Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110884937, 9783110117509

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Aesthetic Illusion

Aesthetic Illusion Theoretical and Historical Approaches

Edited by

Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape

W DE

G_ Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 1990

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

Aesthetic illusion : theoretical and historical approaches / edited by Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape. Proceedings of a Humanities Research Institute conference held at the University of California. Los Angeles, Mar. 2-5, 1989. Includes bibliographical references. Includes index. ISBN 3-11-011750-9 (acid-frce paper). - ISBN 0-89925-500-0 (U.S. : acid-free paper) 1. Aesthetics —Congresses. 2. Illusion in literature —Congresses. I. Burwick, Frederick, II. Pape, Walter. III. University of California (System). Humanities Research Institute. BH19.A46 1990 11Γ.85 —dc20 90-13853 CIP

Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging in Publication Data

Aesthetic illusion : theoretical and historical approaches / ed. by Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape. — Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1990 ISBN 3-11-011750-9 NE: Burwick, Frederick [Hrsg.]

© Copyright 1990 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30. All rights reserved, including those of translation book may be reproduced or transmitted in any mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any without permission in writing

into foreign languages. N o part of this form or by any means, electronic or information storage and retrieval system, from the publisher.

Printed in Germany Typesetting and Printing: Arthur Collignon G m b H , Berlin Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer G m b H , Berlin

Foreword The publication of Gombrich's Art and Illusion (1960) stimulated renewed inquiry into the problem of illusion, and a number of conflicting interpretations have appeared in subsequent years. Many of these, however, have been limited to applications in the Fine Arts, or they have confined the inquiry to phenomenological-hermeneutic approaches — for example, the two volumes in the series Poetik und Hermeneutik: Nachahmung und Illusion (1964) and Funktion des Fiktiven (1983); also the volume Ästhetischer Schein (1982) in the series Kolloquium Kunst und Philosophie. Murray Krieger's Poetic Presence and Illusion (1979) remains the major effort in English to provide theoretical and methodological direction to the analysis of illusion in literature. T h e purpose of the present volume is to discuss theoretical and historical approaches to aesthetic illusion and to address questions of illusion and ideology in terms of social and cultural concepts of reality in relation to the illusory presumptions of literature and the nature of reader/audience response. It is divided into four sections. T h e first section examines illusion as a fundamental issue in the social as well as the cognitive sciences; the essays in this section will address illusion as an attribute of perception shaped by external as well as internal factors. T h e second section will address the problem of illusion in language theory, semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics; the essays are addressed to the constituency of the art object or literary work (such topics as semiotic duality and disparity, affective and suasory strategies in rhetoric and in narrative development) as well as to the nature of the aesthetic experience (vicarious, Sympathie or empathic response; modes of identification and alienation; game or play involvement; degrees or levels of illusion — fantasizing, erotic indulgence, enthusiasm, delusion). The third section will provide critical examination of the formal conditions, expectations, and manifestations of illusion as developed within different genres. The fourth section surveys historical permutations in the literary uses of illusions; changes are documented with representative studies in major periods (Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modern). — The volume concludes with a bibliography (that also includes some major reference works on illusion etc. not cited in the individual articles) and an index; the bibliography contains the full data of all titles cited by the contributors, the footnotes give only shorttitles.

VI

Foreword

This volume is the proceedings of a Humanities Research Institute Conference on Aesthetic Illusion, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, March 2 — 5, 1989. The conference brought together scholars from the United States, Great Britain, Switzerland, and Germany to discuss different approaches to aesthetic illusion. The intention was to provide a forum for discussion, to engender a collaborative interaction among participants, and to produce this volume. The editors want to thank everybody who helped to complete it: the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the UCLA College of Letters and Science for financial support of the conference; the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which provided the travel costs for the German participants; the publisher Walter de Gruyter, especially Professor Dr. Heinz Wenzel, who made it possible that this volume could be published without any subvention for the printing costs. In checking the bibliography and the index, stud. phil. Daniel Fulda, Cologne, provided valuable assistance. Los Angeles, June 1990

Frederick Burwick

Köln, June 1990

Walter Pape

Contents Foreword

ν

WALTER PAPE/FREDERICK

BURWICK

Aesthetic Illusion

1

Illusion and the Cognitive Sciences PAUL

WATZLAWICK

T h e Illusion o f ' I l l u s i o n ' LAWRENCE E .

19

MARKS

Synaesthesia: Perception and Metaphor

28

BENNETT A JULES-ROSETTE

T h e Aesthetics of Communications and the Reproduction of Cultural Forms: The Case of Tourist Art

41

Aesthetics and the Referentiality of Symbols and Signs W . J . THOMAS

MITCHELL

Looking at Animals Looking: Art, Illusion, and Power MARC E.

BLANCHARD

Aesthetic and Illusion of Daily Life K . LUDWIG

79

PFEIFFER

Fiction: O n the Fate of a Concept Between Philosophy and Literary Theory JOCHEN

65

92

SCHULTE-SASSE

Aesthetic Illusion in the Eighteenth Century FREDERICK

BURWICK

The Grotesque: Illusion vs. Delusion ELINOR S.

105 122

SHAFFER

Illusion and Imagination: Derrida's Parergon and Coleridge's Aid to Reflection. Revisionary Readings of Kantian Formalist Aesthetics BARBARA M A R I A

138

STAFFORD

"Fantastic" Images: From Unenlightening to Enlightening "Appearances" Meant to Be Seen in the Dark

158

Contents

Illusion and Literary Genre MURRAY

KRIEGER

Representation in Words and in Drama: The Illusion of the Natural Sign

183

REGINALD A . FOAKES

Making and Breaking Dramatic Illusion WALTER

217

PAPE

Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy: The Discourse of Emotional Freedom

229

HELLMUT THOMKE

Appearance in Poetry: Lyric Illusion? WULF

250

KOEPKE

Epistolary Fiction and Its Impact on Readers: Reality and Illusion VOLKER

NEUHAUS

Illusion and Narrative Technique: The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel Between Truth and Fiction WERNER

263

275

WOLF

Illusion and Breaking Illusion in Twentieth-Century Fiction

284

Historical Changes in the Literary Uses of Illusions WERNER

HABICHT

"And Mock Our Eyes with Air": Air and Stage Illusion in Shakespearean Drama JANE K .

Double Plotting in Shakespeare's Comedies: The Case of Twelfth Night EUGENE R .

324

MCFARLAND

Imagination and Illusion in English Romanticism JACK H .

313

CUNNAR

Illusion and Spiritual Perception in Donne's Poetry THOMAS

301

BROWN

337

HAEGER

"The Picture of the Mind": Eidetic Images and Pictorial Projection in Wordsworth

349

PHILIP V . BRADY

'Verfremdung' and Illusion in Brecht's Drama

362

SUSAN BRIENZA

Sam Shepard, Anti-Illusion, and Metadrama: Plays on Writing, Acting, and Character

376

Contents

Bibliography

ix

393

Primary Sources

393

Secondary Sorces

406

Notes on Contributors

439

List of Illustrations

447

Index

449

A r t treats appearance as appearance and thus does not want to be an illusion, but is true. [...] truths are illusions which we are oblivious o f their being illusions [...]. Friedrich Nietzsche 1

WALTER PAPE/FREDERICK BURWICK

Aesthetic Illusion Illusion, fiction, mimesis, imitation "All our tales are experiences of men. They are true. What was handed down by our wise forefathers, is not careless discourse or lie. When people of our times consider many events untrue, this is only because they are of thinner juice of life than the forbearers, to whom we owe the tales." 2 These sentences from an Greenland aborigine remind us that story-telling in oral societies was regarded as a kind of ritual and thus part of reality. Though our juices seem to have been progressively thinned by contemporary modes of fiction, we still rely on those Platonic and Aristotelian concepts which were based on conventions originally observed in oral traditions. Although a recent translation of Plato will use such terms as fiction, illusion, imitation, these words now bear the burden of a long aesthetic discourse, and we easily neglect to consider the historical change. Nevertheless, fiction, mimesis (usually translated as 'imitation'), and illusion have become the crucial terms in defining the nature of art and/or aesthetic experience. Among these words, only mimesis had been used in antiquity as an aesthetic concept. In Roman rhetoric,/ZV/JO and illusio denoted hypothesis and irony. In English, fiction in the sense of 'imitating', 'feigning', 'inventing imaginary incidents', 'invention as opposed to facts', and even as a poetic term has been used since the sixteenth century and earlier 3 ; in German Fiktion was first used 1

2 3

Nietzsche: "Nachgelassene Fragmente" (1873). Sämtliche Werke vol. 7, p. 632; "Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne". Ibid. vol. 1, pp. 880 — 881. Quoted from Röhrich: Märchen und Wirklichkeit, p. 162. See Oxford English Dictionary vol. 5, p. 872.

Pape/Burwick: Aesthetic Illusion

2

in the seventeenth century, mostly in the context of criticizing novels as opposed to truth. 4 K. Ludwig Pfeiffer in the present volume has outlined the 'fate of this concept between philosophy and literary theory'. Illusion on the other hand was always more connected with cognitive experience than just being the opposite of truth or reality. As an aesthetic concept the word came into use no earlier than the eighteenth century. And then no other aspect of aesthetic experience received more attention. 5 Du Bos, Diderot, Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Schiller all endeavored to explain the phenomena of aesthetic illusion. A new concept of reality and verity emerged in the age of enlightenment, a new social function of literature arose: literature was meant to regulate human and social development, to be part of the new age of education. Literature, operating through emotion, consequently had to give an illusion of that better world, proceeding from the imitation of real life. The spectator in a theatre audience, or the solitary reader, was supposed to lose consciousness of himself and become oblivious to the act of watching or reading6. In this century the central concept of mimesis has gained a new meaning, even as it has blurred the meaning of illusion1. Many a scholar thus succeeds today in making Aristotle a philosopher of the eighteenth century8. What seems to be a venerable aesthetic commonplace at closer investigation turns out to be the product of misinterpretation. Almost eighty years ago Jane Ellen Harrison had warned: "we translate mimesis by 'imitation', and do very wrongly" 9 . Periods in the history of art during which artists or poets strove for an 'exact imitation' of reality are much shorter than is usually presumed. Aesthetic illusion, consciously engaged, is older than aesthetic theory might suggest. Coleridge's famous definition of illusion as "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment" 10 is preceded by Gorgias who stressed the awareness of experiencing illusion: For him tragedy was a "deception [...] in which the deceiver is more justly esteemed than the nondeceiver and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived."11 Gorgias was also quoted by a French theoretician of the seventeenth century, who emphasized the willing disposition of the spectator.12 4

Cf. Sauder: "Argumente der Fiktionskritik 1 6 8 0 - 1 7 3 0 und 1 9 6 0 - 1 9 7 0 " .

5

Cf. Hobson: The Object of Art.

6

According to Friedrich von Blanckenburg, cf. Voßkamp: Romantheorie in Deutschland, p. 173.

7

France.

Tarot: "Mimesis und Imitation" suggests to separate mimesis ("dargestellte Wirklichkeit") strictly from imitation

8

The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century

("fingierte Wirklichkeitsaussage").

Bien: "Bemerkungen zu Genesis ursprünglicher Funktion des Theorems von der Kunst als Nachahmung der Natur", p. 27.

9 10

11

Harrison: Ancient

Art

Coleridge: Biographia

and Ritual, l.iteraria

p. 47.

vol. 2, p. 6.

Fragment 23 — Sprague (ed.): The Older Sophists, p. 65. See also Nestle: Vom Mythos s^um Logos, p. 320 and p. 324.

12

Georges de Scudery in his Apologie

du theatre (1639) — quoted from Biirger: Die

Komödien Pierre Corneilles, pp. 4 1 — 4 2 .

frühen

3

Pape/Burwick: Aesthetic Illusion

The function of art, poetry, and illusion Contributors to the present volume demonstrate that we cannot approach literature on ontological terms of fiction, because the very perception and cognition of art and reality reveal the limits of sensory response, the influence of social, cultural, and psychological conditioning. For the arts this is explicitly demonstrated by Barbara Stafford in her study on the development of technical and optical devices that enhance illusion in painting, as well as by Elinor Shaffer in her article on the "parergon, the merely ornamental, concealing the true subject" in painting. The concept of illusion — in spite of the presumed constraints of subjectivity — has proved itself a crucial and unavoidable issue in literature and the arts. From the time of Mendelssohn's popular philosophical and psychological exploration of audience response through Adorno's effort to redeem aesthetic illusion from that twentieth-century attack which saw all illusory strategies in art as fundamentally propagandistic 13 , illusion ceased to be discussed merely as imitation of reality — and thus was linked again with the original aesthetic discussion in ancient Greece. Greek poetry and drama had a social function that differs totally from the modern. It actively participated in "the ritualistic and symbolic world of oral discourse" 1 4 . Actors and spectators were not yet separated as in modern theater 1 5 . The audience watched four performances a day, starting in the morning and lasting much o f the day: "These daylong marathons were also political events." 1 6 The modern understanding of mimesis as imitation o f 'nature' or 'reality' and modern interpretations of Aristotle's Poetics as a poetics o f imitation has its origin in Plato's pejorative use of mimesis (in the tenth book o f his Republic) as copying reality which itself is only an image o f the idea. Plato's rational philosophy had to grapple against the elder sensuous or emotional means of preserving knowledge and social identity. 17 The poet, not the philosopher had his "central position as a link to the past, storer o f knowledge, and educator o f the youth". 1 8 Only in the context o f this campaign against poetry and for his conception of ideas did he devaluate the mimesis of poetry from the original sense of "enactment of deeds and experiences, whether human

13

Cf. Sauder: "Argumente der Fiktionskritik 1 6 8 0 - 1 7 3 0 und 1 9 6 0 - 1 9 7 0 " .

14

Definition from Stock: The Implications

15

Ruth Padel: "Making Space Speak". Nothing Social Context,

of Literacy,

p. 526.

to Do with Dionysos? Athenian

Drama

in Its

pp. 336 — 365, here p. 338 — 339.

16

"Introduction" ibid., p. 5.

17

Oddone Longo: " T h e Theater of the Potis".

18

Sörbom: Mimesis

and Art,

present volume p. 94.

Ibid. pp. 12—19, here p. 16.

p. 146. — See also Pfeiffer's remarks on this subject in the

4

Pape/Burwick: Aesthetic Illusion

or divine" to mere "copying the appearances o f ' something 1 9 . Greek poetry never attempted to produce illusion by actually imitating reality, giving a copy deceptive in its verisimilitude (an eighteenth century notion). In Greek tragedy the language (both o f the words and of the body) "points out to a world outside which is truly haunted by furies, where gods journey over oceans, mad people wander over continents, prophecies flit around above a murderer's head; where ships sail towards us, away from us, ram each other and sink." 2 0 Theater did not attempt to procure scenic or stage illusion, poetry in general did not strive for an 'imitation' of reality, but for an enactment, presentation, or symbolization of human character and feeling. Ancient drama and epos are inconceivable without music, and all music was regarded "as representative and imitative" {Laws, Book 2, 668a) 2 1 . Lukacs would agree. Although he insists on using his crucial term, "Widerspiegelung der Wirklichkeit" (reflection o f reality), he includes also abstract forms like rhythm and ornaments in his concept. In his analysis o f the 'general problems of mimesis'' only Lukics's term is misleading. 2 2 Not only "the basic character of works of art", but the "psychological explanation of the way in which we experience and react to works of art" is connoted in the concept of mimesis21. Even if we distinguish between mimesis (enactment, presentation) and imitation (of 'reality', 'nature'), both may have the same striking effect in the listener's or spectator's mind: illusion. Gorgias called this effect άττάτη, and Plato in the tenth Book of the Republic described the mimema (imitations) "as apprehended by a spectator or a listener" as an είδωλον, φάντασμα, or φαινόμενον" 24 . In discussing optical illusions, which he calls ττλάνη (error), and other delusions like magic (γοητεία), Plato suggests that the power of calculation and measuring and weighing can serve as a remedy against these illusions, which actually are delusions (Republic 10, 602c/d): Plato certainly was full of fear of the 'magic' effect o f mimesis25. When Hugo von Hofmannsthal tried to revive in his Jedermann (Everyman, 1911) the old magic and ritual functions of the pre-illusionistic morality play, he pointed out the nonillusionistic possibilities of aesthetic illusion by quoting Immermann's 19

20

21

Keuls: Plato and Greek Painting, p. 24; Eva Keuls summarizes and slightly modifies the argument of Koller: Die Mimesis in der Antike. Now also Feldmann: Mimesis und Wirklichkeit, pp. 1 1 - 1 2 . Ruth Padel: "Making Space Speak". Nothing to Do with Dionysos?, pp. 336 — 365, here p. 364. See also in Hellmut Thomke's essay, p. 253.

22

Lukacs: Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, pp. 253 — 351: "Abstract forms of aesthetic reflection of reality", pp. 353 — 377: "General problems of Mimesis".

23

Cf. Sörbom: Mimesis and Art, p. 11. Ibid. p. 145. Koller: Die Mimesis in der Antike, p. 57.

24 25

Pape/Burwick: Aesthetic Illusion

5

observations on the old english stage: "The false-illusionistic has been totally abandoned, whereas the only really illuding device, the spiritualpoetical, is sustained all the more." 26 The "mental experience" of Greek tragedy 27 is comparable to what Werner Habicht demonstrates in his essay about Shakespeare's illusions in the air. It is because mimesis and fiction are overcharged with meaning, because they almost became myths in Roland Barthes' sense (mimesis became shallow as mere imitation of reality, fiction often seems to be reduced to philosophical and phenomenological-hermeneutic conceptions 28 ), that the editors chose to focus on the concept of illusion, aesthetic as well as theatrical, including stage and scenic illusion (see, for example, the essaybelow by Reginald A. Foakes). By the end of the eighteenth century critical theory had added to the deliberation of aesthetic illusion the possibilities of referential illusion 29 , in which art was to evoke, not a substitute reality, but a conscious awareness of illusion as illusion. As various essays in this volume show (e.g. Habicht, Brown, Pape), the practice long preceded the theory and is abundantly evident in preeighteenth-century art and literature. Pragmatic and aesthetic reception Brecht's effort to rid the theater of illusionism, a problem addressed in Philip Brady's contribution in this volume, continues to stir controversy. Peter Handke is right when he argues: "I looked upon Brecht's disillusioning always demanding illusion for disillusion only as a whole bag of tricks [dt.: fauler Zauber = idle magic]; again reality was feigned where there was only fiction." But Handke is on the wrong track when he continues: "In my first plays I therefore confined the theatrical action to the words themselves, their contradictory meaning impeding an action and an individual story." 30 Since Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme, and the subsequent Dada movement, it has been the poet's dream to free words from their reference to reality, to create a world out of words, but words always refer quite pragmatically to the 'given' world. Every text, 26

27 28

29

30

Hofmannsthal: "Das Spiel vor der Menge". Gesammelte lWerke: [vol. 3] Dramen 111, p. 105. — On the function of liturgy and costum in popular theater see Bausinger: Formen der " Volkspoesie", pp. 238—260. Ruth Padel: "Making Space Speak". Nothing to Do with Dionysos?, pp. 336 — 365, here p. 340. See also Pfeiffer: "Schwierigkeiten mit der Fiktion" (Review of Funktionen des Fiktiven, ed. Henrich and Iser, 1983; Ästhetischer Schein, ed. Oelmüller, 1982; Assmann: Die Legitimität der Fiktion, 1980). See Stierle: "Was heißt Rezeption bei fiktionalen Texten", esp. pp. 362—367; while this book was going to press Gottfried Willems' comprehensive study Anschaulichkeit (1989) was published; the German term "Anschaulichkeit" is very close in meaning to "aesthetic illusion", but has the disadvantage of having no proper English equivalent. Handke: "Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms" (1967). Handke: Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms, pp. 19 — 28. here p. 27.

6

Pape/Burwick: Aesthetic Illusion

every word, referentially conjures some sort of illusion of reality. Karlheinz Stierle, in his informative study "Was heißt Rezeption bei fiktionalen Texten", differentiates between pragmatic and referential reception and tries to solve the crucial problem of language's nature: both kinds of texts, pragmatic as well as fictional, are primarily comprehended pragmatically, that is they create an illusion referring to reality. 31 Only by a second reading is the reader led from the initial illusory reading to a reading which comprehends the text as fiction32 — of course, this is only valid in the context of modern aesthetic autonomy which has alienated literature from direct social function. Ergo: Even if the function of literature actually would be only its lack of function, the illusory effect of literature is inescapable, as most essays in this volume, directly or indirectly, acknowledge. Stierle in his theory of the second reading in a way modifies Mendelssohn's theory of aesthetic illusion, where a constant interchange between emotional illusion and rational illusion (referential reading/seeing) is supposed. The quandary over the relation of language to reality, of signifier to signified, has been discussed since Plato, as Murray Krieger shows in his contribution. Schiller in his Kallias oder über die Schönheit pondered the dilemma that language shows a tendency towards the general and thus competes with poetry that wants imagination {Anschauung). Nietzsche introduced fundamental critique of language: he maintained that language offers no adequate expression of all realities 33 . For Nietzsche and his recent followers, man constructs in language a world of its own beside the 'other' world. 34 Constructivists, like Watzlawick in his opening essay, also question the 'other' world. But Nietzsche and his devotees ignore the different functions of language. Fritz Mauthner, founder of the modern critique of language, clearly differentiates between language as a tool of cognition or philosophy and language as a means of literature and poetry. Though he calls — following Nietzsche — philosophy delusion (Täuschung), poetry for him, giving only images of images of images, and consequently remaining inside the realm of language 35 , has a certain power to evoke emotion, and thus the poet's language can 31

Stierle: "Was heißt Rezeption bei fiktionalen Texten", pp. 347 — 348; see also Iser: Der Akt des Lesens, esp. pp. 175 — 256: "Die Erfassungsakte des Textes"; and from a more linguistic view Kern: "Wie baut sich im Leser eine fiktive Wirklichkeit auf?" Cf. also Rainer Warning: "Rezeptionsästhetik als literaturwissenschaftliche Pragmatik". Re%eptionsästhetik, pp. 9 — 41, here p. 32.

32

Stierle: "Was heißt Rezeption bei fiktionalen Texten", pp. 367 — 368. Nietzsche: "Uber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne". Sämtliche p. 880.

13

34 35

Werke vol. 1,

Nietzsche: "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches". Ibid. vol. 2, p. 30. Cf. the basic study of Kühn: Gescheiterte Sprachkritik, pp. 69 — 73 (philosophy), pp. 58 — 64 (poetry).

Pape/Burwick: Aesthetic Illusion

7

overcome the split between language and reality — we could add: through aesthetic illusion. The non-illusionistic, aesthetic force of poetry can be illustrated with Lewis Carroll. Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass says to Alice: "There's glory for you!" Alice does not understand. "I don't know what you mean by 'glory' ", Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't — till I tell you. 1 meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' " "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected. "When / use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all." 36

Of course, poetry cannot radically push meaning beyond a word's range of connotations. Humpty Dumpty is like those modern writers, as Werner Wolf describes them in his study on "Illusion and Breaking Illusion in Twentieth Century Fiction", who desire to go beyond aesthetic illusion. Carroll also gives us a perfect example for the power of language over reality. Passing through a wood "where things have no names", Alice meets a fawn; not until they leave the magic forest does the fawn recognize the 'real' relations: " 'I'm a Fawn!' it cried out in a voice of delight. 'And, dear me! you're a human child!' A sudden look of alarm came into his beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed." 37 Carroll shows that we are captured in the prison of language, and that aesthetic illusion of literature can function to make this prison visible. Though many of the contributors focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the main periods of theoretical discussion of aesthetic illusion, one central issue could not be discussed at length: the question whether social change and social status, of a reader and text or spectator and theater, involve different types of illusion. In spite of their various approaches, studies in literary reception rely on the same more or less differentiated categories of attitudes towards literature, following the distinction between aesthetic and practical norms like Jan Mukarovsky 3 8 . Georg Jäger, following him, distinguishes three kinds of non-aesthetic reception: (1) the edifying, (2) the didactic, and (3) the trivial-sentimental concretisation of a text. In all of these, he argues,

36 37 38

Carroll: The Annotated Alice, p. 269. Ibid. pp. 2 2 5 - 2 2 7 . Mukarovsky: Kapitel aus der Ästhetik, and other norms p. 65).

pp. 64—71 on the relation between the aesthetic

8

Pape/Burwick: Aesthetic Illusion

an extra-aesthetic (ucis et Umbrae, p. 768. For the association of the camera obscura with the revival of the perspectivist tradition, see I.indbcrg: Theories of Vision, pp. 178—184.

176

Aesthetics and the Referentiality o f Symbols and Signs

During the decade preceding the writing o f Diderot's phantasmagoric Salons0, an improved solar microscope was introduced into France in its characteristic English form by one o f its most distinguished makers, Ο. N. Degermann. 5 1 T h e Abbe Nollet noted, however, that it first entered Paris as early as 1743. 5 2 T h e rack and pinion motion for rotating the mirror, the endless screw and section for altering the inclination, six separate powers, and three auxiliary condensing lenses — mounted in dovetail slides to increase the amount o f light passing through the projecting lens — ushered in an era o f disembodied, hyperbolic microscopic theater witnessed in the home. Significantly, these private, silent simulations in small dark rooms should be contrasted with public pantoscopic peepshows peddled in the bright light o f the market place, or with fireworks shot off in front o f a boisterous crowd. 5 3 The concealed microscopist-sophist, on the other hand, through a mere sleight o f hand produced colored illusions in a fashionably up-to-date residential Platonic Cave, thus making the invisible intimately visible, the ordinary strange, the unusual familiar, the farfetched proximate. Martin Ledermüller (1719—1769) graphically recreates these popular "amusements microscopiques". 5 4 T h e combination o f as many instruments as possible into one by mid-century (the 'aquatic' or 'polyp' microscope, the pocket or 'flea' microscope, the compound microscope, the Wilson Screw-Barrel microscope (serving as the projector in solar microscopes), the Cuff microscope, the botanical microscope, Lieberkuhn's "frog-plate"), 5 5 had at last made the fantastic skiagram, or glowing aerial image, delightfully educational and even 'scientific'. Significantly, these dim, domestic optical cabinets for the realization of somnambular moving pictures, for the two-dimensional or visual possession o f all three-dimensional experience, forecast and, I believe, shaped some o f the most important tenebrist and spectral pictorial innovations o f

50

Significantly, it was also in this decade with the publication o f Watelet's "L'Art de peindre" (1760) that clair-obscur first begins to be discussed in aesthetic treatises and dictionaries as a natural force which dictates its own rules. See Verbraeken:

Clair-Obscur,

pp. 3 0 - 3 3 . 51

Clav and Court: The History

52

Nollet: Lefons de physique experimentale,

53

Corno: " L e scattole ottiche e il loro uso".

54

of the Microscope, p. 219. pp. 572—575.

Ledermüller: Troisieme cinquantaine des amusements microscopiques (1768), pp. 3-8, 10, 53. See, especially, his discussion o f the solar microscope, and o f a gamut o f "Representations optiques" constituting "une Infinite d'autre beaux Experiments". This microscopic theater seems to have escaped the attention o f Altick: The Shows of London. Indeed, the eighteenthcentury phenomenon o f moving pictures needs a full study.

55

Clay and Court: The History

of the Microscope, pp. 220 — 221.

Stafford: "Fantastic" Images

177

the last two decades of the eighteenth century and beyond. 56 I believe, further, that these Romantic or 'fantastic' images — specifically painted in emulation of light-shot simulacra — should be exhibited in darker rooms than is now common in current museum practice. Indeed, these prismatic appearances meant to be seen in the dark presage our contemporary culture of visualization which consumes the world as chromatic 'sights', with the ranging gaze alone. Whereas historically, with the notable exception of stained glass and mosaics, light had to be evoked in the visual arts by means of an opaque material unlike its airy colored self, the new instrumentation did away with such translation. The distant cause could now 'magically' be made immanent in the immediate effect, thus heralding the nineteenth- century panorama, daguerrotype, and, of course, cinema. Reality could at last be captured as it was, temporal and apparitional. Think of Gainsborough's 'phantasmatic' late portraits rising out of the gloom and often painted by candlelight, or of Fuseli's Eddie specters. Moreover, Gainsborough's penchant — according to Ozias Humphrey — for keeping his studio even by day in "a Kind of darkened Twilight", and his construction (ca. 1781 — 1782) of a peepshow box for which he made small landscape transparencies, must be connected to the new technology and taste for producing sophistic spectacles meant to be seen in a penumbrous setting. 57 Similarly, the Eidophusikon (1773) of de Loutherbourg — Gainsborough's and, in fact, Fragonard's friend — used brilliant projected colors to create enchanting transparent shades. Robertson's 'fantoscope', of 1798, employing two light sources and two lenses mounted on wheels, produced hovering ghostly visions intended, paradoxically, to liberate the fettered mind from superstition and fanaticism. 58 On another front, Girodet's 'phosphorescent' Sleep of Endymion (Louvre, 1793) seized the disembodying impact of a concentrated moonbath or insolatio. The painter — known from contemporary accounts to have been in thrall to

56

57

58

The tenebrist tradition in late eighteenth-century French painting has been connected to the influence of Caravaggio. See Whiteley: "Light and Shade in French Neoclassicism". I think it ranges far more broadly and owes much more than has been hitherto suspected to the new scientific instrumentation and its popularization. On Gainsborough's practice of drawing by candlelight in the latter part of his career, see Hayes and Stainton: Gainsborough Drawings, p. 136. Waterhouse: Gainsborough, p. 25. In December 1773, James de Loutherbourg, who was scene-master for Garrick at Drury Lane, first introduced his newly invented "transparent shades". Gainsborough apparently experimented with this method in 1775 when he and other painters did some life-size figures which were transparent and lighted from behind. When de Loutherbourg produced his Eidophusikon with moving images (an extension of the initial transparencies), Gainsborough again experimented with transparencies, now on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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the singular effects produced by artificial light — shows the 'charged' inner lambency and transparency o f cold marble turned into glittering flesh — opaque under ordinary conditions — that can be perceived only at night and from afar, from Diana's elevated vantage. 5 9 And think, too, o f Ingres' shadowless Napoleon (Musee de la Grande Armee, 1806), criticized for seemingly having been painted by moonlight. Most dramatically, perhaps, Goya's flying gigantic imaginings, those large Caprichos or "black paintings" 6 0 — designed to be seen from below and to materialize above the heads o f the dwarfed beholders seated or standing in the darkened salon o f the Quinta — became animated solely by means o f a flickering projected light. 6 1 Goya's new "idioma universal", then — as stated on a sketch for the frontispiece to the 1797 Caprichos, and as predicted by Berkeley — was the universal language o f images. 6 2 Indeed, such mutable species and weightless visual phantoms served once again, in Baroque fashion, to establish the world as a catoptric or dioptric theater for hermetic performances. But while the seventeenth-century devisers o f "curious perspectives" had enjoyed producing ingenious games and obscure conceits for the erudite wits at Church or Court, late eighteenth-century technological wizards such as Ozanam, Guyot, and Ledermüller, or empiricist artists such as Wright o f Derby, sought to mingle learning with optical 'recreation' in the residential laboratory or private 'academy' o f the middle-class home. Like Diderot and the philosophe, they hoped to reveal, one by one, to a broad audience some sparks o f clarte embedded in the prevailing tenebres. But it was specifically with Goya's viewer 're-forming' or life patternchanging drawings, aquatints, lithographs, and murals that the scientifically staged scene became pedagogically devoted to personal enlightenment. At a fundamental level, his fantastic 'glaring' art — like Fragonard's reverberating light 'echoes' — made the invisible visible. The emission and reception o f light, or the repercussive revelation of lux et tenebris, was

59

On the eighteenth-century scientific sources for the Hndymion,

see my: "Endymion's

M o o n b a t h " . F o r Girodet's deliberate quest after nocturnal effects, also see my: " L e s meteores de Girodet". 60

Fauque and Etcheverria: Goya y Burdeos, pp. 652—653; 642 — 644. O n Goya's technical experimentation in the nocturnal 'dreams' or Caprichos (1799) with etching and aquatint in order to make absurdities and superstitions 'glare', or loom up from out o f the dark ground, see my: " F r o m 'Brilliant Ideas' to 'Fitful T h o u g h t s ' " .

61

Muller: Goya's 'Black'

Paintings.

Truth and Reason-Light

and Liberty,

pp. 28 — 29. Muller

says Goya was inspired by Robertson's claim that phantasmagoria would scientifically expose and banish falsehoods. In the 1820's, the artist made his own camera obscura and created 'sights' (catoptric illusions, specters) performed in a darkened room. This educational spectacle, however, had already been forecast in the 62

Held: Francisco de Goya, pp. 68 — 69.

Caprichos.

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the revolutionary artist's supreme aesthetic and ethical task. T h e epiphanic mechanism of optical illusion, ironically, helped him to fabricate persistent illuminating 'sights' subtly p r o p o u n d i n g liberty, reason, and the banishment of delusion f r o m the world, or f r o m the darkened room.

Illusion and Literary Genre

MURRAY

KRIEGER

University of California, Irvine

Representation in Words and in Drama: The Illusion of the Natural Sign From the dawn of systematic thought about the arts in the West, illusion has been treated as the source of the appeal of the arts, even of the verbal arts, whether for good or ill. It was on the grounds of its special illusionary power that, ever since Plato, drama was separated from the other literary genres as a special case that demanded its own theory. And that theory has been granted a history in some crucial ways distinct from the history of literary theory at large. At some moments in that history, where the theory of drama has overlapped the general theory of literature, drama was encouraged, as the model genre, to absorb the other genres within its own norms, to seek to turn literature itself into greater and lesser forms of dramatistics, with drama itself the ideal form to be aped by the others. At other moments drama has been forced, by self-exclusion, to go its own way, separate from — but more than equal to — its rivals, narrative and lyric, among the verbal arts. But always its peculiar character as a performance art — that is, as an /'»mediately representational art — allowed it to be treated as different from the other verbal arts in that it was uniquely free from the limits which language placed on the representational powers of the others. In brief, the apparent presence — the tangible presence — in drama of the objects of representation gave it an immediacy denied to words alone. No matter how forceful the conjuring power of verbal images, only drama could claim to produce a sensible illusion of reality. For words, strictly speaking, must always, at the source of our experiencing them, be intelligible only — transmitting their images and objects only through the mediation of mind — and not sensible, with their images and objects, as with pictures, known immediately as they are sensed. What is being appealed to in this over-simplified opposition between the sensible and the intelligible arts is the dubious distinction, as old as the philosophical study of language, or, more broadly, of all symbolic systems, between natural signs and signs which, though conventional, are arbitrary. But all this is to go too fast and get far ahead of our story. I propose instead to start at the beginning and to move slowly.

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I. In Book 3 of the Republic Plato makes a strange move whose repercussions literary theory may still be feeling. In Book 2 he had prepared for the application of his general theory of imitation to the arts, including of course all the verbal arts, without regard to differences among the literary kinds: Imitation is the same operation, "whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given" (379a). Plato is laying the ground here for his attack upon all poetry as a mode of imitation in Book 10: 1

S p e a k i n g in c o n f i d e n c e , f o r y o u will n o t d e n o u n c e m e t o the t r a g e d i a n s a n d the rest o f the imitative tribe, all poetical i m i t a t i o n s are r u i n o u s to the u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f the hearers, unless as an a n t i d o t e they p o s s e s s the k n o w l e d g e o f the true n a t u r e o f the o r i g i n a l s . ( 5 9 5 b )

And he proceeds to the well known epistemological-ontological arguments about the incapacity of "poetical imitations", without regard to differences in genre, to gain or transmit such "knowledge". Since Homer is his prime target, there can be little question that his target is far broader than dramatic tragedy. But despite the fact that his working definition of imitation allows it to characterize all the arts, including, of course, all the verbal arts, in Book 3 he surprisingly restricts it to one verbal art, the dramatic, exempting the lyric and many moments of narrative from the mimetic arts. A theory of poetic genres, distinguished by the manner (or "point-of-view") of representation, replaces a single universal characterization of the arts as mimetic. Without warning, Plato confines imitation to the one sort of representation that seeks to become a total illusion instead of allowing the term to define all the modes of representation. Plato introduces this division within the verbal arts by stating a simple three-way choice for the poet: "[...] all mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or to come [...]. And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union of the t w o " (392d). In the first case the p o e t is s p e a k i n g in his o w n p e r s o n ; he n e v e r e v e n tries t o distract us by a s s u m i n g a n o t h e r character. B u t in w h a t f o l l o w s [in the o p e n i n g lines o f the Iliad\ he takes the p e r s o n o f C h r y s e s , a n d then he d o e s all that he can t o m a k e us b e l i e v e that the s p e a k e r is n o t H o m e r , but the a g e d priest himself. ( 3 9 3 a / b )

All that follows in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, Plato concludes, is cast "in this double f o r m " (393b) ("simple narration" in Homer's voice and language, and the imitation of the voices and language of others). This mixed (or "double") form mingles the two purer possibilities of the poet's

1

All my quotations are from Plato: Dialogues,

translated by Benjamin Jowett.

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simple narration (without any dialogue or even monologue in a character's voice) and of imitation, in which — as in dramatic tragedy or comedy — there is nothing but the speeches of characters, uninterrupted by the narrative voice. In his diatribe against imitation as a falling-away from the archetypal source of truth and virtue, Plato must outlaw both the purely imitative art in this narrow sense (drama) and those which from time to time descend to imitate the imperfect (narrative), leaving as the only admissible possibility the unmixed imitation of virtue (the lyric defined as hymns of praise to gods and heroes). These three manners of writing, "the two styles, or the mixture of the two, comprehend all poetry and every form of expression in words" (397c). There seems in this discussion, then, to be no ambiguity about the definitions of imitation and narration, which are mutually exclusive, though a writer like Homer mixes them. Of course, the dramatic effects of parts of the epic are exacerbated by the role of the rhapsode, who, in the oral performance of Homer, must mimic one character after another when he is not speaking in the narrative voice of Homer (393c). 2 The sins that Homer commits in parts of his works, the tragic poets extend to all of theirs. When Socrates refers in Book 10 to Homer as "the great captain and teacher of that noble tragic company" (595c) (or "tragedy and its leader, Homer" [598d]) and elsewhere lumps him with the "imitative tribe" of tragic poets (595b), it may be that Plato sees him as indulging sufficiently in those mimetic moments of quoted speech to open the way for the total dialogue form of tragedy, as well as furnishing the tragic poets with their master story; or it may be that Plato is again broadening his concept of imitation to one that joins all the verbal arts instead of distinguishing one kind of verbal art (the dramatic) from the others. Because of the shifting meaning of Plato's imitation it is difficult to be certain of the grounds on which Plato links Homer to the tragic poets. Is it because Homer has furnished them their master story? Or is it because Plato sees what he considers Homer's excessive use of the literally mimetic act of dialogue as a partially indulgent precedent for the total indulgence of dialogue in tragedy (in accordance with Plato's narrower definition of imitation)? Or is it because, like them and chief among them, Homer is

2

It is perhaps this function of the rhapsode as the imitator of Homer (in the purely narrative moment of the epic) as well as the imitator of the speaking characters (in the dramatic moments of the epic) that persuades Plato at moments to make Homer a member of the mimetic tribe of tragic poets, indeed their leader. At other moments (as in Book 3) he clearly separates them. Plato appears to see the presentational device of the rhapsode as an elocutionary performance of Homer, a mimetic art that has much in common with the drama. Thus he is led to confuse his categories f r o m time to time as he either associates Homer with writers of tragedy or distinguishes him f r o m them.

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guilty of representing imperfect and unworthy actions of gods and humans (in accordance with the broader definition of imitation that characterizes all the representational arts regardless of genre). 3 Still, it is clear that in Book 3 only the drama, or the dramatic moment that interrupts narrative, is termed "imitation", with other verbal artifice — mere words — apparently non-mimetic. Without warning, Plato has confined imitation to the one sort of representation that seeks to become a total illusion instead of allowing the term to define all the modes of representation. It is, however, the broader definition of imitation toward which Plato works in Book 10, and it is clear — as he moves back and forth between poetry and painting — that he means to overlook the kinds of distinctions so central to Book 3 when he looks at the nature of artistic representation generally, and finds it wanting, both cognitively and morally. By the time we are through with the definition that he arrives at in Book 10, drama and narrative are companion mimetic sinners, charged on similar grounds, rather than opponents, one the many-voiced imitator and the other the unchanging, single-voiced teller. It is significant that, though Book 10 begins by referring agreeably back to the damning judgment made against "the imitative kind of poetry" (595a) in Book 3, it rapidly shifts to the world of things and the representation of them by the painter. But this must shift the grounds on which Socrates has declared himself to be hunting for "a general definition of imitation" (595c). It is the one-to-oneness of relation between thing and representation that establishes the mimetic character of the latter. From general idea to a generic noun to a particular example of it in a thing, the direct passage from one to the other is a series of untransformed reflections. His argument is based, of course, on an unproblematic view of representation that recent judgments have taught us to think of as "logocentric". A word itself, a generic noun, contains the substantive idea within it, as the idea contains all its particular representatives within it. Hence Plato's acceptance of an assumption which, in our ontological insecurity, we must question rather than assume: "Whenever a number of individuals have a

' It should be pointed out that Plato's attack on the mimetic art o f dialogue — the employment o f speaking characters whose voices are distinct from the author's — should not be taken as inconsistent with his own dialogistic practice. We must remember that his own dialogues are not viewed by him as drama — whatever their apparent form on the page — simply because they are only to be read, and not performed. S o dependent does Plato seem to be on the literal manner o f presentation that he can attack, as mimetic, a narrative poem elocuted by a rhapsode while remaining oblivious to a piece o f writing (his own) composed only o f characters' speeches, so long as they are never to be actually delivered.

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common name, we assume that there is one corresponding idea or form [ . . . ] " (596a). From here he moves to his well known discussion of beds and tables — the universal "ideas or forms" of them, the particular examples of them made for use in our world, and the imitation of them by the painter. We must note that the ground for establishing this sequence rests primarily on visual resemblance, what Plato hastens to call "appearances" (598b). Indeed, he invokes the metaphor of the mirror (596d) to make his point. How may one appear to be a universal maker, a maker of "earth and sky and the gods, and all the things which are in heaven or in the realm of Hades under the earth"? [...] there are many ways in which the feat might be quickly and easily accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round — you would soon enough make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and furniture and all the other things of which we were just now speaking, in the mirror. (596c-e)

When it is objected that these creations would only be "appearances", Socrates eagerly agrees, labeling the painter just such "a creator of appearances" (596e), appearances of particular beds each of which is in its turn only a "semblance" of "the idea which according to our view is the real object" (597a). On this ground for discovering the "general definition of imitation" (595c) — the realm of hard things and their visible representations — we can understand why Plato has shifted from the verbal to the visual arts, from poetry to painting. This general definition rests on art's capacity to mirror the real thing by making an illusionary substitute for it, so that the visual and spatial art is clearly a more appropriate example than is the verbal and temporal art. When he moves back to the poet, he hopes to carry with him the advantages of the definition which he derived by discussing the painter. Yet once again it is Homer he focuses upon, even though it is not now Homer's habit of speaking through the mouths of others that concerns him, but the fact that he is "an image-maker, that is, by our definition, an imitator" (599d). The poet is like a painter w h o [...] will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colors and figures. [...) In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colors of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in meter and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well — such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. (600e —601b)

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There are few better examples of the position read into Horace's later phrase, ut pictura poesis4. Yet here, quite clearly, the common ground between painter and poet depends not at all on the poet's attempt — through dialogue — to imitate the voices of his characters. Instead, it depends on the poet's capacity to create images, in his verbal way, different as it is from the painter's. Socrates now can even add that undramatic poet, Hesiod, to Homer as his examples. So the definition of imitation is general and consequently is far removed from the limited definition of Book 3. And it would include all the varieties of poetry — dramatic, narrative, lyric — so long as they were characterized by the poet's misleading power as "image-maker". Still the poet's objective, however misguided, must require him to use his more indirect medium to follow as best he can (with his inferior instrument) in the footsteps of painting, the model art which produces duplications directly, as the visual substitute for its object. Plato's invocation of painting to emphasize the visual character of mimetic illusion allows him to bring together the several varieties o f the verbal arts by means of their image-making power: poetry thus creates mimetic images for the mind's eye as painting does for the body's eye in accordance with a theory of mental imagery consistently put forward by Plato. But he can use this theory only by relying on a metaphorical use of "image" (as applied to words) that elides differences between the verbal and the visual. On the other hand, in Book 3 poetry itself could be literally and even visually mimetic — as much involved with illusion as painting is — so long as it was exclusively dramatic poetry that was spoken of. Painting is invoked as the model art, then, only when dramatic poetry can no longer serve as model because our interest in poetry wants to broaden into its non-dramatic forms. So the confusion about the relation between painting and poetry or about the relation between the several poetic genres and imitation reflects Plato's primary confusion about which aspect of poetry he sees as responsible for its mimetic character: is it poetry's capacity in all its forms to give us verbal equivalents of visual images or is it its capacity — through speaking and acting characters in drama — to duplicate actual people speaking and acting in the world of actual experience? Only one of these is literally mimetic in the way that painting is — hence the narrowing to drama (and the dramatic aspect of narrative, especially in the elocution of the rhapsode). The literally mimetic, then, which normally would seem to be the province of sculpture or painting, can also be made to include poetry, so

4

Horace: Satires,

Epistles

and Ars

Poetica — "Ars Poetica", 1. 361.

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long as we speak only of the dramatic mode of representation, as circumscribed by the narrow meaning given to imitation in Book 3. But of course the literally mimetic in art is carefully delineated in order to be most seriously condemned, condemned because it is false, in every way deceiving its audience. It is its dependence upon illusion that enables it to practice its deception, and it is only in drama that the verbal arts can find a wholly illusionary form, as illusionary as what we find in sculpture or painting, and hence especially culpable among the verbal arts. Only in drama are we encouraged to see a representation as if we were witnessing real experience. This separation of the dramatic from the rest of poetry while allying it to the visual arts — all in the subversive interest of illusion — is echoed in the Sophist, a late dialogue in which the poet, by using the deceptions of illusion, becomes one of the guises the sophist assumes. Where Plato discusses the artist in the earlier portion of the Sophist, he emphasizes the deceptive character of those visual distortions, those misrepresentations related to perspective, which cater to our interest in appearances, in apparent accuracy. But as he recapitulates his argument at the end, he extends the falseness of aesthetic illusion to cover the poet as well. In his sequence of distinctions late in the dialogue, Plato reaches the class of image-making and the sub-class within it of the fantastic, producer of false and illusionary images. These lead to one further subdivision between "one kind of fantastic images which is produced by instruments and another in which the creator of the apparition is himself the instrument" (Sophist 267a). This would seem to be the distinction between the plastic artist using his materials and implements and the impersonating actor of drama or the rhapsode of the dramatic portions of narrative (playing, one after the other, each of the several roles). As it did within the narrow focus of Book 3 of the Republic, this act of impersonation becomes the sole criterion of imitation here: "When anyone, by the use of his own body, makes his figure or his voice appear to resemble yours, imitation is the usual name for this part of the phantastic art. [...] Let this, then, be named the art of mimicry" (267a). Through the illusion produced by the act of impersonation, a language art turns itself into a natural sign, and into a mode of sophistry. But Plato's general devotion to what has been called "visual epistemology" leads him sometimes to attribute image-making to less immediate means. 5 Nevertheless, since poetry at large, including non-dramatic genres (as seen — for example — in Book 10 of the Republic), consists of

5

I borrow the phrase from Robinson: The Shape of Things Known: Sidney's Apology in its Philosophical Tradition·, see especially Chapter 1: "The Tradition of Visual Epistemology".

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conventional (though no more than arbitrary) signs, it can produce internal pictures only through the interpretation of words, mediating signifiers which must be converted into meaning — and, presumably, into mental images — through the transformation governed by their controlling code. With signs in the verbal arts there is no immediacy of movement from physical stimulus to mental image such as a natural-sign art like painting permits. But in a definition of poetry-as-imitation that is contained within the domain of dramatic illusion (as in Book 3 and as confirmed in the Sophist), literature can be permitted to join with painting in the mimetic function of aesthetic signs as natural signs, even if only to be charged and exiled by the priggish moralist. We must remember that Plato dealt profoundly with the relation of language to natural signs in the Cratjlus, in which he argues for the mimetic function of words. There, despite his confusing playfulness, he must urge the "natural" fitness of words to their meaning, their morethan-arbitrary, more-than-conventional character. At moments almost wanting them to approach becoming natural signs just this side of onomatopoeia, he draws back and leaves the claim to be made by Cratylus and only fleetingly by Socrates who, when it counts, can deny that a name is a vocal imitation of that which the vocal imitator names or imitates (423b). Thus a name is "not a musical imitation", and "the art o f naming" has nothing to do with forms of imitation like "music and drawing" (423cd). Yet "the name is an imitation of the thing" (430b): "the correct name indicates the nature of the thing" (428e). Further, it has the obligation to represent accurately the nature of the thing, though it must be conceded "that pictures are also imitations of things, but in another way" (430b). And that difference is all-important to the conclusion of that baffling dialogue. Socrates' subsequent argument makes clear his commitment to the distinction between sensible signs (as in pictures) and intelligible signs (as in words). And it is this distinction that underlies the further distinction we have made over the centuries between the natural sign and the arbitraryconventional sign (arbitrary with respect to its object, though conventional, as a code, with respect to its community of users). This distinction, resting on the resemblance between signifier and signified in the natural sign and the lack of sensory relation between them in the arbitraryconventional sign, has assumed that the natural sign functions immediately while the arbitrary-conventional sign requires a translating mediation in order to function. So Plato can claim a natural and imitative fitness between picture and thing, as he makes this claim in the realm of the sensible when speaking of pictures, as he can claim this fitness in the realm of the intelligible when speaking of words. It is in either case a "visual epistemology" yielding internal pictures, though this mental imagery must occur through

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very different processes in the two cases. This distinction would preserve his right to speak of poetry as mimetic in the broad sense of verbal representation in Book 10 of the Republic. But when, in Book 3 or in the Sophist, Plato equates imitation with literal impersonation, he yields to the temptation which he often feels in dealing with the fallen world of art — the temptation that caters to sensible appearances — as he tries to bring poetry into the sensible world of natural-sign immediacy that characterizes the visual arts. Of course, one must note the extent to which his entire conception of natural-sign imitation rests upon an unproblematic notion of how pictures represent and how the viewer reacts to the representation: from thing to picture of the thing to our internal image of the picture as if it were the thing. In moving to the intelligible mental imagery produced by words as pictorial translations, the semiotic rests upon an equally simple view of transparency, only slightly less immediate. The process must merely tolerate a middle (mediating) but untransforming element to intrude itself: from thing to its equivalent word to its idea to our internal image of our pictured idea as if it were the thing. So whichever way one conceives poetry as mimetic — as an intelligible surrogate for the sensible or as itself a sensible impersonation — the one-to-one simplism remains as the basis for the conception. Yet the difference between these two ways of treating poetic imitation has a crucial consequence for the history of literary theory, particularly for the place of drama in the history of theory. Plato's broad view of literary imitation seemed enough to allow him to condemn poetry merely because, as an intelligibly based art, it creates mental images through its verbal representation. So we may wonder why, as if not content with this broad attack grounded in his acknowledgment that poetry cannot be a natural-sign art, he should feel the need for those moments when he collapses poetry's mimetic guilt into the dramatic, using drama's peculiar representational character as an impersonator of reality to open it to his attack upon it as if it were a natural-sign art indeed. At these points the drama, or the dramatic elements in narrative, stand alone among the verbal arts (though together with the visual arts), apparently leaving the other verbal arts outside the definition of imitation and thus exempt from being condemned as mimetic (though of course they can be taken care of later on the other grounds that recognize that they are intelligible rather than sensible, but can condemn them nonetheless). The reason for these lapses, I would suggest, is that they represent Plato's attempt to find a place for poetry within the spatial and visual categories of art because of his special concern for the sense of sight, and thus his desire to include poetry among the arts to be condemned for their exclusive traffic with the realm of appearance, and hence of illusion. Why not, then, seize upon that mode of poetry which seems calculated to deceive our senses?

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Other theorists through the centuries will also feel the special illusionary force o f the drama as an immediate visual presence, while reserving for another class o f considerations those problems deriving f r o m poetry (primarily non-dramatic) as a temporal art. O n c e thus cut o f f by Plato, drama seems to continue its lone, privileged path as a special (and spatial) m o d e o f representation, one requiring its o w n poetic, to be distinguished f r o m the poetic o f the other kinds o f verbal art. I repeat that this difference between the developing poetic of the drama and the poetic o f the other literary genres reflects the differing demands o f the natural-sign arts and the arbitrary-conventional-sign arts; and this familial separation within literature echoes the more general separation between the plastic arts and literature as a family. Plato has helped us see that it is the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible that the distinction between natural and arbitrary-conventional signs was all about. II. We may after all understand Plato's singling out o f drama, the special vituperation which he reserves for the "imitative tribe" (the writers of dramatic tragedy [595b]), once we recognize that his antipathy to imitation is metaphysically and thus morally rooted in his concern about the sensual (and in this case the visual) consequences of the world o f appearance. Hence his desire to expel it as a threat to the Republic's health. It is more surprising — and instructive — to find that even Aristotle, who responds to Plato with a p r o f o u n d defense o f literary imitation, in an unguarded moment b o r r o w s f r o m Plato, his precursor-antagonist, the narrow definition o f imitation that isolated drama from its sister verbal arts. It is the more surprising, in view o f the care with which Aristotle, from the start o f the Poetics6, defines imitation as his central term and concept, g i v i n g it a broadly inclusive coverage. It explicitly includes all the " v a r i o u s k i n d s " o f poetry, however they may differ f r o m one another in the " m e d i u m " o f imitation, the " o b j e c t s " o f imitation, or the " m a n n e r o f m o d e " o f imitation (1449a). In Chapter 3 Aristotle clearly distinguishes drama from the other kinds by virtue o f the difference in its " m a n n e r " , even if the " m e d i u m " and the " o b j e c t s " are the same (1448a). D r a m a , as that kind which — whatever its " m e d i u m " and " o b j e c t s " — presents all the "characters as living and m o v i n g before u s " , is distinguished from " n a r r a t i o n " , which is of t w o types, depending on whether the poet decides to " t a k e another personality as H o m e r does, or [to] speak in his own person, u n c h a n g e d " (1448a). Obviously, these distinctions in Aristotle's

6

All my quotations are from Aristotle: Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, Butcher.

translated by S. H.

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third chapter repeat Plato's in his third book; but Aristotle insists that the poet does "imitate by narration" as much as he does by representing the action in drama. These are equally modes o f imitation since the "objects" o f their imitation are "men in action", and narrative as well as drama imitates men in action, though in its own "manner". Imitation, then, does not have the restriction to one mode of direct representation that it has for the Plato o f Book 3 and — I would add — o f the Sophist. (I have acknowledged that Plato's own definition is similarly broadened elsewhere, but in the place where he makes the distinctions among literary kinds which Aristotle clearly takes up, he restricts imitation to dramatic impersonation. Hence Aristotle's departure is significant.) But, after clearly using imitation throughout the Poetics in a way that includes all the "various kinds" o f poetry, in Chapter 24 Aristotle suddenly reverts to Plato's narrower meaning, that which would restrict imitation to dramatic representation, whether in plays or in the dialogue portion of narratives. Speaking approvingly o f Homer for staying out o f the action as much as he does, Aristotle asserts: " T h e poet should speak as little as possible in his own person, for it is not this that makes him an imitator. Other poets [unlike Homer] appear themselves upon the scene throughout, and imitate but little and rarely" (1460a). T h e dramatist, needless to say, does nothing but imitate. In this passage all the parts o f the poem which are in the voice of the poet, rather than in the voices o f the characters, are not imitations. For it is the poet's speaking in the persons o f others "that makes him an imitator". This passage occurs in the midst o f Aristotle's discussion o f epic — begun in Chapter 23 — and his attempt to judge it as a rival to tragedy. 7 Aristotle wants to counter Plato's condemnation o f drama by arguing for a preference o f the dramatic "manner" over the narrative "manner", so that it is not surprising that he has allowed imitation to be reduced to its purest form in drama, with tragedy becoming a synecdoche for general poetic mimesis, as his scientific analysis gives way to the privileges o f hierarchy. With the unmediated representation o f tragedy as the model, that variety o f epic which most closely approaches it — in spite o f the lingering handicaps o f its own "manner" — is best. Since for Plato imitation was bad and drama was the most extreme version o f imitation, he charged Homer with speaking too little in his own voice and too much in the voices o f his characters; since for Aristotle imitation is salutary and drama is the most extreme version o f imitation, he praises Homer for 7

1 must in fairness add that, by the start o f Chapter 25, Aristotle again speaks o f the poet as " m i m e t i c artist" in the broad sense that characterizes all forms o f poetry as it characterizes art produced by "any other image-maker" (1460b). T h e Plato-like aberration caused by the comparison o f tragic to epic " m a n n e r " is behind him and out o f sight.

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hiding himself behind his characters as much as he does. Both see Homer's narrative moving toward drama; Plato deplores it while Aristotle applauds. Both are conceding to drama, at least momentarily, an unmediated representation that seems to make only it deserving of having the word imitation applied to it, converting it into the one literary kind that can overcome the handicap of language as an arbitrary-conventional medium and can truly, "naturally" imitate, even as the plastic arts do. What makes this momentary lapse in Aristotle's use of imitation significant (aside from its indication of the hold Plato has upon him even in his dissent) is the fact that it runs counter to a main objective of the Poetics — Aristotle's formalist desire to transcend Plato's limited concern for the separate, imitated objects by concentrating upon the poem as itself one integral, formed object. For Aristotle the imitation refers to the created structure that overrides the individual elements in it (hence his choice of the probable impossibility over the possible improbability). So imitation for Aristotle derives from the "formal cause". But the Platonic restriction of imitation to impersonation, borrowed by Aristotle in his Chapter 24, limits the power of imitation to taking advantage of the peculiar capacities of the dramatic "manner" — even in epic! — at the cost of the larger, formal notion of imitation as poetic structure. (Aristotle here seems to give the epic — because it is not limited to what is representable on the stage — the freedom to introduce the element of "wonder" (1460a). Yet this difference is not intended to raise the epic above the drama. Indeed Aristotle is here comparing the two genres to demonstrate the superiority of the drama — on the grounds of its compactness, its capacity to accomplish its end more efficiently, within a smaller, more contained compass. So the freedom from representational restriction, the freedom to wander into the wonderful, is, within these Aristotelian criteria, no virtue. What is not representable within the constraints of stage "imitation" is a threat to the formalist structures of the Aristotelian system.) This dependence on characters visibly in action means that Aristotle, at least in this context, limits imitation to his "efficient cause" so that it is applicable to drama only, that is, to the one natural-sign manifestation in poetry. It is this Platonic hangover, given Aristotelian sanction, that — we shall see — will be carried over to the "verisimilitude" version of imitation that characterizes French dramatic criticism in the 17th Century, in which the natural-sign character of drama is carried to its farthest consequence. III. What we are confronting is an aesthetic directed toward an ideal of pure natural-sign representation. Its basis in imitation theory led to its assigning aesthetic value to the extent that the imitation approximated its object of

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imitation. I put it this way despite the fact that Plato, as moralist, rather insisted that the greater the aesthetic value — that is, the more mimetic, the more illusory and deceptive the representation — the more it was to be condemned on both moral and metaphysical grounds. But once a higher worth was put on our phenomenal experiences, the more positive view o f aesthetic value, and o f mimetic fidelity, took over our judgments o f all the arts. By the 18th Century, which produced a comfortable epistemology for this variety o f mimetic theory, with the visual arts leading the way, the slogan ut pictura poesis imposed itself on the poet. He was required to spatialize his temporal object by naturalizing his arbitrary instrument, so that he might compete in an aesthetic drawn to the specifications o f another art, a natural-sign art. There is perhaps no clearer statement o f the natural-sign aesthetic than we find in a few paragraphs o f Addison's Spectator No. 416, from his Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination (1712). 8 Adapting Locke's epistemology too uncritically, Addison — as is so often the case — allows his popularizing intent to denude the more carefully drawn distinctions he has borrowed and to press them toward an extreme though commonplace statement, the special value o f which is its capacity to let us see the consequences o f the position. In these paragraphs he sets forth a spectrum running from the art closest to being a natural sign to the art that is farthest from it. Thus he begins with sculpture, the art which, in its threedimensionality, could almost be mistaken for what it imitates. "Among the different kinds o f representation, statuary is the most natural, and shows us something likest the object that is represented." 9 Painting is only a bit further from pure naturalness as an art: despite the appearance o f similarity between the imitation and its object, the two-dimensionality o f the representation o f a three-dimensional object creates in physical, touchable reality a significant difference between them. Clearly there is a greater need in painting than in sculpture for a medium to create an illusionary naturalness in the art work as sign — which is all it is. O f course, we have left art as natural sign well behind when we move along to the verbal arts, even though Addison's sole interest is in the verbal art of "description", the use o f words to create a mental picture: "Description runs yet further from the things it represents than painting; for a picture bears a real resemblance to its original, which letters and syllables are wholly void o f . " 1 0 As Addison completes his spectrum, only music, in

8

I am passing over the later classical period and the Renaissance in order to get at once to those writers whose statement of the natural-sign aesthetic is most openly revealing.

9 10

Addison: Works vol. 3, p. 411. Ibid.

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which — he concedes — mimetic meanings (if any) are "confused" 11 and "imperfect" at best, remains to move us toward the pole of totally arbitrary signs. This concept of natural-sign representation rests on Addison's mimetic definition of the "secondary pleasures of the imagination". 12 These secondary pleasures arise from recollections in our mind of our original sensory experiences, including those recollections strengthened through the stimulation of an art object. This is, of course, Addison's extension of Locke's basic distinction between "sensation" and "idea" ("idea" as mental image, the recollected sensation in the absence of the object). Thus those secondary pleasures deriving from art (rather than from unaided memory) proceed "from that action of the mind, which compares the ideas arising from the original objects, with the ideas we receive from the statue, picture, description, or sound that represents them". 13 This mimetic view seems to value art largely because of its function as mnemonic object, which serves to remind us of the primary object of actual experience which it seeks to imitate. The pleasures of art are not called "secondary" pleasures for nothing. A literal imitation must assume the superiority of real experience to art, the superiority of the imitated object to that reproduction which can do little more than point toward its "origin", recalling the stored mental snapshots of our original sensory experiences. Further, its reductive notion of artistic mimesis assumes — as Plato did — that the work of art must be no more than a collection of represented objects, each related, separately, to its original rather than to one another: the work is to consist of objects as imitated rather than being itself a made object. This is the reason why it is more accurate to speak of the origins of the work of art as the "real" objects of experience out there rather than as the creative mind of its author as maker, since that mind is given little enough to create — especially when the artistic process is to seek representational immediacy, thus avoiding the intrusions of any medium. Pope's injunction, written at much the same time, applies to poets as well as the critics he was addressing: "First follow nature [...]". 1 4 This fidelity to its external, "real" origins in experience is what makes the natural sign the highest achievement of the work of art. It also dictates that the visual arts, as natural-sign arts, are the model arts for the others, and that the disadvantaged art of literature must struggle against its handicap as an arbitrary-conventional-sign art and still try to imitate as best it can, seeking to do in its way what comes naturally to sculpture and painting, the 11 12 13 14

Ibid. p. 412. Ibid. p. 411. Ibid. p. 412. Pope: Hssaj on Criticism

1.68, p. 4.

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providing o f "images" to match "reality". Hence "ut pictura poesis erif'.xb It is no wonder that Addison in this passage speaks only o f "description" 1 6 as the product o f the verbal arts, and that "landscapes" and "portraits" were treated in the 18th Century as poetic genres as well as painterly genres. I f we extend this line o f argument, nature itself, the prime mover, is itself as much superior to the visual arts as the latter are superior to literature. Logic would suggest that the best art object is that which tends toward self-effacement as art in favor o f appearing to be the natural object itself: all works try to become the substitute without difference; all would approach the trompe I'oeil. Hence, as we have seen, the special virtue o f sculpture and the special disadvantage o f the verbal arts (unless, o f course, we except the drama on the Platonic precedent, as Addison does not in this discussion). Obviously, immediacy is all in the illusionary identification between imitation and object. Therefore there should — if possible — be no medium at all, or at least no awareness o f any medium. We can, then, better understand Addison's attack on "false wit" (Spectator No. 58 —62) 1 7 because in "false wit" our consciousness o f words as words is forced to intrude upon what should be the unimpeded transparency o f "true wit" as naked bearers o f ideas. So confident a doctrine o f pure and unimpeded representation rests not only on a self-assurance about the transparency o f representational media (the visual ones automatically and the verbal ones by emulation), but also on an ontological assurance about "real experience" that even the epistemological doubts suggested by empiricism could not shake. Not that Addison adhered to this rigid, and rigidly self-denying, view consistently, not even for the balance o f Spectator No. 416. I will only touch here on the curious and instructive turn that he makes, perhaps out o f his fidelity to literature as a verbal art, in order to examine the other side o f the pictorial disadvantage o f words: to give that art an unexpected ascendancy — despite all he has done earlier to subject it to the visual arts and to nature. Indeed, it suddenly emerges as potentially their superior, and precisely because o f its arbitrary (non-natural) signs. T h e very fact that verbal description is not limited to what we are able to view at a given

15

By this time a change in punctuation attributed to the Pseudo-Acron of the fifth century had allowed the neo-classical injunction to become the more insistent. Horace's phrase, ut pictura poesis, distorted from its originally unaggressive context (Horace: Satires,

Epistles

and Ars Poetica — "Ars Poetica", 1. 361), is given new dictatorial power as a carrier o f the natural-sign aesthetic when it is transformed to "ut pictura poesis erit". This change and its influence are discussed in Hagstrum: The Sister Arts, pp. 59 — 61. 16

Addison: Works vol. 3, p. 411.

17

Ibid. vol. 2, p. 3 4 2 - 3 6 2 .

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point in space and time allows it to range freely beyond what a picture, as a natural sign, permits: " [ . . . ] in the survey of any object we have only so much of it painted on the imagination, as comes in at the eye; but in its description, the poet gives us as free a view of it as he pleases [ . . . ] " . 1 8 The property of words is such that they can stimulate "stronger colors" in the imagination than a faithful reproduction can. Further, the fact that language, as made up of arbitrary signs, is a mediating instrument means that it permits — indeed requires — interpretation, so that readers "have a different relish of the same descriptions" because of "the different ideas that several readers affix to the same words". It is this capacity of words as medium to excite the reader in ways not open to the faithful picture that allows Addison to turn the mimetic privileges around by finding that the poet seems to get the better of nature; he takes, indeed, the landskip after her, but gives it more vigorous touches, heightens its beauty, and so enlivens the whole piece, that the images which flow from the objects themselves appear weak and faint, in comparison to those that come from the expressions. 19

Needless to say, what is true of nature is, a fortiori, true of natural-sign representation, and the poet can exceed both. It is this emphasis on the subjective power unleashed by arbitrary signs that leads to the open attack on natural-sign art by Edmund Burke. In

Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the emotional release, the pure subjectivity, encouraged by language leads him to relegate the visual arts to a lower order, to the realm of the "beautiful" instead of the preferred "sublime". This is his answer to the claims of Abbe Du Bos who, according to Burke, "gives painting the preference to poetry in the article of moving the passions; principally on account of the greater clearness of the ideas it represents". 2 0 But Burke insists that clarity and the appeal to the passions are opposed rather than mutually supportive, and precisely on the grounds that sever natural signs from the w a r m l y human response. It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it a f f e c t i n g to the imagination. If I make a drawing of a palace, or a temple, or a landscape, I present a very clear idea of those objects; but then [...] my picture can at most affect only as the palace, temple, or landscape would have affected in the reality. On the other hand, the most lively and spirited verbal description I can give, raises a very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than I could do by the 18 15 20

Ibid. vol. 3, p. 413. Ibid. p. 413 and 414. Burke: A Philosophical p. 61.

Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and

Beautiful,

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best painting [...]. In reality a great clearness helps but little towards affecting the passions. 2 1

Thus obscurity is linked with passion while clarity is cut off from it. For verbal signs, because of their non-natural character, their failure to represent with the fidelity of a picture, can stimulate the wellsprings of the passions to open and flow freely. The visual, constrained within the finitude of the outlines of things, can only inhibit those passions. Burke seems to have extended Addison's claims for the advantages of our varying interpretations of words ("the different ideas that several readers affix to the same words" 2 2 ) and their connotative potential for emotional appeal. Thus it is the very arbitrariness of language as signs that permits the stimulation, as it is the fixed, mimetic naturalness of the pictorial arts as signs that precludes it. The valorizing of the subjectivity of response, and — even more — of the obscurity that allows it, not only leads away from painting and toward poetry, but also, within poetry, leads away from those genres like drama, which are less distant from the natural-sign arts, and toward the lyric, the subjective and privately obscure lyric such as the history of literature shortly will provide. IV. Let us return to Addison's more orthodox statement about poetry's relation to natural signs. In it poetry was championed as description so that it could seek — despite its obvious handicaps — to become the verbal equivalent of painting. But there is, as we have seen in Plato, a more efficient (because more "natural") way than description by which words can emulate the natural-sign art: by the employment of the dramatic "manner". Addison, content to concern himself with the mental images conjured up by the "idea" stimulated by verbal description, does not look for this way. In the later 18th Century, it is Lessing, protagonist for the drama, who extends and completes the attempt to convert poetry into a natural-sign art. He does it, strange to say, by appearing — but only appearing — to undermine the natural-sign aesthetic that I have associated with Addison. For his Laokoon (1766) seems expressly aimed against those who would use poetry to make verbal pictures. Nevertheless, he remains a propagator of essentially the same aesthetic. The opening lines of his Preface assert the common mimetic, illusionary objective of painting and poetry: " [ . . . ] both represent what is absent as if it were present, and appearance as if it

21 22

Ibid. p. 60. Addison: Works vol. 3, p. 414.

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were reality; both deceive and the deception of both is pleasing." 23 Here again is the appeal to art's mnemonic character; here again what Plato found vicious in the imitative arts has been converted into their virtue, thanks to an aesthetic validated by an empiricist psychology that accepts appearance, for all its deceptiveness, as reality enough. But Lessing goes on to establish a mimetic function for poetry that differs from that of painting as the temporality of verbal sequence differs from the spatiality of the pictorial instant. And he enjoins poetry to shun any attempt at static description, the proper business of painting, in order to indulge the kind of consecutive images appropriate to poetry as a temporal art. Consequently, he has been credited with helping to undermine the neoclassical injunction, utpicturapoesis, though he by no means releases poetry from its literally mimetic obligation, no less obligatory than painting's. Poetry is indeed freed from the obligation to provide "descriptions" (in Addison's sense of the word) that yield pictures for the painter, but it yields its own sort of pictures nonetheless — in effect moving pictures. This critical attitude would support the proscenium-arch theater in which the action is framed in a way that makes it the moving analogue to the framed painting as a "still life". Drawing a distinction between the "picturesque" ("malerisch") and the "picturable" ("malbar"), Lessing argues that poetry can be the former, though without being the latter, since it is full of time. 24 And he proceeds to distinguish between those pictures that emphasize the movement among objects rather than dwelling upon statically disposed objects themselves, the first properly the poet's and the second properly the painter's. Each may impose upon the other's proper realm to its own detriment, but the Laokoon is dedicated to setting the matter straight. Indeed, it is Lessing's consequent emphasis on action as poetry's realm that makes him a faithful Artistotelian in spite of his lingering pictorialism: A l t h o u g h both objects, as visible, are alike capable of being subjects of painting in its strict sense; still, there is this essential difference between them, that the

23

24

Lessing: "Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie" (1766). Werke vol. 6, p. 9: "Beide [...] stellen uns abwesende Dinge als gegenwärtig, den Schein als Wirklichkeit vor; beide täuschen, und beider Täuschung gefällt." The English version of my quotations is from the translation by Robert Thillimore. Ibid. p. 100. — We can recall here the frequent discussion in the history of criticism (including Lessing's own) of Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad (Book 18). It is an ekphrasis, but of an imaginary object, one that — given its need for the temporal flow of implied narrative — could hardly be pictured, though surely it provides a brilliant series of pictorial images. In Virgil's description of the shield of Aeneas (Aeneid, Book 8), another widely discussed ekphrasis, the role of time, in this case of "unpicturable" prophecy, is even more central.

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action of o n e [poetry] is visible and progressive, its different parts h a p p e n i n g o n e after a n o t h e r in sequence of time; while o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , the action of the o t h e r is visible and stationary, its different parts d e v e l o p i n g themselves in juxtaposition in space. 2 5

H o w e v e r forcefully Lessing may a r g u e f o r the distinctness between time arts and space arts and thus the need to keep their mimetic f u n c t i o n s distinct f r o m one another, he insists that the poet, with his " p o w e r of setting f o r t h picturesquely the most unpicturable" 2 6 , should still p r o d u c e that w h i c h inspires the reader to mental r e p r o d u c t i o n of the visible world. Nevertheless, w e m u s t remember, "a poetical picture is n o t necessarily convertible into a material picture" 2 7 . It t u r n s out, then, that, for Lessing also, the mimetic f u n c t i o n of poetry leads us to reduce the role of the verbal m e d i u m to self-effacing transparency: "[...] the poet makes his object so palpable to us, that we b e c o m e m o r e conscious of this object than of his w o r d s . " 2 8 E v e n t h o u g h this picturesque object is in m o t i o n , "it brings us nearer to that degree of illusion of w h i c h the material picture is especially capable, and w h i c h is most quickly and easily called f o r t h by the contemplation of the material picture" 2 9 . Still, the poet creates his o w n illusionary object in his o w n slightly less effective way to the extent that we " b e c o m e m o r e conscious of this object than of his w o r d s " . So it is a verbal illusion that allows o u r mind the pictorial conversion, h o w e v e r different the kind of picture: h o w far have w e progressed f r o m A d d i s o n ' s m o r e conventional passages after all? At the start of Chapter 17 Lessing freely grants that w o r d s are arbitrary signs only, so that they differ f r o m painterly images in t w o ways: they are progressive and they are arbitrary instead of being static and natural. T h u s 25

26

27

28

29

Ibid. p. 102: " O b schon beide Vorwürfe, als sichtbar, der eigentlichen Malerei gleich fähig sind: so findet sich doch dieser wesentliche Unterschied unter ihnen, daß jener eine sichtbare fortschreitende Handlung ist, deren verschiedene Teile sich nach und nach, in der Folge der Zeit, eräugnen, dieser hingegen eine sichtbare stehende Handlung, deren verschiedene Teile sich neben einander im Räume entwickeln." — It is in defense of what Lessing feels to be his progressive Aristotelianism that he must write the Laokoon in order to do battle with the static universality of Winckelmann's Platonism. Ibid. p. 100: "[...] als der Dichter die unmalbarsten [Facta] malerisch darzustellen vermögend ist." Ibid.: "Ein poetisches Gemälde ist nicht notwendig das, was in ein materielles Gemälde zu verwandeln ist; [...]." Ibid.: "[...] sondern jeder Zug, jede Verbindung mehrerer Züge, durch die uns der Dichter seinen Gegenstand so sinnlich macht, daß wir uns dieses Gegenstandes deutlicher bewußt werden, als seiner Worte [..··]·" Ibid.: "weil es uns dem Grade der Illusion näher bringt, dessen das materielle Gemälde besonders fähig ist, der sich von dem materiellen Gemälde am ersten und leichtesten abstrahieren lassen."

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they are moving verbal sequences rather than still pictures, so that we can treat them as moving pictures only by a sort of metaphor that characterizes the way in which the reader's receptivity acts upon them. The poet does not merely wish to be clear; the prose writer is contented with simply rendering his descriptions lucid and distinct, but not the poet. He must awaken in us conceptions so lively, that, from the rapidity with which they arise, the same impression should be made upon our senses which the sign of the material objects that these conceptions represent would produce. In this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious of the instruments — his words — by which this effect is obtained. This was the source of the explanation of poetic painting which we have given. But a poet should always produce a picture [...]. 3 0

In this key passage of a document presumably dedicated to undermining the ut pictura poesis tradition, we find echoes of the age-old pictorial injunctions controlled by the rhetorical device of energeia, which in the Renaissance culminated in the presentational aesthetic of Jacopo Mazzoni: here too the poet, unlike the orator (Lessing's "prose writer"), is required to figure forth "images" or "idols" instead of engaging in discursive description. These may all be seen as extensions of Aristotle's (or even Plato's) separation of those kinds (or portions) of literary works in which words are forced into functioning as something like natural signs. If the poet leads us to "cease to be conscious of the instruments — his words", then, under the spell of the illusion, we seem to substitute the object itself for its representation, so that the medium itself disappears into its transparency. This suppression of the medium, and with it all consciousness of the artistic process, seeks to turn arbitrary signs — despite themselves — into the illusions of natural signs. It may seem odd that, despite Lessing's concern to keep the medium out of it, it is for him the medium of the particular art that, because of its intrinsic limitations, defines what the art can or cannot do. The temporal character of words and the spatial character of pictures determine what kind of object each art is capable of imitating: I reason thus: if it is true that painting and poetry in their imitations make use of entirely different means or symbols — the first, namely, of form and colour in space, the second of articulated sounds in time — if these symbols

30

Ibid. p. 1 1 0 : " D e r Poet will nicht b l o ß verständlich w e r d e n , seine V o r s t e l l u n g e n sollen nicht b l o ß klar und deutlich sein; hiermit b e g n ü g t sich der Prosaist. S o n d e r n er will die Ideen, die er in uns e r w e c k t e , s o lebhaft machen, daß w i r in der G e s c h w i n d i g k e i t die w a h r e n sinnlichen E i n d r ü c k e ihrer G e g e n s t ä n d e zu e m p f i n d e n glauben, u n d in diesem A u g e n b l i c k e der Täuschung, uns der Mittel, die er dazu a n w e n d e t , seiner W o r t e b e w u ß t zu sein a u f h ö r e n . Hierauf lief o b e n die E r k l ä r u n g des poetischen G e m ä l d e s hinaus. A b e r der D i c h t e r soll i m m e r malen; [...]."

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indisputably require a suitable relation to the thing symbolized, then it is clear that symbols arranged in juxtaposition can o n l y express subjects o f which the wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition; while consecutive symbols can only express subjects o f which the wholes o r parts are themselves consecutive. 1 1 Lessing terms the first o f these objects o f imitation "bodies" and s e c o n d " a c t i o n s " . C o n s e q u e n t l y , j u s t as t h e m e d i u m o f p a i n t i n g

the

requires

t h a t it a v o i d t h e t e l l i n g o f s t o r i e s t h a t a r e a p p r o p r i a t e t o t h e v e r b a l a r t s , t h e m e d i u m o f p o e t r y r e q u i r e s t h a t it a v o i d t h e d e s c r i p t i o n o f o b j e c t s t h a t are a p p r o p r i a t e t o the v i s u a l arts. O t h e r w i s e "the coexistence o f the b o d y comes into collision w i t h the consecutiveness o f language"32, so that the illusion, w h i c h d e p e n d s o n this o n e - t o - o n e relationship b e t w e e n

medium

a n d o b j e c t o f i m i t a t i o n , m u s t fail. S o , i n p o e t r y as i n p a i n t i n g , t h e m e d i u m is t h e d e t e r m i n i n g

f a c t o r o f t h e a r t a f t e r all, t h o u g h

only

because

it

f u n c t i o n s in a c c o r d w i t h an o b j e c t i v e so p u r e l y m i m e t i c (time f o r time, s p a c e f o r s p a c e ) , t h a t it d e t e r m i n e s a l s o t h a t a n y a w a r e n e s s o f i t s e l f b e eliminated. It is c l e a r t h a t , f o r L e s s i n g , a r t ' s m i m e t i c p u r p o s e r e q u i r e s t h a t all t h e arts ( t h o u g h in d i f f e r e n t w a y s ) seek a n a t u r a l - s i g n that

— as i f t h e m e d i u m w e r e n o t t h e r e

status so

— they may become

complete illusive

substitutes f o r the objects o f imitation. His letter t o Nicolai o f M a y 1 7 6 9 , s u m m a r i z e s this a r g u m e n t a t i v e t h r u s t o f the

26,

Laokootr.

[...] the m o r e painting gets away f r o m natural signs, o r mixes natural signs with arbitrary signs, the m o r e it gets away f r o m its highest point of perfection; while poetry approaches perfection the m o r e nearly, the m o r e its arbitrary signs approximate natural signs. Thus the higher painting is that which uses only natural signs in space and the higher poetry that which uses only natural signs in time. 3 3

31

32

33

Ibid. pp. 102—103: "Ich schließe so. Wenn es wahr ist, daß die Malerei zu ihren Nachahmungen ganz andere Mittel, oder Zeichen gebrauchet, als die Poesie; jene nämlich Figuren und Farben in dem Räume, diese aber artikulierte Töne in der Zeit; wenn unstreitig die Zeichen ein bequemes Verhältnis zu dem Bezeichneten haben müssen: So können neben einander geordnete Zeichen, auch nur Gegenstände, die neben einander, oder deren Teile neben einander existieren, auf einander folgende Zeichen aber, auch nur Gegenstände ausdrücken, die auf einander, oder der Teile auf einander folgen." Ibid. p. 113: "weil das Koexistierende des Körpers mit dem Konsekutiven der Rede dabei in Kollision kömmt". Wellek: A History of Modern Criticism vol. 1, p. 164. Wellek most shrewdly excised these passages from the letter to Nicolai and reminded me of their crucial significance. At several points over the next paragraphs I have altered his translations where a more literal rendering suited my purpose. — Lessing: Sämtliche Schriften vol. 17, p. 290: " [ . . . ] je mehr sich die Malerey von den natürlichen Zeichen entfernt, oder die natürlichen mit willkührlichen vermischt, desto mehr entfernt sie sich von ihrer Vollkommenheit: wie hingegen die Poesie sich umso mehr ihrer Vollkommheit nähert, je mehr sie ihre

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Illusion and Literary G e n r e

When we remember that the Laokoon, largely because o f the subject announced in its title, is mainly restricted to the epic (Virgil's and, o f course, as the inevitable master, Homer's) as its literary example, we better understand why, in his letter shortly afterwards, he must bring in the drama to complete the move o f the verbal arts toward the natural sign. I originally introduced Lessing into my survey by promising that he would extend and complete Addison's treatment o f literature within the framework o f the natural-sign aesthetic by using drama to convert poetry into a natural-sign art. 3 4 Until now we have seen him urge this conversion while being unable to make g o o d on it. Poetry must deal with the visible while not describing in a way that creates possible subjects for the painter or for our inner eye as mental painter. It must yield pictures — moving pictures — though these are not to be confused with what we normally take to be pictures as spatially bound entities, symbols in juxtaposition. Finally, it consists o f arbitrary signs and not — like paintings — natural signs, and yet it must be capable o f creating a sensible illusion not unlike that created by natural signs. T h o u g h a narration that must avoid static description, it yet creates an illusionary presence for its described action. T h e attempt by the language arts to describe a static picture leads only to the work o f the prose writer rather than the poet: it is a use o f arbitrary signs which does not permit them to rise beyond themselves. How, then, in narrative poetry, can arbitrary signs do more? How can they yield an illusion o f moving life comparable to what a painting does for a static object? E n t e r the drama. In his letter to Nicolai, Lessing takes recourse to various poetic devices as the means that seek to naturalize the arbitrary signs: Poetry must try to raise its arbitrary signs to natural signs: onlv that way does it differentiate itself from prose and become poetry. The means by which this is accomplished are the tone, the words, the position of words, the measure,

willkührlichen Zeichen den natürlichen näher bringt. Folglich ist die höhere Malerey die, welche nichts als natürliche Zeichen im Räume brauchet, und die höhere Poesie die, welche nichts als natürliche Zeichen in der Zeit brauchet." 34

I must concede that there are many places in Lessing's dramatic criticism, and in his debates with his fellow-critics, where — in contrast to the naive c o m m i t m e n t to the natural sign that I am stressing — Lessing indicates his awareness o f the need for the drama to be self-conscious about the illusionary character o f its medium. But Lessing's place in my historical narrative leads me to dwell upon his firmly stated claims for drama as the ultimate — and the only — natural-sign verbal art and to make that aspect o f his theory the ultimate statement o f the natural-sign aesthetic, even if he does display significant qualifications elsewhere.

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figures and tropes, similes, etc. All these bring arbitrary signs closer to natural signs, but they don't actually make them into natural signs [...]. 35

Lessing here is anticipating the efforts of recent critics — Sigurd Burckhardt comes most immediately to mind, though there are many others, several Russian Formalists among them — who seek to account for ways in which poems become poems by forcing their words to create a presence within themselves, in effect to corporealize themselves. These are strange demands to be made of the medium by a critic like Lessing who asks the poetic medium to be self-effacingly transparent. Even so, these devices are not in the end sufficient to make the transformation he seeks, since, as he acknowledges, the arbitrary signs do not quite change into natural signs — not this way. The quest for a fully mimetic poetry in the Laokoon, then, must be incomplete: narrative poetry cannot transcend its arbitrary means totally, nor can the completeness of illusion be attained, however high the hopes Lessing reveals in that treatise. Having exhausted the naturalizing possibilities of narrated poems, Lessing must — if he is to culminate his quest for poetry as a naturalsign art — abandon our epic masterpieces and follow the lead of Plato and Aristotle in his discovery of the special semiotic role of drama. By now the history of criticism has enabled him to use the terms "natural sign" and "arbitrary sign" toward which Plato and Aristotle, in dealing with drama and narrative, were groping (although, in my discussion of the two, I have freely imposed these terms at appropriate points in their arguments); but the specially narrowed notion of imitation (as applicable only to drama) which we have noted before is borrowed by Lessing now to make his own special case for drama. After speaking, in his letter to Nicolai, of those poetic devices (verbal and figural manipulations) which "bring arbitrary signs closer to natural signs, but [...] don't actually make them into natural signs", Lessing continues: [...] consequently all genres that use only these means must be looked upon as lower genres of poetry; and the highest genre of poetry will be that which transforms the arbitrary signs completely into natural signs. That is dramatic

33

Wellek: A History of Modern Criticism vol. 1, p. 164; Lessing: Sämtliche Schriften vol. 17, p. 291: " D i e Poesie m u ß schlechterdings ihre willkührliche Zeichen zu natürlichen zu erheben suchen; und n u r dadurch unterscheidet sie sich von der Prose, und wird Poesie. Die Mittel, w o d u r c h sie dieses t h u t , sind der T h o n , die Worte, die Stellung der Worte, das Sylbenmaß, Figuren u n d Tropen, Gleichnisse u.s.w. Alle diese D i n g e bringen die willkührlichen Zeichen den natürlichen näher; aber sie machen sie nicht zu natürlichen Zeichen [....]."

206

Illusion and Literary Genre

poetry; for in it words cease to be arbitrary signs, and become natural signs of arbitrary objects.36 Because of its peculiar mode of representation — flesh-and-blood creatures (actors) impersonating made-up poetic creatures (characters) who represent real people (objects of imitation) — drama converts literature's words into the moving pictures of a visual art. The words of a play, though arbitrary, like all words, are an imitation of an actual speech act: the words of a dramatic speech constitute a natural representation, in the mouth of a natural-sign speaker who speaks like his or her real counterpart, of our use of words as arbitrary signs. Thus the arbitrary signs of language, like the arbitrarily named fictional creatures who speak them, function within a mimetic operation in which actions and speeches are viewed by us as natural signs. In this way "words [...] become natural signs of arbitrary objects [Dinge\".v Drama has thus defied and triumphed over literature's inherent disadvantage as an arbitrary-sign art; but it also demonstrates its superiority to the spatial visual arts because only it can marry the natural sign to temporality, thereby imitating the sequence o f life itself. In this ultimate extension of the natural-sign aesthetic to literature, dramatic poetry alone becomes the most perfectly realized representation of the consecutiveness of human experience, because the fact that it is only a representation is most completely hidden, so that the illusion is most effective. In view of the real gesturing bodies on the stage, occupying three-dimensional space and moving in time as experience moves, there would appear to be no medium at all required to make the illusion do its work upon us. In nondramatic poetry the poet's attempt to produce something like (but not quite) natural-sign illusion requires a struggle to make words produce extraordinary effects; in drama the poet can relax in the assurance that the very mode of representation carries the illusionary effect within itself. In drama, as viewed by Lessing, it is as if the ancient poetic attempt to produce ekphrases as gestures to the superiority of the natural sign has been realizing itself all along in the easy production of those walking ekphrases, those living, moving, flesh-and-blood sculptures (pace Addison), who strut before us in their own space, so reminiscent of our own.

36

Ibid.: "[..·] folglich sind alle Gattungen, die sich nur dieser Mittel bedienen, als die niedern Gattungen der Poesie zu betrachten; und die höchste Gattung der Poesie ist die, welche die willkührlichen Zeichen gänzlich zu natürlichen Zeichen macht. Das aber ist die dramatische; denn in dieser hören die Worte auf willkührliche Zeichen zu sevn, und werden natürliche Zeichen willkührlicher Dinge."

37

Ibid.

Krieger: Representation in Words and in Drama

207

V. This argument for drama as the hybrid art that has overcome the inherent disadvantages of the verbal arts was anticipated in the previous century in the aggressive defenses of the most extreme practices of the neoclassical French theater, although it took Lessing to create a systematic rationalization for them. While most French dramatists and even their apologists may have been less rigid than their mythical, totally restrictive counterparts created for polemical purposes by a Dry den or a Johnson, the most consistent version of French neo-classical theatrical theory, as it affects the history of criticism, has certain logical consequences for which Lessing's natural-sign commitments are a systematic justification. It is true that the restrictions of French neo-classicism are usually looked upon as arising out of a narrow and legalistic formalism rather than out of a natural-sign interest in the drama. Indeed, they are taken to be an inheritance from, and an extreme extension of, Aristotle's formal analysis converted into prescriptive rules. It must be conceded that Aristotle's preference of tragedy to epic, toward the end (Chapter 26) of the extant version of the Poetics, rests upon the greater compression permitted by the dramatic form ("[...] the art attains its end within narrower limits; for the concentrated effect is more pleasurable than one which is spread over a long time and so diluted [...] it plainly follows that tragedy is the higher art, as attaining its end more perfectly." [1462a-b]). Lessing alludes to these grounds for Aristotle's preference in his letter to Nicolai: "Aristotle said that dramatic poetry is the highest, even the only, poetry, and he assigns second place to the epic only insofar as it is for the most part dramatic or can be dramatic." 3 8 In Aristotle this compactness is a virtue drama can display only by sacrificing the freedom of the epic — because the epic does not actually show us what it narrates — to treat the marvelous, even the monstrous, to tell grandiose lies with impunity. 3 9 Reversing Plato's hierarchy, Aristotle approves the restrictions of the drama that inhibit the more reckless elements of the poet's imagination. This recklessness, with its consequent freedom, leads the epic into a formal diffuseness and looseness that, for Aristotle, make it inferior to tragedy. But Aristotle sees the compact system of internal relations in tragedy as an intrinsic characteristic of the poem, not as an attempt by the play to

38

39

Ibid.: "Daß die dramatische Poesie die höchste, ja die einzige Poesie ist, hat schon Aristoteles gesagt, und er giebt der Epopee nur in so fern die zweyte Stelle, als sie größten Theils dramatisch ist, oder seyn kann." "The irrational, on which the wonderful depends for its chief effects, has wider scope in epic poetry, because there the person acting is not seen [...]. It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully." (Poetics, Chapter 24).

208

Illusion and Literary Genre

imitate the time-space conditions of the members of the audience in order to trick them into viewing it as a real part of their world. Hence the narrowly conceived unities of time and place, instrumental in producing verisimilitude for the French neo-classicists, should not be traced back to Aristotle as fellows of his highly prized unity of action. Aristotle's central concern for the "formal cause" as the primary stimulus of the tragic effect is shifted by the French to an expanded notion of the "efficient cause", "the manner of imitation", surely a minor affair for Aristotle. Indeed, French neo-classicism has the efficient cause take over the role of the formal as it, in effect, creates a semiotics of drama that changes what is being represented: since the stage is taken to be the real world itself, the words in the text can be taken to refer to the limited stage space and stage time (within a picture-frame stage) instead of, as in Aristotle, referring to the world of people, their acts in their time and their space, however those may be formally contracted for effective representation before us. The extreme tightness of French dramatic prescriptions may be traced to an almost perverse naturalism of semiotic desire. (I remind the reader that I am referring here to the extreme version of French 17th-Century dramatic theory rather than to the actual productions of a more interestingly varied dramatic practice.) The restrictive enforcement of the doctrine of "verisimilitude" could be and was interpreted as treating drama as the ultimate natural sign from the viewer's perspective, treating it — that is — as a mimesis that literalized the imagination by reducing the play to the audience's reality as bodies in the theater. The doctrine could be made to rest on the insistence that the play should approach a one-to-one relationship between stage time-and-space and audience time-and-space, between — that is — the passage of time represented onstage and the amount of elapsed time in the theater, as well as between the one place to be represented onstage and the singleness of the framed stage itself. Otherwise, the argument runs, the presentation would not be "verisimilar" and would not be credited by an audience who knew how little their time had advanced and that their space had not changed at all. The absurdity that this theory cultivated rested on the supposed desire to remove from the drama any obstacle of convention that would prevent us from mistaking the play for the real thing: this mistaking is what Lessing thought of as "illusion", though a Dr. Johnson would call it "delusion", saving "illusion" for a more self-consciously aesthetic activity. 4 0 The deliberate confusion that required the time and space of the represented fiction to be one with 40

Johnson: "Preface to Shakespeare, 1765". Johnson on Shakespeare vol. 1 (Works vol. 7), p. 77. — My use of Johnson's views here and later rest primarily on his introduction of the theater of illusion, as contrasted to delusion, in his defense of Shakespeare's violation of the French unities in this "Preface".

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209

the "real" time and space in the theater can be seen as arising from a desire to rid the play of all intrusions by a medium that, in calling attention to artifice, threatened the play's credibility as a real-life happening come upon by the audience. And such a suppression of the medium for the immediacy of illusion (in the sense of Lessing and the French, though not of Johnson) is precisely in accord with Lessing's objective in moving poetry toward becoming a natural-sign art. But of course French neo-classical drama accomplished the very opposite of this intent, since, as Dryden and others — including Corneille himself — freely point out, it is just where such rules of verisimilitude are closely followed that the plays seem reduced to the absurd extreme of un-lifelike artifice. That which would make them "natural" has turned them "conventional" as well as "arbitrary", beyond all chance of being "credited". And, ironically, these plays had no critic more disparaging of them on this matter than Lessing himself. For how can one hope to produce his desired illusion of reality when the rules imposed by the French version of verisimilitude maximize the artificial and minimize the "natural", instead of the other way around? For example, the liaison des scenes — with the stage never left vacant as a character remains onstage to link one scene to the next — could be justified as preventing any gap in the represented time sequence, so that members of the audience would feel that their own temporal continuity, where they sit, is not being violated onstage. Thus the natural signs they observe have their naturalness reenforced, as no dramatic conventions need intervene to account for the leap forward from one time period to another or from one place to another. Yet obviously the play that restrains its actions in order to observe the liaison des scenes must resort to considerable artifice, and — alas — very evident artifice, to do so; what is represented onstage is sometimes so awkwardly restricted that the unnaturalness of the compression of what we are permitted to see demonstrates the strain it imposes on the representation, thereby showing all too clearly that it is only a conventional representation and not life at all. Here, then, in the obvious artificiality that accompanies devices intended to produce the illusion of reality, we find another paradox that emphasizes the strange failings of the distorted and even impossible search after "nature", the search — that is — after the apparently "natural" to command our belief that the signs we see do not merely represent "nature", but are "nature". Yet another paradox, linked to this one, lurks within this restrictive dramatic practice. If the dramatist, in his desire to delude us, is forced to limit what he may directly represent, and must exclude much in his action that ought to be directly represented, he is likely to yield to the temptation of having his characters tell one another (and us) about what has happened or is happening elsewhere, if he is to get his action represented one way

210

Illusion and Literary G e n r e

or another. I have been observing from Plato onward the conflicting discussion of the two modes of representation, the dramatic and the narrative, and I have observed the tendency to ally one with the visual arts as potential natural signs and to resign the other to the realm of verbal arts that cannot rise beyond being arbitrary and conventional signs. Now, we have seen in Lessing the privileging of drama (in the Aristotelian tradition that sought to reverse — though on familiar grounds — Plato's special condemnation of drama) as the way to convert arbitrary signs to natural signs. Consequently, Lessing must want to expand that portion of the drama that shows the audience and hence functions as natural signs and must want to reduce that portion that tells the audience, since this portion is only narrative in disguise, no more than arbitrary signs after all. Indeed the best play, as a perfect structure of natural signs, would only show and never tell. But, as the extreme version of French neo-classical theater demonstrates, the more the collapsing of stage time and stage space reduces what may be shown, the more it expands what must be reported by one character or another for the audience's benefit. The more exclusive the quest for natural signs, the greater the need to resort to arbitrary signs as supplements. The desperate struggle to compress the stage action, so that its verisimilitude may deceive the audience into seeing it as real, leads instead to a severity that necessitates the increased employment of reported offstage action. This narrative intrusion on the dramatic, the theatrical, makes the members of the audience more and more aware of themselves as listeners, auditory recipients of a story being told, engaging in verbal activities that preserve their function within the conventions of an aesthetic transaction; they cease being fully engaged onlookers (even voyeurs) of a real happening they have come upon. The restrictions that were to have produced an unalloyed structure of natural signs end by producing more and more supplementation by arbitrary signs to the point that converts drama into mixed media, a melange of the shown and the reported, the would-be natural and the arbitrary-conventional. Such a dramatist employs supplementary narrative, just as, on the other side of the generic boundary, a narrative poet like Homer — as we have been reminded since Plato — produced supplementary dramatic (that is, quoted) episodes. But both have both, both mixed — neither "natural". The search for the dramatic purity of the natural sign inadvertently turns drama into a hybrid that betrays its ««naturalness. So Lessing's attacks on the French theater of the preceding century are understandable, since — whatever its mission was or could be interpreted as being — it is artificial, and obviously so, so that it is not likely to produce in its audience the natural-sign illusion he sought for drama. Yet we have seen how the arguments made in defense of the French theater may — however self-deludedly — seem aimed at that very objective.

Krieger: Representation in Words and in Drama

211

Perhaps what Lessing saw as its failure should have persuaded him of the futility of pursuing the myth of art — even drama — as a natural sign. This pursuit is self-defeating because, in the very making of art (even if as a would-be natural sign), the employment of various illusionary devices — and hence of artifice — must intrude, and with effects that should be seen as part of a transaction with the viewer-hearer from which the aesthetic (as non-real, as fictional) cannot be excluded. And this is the case even if the work of art is a would-be natural sign; indeed, my examination of French neo-classicism suggests that it is all the more the case as the work seeks to be a natural sign. If by saying this I am consigning the natural-sign aesthetic to the realm of self-deluding myth, I am only anticipating what the subsequent thinking about art has done — and shrewdly and effectively done — in our own century. VI. Dr. Johnson's well known response to the 17th-Century French version of the unities dwells precisely on the extent to which the doctrine of verisimilitude can be exposed as a most naive version of what I have called the myth of the natural sign. In returning us to the drama as a created fiction, Johnson is also, in effect, answering Lessing a year in advance of Lessing's major statement. (Johnson's Preface to his Shakespeare appears in 1765, a year earlier than Laokoon.) Johnson frees dramatic representation from a mimetic subservience to our empirical reality since such a subservience would deny the representation its own constructive power: "It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited." 41 The key phrase, it is clear, is the qualification, "in its materiality": echoing Aristotle's material cause, it points to the difference between the stuff of the world and the make-believe of stage illusion. It is not that the credibility of the drama as dramatic representation is being denied; what is being denied is our literal belief in the stage happening in its materiality as a real happening. We believe in it not as reality but as if it were reality. I quote again the often quoted lines: The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, f r o m the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. [...] It will be asked, h o w the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit due to a drama [...] representing to the author what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done [...]. The delight o f tragedy proceeds f r o m our conscious-

41

Ibid. p. 76.

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Illusion and Literary Genre

ness o f fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they w o u l d please no more. 4 2

Here, in the tradition of Aristotle, the arbitrary inventions of the playwright, subjected to the conventions of the generic literary occasion, presumably are made to achieve a propriety of their own that allows the auditor to receive the experience they impose as an acceptable substitute for nature, though hardly as the thing itself. It is in accordance with this view that Johnson acknowledges the purely nominal and conventional — in contrast to the ontological and "natural" — status of dramatic genres: Out of this chaos o f mingled purposes and casualties [the mixed nature of human experience that he refers to as 'the real state o f sublunary nature'] the ancient poets, according to the laws which custom had prescribed, selected some the crimes of men, and some their absurdities; some the momentous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter occurrences; some the terrors of distress, and some the gayeties of prosperity. Thus rose the t w o modes of imitation, k n o w n by the names of tragedy and comedy.41

Unlike these conventionally distinguished ancients, "Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition." Thus, his justification of Shakespeare maintains, though contrary to the rules, this is not contrary to nature. Indeed there is always an appeal open "from criticism to nature", 44 though obviously this is a more complex nature than that which gives rise to natural signs. Johnson's poet is giving us, though in another form, that "other" or second nature which Renaissance critics like Sir Philip Sidney recommended: "Only the Poet [...] lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature: in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew forms such as never were in nature." 45 As a precursor to Johnson, Sidney in The Defense of Poesie also finds in drama an exemplary genre as he seeks to distance all poetry — and especially the epic — from the truth of a literal mimesis in order to support 42

Ibid. p. 77 — 78. — It must be conceded that this extended argument in Johnson is hardly consistent with Johnson's writings elsewhere. Even in this essay I find two Johnsons: a realistic and particularizing Johnson, who can confound drama with the world of immediate experience, and a moralistic and universalizing Johnson, who would have drama improve upon the way things go in the world, as well as a third: the Johnson I am describing here, who celebrates our consciousness of the artifice of art as fiction. See my "Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson's Criticism of Shakespeare". Krieger: Poetic Presence and Illusion, pp. 55 — 69.

43

Johnson: "Preface to Shakespeare, 1765". Johnson on Shakespeare vol. 1 (Works vol. 7), p. 66; italics are mine. — This passage occurs as Johnson seeks to defend Shakespeare despite his violation of the neo-classical doctrine that calls for the purity of genres. Ibid. p. 67. Sidney: "The Defense of Poesie". Complete Works vol. 3, p. 8.

44 45

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213

his concept of poetry as a feigned fiction, a concept springing from the distinction between poetry and history he borrows from Aristotle: 46 [...] the Historian, affirming manie things, can in the clowdie knowledge of mankinde, hardly escape from manie lies. But the Poet [...] never affirmeth, the Poet never maketh any Circles about your imagination, to conjure you to beleeve for true, what he writeth: he citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for his entrie, calleth the sweete Muses to inspire unto him a good invention.

Consequently, since the Poets persons and dooings, are but pictures, what should be, and not stories what have bin, [readers or auditors] will never give the lie to things not Affirmatively, but Allegorically and figuratively written; and therefore as in historie, looking for truth, they may go away full fraught with falshood: So in Poesie, looking but for fiction, they shal use the narration but as an imaginative groundplat of a profitable invention. 47

As Aristotle demonstrated long before, one cannot press the history-poetry distinction without freeing poetry from nature and from the succession of actual events and subjecting it to the rules of its own operations. Indeed, the power and influence of the Poetics over the centuries have been due in large part to its shrewd instructions about how to impose humanly formed fables upon the casual sequences of history and to do so with forms that will move audiences despite their factual untruth. The several sequential parts of such dramatic forms, clearly, are governed by principles of internal relations which are anything but naturally derived. In the midst of the discussion I have quoted, Sidney explicitly introduces drama as his example to prove poetry's freedom from literal truth. And he does it by summoning stage illusion as his prima facie argument: "What childe is there, that coming to a Play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old doore, doth beleeve that it is Thebes?"48 This passage surely anticipates Johnson's similar defense (in the midst of the passage I have referred to) of the auditor's power to entertain dramatic //lusion, though without i&lusion. The enemy for Johnson is the French insistence that the stage cannot successively represent different places because the spectator "knows with certainty that he has not changed his place; and he

46

I d o not at all deny that Sidney's m a j o r attachment is to Plato rather than Aristotle, but — as is often the case with 16th-Century critics — his Platonism did not prevent him f r o m b o r r o w i n g e n o u g h f r o m Aristotle to free poetry f r o m historical reality, even if largely on metaphysical — and thus Platonic — rather than formalistic g r o u n d s .

47

Sidney: " T h e Defense of Poesie". Complete

48

Ibid.

Works vol. 3, p. 29.

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Illusion and Literary Genre

knows that place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis."49 Johnson answers with his enthroning of our imaginative power to entertain dramatic illusion and, consequently, to resist being deluded about what is art and what is reality. The crucial sentence is the one I have examined before: "It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited." 50 Certainly one should be able to entertain the change on the stage from one place to another once having granted the initial make-believe time and place of the first scene. (As Sidney said, no child believes he is in Thebes — in time and place — when he sees the name written as the denomination of what the stage represents.) After all, the leaps licensed by the imagination, if we are to grant the play its initial premises of time and place, make subsequent demands for shifts in time and place seem slight indeed. Or, in Johnson's powerful simplicity: "Surely he that imagines this may imagine more [...]. Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation." 51 For we know we are actually in none of those places but only in "a modern theatre", watching "players" pretending to be characters who are themselves artful creations and not real people. Despite the French idea, the great variety that can be admitted onstage to be represented is justified because place and, even more, time are utterly "obsequious to the imagination". How far we have come from the literal, surrogate function of the natural sign. In an argument that has been echoed many times, even in recent years, Johnson — after Sidney and with much more detailed argument — speaks for dramatic illusion rather than dramatic delusion. In what sense "illusion" and in what sense "delusion"? He sees illusion as a wilful version of delusion, a deception that is aware of itself even as it indulges itself. The spectator sees the duplicity in the play, but is complicitous in allowing it to function both ways. The sign in drama is no longer viewed as natural, but it does not totally lose its relation to the natural-sign myth. The makebelieve in the play requires that we respond to the sense in which it apparently claims to be a natural sign while ministering to our commonsense knowledge of it as anything but natural — as an artifact constructed out of arbitrary and conventional materials. In effect, the stage illusion is a fake imitation of the natural sign it pretends to represent, and as audience we share both in its pretension and in the deception behind that pretension.

49

5(1 51

Johnson: "Preface to Shakespeare, 1765". Johnson p. 76; italics are mine. Ibid. Ibid. p. 77.

on Shakespeare

vol. 1 (Works vol. 7),

Krieger: Representation in Words and in Drama

215

From this perspective, the worship of the myth of the natural sign turns out to be a theoretical deception not unrelated to the deliberate falseness of the stage illusion which — from the standpoint of a natural sign betrayed — can be read as dramatic deception: here stand apparently real people apparently interrelating as in life, except that their actions and speeches are directed by structural and theatrical requirements both arbitrary and conventional, playing within the realm of appearance, with the representations as in life always belied by the representations as if in life. From Plato through Lessing, the theorist who professes the naturalsign aesthetic seems to have been taken in by what the drama pretends to, and would even try to extend that deception to all the verbal arts; but theorists in the Johnson mold know better on both counts. So, unless we take the Johnson path, the semiotic on which we ground our aesthetics will fool us as the French — and even, in his own way, Lessing — wanted the drama to fool us. The myth of the natural sign, prompted by the example of drama, may have deceived the innocent mimetic theorist about the semiotic of the literary work of art, while in Johnson's view of drama, which converts both audience response and the semiotic itself, the viewer, in complicity with the ambiguous aesthetic occasion, helps to deceive himself or herself, to welcome the illusion in its duplicity, so that he or she is anything but innocent. The drama, given its peculiar character and the peculiar history of its theorists, may be viewed as the example par excellence of how the naturalsign aesthetic turned its deceived worshippers into willing victims of the temptation to convert aesthetic illusions into their delusions. And it is Johnson's corrective view, as developed through the 19th Century and into our own time, which permits us to see that naive conversion and to resist it. It is an unhappy — but should not be a surprising — consequence that, once the natural-sign aesthetic is displaced, the drama appears to suffer its own decline among competing literary genres as a newer theory authorizes a semiotic which privileges more unbounded kinds of verbal representation, mainly the novel and the lyric. In dealing with the nondramatic arts from the 19th Century on, one can extend this perspective by finding versions of the illusionary and its relation to would-be natural signs in both fiction and the lyric, but that is a complicated story — another story for another essay. VII. Instead of telling that story here, let me rather look beyond this capsule history of the role of the illusionary in dramatic theory and suggest briefly some general conclusions we might draw about the social-political role of the aesthetic — especially of this aesthetic — a role much talked of these days.

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The distinction we have been examining between illusion and delusion, a distinction at the heart o f the entire history o f theory o f the drama as would-be natural sign, becomes especially instructive as we look beyond aesthetic signs to those signs that a dominant culture creates and projects in order to dominate its social-political life. For it is just the attempt to authorize arbitrary signs, imposed by the conventional demands o f those in control o f an historic moment, to authorize them by insisting that they be seen as natural signs that can claim an eternal and universal sway — it is just this attempt that recent commentary reminds us is the instrument of political repression as well as a protection against that repression's being seen through and overcome. If, granting the semiotic desire for the natural sign, we see the aesthetic as the apparently innocent agent that misleads us toward a semiotics of delusion, thus opening the way to dire and reactionary political consequences, then we have reason to distrust the very notion o f the aesthetic and to move against it as many have been doing. If, however, we rather see the aesthetic as teaching us a sophisticated consciousness of illusion as illusion, then it works against the attempt to impose upon us the naive satisfactions o f the semiotic desire for the natural sign. This aesthetic would then point the way to a culture's increasing self-awareness and selfwariness. So, to accept Elusion is to satisfy the semiotic desire for the natural sign too uncritically; but to reject //lusion is to blind oneself to what compliant members o f a culture may be uncritically accepting as its natural signs and thus to shut oneself off from the shrewd defenses against them that only recognition can permit. For the aesthetic, as dramatic illusion, can have its own revenge upon ideology as it reveals its own power to complicate it, and by complicating to undermine it. It is this complicating and undermining o f ideology that enable aesthetic illusion, for all its airiness, to affect — and transform — the culture we find reflected in it.

REGINALD A.

FOAKES

University of California, L o s Angeles

Making and Breaking Dramatic Illusion Discussion of illusion tends to focus on optical illusion in painting, drawing, conjuring and other deceptions of the eye, or what W. J . Thomas Mitchell elsewhere in this volume (pp. 65 — 78) calls illusionism. Illusion in the theatre is a more complex matter, in so far as it may involve not merely illusionism, or the use of stage scenery and effects to create sensory illusions, but also the activity of mind on the part of the spectator that distinguishes dramatic illusion from scenic illusion. The distinction has frequently been ignored or confused, so that, as Frederick Burwick recently put it: " T h e controversy over dramatic illusion [...] still becomes entangled in the seemingly paradoxical simultaneity of the consciousness of artifice and participation in illusion." 1 The difficulties we have with this paradox in commentary on the theatre and drama in the English-speaking world are compounded, I believe, by confusions about the concept of illusion that are deeply involved in the history of the term. In this essay I seek to show that S. T. Coleridge made his early attempts to define dramatic illusion with specific reference to the emergence of scenic theatre at the end of the eighteenth century; but because of the nature of the reactions against scenic theatre beginning late in the nineteenth century, the important effort Coleridge made to desynonimize terms has been more or less forgotten, so that the concept of dramatic illusion needs to be redefined. The topic of illusion in the theatre became an issue at the end of the eighteenth century, especially in discussion of productions of Shakespeare's plays. Through much of that century his plays were treated on the stage as vehicles for actors and actresses to display themselves. Not only did reworked versions of popular plays, like Colley Cibber's Richard I I I , Nahum Tate's King Lear, and Dryden's The Tempest, supplant Shakespeare's texts in the repertory, but characters and incidents were transplaced from one play into another; so the sub-play of Pyramus and Thisbe was lifted from A Midsummer Night's Dream and incorporated into As You Like It in the revision by Charles Johnson entitled Love in a Forest. In addition, 1

Burwick: " S t a g e Illusion", p. 693. T h e present essay reconsiders and extends some issues discussed in my " F o r m s to his Conceit: Shakespeare and the Uses of Stage-illusion".

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Illusion and Literary Genre

songs and dances were freely added. Plays were acted in eighteenth-century costumes, or a mixture of eighteenth-century and conventional costumes, and some male roles were played by women in "breeches" parts to show off their legs. To judge by illustrations of the period, costuming was often violently at odds with the backcloths used for the stage-scene. These backcloths, "the flies, as the players call those shreds and patches which hang like so many tattered remnants in a shop in Monmouth Street [•··]",2 might have only a casual relation to the play being performed. The remark just cited was made in The Thespian Magazine in 1794, and relates to improvements introduced at the new Drury Lane Theatre in 1794, when the painter William Capon, who had an antiquarian devotion to the ancient architecture of England, recreated something like a Gothic cathedral for the performance of oratorios there. These new developments were heralded in the 1770s, when David Garrick imported Philippe de Loutherbourg from France to create scenes at Drury Lane; de Loutherbourg aimed at a unity of design, and initiated an important revolution in stage scenes, though I think it is too much to claim with Christopher Baugh that, "henceforward the stage could be viewed as a harmonious and completed vision into a world not participated in by its immediate audience — 'a window on the world' for an essentially passive spectator." 3 In so far as it could be achieved, this aim was gradually fulfilled, and for James Boaden a further step was taken when the artist, whose passion was "the ancient architecture of this country" designed for a rebuilt Drury Lane a stage with illuminated stained glass windows, and flies "carved like the fretted roof on an antique pile, and the wings to the side scenes, are removed for a complete screen, like those in use at the foreign theatres, thereby perfecting the deception of the scene." 4 In the early years of the nineteenth century the leading Shakespearean actor and actress, John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, sought ever more complete "deception of the scene", attempting a new authenticity in staging plays on historical themes, and decorating "the stage with marble architecture, painted palaces, and imposing cathedrals and streets". 5 In 1811 — 12 Kemble produced Shakespeare's Henry VIII at Covent Garden, "the most dazzling stage exhibition" the critic writing in the Times had ever seen, with all the pomp of princely feasting in a setting of Gothic pillars and "rich tracery of the

2

Anonymous writer in The Thespian Magazine, III (March 1794), p. 127 — cited in Odell: Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving vol. 2, p. 91.

3 4

Baugh: "Philippe James de Loutherbourg", p. 110. Boaden: Memoirs of the Life of Philip Kemble

vol. 2, p. 101 — 102; Thespian Magazine,

(1794), p. 127 — cited in Odell: Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving vol. 2, p. 91. 5

Styan: The Shakespeare

Revolution, p. 16.

III

Foakes: Making and Breaking Dramatic Illusion

219

architecture". 6 This kind of production fostered a tradition of lavish spectacle that lasted through the century. In 1808 Drury Lane Theatre burned down, and then Covent Garden was destroyed in 1809. Each was rebuilt on a magnificent scale; the new Covent Garden had a proscenium arch 42 feet 6 inches wide, and a stage 68 feet deep, lit by 300 patent lamps; and each theatre could seat more than 3000 people. 7 The new theatres were designed to make possible elaborate scenic effects on their wide and deep stages. In 1817 gas lighting was introduced on the stage of the Lyceum Theatre, and shortly afterwards the whole of Drury Lane, stage and auditorium, was illuminated by the new lighting. It soon became possible to vary the lighting to create differences between house and stage-lighting, though the practice of dimming house-lights did not become established until late in the nineteenth century. The new theatres and new facilities gave scope to the talents of theatrical designers like John Robinson Planche, who devised the settings for Charles Kemble's production of Shakespeare's King John at Covent Garden in 1824, with "an attention to Costume Never equalled on the English Stage", every character appearing in "the precise H A B I T O F T H E P E R I O D " , and all the costumes and decorations drawn from "indisputable Authorities" such as effigies on medieval tombs, and illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum. 8 The period from 1772, when de Loutherbourg came to London, to 1825 or so brought major developments in theatre technology; these developments were strikingly exploited in productions of Shakespeare's plays, in which scene-painting and set decoration became as important as the texts in appealing to spectators, many of whom may not have been able to hear all that well in the huge principal London theatres; so Edmond Malone, the great scholar, used to attend John Philip Kemble's performances, and, according to Boaden, Whenever, after the play, he walked round to Mr. Kemble's dressing-room, where I have joined him, his usual compliment was, Ί dare say it was a very perfect performance; but you have made your houses so large that, really, I can neither see nor hear in t h e m . ' 9

Malone's sight was poor, but such a comment suggests that the "deception of the scene" was by no means perfect. The visual effects sought were enhanced by the use of various new devices, such as the "Eidophusikon", introduced in London by de Loutherbourg about 1781, a kind of magic

6

Odell: Shakespeare from Betterion to Irving vol. 2, p. 102.

7

Ibid. pp. 7 - 1 0 . Ibid. p. 171. Boaden: Memoirs of the Life of Philip Kemble vol. 2, p. 545.

8 9

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Illusion and Literary G e n r e

lantern w h i c h could suggest m o v i n g pictures of natural effects like clouds; the p a n o r a m a , or u n f o l d i n g scene, invented by R o b e r t Barker in 1796; and the diorama, which created an illusion of d e p t h using c h a n g i n g translucent light effects to represent, for example, fleeting changes in the weather. 1 0 T h e s e inventions contributed to an e v e r - g r o w i n g attempt to p r o v i d e pictorial realism in the theatres of the next generation of leading actors, William Macready and Charles Kean. F r o m a b o u t 1815 playbills begin to print schedules of the scenery for the m o r e elaborate p r o d u c t i o n s , as for E d m u n d K e a n ' s King Lear at the D r u r y Lane theatre in 1820, which advertised for Act III 1 1 : A Land Storm After the manner of Loutherbourgs Eidophusicon. Designed and executed by Marinari and Assistants; and in the course of the Tragedy, the following Scenery will be exhibited: Antichamber in King Lear's Palace Room of State in Palace Court before Albany's Palace Gates of Gloster Castle Forest Gallery in Gloster Castle View near Dover Chamber in King Lear's Palace Valley near the Field of Battle Albany's Tent A Prison

Dixon Marinari Andrews Ditto Marinari Dixon Andrews Hollagan Marinari Hollagan Andrews

T h e painters for each scene are n a m e d , d r a w i n g attention it would seem not so m u c h to the degree of scenic illusion they achieved, as t o their skill in creating scenic effects. Pictorial realism was equated in playbills with the exhibition of scenery, and the requirement of f r e q u e n t scene-changes. It is in the context of these developments in the theatres that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles L a m b took u p the question of illusion in the theatre. In 1808 Coleridge w r o t e t w o drafts of an introduction to a lecture in which he distinguished between the aim of a painting by Claude, in which, he said, the artist imitates a landscape at sunset, " b u t only as a Picture" 1 2 , and the aim of a scenic artist representing a forest in the theatre: "a Forest-scene is n o t presented to the Audience as a Picture, but as a Forest"; the first only delights us if we are n o t deceived into taking it for real, while the second has as "its very p u r p o s e [...] to p r o d u c e as m u c h

10

T h e history of the F.idophusikon, Panorama and D i o r a m a is detailed in Altick: The Shows of Undo«,

pp. 1 1 7 - 1 4 0 , 1 6 3 - 1 7 2 , 1 8 4 - 1 9 7 .

11

Odell: Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving vol. 2, p. 163.

12

Coleridge: Lectures 1808-1819:

On Literature

vol. 1, p. 133.

221

Foakes: Making and Breaking Dramatic Illusion

Illusion as its nature permits." 13 All the same, he argues that though children may sometimes be "deceived by Stage-Scenery", adults "are no more deceived' by it than they are by paintings. It was from this consideration of stage-scenery that he went on to develop his theory of stageillusion as a "temporary Half-Faith", which the spectator enters into voluntarily by an act of will, "because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is". 1 4 In this formulation Coleridge was mediating between the extreme positions of earlier critics who assumed that spectators in the theatre were deluded, or alternatively, like Dr. Johnson, that they remained aware that "the stage is only a stage, and the players are only players". 15 It was a concern with stage scenery also that prompted Charles Lamb's essay on "Stage Illusion" (1825), and he began from what evidently was for him a commonplace: "A play is said to be well or ill acted in proportion to the scenical illusion produced." 16 He went on to argue, in effect, that such illusion is necessary for tragedy, which demands a "strict abstraction from all reference to an audience", but not in comedy, in which he loved to see "an audience naturalised behind the scenes, taken in into the interest of the drama, welcomed as by-standers however." 17 In his writing Lamb appears to use the terms "dramatic illusion", "scenical illusion", and "stage illusion" interchangeably. His primary concern in this essay is with two quite different aspects of stage performance, one being the effect of the scene presented on the stage, the other, his central topic, being the way actors should play roles in tragedy and comedy, whether they should break the illusion or not, and what "degree of credibility" 18 they should seek to maintain. Lamb did not resolve the confusion in his terminology, which reflects a confusion in thinking about dramatic illusion that persists to this day. The confusion troubled Coleridge, however, who constantly sought to desynonimize terms. In a letter written in 1816 he gave an abbreviated and somewhat changed account of what he had said in 1808, offering what he called a "true theory of Stage Illusion"; he now affirmed that, as in dreams, images and thoughts "possess a power in and of themselves, independent of that act of the Judgement or Understanding by which we

13

Ibid. p. 1 3 3 - 1 3 4 .

14

Ibid. p. 134, 133.

15

Johnson: "Preface to Shakespeare, 1765". Johnson

on Shakespeare

p. 77. 16

Lamb: "Stage Illusion" (1825). Lamb:

17

Ibid. p. 165.

IB

Ibid. p. 164.

Works vol. 2, p. 163.

vol. 1 {Works

vol. 7),

222

Illusion and Literary Genre

affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them." 19 So what began in 1808 as an explanation of the effect on the audience of scenery and scene-painting becomes more ambiguously defined in terms of images and thoughts, and prepares for the famous formulation in Biographia Literaria, where, describing his own proposed contribution of "persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic", i.e., imaginary or ideal, to Lyrical Ballads, he defined his aim as "to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." 20 Here Coleridge borrowed ideas he had been developing in relation to the stage and stage scenery, and reworked them into a memorable sentence about poetry that has tended quite to overshadow his continuing concern with the stage. In the 1816 letter he again attacked Dr. Johnson as one who "would persuade us that our Judgements are as broad awake during the most masterly representation of the deepest scenes of Othello, as a philosopher would be during the exhibition of a Magic Lanthorn with Punch & Joan." 21 Coleridge was again arguing that the spectator is not deceived, but voluntarily yields to the spell of a "temporary Half-Faith" in involving himself in the "deepest scenes" of a play. He thus emphatically transferred the notion of illusion from the stage itself and the scenery, however much it seeks to deceive the eye, to the mind of the spectator. In other words, he saw dramatic illusion not as something created on the stage by what Lamb called "scenical illusion", but as a process in the imagination of the spectator. This is made clear in a record that has recently come to light of his closing remarks in a lecture he gave in 1813: Ο blest is He w h o not only in the theatre, but in the probationary Play of Human Life, possesses a life & creative joy in his o w n Heart, which by the Strength of the inward Illusion can supply the defects of the outward scenes — Ο happy that A c t o r on the Stage of real Life, for w h o m in the becoming Warmth & honest F e r v o r of his o w n Part the daubed Landscapes on the wormeaten Canvas, bloom as a Paradize, & w h o m the shiftings of the scenes awakens not out of his delightful Vision. 2 2

The concept of "inward Illusion" supplying the defects of scenery on the stage added another dimension to the analysis of dramatic illusion. At the same time, it becomes evident that the term "illusion" as applied to the stage in the nineteenth century slides rather easily across a spectrum of meanings. At one point is the idea of scenery designed to represent not 19 20 21 22

Coleridge: Coleridge: Coleridge: Coleridge:

Collected Letters vol. 4, p. 641. Biographia Literaria vol. 2, p. 6. Collected Letters vol. 4, p. 642. Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature

vol. 1, p. 543.

Foakes: Making and Breaking Dramatic Illusion

223

merely a harmonious whole (de Loutherbourg's conception), but the illusion of a realistic location; at another, the idea of the actor as maintaining an illusion of being in his own world, abstracted from all reference to the audience; and at a third, Coleridge's notion of inward illusion as the activity of mind whereby the spectator remedies the defects of the scenery, the "daubed Landscapes". The terms "stage illusion" and "dramatic illusion" have been used casually and indiscriminately up to our own time to refer to any of these concepts, and the confusion between them has not been sorted out in criticism of the theatre. One reason for this is the further confusion in the use of the term "illusion" brought about by the advances in stage technology of the later nineteenth century, which made possible a new naturalism in the presentation of drama. Ibsen wanted to make "the spectator feel as if he were actually sitting, listening, and looking at events happening in real life" 2 3 ; and the way to achieve this aim seemed to be made practicable for Strindberg in 1888 by the darkening of the auditorium and the use of realistic properties rather than painted backdrops. As J . L. Styan puts it: A l l o f S t r i n d b e r g ' s r e q u i r e m e n t s for the intense c o n c e n t r a t i o n o f the a u d i e n c e d u r i n g p e r f o r m a n c e clearly indicate his idea o f d r a m a t i c illusion. His audience w a s t o be c o m p l e t e l y c o n v i n c e d o f the reality o f the w o r l d o f the stage, and t r a n s p o r t e d w h o l l y i n t o its sphere o f i n f l u e n c e . 2 4

So there came into being what Styan calls "the theatre of total illusion". 2 5 Serious dramatists were understandably anxious to escape from the rowdy conditions of the theatres of the earlier nineteenth century, in which audiences could react noisily, even riotously, to performances; they also objected to the inattention of the more genteel audiences of the later part of the century, who might hold supper parties in the boxes, or spend their time reading the script, as Clement Scott, attending the premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan's lolanthe in 1882, hardly noticed the production because he became engrossed in the book, which he was reading in the undimmed auditorium. 2 6 The darkening of the auditorium made possible a mode of drama that sought with Ibsen to convince the audience of the reality of the stage world. The proscenium opening was to be treated as if it were opaque, and the audience ignored. Stanislavsky insisted that "the actor 23 24 25 26

Cited in Styan: Modern Ibid. p. 43.

Drama

vol. 1, p. 28.

Styan: Drama, Stage and Audience, p. 170. Davison: Contemporary Drama and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in Bngland, p. 9, citing Rees: Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas, p. 188. Davison interestingly argues that the music-hall tradition in Britain enabled audiences, in spite of the impact of naturalism, to retain "their ability to respond multiconsciously" (p. 12), but he treats the matter of dramatic illusion in rather simple terms.

224

Illusion and Literary G e n r e

should learn by a series of exercises how to keep his attention fixed on the stage so as to prevent it f r o m straying into the auditorium." 2 7 The audience became onlookers, separated by an invisible screen f r o m what was taking place on the stage, and the actor was to withdraw into the picture frame. It has become commonplace to treat the theatre of naturalism as a theatre of illusion, in contrast to the non-illusory theatre of Sophocles or Shakespeare, because this is what the defenders of naturalism claimed to be creating. When he directed Chekhov's The Seagull, Stanislavsky constructed maps of the estate where the play is supposed to be located: Only after he understood the whole geography of the n e i g h b o u r h o o d could the director approach intelligently the work of designing the stage setting. O n the stage this new, Naturalistic setting did not add up to a formal structure on a platform. It was an illusion of the Sorin estate, complete with depth, atmosphere, earth and sky. 28

T h e aim was to hold the audience spellbound by representing a facsimile of life on the stage; thus the curtain n o longer served as a mere device to hide the shifting of the scenery. It became the portal of a magic world of illusion, a world whose compelling truth seemed to vie with life itself. It sealed the opening of a lighted peep-box; and when the curtain rose, the contemplative spectator peered into that lighted box with the absorption of one w h o looks at images in his o w n mind. His imagination soared up and away f r o m the seats of the theatre. T h e new dramatic magic caused the stage platform to vanish. You might almost say it caused the building itself to disappear f r o m the mind of the playgoer as he sat there entranced. 2 9

"You might almost say" stops short of an absolute claim, and wisely; for in spite of the assertions made for naturalism, it is doubtful if an audience ever takes the make-believe world of the stage for reality, or is deceived into a "total suspension of disbelief as a matter of course". 3 0 Stanislavsky in fact did not confuse life and art, but his method and the theory of naturalism as developed by Strindberg and others, seem to be based on a false assumption about the nature of dramatic illusion, in so far as the proposed aim of acting was to enter into the feelings and inner life of the character so as to draw the spectator as an involuntary participant into the life that is taking place on the stage, in the effort to make him accept

27

Bentley: The Theory of the Modern Stage, p. 239.

28

Gorelik: New Theatres for Old, p. 146.

29

Ibid. p. 148; see also Davison: Contemporary pp. 1 1 - 1 2 .

30

Ibid. p. 11.

Drama

and the Popular Dramatic

Tradition,

225

Foakes: M a k i n g and Breaking D r a m a t i c Illusion

it as truth. 3 1 For, paradoxically, the d a r k e n i n g of the a u d i t o r i u m and the e n h a n c e m e n t of the p r o s c e n i u m arch in the naturalist theatre not only established a distance between the actor and the audience as they peered " i n t o that lighted b o x " , but also ensured that the stage-picture should be seen as f r a m e d like a painting, and therefore not likely to deceive anyone 3 2 . I have o f t e n been struck myself w h e n attending a theatre p r o d u c t i o n that aimed at such realism by the way the audience w o u l d , o n the rising of the curtain, at once applaud an elaborate stage setting, so a c k n o w l e d g i n g the skill of the designer and craftsmen, and s h o w i n g their consciousness of the artifice. In a similar way, audiences applaud the arrival o n stage of a distinguished actor o r actress half-way t h r o u g h the first act even t h o u g h the p r o d u c t i o n requires the players to ignore the audience; the players freeze for a few m o m e n t s , s h o w i n g that they are conscious of the applause, and then continue. T h e idea of "total illusion" in the theatre is itself an illusion. T h e mistake of naturalism was to assume that a "magic w o r l d of illusion" had to be created on the stage in order t o engage the spectator; but the spectator becomes a voyeur, and there is n o necessary connection between that scenic o r o u t w a r d illusion, and the freeing of the imagination that encourages what Coleridge called " i n n e r illusion". E d w a r d G o r d o n Craig made the p o i n t as early as 1909 w h e n , reviewing the successive displacements of what had appeared at the time t o be "naturalistic", f r o m I r v i n g t h r o u g h A n t o i n e t o Stanislavsky, he said that naturalism was merely a " n e w artificiality". 3 3 Nevertheless the issue of dramatic illusion has continued to be treated as if there were a total contrast between a theatre of illusion and a non-illusory theatre. In rejecting realism and naturalism, Bertolt Brecht d e m a n d e d the " R e m o v a l of Illusion" 3 4 , and his p h i l o s o p h e r in the Messingkauf Dialogues advises the actor n o t to get t o o absorbed in the characters:

31

Stanislavsky himself affirmed that "Scenic truth is not like t r u t h in life; it is peculiar to itself. I u n d e r s t o o d that on the stage truth is that in which the actor sincerely believes;" he wanted his actor to achieve "the feeling of truth".

See Stanislavsky: My Life in

Art,

pp. 406, 467. 32

A point made long ago by A d a m Smith in Hssays on Philosophical

Subjects

(1795),

pp. 1 3 3 - 4 8 . 33

Craig: On the Art

of the Theatre, p. 290. I am not concerned here t o present a history of

reactions to realism and naturalism, and leap over the important innovations of symbolist theatre, and the w o r k of such seminal figures as Aurelien L u g n e - P o e , A d o l p h e Appia and Vsevolod Meyerhold, w h o wanted the spectator to "employ his imagination creatively in order to fill in those details suggested by the stage action." See Carlson: Theories of the Theatre, pp. 290 — 321; the sentence by Meyerhold is cited on p. 318. 34

Brecht: The Messingkauf

Dialogues, p. 51.

226

Illusion and Literary Genre

There's a vast difference between somebody's having a picture of something, which demands imagination, and an illusion, which demands gullibility. We need imagination for our purposes; we want not to create illusions, but to see that the audience too gets a picture of the matter in hand. 35 T h e dialogues continue with a discussion o f the theatre o f Shakespeare, in which the actor remarks that A Midsummer Night's Dream was played in daylight, "and it was daylight when the ghost in Hamlet appeared". So, he asks, "What price illusion?" 36 Brecht writes as if there were two completely different kinds of theatre, one, the theatre o f naturalism, requiring only a passive gullibility from the audience so that it "doesn't wake up from its illusion", 3 7 the other stimulating the audience to be critical, and reproducing "real-life incidents on the stage in such a way as to underline their causality and bring it to the spectator's attention". 3 8 He assumes that his theatre o f alienation, in which the actor is to show his part rather than get inside it, abandons illusion altogether. In a parallel way, Peter Brook explained his objectives in developing his famous production o f A Midsummer Night's Dream in terms o f breaking with the theatre of illusion. He had much earlier argued that an empty stage liberates the audience's imagination, "leaving it both ready and capable o f creating its own pictures" 3 9 , but there is a sense in which his 1970 production o f Shakespeare's play was the culmination of his rejection o f a naturalistic theatre o f illusion. For he created literally a "magic b o x " on stage; the phrase is J . L. Styan's, writing in 1977, but it echoes Mordechai Gorelik's image o f the naturalistic stage as a "magic world o f illusion [...] a lighted peep-box". 4 0 Brook's setting was a "three-sided white box", brilliantly lit in white light, with two doors and a catwalk; the entrance o f the actors "bluntly declared that they were performers, and that thereafter the audience would be participants in their game" 4 1 . Brook deliberately looked to the art o f the circus and the acrobat in his staging, "because they both make purely theatrical statements". 4 2 While the naturalist theatre's magic box was filled by Stanislavsky for a play by Chekhov with as exact a reproduction o f a room as could be contrived,

35

Ibid. p. 55.

36

Ibid. p. 59.

37

Ibid. p. 55.

38

Ibid. p. 102.

39

Brook: "Style in Shakespeare Production", p. 142; cited in Styan: The Shakespeare

Revolu-

tion, p. 212. 40

Ibid. p. 225.

41

Ibid.

42

Cited in Thomson: "A Necessary Theatre: T h e Royal Shakespeare Season 1970 Reviewed", p. 126; see also Styan: The Shakespeare

Revolution,

p. 225.

227

Foakes: Making and Breaking Dramatic Illusion

Brook's magic box was ostentatiously empty. But this was not to create a theatre of "non-illusion" as Styan calls it 43 , except in the sense that Brook abandoned scenic illusion. Because naturalism claimed to be creating a theatre of illusion, the reaction against it has been presented as seeking a theatre of non-illusion. It is hardly surprising that a confusion persists between scenic illusion, acting illusion and inner illusion. I have tried to show that from the early nineteenth century changing technologies in the theatre made it possible to seek ever greater scenic illusion in stage settings. The culmination of these developments in the use of electricity to darken the auditorium and illuminate the stage coincided with the striving for ever-increasing naturalism, which required the actor to enter the feelings of a character and establish a genuine sense of its inner life, 44 so as, in effect, to create an illusion of being for the time being that person. In the reaction against naturalism and the wellmade play that gathered force in the middle of the twentieth century, critics and men of the theatre have made confusion worse by writing as if they were abandoning illusion altogether in reaction against a theatre that seemed to be striving for total scenic and acting illusion. What I would like to do by way of a conclusion is to offer a definition of dramatic illusion that includes what appears to be an inevitable part of theatre experience, namely, interruptions in the illusion. For what most discussion of illusion leaves out of account is the nature of the experience for an audience of going to the theatre to see a show. If we recognize the role of convention in our response to art, a major theme of Ernst H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion, we come to understand that as in looking at paintings, so in making its way to the theatre, an audience goes with a set of expectations derived from their prior knowledge of the nature of a theatre. They pay voluntarily to enter a special kind of building where they will hear and witness men and women acting on a stage according to certain conventions taken for granted by actors and audience alike. The willing suspension of disbelief begins at the box office. The audience expects to see on stage performers playing the roles assigned to them and listed in a programme; and whether the play selfconsciously parades its own theatricality, as Shakespeare's and Brecht's do, or attempts to present a "slice of life", a naturalistic dialogue in which the performers pretend during the action that the audience is not there, nevertheless the workings of dramatic illusion are similar. In the former kind of play, breaking the illusion is a deliberate part of the structure of 43

Styan

entitles

his chapter

"Shakespeare,

Peter

Brook

and

non-illusion"

—

ibid,

pp. 2 0 6 - 2 3 1 . 44

So Stanislavsky wrote in Creating a Role (p. 44) that the actor seeks to "create the sincerity o f emotions, the heart o f a role, its inner image, its spiritual life".

228

Illusion and Literary G e n r e

the play, as the audience is teasingly reminded of their o w n role-playing activities in their daily lives, and of the uncertain boundaries between seeming and being: "the best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them". 4 5 In the latter something analogous to the trompe I'oeil effect in painting is aimed at, and a combination of three-dimensional scenery and players dressed in historically accurate costumes, draws the applause of an audience responding to the extraordinary skill of the dramatist, designer and scene-painter in achieving the sought-after effect. An audience may be emotionally involved in both kinds of play, but is not taken in; as Dryden put it long ago in writing about heroic poetry, we "are pleased with the image, without being cozened by the fiction."46 For the most naturalistic productions rely upon conventions, the framing by the proscenium arch, lighting, make-up, carpentry and paint, all of which in some measure break the illusion. However ambitious the attempts at scenic illusion or acting illusion (i.e., that the actor literally becomes the character), they can never create a complete illusion, but rely on the audience's capacity to transform in imagination the artifice of the stage into a complete mental world. Dramatic illusion needs to be distinguished f r o m other kinds of illusion and redefined as an activity of mind on the part of spectators, who, having willingly entered a special place for play-acting in the acceptance of a range of possible rules and conventions, yield for a limited time to an emotional and intellectual involvement with what takes place on the stage, filling out in the imagination the inevitable incompleteness and artifice of the representation, while always remaining aware of the action as play and as distinct f r o m life outside the theatre. If this be granted, then the normal condition of theatre includes breaking the stage-illusion, which is one way of stimulating and enlarging the play of imagination on the part of the audience.

45

Shakespeare: A Midsummer

46

D r y d e n : " T h e A u t h o r ' s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence" (1677). Hssays vol.1, p. 185.

Night's

Dream, V. i. 211—212.

WALTER PAPE

Universität zu Köln

Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy: The Discourse of Emotional Freedom For Clemens Zint^en ort his sixtieth

birthday

The chorus of the Oceanides really believes that it sees before it the Titan Prometheus, and considers itself as real as the god of the scene. A n d are we to designate as the highest and purest type of spectator, one w h o , like the Oceanides, regards Prometheus as real and present in body? A n d would it be characteristic of the ideal spectator, to run on stage to free the god f r o m his torture? We did believe in an aesthetic audience and did consider the individual spectator the better qualified, the more he was able to regard the w o r k of art as art, i.e. as aesthetic [...].'

Probably no one had a higher opinion of comedy than the most prominent German writer of tragedy. In On naive and sentimental poetry Schiller wrote: "Comedy's aim goes together with the highest man can strive for: being free from emotion, looking around and inside oneself, always clear, always calm, finding everywhere more chance than destiny or fate, laughing more about absurdity than being angry at malice or crying about it."2 All 1

Nietzsche: "Die Geburt der Tragödie". Sämtliche Werke vol. 1, pp. 53 — 54: "Der Okeanidenchor glaubt wirklich den Titan Prometheus vor sich zu sehen und hält sich selbst für eben so real wie den Gott der Scene. Und das sollte die höchste und reinste Art des Zuschauers sein, gleich den Okeaniden den Prometheus für leiblich vorhanden und real zu halten? Und es wäre das Zeichen des idealischen Zuschauers, auf die Bühne zu laufen und den Gott von seinen Martern zu befreien? Wir hatten an ein aesthetisches Publikum geglaubt und den einzelnen Zuschauer für um so befähigter gehalten, je mehr er im Stande war, das Kunstwerk als Kunst d. h. aesthetisch zu nehmen [...]". Nietzsche criticizes August Wilhelm Schlegel's concept. — All translations are mine.

2

Schiller: "Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung". Nationalausgabe vol. 20, p. 446: "Ihr Ziel ist einerlei mit dem höchsten, wornach der Mensch zu ringen hat, frey von Leidenschaft zu seyn, immer klar, immer ruhig um sich und in sich zu schauen, überall mehr Zufall als Schicksal zu finden, und mehr über Ungereimtheit zu lachen als über Bosheit zu zürnen oder zu weinen."

230

Illusion and Literary G e n r e

theatrical performance — even the non-comic — for the classical Schiller ought to produce emotional freedom ("Gemiitsfreyheit") 3 , not illusion. Even if a perfect theatrical illusion could be accomplished, it would be nothing but a mere poor delusion ("armseliger Gauklerbetrug"): During a theatrical performance all external appearances are against the notion of illusion — everything is but a "symbol of reality." 4 Schiller thus argues against the eighteenth-century demand for a perfect dramatic illusion, against the notion of drama representing natural signs, as it had been inaugurated above all by Denis Diderot 5 . Those periods in the history of drama during which playwrights or stage designers strove for an 'exact imitation' of reality, are much shorter than is usually presumed, and they do not concern comedy. Comedy is largely excluded from dramatic theory in general. Moreover, conceptions of reality change as well as the functions of comedy in social contexts, which also influenced the structure of comedy. T h e history of the types of comedy is far too multifaceted to give more than a sketch of the different modes of illusion — we have only to think of the aristophanic, the new greek comedy, the Commedia dell' arte or the comedies of Moliere or of Shakespeare, eighteenth-century sentimental comedy, the romantic comedies, the Vienna burlesque (Posse), Hofmannsthal's serious comic plays, or even Brecht's comedies. I will try to give a short outline of the problems, and then discuss them with three examples, one f r o m the beginning of the seventeenth, the other f r o m the midst of the eighteenth, and the last from the end of the nineteenth century. T h o u g h it is not possible to present the complete social and historical context of the plays, national and historical peculiarities will be taken into consideration. Dramatic illusion and aesthetic distance The questions concerning illusion and the so-called 'breaking illusion' in comedy are rather multifarious; first of all we have to affirm the general difference between reading illusion and seeing illusion. T h o u g h the visible performance with its "Anschauung und lebendige G e g e n w a r t " (direct view and vivid presence) might have a much stronger effect upon the audience than "dead letter and cold narrative" 6 (as the early Schiller called it, still 3

Ibid. p. 445.

4

Schiller: " Ü b e r den G e b r a u c h des Chors". Ibid. vol. 10, p. 10. " [...] Illusion, die, wenn sie auch wirklich zu leisten wäre, immer n u r ein armseliger G a u k l e r b e t r u g seyn w ü r d e . Alles äußere bei einer dramatischen Vorstellung steht diesem Begriff entgegen — alles ist n u r ein Symbol des Wirklichen."

5 6

Cf. Fischer-Lichte: Semiotik des Theaters vol. 2, pp. 91 — 181. Schiller: "Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich w i r k e n " . vol. 20, pp. 91 and 93.

Nationalausgabe

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

231

impressed by the dramatic theory of enlightenment), this should not deter us from the fact that words — metaphors or allegories — spoken on the stage 7 , stories told or accounts given by a dramatic person evoke a different kind of illusion than that enacted before the spectators: thus we have both visual representation and verbal evocation during a theatrical performance, not mere 'natural signs' 8 . There were some critics in the 18th century like Wilhelm Heinrich von Gerstenberg — one of the forerunners of a new concept of illusion in Germany —, who ignored this fact and therefore blamed dramatic illusion for having no effect on man's imagination comparable to reading illusion 9 . In a sense Gerstenberg is right: a novel, for example, can use the same literary means as an account of historic events, and there are many strategies to convince the reader, that the events really happened; and even more: a novelist can give complete characters, can tell a whole life. The situation on stage is different: the action might refer to real events, but the play always shows itself to be only a play. The alleged "objectivity of the dramatic form" 10 is merely on the surface — and thus Thomas Mann could blame the dramatic genre for its superficiality, calling it the art of silhouette, and praising the novel for presenting the man as perfect, total, real, and vivid 11 . The central issue of dramatic and stage illusion actually is the relation between performance and audience. Not surprisingly what is called the absoluteness of the dramatic text vis-ä-vis both the author and the audience is as controversial as the realistic convention to express this absoluteness, the so-called fourth wall of the stage 12 . One additional point of interest is that the reader's response to a text normally is the response of a solitary reader, whereas a drama is experienced by a group 13 ; this response-situation can have some influence — both in serious drama and in comedy — upon the actors and consequently upon the degree or kind of illusion. But stage conditions for the presentation of tragedy or comedy up to the end of the eighteenth century were at odds with any kind of illusionistic theater — with exception of the well known baroque stage effects which obviously create a different kind of illusion that Reginald A. Foakes called scenic illusion 14 and which is not connected with the human action. An "illusionist7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

Pfister: Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse, p. 41. See also Murray Krieger's essay in this volume pp. 183 — 216. Gerstenberg: Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur, 20. Brief, pp. 222 — 232. Nelson: Play Within a Play, p. IX. Mann: "Versuch über das Theater". Mann: Die Forderung des Tages. Abhandlungen und kleine Aufsätze über Literatur und Kunst, p. 17: "eine Kunst der Silhouette"; "den erzählten Menschen allein als rund, ganz, wirklich und plastisch." Pfister: Drama, p. 22. Ibid. p. 29. See Reginald Foakes' study, pp. 217 — 228 in this volume.

232

Illusion and Literary Genre

ic" theater, where the aesthetic and psychical distance between play and spectator vanishes or is reduced to a minimum certainly is the "most unusual" form in theater history 1 5 . According to a commonplace of literary history, for comedy "the process of alienation and aesthetic distance" are looked upon as the "genre's oldest and most prominent characteristics" 16 . The techniques and means by which the so-called alienation effect or the breaking of the illusion is achieved, are well known: a prologue, or the commentary by a chorus, by a comic figure like harlequin, speaking aside, falling out of one's role, parody of tragedy, masks, disguises, or using metaphors of theater on stage 17 — and, of course, all kinds of comic stratagems are regarded as means of alienation. All these, nonetheless, only work, if the spectator knows the aesthetic code of his time 18 , if he has learned to be a spectator. For only "children or simple persons", as Plato already knew (Republic 598c), can be deceived or deluded by mimesis. Therefore all accounts, mostly dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about spectators intervening in a theatrical situation mistaken for real — if they are true at all — are but mere curiosities and have nothing to do with dramatic illusion, because they are based on error. In dramatic practice and theory, however, the 'unlearned' spectator, as we will see, traditionally is used as a device to illustrate the particular kind of illusion. Notwithstanding all this, I wonder whether the notions of breaking illusion or alienation are adequate in describing the functions of these dramatic devices, or if so-called alienation and breaking illusion are just mechanisms of illusion, or in a more extensive way, only extreme ways of heightening the illusory character of a play, alienating theatrical illusion even more from reality. For a play actually never goes beyond the ramp, the ramp is always a border, visible or not, even in modern forms of noncomic theater, as Günter Säße recently has pointed out 19 . Breaking the 15

17

Reiss: Toward Dramatic Illusion, p. 143. Warning: "Elemente einer Pragmasemiotik der Komödie", p. 307; the phenomenon of comic as such is analyzed as a kind of illusion in the psychological and philosophical study of Chapiro: Ulllusion comique. Chapiro argues that the comic (which he confines to the absurd) is based on the coexistence of contradictory qualities in the comic object (p. 37) which finally leads to "une illusion d'irrealite universelle" (p. 64). See the detailed catalog in Warning: "Elemente einer Pragmasemiotik der Komödie", pp. 3 1 1 - 3 1 3 .

Pfister: Drama, p. 61. " Säße: "Das Spiel mit der Rampe. Zum Verhältnis von Bühnenwirklichkeit und Zuschauerwirklichkeit im Theater der Moderne"; Büdel: "Contemporary Theater and Aesthetic Distance", p. 284 maintains that the modern stage with the audience dragged into the play tends "toward the concept of theater as a rite, as a liturgical celebration of community", where of course the notion of dramatic illusion does not apply. 18

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

233

fiction or illusion is enacted by the playwright or the stage director: they are fictitious, only the conclusion of a play really breaks the illusion. All other sorts of 'breaking the illusion' are nothing but compounding the fiction 20 . Only if illusion is interpreted as involuntary and a temporary actual delusion ("Täuschung", "Gauklerbetrug", according to Schiller) as in several theories of the eighteenth century 21 , does the notion of'breaking the illusion' apply. Thus the greatest difficulty in depicting the character of theatrical illusion and its historical changes is the obvious discrepancy between theatrical practice, which is against the eighteenth-century notion of illusion, and the theory of illusion which often describes a theater as it should be, not as it really is, and thus concepts of illusion often did not concern actual drama and theater 22 . Rendering the subject either tragic or comic One of the most illuminating comments on illusion in comedy we owe to August Wilhelm Schlegel, but he draws upon a normative idea of the drama, when he argues that with the old greek comedy "not only its object, but even the entire treatment is playful and humorous": "Fun's absolute reign is revealed in the fact, that also the dramatic form is not taken seriously and its rules are suspended immediately." 23 In archaic times, however, comedy had quite another function than later; it resembled more the carnival, and there was no action or plot at all. According to Aristotle it was Epicharm who invented the comedy-plot (Poetics Chapter 5) 24 . The development from the Old and Middle to the New Comedy is characterized by repressing the chorus-parabases addressing the audiences, but even the Middle comedy did not yet know an independent plot, and mostly consisted in a travesty of myths: Orest and Aegisth leave the stage as bosom friends, or Ulysses is sitting at the weaving loom waiting for Penelope. Only later on motifs and not a parodied plot were taken from the Euripidean tragedies, such as love, mistaken identity, exposure of an

20

21

22

23

24

See also Alewyn: Das große Welttheater, pp. 83 —87: "Die potenzierte Illusion": "Aber weit entfernt, die Täuschung zu zerstören, dient diese Desillusionierung nur dazu, sie zu erhöhen." Diderot's key-phrase is: "L'illusion n'est pas volontaire." Diderot: "De la poesie dramatique". Le Drame bourgeois (Oeuvres completes. 10), pp. 323—427, here p. 357. Cf. e.g. Reiss: Toward Dramatic Illusion, p. 6: "Few plays of the period [seventeenth century France] reveal much concern for the theories." This is valid for most times. Schlegel: "Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur" Τ. 1. Kritische Schriften vol.5, p. 136. Aristotle: Poetics (translation by Stephen Halliwell), p. 36; cf. also Lesley: Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, p. 275.

234

Illusion and Literary Genre

infant, rape, recognition, or intrigue 2 5 , and in this way also taken out from the network of fate and nemesis into comedy's fiction of present society. 26 Comedy never lost this parodistic attitude towards tragedy and tragic situations. 27 To come straight to the point: the difference between illusion in comedy and dramatic illusion in general consists in different traditional expectations of the audience, to which the structure of the play corresponds, and vice versa. The ancient stage conditions did not allow either 'illusionistic scenery' or 'realistic play', and the chorus did not permit a dramatic form such as Schlegel had in mind 2 8 ; and even the French tragedies of the seventeenth century often were highly self-referential dramas and did not aim at a perfect illusion in the way contemporary dramatic theory might suggest 2 9 . Nevertheless since antiquity they actually keep closer to a certain unity in tone, time, place, and action than comedies. Not breaking the fiction or illusion in comedy denotes the difference between comic and tragic illusion, but breaking tragedy's fiction of a compact, whole action, that which Aristotle called the "mythos" of tragedy and which he opposed to amorphous reality and real history. The whole for Aristotle is something "possessing a beginning, a middle and end" (Poetics, Chapter 7) 30 ; it always refers to the whole of the world, for according to Plato the creator has aimed at a whole organism. This conception remains valid, especially for tragedy, almost throughout the nineteenth century: "The tragic situation seems to demand a stable view of the world". 31 In modern times, in our case since the seventeenth century, this conception is linked with theodicy. Lessing sums up eighteenthcentury opinion by direct analogy with Aristotle: The poet must make an integral whole out of actual history, that rounds completely, where one part is totally explained by the other; the complete work of the poet, whom Lessing calls the mortal creator, "ought to be a silhouette of the

25 26

27

28 29

30 31

Ibid. pp. 7 4 3 - 7 4 4 . This is valid since the Old Greek comedy, see e.g. Landfester: "Geschichte der griechischen Komödie", p. 375: "So war aufs Ganze gesehen die Alte Komödie mit der Demonstration der Macht und Lebensfreude ihrer Menschen das genaue Gegenstück zur Tragödie mit dem Scheitern und dem Leid ihrer Personen." See also Martini: "Zur Poetik des Lustspiels". Martini: Lustspiele — und das Lustspiel, pp. 9-36, here p. 21: "[...] chance in comedy is a parody of tragedy's fate." See also Nietzsche criticizing Schlegels concept in the motto of this essay. See Muratore: "Theater as Theater: The Language of Cornelian Illusion", and Reiss: Toward Dramatic Illusion. — For a comprehensive summary of seventeenth century theory of perfect illusion see Bürger: Die frühen Komödien Corneilles, pp. 39 —45: "Die Theorie der vollkommenen Illusion". Aristotle: Poetics (translation by Stephen Halliwell), p. 39. Reiss: Toward Dramatic Illusion, p. 183.

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

235

eternal creator's integral whole." 3 2 Even nowadays fiction for some critiques is determined as referring to a whole of reality and significance 3 3 ; and the rather conservative philosopher Odo Marquard looks upon contemporary art as more real than reality: "Where reality changes into an ensemble of fiction, art becomes anti-fiction." 3 4 We recognize modern fiction's secularization and greater connection with the so-called reality. Eckehard Catholy defined the structure of tragedy in comparison to comedy in the "homogeneous whole of dramatic reality"; he refers to French classical tragedy and its three unities, which he thinks have a covert connection with the reality of absolutist society. In comedy according to Catholy only the comic characters (like harlequin) in the true sense of the word invalidate the dramatic homogeneity, whereas the other figures — structurally seen — "belong to the personnel of the serious drama or tragedv." 3 5 Such a division according to the personnel ignores all other characteristics of comedy, where another kind of giving meaning, of relation to the world outside the drama — I avoid the term reality — than in tragedy is intended; Lessing already stated that each subject could be used both for tragedy or comedy, nothing but the treatment would be determining. 3 6 And we read the same in Schiller: "It is not the sphere which the subject is taken from, but the forum to which the poet brings it, that renders the subject either tragic or comic." 3 7 Only the point of view, the kind of perception of reality, the mode to encounter society and world, finally renders something comic or tragic. In comedy impenetrable forces and transcendence are suspended, and meaning is given to comedy by the world outside the illusion of comedy, a world, which is the contemporary social reality, this connection was called comedy's "seat in life" ("Sitz im Leben") 3 8 . Diderot, quite inspired, put the relation of comedy to tragedy this way: "In comedy men must play the roles, which in tragedy were played by the gods." 3 9 32 33

34

35 36

37

38 39

Lessing: "Hamburgische Dramaturgie". 79. Stück. Werke vol. 5, p. 598. See Dieter Henrich und Wolfgang Iser: "Entfaltung der Problemlage". Funktionen des Fiktiven, p. 10. Marquard: "Kunst als Antifiktion — Versuch über den Weg der Wirklichkeit ins Fiktive". Funktionen des Fiktiven, pp. 35 — 54, here p. 35. Catholy: "Komische Figur und dramatische Wirklichkeit", pp. 195, 196 and 200. Daunicht: Lessing im Gespräch, p. 214, No. 363 (account of his brother Karl Gotthelf Lessing). Schiller: "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung". Nationalausgabe vol. 20, p. 446: "Nicht das Gebieth, aus welchem der Gegenstand genommen, sondern das Forum, vor welches der Dichter ihn bringt, macht denselben tragisch oder komisch." Cf. Warning: "Elemente einer Pragmasemiotik der Komödie", pp. 317 — 333. Diderot: "De la poesie dramatique". Le Drame bourgeois (Ouevres completes. 10), pp. 323—427, here p. 356: "U faut que les hommes fassent dans la comedie le role que font les dieux dans la tragedie."

236

Illusion and Literary Genre

Summing up: There are two main differences between tragic and comic illusion: first and foremost all comic situations, comic actions, comic language create a distance between the comic object and the laughing subject, looking upon something as comic means being not emotionally involved. But even non-comic situations in comedy can be attended without any emotional concern: the structure guarantees a happy ending, and the spectator knows that through all delusion, feint and trickery on stage he can never be deceived, being always capable to reflect upon the playing within the play. Comedy thus shows itself always being more or less self-referential, being theater on theater. 40 And this — secondly — is made possible only by the exclusion o f all eternal forces, by breaking the great illusion which frames social and individual 'reality': the illusion of destiny, the idea of a world where impenetrable forces rule over men. My three examples shall illustrate these central problems o f comic illusion: the first one illustrates comedy's self-referentiality, the second one the problem o f emotional involvement in comedy, and the last one the dissolvement o f comic illusion by delusion, when social reality, comedy's seat in life becomes instable. "Voicy un estrange monstre" In the early seventeenth century France, when the first play to be discussed was staged, stage conditions were almost medieval; the auditorium was illuminated more than the stage itself: " [ . . . ] l'action se deroulait sur le plateau devant une salle ού brillaient les lumieres des lustres." 4 1 There was no curtain, the decoration remained the same throughout the presentation, only the middle o f the stage could be changed or hidden with scenic drop-curtains. 4 2 In 1635 or 1636 on such a stage, namely on the Theatre du Marais, a play was staged by the troup o f Montdory for the first time, Pierre Corneilles L'Illusion comique. Comedie. Never before — and scarcely ever since — were so many kinds o f illusion not only used, but even thematized in a play. T h e title is not tautological: in the seventeenth century 'comique' has the connotation o f 'comic', but above all o f 'appertaining to theater', related to the theatrical play or the actor. T h e subtitle, neverthe-

40

Cf. Martini: " Z u r Poetik des Lustspiels". Martini: Lustspiele

41

Deierkauf-Holsboer: Histoire

— und das Lustspiel,

de la mise en scene dans le theatre fran$ais

p. 21.

ä Paris de 1600 ä

1673, pp. 76 — 77, pp. 73 — 77: L'Eclairage de la salle et de la scene; cf. also Sckommodau: " D i e Grotte der 'Illusion c o m i q u e ' " , p. 283. 42

Garapon:

"Introduction".

Corneille:

L Illusion

comique,

p.xix-xx; cf. also

Deierkauf-

Holsboer: Histoire de la mise en scene dans le theatre fran$ais ä Paris de 1600 ä 1673, pp. 77 — 80: Le

rideau.

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

237

less, names the special genre. 4 3 In his dedication o f the first edition o f 1639 Corneille says: "Voicy un estrange monstre que je vous dedie. Le premier Acte n'est qu'un Prologue, les trois suivants font une Comedie imparfaicte, le dernier est une Tragedie, & tout cela cousu ensemble faict une C o m e d i e . " 4 4 In the first act, being a frame, the bourgeois Pridamant, his friend Dorante and the magician Alcandre appear on stage. Ten years earlier Pridamant had chased his son out o f his house, now he repents, and with the magician's help he tries to find his son. T h e magician promises: Je vay de ses amours Et de tout ses hazards vous fair le discours. Toutefois, si vostre ame estoit assez hardie, Sous une illusion vous pourriez voir sa vie, Et tous ses accidens devant vous exprimez Par des spectres pareils ä des corps animes: II ne leur manquera ny geste ny parole. 45 Within the context o f the play to Pridamant 'illusion' means a magic appearance — for the moment without any delusion, which in the seventeenth century can be included in the French term. F o r through the magician's discourse the apparitions ("spectres") become real persons with gestures and dialogue. Pridamant thus will be the onlooker during the magic illusion; the spectator in the real theater, however, sees everything, the magic performance and the realistic fictitious frame as 'illusion comique'. T h e spectator observes " a play within a conjuration within a play" 4 6 . T h u s we might understand the magic, depicted and produced by Alcandre, metaphorically as theatrical enchantment, especially since he is called "artiste" and his magic named " a r t " . M o r e o v e r in the framing prologue he gives us a preview o f the device, showing his spectres clothes: "II donne un coup de baguette & on tire un rideau derriere lequel sont en parade les plus beaux habits des Comediens." 4 7 43

For a more detailed summary of the content and the tradition of motifs and theatrical figures see Stackelberg: "Corneille. L'lllusion comique" and Garapon's "Introduction" to Corneille: L'lllusion comique, pp. xii-lxxvii; for bibliographical reference to Corneille's comedies and to L'lllusion comique see Milorad R. Margitic: "Corneille comique: A bibliographical guide (1633 — 1980)". Corneille comique, pp. 185—219.

44

Corneille: L'lllusion comique, p. 3. Ibid. p. 14 (I.ii): "I will give you an account of his love affairs and all his fortunes. However, if your heart is courageous enough, you can see his life in an illusion, all his adventures represented by apparitions like animated bodies: They are lacking neither gesture nor speech."

45

46

Nelson: "Corneille's 'L'lllusion comique'", p. 1128; see also Nelsons Play Within a Play, pp. 47 — 61 (Chapter 4: "Corneille. The Play as Magic").

47

Corneille: L'Illusion comique, p. 13 (I ii).

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Illusion and L i t e r a r y G e n r e

Through acts two to four, while Pridamant and the magician are always present as spectators on stage, one of the standard comedy plots develops: Clindor, the lost son, is servant of Matamore, a swaggering Capitain gascon, a completely theatrical figure about whom Corneille himself said that he has no original among men 48 ; he is the most obvious comic device to keep the onlookers at distance from the play performed. For Matamore Clindor shall woo beautiful Isabelle, but she loves him and he loves her. Clindor is confronted not only with Matamore, but also with another lover of Isabelle, Adraste, whom she repudiated in favour of Clindor. Isabelle's maid Lyse, too is in love with Clindor, and he renounces her only, because Isabelle has a higher social position. Isabelle's father will marry her to Adrast; Isabelle refuses; the braggart wants to help her; Clindor chases him away; the rival Adrast comes running up with a couple of soldiers, threatens to kill him; Clindor, however, is faster in killing, but is seized. The magician has to comfort the excited onlooking father at the act's end. The fourth act shows Clindor in prison, waiting for his execution, but he is liberated and can fly from prison. At the end of this act the magician had announced and promised "des effets plus beaux" for the last act: certainly the father and the real audience have different expectations of what is to come. Isabelle and Lyse enter, and the onlooking father is baffled and confused: "Qu'Isabelle est changee, et qu'elle est eclatante!" 49 Curious things happen: She wants to catch her husband Clindor — also in luxurious costume — red-handed at a rendezvous with the prince's wife; the princess appears, speaks in favour of love. The prince's Guards rush in, Clindor and the Princess are slain, Isabelle is led away, because the prince has cast an eye on her for rather a long time. Here the father Pridamant, watching the spectacle of the magician's spectres, for the first time interrupts the illusionary action with a cry of anxiety: "Helas, il est perdu!" A middle curtain conceals the scene. The father complains the disgraceful end of his son and wants to commit suicide. The illusion of the magician, who promised the true depiction of Clindor's life, may also puzzle the real audience in the theater, if they were induced to forget the genre of the Illusion comique. The magician, leading the poor father along, announces the burial to be seen at the lifting curtain: There we see sitting all together, those who just appeared to the father in the previous illusion, and they are dividing up money: What kind of illusion is this? The fifth act, which the fictitious onlooker on stage and the real ones in the theater have watched, was nothing but the last act of a staged tragedy, performed by Clindor and Isabelle who had joined a 48

Ibid. p. 123 ( " E x a m e n " ) : T h e r e is a character in the play " q u i n'a d'estre q u e dans l ' i m a g i n a t i o n , invente expres p o u r faire rire, et dont il ne se t r o u v e point d ' o r i g i n a l p a r m y les h o m m e s . "

40

Ibid. p. 96 (V.i).

239

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

troupe of actors in Paris. Corneille/Alcandre has shown to the father and to those of the real audience who forgot, that they are watching a comedy, both an illusion and a delusion. Corneille thus plays with several planes and several kinds of illusion and delusion 50 . His most inspired idea is to let the fictitious onlooker be the father of the illusion's hero; the father constantly does not hear the various hints and allusions to the theatrics, made by Alcandre during the whole play: "Pridamant cannot hear Alcandre's reassurances because he is too affected by what is happening to his jo»."51 Nelson is right when he calls this "blood-relationship" "a most telling demonstration of the principle of identification between spectator and personage"; but this might be valid for the contemporary theory of tragedy, not for comedy, as we may learn from theoreticians of Corneille's time 52 . The magician uses the effects of sympathy, which Diderot and his German follower Lessing more than a hundred years later believe will make the theater audience almost forget theater. In order to enhance the father's illusion even more, the magician had sent home the father's friend before the illusion began: Thus — in contradiction to the normal theatrical illusion — he is the only onlooker except the present fictitious producer of the discourse of illusion. His unusual situation as a spectator 53 , together with Alcandre's eulogy of theater which closes the play, prove Pridamant's misguided notion of theater and especially comedy. Only at the end of the play has he learned and understood the theatrical discourse, the theatrical self-consciousness of the contemporary theater: "The spectator is made aware of the theatrical nature of the scene he is watching". 54 And this is valid especially for the early plays of Corneille; for he and other comedy-writers of the French early seventeenth century had renounced the more rude comic devices like harlequin and low characters in order to redeem comedy's ill reputation of being only farce by a more sophisticated self-conscious comic illusion 55 . 50

See Nelson: Play Within a Play, pp. 47 —61; but also Cuche: "Les trois illusions de 'L'lllusion c o m i q u e ' " ; Forestier: "Illusion c o m i q u e et illusion m i m e t i q u e " , and especially Ralph Albanese, Jr.: " M o d e s de Theätralite dans 'L'lllusion c o m i q u e ' . " Corneille comique, pp. 129 — 149. F o r a p r o f o u n d study in the play within a play see Schmeling: Das im Spiel. Ein Beitrag \ur Vergleichenden Literaturkritik

Spiel

(Corneille pp. 64—66).

51

Nelson: "Corneille's 'L'lllusion c o m i q u e ' " , p. 1133.

52

Cf. Bürger: Die frühen Komödien Corneilles, pp. 39 — 62.

53

I cannot see why Pridamant should be "l'image de tout spectateur" — Cuche: "Les trois illusions de 'L'lllusion c o m i q u e ' " , p. 76.

54

55

Reiss: Toward Dramatic

Illusion, p. 56. see also Forestier: Le theatre dans le theatre sur la

scene franfaise du XV11'

siecle.

See e.g. Bürger: Die frühen

Komödien Pierre Corneilles, p. 26, w h e r e he quotes f r o m

Corneilles " E x a m e n " of his Melite\ a few years before Corneille's UIllusion

comique t w o

o t h e r extremely self-referential comedies were staged in Paris: G o u g e n o t ' s Comedie des comediens and G e o r g e s de Scudery's play of the same title; b o t h were a b o u t a company of actors, and thus, being also eulogies o n theater, tried to p r o v e the actors' integrity.

240

Illusion and Literary Genre

The real audience of course is aware of the illusionary character of all levels; only in the last act, even with the actual onlooker, may illusion become delusion. But this delusion would not be dramatic or theatrical, but only a delusion concerning the play's genre: For the experienced spectator of the seventeenth century would see through Corneille's play within the last act, and take it for what it was: an exaggerated travestied tragedy 5 6 . T h e play within L!Illusion comique, as a didactic and demonstrative play about illusion and conventions of genre, had its effect upon Pridamant, w h o knows so little about theater and illusion and w h o m Corneille therefore depicts as a man from the country. Pridamant n o w knows, that the aim of comedy is not sympathy, but emotional freedom: J'ay crue la Comedie au point ou je l'ay veue; J'en ignorois l'esclat, l'utilite, l'appas, Et la blasmois ainsi, ne la cognoissant pas. Mais depuis vos discours, m o n coeur plain d'allegresse A banny cette erreur avecque la tristesse. 57

Confidence in a clear relation between dramatic illusion and reality never is questioned in this comedy, nor even touched. Therefore Corneille's play is comparable to Shakespeare's comedies and some of his tragedies, which also have a "reflexive quality", where the audience is aware "of the complex fictiveness of their experience" 5 8 . All these kinds of breaking illusion do not actually destroy illusion, but — according to the pre-eighteenth century notion of theatrical illusion — drive the spectator even "deeper into his illusion" 5 9 . " T h e young Lady of Barnhelm is dead!" Corneille's play seems to be quite a proper example for comic illusion though it does not confirm the view, that comedy t h r o u g h o u t its history 56 57

58

59

Stackelberg: "Corneille. L'Ulusion comique", p. 72. Corneille: L·Illusion comique, p. 121: "I believed in comedy from the moment I saw it: I did not know its splendor, benefit, and fascination, and thus 1 blamed it, not comprehending it. But since your account, my heart, full of joy, has banished this error together with all sadness." Dawson: Indirections. Shakespeare and the Art of Illusion, p. xii. German baroque literature does not provide appropriate examples for this kind of illusion; Peter Skrine: "Illusion and Reality", p. 247 states: " T h e mirthlessness of German baroque writing — some comedies, prose, and erotic verses apart — is in clear contrast to the baroque in most other European settings. Exuberant delight in make-believe and illusionism for their o w n sake was absent [...]." Melchinger: Illusion und Wirklichkeit im dramatischen Werk Arthur Schnitters, p. 115: on the harlequin and his apparent breaking the illusion: "[...] treibt sie den Zuschauer doch nur umso tiefer in seine Illusion hinein."

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

241

has been played directly to the audience 60 ; comedy's devices, mechanisms and ruses to show itself being theater are far more multifarious than only 'breaking the illusion'. In the seventeenth century comedy is not yet contrasted with what was called 'tragedy's identification demanding sublimity' 6 1 . Sublimity, moreover, could hardly have this effect, and even a theoretician like the Abbe d'Aubignac whose ideal was a complete illusion 6 2 had to admit that in spite of the emotions being transferred from the actor to the spectator the onlooker is always quite sure that he is in a theater: "nous sommes bien assürez qu'on nous trompe" 6 3 . The fundamental change in the history of comedy took place in the eighteenth century; it did not supersede the former tradition, but made it survive rather in the burlesque of the popular theaters than in 'Hochliteratur'. Rainer Warning puts this down to the fact that the comic antagonists, who were loved by the laughing audience in spite of their faults, no longer are the true heros in comedy, and that their folly or nonconformist character can no longer be integrated into the comic play, because the reasonable community now opposing them is explicitly developed. 6 4 August Wilhelm Schlegel already faced the dilemma that modern comedy very often does without traditional comic illusion. In his definition he sums up comedy's development in the eighteenth century: If the poet plays humorously with his o w n inventions, the burlesque [Posse] emerges; if he holds to the ridiculousness of the situations and characters, avoiding, if he can, all serious additions, a mere comedy [ein reines Lustspiel] will be created; as soon as seriousness holds the field in the purpose of the whole structure and in the evoked sympathy of moral judgement, the comedy turns into the didactic or sentimental drama; and hence its only one step to the bourgeois tragedy. 6 5

And consequently he differentiates two kinds of comic: "the comic of observing" in the refined comedy, and "the self-conscious and confessed

60

62

61

64 65

Warning: "Elemente einer Pragmasemiotik der Komödie", p. 314. As Warning supposes, see ibid. See Bürger: Die frühen Komödien Pierre Corneilles, pp. 39—45: "Die Theorie der vollkommenen Illusion". D'Aubignac also gives the example of a young girl who never before has been in a theater watching a tragedy and trying to warn the hero (La pratique du theatre. Paris: Sommaville, 1657, IV, 6; p. 427 — quoted from Bürger p. 41); d'Aubignac follows the rhetorical tradition of transference of emotions and Jean Chapelin famous "Lettre sur la regle des vingt-quatre heures" (1630). d'Aubignac: La Pratique du Theatre (Paris 1657) IV, 8; p. 437 — quoted from Bürger: Die frühen Komödien Pierre Corneilles, p. 41. Warning: "Elemente einer Pragmasemiotik der Komödie", pp. 320—333 passim. Schlegel: "Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur" Τ. 1. Kritische Schriften vol. 5, p. 162.

242

Illusion and Literary Genre

comic" in the lower comedy, the burlesque, that continues the old tradition of comic illusion with its "certain inner doubling" within the comic part and comic action 66 . To the m o d e m comedy and its followers Schlegel ascribes greater propinquity to serious drama. In this kind of comedy the poet depicts "in human characters and situations that which causes amusement and fun, in a word, the comical, the ridiculous. But it ought not appear anymore as a mere offspring of his phantasy, but be plausible, that is appear real." 6 7 Actually suppressing the comic demonstration of the dramatic character as a mere role is connected with a new concept of reality and verity in the age of enlightenment, a new social function of comedy and laughing according to the utilization of poetry in the process of the bourgeois selfdevelopment. Diderot's objection to mere fictional characters, impressive only on stage, now also applies to comedy, where no aesthetic distance, but probability and the possibility of identification are necessary. 68 Lessing discusses, referring to Diderot and Richard Hurd, the problem of verity, and he requires native customs not like Diderot only for the serious drama, but also for comedy, because they enhance the spectator's illusion. 6 9 Nevertheless Lessing concedes that comedy does not need the same degree of illusion ("Täuschung") as is requested to arouse sympathy in tragedy. Marian Hobson has described the historical change in the theory of illusion in the eighteenth century: The most striking o f these [signs and consequences of this change] is the change in the type o f consciousness allowed to the consumer. The retraction of 'illusion' f r o m a containing of awareness to its exclusion both implies and entails a development of a new demarcation between subject and object.

Obviously this reduction of the spectator "to an internal, even private, view point" 7 0 goes together with the embourgeoisement of the drama which actually and above all means that it now focusses private identification demanding emotions and problems. And only comedy partly preserved the elder notion of illusion as the specific "area between art and spectator" 71 .

66 67 68

69 70 71

Ibid. pp. 1 6 4 - 1 6 5 . Ibid. p. 158. Diderot: "Entretiens sur le fils nature!". Le Drame bourgeois (Ouevres completes. 10), pp. 83—162, here p. 85: "[...] j'en ai remarque plusieurs qui ont un caractere de fiction qui n'impose qu'au theatre, ού Ton dirait qu'il y a une illusion et des applaudissements de convention." cf. Jauss: "Diderots Paradox über das Schauspiel", p. 388. Lessing: "Hamburgische Dramaturgie". Werke vol. 5, p. 676. Hobson: The Object of the Art, p. 43. Ibid. p. 38.

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

243

In November 1769 several letters of a boy to his father appeared in the Hamburgische Adress-Comtoir-Nachrichten, one of them giving an account of a curious action which took place in a magnificent hall, after the curtain which covered one part of it was drawn away: Oh! I can't tell you, what all this was about; but I don't want to be your Fritz, if not three times tears came to my eyes watching what those people said and did. Sometimes I also got wild, and I thought some people could be killed, but finally everything turned out well. The young Lady was f r o m Saxony, and her name was Minna v o n Bamhelm. [...] Cousin Steffens told me confidently that a man called Lessing and staying here has caused the whole story — Well, G o d may f o r g i v e him f o r alarming the Major and the poor young Lady like this. 7 2

Matthias Claudius has invented this unlearned spectator to illustrate the new illusion in eighteenth century 'true comedy'; certainly he knew Les Bijoux indiscrets (1747), where Diderot had demanded from the future dramatic performance an exact imitation of an action: the spectator being deluded without interruption should imagine watching the action itself 73 . About the actual theatrical performances of his day Diderot observes: even with an unlearned onlooker the illusion would not last for a moment because of the most unnatural representation 74 .

Lessing's Minna von Bamhelm oder das Soldatenglück75 is a perfect example for this change of paradigm — in regard to comedy — that had been prepared by the sentimental comedies of Richard Steele or the "comedie larmoyante" of Pierre de Marivaux 7 6 , Voltaire, or Pierre Claude Nivelle

72

73

74

75 76

Claudius: Sämtliche Werke, pp. 750—751: "Oh! ich kann Ihnen nicht recht so sagen, wie das alles war; aber ich will Ihr Fritz nicht sein, wenn mir nicht dreimal bei dem, was diese Leute sagten und taten, die Tränen in die Augen getreten sind. Manchmal ward mir's auch grün und gelb vor Augen, und ich dachte, es würde tote Leute geben, doch ging alles gottlob noch gut ab. Das Fräulein war aus Sachsen, und hieß Minna von Barnhelm. [...] Vetter Steffens sagte mir im Vertrauen, daß ein Mann, der Lessing heißt, und der sich hier aufhalten soll, diese ganze Geschichte gemacht habe — Nun so vergeb's ihm Gott, daß er dem Major und dem armen Fräulein so viel Unruhe gemacht hat." Diderot: "Les Bijoux indiscrets". Les Bijoux indiscrets (Oeuvres completes. 3), p. 163: "Je sais encore que la perfection d'un spectacle consiste dans l'imitation si exacte d'une action, que le spectateur, trompe sans interruption, s'imagine assister ä Taction meme." Ibid. p. 165. And, of course, stage conditions and theatrical practice throughout the eighteenth century remained diametrically opposed to the maxim of uninterrupted illusion: Sybille Maurer-Schmoock: Deutsches Theater im 18. Jahrhundert, pp. 74 — 75 and passim; the excellent study provides a lot of material about the actual situation of theater, stage, and acting in eighteenth century Europe. All quotations from Lessing: Werke vol. 1, pp. 605 — 704. For a thorough discussion of the aspects of illusion in his work see Lambert: Realite et ironie: les jeux de I'illusion dans le theatre de Marivaux.

244

Illusion and Literary G e n r e

de la Chaussee 77 . Comedy gained a new social function in keeping with the new conception as the bourgeois saw themselves: a community of likeminded, like-feeling men and women from which nobody really was excluded. Aesthetic distance of comic illusion and laughing, however, involve a certain danger because the spectator thinks himself superior to the comic characters and the absurdities of the comic action; he thus does not feel himself affected by the 'moral purpose' of the play: "Un spectateur pouvait se dire ä lui-meme, ce n'est pas moi", Diderot says78. Consequently laughing was questioned in the enlightenment, following a long tradition of animosity against this human reaction because of its supposed hardheartedness 79 . The revaluation of laughing began in England, and the result was a differentiation between the callous 'laughing at' and the sentimental 'laughing with' 80 ; Lessing and others joined this view, and we can read in his Hamburgische Dramaturgic. "Laughing and derision [verlachen] are quite different. We can laugh at a person, laugh with him [bei Gelegenheit seiner lachen], but by no means deriding him." 81 There is no doubt about Comedy's moral purpose: "Comedy wants to make people better, but not by derision." 82 Thus Lessing in his Minna von Barnhelm connects sympathy — for him the only passion to be aroused in tragedy — with a comedyplot, comedy's structure and personnel, as well as with the new kind of laughing with only hero Tellheim and his deficiency concerning the hierarchy of values like honour, love, and sympathy. In traditional comedy love does everything, in Lessing's play Minna, when she learns that Tellheim — a character also prone to tragic involvement — thinks higher of honour than of love, muses: "Perhaps your sympathy would grant me what your love refuses to do." 8 3 In quite a paradigmatic way from act IV, scene 5, to act V, scene 12, Tellheim's increasing sympathy ("Mitleid") for Minna, and her comedy-like intrigue with two rings drives the major deep into a complete misunderstanding

77

See Warning: " D i e K o m ö d i e der E m p f i n d s a m k e i t . Steele — Marivaux — Lessing".

78

Diderot: " E n t r e t i e n s sur le fils naturel". Le

Drame

bourgeois (Ouevres completes. 10),

pp. 83 — 162, here p. 144; for the discussion of this p r o b l e m see Jauss: " D i d e r o t s Paradox über das Schauspiel", especially p. 388. 79

See Warning: " D i e K o m ö d i e der E m p f i n d s a m k e i t . Steele — Marivaux — Lessing", pp. 13 — 14; Warning refers to Curtius: Europäische Literatur

und lateinisches

Mittelalter,

pp. 421—423: " D i e Kirche u n d das Lachen". 80

Cf. Warning: " D i e K o m ö d i e der E m p f i n d s a m k e i t . Steele — Marivaux — Lessing", p. 15.

81

Lessing: " H a m b u r g i s c h e D r a m a t u r g i e . 28. Stück". Werke vol. 4, p. 362.

82

Ibid. 29. Stück, p. 363. See also Böhler: "Lachen o d e r Verlachen? Das Dilemma zwischen Toleranzidee und traditioneller Lustspielfunktion in der K o m ö d i e n t h e o r i e " .

83

Lessing: Werke vol. 1, p. 681 (IV.vi).

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

245

and delusion, a fearful dream as he calls it ("ein schreckhafter Traum") 84 , from which only Minna herself releases him: "O comediennes, I should have known you!" Tellheim comments upon Minna's and Franziska's play; and Franziska, standing partly in the long tradition of the witty and clever maid — the Colombine or Soubrette —, herself explicates in an almost poetological way her new role: "No, really; I'm not disposed to be a comedienne. I shivered and trembled, and I had to hold my mouth." 85 Franziska in fact is, as Walter Hinck points out, the only figure of the play that guarantees the happy ending: "She is the organ by which the comedy controls itself." 86 And that indicates that the new concept of illusion as identification does not apply totally for the new comedy: traditional devices are used to sustain the elder conception, at least partly. Matthias Claudius' fictive letters prove the new art of 'realistic' and 'natural' acting in comedy that no longer differs from acting in the tragic drama: When the young Fritz in Christian Felix Weisse's Romeo und Julia — a domestic drama-version of the old story — sees the same actress who impersonated Minna dying as Julia, he confounds role and actress, lamenting: "The young Lady of Barnhelm is dead" 87 . Moliere's distinction between comic and tragic illusion regarding the actor is no longer valid: Car v o u l o i r c o n t r e f a i r un c o m e d i e n dans u n r o l e c o m i q u e , ce n'est pas le p e i n d r e l u i - m e m e , c'est p e i n d r e d'apres lui les p e r s o n n a g e s qu'il represente, et se s e r v i r des m e m e s traits et des m e m e s c o u l e u r s qu'il est o b l i g e d ' e m p l o y e r aux d i f f e r e n t s tableaux des caracteres ridicules qu'il imite d'apres nature; mais c o n t r e f a i r e u n c o m e d i e n d a n s des röles serieux, c'est le p e i n d r e par des d e f a u t s qui s o n t e n t i e r e m e n t de lui, p u i s q u e ces sortes d e p e r s o n n a g e s ne v e u l e n t ni les gestes, ni les t o u s de v o i x ridicules d a n s lesquels o n le r e c o n n o i t . 8 8

Taking in account all this, comic illusion, both the traditional and the new one, includes a much more general device than those putative anti-

84

85

86 87 88

In eighteenth century aesthetic theory illusion often was compared with dream; cf. Sulzer: Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste vol. 4, p. 514 (article "Täuschung"). Lessing: Werke vol. 1, p. 701 (V.xii): "Nein, wahrhaftig; ich bin zur Komödiantin verdorben. Ich habe gezittert und gebebt, und mir mit der Hand das Maul zuhalten müssen." Hinck: Das deutsche Lustspiel des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts und die italienische Komödie, p. 293. Claudius: Sämtliche Werke, p. 754. Moliere: "L'Impromptu de Versailles". Theatre complete vol. 1, p. 521: "For if you want to parody a comedian in his comic role, you ought not portray himself, but the type of his roles, he impersonates, with all its features, in the same colors, he has to apply for the various gallery of his comic and ridiculous characters, which he mimics true to life; a comedian in a serious role on the other hand is parodied in portraying the failures, he shows, because these roles do require neither ridiculous gestures nor speech, to be credible and authentic." For Moliere's concept of illusion see e.g. Mould: "Illusion and Reality: A new resolution of an old paradox".

246

Illusion and Literary G e n r e

illusionistic devices or the self-referentiality of a the play within the play: laughing and happy ending, the first being the promise of the latter. In everyday life "absurdity" and "malice", faults and vices, unreason and nonsense, mere accident instead of a destiny actually do not effect laughter; on the contrary, they impede us from "being free f r o m emotion, looking around, always clear, always calm" 8 9 . T h e happy ending in comedy differs f r o m the happy ending in the traditional novel, where the reader is shown a world, where finally, in spite of all misfortune and unhappiness, the reasonable man must be happy — thus Goethe explains his Wilhelm Meister's happy ending: "Strictly speaking the whole seems to say nothing but that a man, in spite of all follies and confusions, will reach the happy ending, guided by a hand higher than his o w n . " 9 0 In comedy there is no such guiding hand, but reason, social standards or social Utopia aim at a social reconciliation after all mere accidents, t h o u g h experience is against a happy ending. Comedy confirms it and thus is able to demonstrate not only a "world of hilarity, unreason and folly, which is kept distinct from the world of seriousness and which lives on its costs" 9 1 , but can give the audience an illusion it needs badly: the promise of Utopia and the appearance of its probability, here and now. A closer investigation could show how the manifest devices of comedy are sublimated more and more into mere metaphors and verbal evocations — one of the most striking examples perhaps is the "Furlani"-clown-episode in H u g o von Hofmannsthal's Der Schwierige, where harlequin only indirectly and by image enters serious comedy. But in all cases the audience's expectations are sufficient: The genre's convention guarantee this untragic denouement and permit the onlooker to follow the often ominous confusions with that distance being the prerequisite for the comic effect, whereas the fictitious persons are not aware of acting in a comic play and do not know the genre's convention of a comedy, and thus encounter the appalling events with full existential earnest.92 Fictionalizing reality As long as the comic illusion of a hilarious world with a happy ending meets a sort of compulsory view of world and society in the minds of the contemporary audience, comedy and its illusion can aim at emotional freedom in denying the illusion of transcendency and being a counterpart to this integral whole both living upon it and breaking its illusion. But in the moment when different perspectives of competing social concepts 9 3 , 89

See note 2.

1,0

G o e t h e to E c k e r m a n n , 18. 1. 1825. Gespräche vol. 3, p. 157.

91

Warning: " E l e m e n t e einer Pragmasemiotik der K o m ö d i e " , p. 325.

92

Pfister: Drama,

93

Ibid. p. 62.

p. 69.

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

247

when the old social order and values begin to break down and thus destroy an integral view of world and society showing everything to be just a construct of man's mind 9 4 , the demonstration of the dramatic character as a mere role, the comic world o f mere accident, and comic illusion gain a new quality. Now comedy illusion can become a metaphor for delusion, mere appearance, making reality and truth inaccessible. The aged metaphor of marionette- or world-theater, dating back to the antiquity 95 , for a long time was only valid in serious drama referring to transcendence, showing that there 'really' was a world beyond mere appearance. Only since romanticism the metaphor can be fused with the metaphor of comedy illusion. The philosophical prelude to and accompaniment o f this metaphorization of comedy illusion are Hegel's distrust in illusion and aesthetic appearance, Schopenhauer's philosophy and Nietzsche's fictionalizing of reality, his criticism of language, his conviction that truth is nothing but "a versatile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms" 9 6 ; a theatrical and dramatic prelude certainly are Johann Nestroy's comedies with their most excessive use of actual delusions within his burlesques; he plays far more often with the traditional comedy illusion than his predecessors, parodying above all comedy's happy ending. Nestroy believes delusion to be the "thin but strong chain that runs through all members of society; deceiving and being deceived, that's the choice, and who believes in an alternative, deceives himself." 9 7 Previously it was comedy's aim to provide an alternative. It is not very far from Nestroy to my last example of comedy illusion, where the boundary between illusion and reality actually is blurred. Arthur Schnitzler's Der grüne Kakadu. Groteske in einem Akt (1898) 9 8 with its several planes of play, illusion and delusion is so complicated that I can only give a sketch of what is relevant for us. The piece plays in "Paris on the evening of the 14th of July 1789 in Prosperes honky-tonk". There every evening a company of actors gives the aristocratic audience the illusion of being in a bar of criminals. But this comedy on a theater, this insulting the attending aristocracy, is meant really by the fictitious actors: "Their play is disguise". Moreover just on this day a real criminal

94 95

96

97 98

See Paul Watzlawick's essay, pp. 19 — 27 in this volume. For a short survey see Alewyn: Das große Welttheater, pp. 60—90, see also Schmeling: Das Spiel im Spiel. Ein Beitrag \ur Vergleichenden Literaturkritik, pp. 25 — 27, and Schütz: Barocktheater und Illusion, pp. 57 — 59. Nietzsche: "Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne". Sämtliche Werke vol. 1, p. 880. Nestroy: Sämtliche Werke vol. 15, p. 682 (Aphorismen und Notizen). Schnitzler: Dramatische Werke vol. 1, pp. 5 1 5 - 5 5 2 .

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plays himself. These plays within a play on the evening of the assault on the Bastille is superimposed by another play: all participants, both of the ruling class and the third estate, anticipate the coming exchange of roles: "Audience and actors actually are no more what they appear to be, and they enact, what they soon will be." 99 Like Corneille Schnitzler introduces a naive onlooker, a young nobleman from the country, for whom it is very difficult to tell illusion apart from reality. But quite different than in L'Illusion comique he actually comes closest to truth of the play, though he does not recognize the various planes: "It's terrible ... they are serious about it." 100 The comedy in Prospere's bar is fused not only with the historical illusion and delusion of aristocracy and the third estate playing their obsolete and new roles, but also with a private play also both of illusion and delusion between the main actor Henri and his ladylove, who is carrying on with the real duke, which Henri does not know until the play within a play changes to reality within the play: Henri really kills the duke, who appears on scene, out of real jealousy, just after he — still being ignorant of his lover's infidelity — has given the audience on stage and in the given theater the illusion and delusion that he just came from killing the duke out of jealousy. The next delusion follows: Henri is celebrated as a hero of freedom, though he only killed the duke as his wife's lover, not as an aristocrat. In a dialogue between the naive young nobleman and another guest Schnitzler reveals his intention: To be ... t o play ... d o y o u k n o w the d i f f e r e n c e so w e l l , C h e v a l i e r ? [...] I d o n ' t . A n d w h a t I find so c u r i o u s here, is that all a p p a r e n t d i f f e r e n c e s are abolished so to speak. Reality changes i n t o play — play i n t o reality. 1 0 1

This is a different kind of illusion than has been described hitherto; it is no longer the traditional comic illusion, because Schnitzler's play finally turns out to be a play about the confusion of illusion and delusion in reality. If a play like Schnitzler's Grüner Kakadu makes clear, "that there is no reality without play, comedy, delusion" 102 , comic illusion no longer guarantees a hilarious world with a happy ending within comedy; where the perspective on reality is blurred, comedy turns to the grotesque; Schnitzler unquestionably chose his play's subtitle for this reason. On the

99 100

101

102

Melchinger: Illusion

und Wirklichkeit

im dramatischen

Werk Arthur

Schnitters,

p. 118.

Schnitzler: Dramatische Werke vol. 1, p. 546: "Es ist erschreckend ... die Leute meinen es ernst." Ibid. p. 541: "Sein ... spielen ... kennen Sie den Unterschied so genau, Chevalier? [...] Ich nicht. Und was ich hier so eigentümlich finde, ist, daß alle scheinbaren Unterschiede sozusagen aufgehoben sind. Wirklichkeit geht in Spiel über — Spiel in Wirklichkeit." Melchinger: Illusion und Wirklichkeit im dramatischen Werk Arthur Schnitters, p. 125.

Pape: Comic Illusion and Illusion in Comedy

249

other hand the play within a play and the dialectic of play and reality belong to every drama about revolution ("Revolutionsdrama") as Reinhold Grimm has pointed out 103 . Taking a device of comic illusion like the play within a play seriously as a metaphor for an uncertain and indeterminate reality thus must not mean the end of Schiller's emotional freedom. For the critical effect of disillusioning after all takes place during a theatrical illusion where a certain attitude towards life is unmasked: playing a (social) role that does not correspond with social reality 104 . So finally even Schnitzler's grotesque view on the revolution can make us "looking around, always clear, always calm, finding everywhere more chance than destiny or fate", because aesthetic illusion always can break 'real' social, political illusions.

103

104

Grimm: "Spiel und Wirklichkeit in einigen Revolutionsdramen", p. 83; see also Hinderer: "Der Aufstand der Marionetten: Zu Arthur Schnitzlers Groteske Der grüne Kakadu". See for this problem also Selling: Die Einakter und Einakterayklen Arthur Schnitters, pp. 6 7 - 1 3 1 , here p. 127.

HELLMUT

THOMKE

Universität Bern (Schweiz)

Appearance in Poetry: Lyric Illusion? In aesthetics and literary theory, the systematic discussion of the imitative representation of reality and the problem of illusion in the epic and dramatic kinds of poetry begins only properly with Aristotle. The discussion continued in the following centuries and up to the present with persistent reference to the Greek philosopher. Lyric poetry, on the other hand, lacks this long tradition of aesthetic debate, and until the present day, the definition and delimitation of this kind of poetry have remained difficult and contentious. This observation is particularly valid if we go beyond the core area of songs and include such literary genres as epigrammatic poetry, the elegy, the iambic poetry of the Greeks and Romans and others in a comprehensive definition of lyric poetry. The reduction of the genres to the three "natural forms", the epic, the lyric and the dramatic (as we find it most impressively with Goethe 1 ), leads, in regard to lyric poetry, to an unhistoric and forced merging of quite dissimilar non-epic and non-dramatic genres. In his Poetics, Aristotle does not discuss the core area of lyric poetry because he takes the concept of mimesis, the imitative representation of characters and action, as the basis for his remarks. We d o not know whether he came to speak of the lyric poets in the narrow sense of the term as the Greeks used it, in his lost dialogue On the Poets. For the poets w h o composed poems to be sung with the lyre, the classical authors employed the terms melopoios, melikos, and, since the Alexandrian era, lyrikos\ the ancient world, however, did not develop a comprehensive theory of melos, i.e., of the song-like poem to be chanted. In his Art of Poetry, Horace devoted all of three lines to lyric poetry: Musa dedit fidibus divos puerosque d e o r u m et pugilem victorem et equum certaminc p r i m u m et iuvenum curas et libera vina referre. 2 1

G o e t h e : " N o t e n und A b h a n d l u n g e n zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlichen D i v a n s " .

2

Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, 11. 83 — 85, p p . 456 — 457: " T o the lyre the muse

Werkt div. I, vol. 7, p. 118. g r a n t e d tales of g o d s and children of g o d s , of the victor in boxing, of the horse first in the race, of the love of swains, and of f r e e d o m o v e r w i n e . "

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Narrative mimesis or a representational, dramatic mimesis in a scene with fictional characters and action is certainly not the constitutive principle of a lyrical poetry freed from magic, religious belief, customs, and work. Consequently it does not wish either to arouse the illusion o f a comprehensive picture which presents the world as the background and scene of characters in a play. On the contrary, lyric poetry appears to be the statement o f an individual or collective subject (which does not necessarily have to be an empirical subject), and this statement is expressed in a particularly dense and concise form and in a highly structured language. This does not mean that fictional and mimetic elements were absolutely impossible in lyric poetry. When the Greek lyrical poet Simonides asserted that the art o f painting was a silent poetry and poetry a speaking painting, he already indicated a mimetic principle in all genres. Mimesis in action and characters exists in particular forms o f lyric poetry, the epic and dramatic features o f which are derived from its religious origin. This is true o f Greek choral poetry and related developments in other cultures. Aristotle mentions it in a few short sentences because it corresponds with his concept of the representation o f characters and action. It is not possible, however, to deduce an independent poetic kind from these remarks. Above all, the investigation o f the imitative representation in choral lyrics reveals nothing with regard to the particular problem o f appearance in lyrical poetry. Work songs are examples o f a completely different kind for the mimesis o f action in lyric poetry and they developed in all peoples at a certain level o f economic progress. The rhythm in these songs imitates the working process, not, however, to give the illusion o f work, but to economize it and give it a rhythmic order. Children's songs are capable of imitating this in a rather more playful manner and give the appearance o f the working process. These brief remarks indicate the existence o f mimetic elements in lyric poetry. However, they yield hardly anything at all in regard to the problem o f aesthetic appearance or illusion. Therefore, let us pose the following question: What actually has happened in the lyric poem as it developed, beginning with the Greeks from the 7th century B.C. onwards, as a personal poetical work, when religious and moral values were no longer able to fully maintain their superindividual authority as a matter o f course? We proceed on the assumption that the lyric subject began to make itself known at a time in which truth and fiction separated from each other, and fiction slowly became an independent, aesthetic value-field. Henceforth, poetical fiction proclaimed truths no longer generally accepted, and it was no longer the objective vehicle o f the remembered past o f a people. It began, therefore, to claim the right to aesthetic appearance, and it possessed, just as much as the fine arts, the possibility o f simulating reality

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and conveying deceptive illusion. Whence arose the suspicion that poets lie. On the one hand, the self-assured poet who saw himself as a creator, as an originator (from the Greek: poietes) was able by his own authority to confer dignity and importance on the aesthetic object. On the other hand, there also existed the possibility that fiction would become merely a game with illusionistic deception, conveying pleasure and delight. (This conception can be found with the Greek Sophists who used aesthetic illusion in a psychological way in oration as well.) We can see then that the lyric poet is able to use the ability of the poietes to a considerable degree in creating an aesthetic world on its own authority. That which Aristotle mentions only in passing — the creation of the possible instead of the mere imitation of historical and factual reality, the admission of the marvellous and even the illusory (pseudos) —, this can most easily develop into a completely independent world in lyric poetry. However, lyric poetry is not exclusively concerned with the expression of a spiritual inner life. It depicts its relationship to superindividual forces and to reality, and allows itself to be affected by the exterior world. It feels and reflects not only itself, but the world as well. Beyond this, it also projects fictional and illusionary worlds in phantasies, visions and dreams, or mixes images of an interior emotional world with likenesses of reality. Finally, the modern lyrical subject can also play freely with associations, with fragments of both the inner and outer worlds, as well as with linguistic media and forms, and in so doing can conceal itself behind the poem and in the end completely disappear. Poetry detaches itself from any responsibility in regard to truth and reality. "It does not have Truth as its object, it has only Itself', according to Baudelaire's formulation 3 . The following also comes from him: Poetry, if one is ever so slightly prepared to descend into himself, to examine his heart, to recollect past enthusiasm — poetry has no object other than itself; it can have no other, and n o poem will ever be so great, so noble, so truly w o r t h y of its name as that poem which was written solely f o r the pleasure of writing a poem. 4

However let's not jump too quickly from the classical lyric poem to the absolute poetry of the modern era! Two particular aspects of the theory of mimesis still have to be dealt with separately: First, the ancient world 3

4

Baudelaire: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe". Oeuvres completes vol. 2, p. 333: "Elle n'a pas la Verite pour objet, eile n'a qu' Elle-meme." Ibid.: "La poesie, pour peu qu'on veuille descendre en soi-meme, interroger son äme, rappeler ses souvenirs d'enthousiasme, n'a pas d'autre but qu'elle-meme; eile ne peut pas en avoir d'autre, et aucun poeme ne sera si grand, si noble, si veritablement digne du nom de poeme, que celui qui aura ete ecrit uniquement pour le plaisir d'ecrire un poeme."

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already knew imitation not only as a slavish dependence on reality, but rather also as a productive process. In the Institutio Oratorio, Quintilian naturally emphasizes the possibility of teaching and learning oratory and extols the importance of models. But in a particular passage, he stresses the creative nature of imitation and treats rhetoric, so to speak, as generative grammar: For it is quite impossible to teach everything that can be accomplished by art. For example, what painter has ever been taught to reproduce everything in nature? But once he has acquired the general principles of imitation, he will be able to copy whatever is given him. What vase-maker is there w h o has not succeeded in producing a vase of the type which he had never previously seen? 5

Secondly, in Aristotle's Politics, we find a passage in the text which suggests that we relate the concept of mimesis to the representation of sensations and passions in lyric poetry. It is true that the philosopher speaks in connection with the cultural, ethical and educational importance of music in the state, of imitation with the aid of tones and rhythms. These latter are endowed with a psychological effect even without the text of song. But since at the core area of lyric poetry, music and text form an inseparable whole, we may assume that for Aristotle, imitation through the use of tones and rhythms was also of crucial importance for lyric poetry. He declares, that songs make our souls enthusiastic: A n d moreover, everybody when listening to imitations (ton mimeseori) is t h r o w n into a corresponding state o f feeling by the rhythms and tunes themselves, even apart f r o m the words and the dances. [...] Rhythms and tunes contain representations ( k o m o w m a t a ) of anger and mildness, and also of courage and temperance and all their opposites and the other moral qualities that most closely correspond to the true natures of these qualities. 6

And he continues: Painters and sculptors are only indirectly able to represent traits of character. "Tunes, on the contrary, do actually contain in themselves imitations (;mimemata) of characters." 7 It can be seen from the present remarks that in lyric poetry, in contrast to other kinds, the independent creation of a world through the poetic subject prevails over imitation. Creation and imitation are not entirely mutually exclusive, however, and may be competing elements in the lyric poem. In this respect, Kant is incorrect in his Critique of Judgment when

5

Quintilian: The Institutio Oratoria, VII.x.8 —9; vol. 3, pp. 166 — 167: "Tradi enim omnia, quae ars efficit, non possunt. N a m quis pictor omnia, quae in rerum natura sunt, adumbrare didicit? sed percepta semel imitandi ratione adsimulabit quidquid acceperit. Quis non faber vasculum aliquod, quale n u n q u a m viderat, fecit?"

6

Aristoteles: Politics 8,5 (1340a) 12—21; pp. 656—657 (translation adapted by the author.) Ibid. 3 8 - 3 9 . ; pp. 6 5 8 - 6 5 9 .

7

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Illusion and Literary Genre

he writes that everyone must agree that genius must be set squarely in opposition to imitation. 8 In what follows, we shall look at the consequences for the problem of illusion in the lyric poem. In so doing, we must take into account the different meanings of the term illusion·. Illusion is either a perfect imitation of reality. Or it is aesthetic appearance and product of a creative imagination. Or illusion is deception, self-deception and delusion. We come to the three following observations: 1. In poetry narrow limits have been set against perfect imitation. In contrast to the artistic media of painting and sculpture, language allows the immediate reproduction of reality only to a restricted degree because it forms a system of conventional signs, and phenomena such as onomatopoeia are of only secondary importance. Although lyric poetry often makes extensive use of onomatopoeia, the latter's practicability in the imitation of reality is, all in all, still more limited than in other kinds of poetry, and this completely apart from the fact that onomatopoeia is more conducive to the play of sounds than to illusionistic representation. This limitation is finally also due to the necessity of this kind of poetry to be short and semantically dense. It is true that there is also painterly or descriptive poetry. But even this poetry does not easily succeed in conveying an immediate visual perception, even when it avoids tropes and concentrates on giving a clear and concrete image. In addition, the attempts at painterly imitation of natural reality set off that basic critique which reached its apex in Lessing's Laokoon. Where descriptive literary genres were not simply repudiated, the descriptive and the lyrical genres were often separated and the attempt was made to preserve the former as an independent kind of poetry. One could mention Johann Jacob Engel, of the later German Enlightenment, as an example. He categorized poetry according to its subject-matter in the following way: a) the pictorial or descriptive kind; b) a kind presenting an action (the epic poem and drama); c) the didactic kind; d) the lyric kind. 9 — After all, visual poetry did not refute the difficulty of deceptive imitation in poetry. Even in the figured poem, the visual presumption can realize only incompletely the identity of the linguistic statement with the symbolic figure of its graphic representation. 2. To a larger degree, the lyric poet can claim the right to generate a world of appearance in his poems, or to refashion the existing world from the point of view of a subject. This claim was decisively uttered in the aesthetic of German Idealism and in the poetry of European Romanticism which had the imprint of the German movement upon it. As early as 8

"Darin ist jedermann einig, daß Genie dem Nacbahmungsgeiste sei." Kant: Werke vol. 5, p. 407.

gänzlich entgegenzusetzen

9

Engel: "Anfangsgründe einer Theorie der Dichtungsarten". Schriften

vol. 11, p. 38.

Thomke: Appearance in Poetry: Lyric Illusion?

255

Kant's Critique of Judgment, the art of poetry appears as the free play of the productive imagination. Kant declares: "Imagination (as a productive cognitive faculty) is very powerful in the creation, as it were, of another nature, out of the material which the true nature offers it." 1 0 In modern poetry, the free play of the imagination leads to extreme consequences. The conquest of banal reality by aesthetic appearance also gave rise to criticism in times of crisis and induced critical lyric poets such as Heinrich Heine or Bert Brecht to expose appearance as falsehood and deceit or else as questionable ideology. 3. The predominance of the Aristotelian concept of mimesis led, at certain moments in the theory of lyric poetry, to the understanding of lyrical expression as an imitation of emotions and passions. This was unproblematic as long as the rhetorical study of emotions was of unlimited validity. During the eighteenth century, however, as poetry came to be seen as the product of inspiration and as the expression of genius, the consciously produced emotion and the merely imitated sensation were inevitably viewed as something spurious. It was no longer the simulation of feelings, but rather only true experiences and serious thoughts which mattered. This restoration of the unity of fact and fiction was based upon a belief in creative man's sharing in the divine spirit. This belief began to collapse as early as the first half of the 19th century, and the claim to truth and authenticity was exposed as romantic self-delusion and as an illusion in the negative sense of the term. We shall now illustrate the three observations through concrete examples. Due to the restricted scope of this paper, we cannot do full justice to the diversity of the phenomena.

On the first

point:

In contrast to illusionistic painting, an illusionistic descriptive poetry is impossible, and criticism of descriptive poetry is justified at least in the category of lyric poetry. In addition, it is easy to show in descriptive poems that their aim is only rarely simple description, and that they cannot dispense with a whole range of tropes, such as comparisons, metaphors, hyperbole, etc. This is as easily demonstrable in the nature poems of the

10

Kant: Werke vol. 5, p. 414: "Die Einbildungskraft (als produktives Erkenntnisvermögen) ist nämlich sehr mächtig in Schaffung gleichsam einer andern Natur, aus dem Stoffe, den ihr die wirkliche gibt." — cf. Addison: "The Spectator No. 421": "It is this talent of affecting the imagination, that gives an embellishment to good sense, and makes one man's compositions more agreeable than another's. It sets off all writings in general, but is the very life and highest perfection of poetry. [...] It has something in it like creation; it bestows a kind of existence, and draws up to the reader's view several objects which are not to be found in being." Addison: The Works vol. 3, p. 429.

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eighteenth-century German lyric poet Barthold Hinrich Brockes, as in the architecture poems of Wordsworth or Rilke's poems on works o f art, to cite only a few examples. One would do well, however, not to dismiss too hastily the possible relation o f the lyric poem to objective reality. As a comprehensive theory o f lyric poetry began to win recognition in eighteenth-century Europe, a simultaneous emotionalization o f poetry took place. This developed under the immediate influence of English sensualism with Abbe Du Bos. Even in recent theory o f lyric poetry, the one-sided opinion that a poem is largely the subjective expression of feelings and sensations has not yet been completely overcome. It must be borne in mind, however, that even Hegel, having the greatest influence on aesthetics o f lyric poetry, bound by the inner logic o f his system, had to place the essence o f lyric poetry in subjectivity and expression, yet could not banish the illustration o f exterior objects. He wrote that the diversity o f conceptions from natural surroundings was not to be ruled out from the start: " O n the contrary, the quite concrete lyrical works represent the subject in its exterior situation as well, and therefore take the natural surroundings, the locality, etc., within themselves; there are even poems which are limited entirely to such descriptions." 1 1 Hegel is not concerned in this instance only with "real objectivity", though. He is interested, rather, in the mood produced by such objects within the soul. Lyric poetry is therefore positively acquainted with the concrete, illustrative image. A typical example o f this is Japanese haiku which restricts itself entirely in its three short lines to a realization of a precise, but not illusionistic image. This image is connected with a certain season o f the year. Not coincidentally, Japanese haiku developed parallel to ink-painting and also to Zen-Buddhism. Here is an example by Basho (1644—1694), the greatest master of haiku: On a withered bough A crow alone is perching; Autumn evening now. 12 In the short description o f nature, the essence o f nature altogether reveals itself and the Zen-Buddhist monk Basho feels himself bound up with it all. In this respect, the illustrative vividness does not remain an end in itself. In reaction to the sentimentality o f epigonic, romantic lyric poems, the Anglo-American Imagists sought, in the second decade o f the twentieth "

Hegel: Ästhetik

v o l . 2 , p. 490: " I m Gegenteil, die recht konkreten lyrischen Werke

stellen das Subjekt auch in seiner äußeren Situation dar und nehmen deshalb die Naturumgebung, Lokalität usf. gleichfalls in sich hinein; ja, es gibt Gedichte, welche sich ganz auf dergleichen Schilderungen beschränken." 12

Yasuda: The Japanese Haiku,

p. 184.

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century, to reduce a poem to one single terse image. But the Imagists were not concerned with mere graphic quality. Even in romantic poetry, the objective illustrative image is not lacking. Here let me mention only two small, but eloquent examples. Eduard Mörike's Jägerlied (Hunting song) begins with the verse: "Zierlich ist des Vogels Tritt im Schnee." 13 And in Coleridge's Lines written in the album at Elbingerode, in the Hart£ Forest, we find the following lines: The dingy kidling with its tinkling bell Leaped frolicsome, [...] 1 4

In both images, the poets evoke a precise conception, and both convey to us the experience of a delicate and refined nature. They do it immediately through the sound in a synaesthetic manner and by means of the onomatopoetic and the symbolic use of the 'i'-sound. However, this illusionistic element in Mörike's verse is only the occasion for a comparison with the daintily writing hand of the loved one. And for Coleridge, it is only a detail in the recollection of an impressive mountain landscape which, in the end, nonetheless, remains unsubstantial for the poet. For immediately afterwards, he says: [...] I moved on In low and languid mood: for I had found That outwards forms, the loftiest, still receive Their finer influence from the Life within; — Fair cyphers else: fair, but of import vague [...]«

Even where a lyric poet represents nature in all its sensual, luxurious vividness, as does Keats in his poem To Autumn, he does not seek an illusionistic realization. On the contrary, he pays homage to an aesthetic sensualism which enjoys to the utmost the fullness of existence: To Autumn

I

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

13

Mörike: Werke vol. 1, p. 23: " D a i n t y is the bird's print in the s n o w . "

14

Coleridge: The Complete Poetical

15

Ibid. pp. 3 1 5 - 3 1 6 .

Works vol. 1, p. 315.

258

Illusion and Literary Genre A n d still more, later flowers f o r the bees, Until they think w a r m days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 1 6

On the second point: R i g h t at t h e b e g i n n i n g I w o u l d l i k e t o g i v e an e x a m p l e w h i c h is as e x p r e s s i v e as it is d i f f i c u l t t o i n t e r p r e t . I n his s e c o n d e p o d e , H o r a c e p r a i s e s t h e t r a n q u i l i t y o f t h e life o f t h e c o u n t r y s i d e a n d d e s c r i b e s in s e e m i n g l y realistic v i s u a l v i v i d n e s s t h e p l e a s u r e s a n d a d v a n t a g e s w h i c h it o f f e r s in contrast to the w o r l d o f business, politics and w a r : Beatus ille qui procul negotiis, ut prisca gens mortalium, paterna rura bobus exercet suis solutus omni faenore, neque excitatur classico miles truci, neque horret iratum mare, Forumque vitat et superba civium potentiorum limina. ergo aut adulta vitium propagine altas maritat populos, aut in reducta valle mugientium prospectat errantes greges, inutilesque falce ramos amputans feliciores inserit, aut pressa puris mella condit amphoris, aut tondet infirmas oves. 1 7 B u t in t h e h u m o r o u s p u n c h line, s o m e w h a t r e m i n i s c e n t o f H e i n e , t h e p o e t i r o n i c a l l y q u e s t i o n s his g l o r i f i c a t i o n o f c o u n t r y life. T h e d e s c r i p t i o n r e v e a l s itself as t h e p i p e - d r e a m o f a u s e r e r a n d t h e p o e m e n d s : Haec ubi locutus faenerator Alfius, iam iam futurus rusticus, omnem redegit Idibus pecuniam, quaerit Kalendis ponere. 1 8 " Keats: The Poetical Works, pp. 2 1 8 - 2 1 9 . 17 Horace: The Odes and Epodes, pp. 364 — 365: "Happy the man who, far away from business cares, like the pristine race of mortals, works his ancestral acres with his steers, from all money-lending free; who is not, as a soldier, roused by the wild clarion, nor dreads the angry sea, he avoids the Forum and proud thresholds of more powerful citizens; and so he either weds his lofty poplar-trees to well-grown vines, or in secluded dale looks out upon the ranging herds of lowing cattle, and, cutting off useless branches with the pruning-knife, engrafts more fruitful ones, or stores away pressed honey in clean jars, or shears the helpless sheep." 18 Ibid. pp. 368 — 369: "When the usurer Alfius had uttered this, on the very point of beginning the farmer's life, he called in all his funds upon the Ides — and on the Kalends seeks to put them out again."

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Have we here a bursting of the illusion with a satiric aim in mind? Is it illusionary wishful thinking and poetic escapism, a flight into a beautiful world of appearance that is being unmasked? The fact that the poem takes its form from the tradition of satiric iambic poetry of the classical era, supports this interpretation. The satire may then be directed at Virgil's Georgics and at bucolic poetry generally, from which Horace appropriated a number of important elements into his poem. The literary critics differ in their views, but, the opinion prevails that Horace knew and loved country life too well to have drawn up a purely ironic portrayal of it. Whatever the case was, we cannot ignore the consciousness of a painful tension between sober reality and an imagined world appearing in a radiant light. Bucolic poetry from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century portrayed the topos of country life in countless variations, thus also directing criticism at court or urban life, and in this way consciously enacting (as an Utopia or a mere game) a beautiful alternative world of appearance to the painful experience of reality. Schiller's desire to overcome the alienation of the sentimental poet from nature in the idyllic poem as the highest form of poetry proceeds entirely from this tradition. The choral lyric poetry of his tragedy The Bride of Messina explicitly incorporates images and expressions from Horace's second epode as quotations: Wohl dem! Selig muß ich ihn preisen, Der in der Stille der ländlichen Flur, Fern von des Lebens verworrenen Kreisen, Kindlich liegt an der Brust der Natur. 19

Schiller instructed the poet to preserve in the song (that is in the beautiful world of appearance) that which as transitory phenomena in life are doomed. The end of the elegiac poem Die Götter Griechenlands (The Gods of Greece) makes this explicit in the following verses: Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben Muß im Leben untergehn. 20

Likewise, his poem Nänie expresses the notion that, in the end, only the art of poetry can console us over the death of all that is beautiful and wonderful on earth. After having evoked the separation of Orpheus and Euridice, the death of Adonis, and the lament of Thetis over the fallen Achilles in three unprecedentedly compact mythological tableaux, he ends the poem with the words:

19

Schiller: " D i e Braut v o n Messina" 11. 2561—2564. Nationalausgabe vol. 10, p. 115: " H a p p y the man w h o in the stillness of the country lea far away f r o m tangled business cares, lays his head like a child at N a t u r e ' s breast."

20

Ibid. vol. 2, 1, p. 367: " T h a t which shall live on eternally in the song, is d o o m e d in life."

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Illusion and Literary Genre A u c h ein Klaglied zu seyn im Mund der Geliebten ist herrlich, Denn das Gemeine geht klanglos zum Orkus hinab. 2 1

Schiller did not even consider the illusion of a permanent reality of the beautiful. It can only survive in the ideal form of art. It was Heine, above all, who destroyed in lyric poetry the classicist consolation of the beautiful world of appearance with the cynical irony of his later work. This can be seen, for example, in his cycle of poems "The Apollogod", in which the god of the arts has become a loathsome juggler or charlatan, a process of extreme disillusionment. The end of the poem reads as follows: A u s dem Amsterdamer Spielhuis Zog er jüngst etwelche Dirnen, Und mit diesen Musen zieht er Jetzt herum als ein A p o l l o . Eine dicke ist darunter, Die vorzüglich quiekt und grünzelt; O b dem großen Lorbeerkopfputz Nennt man sie die grüne Sau. 2 2

However much the later Heine mourned the end of a world of aesthetic appearance, he was prevented by the "Suppenlogik mit Knödelgründen" (the logic of soup and the arguments of dumpling) 2 3 , i.e. the unresolved material and social problems, from dedicating himself to an aesthetic world of dream and fantasy. With Baudelaire, a few years after Heine, aesthetic appearance decomposed, and the poet fell into spleen. Illusion became a mere hallucination and an artificial drug-induced vision — a possibility which had already emerged with English Romantics and which continued in the twentieth century, for example with the great German lyric poets Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn, both much afflicted with pain and misfortune. Intoxication and ecstasy — that was a last hour of happiness and deceit ("letzte GlückLügenstunde") 2 4 as Benn put it! Baudelaire represented the exterior world without any illusions. He called his brain a mass grave of dead memories, seeing himself as a cemetery and an old boudoir full of faded roses. 25 Yet 21

22

23 24 25

Ibid. p. 326: "Even to be a lament in the mouths of loved ones is wonderful, since the lowly go down unsung to Orkus." Heine: "Der Apollogott". Sämtliche Werke vol. 1, p. 352: "From the Amsterdam MusicHouse he recently took out some whores, and now he roves about with these muses like an Apollo.- There is a fat one among them who squeaks and grunts quite well; on account of her large laurel head-dress, she is called the Green Sow." Heine: "Die Wanderratten". Ibid. vol. 2, p. 204. Benn: "Karyatide". Sämtliche Werke vol. 1, p. 38. Baudelaire: "Spleen". Oeuvres completes vol. 1, p. 73.

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out of this decay arose a new cult of beauty and a new, never-beforeexperienced freedom of the lyric poet to create his own world, completely freed (or supposedly freed) from reality and the imitation of reality. This absolute freedom of the lyric poet can best be described in the words of the greatest French lyric poet of our century. In a sketch for a lecture on poesie pure, on the ideals of a poesie absolue, Paul Valery said: It aspires to give us the sense of an illusion, or the illusion of a world in which the events, the images, the beings, the things which, if they remind us of those which populate the ordinary world, have also a mysterious, but deep inner relation to our sensibility as a whole. [...] T h e poetic world so defined displays great similarities with the trance-like state. 2 6

In this way, the poet originates " a world or an order of things, a system of relations without any regard to the practical order". 2 7 Out of subjectmatter of common origin, an artificial, ideal order is created. (Le poete doit "creer un ordre artificiel et ideal, au moyen d'une matiere d'origine vulgaire." 2 8 ) It was in this way that modern lyric poetry, in a paradoxical shift from deformation and disintegration to new creativity, saw the development of a purely aesthetic world in which the fiction of real life is no longer produced. The reference to possible or existing reality was replaced by the self-reference of the linguistic sign. Poetry was definitively and completely separated from truth, and at the same time, from the accusation of being a lie. On the third point: Although already at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Abbe Du Bos had shown preference for true feelings over imitative ones, Batteux himself, around the middle of the century, once again subjugated lyric poetry to the universally valid principle of mimesis. His German translator, Johann Adolf Schlegel, resolutely opposed this view. For him, the lyric poet could only express true, genuine emotions. 2 9 This view, in connection with the theory of genius, prevailed. The true feelings of the heart, the

26

Valery: "Poesie pure". Oeuvres vol. 1, p. 1459: "C'est qu'elle tend ä nous donner 1ε sentiment d'une illusion ou l'illusion d'un monde (d'un monde, dans lequel les evenements, les images, les etres, les choses, s'ils ressemblent ä ceux qui peuplent le monde ordinaire, sont, d'autre part, dans une relation inexplicable, mais intime, avec l'ensemble de notre sensibilite). [...] L e monde poetique ainsi defini soutient de grandes ressemblances avec l'etat de reve, du moins avec l'etat produit dans certains reves."

27

Ibid. p. 1460: " u n monde ou un ordre de choses, un systeme de relations, sans nul rapport avec l'ordre pratique".

28

Ibid. p. 1463.

29

Batteux: Les beaux arts (Chapitre 13 " S u r la Poesie lyrique") pp. 316 — 329 (With a response to Schlegel).

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genuine experience, should supersede playful imitation in the same way as they had the acquired rhetorical models for the representation o f the emotions. Once more, fact and fiction seemded compatible, at least in what concerned the inner life o f human beings. However, in periods of inner strife and deteriorating humanity such as were experienced by many poets even before the middle o f the 19th century, a fundamental doubt in regard to the truthfulness o f feelings inevitably arose. Here too, it was Heine who proved to be an inexorable exposer and destroyer o f illusions. It was not a coincidence that his poetry revolved unceasingly around the theme o f love which emerges as deceptive, empty or false, and is mere coquetry, a lurid dream, a lie or self-delusion. In this connection poetry becomes fundamentally questionable. The ironic punch lines o f Heine's poems lead us out o f an illusionary dream-world back into truthfulness, albeit the truthfulness o f the trivial: Ich wollte meine Lieder Das wären Blümelein, Ich schickte sie zum riechen Der Herzallerliebsten mein. Ich wollte meine Lieder, Das wären Küsse fein, Ich schickte sie heimlich alle Nach Liebchens Wängelein. Ich wollte meine Lieder Das wären Erbsen klein, Ich kocht' eine Erbsensuppe, Die sollte köstlich seyn. 3 0

O f all the forms o f disillusionment in lyric poetry, this had the gravest consequences. It led poets into a near-silence, after language had degenerated, in our century as never before, into triviality, into stale formulae, into lies.

30

Heine: Hist.-krit. Gesamtausgabe der Werke vol. 1, p. 523: "I wanted my songs to be little flowers: I would send them all to the dearest love of my heart to smell. — I wanted my songs to be tender kisses: I would secretly send them all to my true love's cheek. — I wanted my songs to be tiny green peas: I would cook a pea-soup, it should be tasty."

W U L F KOEPKE

Texas Α & Μ University

Epistolary Fiction and Its Impact on Readers: Reality and Illusion In retrospect, the eighteenth century has become the high point in the history of letter writing and the communication by letters. While traveling was still hazardous, regular mail service provided a convenient line of communication. There are many economic and practical reasons for the enormous expansion of letter writing. But they do not explain the incredible increase in private mail. Mail service was anything but cheap, considering the living standard, and many times the receiver paid for the letters, so that the letter carriers had a real incentive to deliver them. Some people must have made sacrifices to be able to indulge in their passion for epistolary communication. Letter writing became a way of life, and possibly the preferred way of self-expression. It is well known that people corresponded not only with distant friends, but with people living in the same town, the same street, even the same house. Letters received were shared with family and friends, not only for information, but often for the beauty of expression. The rhetoric of epistolary expression seemed especially felicitous and persuasive: it combined the polish and conciseness that people were looking for in the age of wit; but beyond the enjoyment of well-made phrases, the letter conveyed an air of informality, of spontaneity. Such combination of witticism and spontaneity could turn out to be a contradiction in direct conversation: the letter offered, or so it seemed, the best of both worlds, spontaneous and sincere feeling, and polished style. Even if letters, in the age of sentimentality, imitated emotional stammering, it stayed within rhetorical conventions. The development of a larger leisure class and the widening gap between the public and private spheres 1 brought an increasing preoccupation with the self and more and more curiosity about the intimate aspects of people's lives, especially those of 'public' persons: hence the proliferation of self-

1

Habermas: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. The leisure class developed first in England; but also in Germany, for example, the female members of the lower nobility in the country and as the small courts would fall into this category.

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centered modes of writing: diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, collection of personal documents. In this realm, the letter was one of the most flexible and adaptable forms. Beyond its uses for public, administrative, economic, and factual personal information, and the appropriate conventional forms for such messages, the letter can be adopted for many purposes in private life and in literature. It can be the vehicle for secret communication and convey very intimate feelings and thoughts; it can range stylistically from untaught scriblings to elevated literary prose, even poetry. While the letter tends to be a short form, it can be stretched considerably, before it reaches its limits. Letters are by definition addressed to a receiver; thus they tended to appear in directly audience-directed literature: in didactic and essayistic forms, for instance, or in satires. Few larger forms of literature can do without the use of letters as one of the indispensable subforms, least of all fiction; but also on stage, the writing, conveying, and receiving of letters is a ubiquitous element. In order to situate the fashion of epistolary fiction properly within the context of the eighteenth-century letter mania, one more aspect should be mentioned. T h e eighteenth-century evolved dramatically different reading habits. The widespread condemnation of novels and novel reading on moral grounds was not only caused by the well documented shift from religious to secular literature, 2 it also tried to combat the habit of addictive reading. As reading became more private, although it still remained largely a g r o u p activity, entertainment for empty hours during the day and especially the evenings, readers and texts grew closer together. Reading became the primary pastime among the members of the female leisure class. Many ladies had their duties and responsibilities taken away from them, either t h r o u g h disenfranchisement, or t h r o u g h the work of servants they could n o w afford. Whereas men's addictions remained gambling, womanizing, consumption of coffee and tobacco, the women became more addicted to reading, especially of fiction, and letter writing. Reading and writing could create a refuge, an escape f r o m unpleasant realities, a pleasanter world of dreams which blurred the distinctions between fiction and reality and made 'romance' a forbidden but very tempting fruit. Literature, especially in England, by now catered more directly to the desires of a larger reading public. T h e writers began to exchange patronage for the literary market. More dependent on the sales of their books for their survival, they developed new types of fictional literature blending in with other writings available in households, and addressing individual readers. T h e situation of epistolary correspondence became the most

2

This is especially dramatic in G e r m a n y d u r i n g the eighteenth century. T h e frequently cited statistics are based o n Goldfriedrich: Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels.

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powerful model for such forms: the isolated, even lonely individual trying to establish contact with a correspondent (at least a reader), and hoping for a sympathetic reading and response. This may describe the market relation between real authors and real readers, but it also is applicable to the communicative situation within the fiction itself, for instance in an autobiography, a memoir or a 'confession' customarily addressed to a fictitional reader, in a diary, and most of all in letters. The idea of the letter is based on an urgent need for communication and on a distance between the correspondents which makes a direct dialogue impossible. Such isolation and distance, at least in the eighteenth century, does not have to be geographical. It can be an isolation in the same house, be it an imprisonment or as a psychological or social barrier which precludes speech. Letter writers tend to be lonely, cut off from others, and so are readers. The form suggests a striking similarity between 'real' and fictional writers and 'real' and fictional readers. This was especially true for woman readers, as it makes sense that much of the recent renewed interest in epistolary novels has come from feminist criticism. 3 The reader finds out that not only are characters, locale, and the details of daily life more familiar, but the fictional act, writing and reading, is what the 'real' reader is doing. At first sight, the epistolary novels inscribe themselves into the eighteenth-century craze for realia, the move of fiction away from romance to the novel, the 'true' and 'new' story about real places and people. This fascination by 'reality', however, developed its own dialectics. The curiosity about natural phenomena became an attraction for exotic items, people, and places: things that were real, but had a flavor of the phantastic, the incredible. In the case of epistolary fiction, the subterfuge of a dream world within reality comes in a different way: the reader is enticed through the wealth of familiar details to identify with the characters. That is one of the easiest ways for popular literature to be popular. The amount of epistolary fiction produced in the eighteenth century was enormous, 4 most of it was commercial property to be sold in large editions. But even the few titles which are listed everywhere as masterworks, such as Pamela, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Helo'ise, Die Leiden desjungen Werthers, and Les Liaisons dangereuses, were bestsellers or at least tremendously popular. They, like all others, were not so much admired as 'literature', but consumed as 'true stories', with masses of readers identifying with the characters. This illicit border traffic between reality and fiction was as common in the eighteenth century as it is in the twentieth, except that it took different forms, and 'true' or 'real' were the catchwords, and not 'documentary'.

3

Cf. especially R u t h Perry: Women, Letters, and the Novel.

4

Cf. Singer: The Epistolary Novel and Versini: Le roman epistolaire and their bibliographies.

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In epistolary fiction, the reader is invited not only to accept the characters as real-life people, but to become, as it were, a participant. Much of that took place in other fiction and in 'real' letters as well. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter for instance who played out his writing life in the realm between reality and fiction5, wrote 'real' letters to girlfriends, relating what had happened on his future trip from Hof to Bayreuth. His fictional narrator 'Jean Paul' had the chance of meeting all the characters whom he had created. What is more: Richter wrote in his letters that one day he would meet the heroine Klotilde of his novel Hesperus in real life — it is little wonder that woman readers identified with Klotilde and wanted to marry Richter. The eighteenth century was great in creating illusions and makebelieve and wanting to transform an imperfect reality into wish-fulfilling perfection. Fiction, in its way, participated in the process of not describing a world of objects, but of creating another world more to one's liking, however, camouflaged as reality. Such a process of fictionali2ing in the name of realism is especially typical for epistolary fiction. Even in any ordinary correspondence, elements of fantasy, imagination, fiction even, may enter at any time. Already eye witness accounts differ and often contradict each other, and much of this can be ascribed to practical considerations, interests, fears, wishes, or more hidden guilt feelings and justifications. Letter writing, like story telling, is inducive to more embroidering, and the eighteenth century had little compunction about embellishing facts. As a matter of fact, the letter was seen as an instrument to turn meaningless raw facts into morally and aesthetically pleasing episodes. Even aside from the crucial fact that the letter writer wants to impress the correspondent, or persuade the correspondent of something, the letter answers in its way to the eighteenthcentury French demand, not to depict 'la nature', but 'la belle nature', meaning a well phrased aesthetic structure which is a proof for both the person's ability to write and to perceive the higher meaning of life. If such are processes at work in an ordinary correspondence, epistolary fiction can take advantage of many degrees between 'fact' and 'fiction'. The fictional mimesis of real life is not only bound to aesthetic considerations and rhetorical conventions. It also subordinates the depiction of facts to the self-expression of the writer. 6 The verisimilitude and authenticity of the fictional letter lies ultimately in its self-representational value. It is the

5

He started his narrative career with a very juvenile imitation of Werther and J o h a n n Martin Miller's then very p o p u l a r Siegwart. Mine Klostergeschichte (1776); but he never returned to the f o r m of epistolary fiction, because the personality of the narrator became crucial for his fiction.

6

Altman: Epistolarity, also Perry: Women, Letters, and the Novel, pp. 119—135.

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writer who convinces, not what he/she writes about. The related facts tend to disappear behind the persona of the narrator. This is closely connected with the fact that the primary subject matter of an epistolary novel is writing and reading. So many letters are written to describe how the writer reads and interprets the correspondent's letter, or describe the writing and reading process itself. Thus the reader, the second one after the fictional reader, is invited to join in and offer perhaps a different reading. The fictional characters and letter writers are projecting themselves into their letters, and as they demand a fictional reader, a participating 'real' reader can more directly project himself/herself into the fictional text. In finding similarities between the fictional and the real situation, the real situation tends to dissolve into the fictional one. A letter is, on the one hand, a self-contained form, with a conventional opening, and introduction explaining the reason for writing and the situation of the writer, a main body of information, narration, and/or argument which may be digressive at times and lead to new subject matter, then a conclusion which is an address to the receiver, usually pleading for an answer containing information or advice. While there is, being shaped by the communicative demands a certain kind of structure, there are really no 'chapters' in such novels, except through very external factors, such as chronology. Each individual letter has, structurally speaking, a high degree of independence. 7 And yet, it is very much part of a sequence. The communicative situation, preceding exchanges, demands and expectations, shape content, style, tone, and format. The message is often unclear, unless the reader comes with a large amount of previous knowledge, so much so that few epistolary novels can do without explanatory footnotes. The individual letter is definitely part of a larger context. The fictional as well as the real reader gradually deciphers the personality of the correspondent, his/her intentions, needs, strengths, weaknesses. Most letters, unless they are declared as simplistic and naive by their style and social origin — typically the letters of servants — must be read on several levels. They may have hidden intentions, and they may carry subtexts, sometimes intentionally, sometimes against their will. Specifically, the letter is a vehicle not only for persuasion, but for seduction. While the affirmation of sincerity fills many pages in real and fictional correspondences, the letter is eminently suitable for deceit. One does not have to think of Les liaisons dangereuses to gauge the ubiquity of false appearances, the pervasive mimicry of sincere feelings — which, paradoxically, might turn into true ones — to realize the stylistic potential of the epistolary mode to convey In a sense, the novel becomes a " c o l l e c t i o n " of letters. T h e r e has been little research on the aesthetics of collections, either of objects or of small literary f o r m s into b o o k s . T h e epistolary novel, h o w e v e r , is a collection "in p r o g r e s s " .

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concurrently different meanings for different readers. Whereas the naive young girl might take certain declarations at their face value, the experienced woman would understand the deceit, and either reject it virtuously or enjoy the aesthetic mastery. In other words: all letters require careful interpretative reading which have to be continual and progressive. The fictional and the real reader has to reinterpret the situation with every new text. Each new letter demands a reinterpretation of the previous ones which takes the form of an answering letter. Thus it is, taken as a whole, a text which continuously reinterprets and corrects itself while it is successively written: a text where the reception becomes constitutive for the consecutive writing. It is no wonder that the real readers participated to the degree that they wanted to redirect the plot according to their desires, especially in the case of Clarissa where after the publication of the first parts, Richardson was implored by women readers to grant her a happy ending. In real life, a correspondence is truly a work in progress. This is, however, where a work of life and a work of art have to part ways. Nonclosure techniques of serial novels and TV series may imitate life to a certain point, but the work of art has limits. There must be something like a completion. When art really imitates life it needs some distinctly artificial procedures and elements. The main vehicle for this operation in the epistolary novel is the change in the professed function of the narrator. 8 While in other fiction, even fiction which declares itself to be documentary or based on documents, the narrator declares to write the work, in epistolary fiction, also in diary fiction, the letters, that is the text, are the documents. It is a documentary fiction in a special sense. The narrator changes into an editor: a person who discovers the letters, selects and arranges them, deletes some names, provides an introduction and explanatory footnotes. Some editors, such as Rousseau, insert value judgments, justifications, or some distancing into these notes. A controversial case in Germany, demonstrating once more the intertwining of fiction and reality was that of Christoph Martin Wieland who in fact edited Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771/72), putting his name on the cover even, while the name of the author, Sophie von La Roche, was not mentioned. The book was received largely if not as a true story, but as a document of life rather than a literary product, as Goethe phrased it, and Wieland's often ironic footnotes were generally rejected by the readers and contributed in an inverse way to the great fame of the book. The fact that the author was a woman certainly contributed to Wieland's reservations and its reception as a 'non-literary' document of life. 8

Cf. on this aspect especially Picard: Die Illusion der Wirklichkeit Jahrhunderts, pp. 15—18.

im Briefroman

des

achtzehnten

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There are curious similarities between epistolary novels and the later scholarly or not so scholarly editions of correspondence; except that the novels admit to their non-scholarly character: they usually present themselves as a selection of letters, and the choice and editing is done for the purpose of general human interest, not for historical and biographical documentation. Often, the editors declare they have changed the names, as to protect the privacy of the 'true' letter writers. It is obvious that the trick of editorship reinforces the illusion of documentary evidence and creates a text designed to look like a sequence of authentic letters. The self-elimination of a 'narrator' resp. the reduction from narratorship to editorship preserves the status of purported documentary authenticity while allowing for a structuring of the material according to aesthetic principles, and a selection according to the interests of readers. Thus the beginning and ending, the development of a plot, the relative importance of subplots, the weight given to the different correspondents, the sequence of the letters and the proportions within the entire work are overtly the work of a reader of the material, a secondary phase in the making of the work. Primary and seemingly chaotic yet authentic material is thus brought into a social order and made accessible to the socialized reader. Seemingly, some of the novels of sentimentality try to break these boundaries. The initial declaration of the editor of Werther is that he offers everything he could find of the remaining letters (and notes) of Werther to the sympathetic reader. But then, toward the end, under the pretext that too much essential material is missing, the editor takes over as narrator, and not only narrates the events (as he can reconstruct them), but also offers his own, tentative, reading of Werther's personality and the causes for his suicide. Thus, the interpretative hand of the editor takes over even in this one-correspondent novel which on the outset pretends to be a direct communication of 'raw' materials. The reader has the best of both worlds: he/she gets a glimpse of life as it really is, through the letters themselves; and a feeling of reassurance, even protection through the ordering and guiding hands of the editor. Reality is filtered in a careful manner while the impression is conveyed that the reader is participating in a real-life situation. 9 The eighteenth century demanded of its literature to conform to the idea of mimesis, no matter how far the concept of mimesis and 'nature' was stretched. While the adventurous spirit of the time wanted to venture out into the wild, the assumption remained that this wild, untouched 9

Cf. Perry: Women, Letters, and the Novel, p. 76: " A l t h o u g h by m o d e r n standards, eighteenthcentury letters seem rather formally c o m p o s e d , even then the conviction prevailed that letters were the spontaneous rendering of a person's innermost t h o u g h t s . " True, but this "language of the heart" was still seen in the f r a m e w o r k of inherent order.

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nature would turn out to be utterly benevolent and idyllic; harmony and cosmos, not violence and chaos. Every form of art imitating nature instilled an ordering principle; but part of the artifice of naturalness was to disguise order and allow for a seeming chaotic freedom on the surface. This is as true for the English garden as for the epistolary novel. The more the century progressed and the more sophistication had to be expected from the readers, the more the idea of documentary authenticity became an artistic game. The authors toyed with it in prefaces, and it was obvious that it became a convenient teaser for the audience. A special, but very revealing case is that of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Helo'ise. Rousseau wanted to impress through his pathos of sincerity and love for truth, as professed later in his Confessions. Moreover, he belonged to the people who warned against the pernicious effects of literature, especially the theatre and the novels. Now, while he declared a young woman reading novels as practically a 'fallen' woman, he wrote and published a novel himself. Its saving grace could only be that it educated women for the practice of virtue and not of vice, and, even more decisively, that its was not really a novel. Inevitably, the public demanded to know whether this was a 'true story'. Rousseau tried very hard to avoid an answer telling the readers to decide for themselves what they thought and preferred. It is interesting to note that hardly more than a decade later, the social dilemma and the controversy about the reception of Werther was not really whether Werther had really existed or not, but whether his style and actions should be taken as exemplary (and thus would justify suicide) or just as a case study and a presentation of a crisis to be overcome by sane individuals. Both criteria are still very much relevant in the reception process of mass audiences: is this a true story, based on documents, or a collection of documents as such, so that the reader/viewer has a better conscience 'believing' it; and: should this case to be taken as a document humain, an interesting case with positive and negative aspects, if not an actual warning, or should it be regarded as a positive model for the right kind of behavior? Epistolary fiction in the eighteenth century was clearly in the midst of such controversies. One of the major reasons why novels in letters tended to be controversial, was not only their popularity, but their very intense invitation for reader identification. While Richardson maintained that his novels had a moral purpose and could definitely initiate a process of moral education, later authors, such as Goethe, let alone 'scandalous' French authors like Retif de la Bretonne and Choderlos de Laclos (not to speak even of the Marquis de Sade), would vigorously disclaim any educational purposes and other moral intentions, although they would claim that literature should not teach through direct examples. Still, the attraction and lure of these letters was undeniable. It was unrealistic to demand from readers to detach themselves from these figures and events and read them

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with a 'cold heart', as it were, the opposite of what was demanded from virtuous people, especially women. Thus, while rationality was portrayed in figures from Lovelace to the schemers of the Liaisons dangereuses as evil, readers were warned against too much emotional involvement. The power of the epistolary novels over their readers become even more insidious through a programmed process of idealization. While the strategy of persuasion is based on winning the readers' faith in the authenticity of these characters and events, this wealth of realistic details leads again and again into situations which, for idealistic, didactic, purely escapist, or commercial purposes, go beyond what true life can really offer. The paradox now emerges that such a combination where the barrier between fact and fiction collapses in a new way, invites a much readier reader identification than a naturalistic representation of this very imperfect life. Such idealization process is somewhat inherent in the aesthetic/moralistic ordering of the epistolary material by the editor. Indeed such an ordering could present a cause for contradictions, if the insistence on the nature of real-life document would remain dominant. Such basic contradictions which, if apparent, could be very troubling for gentle readers, are removed through an aesthetic process within the letters themselves. Not only that these letters represent the best efforts of the correspondents to relate the facts in a pleasing manner and to be persuasive for their partners, they also lead beyond the human, all-too-human behavior of the characters involved, to a mythical dimension which is largely a function of the wishes and fears of the fictional characters themselves, but which is ultimately inscribed in a Christian-based mythology of angels and devils. The evil characters take on distinctly devilish attributes, and the good ones, virgins in particular, reach the sublimity of angels. Even Goethe's Werther which does its best to avoid Richardsonian and Rousseauian flights into sublimity, ends up with a distinct and decidedly blasphemous comparison of the sufferings of Werther and the sufferings of Jesus Christ. 10 The emergence of larger-than-life dimensions is predicated on two mechanisms: ordinary figures, objects, and situations are beautified and aggrandized and thus projected into a larger, more decorative, more elevated environment. Such beautification through elevation involves, by necessity, a dissolution of realistic details into mere suggestions and perception, a creation of 'Leerstellen' which the readers are invited to fill with processes of the imagination. The reader can thus project personal wishes and fears into the sketchy picture, indeed, project the self and a

10

Herbert Schöffler ("Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Ihr geistesgeschichtlicher Hintergrund") first brought this out in the context of "secularization". But it also proves the opposite: the persistence of a Christian mythology.

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vicarious life into such a text. Thus the reader would be invited to answer the question: how would I read, write, react, act, decide in this situation? The limitations and the rapidly declining attractiveness of epistolary fiction after 1800 have been customarily attributed to technical problems of the form which, indeed, are obvious. It is a distinct advantage in the strategy of reader persuasion to reduce narrating to editorship, but it also imposes limits which not seldom turn out to be distinctly restrictive. A classical example of awkwardness imposed by the form is that of Pamela trying to barricade herself in her room and continuing to scribble her diary/letter while Mr. B. tries to force his way in, presumably to rape her. But eventually it is not the addictive writing which makes the scene unbelievable (for us), but that Pamela is such a superhuman and also both naive and calculating virgin, and Mr. B. is such a clumsy devil. This so very extreme and so very symbolic situation turns out to be so much more a projection of fears (and wishes?) than reality, as the maniac seducer is promptly transformed into a gentle husband — who may once more be regarded as a projection of female wishes onto reality. Such dream-like scenes and sequences blur, once more, the boundaries between fiction and reality, and invite to mistake the projection of oneself and one's wishes for reality itself. Such mechanisms are indeed much more powerful and persuasive than 'realism'. In literary terms, Richardson's comparison of his novels with tragedy is revealing: instead of remaining in the tradition and on the level of Cicero's 'familiar' letters, he aims, ultimately, at the form and elevation of the poetic epistles, the heroides. All epistolary novels, especially the famous ones, want to share in this shine of the sublime, not just Rousseau's novel, but also Werther, and even Les liaisons dangereuses in their ultimate depiction of the power of female virtue. The Liaisons demonstrate the collapse of the ancien regime, defeated as it is by Rousseauist virtue. Instead of the games the eighteenth century played, postrevolutionary virtue becomes deadly serious, and the body, especially the female body, is definitely hidden, not just revealed through hiding. The epistolary novel thus reveals much of the inner life of the century through its writing and reading processes and the polarities, contradictions, and dialectics uncovered by them. Although much space in these letters is given to reflection, analysis, calculations, in the battle between reason and passion, passion clearly dominates. While bodily sensations are very much present, and the novels resemble the then prevailing fashions in that they reveal as much as they hide, the decisive battlefield is that of the imagination. What these novels explore, is not really the experience of reality, and that is a good part of what aroused Henry Fielding's suspicions. It is rather the realm of wishes, fears, and imaginations, if not fantasies, the pleasures and passions of the imagination. The intimate character of this literature lies mainly in the fact that it reveals secret wishes and fears.

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T h e reader is drawn into this in a number o f ways: he/she begins to participate in the process o f reading and writing; he/she accepts the text as authentic and relevant to life through the wealth o f realistic details, and the trick of the editorship; and finally, and most decisively, the reader is drawn into an inner world where projections create reality, where ordinary limitations don't seem to be valid, and where fact and fiction merge. This imagined world is offered in the reassuring yet exciting framework of Christian mythology indebted to Milton: a vast space inhabited by angels and devils. This last, idealizing, mechanism also elevates the characters to the rank o f model characters and their letters as model letters: letters one would have liked to have written or received. T h e style and self-projection o f the fictitious letter writers come through as exemplary, as prescriptive, although the genre maintains its quality as realistic, and that is, descriptive. Paradoxically, the most directly artificial aspect o f the form, the work o f the presumed editor, poses much less barriers for our credulity than the documents themselves, the letters: it seems that the framework of authentication is necessary to give them authenticity where they seem to be born out of projected rather than real situations. We accompany Pamela, Clarissa, Julie, Werther, etc. through a number o f very plausible situations, until we find ourselves at the end in a region o f sublimity which clearly transcends what we can expect out o f life. Life is here elevated to art, if not aesthetic religion, and we realize, if we are able to detach ourselves, that this did not happen at once, but throughout the entire book in imperceptible steps. The ultimate illusion created is not that art can imitate life in a deceptively perfect manner, but that the reality o f life is what our desires tell us, transformed into art. T h e creation o f this illusion is only possible through a number o f participatory and authenticating processes. O f course, only a reader who wants this transformation to happen, is ready to be taken in. The demise o f the genre as a captivating creator of illusions was predicated on a change o f mentality: the awareness o f the dangers of aestheticism, fear of the diabolic aspects o f the beautiful, the increasing doubt about the image o f the woman as angel or secularized saint. Realism, after the French Revolution, elevated common sense, will power, strength o f conviction, and physical fitness, over sublimity, delicate emotions, and a dominant imagination. T h e eighteenth century began to look like makebelief, like an illusion itself, like a lie to be discarded, a game lacking in substance. Epistolary novels thrive on the complexities o f the realm between facts and fiction. When facing 'reality' instead o f playing the game which everybody plays becomes the practical imperative, and the world turned from ideas to economic realities, the delicate texture of epistolary fiction seemed out o f date, like rococo painting. Fictional imagination and self-projection began to move in new ways, especially in the direction o f the illusion o f the historical document, and to project

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oneself in another, past or future, age. In the new age of popular historical fiction, letters transported the flavor and spirit of another, a past age rather than the intimate realm of secret pleasures of the imagination.

VOLKER

NEUHAUS

Universität zu Köln

Illusion and Narrative Technique: The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel Between Truth and Fiction D. M. ERVINI KOPPEN BONNENSIS

Of course we all know that there is no such thing as the Novel of the nineteenth century. But nevertheless it is true that we may consider the nineteenth century as a time in which the novel consolidates itself, like it did in the seventeenth century, while the eighteenth and the twentieth century are rather the time of experiments. In the nineteenth century the omniscient or the autobiographical narrators prevail, sometimes commenting on their storytelling, but at the same time believing in it. This seems to be the mainstream of fiction, nevertheless we have some very interesting experiments, for instance in German romanticism, such as Clemens Brentano's Godwi with its subtitle A Novel Gone Wild. In German literature we also have a somewhat belated response to Sterne's Tristram Shandy in Jean Paul's novels early in the century or in Immermann's Münchhausen. A Tale told in Arabesques (1838/39), which at that time also takes over the complicated and seemingly wild technique of Hoffmann's Opinions of Murr, a Tomcat, besides Fragments of the Biography of Kreisler, a Director of Music, preserved accidentally in Waste Sheets. We have an extremely complicated arrangement of documents, novellas and diaries in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, where the material is supposed to be turned from reality into a novel by the work of an editor. Although there would be enough material to talk about "Illusion and Breaking Illusion in Nineteenth-Century Fiction", as Werner Wolf will do for the twentieth century, I will rather take up Wulf Koepke's study and concentrate on "The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel between Truth and Fiction" — focussing on the historical novel, because it is a type of fiction characteristic for this century, which saw its rise and its decline. 'Truth' of course in this case means 'history' — 'what actually did happen and how it really happened' and as for 'fiction' my chief interest will be focussed on Murray Krieger's "so persuasive as-if reality which seems to be all the reality there is while it reveals its merely make-believe (dare we

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say counterfeit, even fraudulent?) character". 1 Because in the historical fiction of the nineteenth century we have many examples where the makebelieve character takes form, becomes a narrative technique in elaborate fictions of authentic source material, original documents published, letters, chronicles, period manuscripts and so on and in some cases it is even pushed to the realms of "counterfeits" and "fraudulent" falsification. I can take up Koepke's subject, where he left it: One of the last epistolary novels written by a prominent author was published at the very beginning of the century, Christoph Martin Wieland's Aristipp and Some of His Contempories (1800 — 1802). Throughout the work, the fiction is maintained that Wieland is the editor of newly found genuine documents dating from the 4th century before Christ. In a short preface to the notes of the first volume, he explains that all that is historically true in the collection can be proven by parallels in classic authors, everything probable can be supported by arguments from ancient sources. The notes themselves, which will be an outstanding feature in the future historical novel, are used by Wieland to play with his own material: The sources he has used are quoted as interesting parallels in other authors' works, minor discrepancies — of course wilfully arranged by Wieland — are discussed at length. These notes and hidden allusions within the letters make it clear that in spite of the historical costume and the document fiction Wieland is not in the least interested in writing a historical novel: Contemporaneous to the romantic movement and its turning to the Middle Ages, he celebrates, for the last time, the uniformity of spirit characteristic for the enlightenment. He chooses Aristipp "as a representative of his own opinions", as Goethe put it. 2 The crossreferences in letters and notes reach from the ancient to the modern and vice versa, from Germany to Greece. They help to create the illusion of a universal uniformity across ages and countries: Socrates is painted in the light of the most recent interpretations, Platon appears as Kant, when the "Ding an sich" is mentioned, and Aristipp makes use of Wieland's anti-Kantian essays when criticizing Plato. A Greek painter confirms and amends Lessing's theory in his Laokoon essay, "the well read" Propertius probably alludes to Wieland's Aristippean letters and so on. The epistolary technique is chosen for the reason of its creating a polyphony of voices and opinions, the multiple viewpoint in fiction corresponds to Wieland's thesis of multiple viewpoint in philosophy, art, literature, criticism — just in everything. The often controversal conversation of the informed and learned in a timeless Pantheon is the

1

Krieger: Poetic Presence and Illusion,

2

" Z u brüderlichem Andenken Wielands 1 8 1 3 " . G o e t h e : translation mine.

p. 194. Werke

div. 1, vol. 36, p. 327;

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only way to approach an unreachable, multifaced, and multicoloured t r u t h , ancient or m o d e r n , idealistic o r realistic. So Wieland's d o c u m e n t a r y fiction, a l t h o u g h historical and with a t o n g u e in cheek claim to authenticity, is not historical at all. T h e p r o b l e m of epistolary, chronical and d o c u m e n t a r y fiction arises, w h e n history is seen not as the realm of uniformity but as the realm of difference and strangeness. Sir Walter Scott describes in the General Preface (1829) to the magnum opus, the Collected E d i t i o n of the Waverley N o v e l s , that he g r e w dissatisfied with the fictional miracles in the w o r k s of the Walpole-ReeveSchool: "[...] I began, by degrees, to seek in histories, memoirs, [...] events nearly as w o n d e r f u l as those which were the w o r k of imagination, with the additional advantage that they were at least in a great measure t r u e . " 3 T h e rendering of these m e m o i r s and oral narrations of eye witnesses of the events of 1745 into the novel Waverley has o f t e n been described 4 . T h e r e f o r e I will concentrate on Scott's use of d o c u m e n t a r y fiction in the Waverley Novels. A f t e r h a v i n g declared 1816, after the publication of The Antiquary, to quit the Waverley stage, he returned to it in 1817 with Rob Roy. A manuscript of an eighteenth century b i o g r a p h y was sent to him and he could not resist the temptation of revising and partly rewriting it for publication. A l t h o u g h this claim f o r authenticity is very transparent, Scott nevertheless revoked it expressis verbis as "entirely i m a g i n a r y " 5 in the reedition of 1829. E v e n in these feigned memoirs, d a t i n g f r o m a period w h e r e real and fictitious autobiographies were well k n o w n — D e f o e ' s novels f o r instance — Scott claims that the original manuscript " m a y in a great measure be said to be n e w w r i t t e n " . 6 In a n o t h e r p o i n t he sticks to the manuscript fiction — verbatim to the very end, w h e r e the ' e d i t o r ' states in brackets: " H e r e the original manuscript ends s o m e w h a t abruptly. I have reason to think that what followed related to private affairs." I k n o w of only o n e example of a complete manuscript fiction in Scott's w o r k , Redgauntlet (1824). Here for once he claims to edit the original letters and diaries of t w o y o u n g gentlemen, dated s u m m e r 1764. O f course it's again "sixty years since", but never before or after Scott came so close to his o w n time and had in the Richardson novels — to which the t w o gentlemen refer in their letters — a very elaborate m o d e r n example of

3

Scott's Waverley Novels are q u o t e d f r o m the Illustrated

Edition,

the "General Preface"

there vol.1, pp. 5 — 30. Some of the a r g u m e n t s of the Scott part of my lecture have been inspired by a thesis in progress on the poetics of the historical novel by G e r h a r d Kebbel (Munich). 4

Cf. Wolfgang Iser: "Möglichkeiten der Illusion im historischen R o m a n .