Guilt and Shipwreck in Cristoph Schlingensief's Flying Dutch in Manaus

The essay aims at analyzing Christoph Schlingensief’s direction in 2007 of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman as an itinerant performance within Amazon rainforest’s suggestive scenery. The victim of a shipwreck – and, in wider terms, the wandering figure – has always been connected in the history of literature with guilt and fault. Goethe’s famous expression: “Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt”, underlines the double meaning of the verb irren, “to err” and “to wander”. The Flying Dutchman can be perfectly described as one of this figures; he wants to “go beyond” human limits, to overstep the Cape of Good Hope: his Streben, like Faust’s longing, is the cause of his damnation, but at the same time the reason of his salvation. Mistake, fault and guilt make the shipwrecked and wandering figure become an “alien”, a “chosen” and “marked” figure, and for that reason an object both of derision and estrangement (by those ones, called by Hans Blumenberg “the spectators of the shipwreck”) and of a higher fate, which puts him to the test and give him the opportunity to pass through a better condition. The forgiveness of the guilt can never be free, because it can be obtained only through an exchange, a test or sacrifice, which occurs in a “inbetween-time” (Marcel Mauss) – represented in Schlingensief’s performance by the opening procession. The exchange, the bind or chiasmus between the spectator and the actor, between Wagner and Samba, the shipwrecked figure and its public, or, in other terms, between “me” and the “other”, can be realized in this inbetween-time. Because of its itinerant nature, the performance seems to be the very place of transition from a “profane” condition (of guilt, sin, and damnation) to a sacred one (of redemption and forgiveness): this aspect of the sacrifice (as an exchange) can be reflected in the double meaning of the term “sacred” (hagios and hieros). In Schlingensief’s performance, however, this important topic from the literary tradition takes on a different meaning and overturns the very sense of guilt. If Wagner’s Dutchman redeems himself through a love sacrifice, Schlingensief’s Dutchman can apparently not find a real redemption. There is no solution (Lösung) nor salvation (Rettung) or forgiveness for his guilt, only transformation and change. For his Flying Dutchman, which is victim of a cyclically recurrent damnation, the final catastrophe, the Vernichtungsschlag, seems to be the only way out from the vicious circle and from guilt. However, to the forthcoming world crash and to the impossibility of redemption, Schlingensief opposes the power of diversity, the revenge of the peripheries and of the weak and marginalized ones (the Wagner-Samba). In Schlingensief’s modernity guilt finally changes its sense. If in the course of the centuries and in Wagner’s Nineteenth century – an important epoch of navigation and shipwrecks – guilt was caused by thirst for knowledge and wealth, by the will to overcome human boundaries and dominate the nature, in the Twenty-first century the victims of shipwreck are the outcasts, the loser and poor ones of the society.