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Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France by Joseph Harris

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2015.0115

1086-332X

Timothy J. Reiss,

Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought

Reviewed by: Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France by Joseph Harris Timothy J. Reiss Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France. By Joseph Harris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; pp. 304. Joseph Harris tells the rise and fall of the spectator as a conceptual, psychological, and aesthetic crux in French dramatic theory from the 1630s beginnings of the “classical” stage to nearly the Revolution, when Denis Diderot’s and Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s drame hoped to “replace” the (individualist) spectator with a communal “audience.” Harris moves between two narratives: the “Whig” story runs from a spectator invented as butt of ruled “trickery,” fooled by staged illusion into a mostly intellectual empathy with character and action, to one who knowingly accepts emotional “identity” with staged interests; another, more tangled narrative has Diderot still reacting to François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac (1640) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau partially echoing strictures raised by others, such as Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in 1694. The resulting rift rather confuses a chronology of the (male) spectator that theorists have created to explore dramatic performance. In three thematic chapters and five on specific writers, Harris focuses on “how spectatorship was understood” (11). He first engages the many polemical texts and prefaces to what were offered as new kinds of play, against earlier forms that assumed quite another performance relationship. These and other writings eventually develop a “‘zero-degree’ spectator of remarkably restricted intellectual faculties, who must be ‘tricked’ into believing himself present at an actual event” (17). Harris traces a path from the uses of illusion to “deceive” a spectator into empathy to the belief that anti-“distraction” rules—one place, one action, time nearing that of performance, and verisimilitude—would thoroughly “enthrall” the spectator’s spirit in the staged action. Here, loose translation creates a key misunderstanding: rendering Jean Chapelain’s “feint” and “feinte” as “false” and “falsity” rather than as “feigned,” “pretended,” or “fictive,” Harris’s translation skews an important conjuncture of vraisemblance and fiction (34–41). The use of staged illusion is not to trick, but to enable a particular psychological effect: empathy among staged action, character, and spectator. Still, Harris rightly stresses in his first chapter all its mid-seventeenth-century authors’ claims that their rules act on the mind as it ever objectively is and therefore can be counted on to produce the effects they analyze (48–49). Chapter 2 studies d’Aubignac, the theorist whom Harris calls “Cartesian” in seeking “to establish a secure, objective, theoretical grounding for his own theories of . . . human subjectivity,” although not adopting “pure Cartesian rationality” (51–52). But nor does Descartes for that matter, and Darren Gobert’s The Mind-Body Stage (2013) offers an excellent counter, highlighting Descartes’ 1649 Traité des passions as guiding quite another understanding of later theatre. For Harris, d’Aubignac elaborates a spectator caught intellectually in the action exactly because he is brought to feel physically absent from the space where the action physically occurs (55, 57). D’Aubignac may leave room for emotions (71), yet takes the rules to a limit where they cannot engage actual performance. On this point, as claimed in chapter 3, Corneille flourishes with a laxer, more subjective, pragmatic approach to the spectator’s role (chiefly in the 1660s Discours). Corneille’s spectator possesses “cultural knowledge and expectations,” as aware of theatrical conventions as of the histories behind the events he watches. Harris asserts that his “‘belief’ is not purely intellectual but deeply intertwined with more subjective questions of perception, interest, and emotion” (84). This [End Page 762] active spectator thereby helps produce the play’s meaning (103). Chapter 4 explores a move from an intellectually to an emotionally engaged spectator from the 1650s to the 1780s. For example, Chapelain’s study of suspense and illusion emphasizing a play’s dénouement yields to the argument that suspense, surprise, and wonder are effects produced throughout the play and engaging the spectator differently. However, that this is most pursued in Jean-François Marmontel (1723–99) is chronologically troubling, while to leap from the sixteenth-century Pierre de Larivey to Cailhava de l’Estendoux...