the intuitive side of understanding, as a trust in magical thinking. This gesture of repression is what returns with the queen’s demands. Indeed, her persistent call for revenge can be read as the voice of the uncanny of the Enlightenment, articulating the return of what it seeks not merely to contain but to obliterate, yet what, by virtue of this violent expulsion, returns with ever more force. It is thus fruitful to read the queen’s demand to be heard over and against Sarastro’s desire to suppress her voice in line with what Horkheimer and Adorno see as a dialectic that was inscribed in the project of the Enlightenment from the very beginning. They locate this dialectic in the Enlightenment’s petrified fear and staunch rejection of any truth that contained not only rational consciousness, but also modes of thinking deviating from this law of reason. The latter was conceived as the expression of an obscure, impenetrable mode of thinking best ascribed to a cultural and psychic night. However, the exile of this thinking, negative in relation to the discourse of Enlightenment, itself binds the spirit to ever deeper states of blindness. False clarity is only another name for myth, Horkheimer and Adorno surmise: Myth was always obscure and luminous at once. It has always been distinguished by its familiarity and its exemption from the work of concepts (xvii). Enlightenment and the night it seeks to contain in cosmogenetic texts about its triumph over archaic knowledge thus prove to be mutually implicated.

The wager of my book is that the night—with all the fears, promises, desires, and fantasies it evokes—always contains elements of the day that precedes and succeeds it, even while the day struggles to master the mysterious residue of night’s illuminations. The day can never be entirely cleansed of traces of nocturnal contradiction. The disenchantment of the world, allegedly the project of the Enlightenment, may be identified as the victory of a will to reason, condemning all embodiments of magical illusion. Nonetheless, Horkheimer and Adorno maintain that the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment had themselves been constructed by it. As a result, the Enlightenment merely re-appropriates and totalizes what myth always wanted, namely, to tell of origins (5). Its project of clarifying illumination and explanation merely replaces the older spirits and demons with a solar, patriarchal figure, who tyrannically suppresses older beliefs. Enlightened humanity searches for universal explanations based on a rational system of truth. Yet having become a faith—evident in the demand of the priests that Tamino be utterly obedient—the Enlightenment destroys not only the injustice of the old inequality of unmediated mastery (8), a political regime that has returned in the Queen of the Night’s notion of sovereignty. It also perpetuates its own totalitarian gesture by severing what is incomprehensible and insisting on conformity. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment unwittingly takes on the features of mythological fear: Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear (11).

Although the Enlightenment directs its cultural anxiety toward myth itself, the magic thinking embodied by the Queen of the Night can never be expelled in The Magic Flute. It is she who gives voice to the dark horizon of the Enlightenment. Without her Enlightenment could not exist. On the one hand, Sarastro produces the Queen of the Night as a representative of that terrifying outside that should be repressed. By accelerating her downfall, he wants to assure himself of the exclusivity of his system. On the other hand, her passion mirrors and reflects his attempt to extinguish everything deemed incommensurable with his project. The nocturnal queen not only functions as a point of resistance to the project of Enlightenment and the disenchantment of the world it stands for; rather, The Magic Flute plays through how the Night and her disciples are in fact engendered by the project of Enlightenment itself. The queen and her troops attest to the cultural survival of a more archaic mode of thinking, the residues of mythic storytelling that itself responded to the anxiety about an originary albeit ungraspable unknown. It may well be that one cannot return to the night, as Pamina discovers, once the spirit of the Enlightenment has caught one in its rays. Having recourse again to formations of nocturnal stories is, however, the precondition for the spirit of the Enlightenment to succeed. Aesthetic texts have recourse to a plethora of chatoyant embodiments of the night so as to explore what Goya called the sleep of reason, embellishing it with monsters, transgressions, and residues of primordial horror.

The Magic Flute is a response to the dangerous appeal of nocturnal magic in an enlightened world. The queen not only reacts with her magical powers, but Sarastro also appropriates her nocturnal superstitions for his own regime of terror. Almost the entire second act is set in a night he has produced. Yet in contrast to the magic of Act I, this night has an alienating, destructive effect. Tamino refers to the darkness surrounding him as a horrible night, and Papageno pleads for light because he cannot see anything even though his eyes are open. When the Three Ladies reappear in this deceptive darkness, their seductiveness induces fear because they embody what Sarastro attributes to nocturnal superstition, namely, betrayal, slander, the expectation of death, and the horrors of fate. They now perform precisely those feminine wiles about which the priest had warned Tamino. Because he is now a confirmed disciple of the sun, Tamino refuses to yield to their temptation. Instead, he dismisses their warning as gossip, repeated by women, but thought out by hypocrites. Having irrevocably changed sides, Tamino makes himself blind and deaf to any truth other than the one professed by Sarastro. Just how dehumanizing this gesture is becomes manifest when he turns his back on the Three Ladies and they fall through the trap door, accompanied by thunder and lightning, disappearing forever from the stage.

Act II of The Magic Flute thus restages the harsh logic of the project of the Enlightenment, producing an outside conceived as eternal night so that a universal law of reason can prevail once night is completely overcome by day. On the level of a personalized narrative, the libretto conceives of Enlightenment as a rite de passage into mature subjectivity, even while the story it tells also points a way out of a magical thinking presumed to be a dungeon. Yet the freedom promised by this project of an all-encompassing rationality can only prevail by means of its antithesis, namely, discipline and control. The Three Boys’ command that Tamino be resolute, patient, and silent takes on programmatic dimensions. In his own text on the Enlightenment, Kant declares that the subject should embrace the courage to use his or her own mind in all situations of life, on the condition that he or she abide by the rules dictated by reason. Obedience emerges not only as the precondition of freedom. It can also only be realized when applied to something that reason, itself obtained by freedom, must forbid itself. At the heart of the project of Enlightenment, we find a split between what reason liberates and what it represses by relegating it to a domain beyond the limits of rationality, to a stage and state of mind aligned with nocturnality. Kant’s argumentative strategy is based on the assumption that the limits set by the law, which one must under all circumstances obey, also liberate reason, even while the totalitarian claims of reason’s regime destroy the very freedom they engender. Freedom brings forth those aspects of subjectivity that undermine reason’s totalitarian regime. Individual subjectivity emerges as a remnant of the night that is exiled by reason. From its position of repression, this psychic night, in turn, sets limits to the interpretive sovereignty of reason, doing so primarily in the shape of affects, dreams, and desires. Articulations of the nocturnal side of reason not only offer resistance to diurnal law, but also reveal the uncontrollable forces intrinsic to every form of power.

If nocturnal forces turn out to be the dark kernel of Sarastro’s power in The Magic Flute, Pamina’s resistance to Sarastro’s prohibitions and threats represents a second dark kernel of the Enlightenment’s law. She insists on speaking her truth, even if doing so means committing a crime according to Sarastro. Pamina expresses that part of subjectivity that eludes and indeed refuses universalization. Sarastro’s demand for unconditional obedience to the law is impossible for her to fulfill because it would destroy her freedom to desire. Rather than blindly obey the law of reason (as Tamino is willing to do), she remains true to the nocturnal side of her emotions when, as I have shown, she longs for death because she sees no other way out of the contradiction of her desire. What renders her human is precisely not the exiling of the nocturnal, but rather a gesture of renunciation that consists of transferring the nocturnal passions Sarastro forbids to the sounds of the magic flute. At the end of their rite de passage, Pamina allows her future spouse to play this instrument while she guides him through the night. Her sacrifice consists of knowing what she is prepared to relinquish, and, by so doing, laying bare the murky interface between freedom and self-curtailment. Rather than extinguishing the power of the night, she acknowledges it as something she has moved beyond, even while retaining it safely within herself.

First performed only two years after the Storming of the Bastille, The Magic Flute can, of course, be read as a polemic against the dark reactionary power of nobility and clergy in the ancien régime. Indeed, the French Revolution explicitly understood its political agenda as a form of banishing of night. Yet one might also associate the year 1791 (when this opera was first performed, and with it the banishment of the Queen of the Night into an eternal darkness), with that epistemic break that Michel Foucault situates at the close of the eighteenth century. This break, he argues, establishes an order of things, condemning reason’s Other to silence by labeling culture’s nocturnal side as madness and/or criminality, thus pathologizing, disciplining, and punishing it. Foucault is neither interested in defending nor critiquing this new model of classification. He merely seeks to draw attention to the way that this new episteme, like all those preceding it, brings with it a conceptual structure that makes new knowledge possible. According to Foucault, each epistemic shift repositions signs. It erects the limit of what can be said, along which and in relation to, but also against which concepts can be generated and perpetrated. The epistemic break consolidating the Enlightenment project around 1800 parallels the point I made for Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. It has recourse to the rhetorical gesture of classic cosmogonies, which (as discussed at greater length in chapter 1), bring forth a new order by retrospectively positing the night as a more primordial conceptual position, so as to negotiate the question of origins, progeneration, and the limit of representability in relation to it.

At the close of the eighteenth century, the night not only flares up with new force so as to serve as a conceptual cipher for what came before, what is other, and what is outside modernity’s system of prohibitions and controls. Thinking in cosmogonies also attains new urgency because, according to Foucault, European culture at this historic moment invents the notion of a depth of existence that remains indistinct even while bespeaking great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus (274). At the height of the Enlightenment, the rediscovered night, as Foucault puts it, is to be thought of as an inert density incessantly receding upon itself. Yet it is also from this dark depth that objects and concepts are incessantly called forth so they can achieve representation. When The Magic Flute premiered in 1791, banishing the night into eternal darkness may still have been imaginable. Just a few years later, gothic culture, as explored in Part III of this book, recovered these nocturnal figures from their exile and sought to punish the successors of Tamino for their willing blindness, thereby prompting an often self-destructive infatuation with the night. As Foucault puts it, the dark unthought or unknown, which incessantly calls upon the subject to recognize himself or herself, regains power around 1800, only now it takes on the shape of the very alterity that the Enlightenment must posit so as to dissociate itself from it. On the level of the conceptual archeology with which Foucault is concerned, the subject, ruled by reason and the unthought residing in its dark depth, are mutually implicated. Enlightened reason could not emerge without thought at the same time discovering, both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught (355).

Although modern thought since Kant is permeated by a will to overcome darkness so as to be able to think the unthought, this new conceptual ordering of the world came to be endowed with very specific traits. As Foucault argues, far from being jettisoned from human subjectivity, the piece of night each of us carries within us proves to be both external to and yet indispensable for the human subject; a shadow of its waking knowledge, an uncanny return of its repression, and a blind spot of its reason. For Foucault, this rediscovery of night around 1800 is to be understood primarily as the product of historically specific discursive structures. Crucial to my argument is the fact that the idea of a piece of night each subject carries within himself or herself should emerge at the height of the Enlightenment, reinvigorating and revising concepts of the nocturnal mapped by cosmogonies since antiquity. The night, functioning as a trope for the unthought and the unthinkable, is constantly being rediscovered, not only so that the alterity it represents can repeatedly be contained, but also so that it can incessantly be recalled.

THE BOOK’S PASSAGE

In our cultural imaginary, the night has come to be represented either as an allegorical personification, as in The Magic Flute, or as a scene, beginning with dusk and ending with dawn. Although it is beyond the scope of this book to address the rich iconography of nocturnal personification in the visual arts, I begin my discussion by looking at the cosmogonies that first installed the tradition of casting the night as a feminine figure. Part I, entitled Cosmogonies of the Night, begins by looking at Hesiod’s Theogony and its cultural afterlife in Teachings of the Gods by Karl Philipp Moritz (1791), reformulating the mythology of antiquity within the context of the project of the Enlightenment. Nyx, the night goddess of antiquity, emerges as the predecessor for Schikaneder’s Queen of the Night, conceived not as an anthropomorphized goddess on Mount Olympus, but as an awe-inspiring figure who sits enveloped in dark veils at the entrance of the cave where she delivers her prophecies. Her function in classical cosmogenetic narratives is to remind human beings that the formless chaos of the primordial night has been overcome, even while it continues to shed its fateful light. The double position Nyx takes on is seminal to my discussion. Although she is part of the mythological universe antiquity devised so as to explain the world, she is also positioned on the limit of this world: an embodiment of the boundary between being and nothing, life and death, the shapes that make up being and the indeterminate void from which all existence has emerged.

The second cosmogony to be discussed is the biblical story of the origin of the Christian world in Genesis and the epic refiguration of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674). Here, too, night emerges as an outside to day, knowledge, rationality, and morality, even while also located inside human subjectivity—the site of creativity, desire for forbidden knowledge, resilience, and transgression. The incessant dialectic between light and dark continues to inform my discussion of two further philosophical topographies that, focusing on the engendering of modern subjectivity, also deploy the night as privileged trope. In his Encyclopedia (1830), Hegel claims that every man is a whole world of conceptions that lie buried in the night of the ‘I.’ His romantic cosmogenetic narrative resuscitates the importance of the nocturnal side of thinking for developing ever new stages of spiritual consciousness. By using the night as a critical metaphor for how all thinking depends on a constant passage through darkness so as to achieve ever more conceptual illumination, Hegel paves the way for Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as the night side of the psychic apparatus. In the final chapter of Part I, Freud’s discussion of vicissitudes of psychic development is critically reconceived as a modern cosmogenetic narrative, given his claim that the ego of ordinary daily existence comes to take the place of a more primary unconscious. As the obscure site harboring repressed psychic material, the unconscious, like Hegel’s night of the I, forcefully impinges on all psychic processes. Both modern cosmogenetic narratives cast the night as a site of innovation, the point of limit through which thinking must pass if it is to develop, the inversion of rationality, the internal and external lining it cannot shed. Although neither Hegel nor Freud embraces the madness or self-expenditure that remaining in the night would entail, both thinkers recognize that the forces of the night cannot only not be repressed. They must be acknowledged as an essential part of a thinking that listens as much to affective desire as it does to reason.

In Part II, Night Talks, I move from the night as allegorical embodiment and critical metaphor to the night as stage and state of mind. The texts I have chosen range from Shakespeare’s plays, to a set of gothic-inspired narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concerned with thinking about the Other outside conscious reason and diurnal laws, which emerges as an intimate possession, the critical narrative I have developed does not treat texts in their historical succession, but rather thematically groups them into comparative readings. Furthermore, the night to be explored is less concerned with a phenomenological experience than with the way nocturnal thinking and psychic processes are aesthetically produced; the way they are the effect of language, scenic description and, in the case of cinema, the play of light and shadow on screen. My claim for aesthetic rediscoveries of the night is that they self-consciously speak to the night we carry within, the psychic nocturnality we need to experience and explore, even though it is hidden, forbidden, or forgotten during our ordinary daily existence. Because the night gives birth to dreams, it discloses secret aspects of the self. Because it evokes death, it triggers a yearning for redeeming the soul from the body. Because it promises erotic ecstasy, it can express the happiness or violence that emerges from a passionate encounter with another. At issue in these dramatic, narrative, and cinematic texts, however, is not a privileging of the night over the day. Rather, nocturnal scenes—with all the emotions, desires, and knowledge they trigger—must be understood as sites of passage and transition. Although going into the night offers a plethora of experiences ranging from mental refuge and erotic pleasure to clandestine adventures and fateful transgressions, the journey is ineluctably limited. Even if the night takes on different shadings, tones, and semantic encodings, what all the aesthetic texts discussed have in common is the idea that a journey into the night is a journey to the end of a night, from which we wake up in a day that has been changed because of this passage.

The chapters in Part II explore nocturnal passages cast as dreamscapes, in which are played out knowledge unavailable during the day and desires forbidden by the laws of the ordinary. In chapter 5, Shakespeare’s Night World, I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream alongside Romeo and Juliet to illustrate the tragic and comic version of a nocturnal love story. If the transformation night affords brings with it a triumph of desires forbidden during the day, the difference in outcome proves to be a question of whether or not the insights gained at night can find a way back into a new day. Using the idea that the night contains knowledge that cannot directly be accessed by the conscious mind, I move to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, given that he, too, deals with a nocturnal theater of the psyche, which allows for a bypassing of the censorship of the conscious ego. Cross-mapping Freud’s discussion of the nocturnal journeys of the dreaming psyche onto Shakespeare’s dreams allows me to highlight that in psychoanalysis, dreams unfold forbidden knowledge, even while upon waking any belated recollection is necessarily riddled with distortions and gaps. Something always eludes the conscious grasp of the unknown. Given that both in Shakespeare and Freud dreams compel us to be vigilant, I move, in the concluding chapter of Part II, to a discussion of insomnia. As Michel Foucault suggests, the West draws one of its fundamental boundary lines in waking before the day, in the night vigil that sustains light in the middle of the night and against the sleep of others. It performs a division which begs the question (that leaves a space for philosophy): what does it mean ‘to appear’? My cross-mapping of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking with the insomniacs in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights serves to think about the night as privileged site for an existential openness to the other, to