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of discourse—to mythopoesis—and renders them vivid, concrete, and contextually specific. As we’ve noted earlier, this is a key move in discourse analysis. In place of a pervasive set of artistic practices which are usually accepted without question or even notice, Delany substitutes a life, its socioeconomic context, and the materially specific foundations of those artistic practices—which
can
be noticed and questioned.
    The strategic placement of the two autobiographical passages near the beginning and end of “Wagner/Artaud” creates a conceptual frame within which the transformation of the myth of Wagnerian discourse can be observed. In the first passage, we are given a vivid account of the chaotic goings-on backstage during a Wagner performance at the newly opened Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center:
    The proscenium is not before you to frame what you see: costumed chorus members in their intense make-up mingle with workmen in their greens and blues and technicians in sweaters and jeans, with metal scaffolding all around (invisible from the seats), lights hung every which where, and music always playing through the lights and motion and general hubbub, so that the effect is more like watching a circus rehearsal scattered about the floor of some vast hangar than an artistic performance. 20
    We are then immediately given a metaphorical reading of this episode:
    . . . one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner’s influence is because we are always within it. We can never get outside it, never see it as an organized stage picture. There is no vantage from which we can slip into the audience and look at it objectively. (W/A 21)
    By this reading, the all-engulfing backstage experience becomes an image of the ubiquity of Wagnerian aesthetic practices—in ironic contrast to the spectacle of transcendence which those practices strive to generate onstage. Yet there seems to be more to this anecdote than a metaphor for pervasiveness—the images are
too
vivid,
too
concrete. There is an excess of signification.
    In the second passage near the essay’s close, Delany considers Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” of the work of art. Arguing (contra Benjamin) that the aura is precisely what is
preserved
in the mechanical reproduction of art, rather than what is lost, Delany shows how a biographical account of a direct encounter with a work of art—such as his own with Picasso’s
Guernica
—can serve as an empirical counter to the mythic “aura” that Wagnerian discourse places around reproductions (W/A 78). This conception of biography as empirical counter provides a second reading for the backstage passage: what stands out now is less the all-engulfing quality of the space than its intense material specificity. Backstage at the Met now looks less like an image of all-encompassing Wagnerism and more like an inadvertent manifestation of Artaud’s insistently corporeal Theater of Cruelty. The guiding metaphor—theater as discourse—has, by its own signifying excess, overturned and revealed its subversive underside.
    The deployment of a self-deconstructing framing structure here recalls the beginnings-and-endings of several of Delany’s novels, most notably
Dhalgren
and
Neveryóna
. Like the framing structures of those earlier works, the theater-metaphor framing “Wagner/Artaud” yields up two equally viable yet mutually subversive readings, neither of which can crystallize out into “the” definitive interpretation. Moreover, the closer we look at these two readings individually, the richer and more complex they seem to become within themselves. This self-complexifying quality suggests an explanation for the intriguing pile-up of ironies and subversions in the essay’s closing pages: the simple thematic opposition of Wagner as the Elder God of the discourse of “High Art” to Artaud as the deranged