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Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-10574846

1527-1943

Jennifer Buckley,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Modernism has long since ceased to have a single meaning—and that is a very good thing. Scholarship on a multiplicity of modernisms, emerging outside the geographic and historical parameters that once defined the term and the field, has greatly extended scholars’ understanding of modernity and its cultural formations. One of many salutary outcomes of the field’s twenty-first-century transformations is a questioning of the basic premises on which European, British, and American artists and thinkers first defined modernism. In Baroque Modernity Joseph Cermatori trains an acute critical eye on modernism’s theatrical inheritance and finds it far more ornate—baroque, in fact—than previously reported. In this deeply researched, theoretically sharp, and superbly written book, Cermatori argues that the elaborate, sensorially supercharged, allegorical spectacles of early modern European theater exerted a crucial influence on major modernist thinkers and writers—even those among the avant-gardes who, like the Italian futurists, disavowed the art of all previous eras.That Stéphane Mallarmé, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin are found among this book’s case studies will not surprise specialists, but the manner in which Cermatori delineates the impact of baroque theatricality on and in their writing is original and convincing. Benjamin’s writing on Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater is well known, yet Cermatori pursues the former’s insights into the latter’s work to the extent that the very cornerstones of Brechtian theory and practice—up to and including the various defamiliarization techniques—are revealed as manifestations of the baroque impetus to create “astonishment” in spectators (136). Brief but significant sections on Thornton Wilder and a chapter on Gertrude Stein are nothing short of revelatory: when seen from a vantage point emphasizing “the miraculous within the realm of the mundane,” the third act of Our Town does indeed appear as “a baroque apotheosis, cloaked in the supposed ‘minimalism’ of the empty stage” (2, 5). Minimalisms of more than one kind, for instance those of the postwar painters and sculptors that Michael Fried (1967) influentially criticized in “Art and Objecthood,” are shown to manifest baroque theatricalism: the drive of artists such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) to activate the entire auditorium in the service of producing intensely embodied responses in audiences whose belief in all things—among them the representational capacities of language—was shaken by large-scale historical crises. Cermatori’s take on Wilder’s best-known play and other stripped-surface modernist works is all the more persuasive because it is so unexpected. Even Samuel Beckett, whose austere drama arguably traces theater’s farthest antirepresentational edge, emerges here as an example of modern art’s pursuit of aesthetic extremity. A reader familiar with twentieth-century theater history would predict appearances by the queer maximalists Robert Wilson, Charles Ludlam, and especially Jack Smith, but the Wilder of Our Town is a brilliant surprise, even for those who know of his admiration for and friendship with Stein.Speaking of Stein, Cermatori’s chapter on the exuberantly theatrical opera Four Saints in Three Acts (premiered 1934) is a tour de force. Drawing on accounts of the opera’s creation (with composer Virgil Thomson, choreographer Frederick Ashton, and designer Florine Stettheimer) and reception, as well as on archival materials and production documentation, Cermatori shows how Stein’s delight in “Catholic kitsch objects” (152) and her identification with Teresa of Ávila inspired the allegorical staging of early modern saints as figures for the modern artist. Overtly citational in its mobilization of baroque and modernist performance forms, Four Saints demands of its audience an active process of interpretation, as all allegorical works do. Here, Cermatori stresses, that process is pleasurable, because the work stages the distance between sign and referent—and between text, music, and movement—within a “kind of queer heterotopia,” a theatricalized “landscape,” in which the condition of mediality could be celebrated for the radical possibilities envisioned, heard, and felt within it (175).Four Saints’ “gaiety” is absent in the Trauerspiele, the seventeenth-century German mourning plays to which the modernist opera bears a surprising degree of formal resemblance, as Cermatori shows. That early modern genre, as theorized by Benjamin in his famously dense 1928 treatise Origin of the German Trauerspiel, is the subject of the chapter at the heart of Baroque Modernity. Origin’s method and style are often dismissed as “esoteric,” but Cermatori’s incisive account reveals how Benjamin’s theoretical writing bore the hallmarks of the baroque in being image- rather than text-based; spatialized rather than plotted; paratactic, metaphoric, and, above all, theatrical. Cermatori swiftly and clearly connects Benjamin’s misperceived early work to his more widely read late essays in extrapolating the theory of the Trauerspiele: “What seemed once a royal road of sacred history leading from Creation to Last Judgment, in which every soul had its privileged place, becomes in the baroque an open setting or landscape devoid of clear directional markers: history as a wasteland” (112). For Benjamin and for Cermatori, plays like Andreas Gryphius’s Leo Armenius (1650) stage with an explicit, almost mechanical artifice the infelicitous construction (and often the violent destruction) of character, language, action, and history itself. Movement stiffens into gesture, and action into tableaux, in an interruptive manner that makes theater’s mediality palpable—and philosophically and politically salient. With Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book framed in this way, it makes perfect sense for Cermatori to comment at length on Brecht’s plays (a number of which are in fact set in the baroque era) and on the baroque antecedents of gestus and the Verfremdungseffekte.That remarkable chapter substantially addresses not only Benjamin, Gryphius, and Brecht but also Nietzsche as Cermatori extends the work undertaken earlier in the book. (Very few first books, it must be said, offer a set of chapters as thoroughly and beneficially interconnected as Baroque Modernity.) Even as Cermatori lays out the shifting contours of Nietzsche’s attack on Richard Wagner as a “baroque stylist” (41), he notes the degree to which the philosopher’s own style, as well as his later thinking about the shape of history, reveals baroque elements. The baroque, as Cermatori understands it and Nietzsche also seems to have grasped, is not a discrete era or a singular aesthetic but is a complex of aesthetic impulses that emerge and reemerge in response to destabilizing historical shifts. In the chapter on Mallarmé, Cermatori shows the salient catastrophe to be the financial crises of the Belle Époque, which exposed the extent to which the process of commodification functions like allegory. In Cermatori’s reading of Hérodiade, Mallarmé stages with deliberately obscure poetic indirection the “effects of commodity fetishism” (93): the body of the title character is a glistering, gesturing assemblage of ornaments. Even the Livre, the Mallarmean project least amenable to the theater as it existed in the poet’s time, is shown to presage “the performance artwork of the future” (95), with formal origins in the Tridentine Mass. In this chapter Cermatori most directly engages with Martin Puchner’s (2002) argument about the constitutive force of antitheatricality on modernists, including Mallarmé, Stein, and Brecht. While Cermatori counters some of Puchner’s points, the modernist works themselves are complex enough to accommodate both approaches; indeed, readers would benefit from reading the books alongside one another. Cermatori also supplements Hans-Thies Lehmann’s (2006) Postdramatic Theatre in an exceptionally useful and generative way by identifying seventeenth-century and modernist precedents for the nonmimetic, allegorical, and theatricalist tendencies that that influential book ascribes to postwar performance.Baroque Modernity should revise readers’ understanding not only of the artists and thinkers who are its primary subjects but also of the complex relationships between modernism and the theater and, more broadly, the history of aesthetics. Cermatori’s thrilling book shows us that the work of modernisms, and of baroque modernisms in particular, is not yet done.