Akhenaten полностью

Even if Glass intended to foreground Akhenaten's religious idealism, it was the sexual aspects of the opera that struck most people. The reviewer in the con­servative Daily Telegraph (19 June 1985) complained that far too much was made of Akhenaten's deviant sexuality, pointing out rightly that the historical evidence for it was pretty thin. 'What did get lost in this production was the spiritual stature of this reformer, depicted unjustly as a moronic nonentity.' The confuscd incestuous relationships of Akhenaten's family were also a focus of interest. 'Who fathered or mothered whom is beyond anyone's wit to sort out. Mr Glass suggests the worst, by making everyone as incestuous as possible.'²⁹ Nearly everybody commented on Akhenaten's body, praising the marvellous make-up job that made Christopher Robson into such a convincing hermaphrodite. Some thought that this was overdone. The reviewer in the Mew Musical Express thought that the most unusual thing in the opera was Akhenaten's body, with its 'somewhat enlarged cranium, female breasts, and male genitalia. As the latter were exposed, I swear I saw a huge collective thought-bubble containing a question-mark rise above the audience.'³⁰ The accompanying still of a bare-chested Robson as Akhenaten is captioned, 'They're Nefertittis!' Other reviewers wrote of the eerie, unearthly quality the combination of counter-tenor voice and hermaphrodite body evoked.³¹ Evidcndy the display of a deviant and sexualised body still had the power to unsettle and confront. In spite of Glass's fascination with him as 'the man of Religion', cultural change had made Akhenaten's ideas less important, interesting or relevant than his sexual self.

EPILOGUE

Ramses docs not signify anything for us, only the mummy is of an inestimable worth because it is what guarantees that accumulation has meaning. Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view. To this end the phar­aohs must be brought out of their tomb and the mummies out of their silence.

Baudrillard 1994: 9-10

The sexualised Akhenaten is a suitable image of him to conclude with. It is an image which encapsulates so many of the ways he, and ancient Egypt, have been used over the past 150 years or so. The gay versions are another example of how Akhenaten has been endlessly co-opted by particular interest groups as the first member of a symbolic ancestry that stretches back to Egypt. They also show that even the visions of him that seem most radical and confronting have something quite conservative at their heart. What we see in Akhenaten's many different faces is actually, then, the stability of ancicnt Egypt's cultural meanings. His guises are reflections of the different people who have adopted him at different times and places and made him their own, but usually for the same reasons. Ancient Egypt promises access to the hidden and the originary. 'We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end.'¹ Akhenaten is that visible myth of origin, immediately recognis­able, endlessly exploitable, and all things to all people. And he will remain a myth, because myths are what people want to believe.

The image of sexualised Akhenaten is also terminable, yet interminable. While summing up what has happened to him in the past, it also hints at what may happen to him in the future. The seeds of Akhenatens yet to come are buried in die representations I have surveyed, and are waiting for the right conditions to make them sprout. Some of the plants that grow from those seeds may be benign and beautiful; others may be monstrous. While writing this I wondered many times how Akhenaten would be regarded had he been discovered for the first time at the end of the twentieth century instead of at the beginning of the nineteenth. Those images of the happy family life, and the naked children being petted, would be interpreted rather differently, I suspect, as Vladimir Nabokov sug­gested in Lolita (1960). Here Akhenaten's 'pre-nubile Nile daughters . . . wearing nothing but many necklaccs of bright beads' stood at the beginning of Humbert Humbert's lineage of nymphets, reassuring him 'that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in my being moved to distraction by girl-children'.² If Akhenaten appeared for the first time now, he might seem to sum up everything that was wrong with the world, instead of being a role model whom we would want to enlist on our side.