PFSCL XXXV, 69 (2008) Proto-Aesthetics and the Theatrical Image NICHOLAS PAIGE This paper relates seventeenth-century antitheatrical discourse - the famous “Querelle du théâtre” - both back and forward in time. Back, by considering its relation to earlier debates on idolatry and iconoclasm; forward, by trying to understand the place of the theater “quarrel” in the history of Enlightenment aesthetic speculation. Another way of putting this would be to say that my question is, “What’s new in the Quarrel? ” For the attacks on theatrical representation by thinkers such as Nicole are commonly taken to be backward looking, both because they are redundant with respect to intellectual history (they rehearse arguments made by Plato or Augustine) and because their rigorism is founded on a doomed conception of the secular (which must, the theater’s enemies have it, submit to religious imperatives). My argument will stress, by contrast, the opposite articulation: both proand antitheatrical forces share a conception of theater that is symptomatic of aesthetic issues that will continue to play themselves out until the end of the eighteenth century. At first blush, seventeenth-century antitheatrical discourse begs to be read as a variation on Renaissance Protestant iconophobia: just as Calvin and other reformers proscribed visual representation of Christ, angels, and saints, so do Nicole and Conti and Bossuet argue the anti-Christian nature of theatrical spectacle. (This has been advanced by Marc Fumaroli, among others. 1 ) Brief reflection, however, reveals the shakiness of the analogy: iconoclasts and iconophiles argued about the representation of divinity, with iconoclasts holding that Christian religious images were no different 1 The suggestion is briefly made by Marc Fumaroli as a point of departure for his “Sacerdos sive rhetor, orator sive histrio: rhétorique, théologie et ‘moralité du théâtre’ en France de Corneille à Molière,” in Héros et orateurs: rhétorique et dramaturgie cornéliennes (Geneva: Droz, 1990), p. 449. See also the similar contention in the appendix to Emmanuelle Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum: théâtre et peinture, de la Renaissance italienne au classicisme français (Geneva: Droz, 2003), pp. 619-31; I will take up Hénin’s reading presently. Nicholas Paige 518 from pagan idols; but the two sides did not argue about representing the secular or natural world, which is precisely the terrain of the seventeenthcentury Quarrel. 2 This is not to say, however, that the Quarrel had nothing to do with biblical injunctions against idolatry. Indeed, the word “idolatry” occurs in some of the Quarrel’s main texts. The Prince de Conti, in his Traité de la Comédie et des Spectacles (1666), speaking of the extraordinary emotion caused by seeing actors in the flesh, thus asks, “n’est-ce pas un terrible mal que cette idolâtrie que commet le Cœur humain dans une violente passion? ” The idea, here, is that theater is idolatry in the sense that it erects man himself as a false god: “La créature y chasse Dieu du cœur de l’homme, pour y dominer à sa place, y recevoir des sacrifices et des adorations.” 3 Nicole’s Traité de la Comédie (1667) echoes Conti, relating as it does idolatry to seductive depictions of the language of love; and Nicole levels charges against theater’s concern with questions of honor and revenge, because “ce fantôme d’honneur qui est leur idole” sensitizes spectators to slights they otherwise would have rightly ignored. 4 Yet even if they mark something of a return to an old argument, these uses of “idolatry” do not, in fact, look much like what one finds in the writings of the Church fathers. (Scripture says next to nothing about spectacle or theater, as even Tertullian had to acknowledge.) Indeed, scholars such as Laurent Thirouin have pointed out that the Church fathers’ arguments weren’t of much use to French antitheatrical forces, because the idolatry of pagan spectacle had been understood to derive from its link to rituals dedicated to false gods - Jupiter, Bacchus, and so on. 5 Moreover, 2 Christian iconoclasm did not proscribe secular art, only the cult of images; moreover, because the natural world was de-divinitized by the Reform it became a worthy subject of representation, which was understood to be a technical feat that underlined the nobility of the artist. See Alain Besançon, L’image interdite: une histoire intellectuelle de l’iconoclasme (Paris: Fayard, 1994), pp. 171 and 259. 3 Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, Traité de la Comédie et des Spectacles, in Pierre Nicole, Traité de la Comédie et autres pièces d’un procès du théâtre, ed. Laurent Thirouin (Paris: Champion, 1998), p. 202. 4 Nicole, Traité de la Comédie, pp. 56 and 74. Similar references to idolatry can be found in more minor texts of the Quarrel. For example, Gerbais writes in his Lettre d’un docteur de Sorbonne (1694): “les intrigues d’amour qui en sont presque inséparables ne laissent pas d’honorer cette Déesse [Venus]; et quoiqu’on ne les accompagne pas d’encens, il est au moins sûr que ces intrigues ne sont pas des offrandes qui puissent être présentées au véritable Dieu” (cited in Henry Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 93). 5 Laurent Thirouin, L’aveuglement salutaire: le réquisitoire contre le théâtre dans la France classique (Paris: Champion, 1997), p. 36. Proto-Aesthetics and the Theatrical Image 519 pace Hénin and Fumaroli, Conti and Nicole never make the charge that secular images are antithetical to Christianity. What we do see them doing is taking the old reproach of idolatry and making it metaphorical, in some sense psychologized: idolatry, here, lies not in the literal worship of a false god, not in the adoration of empty images, but in allowing one’s passions to usurp God’s importance in our hearts. Such psychologizing of the theatrical experience - the concern with the effect of theatrical spectacle on the observer - was of course everywhere in France by the time Nicole and Conti were writing. That is, a set of shared suppositions about the nature of theater, focused around the idea of emotional contagion between characters, actors, and spectators, united Corneille and Bossuet, Nicole and d’Aubignac. 6 Interest in the effect of theater on the passions was not new; in fact, it had a prestigious pedigree. Plato’s reference, in the Ion (536a), to the emotional “chain” linking the god to the poet to the actor to the spectator was known in France, and Plato mentions elsewhere, albeit briefly, phenomena such as audience sympathy with bereaved protagonists (Republic 605d). More important for the seventeenthcentury debate are Augustine’s acute dissection of theater’s emotional effects in the Confessions (III, 2), and of course Aristotle’s cryptic remarks on catharsis in the Poetics. The most important ancient touchstones, however, didn’t concern the theater per se, but rather rhetorical theory: passages from Cicero and Quintilian were routinely adduced, along with two lines from Horace’s Art of Poetry: “If you desire to hear me weep, you must truly grieve” (lines 101-03). Emmanuelle Hénin, in her imposing thesis Ut pictura theatrum, has performed a seemingly complete exhumation of the idea of mimetic emotional contagion in the Italian Renaissance; Horace’s lines figure prominently there. At any rate, in seventeenth-century France the contagion model was commonplace. I’ll limit myself to citing one 6 I am certainly not the first to point out the fact that enemies and proponents subscribed to the same basic assumptions. See, e.g., John Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette (IN): Purdue University Press, 1999), pp. 74 and 78; Georges Forestier, Passions tragiques et règles classiques: essai sur la tragédie française (Paris: PUF, 2003), p. 78; and Louis Marin, “La critique de la représentation théâtrale classique à Port-Royal: commentaires sur le Traité de la Comédie de Nicole,” Continuum 2: Rethinking Classicism, ed. David Lee Rubin, vol. 2 (New York: AMS Press, 1990), p. 90. It is because of this rich current of thought, which they merely inverted, that French antitheatricalists could go so much further than their English counterparts, who, as one historian of the Quarrel has noted, could only complain of the dissolute mores of actors; see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 194-96. Nicholas Paige 520 full-blown example, where there is complete fusion between poet, character, actor, and spectator. (This is from La Mesnardière’s Poétique, of 1639, which puts it near the beginning of this argument’s penetration into French theatrical discourse.) Le Poète se figure [les passions] avec tant de réalité durant la composition qu’il ressent la Jalousie, la Haine, la Vengeance, avec toutes leurs émotions, tandis qu’il en fait le tableau [...]. Ensuite l’excellent Acteur épouse tous les sentiments qu’il trouve dans cet ouvrage et se les met dans l’esprit avec tant de véhémence que l’on en a vu quelques-uns si vivement touchés des choses qu’ils exprimaient qu’il leur était impossible de ne se pas fondre en larmes [...] après avoir représenté des aventures pitoyables. Enfin l’Auditeur […] entre dans tous les sentiments de la Personne théâtrale [i.e., the actor] ; il est gai lorsqu’elle est contente; si elle gémit, il soupire; […] bref il suit tous ces mouvements, et il ressent que son cœur est comme un champ de bataille où la science du Poète fait combattre quand il lui plaît mille Passions tumultueuses. 7 One could probably expand the context for the contagion model - for instance, it’s consonant with medical explanations of sympathy that extend back, again, to the Greeks, and that are still easily detectible in Malebranche, for whom we feel the pain of others literally, in our own bodies. 8 Lacking space to pursue such threads, I will simply add that Nicole’s Traité de la Comédie, where the word “contagion” occurs a number of times, is largely built on this conception. To return to idolatry specifically, when the word occurred in antitheatrical texts, in its metaphorical usage, it did so only sparsely. Emmanuelle Hénin, in the appendix to her book, has attempted to frame the entire seventeenth-century antitheatrical movement as part of a millennial reflection on idols; to do so, however, she needs to equate idolatry with the making of any image. 9 Yet the Bible does not assimilate idolatry to the 7 Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière, La poétique (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1639), pp. 73-74. 8 See Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 29. Sympathy was in no way a special case, since general discourse on the passions was largely somatic as well; see Lucie Desjardins, Le corps parlant: savoirs et représentations des passions au XVII e siècle ([Sainte-Foy, Québec]: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001). 9 Hénin’s interpretation of the Quarrel as an episode in the Judeo-Christian war on idolatry derives from her reading of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom 13-15, in which she sees evidence that the image, “frappée d’un néant ontologique,” “offre le prototype d’une création humaine voulant singer Dieu” (Hénin, Ut pictura Proto-Aesthetics and the Theatrical Image 521 making of secular images. 10 And what the Church later concerned itself with was distinguishing the licit Christian use of religious images - icons - from those pagan idols whose condemnation was so central to Judaism. In the Hebrew Bible, idolatry involved the worship of false gods, certainly; more important, it designated a form of naïve belief, according to which the image is the deity. Historically speaking, it is unclear to what extent this was a fallacy invented with the express purpose of making Judaism’s competitors look primitive, but at any rate, the Israelites held Yahweh to be unrepresentable in physical form. Although Christianity likewise asserted the absolute transcendence of God, a more permissive relation to images was more or less necessitated by the Incarnation: Christ was held to be God made man, the image of God - “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14: 9) - and in view of this, it was difficult to assimilate images and emptiness. The Council of Trent offered the following view of the religious image, which became the Church line: the image is venerated not because it is divine or partakes of the divine, but because the honor paid it is reflected back to the model. 11 If the idol binds image and referent, the icon divorces them. Using this type of terminology - and our use can only be heuristic - we can say this about most theories of the theater from the 1630s on: theater is a kind of temporary idolatry, in the sense that viewers take the image for its referent. The poet, the actor, the spectator all “know” that the play is not the thing; but contagious passion makes us forget, makes idolaters out of us. Indeed, the efficacy of the theater depends on our idolatrous relation to it. In this, we would appear to be close to Port-Royal’s conception of the sign, theatrum, p. 619). Yet Wisdom, and the Judeo-Christian tradition generally, separate the making of images from their worship: it is only with the latter that the critique of idolatry concerns itself. One might note that Hegel’s dismissal of the ideal of the imitation of nature partially on the grounds of it being sacrilegious (he actually says “presumptuous”) needs to be made through the invocation of Islamic, not Christian, beliefs; see G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 1, p. 42. 10 This leads one historian of the Quarrel to conclude that compared to earlier attacks, “l’accusation d’idolâtrie est moins fréquente pour des raisons évidentes” (Sylviane Léoni, Le Poison et le remède: théâtre, morale et rhétorique en France et en Italie, 1694-1758 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), p. 53). The best antitheatrical forces can come up with is to incriminate the theater as a kind of disguise, a “painted woman”: the vocabulary of the fard recurs continually in the Quarrel. See Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum, pp. 620-22. 11 See Besançon, L’image interdite. For an alternate take, see Bruno Latour, “How to Be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion? ,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 418-40. Nicholas Paige 522 at least as Louis Marin has understood it - arbitrary yet transparent, an icon taken for an idol. Indeed, as Marin recalls in his discussion of Nicole’s Traité de la Comédie, Nicole shares with many seventeenth-century theoreticians the idea of the theater as optical illusion: not only do poets and actors and spectators all partake of the same emotion, spectators do so because they react to the visual spectacle as if before reality. Other theories were possible - for instance, some envisioned enargeia being transmitted from the imagination of the artist to that of the spectator - but as Georges Forestier has argued, theater as “mimetic illusion” is very much a constant, from Chapelain’s Lettre sur la règle des vingt-quatre heures (1630) to d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657). 12 (And Hénin’s work demonstrates that French theoreticians were doing nothing new, here.) Seventeenthcentury French theater was a willfully induced state of idolatry, pure and simple. D’Aubignac: “Le théâtre n’est autre chose qu’une représentation, il ne se faut point imaginer qu’il y ait rien de tout ce que nous y voyons, mais bien les choses mêmes dont nous y trouvons les images.” 13 Well, not so pure and simple, of course: problems with the model were recognized repeatedly. For instance, there was the material problem Christian Biet has written of: given theatrical conditions of the time (not the least of which were those pesky fops sitting on the stage), was the illusion that Chapelain and d’Aubignac described even remotely possible? 14 But above and beyond this, there was a persistent nagging feeling that this argument, and this account of theatrical pleasure, left something to be desired. The contagion model necessitated spectators feeling exactly the same emotion that the actors felt that in turn the poet felt when copying what his model felt. It couldn’t explain what we might want to call aesthetic emotions - that is emotions that were different from the emotions represented (pleasure, for starters). There were plenty of ancient touchstones, here, from Aristotle’s observation that we view with pleasure exact copies of cadavers and hideous beasts (Poetics IV) to the Lucretian suavity with which the onlooker watches boats battling the waves. Hénin shows that a select few Italians used these topoi as a springboard for thinking about what 12 Forestier, Passions tragiques, 73-117. Forestier demonstrates that this illusionism is in fact perfectly compatible, in Chapelain’s thinking, with the demands of vraisemblance. See also on this subject Timothy J. Reiss, Toward Dramatic Illusion: Theatrical Technique and Meaning from Hardy to Horace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), not cited by Forestier or Hénin. 13 François Hédelin d’Aubignac, La pratique du théâtre (Amsterdam: Jean-Frédéric Bernard, 1715), pp. 87-88. 14 Christian Biet, “L’avenir des illusions, ou le théâtre de l’illusion perdue,” Littératures Classiques 44 (2002), pp. 175-214. Proto-Aesthetics and the Theatrical Image 523 she calls “the autonomy of aesthetic pleasure”; but while the paradox was remarked, it certainly did not cause the edifice of contagion to crumble, as I hope to show now. 15 Faced with this paradox, seventeenth-century thinkers reacted in a number of ways. Nicole’s Jansenism furnished a perfect solution - we take pleasure seeing pain because of our secret love of vice - but this was atypical. 16 A more prominent line of thinking sprang from Aristotle’s remark on paintings of cadavers: the pleasure one feels comes from wonder at the artist’s handiwork, explain Boileau and Lamy. 17 But this argument was limited to discussions of “low” art - that is, still life, which manifestly could not please through conformity between subject matter and audience emotion. Moreover, it was altogether better, La Mesnardière wrote, not to pursue such “bizarre” pleasures, which wasted artistic talent on Pascal’s famous “choses dont on n’admire point les originaux.” 18 On the other extreme of the generic spectrum, where the imitation of human action was concerned, the problem was dealt with in a similar way, that is, by getting rid of the offending situation altogether: certain horrible acts on stage would so shock the audience that they must be proscribed. Thus, through the denigration of still life on the one hand and the bienséances on the other, theorists carved out a middle ground of intense, but not too intense emotions. Racine’s tears are the perfect solution to the problem: they are the terrain on which the contagion model seems to work best. 19 Cry with Bérénice, and don’t think too hard about why you don’t go mad with Oreste. A final option, I’d note, was to use catharsis in an aesthetic, and not 15 Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum, p. 494; see also for example p. 599: “l’analyse de Beni s’avère (comme toujours) décevante: tout en critiquant la conception traditionnelle de l’empathie, il ne dépasse pas l’intuition du paradoxe, et ne précise pas les modalités de cette émotion fictivement éprouvée par le poète.” 16 Nicole, Traité de la Comédie, p. 60; Bernard Lamy, in his Nouvelles réflexions sur l’art poétique (1668), gives a similar explanation; see Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum, p. 628 n. 34. 17 “Il n’est point de serpent ni de monstre odieux, / / Qui, par l’art imité, ne puisse plaire aux yeux: / / D’un pinceau délicat l’artifice agréable / / Du plus affreux objet fait un objet aimable” (Boileau, Art poétique III, lines 1-4); “Ce qui plaît n’est pas la vue d’un serpent qui est peint; … mais ce qui fait plaisir c’est l’esprit du peintre qui a su atteindre la fin de son art” (Bernard Lamy, La rhétorique ou l’art de parler, ed. Christine Noille-Clauzade (Paris: Champion, 1998), p. 114). 18 See Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum, pp. 499-500. 19 On tears in Racine, see especially Christian Biet, “La passion des larmes,” in Littératures Classiques 26 (1996), pp. 167-83. From a different perspective, see Pierre Giuliani, “D’un XVII e siècle à l’autre: la question du sang sur scène,” in Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 104.2 (2004), pp. 305-23. Nicholas Paige 524 moral, manner: somehow purgation might be understood to convert terror and pity into pleasure. Alas, this line, taken up occasionally in the Italian Renaissance, was not pursued by French thinkers. 20 All of these ideas can be seen as veiled admissions - je sais bien mais quand même - of the fact that the theater is not, after all, an idol. To rephrase the title of the wonderful book by Paul Veyne on Greek attitudes toward mythology, the French did not believe in their theatrical gods after all. But they pretended they did. They had to: they could not think outside the box, which in this case was la scène à l’italienne. How would the inadequacy of the contagion paradigm be resolved? For the eighteenth century, it won’t be, but all the major theorists confront the problem with more tenacity than their earlier counterparts. From Du Bos to Diderot to Burke to Batteux to Marmontel, there are different theories. Some hypothesize a type of flickering, in-and-out identification; this is still evident in Stendhal’s preference for Shakespeare over Racine, on the basis that his drama contains more of those moments in which you are completely swept up by the illusion. But they are just fleeting moments of idolatry, now, no more. Another major idea - found in Du Bos and Burke - is to hold that because we know that the theatrical image is an illusion, the passions the audience feels are of necessity diminished copies of real ones. 21 There is no more total illusion, and this has the advantage of explaining why we don’t go mad with Oreste: the effects of the copy are temporary, and they are tempered. In his 1719 Réflexions critiques, Du Bos calls this “un plaisir pur.” 22 Presumably, this would be aesthetic pleasure. But there is still a sleight of hand, here, because all his reasoning really does is allow for reduced copies of real emotions - not for a qualitatively different type of emotion. 23 (Burke will attempt to distinguish delight from terror; but he too runs into problems resulting from the fact that art is still seen to provide a 20 Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum, pp. 494-99. Hénin’s reading of Boileau’s “Il n’est point de serpent” as a recognition of catharsis’s aesthetic dimension seems to me debatable, however, since a better context is probably attention to the problems posed by low subject matter in the still life. 21 “La copie de l’objet doit, pour ainsi dire, exciter en nous une copie de la passion que l’objet y aurait excité. Mais [...] comme l’impression faite par l’imitation n’est pas sérieuse, d’autant qu’elle ne va point jusqu’à la raison, pour laquelle il n’y a point d’illusion dans ces sensations, [...] elle s’efface bientôt” (Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), pp. 27-28). 22 Du Bos, Réflexions critiques, p. 29. 23 For a similar reading of Du Bos’s sleight of hand, see Peter Kivy, Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 129. Proto-Aesthetics and the Theatrical Image 525 partial illusion of reality.) Eventually, only Kant and Hegel will get rid of the difficulty by divorcing aesthetics from its etymological roots as a science of perception. It makes a certain sense for David Marshall, in his recent book The Frame of Art, to note that unlike nineteenth-century aesthetics, founded on the idea of disinterestedness, eighteenth-century versions are obsessed with the “blurring of the boundaries between the realm of art and whatever is defined in opposition to art: nature, reality, real life.” 24 But he jumps to two erroneous conclusions. First, that this blurring was an eighteenth-century phenomenon: that century did bring its own pseudo-solutions to the problem, and with all the urgency of a period founded on sensibilité; but the blurring itself was old hat, even a hundred years earlier, when Nicole and Conti incorporated it into their critique of the theater. Second, and following from this: what is significant is not the blurring, but precisely the repeated attempts to confront the paradoxes resulting from what I call the contagion paradigm. What does strike me as right about Marshall’s point (though I’m not sure he has this in mind) is that we must not conclude from these attempts that Boileau and Du Bos “anticipate” Kant or Hegel, for it is quite possible that the latter philosophers so rewrite the assumptions of discourses on the arts as to make early aesthetic speculation qualitatively different from what we might want to call “modern aesthetics.” The richest reflections coming out of France on theatrical passions, and which have accompanied my own work - Hénin’s Ut pictura theatrum and Forestier’s Passions tragiques et règles classiques - may well be liable to this critique: that is, they don’t adequately distinguish between what my title names as “proto-aesthetics” and “aesthetics proper.” For this is ultimately the big question: do all these attempts at understanding audience emotion prepare the ground for the modern aesthetic regime, or are they false starts, as Hegel had it, mooted by later developments? In spite of all the work that has been done on eighteenth-century aesthetics, this seems to me to be the key question, and one whose answer very much depends on taking into consideration earlier theatrical idolatries. 24 David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 4.